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Comment Re:Why... (Score 1) 43

by DogAlmity (#30606046) Attached to: NASA WISE Telescope Starts Taking Pics

I'm not sure that they really need the hydrogen, being in a hard vacuum a couple degrees above absolute zero and all

Wrong!

the boiling point of hydrogen is 20 degrees K

Irrelevant!

interplanetary space is about 4 degrees K

Wrong!.

Wow, a lot of wrong was packed into just a few sentences.
Programming

Haskell 2010 Announced 173

Posted by kdawson from the eddie-and-the-beav dept.
paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."
Space

Planck Telescope Is Coolest Spacecraft Ever 196

Posted by timothy from the that's-certainly-what-the-moon-rabbits-think dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Launched in May, BBC reports that Europe's Planck observatory has reached its operating temperature, a staggering minus 273.05C — just a tenth of a degree above what scientists term "absolute zero." and although laboratory set-ups have got closer to absolute zero than Planck, researchers say it is unlikely there is anywhere in space currently that is colder than their astronomical satellite. This frigidity should ensure the bolometers will be at their most sensitive as they look for variations in the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) that are about a million times smaller than one degree — comparable to measuring from Earth the heat produced by a rabbit sitting on the Moon. Planck has been sent to an observation position around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2, some 1.5 million km from Earth and Planck will help provide answers to one of the most important sets of questions asked in modern science — how did the Universe begin, how did it evolve to the state we observe today, and how will it continue to evolve in the future. Planck's objectives include mapping of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies with improved sensitivity and angular resolution, determination of the Hubble constant, testing inflationary models of the early Universe, and measuring amplitude of structures in Cosmic Microwave Background. 'We will be probing regimes that have never been studied before where the physics is very, very uncertain,' says Planck investigator Professor George Efstathiou from Cambridge University. 'It's possible we could find a signature from before the Big Bang; or it's possible we could find the signature of another Universe and then we'd have experimental evidence that we are part of a multi-verse.'"
Music

Spotify Releases a Linux-Only Client Library 96

Posted by timothy from the you-and-you-and-definitely-not-you dept.
f0rk writes "Spotify, a popular music streaming service, has just recently released libspotify. An official, binary-only, only for subscribers, library to 'enable and inspire you to build some really cool stuff.' The first release only has support for x86-32 Linux, the only major platform Spotify does not run on. It looks like the Spotify team is trying to be nice to the Linux community and hope someone will use their restricted binary-only library to write a Linux client."

Comment It is more important (Score 5, Insightful) 196

by DogAlmity (#27457687) Attached to: Larrabee ISA Revealed
I'm gonna go ahead and agree with management that maintainability is more important than any other factor. Having had to maintain a few ancient codebases is my day, I've seen way too many "clever" coders that do ridiculous tricks to save time or space. Well designed (read: maintainable) code does not imply any significant performance hit.

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