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Comment Re:Foresight? (Score 1) 154

Not sure, the article that I read said the temperatures would be around -128C. At that temperature and in that location it would be encased in a tomb of carbon dioxide ice, and the cold would be enough to crack the solar arrays and break the circuit boards. So you'd have to either be able to move enough to get out of the danger area, or perhaps generate enough heat to not be frozen solid. I'm guessing neither would be very easy to combat due to payload weight issues (getting off earth) and the energy needed to offse those extreme conditions.

Comment Re:Foresight? (Score 5, Interesting) 154

It was named Phoenix as the mission was originally scrapped after the polar lander crash. When they revived the project they renamed it Phoenix. It's also unlikely that it will be revived in the next martian summer. The reason being that where the rover is, it will be cold enough for the solar cells and other components to be destroyed.

Networking

Best DNS Service With API Access? 221

netaustin writes "My company runs quite a few media websites, mostly on Drupal, and about half on ec2. We have a good server setup with ec2 which allows us to route requests through Pound, a cluster of Varnish servers, then a cluster of Apache servers. We manage 50 domains (one per state) like this. Problem is, anytime things change, we have to manually adjust DNS for all 50 states, which is very boring and usually causes negative side effects too as we can't ever adjust all 50 DNS entries at once. We'd like to just change DNS providers and be done with it, but there are a lot of options, and I don't often shop for DNS services. I use EveryDNS for my personal domains, but I don't think they provide an API and it'd feel a little dishonest to reverse engineer the forms on their site since they're an esteemed donations-based service. I wouldn't feel bad about doing that to DNSPark, but they have a CAPTCHA image accompanying their login form, so goodbye DNSPark. I found a couple services that seem to do what I'm looking for, but they both feel a bit Microsoft-y and since I only want to change once, I want to get this right. Advice?"
Science

LHC Shut Down By Transformer Malfunction 293

Ortega-Starfire writes "A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online. No one at CERN reported any problems, and they only released this data once the Associated Press sent people to investigate rumors of problems. I guess it's hard to just sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the rug."
Security

Submission + - Border Patrol Using Domestic Checkpoints (nwsource.com) 5

An anonymous reader writes: The Seattle Times has an article "Border Patrol "spot checks" on ferries provoke outrage in San Juan Islands" [I]n February, when federal agents started corralling everyone off domestic ferries into a fenced-off area in Anacortes and questioning them about their citizenship. It now happens once, maybe twice a week; no one has any way to know if they will be stopped.

The article goes on further, As for residents who refuse to cooperate or answer questions, Giuliano [the Border Patrol's deputy chief patrol agent for the Blaine border sector] said, agents will still run their license-plate numbers and search databases, detaining them until it can be determined whether they are here legally.

Anybody remember the movie, "Born in East L.A.?"

Communications

Swearing at Work is Bleeping Good For You 421

coondoggie writes "This is the kind of news that your HR folks don't want to hear, but researchers today said letting workers swear at will in the workplace can benefit employees and employers. The study found regular use of profanity to express and reinforce solidarity among staff, enabling them to express their feelings, such as frustration, and develop social relationships, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UES). Researchers said their aim was to challenge leadership styles and suggest ideas for best practice. "Employees use swearing on a continuous basis, but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner. Swearing was as a social phenomenon to reflect solidarity and enhance group cohesiveness, or as a psychological phenomenon to release stress, " the study stated." I'm sure the discussion and tags on this story will be completely G Rated ;)
Operating Systems

Intel Chief Evangelist Comments on Linux Scheduler 178

ByeByeWintel writes "James Reinders is Intel's Chief Evangelist for Intel's Software Development Products. In a recent interview on Devx.com he stated: 'If I could get ONE wish fulfilled would be for OS scheduling to focus on processes, and not threads, for scheduling. And demand that processes manage their scheduling of threads ... There is a lot of opportunity for operating systems to offer these types of control in the 'running of applications' interfaces. I'd like an OS to let me specify the 'world' my application runs in (which processors, how many, etc.) These interfaces are available in Windows at run time (the task manager will let you adjust where a running task can go).'"
Microsoft

de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard" 615

you-bet-it's-not-out-of-context writes "A blogger on KDE Developer's Journal has found an interesting post by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Mono, in a Google group dedicated to the discussion of his blog entries. Six days ago Miguel stated that 'OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it.' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), i's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'"
Communications

Skype Blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage 286

brajesh writes to tell us that Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. Apparently the huge numbers of computers rebooting (and the resulting flood of login requests) revealed a problem with the network allocation algorithm resulting in a couple days of downtime. Skype further stressed that there was no malicious activity and user security was never in any danger.
It's funny.  Laugh.

NYT Exposes the Identity of Fake Steve Jobs 166

mattatwork writes "NY Times writer Brad Stone figured out the real identity of Fake Steve Jobs. With classic nick names like 'freetards' and 'beastmaster' Fake Steve captured an audience of 700,000 visitors to the site and around 50 emails a day. According to Daniel Lyons, the senior editor at Forbes magazine who maintained the blog, there is no definite plan for the future of the site. 'Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. "I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it." Mr. Lyons says he recalled trying out the voices of several chief executives before settling on the colorful Apple co-founder. He twice tried to relinquish the blog, but started again after being deluged by fans e-mailing to ask why Fake Steve had disappeared.'"
Graphics

The History of Photoshop 298

Gammu writes "For the past fifteen plus years, Photoshop has turned into the killer app for graphics designers on the Mac. It was originally written as a support app for a grad student's thesis and struggled to find wide commercial release. Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies." Achewood's Chris Onstad also offers a different take of how it all went down.
Censorship

Censoring a Number 1046

Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?
The Internet

The Virtual Teacher 94

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from Illinois and Florida are developing a networking system which will create virtual representations of real people to improve our knowledge. They will use artificial intelligence and natural language processing software to enable us to interact with these avatars. The goal of the project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is to give us the possibility to interact with these virtual representations as if they were the actual person, complete with the ability to understand and answer questions. We should see the results at the beginning of 2008 — if the researchers succeed."
Graphics

Submission + - PR - The3dStudio.com offers over 50,000 resources

Matcoland writes: "December 19, 2006 — The3dStudio.com web site, one of the oldest and largest 3D resource sites on the Internet, today reached over 50,000 downloadable resources on its web site. With over 50,000 resources available for immediate download, customers from all over the world can easily get the resources they need right away.

Since its re-design in late 2004, The3dStudio.com has been offering authors and artists of 2D and 3D resources a way to easily sell their products while still retaining a high royalty rate. At the same time The3dStudio.com was able to offer its customers a fast and easy way to find and download the resources they needed. In just over two years The3dStudio.com has gone from 0 to 50,000 downloadable resources with more products being added every day.

"Getting 50,000 resources on The3dStudio.com is another huge milestone for us." said Matt Anderson, President of The3dStudio.com, Inc. "We have been looking forward to reaching this goal since we hit 25,000 resources last November, we just didn't realize how fast it would happen. With so many veteran resource authors and so many new authors that are joining The3dStudio.com every day, we have had an explosion of excellent resources being added around the clock. Since we have authors from all over the world, it's very exciting to come in every day and see all of the great new products that were added overnight."

http://www.the3dstudio.com/

About The3dStudio.com
Being one of the oldest and largest 3D resource sites on the Internet really sets The3dStudio.com apart from the rest. The3dStudio.com started out as a free resource site back in 1996 and has undergone many changes to keep up with the times. Today, The3dStudio.com offers tens of thousands of free and priced 3D models, textures, tutorials, plugins, gallery art, and much more. The3dStudio.com gives resource authors a place to give their work away free or sell it for a price with no monthly hosting or subscription fees and some of the best royalty rates anywhere. The3dStudio.com continues to lead the pack as it evolves to exceed customer expectations. Media information available at: http://www.the3dstudio.com/about.aspx"

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