mwu - Slashdot User

Indian Moon Mission Launched 305

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @08:46AM from the to-the-moon-alice dept.

hackerdownunder writes "India's maiden lunar mission (Chandrayaan-1) got off to a flying start today. Describing the launch as 'perfect and precise,' the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), G Madhavan Nair, said that it would be 14 days before the satellite would enter into lunar orbit. Chandrayaan carries eleven payloads: five designed and developed in India, three from the European Space Agency, one from Bulgaria and two from NASA."

Stem Cells From Fat Create Beating Heart Cells 198

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @01:05AM from the for-the-love-of-god-montressor dept.

Amenacier writes "Melbourne scientists recently discovered that stem cells isolated from human fat could be made to turn into beating heart muscle cells when cultured with rat heart cells. This discovery may lead to the use of fat stem cells in repairing cardiac damage, or fixing such cardiac problems as holes in the heart. It is proposed that culturing the stem cells with rat heart cells allows them to differentiate into heart muscle through signals from the rat cells. In the future it may be possible to inject/transplant the stem cells into the damaged area and have them naturally differentiate into the type of cell required, with only the natural stimuli provided by surrounding cells, without any danger of rejection by the body. Quoting: 'The next step is to implant the human heart cells onto the damaged heart of a laboratory rat to see whether they repair the heart. Then they would be trialled in higher species such as sheep and pigs before human applications could be considered. Clinical application could be five years away ...'" The Age has a multimedia treatment (Flash) of the discovery.

Why RAID 5 Stops Working In 2009 803

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @07:03PM from the back-'em-up-rawhide dept.

Lally Singh recommends a ZDNet piece predicting the imminent demise of RAID 5, noting that increasing storage and non-decreasing probability of disk failure will collide in a year or so. This reader adds, "Apparently, RAID 6 isn't far behind. I'll keep the ZFS plug short. Go ZFS. There, that was it." "Disk drive capacities double every 18-24 months. We have 1 TB drives now, and in 2009 we'll have 2 TB drives. With a 7-drive RAID 5 disk failure, you'll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives. As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an [unrecoverable read error]. So the read fails ... The message 'we can't read this RAID volume' travels up the chain of command until an error message is presented on the screen. 12 TB of your carefully protected — you thought! — data is gone. Oh, you didn't back it up to tape? Bummer!"

Comment Re:Only one USB slot? (Score 1) 332

by mwu on Monday August 27, 2007 @04:46AM (#20369217) Attached to: Airbus 380 To Have Linux In Every Seat

i have used the system on one of their B777-300ER and yes 1 usb slot. there is a remote control comprising a mini keyboard and pointer. tried to use the star office suite, it was SLOW. i guessed that because of the hardware linux was chosen, windows would have died.

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