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Space

Submission + - Of Rockets, Space Elevators, and the future of Spa (goldilocksmission.com)

goldilocksmission writes: The expansion of man’s reach into space will not be possible without the discovery of rockets. They have taken us to the moon and back. We have sent numerous probes and captured close glimpses of most members of our planetary neighborhood. Rockets enabled us to construct space stations and artificial satellites. They are still the mainstay of space propulsion and will continue to do so until we discover something better...A famous alternative, one which has been around since 1895, that has developed into many designs is the space elevator concept.

Comment Expanding on the post... (Score 1) 145

To expand a little more on my post....This is an excellent idea. In fact, it could probably be done for not a whole lot. The entry-level SpaceX rocket costs $6million per launch, and NASA could probably get a (very) bulk discount, so lets say $5m. If they launch 50 times a year (take a couple weeks off for christmas or something), that's only $250million...just chump change in NASA's budget.

Then it would be an issue of finding payloads for these 50 launches each year. Ideally NASA could have a competitive process that would let individuals or organizations compete for the free launches. Then if the org isn't able to get their payload ready in time, you could have a pool of ready-to-launch payloads that didn't win the competition, but are willing to launch if there is a chance. If all that fails, the rocket should launch anyway, and just do a sub-orbital flight, so that the system stays sharp.

There's a couple issues with this...one if the biggest is range tracking and availability. Having to be available to launch every week would be very tough for the range, because it usually takes them 24hrs+ to get set for a launch, then there are several days booked where the launch can happen any time in that window. To solve this problem, something that launches with this regularity would need to be independent of the current assets, which with cheap GPS and sat data links shouldn't be too big of a deal.

Another thing to think about would be orbital debris. Launch every week, with the competitively determined payloads, which probably won't be as long lived as traditional payloads, could contribute negatively to the amount of debris in orbit. To mitigate this, a big part of the competitive selection process should be how the payload will de-orbit itself, even in the event of a failure.

Microsoft

Cygwin 1.7 Released 203

jensend writes "The 1.7 branch of Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows, has reached stable status after about 3 1/2 years of effort. Among many other changes, this release drops support for Windows 9x. Since the NT API and NT-based versions of Windows are more capable and somewhat less of a mismatch with POSIX (for instance, they include a security model), this has allowed for code path simplifications, better performance (particularly noticeable with pipe I/O), better security, and better POSIX compatibility."
Novell

Submission + - All GPLed Code Removed from MonoDevelop (boycottnovell.com)

rysiek writes: A few days ago, Miguel de Icaza wrote on his blog that the whole MonoDevelop is now "free" of GPL-licensed code. "MonoDevelop code is now LGPLv2 and MIT X11 licensed. We have removed all of the GPL code, allowing addins to use Apache, MS-PL code as well as allowing proprietary add-ins to be used with MonoDevelop (like RemObject;s Oxygene)." A move that may be seen as quite controversial.
Open Source

Helping Perl Packagers Package Perl 130

jamie writes "chromatic has a great post today on the conflict between OS distributions and CPAN's installations of perl modules, along with some suggestions for how to start resolving this maddening problem: '[Though Debian has] made plenty of CPAN distributions available as .debs, I have to configure my CPAN client myself, and it does not work with the system package manager. There's no reason it couldn't. Imagine that the system Perl 5 included in the default package... had a CPAN client configured appropriately. It has selected an appropriate mirror (or uses the redirector). It knows about installation paths. It understands how to use LWP...' The idea of providing guidelines to distros for how to safely package modules is a great one. Could modules request (a modified?) test suite be run after distro-installation? Could Module::Build help module authors and distro maintainers establish the rules somehow?"

Submission + - US Patent Office Tightens Software Patents (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A decision from a key panel at the Patent Office builds on last year's Bilski decision to place new limits on software patents. Just running some algorithm on a PC and claiming that you've built a patentable "machine" may not work any more.
Perl

Submission + - Helping Perl Packagers Package Perl (modernperlbooks.com)

jamie writes: "chromatic has a great post today on the conflict between OS distributions' and CPAN's installations of perl modules, along with some suggestions for how to start resolving this maddening problem: '[Though Debian has] made plenty of CPAN distributions available as .debs, I have to configure my CPAN client myself, and it does not work with the system package manager. There's no reason it couldn't. Imagine that the system Perl 5 included in the default package... had a CPAN client configured appropriately. It has selected an appropriate mirror (or uses the redirector). It knows about installation paths. It understands how to use LWP...' The idea of providing guidelines to distros for how to safely package modules is a great one. Could modules request (a modified?) test suite be run after distro-installation? Could Module::Build help module authors and distro maintainers establish the rules somehow?"
Science

Submission + - Sceptical climate researcher withholds code (newscientist.com) 1

xav_jones writes: New Scientist is reporting that Nicola Scafetta, a physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina — whose work is often highlighted by climate-change sceptics, including US senator James Inhofe — is refusing to provide the software he used to other climate researchers attempting to replicate his results. Emails between Rasmus Benestad of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute in Oslo and Scafetta over the past week had Scaffetta repeatedly refusing to provide the code. "If you just disclose your code and data, then we will manage to get to the bottom of this," Benestad writes in one email. "I really do not understand why you are not able to write your own program to reproduce the calculations," responds Scafetta.
Microsoft

Submission + - Cygwin 1.7 Released 1

jensend writes: The 1.7 branch of Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows, has reached stable status after about 3 1/2 years of effort. Among many other changes, this release drops support for Windows 9x. Since the NT API and NT-based versions of Windows are more capable and somewhat less of a mismatch with POSIX (for instance, they include a security model), this has allowed for code path simplifications, better performance (particularly noticeable with pipe I/O), better security, and better POSIX compatibility.
NASA

Submission + - Voyager Makes an Interstellar Discovery (nasa.gov)

azoblue writes: The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.
Programming

Submission + - Why Coder Pay Isn't Proportional to Productivity

theodp writes: John D. Cook takes a stab at explaining why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity. The basic problem, Cook explains, is that extreme programmer productivity may not be obvious. A salesman who sells 10x as much as his peers will be noticed, and compensated accordingly. And if a bricklayer were 10x more productive than his peers this would be obvious too (it doesn't happen). But the best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code; nor do they work 10x longer hours. Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. An über-programmer, Cook explains, is likely to be someone stares quietly into space and then says "Hmm. I think I've seen something like this before."
Security

Submission + - Is Code Auditing Of Open Source Apps Necessary?

An anonymous reader writes: Following Sun Microsystems' decision to release a raft of open source applications to support its secure cloud computing strategy, companies may be wondering if they should conduct security tests of their customized open source software before deployment. whilst the use of encryption and VPNs to extend a secure bridge between a company IT resource and a private cloud facility is very positive — especially now that Amazon is best testing its pay-as-you-go private cloud facility — it's important that the underlying application code is also secure. What do you think?

Submission + - An Open Source Compiler From CUDA to x86-Multicore (google.com)

Gregory Diamos writes: An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target, it has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license.

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