Comment: Re:Flickr (Score 1) 37
That's great, they even have a picture of Fabian Mohn putting the atom to be imaged into the scope:-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ibm_research_zurich/6807218837/in/set-72157629144258045
Comment: Re:europe's spaceport? (Score 2) 32
Why is "Europe's Spaceport" in South America? Isn't that South America's Spaceport?
"Europe's Spaceport" is in Kourou, in French Guiana. Which is a French colony in South America.
Comment: Re:Perspective (Score 4, Insightful) 438
Would having wireless carriers be dumb pipes really be so bad?
Not as far as I'm concerned. The sooner the carriers work out where the future is taking them, the sooner they can change their 'investment' in phone branding to improving their network infrastructure.
Comment: Obligatory missing option (Score 1) 559
Too many to count.
Comment: Re:VMS (Score 1) 763
VMS FTW!
Fantastically consistent command line interface. Tools that were designed to do the job rather than just thrown together. Sadly the only current hardware OpenVMS runs on is iTanic. So it's days are numbered.
Comment: Re:Who cares? (Score 1, Troll) 279
Not exactly everyone but you. I'd guess anyone, like me,
who blocks almost all Javascript is going to find an improvement in it's execution speed fairly irrelevant.
Ulysses Spacecraft final track
Submitted
by
Dusty
Dusty writes "After several false alarms, the Ulysses Mission is finally
ending. According to the Spacecraft Operations Manager's
latest status report, the
last track will be on 30th June 2009 from 15:25 until 20:20 UTC. There's an article on the BBC.. Slashdot has
covered Ulysses several times, not dead yet,
on it's last legs and
chilly death."
NASA budget for 2010
Submitted
by
Dusty
Dusty writes "The NASA budget for 2010 has been announced, up
5% on 2009. Human space flight plans to be reviewed.
NASA's press release."
Comment: Re:BeOS: still my favorite UI (Score 2, Informative) 448
I don't know how BeOS was engineered to achieve this, I only know that no other OS I used during and since then, achieved this sort of responsiveness.
Fine grained multi tasking, and avoiding mutexs. I think BeOS uses message passing to implement inter process communications. In engineering terms, it is the most modern desktop operating system.
Comment: Re:BeOS: still my favorite UI (Score 1) 448
I fail to see why NOT having one (a command line) is good?
It is difficult to get a buffer overflow exploit to run the command line interpreter, when the operating system doesn't have a command line interpreter.
Phishing Is a Minimum-Wage Job 224
Posted
by
kdawson
from the triumph-of-the-commons dept.
from the triumph-of-the-commons dept.
rohitm918 writes "A study by Microsoft Research concludes that phishers make very little (PDF): '...low-skill jobs pay like low-skill jobs, whether the activity is legal or not.' They also find that the Gartner numbers that everyone quotes ($3.2B/year etc) are rubbish, off by a factor of 50. 'Even though it harvests "free money," phishing generates total revenue equal to the total costs incurred by the actors. Each participant earns, on average, only as much as he would have made in the opportunities he gave up elsewhere. As the total phishing effort increases the total phishing revenue declines: the harder individual phishers try the worse their collective situation gets. As a consequence, increasing effort is a sign of failure rather than of success.'"
Comment: Here there's more (Score 4, Informative) 134
The European Space Agency had a press conference about the end of Ulysses on Thursday. Brief note and audio feed. Longer press release.
The video the Ulysses Legacy has a great summary of the mission, and of the problems it now faces.