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NASA

Submission + - NASA Upgrades Mars Curiosity Software ... From 350M Miles Away (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Picture doing a remote software upgrade. Now picture doing it when the machine you're upgrading is a robotic rover sitting 350 million miles away, on the surface of Mars. That's what a team of programmers and engineers at NASA are dealing with as they get ready to download a new version of the flight software on the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed safely on the Red Planet earlier this week. 'We need to take a whole series of steps to make that software active. You have to imagine that if something goes wrong with this, it could be the last time you hear from the rover,' said Steve Scandore, a senior flight software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'It has to work,' he told Computerworld. 'You don't' want to be known as the guy doing the last activity on the rover before you lose contact.'"

Comment Re:Crowdsource (Score 2) 288

by mark_elf (#40926645) Attached to: Legitimate eBook Lending Community Closed After Copyright Complaints

There are lots of easy ways forward for him, but he seems to be even more butthurt than the people complaining to his host. All he was asked to do was respond to them. Fine. We don't need to crowdsource that. Don't handle any complaints, just send them all the same three paragraphs and be done. Add some text to the site somewhere to discourage this in the future. We don't need to hold this guy's weiner for him, if he wants to be in business he knows what to do.

The fact is, the site owner has a reasonably cool idea but can't be bothered with managing it. Just seems like a convenient opportunity to play the victim. Nothing to see here.

Submission + - Brutal July heat a new U.S. record (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by gollum123
gollum123 writes: The July heat wave that wilted crops, shriveled rivers and fueled wildfires officially went into the books Wednesday as the hottest single month on record for the continental United States. The average temperature across the Lower 48 was 77.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.3 degrees above the 20th-century average, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported. That edged out the previous high mark, set in 1936, by two-tenths of a degree, NOAA said. n addition, the seven months of 2012 to date are the warmest of any year on record and were drier than average as well, NOAA said. U.S. forecasters started keeping records in 1895. And the past 12 months have been the warmest of any such period on record, topping a mark set between July 2011 and this past June. Every U.S. state except Washington experienced warmer-than-average temperatures, NOAA reported.

Comment Re:Canticle for Leibowitz (Score 1) 1365

by mark_elf (#40921529) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Depressing Sci-fi You've Ever Read?

Canticle: Doesn't the protagonist just die a pointless death about 1/3 of the way in? He's on his way somewhere and gets shot by a stray arrow, just because. Or maybe the point is that life sucks. I wouldn't know if it has a happy ending. I liked "The Lineman". Miller really likes his characters to suffer.

But "The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester is worse. Talk about punishing some poor sod beyond the limits of sanity. Once again it may be unicorns and lollipops in the end, but there's no motivation to read that far. Apparently "repeatedly voted in polls the "Best Science Fiction Novel of All Time'" by people who like pain.

Philip K. Dick manages to stay classy while being all post-apocalyptic.
Software

Submission + - Productivity and creativity software coming to Steam

Submitted by
lga
lga writes: "Valve announced today in a press release that they are expanding Steam beyond games and will start to deliver other software. This means that Steam will compete directly with Microsoft's Windows Store and perhaps explains some of Gabe's disdain for Windows 8. The ability to save documents to Steam Cloud space also brings Valve into competition with the likes of Dropbox and Skydrive.

According to the press release:

The Software titles coming to Steam range from creativity to productivity. Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you.

"
Movies

Submission + - No bomb powerful enough to destroy an on-rushing asteroid, sorry Bruce Willis (networkworld.com) 2

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Maybe it's the doom predictions some folks are fearing about the end of the Mayan calendar this year or maybe these guys are obsessed with old Bruce Willis movies. Either way a class of physics students from the University of Leicester decided to evaluate whether or not the premise of Willis' 1998 "Armageddon" movie — where a group of oil drillers is sent by NASA to detonate nuclear devices on an asteroid that threatens to destroy Earth — could actually happen."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft developer tools abandon Windows XP suppo (microsoft.com)

Submitted by GigaplexNZ
GigaplexNZ writes: Earlier this year a bug was filed against the developer preview of the next version of Visual Studio complaining that applications built with it are incompatible with Windows XP. Pat Brenner from Microsoft Visual C++ Libraries Development issued a response: "Thanks for the report. This behavior is by design in MFC and CRT for Visual Studio vNext. The minimum supported operating systems are Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Vista. Windows XP is not a supported operating system for the release (design-time or run-time)." Can Microsoft seriously be considering preventing early adopters of the next version of Visual Studio from supporting a large portion of their existing customer base?
Censorship

Submission + - GoDaddy Backs SOPA (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "Website hosting company GoDaddy has officially voiced its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Bill in 2012, which is designed to thwart movie and music piracy on the Internet by empowering copyright holders to effectively shut down websites or online services found with infringing material. If passed, the U.S. government could blacklist any website it deems in violation of copyright, which could range from a few posts in a Web forum to a few links sent in an e-mail. GoDaddy supports SOPA for "protecting the intellectual property of hard-working Americans, U.S. business and the American public from the harm that necessarily flows from the purchase of counterfeit products." Yet, of the 142 companies that support the SOPA bill, GoDaddy is the only Internet company on that list."
Supercomputing

Submission + - How did the Tevatron influence computing? (isgtw.org)

Submitted by SciComGeek
SciComGeek writes: Few laypeople think of computing innovation in connection with the Tevatron particle accelerator, which shut down earlier this year. Mention of the Tevatron inspires images of majestic machinery, or thoughts of immense energies and groundbreaking physics research, not circuit boards, hardware, networks, and software.

Yet over the course of more than three decades of planning and operation, a tremendous amount of computing innovation was necessary to keep the data flowing and physics results coming. Those innovations will continue to influence scientific computing and data analysis for years to come.

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