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Comment 5 out of 6 wheels?!? (Score 5, Informative) 160

by DavidChristopher (#27921001) Attached to: Spirit Stuck In Soft Soil On Mars

SOURCE: Wikipedia
On sol 779, the right front wheel ceased working after having covered 4.2 mi (7 km) on Mars. Engineers began driving the rover backwards, dragging the dead wheel. Ironically, although this has resulted in changes to driving techniques the dragging effect has also had a positive effect in the fact that the wheel dragging has partially cleared soil away on the surface as the rover travels and allows for imaging areas that would normally be covered in soil.

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/images/rover1_detail_500.jpg

NASA got awesome mileage out of this vehicle... considerably more than was initially expected- over 7700 meters! Hopefully they get it unstuck. According the the NASA website, they've gotten it backed up by a few CM over the last few Sols...

Comment Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard? (Score 0) 256

by DavidChristopher (#27920849) Attached to: Apple Freezes Snow Leopard APIs
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

It's mostly under the hood, but these are the kinds of underhood changes that application developers will take to quickly- such Grand Central, OpenCL and the new QT. The performance optimizations are what will really drive this product, providing they live up to expectations. Each subsequent release of MacOS X has felt faster (to many, including myself). As to Mom's mac? She probably won't need this update, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to get it anyway...
:)

Comment Re:State of IRIX? (Score 5, Insightful) 107

by DavidChristopher (#27920587) Attached to: SGI Lives On, In Name At Least

Does this mean IRIX will be developed again? I'm not seeing any info one way or the other.

As a Linux and BSD guy, I'm pretty ignorant about IRIX other than the MIPS support. Does IRIX do anything innovative that makes developing it worthwhile?

No. And I'm fairly certain of that.

IRIX was discontinued in 2006 by SGI - http://www.sgi.com/support/mips_irix.html - and most of the cool technical features of IRIX were ported over to Linux ages ago - like xfs http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/. Actually, the correct question is will this new, improved and revived SGI continue to support the open source efforts of the old SGI regime? http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ . I don't see a point in reviving IRIX, but there was a lot of OSS work done out of that shop and I'd hate to see it disappear. Right?

Comment Sure... Belkin... right... (Score 1) 837

by DavidChristopher (#27729075) Attached to: Handmade vs. Commercially Produced Ethernet Cables
I'm compelled to ask what your phb actually does for a living. because it's not networking
In the data centre, all of our runs are custom. Even in the lab and development rooms, the runs are custom built cables. If a "belkin" cable gets into the datacentre, it's lost.
Now, I'm not promising that YOU can make the cables, there's a definite knack to it ( I personally don't have it, I hate making cables but our datacentre guys are wicked awesome at it). I've ever heard of these magical special jacks dies and cable he's referring to.

Maybe he wants you to get some of these?: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9967991-1.html ?

Comment This has been a long time coming (Score 4, Interesting) 364

by DavidChristopher (#27712059) Attached to: Windows 7 To Include "Windows XP Mode"
... one of the drawbacks of the WIndows platform - from an development and engineering point of view - is that it's backwards compatible all the way back to (if I'm not mistaken) Windows 1.0. That's an insane codebase to be dealing with. By bundling an XP VM with Win7, they can- for the first time - take the backwards compatibility crap out of Windows and concentrate on providing a stable OS.

Isn't that essentially what Apple did with the transition from 68000 series chips to PowerPC, from OS 9.x to OS 10, and then again from Power PC to Intel?

I've believed this was a necessity for quite a while.

D

Comment Re:I cannot believe it... (Score 5, Insightful) 325

by DavidChristopher (#27689711) Attached to: Researchers Show How To Take Control of Windows 7
In the absence of physical security, taking over a vista, linux, mac os x or (insert vendor here) UNIX system is not difficult, providing you know the platform. No, the 'average gramma' can't do it, but most of us most likely can - with not much more than a google search and a quick download.

I'm not a microsoft (or apple, or linux) fanboi by any means, but a system is only as secure as you actually make it. Disk encryption helps - it's a great idea - so I've honestly never met anyone who's used it.

While this is certainly an interesting exploit, I doubt highly that many systems will be compromised in the wild with it.

Comment Re:'Human' (Score 2, Insightful) 309

by DavidChristopher (#27637765) Attached to: Telepresence — Our Best Bet For Exploring Space
Yes! We could start out with robotic, sentient bipedal metal human analogs.

But why limit them to exploration? They could also work in our factories, mines, and ... oh... even better - wage our wars. We could call them "Centurions", in honour of our ancient roman brothers. I suppose we could also give them one red back-and-forth scanning eye, too.

Why does this all sound familiar suddenly?

Comment Nice, but... (Score 2, Informative) 239

by DavidChristopher (#27607615) Attached to: Ubuntu 9.04 RC Released
Remember, this is "pre-release" software.

Looks like there's lot of good stuff in there though - X.Org 1.6, Gnome 2.26, a kernel based on 2.6.28, ext4 support... (I'm especially interested in wacom hotplug tablet support in a mainstream distro


This won't be the year of the linux desktop- but we'll see how it goes on my laptop :)

Comment Re:well... (Score 1) 41

by DavidChristopher (#27541909) Attached to: NASA's Zero-Gravity Robotic-Arm Partnership With Canada
I had to look it up- but my last post felt incomplete:

There was some controversy a little while back when SPAR/MacDonald Dettwiler's Information Systems and Geospacial Services operations division was to be bought out by to Alliant Techsystems of Edina, Minnesota for $1.325 billion..

However, that move, while approved by the shareholders was blocked by the Canadian Federal Government.Nice to see CSA is on the ball again :)

(There, that's better)

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