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Space

Geomagnetic Storm In Progress 110

Posted by Soulskill from the sky-is-falling dept.
shogun writes "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports a strong geomagnetic storm is in progress. The shuttle, ISS and GPS systems may be affected." They think this storm was caused by a weak solar flare on April 3rd. As you may expect, this has caused some unusually impressive northern lights since it started. What you may not expect is a photograph from Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard the International Space Station showing the aurora from orbit. He apparently tweets a lot of pictures from space. He and his crewmates have taken over 100,000 pictures since coming aboard the ISS.

Comment Re:10+ the max? Come on... (Score 1) 958

by Krisbee (#29662603) Attached to: How many countries have you visited?

Not possible from here.

While still in Europe If I take off NNE I won't get halfway though my country in 8 hours (and my car isn't a wreck). In that direction I need some 17 1/2 hours to get out of the country.

Going north I'll leave my country in 2 hours 19 minutes.

Going west will drown me in an hour, Going east will drown me within 4 1/2 hours

Going south I can visit two other countries within 8 hours of car drive

Everything according to Google maps. Where am I ?

Comment Re:I think I'm in the minority here... (Score 1) 688

by Krisbee (#29111685) Attached to: Suitable Naming Conventions For Workstations?

However -- The moment you enable sshd on it, it becomes a server,
and if it isn't a dumb dataless box, it needs to be able to be referred to.

That referral should preferably work not just through the network or a database,
but also through normal speech, phone and should be able to memorize.

Therefore, don't use the name as a database, use a database.

Previously we used whiskey labels even if some of those esoteric Irish labels were a bit awkward over the phone.
Nowadays, management has decided we must use the name as a database, thus enclding the location in the name, and we have to rename machines all the time. Fortunately they are all dumb dataless thingies, so when something needs to be moved we just change the mac address in the DHCP database and reinstall.
Networking

Internet Black Holes 100

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-can't-get-there-from-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur. Hubble has operated continuously since September 17, 2007. During that time, it identified 881,090 black holes and reachability problems. In the most recent quarter-hourly round, completed at 04:40 PDT, 04/09/2008, Hubble issued 46,846 traceroutes to 1,815 prefixes it identified as likely to be experiencing problems (of 78,772 total prefixes monitored by the system). Of these, it found 195 prefixes to be unreachable from all its vantage points and 139 to be reachable from some vantage points and not others." No relationship to that other Hubble which also tries to find black holes ;)
Businesses

Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry 405

Posted by CmdrTaco from the mmmmmmm-beer dept.
Socguy writes "According to a New Zealand scientist, Jim Salinger, the price of beer in and around Australia is going to be under increasing upward pressure as reductions in malting barley yields are experienced as a side effect of our ongoing climate shift. "It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," Mr. Salinger told the Institute of Brewing and Distilling convention."
Power

The Texas Petawatt Laser 174

Posted by kdawson from the you-can-pet-a-dog-or-you-can-pet-a-cat dept.
Roland Piquepaille notes the hype surrounding what the University of Texas at Austin is calling the world's most powerful laser. During a tenth of a femtosecond this laser is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the US, and is brighter than sunlight on the surface of the Sun. On his own blog Roland points out that UT's is not the first petawatt laser; that distinction belongs to a system installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1996.

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