Muad'Dave writes "CNN is reporting that the crew of the International Space Station was forced to take refuge from a possible collision of the ISS with a piece of space debris Thursday. From the article: 'Floating debris from a satellite forced the crew of the international space station to retreat to a safety capsule Thursday, according to a NASA news release. .. The debris was too close for the space station to move out of the way, so the station's three crew members were temporarily evacuated to a the station's Soyuz TMA-13 capsule, NASA said.'" Update: 03/12 18:42 GMT by T : The original story incorrectly said the ISS had 18 crew members. Luckily for the three in the Soyuz, that was a mistake.

supaneko writes "I am working with a non-profit that will eventually host a massive online self-help archive and community (using FTP and HTTP services). We are expecting 1,000+ unique visitors / day. I know that having only one server to serve this number of people is not a great idea, so I began to look into clusters. After a bit of reading I determined that I am looking for high availability, in case of hardware fault, and network load balancing, which will allow the load to be shared among the two to six servers that we hope to purchase. What I have not been able to determine is the 'perfect' solution that would offer efficiency, ease-of-use, simple maintenance, enjoyable performance, and a notably better experience when compared to other setups. Reading about Windows 2003 Clustering makes the whole process sounds easy, while Linux and FreeBSD just seem overly complicated. But is this truly the case? What have you all done for clustering solutions that worked out well? What key features should I be aware for successful cluster setup (hubs, wiring, hardware, software, same servers across the board, etc.)?"

SpuriousLogic writes "There's been another delay in the schedule announced for getting the Large Hadron Collider switched back on — now it's September 2009, a year after it shut down due to a malfunction. Scientists had said they expected the $5.4B machine to be repaired by November 2008, but then pushed the date back to June 2009, before the latest delay."