Mr_Trol - Slashdot User

Decades-Old Soviet Reflector Spotted On the Moon 147

Posted by Soulskill on Monday April 26, 2010 @05:16PM from the always-in-the-last-place-you-look dept.

cremeglace writes "No one had seen a laser reflector that Soviet scientists had left on the moon almost 40 years ago, despite years of searching. Turns out searchers had been looking kilometers in the wrong direction. On 22 April, a team of physicists finally saw an incredibly faint flash from the reflector, which was ferried across the lunar surface by the Lunokhod 1 rover. The find comes thanks to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which last month imaged a large area where the rover was reported to have been left. Then the researchers, led by Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego, could search one football-field-size area at a time until they got a reflection."

Google Street View Shoots the Same Woman 43 Times 106

Posted by samzenpus on Monday April 26, 2010 @03:22PM from the get-your-face-out-there dept.

Geoffrey.landis writes "Terry Southgate discovered that his wife Wendy appears on the Google Street View of his neighborhood not once or twice but a whopping 43 times. From the article: 'It seems as if the Street View car simply followed the same route as Wendy and Trixie. However, Wendy was a little suspicious that the car was doing something on the "tricksie" side. Several of the Street View shots show Wendy looking with some concern towards the car that was, well, to put it politely, crawling along the curb. "I didn't know what it was doing. It was just driving round very, very slowly," Wendy told the Sun.' The next best thing to being a movie star — a Street View star!"

Comment Phillips G7000 'videopac computer' (Score 1) 1485

by Mr_Trol on Monday February 13, 2006 @05:40PM (#14710876) Attached to: What Was Your First Computer?

My first "computer" was a Phillips G7000 - I googled this link up http://www.sothius.com/hypertxt/welcome.html?g7000 .html, which has a nice picture and specs of the machine. I actually think I still have this machine (in a box somewhere).
I actually got a programmer-cartridge - the programming language was pure assembler (e.g. LDA 05). However it was difficult to keep motivated, because it was not possible to store my "creative" work.
My next computer was the legendary C=64 - with a tape station only. I was sold when I started to type in the sample programs from the manual - like Guess a Number game. Also the sprite samples was facinating.. And the obvious one:

10 print "Hello World!"
20 goto 10

With only the tape station I soon learned to have Turbo ABC or was it ABC Turbo? handy for fast loading of programs
Over time I also bought a used 1570 disk station. A matrix printer was added - at that time, manuals for printers included entire descriptions of character sets and escape codes and all that stuff. Today this kind of manual would be called a "Developers Reference Manual" ;-)
My first IBM PC compatible, was a 286, 1MB RAM, 40MB harddrive and super VGA! wild stuff. However a few months after I bought it, Intel declared the processer for dead/depreciated - That was hard to handle for a young proud man! - well I had a lot of fun with games, hacking fractal programs in Turbo Pascal... Oh - and I discovered fidonet as well :-)
After a couple of years it was time to move on to new adventures - I went back to Commodore - The Amiga 1200 with AGA chipset - need to say more? - OK I added a 68030, more memory and harddrive - like everybody else. I remember there was a great "Intel outside" campaign going on - We were truly Motorola fans at that time.
When the 3D games took over in the gaming world and faster PC's came to the market, it became more and more difficult to stay with old Amiga hardware - but that is another story.

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