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NASA

Submission + - Spirit stuck in soft soil on Mars

Submitted by cheros
cheros writes: NASA reports that the Spirit Mars lander is presently stuck in soft soil. The lander's wheels are halfway sunk into the soil and they are planning simulation tests to see if they can get it out again.

I hope they can get it out of there because it's picking up enough new energy to work with, however, it only has 5 wheels left to work with — one of the wheels hasn't been working for years. Fingers crossed..
Idle

Submission + - McDonalds free wifi users soak up seating (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by bfire
bfire writes: McDonalds has earmarked potential changes to seating plans in some restaurants to prevent free wifi users from monopolising seating, particularly in peak periods. The availability of wifi means people are now spending 35 minutes in McDonalds — rather than the average 10 minutes that patrons used to spend eating there. But it appears not everyone is happy with the increased 'stickiness' of customers, with some licensees in Australia reporting that wifi users aren't turning over seats fast enough. The restaurant chain is considering options including space demarcation to deal with the problem.
Censorship

Submission + - 'Creative Industries' call for file-sharers ban (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
siloko
siloko writes: "An alliance of so-called 'Creative Industries', including the UK Film Council, have signed a joint statement asking the UK government to force ISPs into banning users caught sharing illegally. In an "unprecedented joint statement", the alliance predicted a "lawless free-for-all" unless the government ensured the "safe and secure delivery of legal content". The previous tactic of pursuing individual file-sharers in the courts appear to have been abandoned. "Instead, [the government] should provide enabling legislation, for the specific measures to be identified and implemented in an Industry Code of Practice," it recommends. One wonders how they remain 'creative' in their vocation when they keep on trotting out the same old story backed up by imaginary statistics (they claim 50% of net traffic in the UK is illegal content but provide no evidence for this figure). The BBC also has a blog entry dissecting their statement."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Apple freezes Snow Leopard APIs as software nears (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by DJRumpy
DJRumpy writes:

Apple this past weekend distributed a new beta of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that altered the programming methods used to optimize code for multi-core Macs, telling developers they were the last programming-oriented changes planned ahead of the software's release.

More specifically, Apple is said to have informed recipients of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build 10A354 that it has simplified the application programming interfaces (APIs) for working with Grand Central, a new architecture that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of Macs with multiple processing cores.

This technology works by breaking complex tasks into smaller blocks, which are then routed — or dispatched — efficiently to a Mac's available cores for faster processing. This allows third-party developers to leverage more of a Mac's hardware resources without having to be well-versed in multithreaded programming.

I had a conversation in a thread earlier about the fact that Linux wasn't scaling well and I asked why the OS wasn't doing exactly what is stated above. I was told it wasn't feasable due to overhead. Seems that may not be the case. I'm psyched about this release. Rumor has it that it will also include read/write access to HFS+ partitions via boot camp.

Comment North County Regional Library? (Score 1) 420

by Washii (#27649823) Attached to: Worst Censorware Blocks Cannot Be Fixed
Try North Central Regional Library District. That's a big freakin' difference, considering the NCRL basically covers Leavenworth, WA east to past Moses Lake, WA; Rock Island, WA, north to basically the Canadian border.

Also, in your own ACLU-WA link, you only had to read until the end of the first paragraph (update ignored) to get the name right. Of course, I barely remember this tizzy at all, and I actually live around the NCRL's headquarters. Go ACLU!

Comment Re:Every time Obama opens his mouth... (Score 1) 212

by Washii (#27057905) Attached to: Tigger.A Trojan Quietly Steals Stock Traders' Data
Because it took all of 1.5 years for the Democrats to legislate to the banks "give billions upon billions of dollars to people in ill financial health!"

You know, because we wouldn't have heard that being pushed through and soundly destroying the economy in only several months, right?

These sub-prime loans started well before the Y2K bug was due to hit, my friend.

Comment Re:Just giver her Windows 7 (Score 1) 479

by Washii (#26853283) Attached to: Microsoft Sued Over Vista-To-XP Downgrade Fees
I want to chime in with Vectronic. At my work, we pulled out a 2.6GHz Celeron with 512MB of RAM and compared 7 Beta 1 to Vista SP1.

Windows 7 performed awesome. It took a little longer to load (boot screen only) than would be hoped, but it ran slick. In fact, a virtualized copy I was running with VirtualBox on an Athlon X2 with the Virtualization Extensions used ran only somewhat better with 2GB of RAM allocated and practically nothing else running on the host. Also, shitty virtualized video vs. crappy Intel 'Extreme' Graphics.
(The host was Server 2003 R2 Enterprise that did nothing more than serve up WSUS and a few simple workgroup fileshares. Rarely ever more than 2-5% utilization, and nothing was going on when 7 was played with).

Trying to run Vista on that with 512MB of RAM? Ha! It was horrid.

That's some pretty heavy-duty 'Service Pack' right there.

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