out of control - Slashdot User

Submission + - Small World Discovered Far Beyond Pluto (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @02:00PM

astroengine writes: After a decade of searching, astronomers have found a second dwarf-like planet far beyond Pluto and its Kuiper Belt cousins, a presumed no-man’s land that may turn out to be anything but. How Sedna, which was discovered in 2003, and its newly found neighbor, designated 2012 VP 2113 by the Minor Planet Center, came to settle in orbits so far from the sun is a mystery. Sedna comes no closer than about 76 times as far from the sun as Earth, or 76 astronomical units. The most distant leg of its 11,400-year orbit is about 1,000 astronomical units. Newly found VP 2113’s closest approach to the sun is about 80 astronomical units and its greatest distance is 452 astronomical units. The small world is roughly 280 miles (450 kilometers) wide, less than half the estimated diameter of Sedna.

Comment Just Say NO!!! (Score 1) 1059

by out of control on Saturday January 07, 2012 @12:47AM (#38619060) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Way To Deal With Roving TSA Teams?

Move to Canada. We would love to have you - and we don't put up with that kind of bullshit here. You Americans are too willing to put up with such bullshit.

Submission + - Jupiter moon pukes into space: probe movie

Submitted by Tablizer on Saturday June 09, 2007 @11:45PM

Tablizer writes: The New Horizons probe caught the moon Io in the act of barfing into space. "This five-frame sequence of New Horizons images captures the giant plume from Io's Tvashtar volcano. Snapped by the probe's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as the spacecraft flew past Jupiter earlier this year, this first-ever "movie" of an Io plume clearly shows motion in the cloud of volcanic debris, which extends 330 kilometers (200 miles) above the moon's surface...The appearance and motion of the plume is remarkably similar to an ornamental fountain on Earth, replicated on a gigantic scale."

Submission + - NYT Shines a Light on Firefox's Financial Sucess

Submitted by

NewsCloud

on Monday May 21, 2007 @03:03AM

NewsCloud writes: "Noam Cohen raises the issue of Mozilla's amazing financial success with Firefox's Google relationship.:

"Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year [similar revenue is expected in 2006]...In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation,...mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract...By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of "its arrangement and agreements," said board member Mitch Kapor.

The article compares this approach to Wikipedia's ongoing fundraisers and raises the issue of transparency in open source projects. i.e. should Firefox's 1,000 to 2,000 developers and 80,000 evangelists have full knowledge of how revenue is spent as well as the extent to which Google is able to influence strategy vs. other stakeholders."

Submission + - Rerouting the networks

Submitted by

prostoalex

on Monday May 21, 2007 @01:18AM

prostoalex writes: "Scientific American looks at new technologies to clear the networking jams. Instead of using routers to route the packets from point A and point B and therefore some hop in the sequence becoming critical for delivering the message, new technology explores a new approach of network coding: "Rudolf Ahlswede of the University of Bielefeld in Germany, along with Ning Cai, Shuo-Yen Robert Li and Raymond W. Yeung, all then at the University of Hong Kong, published groundbreaking work that introduced a new approach to distributing information across shared networks. In this approach, called network coding, routers are replaced by coders, which transmit evidence about messages instead of sending the messages themselves. When receivers collect the evidence, they deduce the original information from the assembled clues. Although this method may sound counterintuitive, network coding, which is still under study, has the potential to dramatically speed up and improve the reliability of all manner of communications systems and may well spark the next revolution in the field. Investigators are, of course, also exploring additional avenues for improving efficiency; as far as we know, though, those other approaches generally extend existing methods." Research is funded by the US military."

Submission + - Indiana to make Solaris "better Linux than Lin

Submitted by

ramboando

on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @09:44PM

ramboando writes: "In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun Microsystems has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of Linux's success. Sun has been trying for years to restore the luster of Solaris, but that since has faced a strong challenge chiefly from Linux. Sun wants to embrace some Linux elements so "we make Solaris a better Linux than Linux," said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief operating systems officer, quoting Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose latest start-up, Ning, uses Solaris. But it's a tricky balance to adopt elements of Linux while preserving Solaris technology and advantages such as the promise of backward compatibility. "As we make Solaris more familiar to Linux users, we don't [want to] lose what makes it more compelling and competitive.""

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