Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

You probably won’t see it on TV, since no one follows space stuff anymore but us hypergeeks! Sigh. But it will be SO VERY COOL!

Back to Mars: After ’99 failure, NASA sets sights on lander touchdown Sunday

“After a nine-month, 422-million-mile trip from Earth that began last August, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander will catch up to the red planet Sunday to begin its three-month science mission. Its mission is series of soil analysis projects that involve digging lightly into the Mars surface to study the history of water, ice and life potential in the planet’s soil. But before those soil analysis projects can even get under way, the Phoenix has to successfully land on the planet’s surface, which, as NASA knows by experience, isn’t a sure thing. More than eight years ago, in December 1999, NASA’s Mars Polar Lander project came to a disastrous end when the craft’s descent engines shut down early as it prepared to land on the Martian surface. The lander went out of control from a high altitude, crashed and was destroyed. Since that mission, changes were made in the design of the Phoenix, the next-generation lander that is expected to touch down on Mars at 7:38 p.m. EDT Sunday. Once the Phoenix lands, NASA won’t know if the mission was successful until 15 minutes and 20 seconds later. That’s how long it will take for radio signals to get back to Earth with confirmation of a safe landing. The radio signals move at the speed of light and will travel approximately 171 million miles to reach Earth. The system improvements on the lander stem from the results of a NASA review board, which investigated the failure of the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) mission, said David Spencer, the Phoenix deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.”

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project has announced it’s new “Version 2.0” of it’s $100.00 laptop… this time they are shooting for $75.00 per laptop (more or less.) It looks more like an electronic book.

Design revamp for ‘$100 laptop’

The wraps have been taken off the new version of the XO laptop designed for schoolchildren in developing countries. The revamped machine created by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project looks like an e-book and has had its price slashed to $75 per device. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte gave a glimpse of the ‘book like’ device at an unveiling event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first XO2 machines should be ready to deliver to children in 2010. Mr. Negroponte said he hoped the design would also be used by other manufacturers. ‘This laptop comes from a different point of view,’ he said. The new version loses the green rubbery keyboard, sporting instead a single square display hinged at its center. This allows the device to be split into two touch screens that can either mimic a laptop with keyboard or the pages of a book. ‘Over the last couple of years we’ve learned the book experience is key,’ he said. The idea is for several children to use the device at once, combining the functions of a laptop, electronic book and electronic board. ‘It is a totally new concept for learning devices,’ said Prof. Negroponte. The new machine will also be more energy efficient, half the size of the first generation device and lighter to carry. It will continue to sport the XO logo in a multitude of colours so that children can personalize them. ‘The XO2 will be a bit of a Trojan horse,’ said Prof Negroponte. Initially it will be promoted as an e-book reader with the capacity to store more than 500 e-books. ‘Currently developing nations such as China and Brazil are spending $19 per student per year on books,’ he said.”

You just have to download it. Keep this in mind when your old version 7.x expires!

Here’s the link:

Grisoft AVG FREE 8.0

I have had a lot of folks that I set up with the free version in the past ask me about the upgrade. IT IS STILL FREE!

A new Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been released. Version 5.2 will add additional driver support and several new features.

Red Hat refreshes its Enterprise Linux distro with version 5.2

“The latest version of the company’s commercial version of Linux for businesses offers new hardware support, several new features, and performance and stability improvements. The company’s Enterprise version is the premium edition of its Linux distribution. Back in 2003, the company split its business up into the Enterprise effort and Fedora, its sponsored open source project. Users wishing to receive support, training and documentation pushed to deploy the RHEL releases. Thus for general consumers, Fedora is a much more economical option. By comparison, with RHEL, update cycles are roughly every 18 months, with various levels of support available. Additionally, any documentation and training provided by Red Hat typically focuses on the Enterprise release. Red Hat says version 5.2 includes ‘extensive driver updates,’ and that the company will certify IBM’s new Cell Blade systems. Enhanced capabilities including power usage, scalability, and manageability are now provided for x86/x64, Itanium, IBM Power, and IBM System z in this release. The OS should provide better support for suspend, hibernate, and resume functions on laptops, while also improving graphics capabilities, Red Hat said this morning. Additionally, the included application set has also been given an update, which includes a Firefox 3 Beta (perhaps now replaced with a release candidate) and OpenOffice 2.3.”

How cool is that?!

Symantec disses Vista, says corporations ‘not comfortable’

“Microsoft seems to be fighting a losing public relations battle for Vista, as companies continue to criticize the latest Windows operating system. In an interview with InformationWeek, Symantec’s chief operating officer Enrique Salem said his customers in the enterprise sector are sticking with the older operating system. This apparently is resulting in lost sales for the company and other third-party providers, he laments. While the first service pack for Vista was intended to drum up interest in the OS, Salem has seen no evidence of an increase in adoption. He added that the company is looking towards Windows 7 and is already working on applications for that operating system, due out in 2010.”

Dewd! I am ready! Download it and check it out!

Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 available on Mozilla servers

“Moving right along according to plan, the first release candidate of Firefox 3.0 appeared this morning among Mozilla’s beta and candidate downloads. BetaNews has obtained the link, and RC1 is downloadable now. On previous occasions during this testing cycle, what appeared to be public betas of Firefox 3 showed up in just the right place on Mozilla’s servers, at just the right time, but ended up being internal builds of the product. BetaNews is testing this RC1 download now, and will have more news about it later this afternoon. As best as we can tell, it’s the genuine article. As expected, most of the plug-ins recently upgraded for usability with Beta 5 were operable in this version, though our plug-in to switch rendering engines with Internet Explorer at will, is functional. The ‘About’ screen clearly registered the product as ‘Firefox 3.0’ instead of ‘Firefox 3.0b5.’ And after installation, the browser attempted to load a ‘What’s new in 3.0’ page that does not yet exist. In the early going, we notice one obvious new addition: A link marked ‘Most Visited’ appears next to the ‘Smart Bookmarks’ button in the Links toolbar, which itself was an addition that cropped up, we believe, in Beta 3. Clicking on this button brings up a list of URLs that appear to be the top 10 members of the current History buffer. The default skin looks ever-so-slightly tweaked, with more space between the new ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ rocker-switch-looking contraption and the ‘Reload current page’ button. Some pixels appear to have been cropped from the Address bar to make room.”