As many news portals announced The U.S. Navy likely will make its first attempt to shoot down a faulty spy satellite Wednesday night. It seems a warning was issued
by the US government to all ships and planes to stay away from a specific area of the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii. The notice says the two- and-a-half hour window begins 2:30 a.m. Thursday Greenwich Mean Time, which is 9:30 p.m. Wednesday on the East Coast, and 4:30 p.m. Wednesday in Hawaii. If you were wondering about the Atlantis space shuttle, don’t worry the timing of the satellite shoot down is after the space shuttle is scheduled to be safely on the ground. Also the Pentagon officials warns that the notice reflects the first opportunity to make the satellite go down, and solve this problem, but it’s possible the attempt it’s delayed until further notice:
“We have to make the notification, but it’s possible the conditions won’t be ideal, or that everything won’t be ready,” said a Pentagon official who asked not to be identified.
The satellite that costs approximately 5000 pounds, malfunctioned immediately after its launch in 2006, December, has a full tank of fuel attached to it. It is likely that it would remain intact during re-entry and disperse potentially deadly fumes and substances over an area the size of two football fields. The Navy plans to fire at the satellite as it enters Earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of about 150 miles. The cost of the satellite shoot down was estimated by the Missile Defense Agency at 40 to 60 million
dollars. The option of striking the satellite with a missile launched from an Aegis cruiser was decided upon by President Bush after consultation with several government and military officials and aerospace experts, said Deputy National Security Adviser James Jeffrey. I wrote this article after I read about this thing on CNN so you might find in here some numbers I got from there.
The reason I wrote this, is the connection with an aspect of technology, and I do like a saying “With great power comes great responsability”. If we launched a faulty satellite into our sky, it’s our business to take care of it, and we should make it fast and clean. This is an ugly part of science and technology but this things happens and we have to be prepared to deal with them.
The pre-installed OS is pretty good for most things, but I find it is a bit limiting for real work. Xandros comes with KDE 3.4.2, so installing any newer KDE based apps is tricky, since that will force the upgrade of the kdelibs and could break stuff.
The other reason why the default OS is not appealing to me is that there is a 2.3GB read only partition for the OS files and pre-installed programs. So you only have 1.4GB for your user files on the built-in drive. That wouldn’t really be such a big problem if you could free up some space, however even if you uninstall apps you don’t use, you can’t actually use any of that freed space because no data gets removed from the system partition. And if you install new apps it uses space on your user partition.
So that’s a no go. I installed plain debian on my EeePC and it works really nicely. All the apps I need (Firefox, Openoffice, Kopete, Konversation, KDevelop, , plus a full Qt/C++ development enviroment fits into 1.5GB so I have more functionality in much less space and much more flexibility. Got an extra 4GB SD card so I might put Windows on that (although windows is a bitch to install on removable storage).
Overall the EeePC is really awesome.. Even though it has a small screen, I find I’m using my main laptop less and less at home. There’s a huge benefit to having something you can easily carry around with one hand, has no moving parts, and can use in any place, and boots up super fast.
VMUSIC is a product that not only lets you add USB Flash drive interfacing to your product but allows you to play back MP3 and other popular digital music formats direct from a USB Flash drive. Extensions to the VDAP command set allow you to play a selected file as well as control the volume, balance, etc. of the sound channel and monitor the status of the file being played. VMUSIC is ideal for adding MP3 playback from USB drive capability to home entertainment and in-car audio systems, as well as other appliances requiring audio playback capability from USB Flash drives.
Vmusic features include :
One USB “A” socket to connect to USB Flash drive
Audio line-out connector for audio playback
Stereo 3.5mm headphone jack socket and audio line-out connector for audio playback
Single 5V supply input
Program or update firmware via USB Flash disk or via UART interface
We have to ask ourselves , is this the future in user interfaces ? maybe yes. Students at Georgia Tech have created an audio analysis program that lets you blow at your computer as a way to control it. It only uses one microphone, and after a quick calibration, it’s ready to go.
This is a way to support blowing at a laptop or computer screen to directly control certain interactive applications. Localization estimates are produced in real-time to determine where on the screen the person is blowing. You can do this by using a single microphone, such as those that are already embedded in a standard laptop or one placed near a computer monitor by using audio fingerprinting.
Yes I know, its one gadget that everyone will want to have, its like a new iphone concept, unfortunately this phone wont be available to soon on the store shelves because its only a concept. However, Gizmodo informs us that the Pen Phone concept will be developed by an anonymous manufacturer.
The phone uses Bluetooth ear buds for voice calls. It features a little display, the dialing numbers, a microSD card slot and seems to support USB connection. The project looks very promising and I bet they will hit some high numbers when they put this gadget on sale.
you should also read this article about the New iPhone.
