Mars Science Laboratory: Update Set In San Francisco About Curiosity Mars Rover

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Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect. The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover’s full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. One class of substances Curiosity is checking for is organic compounds — carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life. At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.

via Mars Science Laboratory: Update Set In San Francisco About Curiosity Mars Rover.

Probably in reference to this site:

Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Press Releases.

It had me going for awhile and it’s not even April 1.  People like having fun on these intertubes.  🙂

Optical SDN Gets a Test Run

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Building an OTS boils down to adding two things to an optical transport box: a virtual switch and the software hooks to receive commands from OpenFlow or some similar protocol. Infinera outfitted its gear accordingly, and ESnet provided a home-built SDN controller to talk to it.

via Optical SDN Gets a Test Run – Optical Networking – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading.

The OTS used in the tests is nowhere near commercial viability, both sides tell Light Reading. The software doesn’t have operational niceties such as alarms or debugging tools, for instance.

OTS=Optical Transport Switch

Are Your Facebook Friends Stressing You Out? (Yes)

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Facebook’s power, and its curse, is this holistic treatment of personhood. All the careful tailoring we do to ourselves (and to our selves) — to be, say, professional in one context and whimsical in the other — dissolves in the simmering singularity of the Facebook timeline. The circumstantially mediated relationships typical of IRL interactions — you see your boss at work, your friend after work, your mother-in-law at Thanksgiving — are mediated instead by one overarching, and overpowering, circumstance: Facebook.

via Are Your Facebook Friends Stressing You Out? (Yes) – Megan Garber – The Atlantic.

Research discovery could revolutionise semiconductor manufacture

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Instead of starting from a silicon wafer or other substrate, as is usual today, researchers have made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended nanoparticles of gold in a flowing gas.

via Research discovery could revolutionise semiconductor manufacture – Lund University.

The structures are referred to as nanowires or nanorods. The breakthrough for these semiconductor structures came in 2002 and research on them is primarily carried out at Lund, Berkeley and Harvard universities.

Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

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The laptop comes with Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS plus a few additions. Dell worked closely with Canonical and the various peripheral manufacturers to ensure that well-written, feature-complete drivers are available for all of the laptop’s hardware. Out of the box the laptop will just work. They also have their own PPA if you want to pull down the patches separately, either to reload the laptop or to use on a different machine.

via Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook | Ars Technica.

Syrian Internet Is Off The Air

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Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria’s international Internet connectivity shut down. In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria’s IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet.

via Syrian Internet Is Off The Air – Renesys Blog.

These five offshore survivors include the webservers that were implicated in the delivery of malware targeting Syrian activists in May of this year.

For Winning The Nobel Prize, Niels Bohr Got A House With Free Beer

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Niels Bohr is one of the greatest scientists who ever lived and a personal hero of mine. He was also a favorite of his fellow Danes when he lived in Copenhagen. Today, however, I found out just how much they loved him. Apparently, after he won the Nobel Prize in 1922, the Carlsberg brewery gave him a gift – a house located next to the brewery. And the best perk of the house? It had a direct pipeline to the brewery so that Bohr had free beer on tap whenever he wanted.

via For Winning The Nobel Prize, Niels Bohr Got A House With Free Beer – Forbes.

So was free beer the reason why Bohr was able to make great strides in developing quantum mechanics? Okay, probably not – but I’m sure a few late night drinking sessions with other physicists didn’t hurt.

Perl/Tk Tutorial – Create GUI with Perl’s Tk Module

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In Unix/Linux you can execute your perl scripts by typing “perl <filename>” at command prompt. But before you do that make sure you have both Perl and its Tk module. Most linux distributions have perl – but quite a few don’t have the Tk module. Make sure that the system you are using have the Tk module. If you don’t have it, go to http://www.cpan.org and download the perl module. Or you can use the perl’s CPAN module to install the Tk module. To do this, open a terminal and enter the following command
perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install Bundle::CPAN
cpan> reload cpan
cpan> install Tk

via Perl/Tk Tutorial – Create GUI with Perl’s Tk Module.

Alcatel-Lucent Takes SDN to the Enterprise

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AlcaLu wants to see policy infused into SDN early on. Ideally, the network would tap a user profile — or a virtual machine’s profile — to help it make on-the-fly decisions about what to do with traffic coming from (or being sent to) a virtualized application.

via Alcatel-Lucent Takes SDN to the Enterprise – IP & Convergence – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading Service Provider IT.

.mobi

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The domain name mobi is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from the adjective mobile, indicating it’s used by mobile devices for accessing Internet resources via the Mobile Web.

The domain was approved by ICANN on 11 July 2005, and is managed by the mTLD global registry. It was originally financially backed and sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica Móviles, Telecom Italia Mobile, Orascom Telecom, GSM Association, Hutchison Whampoa, Syniverse Technologies, and Visa, with an executive from each company serving on mTLD’s board of directors.[1][2][3]

In February 2010, Afilias acquired mTLD Top-Level Domain Ltd. (known publicly as “dotMobi”).[4]

via .mobi – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.