Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
The Smidgen
Everything you never needed to know. Ok maybe not everything, that would be ridiculous.
The answer is, “of course you don’t need that.” The response that follows, however, is, “but that’s not the point!” Face facts buddy, you’re never going to own a real Delorean let alone one with a flux capacitor and Mr. Fusion on the back so that’s why we buy models.
But why get a 1/18th scale replica that’s just going to sit on a shelf somewhere hoping to be dusted when you can buy this beaut? Granted, $250 is a bit more change than your average replica but how many of them have a 500 GB Seagate hard drive built in?
SOURCE: Flash Rods
It seems that Facebook is about to hold yet another event, this time in advance of Zucky’s talk at the Web 2.0 Summit. TechCrunch and Engadget have speculated, by the fairly obvious mail and messaging clues in the design of the invite, that this may have something to do with Facebook’s Project Titan email client that they have supposedly been working on since at least February.
Titan is reported to be a “full-fledged” webmail service and internally referred to as a “Gmail killer” so what will that mean to me, the masses and old Googs?
For Me: Very little, I use Facebook but not religiously. I don’t actually like Facebook chat and I’m quite happy with Gmail. The truth of the matter is unless someone makes a new webmail service that somehow makes all others look archaic, I doubt I’ll be switching because I don’t want to go through the hassle of redirecting contact info. It’s worse than moving.
For the Masses: Could be worth note, while I may not like the message services from Facebook there are a lot of people who do use them and I’m sure would welcome an improvement and the addition of having a @facebook address.
For Google: This isn’t something they can just laugh off but neither do I think they should panic. There are 500 million Facebook users out there and if all of them decided to up and switch webmail services then that would certainly put a hurt on Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, but it’s not going to happen. Partially for the reasons I’m not going to switch but there are plenty of other reasons out there. Many of those 500m may use a Facebook email account as a 2nd, 3rd, 15th address but probably not as their primary account.
What will be a concern for Google are the new users, the younger generation just starting to form their own online identities. These users are likely to get pulled into orbit around the supermassive Facebook and find it easy to use their @facebook account as their primary email address as well. After all, it is easier to have everything centrally located and if you don’t have any previous attachments there’s nothing getting in the way of that.
In the end it will probably lead Google to put much more effort into Buzz and grow it’s own ecosystem to attract the new users. Either way, competition is good so Facebook, Google … FIGHT!
Oh also, this event is strictly invite only so naturally we … did not get invited.
SOURCE: Engadget
Yes, it’s true, the new AMD Radeon HD 6800 series of cards (Barts core) perform slightly worse than the previous generation of 5800 series cards … on purpose. It might be hard to wrap your head around the concept of increasing a model number while decreasing performance but AMD’s thinking is that they wanted to bring the x800 series back down to the sub $300 level. I’m not sure I follow this logic since for the past several years we’ve come to expect the x800 to represent the high-end with the x700 at the mid range. I guess since they are not discontinuing the 5700′s they didn’t want to step on their own toes. Hopefully it will make more sense with the Cayman core 6900′s come out. So anyway, while 6800 has an average performance of about 7% less than 5800, it’s also 25% smaller, takes less power and costs less. Prices for the 6850 start at $179 while the 6870′s will begin at $239.
So what is the new Barts core then anyway? Well it’s basically a refactored Cypress core (the 5800′s). AMD managed to cut the stream processors from 1600 down to 1120 but with a clock speed bump, as I had said, performance is still pretty close to the 5870. Not bad for losing 480 stream processors. There are other improvements to tessellation, anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing but for the most part your looking at a more efficient, significantly smaller and slightly less powerful last gen card. Have I said that already?
If you want a full performance breakdown, hit up the source link as AnandTech always does a very thorough job, but for a quick look here’s the important compares. How does the $239 reference AMD 6870 compare to the now reduced $199 reference Nvidia 460 1GB? Generally speaking the 6870 outperforms the 460 in a way that exactly justifies $40. When compared to the heavily overclocked and unfortunately titled EVGA 460 FTW edition (groan), which on Newegg is the same price as the 6870, we see very similar performance with the EVGA card outperforming the 6870 slightly. It’s not an entirely fair fight though as it is an overclocked card.
What this all means to me is that AMD has released a slightly updated, reduced-price part that competes on the same level as an overclocked, price-matched 460 from Nvidia giving them both a very nice card in the Bang-For-Your-Buck category. So really, for most people it’s just who you prefer, are you an Nvidia guy or gal, or do you see the red lights of AMD? If you have the cash to go nuts you’re still probably looking at a GTX 480 until we know more about Cayman or the dual chip Antilles solutions from AMD.
SOURCE: AnandTech
The LRO recorded temperatures about 90 seconds after impact over 1340 degrees Fahrenheit (727 degrees Celsius). Credit: NASA/UCLA
In the name of Science, we destroy. In this case, the $79 million LCROSS spacecraft NASA sent crashing into the Cabeus crater at the south pole of the Moon on October 9th, 2009. Now the reports are in and what did we find? Water, and lots of it … compared to, you know, what you’d think a dried up moon would have.
Six separate reports reveal that water ice makes up about 5.6% of the total mass of the Cabeus crater floor, making the crater twice as wet as earth soil … in the Sahara desert. While there may be no reason to lead a horse there, all kidding aside it is still a significant amount of water and more than what was expected.
Apart from water, other things like elemental hydrogen, carbon monoxide, ammonia, methane, mercury, calcium, magnesium and silver were found to be present in the crater. These findings give hope that a lunar base of some kind could one day be constructed on the moon and use resources present for fuel, drinking water, breathable air and other things. For a lunar base to be viable at all having these things present is crucial as transporting all of your supplies would be beyond impractical.
Although Cabeus crater itself would not make for an ideal location for a lunar base (something about always being minus 387 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 233 Celsius) and no access to the Sun for solar power) researchers believe that there is no reason to think this is an isolated incident. Other locations both at the north and south poles are likely to contain water as well, so lets all have a drink!
SOURCE: Space.com
Llano is the chip under the copper heatsink and pipes
OK, so you can’t really buy it or anything but at least AMD is finally showing off hardware prototypes of it’s 32nm Llano APU (Accelerated Processing Unit, according to AMD). No idea what any of that mean? I forgive you, it’s been a while since AMD promised us this golden age. The Fusion APU’s are a hybrid of a standard CPU (Phenom II architecture in this case) paired with a DirectX 11 class GPU and a northbridge chip all on one die. Screaming beast of a gaming machine this is not, however, it is a very low power and capable platform for laptops and the like.
At the AMD Technical Forum & Exhibition (TFE) in Taiwan this year they showed Llano running a Windows 7 machine playing a loop of an Aliens Vs Predator demo on default resolution and while it certainly didn’t churn through the frame rates, it could be acceptable if necessary. Still, it’s actually pretty impressive for an integrated (read: no separate graphics board) solution. More importantly this sort of on board graphical power raises the low end of the bar which would allow game developers to focus on a smaller range of hardware rather than providing scalability across a vast sea of specifications.
Speaking of specifications, I have none. Yup, just like the Radeon’s I don’t know anything about the speeds and feeds of Llano. I do know that in addition to AvP, Llano was shown running SuperPi and calculating Pi to 32 million decimal places, decoding HD video and performing … something else (really, I don’t know what it was) all at the same time.
In the end, Llano should perform much better and with less power than an Intel Core i5 M520 solution (Intel’s integrated graphics wonder) provided nothing changes between now and some vague time in 2011 when Fusion is finally for sale. And really, how often do things change in the tech world anyway?
That image, dear friends, is the future. Well, OK, the future of ATI AMD’s line of Radeon video cards anyway. And for the moment, that’s about all we know. AMD teased us with a barrage of images but the specs will have to wait until a Friday reveal. Until then I can tell you that two cards are known, the Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850, no surprises there, and that the former will need two 6-pin power connectors where the latter will need but one. Also, it seems like there are 5 video connectors on the reference model: two DVI, one HDMI(1.4a) and two Mini DisplayPorts.
Presumably, AMD’s new 6800 series of cards will attempt to leapfrog Nvidia’s Fermi based cards in the GTX 400 line. While the Fermi cards started off rather slow (high performance at the cost of oodles of power and heat) for anyone outside of the ultra high-end market, Nvidia’s latest GTX 460 card is arguably the best card your money can buy right now so it will be interesting to see how AMD’s new line stacks up.
Of course I know you have a plethora of question like: How will they perform? How big is the improvement? What will they cost? Like I said I guess we’ll have to wait till Friday for that info. Stupid space/time, bend damn you!
The story goes like this: a professor in Sweden, who wishes to remain anonymous, places his bag containing laptop, keys, credit cards, calendar and various important documents under the stairwell in his apartment complex while he goes to the laundry room. When he comes back, the bag is gone, naturally. The most upsetting for him was the loss of his calendar which was his life, according to the professor.
After reporting the incident to the police and blocking his credit cards he returned to the stairwell a short while later to discover his missing bag. “The backpack was there again. With all the papers, calendar and credit cards. It was just the computer that was missing,” he explained. Relieved to have his calendar and most of his belongings back the professor was resigned to having only lost the computer. “Unfortunately, I have been bad at backing up my computer.”
I think its safe to say that it’s a rare trait among thieves to be considerate enough to steal only what they were after and return the rest of the victim’s belongings, lessening the pain of the loss, however, the courtesy was extended farther still.
About a week after the theft our professor returned home to find an envelop containing a USB flash drive that had been taking along with the computer. It seems the Courteous Crook (my name for him) had taken the time, likely hours, to copy all of the professor’s documents and personal files from the computer on to the flash drive, something the professor had never bothered to do himself.
Despite having been robbed, the professor was rather pleased with the outcome of Caper of the Courteous Crook, “Often when people lose their computers and cameras, it is understandably not the gadget itself that is the most important. The content is often irreplaceable.”
Well, color me surprised.
SOURCE: The Local.se
Concept art, obviously
Gliese 581 is a star, a red dwarf star to be specific, that’s about 20 light years from Earth. Slap a ‘G’ on the end of that name and you have the sixth observed exoplanet in that solar system (gliesean system?). That’s cool, exoplanets are still fun but we’ve found over 400 of them now so why should you care about this one? Life, baby, life.
Gliese 581g is the first world discovered that sits in what is called “the habitable zone” where temperatures on the planet’s surface are right for liquid water. Life, as we know it today, needs this water stuff to be, so that’s a pretty good start for life on other planets. Additionally, the planet has a mass of about 3 to 4 times that of Earth’s making it one of the closest in size to Earth we’ve ever found, but also giving it enough girth to hold on to an atmosphere, also important for life, we think.
Since g-money’s local star is a red dwarf, much cooler than our yellow, mid-sized star, it’s orbit in the habitable zone is only 37 days. Also, the proximity to the host star means that 581g is tidally locked with the star, like our moon is locked to us. Unlike our moon, this is a planet (duh, I know) so that means no day night cycle. The “sun” for g-baby is always in the same spot in the sky, or never in the sky if you happen to live on the dark side (where there are cookies I hear).
Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy who was part of the study that found this planet, says that this set of circumstances; tidally locked planet providing stable temperatures pretty much year round, red dwarf star that has a nearly infinite lifespan (estimated to be hundreds of billions of years, which incidentally is many times the age of the friggen universe), the relative abundance of water found in the solar system and beyond, and the propensity for life to flourish wherever it can, there is no doubt in his mind that life does exist on this planet. That’s a good enough lead for me, point all the telescopes and satellites SETI has at this puppy and lets chat it up. Better than pointing aimlessly in the dark right?
Welcome to a new segment of the Smidgen dedicated to the wacky things those CEOs and other high profile executives say and do. Today on the block is Nokia CEO EVP and GM of Mobile Solutions, Anssi Vanjoki. When asked why Nokia hasn’t made the switch to use Android like nearly everyone else he responded with a vivid illustration about the “permanently low profitability” that stems from the constant one-upsmanship amongst mobile manufacturers using the same OS was like Finnish boys who “pee in their pants” for warmth in the winter.
Classic.
Update: OK so he’s actually the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Mobile Solutions and not the CEO, my bad. Or, at least he was those things, because he’s now announced his resignation from Nokia despite being “committed, perhaps even obsessed” with bring Nokia back o the top of the smartphone heap. Or maybe it’s because of that commitment. His stated reason for leaving is simple, “I didn’t become the CEO,” so it’s all come full circle then, sorta.
