India’s ISRO Chairman, G Madhavan Nair recently gave a brief description of a fully-reusable 2-stage satellite launch vehicle that is being planned at ISRO. From the article: ‘This is in its initial stages of vehicle configuration and the first stage is configured as a winged body configuration, which will attain an altitude of around 100 km and deliver nearly half the orbital velocity. This stage after burnout will re-enter and will be made to land horizontally on the runway, like an aircraft. The second stage after delivering the payload in the orbit will be made to re-enter the atmosphere and will be recovered using airbags either in the sea or land. This is only in its conceptual stage.’
Daily Archive for January 17th, 2006
“The first draft of version three of the GNU General Public License was released to the public this afternoon. Major improvements touted in version three include changes designed to mitigate the damage posed by new threats to free software such as software patents. One individual stated about the release: ‘It is changes in law, not computer technology, that pose the principal challenges to the free software community. Chief among these changes has been the unwise and ill-considered application of patent law to software. Software patents threaten every free software project, just as they threaten proprietary software and custom software. Any program can be destroyed or crippled by a software patent belonging to someone who has no other connection to the program.’”
Apple’s television ads for its new Macs boast that for years, Intel’s chips have been “trapped inside PCs–dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks.” Now, the voiceover proclaims, the Intel processor will finally be set free.
Of course, that’s not exactly the way Intel would put it.
“Never would we characterize our customers that way,” Intel Vice President Deborah Conrad said in an interview.
Conrad said that Intel cooperated with Apple for some particulars of the TV spot, but added, “We didn’t know what the end result was going to be.”
The company did get a peek at the ad before Tuesday’s keynote, but it wasn’t too much earlier.
“It’s probably a good thing that we didn’t see them earlier,” Conrad said.
That said, if Intel’s work with Apple inspires some PC makers to think more creatively, Intel wouldn’t complain.
“We certainly hope that this innovation engine kind of picks up and that you do see the beige box makers going, ‘You know, maybe we could do something that looks and feels like that.’ That would be a good thing, I think, from our perspective.”
Bink has an interesting article up on his site concerning Windows XP SP3. Microsoft has apparently pushed back the scheduled release date of SP3 to the second half of 2007. Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer had originally announced that the 3rd service pack for XP would be released before the launch of Longhorn (now Windows Vista).
Bink suggests that we could see a “Rollup Package” coming from Microsoft in the near future for XP, with the possibility of that package replacing SP3 all together. One can also reason that Microsoft will use the delay of SP3 to further the cause of upgrading to Vista later on this year. Server 2003 SP2 is still scheduled for release in Q3/4 of this year and no more service packs will be made available for Windows 2000 or NT4.
View: Bink.nu Article
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