• Making Wrong Code Look Wrong
• Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize
• A rant against flow control macros

The new servers were donated by Hewlett-Packard, and are each quad Opterons with 24 gigabytes of RAM and 10 terabytes of disk space. Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. donates the bandwidth in the form of two independent gigabit-connected datacenters, PAIX Palo Alto and e200paul in San Francisco.

It’s a great read … check the rest out at http://kerneltrap.org/node/5070.

“… would enable computers to process data at 64 bits per second, compared with the current standard 32 bits per second.”
http://www.xcom2002.com/doh/index.php?s=05042613mis

HOUSTON – A group of engineers was honored Tuesday for concocting a plan using plastic bags, cardboard and duct tape to save Apollo 13′s astronauts after their spacecraft was crippled by an explosion 35 years ago.

Yahoo! Story …

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) – Police in a Vancouver suburb issued an unusual warning to drivers on Monday: If you run out fuel, do not lay down on the road to get assistance.

Yahoo! News

• Summary of events.
• Photo of the damage.

NASA press release
SCI-TECH-Today Story

No one knows when the Internet will fail. It could happen at any time, leaving you bereft of your e-mail, your sports scores, and your Blogs. Therefore, it’s important that you and your family have a contingency plan for just such an emergency. If your connection to Cyberspace were to ever get severed, you should at least be prepared. We have included a few key points that should assist you if that were to happen.

(Read the story …)

CNN

FoxNews

An international team of scientists has made a new material just one atom thick, by extracting a single plane of carbon from a graphite crystal. Known as graphene, the new fabric effectively exists in just two dimensions, and could pave the way for computers built from single molecules.

In the latest edition of Science, published tomorrow, the scientists from Manchester University and Chernogolovka, Russia, explain that the atomic sheet is a fullerene molecule. Fullerenes are a class of carbon molecules discovered in the last twenty years. The first, the famous football-shaped Carbon-60 molecule, was named for architect Buckminster Fuller, because of its resemblance to his geodesic dome structures.

The sheet of atoms is highly flexible, stable and strong and demonstrates remarkable conductivity. Manchester University’s Professor Andre Geim says that qualities like this have been found so far only in nanotubes. “As carbon nanotubes are basically made from rolled-up narrow stripes of graphene, any of the thousands of applications currently considered for nanotubes renowned for their unique properties can also apply to graphene itself,” he said.

Although the samples they have studied are mere microns across, the researchers found that the electrons will travel across the material without scattering over submicron distances – ideal for building very fast switching transistors. The researchers have even managed to demonstrate an ambipolar field effect transistor (a transistor commonly used to amplify a weak signal, such as a wireless signal) that works under ambient conditions.

Geim adds that there is some way to go still before the material can legitimately be considered the next big thing. Currently, the samples are tens of microns across, but for real engineering, the scientist says wafers will need to be a few inches in size.

However, Dr. Novoselov, Geim’s counterpart at Chernogolovka, is optimistic: “Only ten years ago carbon nanotubes were less than a micron long. Now, scientists can make nanotubes several centimetres long, and similar progress can reasonably be expected for carbon nanofabric too.”

In related news, Burt Rutan talks about the rolls encountered in the previous flight.

Four high school students and adult killed in car accident

Users say Microsoft’s Money is broke

Mount St. Helens Alert Status Increased