Apple iPhone

"Sweet, glorious specs of the frickin' thin 11.6 millimeter device include a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the screen when it's close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 4GB or 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quad-band GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X."
Unix on my mobile ? I want one of those.
Update : more coverage here.

Karel Jansens Thu, 01/11/2007 - 13:28

No VoIP if Linksys has anything to do with it (IPhone, remember?). Unless Stevie changes the name of his phone, of course.

I like my Nokia 770 more...

Methane lakes finally found on Titan

Titan has long intrigued space scientists, as it is the only moon in the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere -- and its atmosphere, like Earth's, mainly comprises nitrogen. Titan's atmosphere is also rich in methane, although the source for this vast store of hydrocarbons is unclear. Given that Titan is billions of years old, the question is how this atmospheric methane gets to be renewed. Without replenishment, it should have disappeared long ago. A popular hypothesis is that it comes from a vast ocean of hydrocarbons.

But when the US spacecraft Cassini sent down a European lander, Huygens, to Titan in 2005, the images sent back were of a rugged landscape veiled in an orange haze. There were indeed signs of methane flows and methane precipitation, but nothing at all that pointed to any sea of the stuff. But a flyby by Cassini on July 22 last year has revealed, thanks to a radar scan, 75 large, smooth, dark patches between three and 70 kilometers across that appear to be lakes of liquid methane.

They believe the lakes prove that Titan has a "methane cycle" -- a system that is like the water cycle on Earth, in which the liquid evaporates, cools and condenses and then falls as rain, replenishing the surface liquid.

Linux virtualization

IBM carries an article containing an overview of the current Linux virtualization methods, the techniques used over the years, and a survey of Linux virtualization projects. The different methods are somehow very briefly discussed, eg the part about the now standard KVM could have been described in more detail. QEMU though, looks promising, and I really should give it a try in order to remove VMWare from my system.