Tokyo, Japan — Japanese police have arrested two Greenpeace activists for exposing a whale meat scandal involving the government-sponsored whaling programme. The two activists, Junichi Sato, 31, and Toru Suzuki, 41, are being investigated for allegedly stealing a box of whale meat which they presented as evidence.

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2008 June 19  

The Star Streams of NGC 5907
Image Credit & Copyright: R Jay Gabany (Blackbird Observatory) - collaboration; D.Martínez-Delgado(IAC, MPIA),
J.Peñarrubia (U.Victoria) I. Trujillo (IAC) S.Majewski (U.Virginia), M.Pohlen (Cardiff),Explanation: Grand tidal streams of stars seem to surround galaxy NGC 5907. The arcing structures form tenuous loops extending more than 150,000 light-years from the narrow, edge-on spiral, also known as the Splinter or Knife Edge Galaxy. Recorded only in very deep exposures, the streams likely represent the ghostly trail of a dwarf galaxy — debris left along the orbit of a smaller satellite galaxy that was gradually torn apart and merged with NGC 5907 over four billion years ago. Ultimately this remarkable discovery image, from a small robotic observatory in New Mexico, supports the cosmological scenario in which large spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, were formed by the accretion of smaller ones. NGC 5907 lies about 40 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Draco.

TAKEN FROM apod.nasa.gov

By Brian Proffitt

By Mark Hinkle

Bill Gates steps down as the Chairman of Microsoft on July 1st to transition to full time philanthropic efforts with the Gates Foundation. However, I wonder how effective Bill will be other than writing checks. You see Bill’s never played well with others.

• Microsoft v. United States
  
• Microsoft v. AOL (Netscape)
• Microsoft v. Apple
• Microsoft v. Sun

At a speech on Monday for the Institute of Systems Biology he gave a speech followed by a Q&A session he reportedly answered one poor chap’s questions on whether open source methodologies would be used in his research.

Gates responded with the following:

“There’s free software and then there’s open source,” he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.”

Open source, he said, creates a license “so that nobody can ever improve the software,” he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we’re aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: “I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,” he said, adding with a shrug: “That may seem radical.”

Touché Bill. Of course competing with the monopoly that is Microsoft requires radical measures. Competition among desktop operating systems is pretty much non-existent. It even looks like Windows will someday become the OS of choice on the current Linux-based  OLPC project.

Now children in the poorest nations in the world who might have been given a chance to learn about free and open source software will be given Windows. Hooking them early, like handing out crack cocaine in kindergarten and waiting until graduation to start selling to the addicts.

Without compromise there is no progress. In the software world Gates was the Godfather he didn’t need to work with anyone until the Justice Department ruled against him. Even as the richest man in the world he’s got to work together with researchers and others if he wants to be successful. Too bad he didn’t learn anything about open source’s collaborative values it might have served him well as he tries to help cure disease and improve world health standards.

I have to wonder if he will be able to make the transition from dictator to do-gooder or if he will just write checks?

For more Mark Hinkle, visit his Socialized Software blog.

Taken from http://blog.linuxtoday.com

Storage Networking is a tricky animal. My brush with networked storage platforms started from the time we needed few hundred megabytes of shared storage for building a cluster to enable database and email consolidation in the late 90’s.

The goal of block-based network storage is to protect and consolidate mission critical workloads. Networked storage using traditional FC-SAN’s is getting more complicated in the quest for speed and functionality. Yet, there is a need to simplify networked storage to reduce risk, decrease mean-time-to-repair and reduce costs.

Drawing from my personal experience, more complicated SAN sub-systems and network elements are harder to understand, harder to troubleshoot and expensive to deploy. Because of that I, personally, have moved away from SAN implementations with FC-Front end networks after attempting to use use FC-to-iSCSI routers and put up with the complexity in the network layout and provisioning challenges.

The approach I took was to select medium-to-high performance native iSCSI storage arrays with FC-Disk based backend networks. I deployed the front-end network (for connecting to servers) with Redundant Gigabit Ethernet (layer 3 capable) switches to mimic a FC network for Multi-Pathing and fault tolerance. This allowed me to maintain the essential performance posture (with FC disk backends) while maintaining the front-end simplicity for iSCSI networking.

Performance

There is still a question of performance in activities like synchronous replication, where FC-SAN technologies are superior — but these needs are becoming less acute with applications like MS-Exchange supporting varied data replication topologies (Cluster Continuous Replication-CCR, Local Continuous Replication-LCR, Standby Cluster Replication-SCR). Databases (Oracle, MS-SQL, MySQL, Postgres) are all supporting high availability using grid/federation, mirroring and master/slave models.

Advances in storage awareness in modern operating systems (Windows, Linux and Solaris) also allow support for native multi-pathing for iSCSI. Support for Features like VSS and VDS on Windows, GFS on Linux and ZFS on Solaris allow for less stringent application-aware iSCSI friendly asynchronous replication between storage systems.

Another major challenge is the emergence of Virtual Machines and their impact on performance and availability of Networked Storage. FC-Storage systems have an inherent disadvantage in VM-based environments due the multiple layers of device drivers and in-memory indirection of I/O calls. The practical impact on processor usage in hypervisor-based VM setups using FC-SAN are evident due to the lack of availability and optimization of transparent ToE type solutions for FC. The ability of a Virtual Machine to use raw ethernet adapters with ToE capable drivers results in little or no loss of storage I/O performance. There is practically zero impact on processor performance due to the use of networked storage.

In conclusion, with the emergence of relatively inexpensive 10 gigE switch and HBA Solutions, continued sophistication of operating systems and applications, the time is right to start adopting iSCSI for your mission critical storage networking needs.

Taken From http://arstechnica.com

I expected a roaring debate in the political blogosphere this morning, and on cable news after the Friday night Bill Moyers interview with Rev Jeremiah Wright. Instead, there’s eerie quiet.

The most I could find was this post on Protein Wisdom saying that Moyers didn’t play hardball with Wright. It’s true, he didn’t. Instead he did what I wish more journalists would, he interviewed him in a way that helped us get to know the person. He let him speak his piece, so we could listen.

There’s so much to admire about Rev Wright, but first, the shame of the professional media, who hounded not only Wright, but members of his congregation, incluing a woman in a hospice, to try to uncover more dirt about Wright and thereby embarass Barack Obama.

Wright isn’t running for office, he points out, it isn’t his job to get our vote, it’s his job to help his congregation, to help them understand the world they live in, to help them do better in that world, and to prepare them for what they believe comes in the afterlife.

Watching Wright, I wondered if Sean Hannity’s preacher could stand up to the kind of objectification this man has withstood. What about Tim Russert’s? How about the people who are close to Charlie Gibson and Andrea Mitchell? And how about the CEOs of Time-Warner, GE, the Sulzbergers and the Murdochs? These people have never run for office, they’ve never been vetted or elected. Could they come out so well after being put through the wringer that Wright has been through.

I think the silence comes from the fact that there still is some humanity in the press and in the blogosphere, and those who watched Moyers and really listened to Wright, realized that he’s not a liability to Obama, he’s an asset. At least some of the polish, the quiet confidence, self-respect, intelligence and grace we see in Obama must have rubbed off this man.

Watching Wright gave me pride in being an American, and shame at the same time, for coming from a country so willing to objectify and villify this person before checking out whether the characterization was accurate. Even the supposedly courageous and thorough NY Times calls his oratory “racist” in an editorial in today’s paper. Based on what? I’ve watched the sermons that have been excerpted; if these are racist, then every other preacher in the US is racist too.

Wright says the religion of the people on the deck of a slave ship must be different from the religion from the people under the deck. On the deck, god is justifying the practice of slavery, and below — god gives them hope that someday they will be free. My people, the Jews, understand this very well, it’s part of our tradition. We’ve just celebrated the holiday of Passover, a feast that’s all about the pride of an enslaved people. If we’re still telling the story, passing it down from generation to generation, after 3000 years, why should we be critical of the African-Americans who are telling the story of their enslavement, which ended only 145 years ago, and whose manifestations are still with us today.

We, the United States, have made mistakes, and those mistakes are as much who we are as our triumphs. The failures leave behind people and their culture, their music, their legends, their religion and their hopes. Sure it seems strange when you hear it for the first time, but that’s good! Because the second time it’s not so strange, and eventually it becomes part of our melting pot, and enriches all our lives.

If you haven’t watched the Wright interview, make the time to do so. You won’t be sorry.

Taken from www.huffingtonpost.com

Dubai’s sheikhs have claimed it is “the eighth wonder of the world”, and seen from space the tree-shaped sand and rock formation of the Palm Jumeirah looks exactly that. But after the hype and the novelty of living four miles out to sea has faded, that claim is starting to look shaky. It seems there is a little trouble in paradise….

Dubai’s sheikhs have claimed it is “the eighth wonder of the world”, and seen from space the tree-shaped sand and rock formation of the Palm Jumeirah looks exactly that.

But after the hype about David Beckham buying a mansion here and the novelty of living four miles out to sea has faded, that claim is starting to look shaky. It seems there is a little trouble in paradise.

Four thousand “Palm pioneers” have moved in and are getting to grips with life in the sweltering Arabian Gulf. This week, when the Guardian visited, the gripes were as common as the plaudits among the Brits who are in the vanguard of this new community.

Multimillion-pound villas have been squeezed together “like Coronation Street”, air-conditioning bills are hitting £800 a month and persistent snags have led some to joke it is more “eighth blunder” than “eighth wonder”.

The villas were developed by the government-owned Nakheel Properties, and many residents believe the company’s slogan, “Our vision inspires humanity”, which flutters on flags around the place, is beginning to look over-egged.

It is not all bad news. The blue seas which lap the man-made shores are teeming with rays, hermit crabs and baracudas. Away from the ongoing construction, which has four years to run, life in the middle of the ocean is incredibly peaceful.

But for Rachael Wilds, 42, an exhibition organiser from Surrey who moved in with her family to a palatial villa on one of the Palm’s “fronds” a year ago, it was not what she expected. She found her £3m property squashed against a neighbour’s and set in a barren, almost treeless, landscape. “It was absolutely nothing as it was depicted in the brochure,” she says. “There was a massive gap between the villas and it was full of lush tropical gardens. We were totally shocked at the closeness of the villas.”

Despite summer temperatures of 48C and high humidity, access to centralised air conditioning was not included in the purchase price of apartments, and residents are rebelling against plans to ask them to pay extra. More seriously, there is evidence the low-pay and hard conditions endured by the thousands of migrant workers who built the area are driving many into despair and debt.

It has made for an awkward start for a development that is far more than a whim of the Dubai royal family. Palm Jumeirah is the testing ground for the United Arab Emirates’ strategy for life after oil - big-scale tourism. Once complete, there will be homes and hotel rooms for 65,000 people.

Taken from http://www.guardian.co.uk