A sad day at NASA has been followed with more grim news – it seems the dust storm responsible for covering Phoenix’s solar panels and contributing to its icy demise has also possibly claimed the Mars Spirit rover.
The rover hasn’t generated enough power in the last few days to keep running at full strength. NASA engineers are turning the internal heaters off to conserve battery life long enough to get through the storm, with hopes of somehow knocking the dust off the solar panels.
Spirit’s sister rover Opportunity is still plugging along on the other side of the planet. Both rovers have far exceeded the mission’s expected lifetime, logging data for five years – far outlasting what anyone thought possible.
Windows is a virus?
In a real-world occurrence of every geek’s favorite joke, the anti-virus scanner AVG has actually begun detecting critical Windows files as harmful, deleting them from the system.
The problem was noticed when users began complaining to AVG that their machines wouldn’t boot.
As irony would have it, the most recent update to AVG’s signature file actually listed the user32.dll file as a threat and began quarantining the file on machines with the new update.
AVG has posted recovery instructions on its Web site, and has released a new signature file without the fatal flaw.
New best friends
Following the merger of Sirius and XM earlier in the year, the two former competitors have finally started sharing channels.
Starting Wednesday, the two providers will offer a blend of each other’s channels, with some dropping out entirely, some being added and others getting name changes or channel number changes.
Sirius’ odd habit of removing channels for a few months to replace them with a single band’s music was followed by the eventual return of the original channel remains, so listeners will not actually hear some of the new channels, but will hear the featured band’s music, until the beginning of 2009.
There is still the option to pay for the best of each provider’s content – XM is offering Opie and Anthony, Oprah and more sports channels, while Sirius is putting Howard Stern, Martha Stewart and NFL games in the mix – but they will not be included in the latest round of lineup changes for free.
Neither provider has a full lineup of the other’s channels yet, although that is the eventual goal.
For new subscribers, pricing structures have been revamped, with some plans approaching an "a la carte" system, though not quite hitting the mark. Most subscriptions are put together like a cable bill – packages of channels are separated by type and popularity; pay more to get more.
