Voyager 1 Sails Past 100 AU- Planetary News | The Planetary Society

Last week, the Voyager 1 space probe passed the 100 AU mark on it’s journey towards interstellar space. (that’s about 9.3 billion miles from the Sun) It’s absolutely amazing that this spacecraft has lasted as long as it has. If you have any interest in space science, I would recommend reading this article. It contains a great deal of background information on the probe, it’s mission, and what we have learned to date. More information is available on the Voyager mission homepage.

While this isn’t exactly hot off the press, (the press release came out in July) I thought some of you might find it interesting. Winternals, the company run by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell was aquired by Microsoft. Mark and Bryce also have a companion site called Sysinternals that contains a wealth of useful freeware utilities. Many of the freeware programs also come with source code allowing interested software programmers to make modifications. The recent aquisition has been a cause for some fearmongoring on sites like Slashdot and others. While I’d like to believe that Microsoft will allow Mark and Bryce to keep the Sysinternals site available, I have to admit I downloaded a copy of every one of the utilities just in case. I honestly think this aquisition is a win for Mark and Bryce as well as for Microsoft. These are 2 of the brightest windows developers around and their combined experience can only serve to improve the quality of Microsoft’s products. (and that’s good for all of us…)

Wired News: Text Games Get Film Treatment

Jason Scott, a UNIX sysadmin from Boston is shooting a documentary about the text-based adventure game genre of the late 70’s and early 80’s. There weren’t any flashy graphics, just text on a screen. Your own imagination played a large role in your progress and interpretation of the game. That’s something that seems alien in this age of heavily scripted photorealistically rendered games. I remember enjoying some of those games so much that I tried my hand at writing a few. (probably to the detrement of my studies..) I’m glad someone is documenting these things since all I have are my memories. I might just have to pull the old Apple II out and reminisce a bit. 🙂