Sunday the Indian Space Research Organization successfully test-launched a scramjet rocket, propelled by “an air-breathing propulsion system which uses hydrogen as fuel and oxygen from the atmosphere air as the oxidizer” rather than carrying a tank of liquid oxygen. “if the need for liquid oxygen is taken away, the space craft can be much lighter, hence cheaper to launch,” notes one newspaper, adding that India is only the fourth country to flight-test a scramjet engine after the U.S., Russia and the European Space Agency.

But in addition, 15 former ISRO scientists are now helping Team Indus, one of the 16 teams remaining in Google’s $30 million Lunar XPRIZE competition, who will use ISRO’s polar satellite launch vehicle to send their spacecraft to the moon.
GillBates0 writes:
An official designated as “Skywalker”, said that such space missions used to be limited to extremely elite people and PhDs in the past. That stereotype is now breaking. “I was just a college student a couple of years ago and now I am working on an actual space mission, how cool is that,” said Karan Vaish, 23, who is helping the team to design the lunar rover. Eighty per cent of the team is reported to be less than five years out of college.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Recent College Grads Aim To Land A Robot On The Moon

An anonymous Slashdot reader has “approximately two terabytes of photos, currently sitting on two 4-terabyte ‘Intel Rapid Storage’ RAID 1 disks.” But now they’re considering three alternatives after moving to a new PC:

a) Keep these exactly as they are… The current configuration is OK, but it’s a pain if a RAID re-sync is needed as it takes a long time to check four terabytes.
b) Move to “Storage Spaces”. I’ve not used Storage Spaces before, but reports seem to show it’s good… It’s a Good Thing that the disks are 100% identical and removable and readable separately. Downside? Unknown territory.
c) Break the RAID, and set up the second disk as a file-copied backup… [This] would lose a (small) amount of resilience, but wouldn’t suffer from the RAID-sync issues, ideally a Mac-like “TimeMachine” backup would handle file histories.
Any recommendations?

This is also a good time to share your experiences with Storage Spaces, so leave your answers in the comments. What’s the best way to backup large amounts of personal data?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Ask Slashdot: What’s The Best Way To Backup Large Amounts Of Personal Data?

The third season of AMC’s technology drama “Halt and Catch Fire” painstakingly recreated Silicon Valley and San Francisco in 1986. Long-time Slashdot reader harrymcc shares his first-person report:

The new episodes…are rich with carefully-researched plot points, dialogue, and sets full of vintage technology (including a startup equipped with real Commodore 64s and a recreated IBM mainframe). I visited the soundstage in Atlanta where the producers have recreated Northern California in the 1980s, and spoke with the show’s creators and stars about the loving attention they devote to getting things right.

Harry argues that the show “is in part about how we got from the past to the present,” and writes that he saw several 5 1/4-inch floppy disks “including Memorex, 3M, and BASF FlexyDisk,” plus “a manual for Frogger for the Atari 2600, a copy of a spreadsheet program known as MicroPro CalcStar…and countless other little pieces of history.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Welcome To 1986: Inside ‘Halt And Catch Fire’s’ High-Tech Time Machine