space

Forty years ago the British invaded American pop culture, led by four polished, handsome devils from the least-polished place on earth. Upon arrival in the United States from Liverpool, England, the Beatles' went about changing American music ... forever. That impact will be commemorated in the oddest fashion when NASA blasts the lyrics for the band's popular "Across the Universe" as part of the 50th anniversary of its first space mission. Although neither anniversary is particularly odd, their combination seems an interesting 'mashup'. For a space administration that is as American as Wisconsin ... (view more)

Since NASA routinely puts astronauts in space, you'd think the trip would be filled with all sorts of experiments dependent upon modern science and technology. Surprisingly enough, however, it's technology failing the visitors to NASA's ... International Space Station, while extremely low-tech techniques are saving the day. Blame Russia The problems all started with an unreliable Russian navigation computer. The device hung up on the astronauts last Tuesday, causing a not-so-funny comedy of errors while engineers worked to open external solar blankets. Despite the hiccup, the solar technology ( ... (view more)

Unlike most of those who have passed on, Star Trek actor James Doohan, best known as "Scotty", wasn't laid to rest six feet under the earth. Instead, the famous Canadian-born actor was officially "beamed up" yesterday, even though he died a couple ... years ago at the ripe age of 85. The unorthodox ceremony lifted the ashes of some 200 people into the edge of space over New Mexico's desert base, "Truth or Consequences." Hundreds of onlookers applauded as the slim, twenty-foot rocket spiraled up towards the heavens. As mentioned, Doohan is most remembered for his supporting role on Gene ... (view more)

Between Google's acquisitions and new program launches, the company has still managed to find time to create a partnership with space conglomerate NASA. Google and NASA have come together to sign the Space Act Agreement. The agreement will enable ... the two companies to collaboratively develop a system which will make it easy for people to find weather forecasting data, view high-resolution 3D maps of the moon and Mars, and track the International Space Station in real time. (Source: pcworld.com ) Although the partnership may not seem to be the most natural fit at first, it actually makes ... (view more)

Have you ever taken a good, long, hard look at everything stored on your computer? Chances are there are heaps of redundant and unnecessary files that are taking up valuable disk space and cluttering up your file system. Why are they there? What's ... their purpose? And how in the world did they get on your PC in the first place? If you've owned a computer for any length of time, you have inevitably downloaded, installed, and later gotten rid of program after program. What you may not realize, though, is that uninstalling a program often leaves you with "leftovers." Now, you'd think that the " ... (view more)

The struggle of circling around streets to find a parking spot may soon be at an end. These days you can do just about anything online, from paying bills, purchasing movie tickets, and even buying groceries. And soon, the Internet may be the best ... place to look when trying to reserve a parking spot. Internet-based parking services were first introduced in late 2005 at airports, and continued to develop as many companies experimented with the technology. With urban planners estimating 30% of all downtown traffic is a result of drivers looking for parking spots, this new technology should make ... (view more)

One of my all-time favorite multi-purpose optimization utility programs just got a major update. Of course, I'm talking about the release of WinOptimizer Platinum version 3: and there's plenty to talk about. To recap: What is WinOptimizer Platinum? ... For years, millions of users have depended on Ashampoo's award-winning WinOptimizer series to keep their PCs clean and running smoothly and efficiently. As one user put it, "[WinOptimizer Platinum 3] gives you all the maintenance tools that should have been included with Windows in the first place. And it's all so easy to use, you don't need a ... (view more)

Spacing affects the readability of a document. If you have long lines of text spanning the width of the page, your eye has to work to track all the way across it. To make it easier to follow the lines across the page, you should increase the spacing ... between the lines (or shorten the lines). That's why teachers usually ask students to double-space reports. As with all paragraph formatting, place the insertion point within the paragraph or highlight all or part of the paragraphs you want to format; then, do any of the following instructions. Set Line Spacing using Menus: Choose Format | ... (view more)

A recent question raised a red flag in my mind. I think most, if not all, of you read my 'brief' description of about what happened to the missing 32 MB on a 512 MB Thumb Drive: Available Space Misreported by USB drive? Allow me to explain in ... greater detail. On a hard drive, thumb drive, or any other storage device in common use, the capacity displayed on the carton is the maximum 'raw' or usable number of bytes the device can hold. However, a device that 'says' it can hold 512 MB of data will not display the number 512 MB after it has been formatted. As stated in the previous article , some ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Jeff R. writes: "I recently bought a 512MB USB 'TravelDrive' made by Memorex. Everything works great, except I can't figure out why the drive is only showing 480MB of usable, available space. In correspondence with a Memorex tech, ... I asked why this was so, and his answer was rather vauge and confusing. Does it really take 32 MB of overhead to format a USB drive? If this is the case, it's probably a good thing I didn't buy a 128MB drive!" Doug's Response: It's questions like these that make me feel glad I've been involved in the computer industry for as long as I have. ;-) In ... (view more)