This 100,000 lumen artificial sun lit up the town of Inuvik, giving them long days during a winter that’s mostly shrouded in darkness. It was sponsored by Tropicana, which I’m sure had some bizarre marketing angle about orange juice and breakfast and sunrises. BUT: the important thing is that technology – as simple as affixing lights to a large helium balloon – gave light to 3500 people who were otherwise mired in darkness. [Cream Global]

“Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. “And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too.” Steve was silent.

And probably foaming at the mouth, and wanting to send Luca Brasi.

Even while Apple uses BSD as the basis for Mac OS X, I bet Jobs realised the stupidity of his call, knowing that Sun had a very strong IP portfolio and plenty of ammo to fight Apple back. Something that HTC and Google, when it comes to phones, don’t have. [Johnathan Schwartz via Silicon Alley Insider]

I think it’s only fair, since Jonathan left us with a poem, that we return the courtesy. I’ll start!

Jonathan Schwartz: Don’t

care for the ponytail, but

Java’s pretty sweet.

OK, now you go. Dirty limericks also accepted/encouraged. [Twitter via Boing Boing]

After its February 2010 launch on top of an Atlas V rocket, the SDO will capture images at almost four times the resolution of an HD TV, transmitting the results back to Earth at 130 megabits per second. Basically, this thing will be transmitting the equivalent of 500,000 MP3 per day, seven days a week. According to Dean Pesnell at the Goddard Space Flight centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, the potential for new discoveries is giganormous:

We’ll be getting IMAX-quality images every 10 seconds. We’ll see every nuance of solar activity.

Pesnell said that this speed opens an incredible potential for discovery, using 18th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge as an example:

But when Muybridge photographed horses using a new high-speed camera system, he discovered something surprising. Galloping horses spend part of the race completely airborne-all four feet are off the ground.

To achieve all this, the three instruments in the SDO have been designed to cover three vital aspects of our home star. First, the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly – which will be producing most of the data – that you see at the opening of this post uses four telescopes together. They will be the ones photographing Sol’s surface and atmosphere using 10 different wavelength filters. Meanwhile, the HMI will analyse the innards of the star, looking into the physics that govern it inside. Then, EVE will measure extreme ultraviolet light activity while getting a nice and toasty tan.

How would this data be received? Using two 18-metre antennas near Las Cruces, New Mexico, which will be linked constantly to the SDO thanks to its geosynchronous orbit. Until it gets destroyed by the mysterious flying spaceship.

The Iron Line is made of highly ionised iron, called Fe XI 789.2 nm. The iron spewing reaches an extremely far distance – an amazing three times the solar radii – and has regions in which there are more irons than in others. [NASA]

Maybe the little guy is safe. Maybe he went… around back? In any event, this senseless celestial murder was captured by SOHO today. The dirty deed gets done toward the end, coming from left to right.

[Tom's Astronomy Blog]

Specifically, Apple may have wanted a “private license” from Sun Microsystems, and Sun simply did not want to play ball. Neither side could agree on suitable terms, so support was removed. [OpenSolaris Mailing List via Daring Fireball]

A message on MacOS Forge tersely states,

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

There have been multiple explanations as to why Apple dropped ZFS support in Snow Leopard, and now there’s more speculation to add into the mix. This time the story goes that when Oracle bought Sun, Oracle didn’t want continue development on ZFS because they already had their own filesystem (BTRFS) in the oven.

ZFS was also apparently facing patent suits at the time. It all sounds like a complicated legal and political mess, which is probably why Apple just dropped it.

Whatever the true causes behind ZFS’ sudden fall from grace may be, it’s disappointing that we’ll have to wait longer for a true filesystem upgrade in OS X. [AppleInsider]

The Power pouch from Latestbuy is a solar panel-packing pouch that incorporates a portable battery and a million different little plugs. You can plug your gadget directly into the sunlight scraping juice pack and charge using the sun, or you can plug your gadget into the included battery, which you conveniently didn’t forget to charge using the solar panel back when it was sunny.

If you do happen to forget to charge the battery though, it can be charged via USB as well.

Included in the charging adapters are:

Mobile phone adaptors for: LG, Motorola, Nokia (thin & standard plug), Samsung, Sony Ericsson (wide & standard plug) and iPhone.

4 mm straight jack for: Sony PSP, Tom Tom GPS, digital cameras, PDAs and two-way radios.

USB female socket for: iPods, MP3 players, PDAs and GPS systems.

Mini-B USB male plug for: charging the portable battery via USB and for connecting other devices that also use a Mini-B USB connection.

And the best part is that unlike the Powertraveller, which offers the same sort of functionality, this thing is cheap. Like $50 cheap. But considering all the free juice you’ll get, that’s a bargain and a half, right?

[Latestbuy]