May 23, 2003

New Star Discovered In Space - Not American Idol Astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have announced the discovery of a red dwarf star that is between 6.5 and 10.1 light-years from the Solar System making it the third or fourth closest star from the Solar System. Closer stars are the Alpha Centauri system and Barnard’s Star at 4 and 6 light-years away and possibly Wolf 357 which is 7.7 light-years away. The star has been given the name SO25300.5+165258. 12:53:33 AM

SciFiWire reports that Jordan Levin, president of The WB Network is confident Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon will figure out a way to bring Spike (James Marsters) over to the network's spinoff series, Angel, next season. He also said that other Buffy characters are scheduled to make appearances on Angel next season, but that Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia) won't return. I thought that the talk about Spike being on Angel was just a diversion to make the ending of Buffy the Vampire Slayer more interesting. Well most people don’t stay dead on Buffy anyhow. 12:39:00 AM

Computerworld reports that the final draft of the 802.11g specification has butchered the throughput of the next generation wireless standard; reducing it from the initially proposed 54Mbit/sec. raw data rate to between 10 and 20 Mbit/second to retain backwards compatibility with 802.11b networks. (via Slashdot) Update May 24/03: Apparently this is a misunderstanding – the actual data transfer rate for 802.11g has always been expected to be about 20Mbit/sec, just as the actual rate for the 11Mbit/sec 802.11b is between 4 and 5-1/2Mbit/sec 12:14:27 AM