Drew Falkman writes “In the early days of open source J2EE Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), I experimented with both NetBeans and Eclipse. Ultimately, I opted for Eclipse. At the time, Eclipse appeared to have a more intuitive UI, faster performance and a deeper library of plug-ins to enhance my development experience. Since then, I have stuck with Eclipse.

Despite this, I have felt that Eclipse is getting slower over the versions, while, at least the word on the street is, NetBeans has evolved in the other direction. NetBeans recently announced significant refinements to the User Interface (UI), more J2EE support, and more support for mobility applications, all of which has created significant buzz in the J2EE world…”

Read the full article:
Java(TM) Boutique – Review – IDE Wars: Has NetBeans 4.1 Eclipsed Eclipse?

darylb writes “NASA is proposing ending the 28-year old Voyager program, which costs a paltry $4mil per year to operate. One of the two Voyager probes is approaching the edge of what can be thought of as the sun’s atmosphere (where the solar wind bumps up against interstellar wind), a place where no probe has gone before. Canceling this project means saving almost nothing compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent so far. The craft will be out of juice by 2015 in any case, so the marginal cost for the extra, invaluable, data would be minimal.” From the article: “NASA officials said the possibility of cutting Voyager and several other long-running missions in the Earth-Sun Exploration Division arose in February, when the Bush administration proposed slashing the division’s 2006 budget by nearly one-third — from $75 million to $53 million.”

Slashdot | NASA Proposes Ending Voyager

allanj writes “According to the BBC, the ESA is set to send a robotic probe to Mars around 2011. They apparently want to return samples of Martian soil with the probe – cool idea if it works better than Beagle 2 did…” From the article: “They
still require a great deal of further detail and the agency’s member states will also have to sign off the mission. Ministers will have their say when the Esa Council meets in December.”

Slashdot | ESA Aiming for Martian Probe in 2011

FleaPlus writes “The American Institute of Physics has a news bulletin describing a couple of interesting nanotech advances. The first is the smallest electric motor in the world, made by Alex Zettl’s group at UC Berkeley. The second is a single-protein wet biotransistor. Additionally, Technology Research News reports on algorithmic self-assembly of DNA Sierpinski triangles, by Erik Winfree’s group at Caltech.”

Slashdot | Nanotech Motors, Biotransistors, DNA Fractals

AtariAmarok writes “A new article is up on LiveScience about a hole drilled into the Earth’s crust to explore the layers of our planet’s substrate. The hole gets closer to the mantle than any other efforts that have gone before. The hole might reach the “Moho” (division between Earth’s brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle) within a few years.” From the article: “The depth of the Moho varies. This latest effort, which drilled 4,644 feet (1,416 meters) below the ocean seafloor, appears to have been 1,000 feet off to the side of where it needed to be to pierce the Moho, according to one reading of seismic data used to map the crust’s varying thickness.”

Slashdot | Hole Drilled to Bottom of Earth’s Crust