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Then let me tell you what I want on the next generation cameras: more dynamic range, the Fuji S5 paved the way but they can do better. Then a better signal / noise. Then a raw file format with at least some (lossless) compression (Jpeg2000 anyone). Then full 24x36 frame sensors on a tiny compact cameras (they used to fit such a film sensor, plus a roll, plus the winding space in much smaller cameras than the current crop of 7x9mm sensors). Then a self-detection when there is dust on the sensor and a warning on the camera. Then physical buttons to change the settings, not just menu functions. A hyperfocal distance setting (I've been claiming for that ever since the start of the 'D' line of Nikkors 2 decades ago and it's only a fucking simple software fix). Enough ? Get crankin'

I've never heard a stamp collector writes more letters or postcards than average.

Sorry to pour cold water on your analogy, but they do. I worked in Antarctica where we have special and unique stamps. Collectors would send us packages full of envelopes to send back so they'd get the stamps and nice stamps on them. During the winterover (9 months with no outside communication, locked out by the ice), there was a full-time mailman who was there just to stamp the shitload of envelopes sent by those guys. It did pay one fifth of the cost of hiring the ship to go there in the first place !!! The nicest of those guys would put some gifts in their packages (like a bottle of wine).

Don't ever try to discuss Labview licenses with National Instruments

Yeah, I'm pissed off too. We had a site license where they sent us a set of CDs and we could install them wherever we wanted, no strings attached, just type in the license number.

But then the powers-that-be thought they could save money by getting a floating license. So now all the acquisition and development systems need a flexlm or similar piece of shit DRM that connects to a license server 200km away that connects to who-the-fuck-knows in Austin, Tx.

Guess what, I design acquisition systems that go in Antarctica or experimental nuclear reactors. Hint: they are OFF the net, you asswipes.

Your Vostok curves are a bit outdated. Get the more precise and complete ones from Epica (2005 Dome C ice core).

How long will it take?

Well, according to ice core samples, in several instances there have been massive global climate changes in less than a generation. One such known instance is a -14ÂC drop in less than 10 years !!! You can imagine positive loopback thresholds such as the permafrost melting and releasing all its methane, or the deep sea hydrates, thus leading to a brutal warming.

I managed to work around it by putting a subset of cygwin on a USB key (rsync, ssh and appropriate DLLs) with the site to update and a script, but the most important part was sweet talking the communication officer to plug it in and start the batch job while the email up/downlink was in progress. In other words, the hack relied on social engineering, as usual.

In a similar situation as the original poster, I'm also looking for a blogging software (preferably Php) that can be updated by email. I should set up a specific email account, then the blog software connects to it via POP3 regularly and publishes what is received, in particular image attachments. Anyway that's the idea. Anybody has recommendations ?

Good description of personality tests as used in a work environment. I had to submit to those as a selection to go to Antarctica. So you have to be crazy enough to want to go to such a place, but the test fails if you are crazy. You have to be an introvert because you'll be completely cut off from the rest of the world for 12 months once you are there, but at the same time be a social animal able to work on a team day and night with no escape except booze. Etc, etc... No wonder they use those same tests for astronaut testing ! I just fail to see how they can extract any meaningful data from seriously conflicting requirements.

I don't even know what websense is. Should I be worried, and how does one 'beg' to be taken off their blacklist ? Is it because there are executables (freewares) or because there are some jokes ? I doubt it's because of the penguin sex picture !

Plug them in a PC, move everything over to the PC, reformat the card. Now they are all identical and it doesn't matter who they belong to or if you lose them. Why do you ask ? Incidentaly I use the following Linux/Cygwin script to sort out the files.

And keep in mind that the festive period of Antarctica is not Giftmas or even New Years (too much work to do, too many bosses around), but the Midwinter, celebrated when you are halfway through your 'tour of duty', and the days are the coldest.

That's reasonable. In the case of appendectomy for instance, now massive doses of antibiotics are given before resorting to surgery. But having myself participated in an emergency on-the-field appendectomy in Antarctica, I can tell you that the guy would have been dead given another day or so. And also the field of surgery itself knows that less is better, hence the recent explosion of less invasive techniques like endoscopic techniques. And you are wrong if you think that those techniques are not evaluated. They are, and very closely, and they evolve all the time. Doing a double-blind would be stupid as 1 - it's impossible; 2 - in most cases the alternative is death. Instead different techniques are evaluated against one another.

1. Heat conduction of the ground is pretty poor.
2. Heat will build up very quickly
3. The ground is already pretty warm as it is (it's the average temperature of the place some meters underground, and only increases the deeper you go). Meaning if you want to dump excess heat in the Texas underground, you'll need additional heat exchangers, meaning even less efficiency.
4. Geothermy works because there are physical fluxes: hot water flowing through porous ground, lava flow nearby (Iceland).

I'm completely surprised that some people get it to work. I'd love to see a temperature curve of the surrounding ground. Personally I've had the opposite problems, getting servers to run in places that are too cold...

Hopefully with the polar orbiter we'll now get google maps of Antarctica. I've been lamenting the fact that it's impossible to find any halfway decent satellite image from down there, for ever.

accelerator driven subcritical reactors

And you can also use it to burn dirty actinids by modulating the beam. And YES, it runs Linux ! I'm not kidding, I just booted the reactor I'm working on for the first time this afternoon !!! Of course there's no Uranium in it while I debug the bootloader, but it will, it will...

A few days later, the first thing the geologist sees when he reaches the area is of course this rock. He aborts his trip, comes back to the main base all excited about some revolutionary theory or other and starts writing feverishly about it. It took us a bit of courage to tell him the truth and deflate him... He was able to go back to his advanced camp, but it proves that it can be too easy to fake/mistake data in some cases.

I wonder why they don't use a sonic anemometer: precise, works in any conditions and at any wind speed, no mechanical parts and it can take fast readings several times per second to measure turbulence. Yes, I've operated one in Antarctica.

My wife uses a "Freshette" on climbing expeditions. Picture

Easier to do on a penguin...

And, shameless plug, I also have some nice pictures to look at.

I spent a year launching weather balloons from Antarctica. They take about one hour to reach 20~30km altitude, then the latex tears up (remember, as the pressure decreases, the volume increases) and the plummet to the ground in less then 10 minutes. In rare cases what's left of the latex will form a parachute shape and they will drop slower.

If you fill them more, they go up faster and blow up earlier (as the latex reaches its maximum thinness earlier). If you underfill them, you get less buoyancy, and they can float for a long time if they don't go up to where they'll pop, which is probably what you want here.

But I have to remind you that:

• latex is expensive (at least for daily balloon launches, you are OK with your S&M fantasies).
• helium is very expensive and world quantities are limited and will run out before petroleum does.
• a standard weather balloon can lift only about 200 grams, which pretty much limits the quantity of battery and thus the wifi power range you can carry.

As for astronomy, the team running this automated experiment at Dome A did it previously at Dome C. I was on the first winterover team in 2005 and monitoring the turbulence for astronomy was one of the main goals. Bigger telescopes are being installed as we speak in time for the start of the 4th winterover in a few days.

Dome A is 1000m higher than Dome C (4200m vs 3200m) but is even harder to reach and the temperature in winter borders on the insane: we had -78C during our winterover so I'll let you imagine at Dome A...

Proof that science is a good thing, news reporting is a good thing, but mixing both together not necessarily...

Shipping to Antarctica is basically the same as shipping to NZ / Australia / South America if you use the normal post office. It then gets carried by the relevant polar organization onto the final destination. Of course a dead server case might raise suspicion, although if the fans are working it might be worth it: when I was last there during the winter 3 out of 4 of my stash of backup drives died out and almost all my fans on tens of boxes. Power outages that drop the temperature by a hundred celcius in matter of minutes and low air pressure at altitude are not sweet on those two pieces of hardware

Hmmm, reminds me of a different way to arrive at the same objective. Years ago, when I was a beginning climber many years ago we climbed a long classic route called Ula in the Verdon (France). While we were on it we got passed by two old timers who were cruising up. They weren't even belaying each others but, unlike us, they were wearing helmets. As they passed, one told us that we should be wearing them as well: he removed his and showed us a caved in hole as big as a fist inside his skull. 'Rock', he just said and disappeared up...

...hmmm, not mine ! The only story I ever submitted was about the very first winterover at Dome C, on the high Antarctic Plateau. Since I was rith there in the middle of Antarctica at the time, I didn't want to have to deal with a crashed server 10000 miles away through a shitty satlink, so I submitted the story with coral links. It made front page news on slashdot... and the log hardly even registered a blimp ! To this day I have no idea how many people read it, and I wizened up and put advertisement on the page only 6 months later !!!

In the case of the article being discussed, I really do think that the difference of culture is the root cause. While at a university party 20 years ago, a student in biochemistry from a moslem country (you wouldn't call that an uneducated idiot), said point-blank: "how do yo uwant us to respect a country where women sing ?". That pretty much forged my opinion on that religion on that day. A low one indeed.

I'll take you on that. We are preparing to hire someone for a year in a nuclear research facility in an IT job. Position not fully defined yet (either sysadmin or embedded). In Grenoble. C;-)

Or like this...

And when you are on the cold field, no matter how well you plan, shit happens regularly. It's Murphy's law incarnate.

Get off your high horses. There are some distros that are basically unusable after a CD install and that require a lenghty internet connection to get everything patched up and running. If you need to do a reinstall of Gentoo on the field, you are basically screwed. Similar with a personal copy of XP, the minute of satellite phone connection was 7$ so the first words of any support call were a screamed "Don't put me on hold I'm calling from Antarctica!".

That answer astounded me as in our own project the point was to make the data public as efficiently as possible. I mean, their funding is public, so why not their data ? I can understand holding onto it until you have a paper published, but after than it should be required in the funding statement. I don't know if this is typical of the field of astronomy, but I've searched high-res sky images in the past without finding anything systematic except some specific projects such the Sloan Sky survey (which are just coordinates) or the odd marketing Hubble shot.

OK, anyone who wants some more penguin info can check out my sig and the associated FAQ... I just want to add that this is not the first time that penguin fossils are discovered, and some larger than the Emperor penguins (actual largest species) are known.

It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds.

Seriously ! I spent a year with 12 other people in the middle of Antarctica in 2005 and we were being followed by shrinks of the ESA. There's a big difference between a winterover and the proposed experiment: the first has a purpose while the second has not. I mean the only purpose here is to stay in a can. At least when you go to Mars or to Antarctica you have a job to perform and important things to do (science and ensuring your survival because there's no way out). Here you'll have people crack down after a few weeks from a sense of uselessness. I would sign up for another winterover or a Mars mission no questions asked. I wouldn't get canned like this for a heap of gold and an all you can download porn access.

If I want low-impact aerobics, I'll masturbate. If I want high-impact aerobics, I'll masturbate again." -- Dennis Miller.

DES PINGOUINS! excellent ça :)

Cars don't explode like they do in the movies

If I may add something about the altitude, running in an O2 reduced environment would be much better. As someone who's run a bunch of servers at high altitude (3300m, 11000ft), I can say it's not a good idea. The lower pressure also means that you get less heat exchange, and a result of that is overheating components. In one year of operation we lost half our hard drives and fans while about 25% of our mobos and graphic cards failed. Strangely I don't recall any failed processors.

Time for an old classic: How to prove that all odd numbers are prime?
Well, this problem has different solutions whether you are a: Mathematician: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, and by induction we have that all the odd integers are prime. Physicist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is an experimental error... Engineer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime... Chemist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime... hey, let's publish! Modern physicist using renormalization: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is ... 9/3 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is ... 15/3 is prime, 17 is prime, 19 is prime, 21 is ... 21/3 is prime... Quantum Physicist: All numbers are equally prime and non-prime until observed. Professor: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, and the rest are left as an exercise for the student. Confused Undergraduate: Let p be any prime number larger than 2. Then p is not divisible by 2, so p is odd. QED Measure nontheorist: There are exactly as many odd numbers as primes (Euclid, Cantor), and exactly one even prime (namely 2), so there must be exactly one odd nonprime (namely 1). Cosmologist: 3 is prime, yes it is true.... Computer Scientist: 10 is prime, 11 is prime, 101 is prime... Programmer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 will be fixed in the next release, ... C programmer: 03 is prime, 05 is prime, 07 is prime, 09 is really 011 which everyone knows is prime, ... BASIC programmer: What's a prime? COBOL programmer: What's an odd number? Windows programmer: 3 is prime. Wait... Mac programmer: Now why would anyone want to know about that? That's not user friendly. You don't worry about it, we'll take care of it for you. Bill Gates: 1. No one will ever need any more than 3. ZX-81 Computer Programmer: 3 is prime, Out of Memory. Pentium owner: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 8.9999978 is prime... GNU programmer: % prime
usage: prime [-nV] [--quiet] [--silent] [--version] [-e script] --catenate --concatenate | c --create | d --diff --compare | r --append | t --list | u --update | x -extract --get [ --atime-preserve ] [ -b, --block-size N ] [ -B, --read-full-blocks ] [ -C, --directory DIR ] [--checkpoint ] [ -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F ] [ --force-local ] [ -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F ] [-G, --incremental ] [ -g, --listed-incremental F ] [ -h, --dereference ] [ -i, --ignore-zeros ] [ --ignore-failed-read ] [ -k, --keep-old-files ] [ -K, --starting-file F ] [ -l, --one-file-system ] [ -L, --tape-length N ] [ -m, --modification-time ] [ -M, --multi-volume ] [ -N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE ] [ -o, --old-archive, --portability ] [ -O, --to-stdout ] [ -p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions ] [ -P, --absolute-paths ] [ --preserve ] [ -R, --record-number ] [ [-f script-file] [--expression=script] [--file=script-file] [file...]
prime: you must specify exactly one of the r, c, t, x, or d options
For more information, type "prime --help'' Unix programmer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, ...
Segmentation fault, Core dumped. Computer programmer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 9 is prime, 9 is prime, 9 is ...
Oops, let's try that again:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is ... 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is ... 3 is ...
Um, right. Okay, how about this:
3 is not prime, 5 is not prime, 7 is not prime, 9 is not prim

People who forget history are bound to repeat it goes the saying. At the very begining of the WWW, not everyone had access to web browsers so various systems were developped, including web to mail portals. You would sent an email to a specific address with a GET request, and you'd get the page in return. Some of those servers are still in use to get around censorship or very limited conectivity, which was my case last year in Antarctica. I read slashdot thanks to a daily email connection, text only, and the agora web-to-mail portal.

I did my part for the construction of Concordia station, up on the high Antarctic plateau. About 5 years of thinking and development followed by 4 summers of construction in terrible conditions. My part was to survive the first winterover there, and it wasn't that easy with -80C temperatures ! And year certainly out of the ordinary, now where do I sign up for Mars ?!?

I did my part for the construction of Concordia station, up on the high Antarctic plateau. About 5 years of thinking and development followed by 4 summers of construction in terrible conditions. My part was to survive the first winterover there, and it wasn't that easy with -80C temperatures ! And year certainly out of the ordinary, now where do I sign up for Mars ?!?

I've been following this subject for years and also wrote my thoughts on the subject. My conclusion is the same: the meta keywords MUST be kept inside the EXIF fields of the images, alternatively in the path/filename info.
The hitch ? No program can handle them properly: the programs that can put the keywords in the EXIF are bugged, crash often (taking the entire Windows Explorer with them, requiring a reboot in XP), have shitty UIR, overwrite other EXIF fields, drop color profiles or recompress the JPEG data (absolute no-no); the programs that should read the fields to extract the content for quick search are just too slow or re-import it into complex systems. I want to keep the two things SEPARATE, and for good reasons.