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Also known as 'Freshette', sold as a medical device but often used by female mountain climbers. Take a look at the pic of my wife and her friends using one... Yeah, who'd had thought that a group pissing pic could be relevant to a /. discussion...

Entirely correct. I've observed liquid water at -25C on the high Antarctic plateau, on black metal in the sun without wind. But it is a rare occurence and doesn't last very long. What occurs naturally are black rock which get plenty warm enough in the sun, also on Mars I believe. Or much more interesting and on topic to this discussion: cryptoendolith (or more simply endolith): life forms that hide inside clear rock: they get sunlight through the clear rock, protection from the elements, air by porous diffusion... It's a whole ecosystem in a few mm of thickness. It shows if you break a clear rock as a green line about a cm underneath the surface. I have a picture of an endolith here and Wikipedia has, of course, more information.

Entirely correct. I've observed liquid water at -25C on the high Antarctic plateau, on black metal in the sun without wind. But it is a rare occurence and doesn't last very long. What occurs naturally are black rock which get plenty warm enough in the sun, also on Mars I believe. Or much more interesting and on topic to this discussion: cryptoendolith (or more simply endolith): life forms that hide inside clear rock: they get sunlight through the clear rock, protection from the elements, air by porous diffusion... It's a whole ecosystem in a few mm of thickness. It shows if you break a clear rock as a green line about a cm underneath the surface. I have a picture of an endolith here and Wikipedia has, of course, more information.

Yup, one thing the summary forgets is that those critters thrive and reproduce only when the temperature gets warm enough, which happens for about 2 months a years in Antarctica, while it never happens on Mars. Yes, you can have small springs with running water in Antarctica. I am not a microbiologist but I've spent 3 years in Antarctica.

I've lived most of my life in foreign countries: Italy, the US, Alaska (is it the same than the US ? I don't think so), France, Antarctica and some others. Between the US and Europe the differences are not that big, cultural mostly. What I personally find truly annoying are the administrative differences. Before the onslaugh of terror bullshit the US had great and quick administration, at the end of my 1st day I would already have most of my paperwork in order (bank account, SSN, driver's licence, bought car, car insurrance). On the other hand it's almost impossible for a foreigner to open a bank account in France or Italy (it takes huge pressure from your company).
And I know why guns are illegal in Italy, it's to make sure you don't shoot the clerks from pure rage after being turned around for the 7th time for a missing comma in the certificate of proper translation to the official translation of the certified copy of your grand mother's birth certificate. Each time after fighting to stay in line for 4 hours. Or somesuch.

we are are rasing a bunch of whiny little snots who can't even take a little bruse

"Why don't you light that candle?" —Alan Shepard while waiting for the first american rocket to launch.

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars." —Les Brown.

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." —Larry Niven.

I've been interested in parallel languages for a while (think Ada) and I think they'll become more important in the future with all those multicores, without having to resort to dirty hacks like MPI or OpenMP. But one thing about Erlang is that the threads run inside the compiled program, without the OS knowing about them, just like Java green threads. When I was working on a cluster a couple years back, Java was a no-no as the whole mess of processes would run on a single processor and never split or migrate. Has this improved since and how is it addressed in Erlang ?

I'm not sure why you wouldn't want this sort of metadata saved in your pictures

Yeah, tell me something I don't know. When I left for a winter in Antarctica, I configured an old headless PC into a gentoo server I left at home with the instruction to my wife: don't touch it! It handled email, ssh and image sales. When I got back, it had an incredible 400 days of uptime, but after I emerged it, I basically had to stop using it: there where thousands of problems, breakages and nasties which were obviously impossible to clean up. It served well, RIP.

I spent last year in a tiny outpost up on the high Antarctic plateau where we had no web access, but limited email (two coms a day, only small messages). I managed to do everything important with email, even reading slashdot (thanks to email-to-web portals) and updating my website. I've been using email for exactly 20 years and it would be very hard to give up this regular contact with friends and family, even though spammers are really ruining it for everyone, including me (I had to dispose of my original address because of excess spam).

Sorry to barge in a bit late on the discussion, but I have recently posted some pics about the Epica drilling project which is quoted by the article. I was part of the team working up at Concordia station in 2005 and I was there when the drilling reached bedrock (or almost) in december 2004. We celebrated by using some million-year old ice into our drinks ! (tastes like drill fluid)

Yes, see here. Sorry, don't have the time to comment right now.

I wonder what extremely skilled individuals have an entire year to spa

There used to be some in Antarctica, used to power Automated Weather Stations and the like, but they've been banned by the Antarctic Treaty (_no radioactive device allowed_) and replaced by big (1 cubic meter batteries and solar panels + wind generators to last the long winter night). Yup, I work there.

As well as some, but not too many, stupid questions I get through my website (most people are just impolite), I sometimes grep the access.log file for "$how|$why|$when|$where" and get surprisingly funny results. I haven't done this in a while, but some of the best older results are here.

This being said, for an instant trial, there are some OpenMosix LiveCDs, such as Quantian or other variants of Knoppix. Put the Quantian DVD in the 1st PC, boot, enable the remote boot option, boot the other computers over the network. Here: you have an operational cluster.

I think there may also be Rocks LiceCDs but haven't tried them. And remember your electricity bill when playing with clusters !

The most common result is frostbite, of course. In addition, after it happens once, you are best advised to not subject the same body part to another incident, as tissue durability in regards to a repeat is lost.

The most common result is frostbite, of course. In addition, after it happens once, you are best advised to not subject the same body part to another incident, as tissue durability in regards to a repeat is lost.

I do wish my webcam could deal with that wide a range of operating environments though

Question is: how do you touch the bone with the sound transmitter ? Either you surgically implant it in there or you press the skin very hard to get close enough to the bone. Friends of mine have bone-conduction helmets for use in mountain rescue helicopters. Reception is on top of the head, below the helmet, emission is on the jawbone sling of the helmet. In order for that thing to work the helmet needs to be worn very tight (very uncomfortable). And the frequency response makes it so weird you have to concentrate hard to understand, although I guess it could be solved with the right amount of signal processing.

I have my own list here, with emphasis on Cygwin, but the single most important tool is [Send To Clipboard As Name] which is a leftover from Win95 tweaks. Essential when doing lots of file manipulations but hard to find. It's an inf file and a dll.

My website has already been on the front page of slashdot, so I'm not really kharma whoring, but yes, we do run Linux there. I got back last months from 12 months in Antarctica, spending the winter at the new station of Concordia on the high Antarctic Plateau where we had temperatures of -78C (no, not including the windchill). I was doing atmosphere science there, in charge of 8 experiments as part of a team of 13 people. I had something like 10 PCs with me, many of whom died at one point or another, due to the high altitude, exposure to cold when the power goes out, or overheating due to thin dry air (not good for cooling).

For Antarctica, I think an OS with a penguin would be the most suitable.

My website has already been on the front page of slashdot, so I'm not really kharma whoring, but yes, we do run Linux there. I got back last months from 12 months in Antarctica, spending the winter at the new station of Concordia on the high Antarctic Plateau where we had temperatures of -78C (no, not including the windchill). I was doing atmosphere science there, in charge of 8 experiments as part of a team of 13 people. I had something like 10 PCs with me, many of whom died at one point or another, due to the high altitude, exposure to cold when the power goes out, or overheating due to thin dry air (not good for cooling).

For Antarctica, I think an OS with a penguin would be the most suitable.

So I figure the high ranking is due to several factors, like being on the net for 10 years, but also being all text and spending more time on content than on 'aspect'. See how many sites have their menus entirely in mouseover graphics of JavaScript... What do you want Google to do with those ?

But it does look ugly, particularly in Mozilla/Firefox which doesn't seem to respect float and alignment orders in CSS. Or at least in any way I could control. If anybody has a workaround...

So I figure the high ranking is due to several factors, like being on the net for 10 years, but also being all text and spending more time on content than on 'aspect'. See how many sites have their menus entirely in mouseover graphics of JavaScript... What do you want Google to do with those ?

But it does look ugly, particularly in Mozilla/Firefox which doesn't seem to respect float and alignment orders in CSS. Or at least in any way I could control. If anybody has a workaround...

So I figure the high ranking is due to several factors, like being on the net for 10 years, but also being all text and spending more time on content than on 'aspect'. See how many sites have their menus entirely in mouseover graphics of JavaScript... What do you want Google to do with those ?

But it does look ugly, particularly in Mozilla/Firefox which doesn't seem to respect float and alignment orders in CSS. Or at least in any way I could control. If anybody has a workaround...

I don't know in what format they provide the image, but if it's some kind of bitmap I've written a freeware for the express purpose of displaying quickly large image files (64 exabyte limit). Windows only, sorry.

http://www.gdargaud.net/Hack/Windows.html

With a little work you can even rig yourself a portable cygwin which allows you a real unix environment anywhere you go. That way you can have firefox in X with multiple desktops and proper middle button behavior, with a shell and everything

Physicist:
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is an experimental error...

Logician:
Hypothesis: All odd numbers are prime
Proof:
1. If a proof exists, then the hypothesis must be true
2. The proof exists; you're reading it now.
From 1 and 2 follows that all odd numbers are 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''

Apparently they want to build it in the high deserts of South America

Kudo to Jacket for his success. I met him couple years back when he was working on a previous penguin documentary.

Yet more proof that the internet is truly everywhere

Well, well, well... I'm writing this from the center of the Antarctic Plateau, where the winter night is now permanent and the temperature drops to below -80C... And I can tell you that the internet connection sucks. We connect 2-3 times a day to transfer email, and web connection is only available during those 20 or so minutes. The DNS timeout is 2 seconds while the ping on the DNS is on average 5 seconds... (if anyone knows how to change that 1st value on a windows box, let me know through my site contact address).

So, no, Internet access is not ubiquitous yet. Read my blog for more info (some actually relevant to this thread).

Here's the first crash

I think they were computing pi.

I've bought dozens of LCDs and haven't seen a dead pixel in over five years. Just to be sure you aren't right, I just ran a dead pixel test on the monitors I have access to. No dead pixels. Dead pixels are not common any more, because as you say, manufacturing has improved.

You're lucky.

I've bought 4 LCD panels in the last two months. Two from Dell, One from Hyundai, and one from Acer, and all of them have had either dead, or stuck pixels. Each time the manufacturer (reluctantly) replaced the display, but they were there. My wife couldn't see them at all until I shoed her through a jewelers loupe... Of course once you know where they are, they seem to stand out.

Dell doesn't have a "no dead pixels" policy, but if you mention that you're going to return the monitor to their "LCD support center" (I.E. Some cheap warm bodies on the other end of a long phone line to india) they'll replace your display... Just don't be surprised if the one you get is worse. They consider up to 5 dead or stuck pixels "acceptable".

On high resolution displays, stuck sub-pixels are really small. They're hard to see. If you have bought 12 displays and haven't noticed a stuck pixel, chances are you haven't looked hard enough. You almost certainly have at least one. (Or you're incredibly lucky.)

Check out some dead pixel test patterns and see if you missed something. You have to use all of the patterns. They may all look grey when you load them up, but they really are made up of different colors and will test every sub-pixel on your display.

for question like this. Its why i love slashdot!
Check out Some notes on how to build a Linux cluster and Linux Cluster HOWTO. Good luck!

In the past, on cold summer days (meaning below -50C), I've noticed solid state condensation on some materials, but that's just ice (I think). Anyway, my mission blog will be here.

Yup, good, but I got them beat for the temperature part, and I was in the freezer myself...

Yup, good, but I got them beat for the temperature part, and I was in the freezer myself...

As I closed my freelance IT company yesterday, I'll be moving onto my new job in 2 weeks, far, far, far away.

As I closed my freelance IT company yesterday, I'll be moving onto my new job in 2 weeks, far, far, far away.

"Global Warming's treatment in the media is done in a biased way in the sense that they often present both sides viewpoint. The fact is, there IS NO OTHER SIDE. The scientific evidence that humans are affecting the climate with CO2 is as clear as day, and scientists who say otherwise are hired by special interest groups or oil companies. The media do the issue a great disservice by trying to be fair and covering both sides of the issue. We NEED to be concerned." [source]

Is it possible for you people at Dome C to blog or something?

More on topic, this genetically enhanced cat is a good idea. I've had cats and dogs until I was 16. Then I moves to the city away from my parents. Upon returning after a month away... I was allergic to the cat ! I've kept this allergy and although I like to pet my current neighbor's cat I can't have one nearby for long. Yes, I know you can shower your cat daily to greatly disminish the allergens, but I think it's probably a lot more life-threatening to clean a cat than to live in an iron lung.

As for what I think of dogs, I had a few run-ins with those social parasites in the US and their often 'religiously stupid' owners which led to this piece.

...use the devil's own beer fridge !

I'll be wintering over at Dome C in 2005 (in the center of Antarctica). We'll be taking with us a prototype recycling system designed by the European Space Agency, able to recyle grey waters (also black 'waters' in 2006, but it will be after my time). So, yes, we'll be drinking and showering with past shower and dishwasher water... I won't go into details but the system has 4 successive filtering systems, and the water is so pure in the end that we have to add minerals to it. The funny thing is that the only thing that passes through unfiltered is alcohol; so since the water is recycled at only 75% (100% in 2006), it means that the alcohol content of the water will increase over time. Yum, I'm looking forward to the showers after a few months of pissing beer !!!

I'm at my most productive when I'm in Antarctica. I'm going to be a lone coder for the first winter over at Dome C, starting next months.

I'm at my most productive when I'm in Antarctica. I'm going to be a lone coder for the first winter over at Dome C, starting next months.

it appears there isn't even anything on the drawing board which would be able to achieve this feat