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Here's my favorite: http://socaldem.smugmug.com/photos/2128563-M.jpg

Here you go: https://photos.smugmug.com/Ant... ... ;)

I didnt asked for your feedback and it's funny you think any one cares.

Oh, you wish you could reach into your monitor and give me a good electric shock. Or you wish you had this device. I get paid in cash and you'll never have good coworkers until you change.

From WikiPedia

The flood discharge at the peak of an eruption in 1755 has been estimated at 200,000–400,000 m3/s (7.1-14.1 million cu ft/sec), comparable to the combined average discharge of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers (about 266,000 m3/s (9.4 million cu ft/sec)).

THAT is a lot of warm water.

There probably are more spectacular floods elsewhere on earth but these glacial floods are still relatively impressive

https://baldpacker.smugmug.com...

I was in Iceland during and after the last major floods. Those I-beams came from a road bridge, the beams are about 1 meter high and were bent up and torn apart like liquorice sticks. The same flood also washed out ice blocks the size of houses that took months to melt down. It was quite surreal to drive down the coast road with those massive blocks of ice lining the road like houses. Made one realise how small and insignificant humans really are.

I would also read Mike Acton's presentation:

* Typical C++ Bullshit

I have a hard time convincing myself to take best-practices advice from someone who thinks information is best conveyed by a slide presentation of photographs of hand-written notes on post-its stuck to a printout of code.

> What part of C++ OO imposes runtime performance costs?

Uh, the fact that it is designed for the uncommon single case instead of the common multi case. You want to optimize for the throughput, not latency.

OOP (Object Orientated Programming) has terrible performance scalability since it has terrible D$ (Data Cache) usage. For high performance OOP is completely ditched in favor of DOD (Data Orientated Design). DOD is used heavily in modern game development, and HFT (High Frequency Trading.)

I would recommend starting here:

* Pitfalls of Object Oriented Programming

Even Bjarne Stroustrup was ignorant of D$ usage and how it effects performance:

* Why you should avoid Linked Lists, where someone subtitled it: Stroustrup learns how L1 Cache usage is critical for performance sensitive code.

I would also read Mike Acton's presentation:

* Typical C++ Bullshit

> C++ written like C tends to be crap code

Total nonsense as you completely ignored context.

You've obviously never had to write high performance C++ code; guess what, we don't use OOP instead we use DOD (Data-Orientated-Design) which is far more a simpler C style then over-complicated C++ style. It also has the benefit of being simpler to read, easier to write, and performs far faster. Go figure!

* Pitfalls of Object Oriented Programming -- http://www.slideshare.net/royc...
* Data-Oriented Design and C++ -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* Typical C++ Bullshit -- http://macton.smugmug.com/gall...

Next, it appears you don't understand what Casey calls "Semantic Compression". There is nothing wrong with using C++ as a better C.

    * http://mollyrocket.com/casey/s...

Gee, why do other professional game devs not bother with using STL, Exceptions, or RTTI ? Because TANSTAAFL / TINSTAAFL !

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Lastly, I can tell you've never shipped any games where C++ obfuscates readability and performance.

> But C++ is designed to be used with "scoped objects"

Maybe in your mythical world, but rarely does C++ classes map perfectly to the real world.

I've been shipping games since 1995. Modern C++ is over-engineered.

While there is some truth to that, you haven't been keeping up to date with Orgre's design and architecture changes:

Orgre 2.0 Pitfalls and Design Proposal
* http://www.mediafire.com/downl...

They ditched OOP and incorporated DOD (Data-Orientated-Design) for a 5x performance increase!
* http://www.yosoygames.com.ar/w...

Mike Acton is a respected programmer in the video game industry, and he's right. In fact, if you were paying attention I listed his famous Typicall C++ Bullshit as reference in my Ogre 2.0 proposal.

OgreNode.cpp was written 13 years ago when OO programming was all the rave (still is?) everyone had a single core, caches didn't matter and most efficient way to cull the world was to use an Octree or a BSP. The world believed that "if( dirty )" was a magical, no-cost expression that is immediately a performance improvement wherever used to avoid the execution of more than 3 instructions.

13 years later, Moore's law kicked us in the butt and everyone is multicore. You probably know that story already.

Mike Acton reviewed the 1.9 version. Perhaps it would've been more interesting to see a review of the 2.0 file which has been refactored to better fit Data Oriented Design principles (and I'm sure there are things I wrote to criticize). Many of the things he criticizes of 1.9 have been fixed. Nevertheless there are things we can learn. Note that if he weren't right, then it would be hard to explain why there was a 5x performance increase between 1.9 and 2.0.

Mike Acton's DOD comments
* http://bounceapp.com/116414

The very lack of them finding the plane (MH370) at all means that it more than not it did not crash

No - They haven't found the plane because of the size of the search area.

Search area is a big issue; but the fact that they've ignored a sizeable chunk of it is another part of the issue. As noted, someone with access to the data (who publically wrote up the issue a few weeks ago) gave credence to the fact that it was more likely to have taken the northernly route - which has been completely ignored - and whether it made it to a destination controlled by a terrorist group or otherwise or crashed in the mountains along the way is another things that has yet to be ruled out.

I'm surprised how few people seem to get this.

The search area is choppy, stormy ocean and is the size of Australia. To put that in perspective, here's a map of Australia overlaid on the USA: http://keithooper.smugmug.com/... So imagine you're looking for a seat cushion in Nevada that's bobbing on the water in Illinois.

It's actually bigger than that.

And no, I'm not discounting the size of the search area. The issue with looking in the ocean is the fact that no debris of any kind has turned up any where. The likelihood of a crash happening in the ocean with zero debris (no debris, no oil slicks, etc - nothing) is smaller than that of the plane being hijacked for neferious purposes by an organization like Al Qaida.

As to why...well, a country like Russia might just want to remind certain powers that be of their influence; or for an organization like Al Qaida - it's easier to hijack a plane in that part of the world this way than it is to do it in someplace like the US or Europe. All they have to do then is figure out how to turn it into a bomb and get a flight plan scheduled that takes them close enough to the targets they want in a legit way that they can then carry out a mission.

Just saying, there's numerous methods to the madness. An outright crash is making less and less sense by the day.

The very lack of them finding the plane (MH370) at all means that it more than not it did not crash

No - They haven't found the plane because of the size of the search area.

I'm surprised how few people seem to get this.

The search area is choppy, stormy ocean and is the size of Australia. To put that in perspective, here's a map of Australia overlaid on the USA:

http://keithooper.smugmug.com/...

So imagine you're looking for a seat cushion in Nevada that's bobbing on the water in Illinois.

> Optimizing memory is a dying skill,

It is now called Data Orientated Design.

Google+ Group
* https://plus.google.com/+Datao...

Data-Oriented Design and C++
  * https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Typical C++ Bullshit
  * http://macton.smugmug.com/gall...

Pitfalls of Object Oriented Programming
* http://research.scee.net/files...
* http://www.slideshare.net/royc...

> you can write blazing fast code in C++ and still provide a sensible code architecture.

Not if it is OOP based.

Pitfalls of Object Ooriented Programming

Mirror:

*http://www.slideshare.net/roycelu/pitfalls-of-objectorientedprogramminggcap09

* http://www.google.com/url?q=ht...">

Us console game devs use DOD (Data Orientated Design) for highest performance.

* http://www.yosoygames.com.ar/w...

Mike Acton is a respected programmer in the video game industry, and he's right. In fact, if you were paying attention I listed his famous "Typical C++ Bullshit" as reference in my Ogre 2.0 proposal.

OgreNode.cpp was written 13 years ago when OO programming was all the rave (still is?) everyone had a single core, caches didn't matter and most efficient way to cull the world was to use an Octree or a BSP. The world believed that "if( dirty )" was a magical, no-cost expression that is immediately a performance improvement wherever used to avoid the execution of more than 3 instructions.

13 years later, Moore's law kicked us in the butt and everyone is multicore. You probably know that story already.

Mike Acton reviewed the 1.9 version. Perhaps it would've been more interesting to see a review of the 2.0 file which has been refactored to better fit Data Oriented Design principles (and I'm sure there are things I wrote to criticize). Many of the things he criticizes of 1.9 have been fixed. Nevertheless there are things we can learn. Note that if he weren't right, then it would be hard to explain why there was a 5x performance increase between 1.9 and 2.0.

* http://www.bounceapp.com/11641...

Fabrication costs eat you alive if you try to approximate a fractal too closely; but that is essentially where the later generations of solid metal heatsinks were heading before heatpipes hit the scene.

In the cheapest and simplest incarnation is just a beefy heat spreader plate on the bottom to ensure that each fin gets a reasonable connection to the heat source. In fancier versions, the spreader also extends vertically to help transfer heat to the more distant parts of the fins.

Recent AMD retail heatsinks use a clever design (cheap, because it's an aluminum extrusion with just a couple of cuts for the retention clip; but a combination of fins for surface area and bulkier conductive struts to feed the fins): image. The central slug is about the same size as the CPU heat spreader, and is solid throughout except for the slits for the retention clip. The longest fins are the ones directly attached to it. The four thicker struts on each corner support shorter fins(longer close to the base, shortest at the edges where there will be the least heat available for dissipation).

Heatpipes are superior enough to just about any solid material(with the possible exception of diamonds and carbon nanotubes; but those aren't really options) that most of the more expensive coolers have moved to 'heatpipes as close to the CPU as possible, loads of sheet metal fins with the heatpipes running through them' design; but you can definitely see the tradeoffs between surface area and conductive cross section in today's cheaper extrusion designs and the last generation or two of pre-heatpipe enthusiast gear.

The problem is that the most popular NTIS stuff is already on the net, but the remaining 30% (the long tail) is not.

The federally funded research was about these large (miles in radius) circles found in Nevada. There was conjecture that they were from a nuclear test. It turns out that they were from a toxic cloud test that was done using a solid rocket engine treated with beryllium. See http://pacaeropress.websitetoo..., http://aair.smugmug.com/Aviati... and http://blackrockdesert.org/wik...

The NTIS had the paper in question, which I was able to get and confirm that the semi-circles were created as part of the test. There was no mention of the test in the local papers or anywhere else I could find. If the NTIS did not have the paper, then my only hope would have been to ask Aerojet, the company contracted to do the research. The odds of them having a paper from 1967 is pretty low.

I realize that this question is not a critical, life threatening question, but determining *why* the circles where there and dispelling rumors about nuke tests is useful. The pursuit of the truth is lofty goal. Those who do not know history are bound to repeat it. In the case of this study, it turns out that there was an inversion layer that prevented a bunch of the particulate matter from reaching the ground in the test site. Maybe this is a well know mechanism now, but if I were researching atmospheric pollution, then I would want to review a study like this. If this study is not accessible, then it is like it never happened.

If the NTIS is disbanded, then we are basically tossing a bunch of tax-payer funded projects in to the shredder.

Interestingly, Canada is going through a somewhat similar issue where libraries containing research materials are being closed. Here an article from 2012: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

I'm no fan of big government, but if the NTIS is to be closed, then the entire contents of the NTIS library must be made freely available.

Look harder...

http://njtoaz.smugmug.com/Police/Maricopa-County-Sheriff/12272935_VDtZH9/1743890101_DDTvpXz#!i=1743890101&k=DDTvpXz

The main gun is now just a battering ram, but, well...

...that's a tank.

I'm not sure what country you went to school in, but in the US we use frogs that are already dead and soaked in preservatives. Kids don't kill their own frogs, and surely don't cut them open alive to watch their living hearts beat.

For that particular dissection, I was in a school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. That said, it was an American school, so I figured the curriculum wouldn't deviate that much from the norm here. And I wasn't wrong, read on.

The "norm" just happens to deviate a great deal between different schools in different parts of the country. A quick search brought me a curriculum resource for middle school teachers with a page on dissection. The relevant quote you should be looking for is, "It is recommended that you get a preserved frog. If you use a living frog, you will have to put it in a bottle or jar and drop a cotton ball of chloroform to put it into deep sleep." That was the procedure followed at my school, and the page seems to confirm that it does happen in the US, it wasn't particular to my school. You're just thinking, "that's not how I did it, so no other school could have possibly done it differently."

That said, most of the results from my web search were pages talking about how evil and unnecessary dissection is, how we need to move to more humane education, a bunch of PETA and "anti-vivisection society" pages...well, I'm guessing the dissection of frogs, especially live ones, have become a rare occurrence now. So here I am trying to use it as an example of why we shouldn't be fighting the cockroach rights battle, but the battle has actually been going on with the very examples I'm trying to use to explain why it's alright. And I'm on the losing side, with a lot of school opting for "virtual" dissection on ipads.

Your claim about being 9 does not match any school in the US either

Hey, look! Pictures of a frog dissection in a US elementary school in third grade! So they still do that, at least. Did you even bother doing a search before deciding to call me a liar? Or did you, once again, decide that whatever education experience you had when growing up was the exact same everyone else had?

In this case you are talking about something other than mutilation for effect. Dissecting to educate is not the same thing as ripping something open to attach wires and make it work.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I'm pretty sure we're not going to find common ground if we disagree on the educational value of the kit.

> You have to really really fuck something up to have C++ OO code be too slow where you're talking "milliseconds".

The problem is OO tends to over-engineered solutions*. i.e. multiple levels of inheritance, deep and tightly coupled interfaces, virtual functions in the middle of the a performance critical loop, template bloat, etc. :-( The younger programmers haven't learnt the rule-of-thumb:

  Just because you can, doesn't imply you should.

The great C++ programmers knows how to balance the simplicity & speed of C with the power & flexibility of C++.

* See: See Mike Acton's "Typical C++ bullshit"
http://macton.smugmug.com/gallery/8936708_T6zQX#!i=593426709&k=ZX4pZ

> because the PEBCAK

Agreed: Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.

Who cares what equipment they're using... A piece of crap camera in a skilled photog's hands can still get a great photo.

Yes, it can. Occasionally and given the conditions that won't cause the picture to turn into a total crap due to simple laws of physics. The point of photo journalism is not to make "great photos", it's to make acceptably good photos OF THINGS THEY ARE REPORTING ABOUT.

What is often in conditions like this, this, this, this or this.

And then amateur (such as myself) is ok, but he still has to use a camera that can handle the lighting conditions, movement, distance and required depth of field, and have minimal clue about taking photos in those conditions. Neither a great photographer with iPhone, nor a reporter with minimal training and DSLR (because really, they have to be delusional to combine a beginner photographer and a camera that only works in perfect conditions) would be able to take them. I admit, I have chosen subjects such as Valencia Street hipster in his natural environment for the heck of it, but journalists don't get such a choice.

Who cares what equipment they're using... A piece of crap camera in a skilled photog's hands can still get a great photo.

Yes, it can. Occasionally and given the conditions that won't cause the picture to turn into a total crap due to simple laws of physics. The point of photo journalism is not to make "great photos", it's to make acceptably good photos OF THINGS THEY ARE REPORTING ABOUT.

What is often in conditions like this, this, this, this or this.

And then amateur (such as myself) is ok, but he still has to use a camera that can handle the lighting conditions, movement, distance and required depth of field, and have minimal clue about taking photos in those conditions. Neither a great photographer with iPhone, nor a reporter with minimal training and DSLR (because really, they have to be delusional to combine a beginner photographer and a camera that only works in perfect conditions) would be able to take them. I admit, I have chosen subjects such as Valencia Street hipster in his natural environment for the heck of it, but journalists don't get such a choice.

Who cares what equipment they're using... A piece of crap camera in a skilled photog's hands can still get a great photo.

Yes, it can. Occasionally and given the conditions that won't cause the picture to turn into a total crap due to simple laws of physics. The point of photo journalism is not to make "great photos", it's to make acceptably good photos OF THINGS THEY ARE REPORTING ABOUT.

What is often in conditions like this, this, this, this or this.

And then amateur (such as myself) is ok, but he still has to use a camera that can handle the lighting conditions, movement, distance and required depth of field, and have minimal clue about taking photos in those conditions. Neither a great photographer with iPhone, nor a reporter with minimal training and DSLR (because really, they have to be delusional to combine a beginner photographer and a camera that only works in perfect conditions) would be able to take them. I admit, I have chosen subjects such as Valencia Street hipster in his natural environment for the heck of it, but journalists don't get such a choice.

Who cares what equipment they're using... A piece of crap camera in a skilled photog's hands can still get a great photo.

Yes, it can. Occasionally and given the conditions that won't cause the picture to turn into a total crap due to simple laws of physics. The point of photo journalism is not to make "great photos", it's to make acceptably good photos OF THINGS THEY ARE REPORTING ABOUT.

What is often in conditions like this, this, this, this or this.

And then amateur (such as myself) is ok, but he still has to use a camera that can handle the lighting conditions, movement, distance and required depth of field, and have minimal clue about taking photos in those conditions. Neither a great photographer with iPhone, nor a reporter with minimal training and DSLR (because really, they have to be delusional to combine a beginner photographer and a camera that only works in perfect conditions) would be able to take them. I admit, I have chosen subjects such as Valencia Street hipster in his natural environment for the heck of it, but journalists don't get such a choice.

Who cares what equipment they're using... A piece of crap camera in a skilled photog's hands can still get a great photo.

Yes, it can. Occasionally and given the conditions that won't cause the picture to turn into a total crap due to simple laws of physics. The point of photo journalism is not to make "great photos", it's to make acceptably good photos OF THINGS THEY ARE REPORTING ABOUT.

What is often in conditions like this, this, this, this or this.

And then amateur (such as myself) is ok, but he still has to use a camera that can handle the lighting conditions, movement, distance and required depth of field, and have minimal clue about taking photos in those conditions. Neither a great photographer with iPhone, nor a reporter with minimal training and DSLR (because really, they have to be delusional to combine a beginner photographer and a camera that only works in perfect conditions) would be able to take them. I admit, I have chosen subjects such as Valencia Street hipster in his natural environment for the heck of it, but journalists don't get such a choice.

Make it long enough, and the moon will look like the sun
Here you go, an example shot
http://tanveer.smugmug.com/Travel/Ladakh-2012/TSR/i-v7ZtdHc/0/L/DSC_5964_LR-L.jpg

Its all in the exposure

Faith Baptist Bible isn't even a Division III team. Everything I've read, from people in the know (http://www.d3boards.com/index.php?topic=4558.12195 -- starting around page 814) indicates that Grinnell specifically intended to have Jack Taylor set this record. He literally wasn't playing defense -- he was standing around at halfcourt to receive an outlet pass so he could jack up yet another 3.

Somebody watching the video noticed that Faith was cheering this on, and the Grinnell crowd was cheering scoring by both teams (http://www.d3boards.com/index.php?topic=4558.msg1469592). I have a suspicion that they were in on this joke. Given that their opponent was not an NCAA team, I don't think this record should count.

It's interesting that for all this, they've never won an NCAA tourney game (Division III, that is). I don't think they've even won their conference (see http://d3hoops.com/teams/Grinnell/Men/2011-12/index and look at the other years -- usually their last game is against a conference team, and they've always lost). That kind of run and gun and press may be fun to play and watch, but it doesn't work against good teams.

And there's plenty of very good basketball being played in Division III. Yes, it's very rare for Division III teams to beat Division I, but a couple of weeks ago MIT lost to Harvard 69-54, and the game was not a blowout -- Harvard had to work hard for its W (Harvard shortly thereafter beat Manhattan College, which is also Division I, 79-45). If you watch the real power teams in Division III -- schools like MIT (yes, MIT is ranked #1 in Division III right now, and they have some damn good players, including a point guard, Mitchell Kates, who was abusing the Harvard back court all game), Amherst, Williams, Franklin and Marshall, Cabrini, UW-Whitewater (which beat MIT last year in the semifinal, and went on to win the title), it's very high quality basketball, just not the kind of athleticism you'll find in Division I. Teams like these, that play real defense and are in control on offense, would make short work of Grinnell.

And one of our (MIT) alumni, Jimmy Bartolotta '09, was Division III national Player of the Year, and is now playing professional basketball in Iceland.

(Yes, I'm an Ancient and Honorable Nerd of the Infinite Corridor -- VI-3 '87. I'm unofficially one of the team photographers. See http://rlk.smugmug.com/Sports/Basketball)

Very well stated!

Summary: An expert knows when TO and when NOT TO use certain tools. In the hands of a novice C++ tends to lead to over-engineered solutions. In the hands of a master C++ can succinctly express idioms.

OOP is a design tool; not an measure of efficiency.

There are times when it is the right solution, and there are times when it is the wrong solution.
i.e. Mike Acton's famous "Typical C++ Bullshit."
http://macton.smugmug.com/gallery/8936708_T6zQX/1/593426709_ZX4pZ#!i=593426709&k=ZX4pZ

No, I'll be fair, the food has clearly improved massively since the "cheeseburger" picture was taken. For example, I'd eat this right now if you put it in front of me.

400mm telephotos are best, but your camera will damage if you try to do direct photography.
So go to ebay.com, and get a cheap 900nm+ IR filter. These filters are so dark, that even bright sun is a pale object through them.
These cost 20$ for a 77mm filter.

With filter on, point your cam at sun, shoot with 1/1000 or faster and then quickly point camera away.

Remember, do not keep camera pointed at the sun continously.

I did a solar eclipse with 300mm lens.
Here are the pics
http://tanveer.smugmug.com/Nature/Solar-Eclipse-July-22/8996323_xLmdqp#!i=598157547&k=7ZhhD.

you can also stack two filters, but then you would need a shutter speed of 1/500 or slower.

Start here young grasshopper...

Mike Acton's "Typical C++ Bullshit"
http://macton.smugmug.com/gallery/8936708_T6zQX/1/593426709_ZX4pZ#!i=593426709&k=ZX4pZ

OOP, while a great paradigm, is NOT a silver bullet for every problem. Unfortunately far too many programmers view OOP as the only way to solve a problem in C++. "When all you have is a hammer ... every problem starts to look like a nail."

I had to look at similar options. I might take 50,000 pictures in a year, all raw, and I needed to find a good solution. Losing images means I could be sued (and I actually carry malpractice insurance for photography).

My conclusion: using only local storage or only remote storage is dangerous. Use both.

Using only local storage, no matter how many backups you have and how often you refresh them, is vulnerable to your house burning down or burglary. Even ignoring refreshing the data, storage media are vulnerable to obsolescence. Try reading a 9-track tape nowadays -- even if the tape is good, it'll be tough to get the data.

Using only remote storage is highly vulnerable to sites simply going out of business or deleting your images. And if a site goes down, they don't care if you sue them -- you still lost your images. Flickr has, in the past, simply deleted someone's archives and was unable to restore them.

Initially, my backups consisted of a USB HD stored in a fire safe. Nowadays, I use a combination of both local and remote storage. I purchased a "pro" account on an image hosting service (smugmug, in this case) which has unlimited image storage (and the option for backups of any file types), and I also have a 10TB NAS. The local NAS holds the raw image backups, and after they're processed, I upload them to hidden galleries on my pro account as JPGs. If my house burns, I might need to do a reshoot of the past week, but everything processed is backed up offsite in some usable format.

I highly recommend Synology NAS solutions for local storage, which are open source and actively encourage ports and enhancements to their systems, and they have an excellent admin panel. This is unlike Drobo, who has their system fairly locked down...

> C++ is a powerful and pragmatic, but ugly and dangerous language.

Agreed. I love C++ (worked on a professional C++ compiler for a brief stretch), but C++ also sucks.

Mike Acton has documented why C++ continues to sucks.

- Typical C++ Bullshit
http://macton.smugmug.com/gallery/8936708_T6zQX#593426709_ZX4pZ

- Do not force shared data formats for exclusive purposes
http://macton.posterous.com/do-not-force-shared-data-formats-for-exclusiv
"However, Object-Oriented Design (OOD) and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) have perpetuated this misguided belief that there is an ideal abstract data form where all transformations are given equal weight*. "

The largest problem is that C++ is over-engineered (designed by committee.) Its like people don't know how to say no. I figure it will be 2040 before C++ removes the ass-backwards compatibility of 'long long', 'short', 'long double', etc. nonsense. How many more years do we have to wait before we get _one_ standard on name mangling??

Cheers

Too bad you couldn't get the shot you wanted, Taco. Looks like Trey Ratcliff managed it though. No offense, but I think his picture wins.

http://volcanochaser.smugmug.com/Nature/Man-vs-Wild/3444749_tfamk#240930193_HWive

Use Google next time, you lazy shit.

You could get in touch with the guys who run the telescope.
http://www.iiap.res.in/iao/about.html
Permits for foreigners are a little difficult to get otherwise.

That said, you can visit other places in ladakh region (Tso moriri/Pangong) which are 4000m+ and have equally amazing skies.

Check out my http://tanveer.smugmug.com/Travel/Ladakh-2010 gallery, as well as 2009 gallery in the "Travel" section.

High altitude observatories are usually located at places with little light pollution, and clean air.
I have made two trips to Hanle(4400m above MSL)
For the first visit, we could not see stars as it was overcast(a rare event!)
However, on the second visit, we did see an amazing sky.
http://tanveer.smugmug.com/Travel/Ladakh-2010/Chushul-Hanle/IMG3746/906412622_rooft-XL.jpg

I am told there are some high altitude observatories in Andes mountains(4500m approx)
2600m above sea level is one of the lowest.

They turn them down at night; to something like half the flow required at peak daytime viewing hours.

Then they shine lights on them; the tour guide at Sir Adam Beck smugly called them "weapons of mass distraction". (He also asked me more questions about my DSLR then he could answer about their power station... but I am an electrical engineer, so already knew way more than the "tourist" stuff. And the guide was in the market for a new camera.)

• Horseshoe falls
• Light projectors
• American falls
• Complete gallery

They change the colours periodically, and if we hadn't been short of time, I'd have gotten some shots of the gels part-way across the projector lenses. It turns out of you spend enough time taking pictures at night, they DO turn the lights off... 5 minutes to midnight, at least on Mother's Day.

(Since power demand is low at this time of year, and it's spring runoff, I doubt the water level was reduced by much that particular night. In the summer, they'll be storing everything they can in the pump-generating reservoirs on both sides for that 4PM demand peak... the one Ohio mucked up a few years back.)

They turn them down at night; to something like half the flow required at peak daytime viewing hours.

Then they shine lights on them; the tour guide at Sir Adam Beck smugly called them "weapons of mass distraction". (He also asked me more questions about my DSLR then he could answer about their power station... but I am an electrical engineer, so already knew way more than the "tourist" stuff. And the guide was in the market for a new camera.)

• Horseshoe falls
• Light projectors
• American falls
• Complete gallery

They change the colours periodically, and if we hadn't been short of time, I'd have gotten some shots of the gels part-way across the projector lenses. It turns out of you spend enough time taking pictures at night, they DO turn the lights off... 5 minutes to midnight, at least on Mother's Day.

(Since power demand is low at this time of year, and it's spring runoff, I doubt the water level was reduced by much that particular night. In the summer, they'll be storing everything they can in the pump-generating reservoirs on both sides for that 4PM demand peak... the one Ohio mucked up a few years back.)

They turn them down at night; to something like half the flow required at peak daytime viewing hours.

Then they shine lights on them; the tour guide at Sir Adam Beck smugly called them "weapons of mass distraction". (He also asked me more questions about my DSLR then he could answer about their power station... but I am an electrical engineer, so already knew way more than the "tourist" stuff. And the guide was in the market for a new camera.)

• Horseshoe falls
• Light projectors
• American falls
• Complete gallery

They change the colours periodically, and if we hadn't been short of time, I'd have gotten some shots of the gels part-way across the projector lenses. It turns out of you spend enough time taking pictures at night, they DO turn the lights off... 5 minutes to midnight, at least on Mother's Day.

(Since power demand is low at this time of year, and it's spring runoff, I doubt the water level was reduced by much that particular night. In the summer, they'll be storing everything they can in the pump-generating reservoirs on both sides for that 4PM demand peak... the one Ohio mucked up a few years back.)

They turn them down at night; to something like half the flow required at peak daytime viewing hours.

Then they shine lights on them; the tour guide at Sir Adam Beck smugly called them "weapons of mass distraction". (He also asked me more questions about my DSLR then he could answer about their power station... but I am an electrical engineer, so already knew way more than the "tourist" stuff. And the guide was in the market for a new camera.)

• Horseshoe falls
• Light projectors
• American falls
• Complete gallery

They change the colours periodically, and if we hadn't been short of time, I'd have gotten some shots of the gels part-way across the projector lenses. It turns out of you spend enough time taking pictures at night, they DO turn the lights off... 5 minutes to midnight, at least on Mother's Day.

(Since power demand is low at this time of year, and it's spring runoff, I doubt the water level was reduced by much that particular night. In the summer, they'll be storing everything they can in the pump-generating reservoirs on both sides for that 4PM demand peak... the one Ohio mucked up a few years back.)

Partners in Health harvests peanuts from a 30-acre farm or buys them from a cooperative of 200 smallholders. It’s planning to build a larger factory, but for now the nuts are taken to the main hospital in Cange, where women sort them in straw baskets, roast them over an outside gas burner, run them through a hand grinder and mix all the ingredients into a paste that is poured into reusable plastic canisters.

PIH has a slideshow of manufacturing Nourimamba on smugmug, here. The Times article does address some of the interesting (and sad) legal wrangling behind a simple peanut mix that has the power to save millions of lives. Also, for an interesting take on how famines can be "manufactured" by unscrupulous governments or warlords seeking to skim or redirect aid, see Linda Polman's work. Here's an excerpt from a Guardian article,

All too frequently, according to Polman, the result is not what it says in the charity brochures. She cites a damning catalogue of examples from Biafra to Darfur, and including the Ethiopian famine, in which humanitarian aid has helped prolong wars, or rewarded the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide rather than the victims. Perhaps the most striking case in the book deals with the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda in which the Hutu killers fled en masse across the border to what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). There, in Goma, huge refugee camps were assembled and served by an enormous array of international agencies, while back in Rwanda, where Tutsi corpses filled rivers and lakes, aid was not so focused. The world was looking for refugees, the symbol of human catastrophe, and the refugees were Hutus. This meant the militias that had committed the atrocities received food, shelter and support, courtesy of international appeals, while their surviving victims were left destitute. Worse still, Polman believes the aid enabled the Hutu extremists to continue their attempt to exterminate the Tutsis from the security of the UNHCR camps in Goma. "Without humanitarian aid," she writes, "the Hutus' war would almost certainly have ground to a halt fairly quickly."

No affiliation, just a satisfied customer for many years. Best way to view and store your pictures. $40 / year for unlimited uploads. The above link will get you $5 off for the first year. I also use an external disk for backing up my RAW files.

...then you should get a badass boat like this one, a 190 tons displacement, 37 meter costal patrol boat purchased by an early Internet pioneer from the Royal Navy.

The problem is not the lens alone but the sensor dye size : Megapixel myth

So basically you need both , a big lensd and a big dye size, for the same amount of megapixel you get less noise. Naturally increasing megapixel , dye size *and* lens is the bets of the world.

What you don't mention is that you pay a premium for using only what you need instead of building out your own infrastructure. In some cases, the premium is upwards of 100% (have had to run the numbers for several clients, for some it works out well, for some it's grossly more expensive).

I think that's fair. It would be pretty amazing if it worked out cheaper in all cases, and everyone should run the numbers and evaluate the benefits before going into it.

I know Smugmug.com believe they're $500K by using S3 instead of their own storage servers. http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/

But, there are plenty of scenarios where due to predictable loads (or simply low loads), or simple requirements Amazon's pricing model is a bad fit.

I would be most tempted by Amazon's model if I was starting up a service, was hoping for huge sudden growth, but didn't have the confidence to invest upfront in my own hardware for that capacity.

The thing that bus me about this 'cloud computing" nonsense is we already had a perfectly good and well established term for this-thin clients.

That would be an excellent point, if only cloud computing and thin-client were related in anything but the most tangential of ways.

But they're not, so it isn't.

5 years from now this will be just another dotbomb buzzword chucked in the trashcan of history

Meanwhile, people are actually using cloud services right now, and they're saving money.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/

These people aren't affected by the ISP caps you mention -- because cloud computing isn't what you think it is.

OTOH, I do think that service aimed at end-users will become popular. Things along the Google Docs model and, yes, the OnLive model. They will drive demand for faster ISP services with higher caps, or no caps at all. And for wireless ISPs with broad coverage.

The Grand Canyon could not have been created by flash floods. It is absolutely impossible unless you can explain how flash floods also created these. Where, anywhere else in the world, has there ever been a flash flood that could carve such twisty canyons out of multiple layers of solid granite?

I saw the eclipse from Delhi. 83% totality.
However it was cloudy till 6:30am. 6:26 was the max phase.
From 6:30 to 6:45 clouds relented, and I could actually take a few pics.
Here you go!
http://tanveer.smugmug.com/gallery/8996323_Jy27n

Considering that you said "mostly pictures" it would be worth considering a professional image hosting service such as Smugmug.

Unlimited storage from US$40 per year is less than half of what you would be paying for 50GB on Dropbox.

Percona, XtraDB, Drizzle

What about American McGee's Strawberry Shortcake?

I posted this as a comment on the blog post, but I'm copying it here as well:

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2-smugmug/

Outside of one instance where it launched 250 XL nodes, it seems to be performing pretty well. Their software takes into account a large number of data points (30-50) when deciding to scale up or down. It also takes into account the average launch time of instances, so it can be ahead of the curve, while at the same time not launching more than it needs.