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'Haute Cuisine' on Mars?

If you're lucky enough to be a crew member of one of the next European Space Agency (ESA) long-term missions, you will have the choice between eleven new delicious recipes, such as 'martian bread and green tomato jam' or 'potato and tomato mille-feuilles' when it's time for dinner. In 'Ready for dinner on Mars?,' ESA says that these recipes will use fresh ingredients grown in greenhouses built on Mars colonies or other planets. The future astronauts -- should I write 'farmonauts'? -- will grow potatoes, onions, rice, soya or lettuce. And it's interesting to note that the new menus were elaborated with the help of Alain Ducasse, the French chef who has almost as many stars in the 'Guide Michelin' as there are planets in our Solar system. Read more...

Below is a picture showing a 'potato and tomato mille-feuilles,' a recipe prepared for ESA (Credit: ADF - Alain Ducasse Formation -- site in French). Here is a link to a larger version (283 KB).

A 'Potato and tomato mille-feuilles' for Mars astronauts

The thin slices of potato, tomatoes and onion are cooked one by one, for a homogeneous colour and a melting and crispy sensation in the mouth. The basic ingredients are potatoes and tomatoes, both thought to be easy to to grow in space, on Mars or other planets.

So, what kind of vegetables will the 'farmonauts' be able to grow?

The menus were all based on nine main ingredients that ESA envisions could be grown in greenhouses of future colonies on Mars or other planets. These nine ingredients must comprise at least 40% of the final diet, while the remaining (up to) 60% could be additional vegetables, herbs, oil, butter, salt, pepper, sugar and other seasoning brought from Earth.

The nine basic ingredients that Christophe Lasseur, [ESA's biological life-support coordinator,] plans to grow on other planets are: rice, onions, tomatoes, soya, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, wheat and spirulina -- all common ingredients except the last. Spirulina is a blue-green algae, a very rich source of nutrition with lots of protein (65% by weight), calcium, carbohydrates, lipids and various vitamins that cover essential nutritional needs for energy in extreme environments.

Besides the fact that astronauts will have better food than today, this will have additional benefits.

Today all the food for astronauts in space is brought from Earth, but this will not be possible for longer missions. Although still on the drawing board, ESA has already started research to see what could be grown on other planets -- and what a self-supporting eco-system might look like on Mars.

"In addition to being healthy and sufficiently nutritious for survival, good food could potentially provide psychological support for the crew, away from Earth for years," emphasises Lasseur.

It is extremely difficult today to be selected as an astronaut. But tomorrow, when a candidate needs to show additional qualifications in farming and in cooking, it will become almost impossible...

Anyway, for other stories about space food, you also can read two previous posts, "Eating in Space" or "Astronauts To Eat Italian-Style."

Sources: ESA, June 13, 2005; and various sites

Note that these guys are under NDA with Microsoft (from my first link: "All will need to sign NDAs cause there are things ... that we don't want to leak out"), so they probably can't even say who they are -- but basically they troll around the various blogs pushing Microsoft fud.

This smells exactly like one of those postings.

Heterarchies represent a new logic of organizing that is neither market nor hierarchy: whereas hierarchies involve relations of dependence and markets involve relations of independence, heterarchies involve relations of interdependence. As the term suggests, heterarchies are characterized by minimal hierarchy and by organizational heterogeneity, a pair of concepts elaborated below.

since everyone bitches about how they have no content, let's see how many present their content, or rather: how many are black text on white background...

EVIL

* underlined+bold
* drop shadow
* cream background, not much of an improvement. some of the header text is glossy (shiney / embossed / see above one / other various "auto-artistic" trash ).
* the tiny images illustrating each entry, are dithered (i guess with a "web palette" [making it look even more horrible], which people stopped doing 5+ years ago) then jpg'd.
* cyan background (the name of 100% green + 100% blue)
* purple text, orange links. no, that's not better.
* yes i really want to be tortured with your family album pics
* half of the people leave directly (or die) with the header
* light yellow (piss-water yellow?) background.
* "I.Mter-
views" ?
i don't get it. dashes in headlines are satan.
* scary vector portrait
* horrible. evil. tasteless.
* scarier than the sixapart girl.
* yellow background.

GOOD

* pear/white background. title with first letter biggie, first line in different font from rest.
* greenish tasty tone over everything ...which i didn't follow. great. thanks. as for the equally bad link-colours being that horrible default-blue/purple, it was only around 10%. this was checking 70% of the a-list. methinks those popular people should hire someone to design their site

good design = pyros, don't remember any other. and yeah, it's not a blog.
says intersting things = ms g33k. who i'm not sure is a good thing to link, i won't link myself.

1. I recently had a slightly difficult time getting the webmaster of a popular Country artist site to understand that linking a MP3 to a website doesn't make that MP3 a podcast. He was initially insulted by my suggestion he include an RSS feed to make the file a true podcast. Fortunately, there were plenty of links at http://www.ipodder.org/ to share with him that showed him how RSS is the magic ingredient. It wasn't that he couldn't roll RSS code; he was a competent coder. He, like most of the public out there, was simply misinformed. Let's face it, RSS is wicked geeky and trying to explain it to somebody is often an exercize in futility (See the end of Josh's vlog on the subject - lesson #4). After all, isn't Really Simple Syndication such an obvious sort of technology that you wonder why somebody had to invent it in the first place? ;)

   But if you want to see how completely the public misunderstands just what the heck a podcast is check out Bill Gate's first podcast as an example. The MEDC site refers to it as a "Video Podcast", but on film they just call it a podcast, so if you are new to podcasting then this is what you are going to think a podcast is: a video broadcast via WMV. Obviously there's a slight problem here in that podcasts are audio enclosures via RSS and vlogs are video enclosures via RSS. One could argue that this is a simply an exercize in semantics, or one could argure that Bill & Co. are once again trying to embrace and extend a technology/term for their own purposes. But the main result is that the common guy isn't going to have a clue about any of this. He only knows what he is told.

   So, IMO, iTunes adding podcast support is a really good thing. This will help solidify the meaning of the word "podcast" before more confusion sets in. (Of course, if Steve & Co. are also embracing and extending...)

2. As for podcasts being "Wayne's World for radio", sometimes that is the case. If I have to download another walk to the (backyard shed, park, bigwig meeting, etc) soundseeing tour on Daily Source Code I will scream, or just not subscribe anymore. Vlogs can be just as bad. I've seen some kid animate her Barbies in a sordid romance, a guy video tape his trip home from work, and somebody wash their dirty sink to music. Not winning content by any means. However, like anything out there, there is crap and there is gold. And then there's the whole realm inbetween. YMMV, but podcasts are turning out to be an alternative form of entertainment. Don't write them off before trying out some of the more interesting ones. I wouldn't recommend sampling them at random if you don't have the time or patience to filter out the dross.
   
   I know that tech podcasts get covered here a lot. Maybe some of you might enjoy these music podcasts:
   • http://carmenrasmusen.com/audio/idolupdate.xml - Carmen Rasmusen of American Idol fame gives the inside dope on what happens after the cameras shut off.
   • http://feeds.feedburner.com/BitzOfBrin - a thirteen year old girl talks about getting into the music biz and tracks her progress. She's not bad at all.
   • http://composerplanet.com/speechless/index.xml - Speechless covers instrumental music from rock to electronica. Very fascinating stuff.
   • http://www.coverville.com/index.xml - Coverville is a popular podcast featuring covers of well known music done by obscure and well

I've got a question here. When I find security bugs in your software, how on earth can they be submitted for you to fix them? The support page offers little guidance.

Last time I found a security bug in IE, I ended up e-mailing it to Scobleizer who thankfully picked up on it quickly. This doesn't seem like a very effective system though!

-dgr

FreeBSD 1.0 cannot be run unless you have a Unix license. I'm not sure what this would cost you, but SCO is selling licenses to Linux users for $699.00, so my guess is about that. However you need to ask SCO, as they are the only ones legally selling such a license.

For Freebsd 2.0 the requirement of a Unix license was eliminated (there were only 7 files to re-implement).

I belive that requirement is no longer valid. It was based on the licensing of V7/32V Unix which was released by Caldera in January 2002. A later release put it under the original BSD license. Here is a Groklaw article talking about the way SCO tried to later say it was on for the 16bit code and non-commericial.

Since the bits of 1.X that were tainted are now release under a BSD license, well..... Thats why you can once again get FreeBSD 1.X if you look around enough.

BWP

>When building cluster of stock PCs it should not be more then $500/PC.

What are you talking about?

The now (in)famous Apple cluster cost them about 5 million for 1,100 nodes or $5K/node.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/G5cluster.html
And that was supposed to be a good deal.

Merrimac 2 terraflop workstation for $20,000

General CPU's just don't have the punch that special purpose or Fpga processors do.

People do this all the time, in message boards and on blogs, usually with a standard disclaimer that opinions expressed are not of their employer.

There are so many examples of this... Look at how many Microsoft employees have blogs like Scoble or Don Box, or Oracle's Tom Kyte, or IBM's Kyle Brown, or BEA 's David Orchard (I work for BEA as well) , or Google's Bosworth.. Do you really think these people are vetted by PR? How many employees post to newsgroups or public tech support forums... I see people get into public flamewars too.

On the other hand, there is a problem here with what constitutes a company's "voice". Bosworth, for example, gets into controversy for people confusing his opinions with Google's (or BEA's , previously).

Frankly, I tend to side with the cluetrain. As long as you don't claim to hold the "official" position, and don't talk about internal confidential information, it's beneficial to the company, its investors, customers, and prospects for employees to engage in open and honest dialogue with others.

I guess it depends on how paranoid you are about your company firing you for speaking your mind. Generally I don't get too concerned about it, if they did such a thing, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.

Maybe in Cupertino. If you claimed the "vast majority used Firefox", you'll be warm, but you'll still be wrong. Blogging is now mainstream, and the mainstream uses IE on Windows.

Scoble uses Firefox, BTW.

Microsoft's sudden turnaround on gay rights are, of course, coincidences.

Read this you ridiculous fuck, and stop swallowing the never-ending bullshit pie that comes out of Bashdot.

Fucking sheep.

There's no quality control, but audio.weblogs.com is a comprehensive list of the newest podcasts (audio available for download) as they become available. Take a gander and you can find some cool stuff in there.

Robert Scoble, Microsoft's chief humanising officer has posted a response to Hakon's letter.

Apparently, they are working hard to fix it in IIS 7.0 and the next version of ASP.NET.
Apparently.

Stanford professor Dally's stream processor.

It's almost just like Cell but has onchip memory to solve the bandwidth problem.

Dally worked for Cray and mentioned that todays supercomputers are not efficient.

What's the deal with the PDF-format anyway? The document is 17 pages of Powerpoint-like slides. I'm sure some nice, simple HTML could have displayed that much more quickly.

Boy, that's for sure. And you're not the only one who thinks so; see Jeff Jarvis' and Doc Searls' rants on the subject, which prompted a response from ChangeThis' founder, Seth Godin:

I hear you. But I think the comparison is not apt. The right comparison is to compare our PDFs to books.

Books are not searchable. They cost money to reproduce. You can't print multiple copies and Google searches them even less well than they search PDFs.

You don't hear anyone whining about books...

Anyway, we use PDFs because they're a lot more booklike. They read better. They stick together when you forward them. They print better.

Maybe he should have just gone all the way and printed them as books, then?

Robert Scoble--one of the people mentioned in the article--has already written about it. "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees own an MP3 player. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in...

He went on to state, "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees use more than 640k of ram. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in..."

Because, after all, if someone at Microsoft doesn't recognise people's usage patterns and habits, it can't be true.

Remember, this is the same guy who stated, "3) Pay whatever big money it'll take to get ... Elton John ...[and] Shania Twain to work on designing an entirely new player from the ground up." link

I don't know what world he lives in. I don't think I want to. I do know they'd have fabulous, sequined and ruffled, faux 17th century french MP3 players with a disneyfied country theme. Kind of like Euro Disney, when you think about it. That's enough to tell me I don't want to live there.

Just because a source contradicts the original, it doesn't make it a good one.

Robert Scoble--one of the people mentioned in the article--has already written about it. "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees own an MP3 player. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in... the story is a non-starter. I know a lot of Apple employees who play Halo 2 too. Is that a story?"

Ed Bott has some good comments too: "Now read the story. Read it carefully.... Note that the entire thingis based on an interview with one "high-level [Microsoft] manager who asked to remain anonymous." From this one source, we are able to calculate with confidence that 16,000 employees at Microsoft's Redmond campus own iPods... taking an offhand remark from an unknown source (who may or may not have a hidden agenda and who may or may not know what he's talking about) and extrapolating it to the entire campus is just silly...
One thing they teach you in Journalism 101 is that when you have a single anonymous source, you don't have a story. That's still true."

The Microsoft employee's open letter to Bill Gates almost made me choke. In case you haven't read it, let me paraphrase: "How do we make an iPod killer?" he asks rhetorically. "First we must harness the blogosphere!" he answers. "Then we'll design the interface by committee. Synergize, baby."

Anyway, I found it interesting how clearly the note reveals (what seems to be) Microsoft's general thought process. Never lead, always follow. I mean, how pathetic is this sort of blatant, shameless me-tooism? While innovators like Apple are trying to build the future, Microsoft employees like this guy are trying desperately to catch up... and they still can't figure out how.

Just my two cents from an Apple fanboy. Flame on...

Dally's Merrimac processor.

It's so similar that you wonder if they lifted it from him. The only difference is that Prof. Dally's chip has a big cache.

Parallel processing is nothing new but this chip sounds like Professor Dally's custom stream processor, the Merrimac He lectured congress on the need of a vector/streaming processor supercomputer because the current supercomputers are inefficient. His Stanford website. Description of cell sounds just like his processor. Even the drawings. The only differene is the location of memory. He makes the point that memory should accessed fast and installed on the chip. That's whats different between the two.

But the Prize Budget for Boys published Pac-Mondrian on the web in 2002, although the game itself was finished in 2001. We didn't finish the physical cabinet til early 2004, but the old Galaga cabinet sat in my living room for at least a year and a half before we got around to putting a computer in it and painting it.

There's a press release in the rhizome.org archive dated 2002-12-03:

http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=6124&text=12 716

For Release: PrizeBudgetForBoys.com Clubhouse Open

Neil Hennessy
Message 1 of 1 in thread
2002-12-03 12:00:00 AM


printer version
Post A Reply

The Prize Budget For Boys
Nothing is True. Everything is Permuted.

PBFB just opened their Clubhouse at PrizeBudgetForBoys.com where you can find fun stuff like Pac-Mondrian, DIY Duchamp Rotoreliefs, the Clubhouse PooCam (requires registration), LadyKiller: A Fratricidal Romance, and A Supplement to The Illustrated Gude to Child Pornography Laws in North America. In an effort to collapse the distance between the art object and its critical reception, PBFB includes a comment page for every piece of art on the site. Come see the Clubhouse and become a PBFB Member today!

Percival Peabody
Standing Member
PrizeBudgetForBoys.com
Ideas. Energy. Execution.

-----

This person claims provenance over the idea too:

"This is what Mondriaan is all about. I once made a copy of one of Mondriaan's paintings with the pacman icons painted on the lines, but this Pac-Mondrian is the real thing, it moves and plays music."
Hetty Litjens
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116902/categories/art/20 04/07/18.html

but I turned off letting other sites know when I update and the online casion spam stopped.

I've seen this observation mentioned once before, and I'd like to see this explored further. It seems that spammers are harvesting URLs from sites like weblogs.com and blo.gs. I don't doubt that their finding blogs via Google searches, though, so turning off update notifications is probably a temporary solution at best.

...because well-written OSS isn't tied to Windows. That reduces the applications barrier to entry

If the author of TFA has a beef, it should be with lazy OSS authors who don't write their apps in a portable fashion, or who succumb to the siren song of people like Robert Scoble, who was urging Mozilla to tie itself inextricably to Longhorn, thus making Mozilla Windows-only as MS tried to do to Java code with their polluted Java. As long as they don't do that, eventually OSS apps will cover the majority of things people want to do with computers, and eventually they'll ask themselves why they are bothering to pay the MS Tax.

Back in September Microsoft blogging evangelist Robert Scoble warned that RSS is broken, saying the sky was falling and RSS bandwidth usage was forcing Microsoft to skinny down its feeds. Turns out it wasn't quite true. Microsoft's IT folks thought 400KB feeds were excessive, and RSS feeds are no big deal compared to 106 million downloads of the 75MB SP2 update. But the ensuing debate produced some useful discussion among RSS enthusiasts about ways to make clients smarter and give more server-side control. See the writeup at Netcraft (Slashdot is noted as an early adopter).

On the issue of getting updates quickly, there's a new project dedicated to that. It's called Feedmesh, and it's being done on a Yahoo Group, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/feedmesh.

Basically, the idea is to share/distribute new item pings. Most blogging software has the capability to ping services when you post a new item. Sites like blo.gs and weblogs.com currently act as 'clearinghouses' for these pings. The Feedmesh project's goals are to distribute these more, while at the same time concentrating all the pings, so that everybody has access to all available pings. This will lead to faster updates in aggregators as well as decreased bandwidth for content providers.

This feels like the Wiki topic debate in many ways. Except with one big difference no set group "moderation" option. While info can be repeated over and comments added by other blogs there isn't a central location which sumerizes all the views.

During the elections one station had a "blog point of view" (I forget who) which they were trying to use as feedback for trying to see what issues people were talking about most and what general opions were. So as a census type review of the public eye they seemed to think it had some merrit at least. Maybe this is a place to start? Blog Stats

Examples blogs you might consider news:
"E-LawLibrary Weblog provides professional analysis and commentary on current news items regarding research, the information profession, libraries, the legal profession, and law school."
E-LawLibrary Weblog

Blogging for PR?

If your now convinced... ;) You too can own your own blogger: A Blogger Put himself on Auctions at e-bay

I don't think anyone can work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. You need some time to refresh,recycle,renew. What's a reasonable amount of time to recuperate?

Ask an Amish. Your bosses grew up in a post-industrial society that still has a lot of funky industrial/pre-industrial ideas. Historically, sharecroppers and subsitence famers worked from Sun up to Sun down - usually 12 - 16 hours for 6 days a week during the Spring, Summer and Fall in temperate climates. The only motivation they had was starvation (if they were smart) or cultural obligations to 'look busy.' However, most of the work on a farm is menial and not intelectual. Before the rise of computer-assisted industry, a borderline functional intellect in our post-industrial world could find ready work doing slow, repetative tasks that at one time required only a strong back and good arms/legs. Today, work such as programming requires mental, verses phsycial, prowess. While anyone will eventually hit the 'Wall' physically, you can also hit one mentally. (Often long before your body wears out.) Your employers need to learn the Death-March lesson in a bad way.

I knew guys who would feel guilty about going home to see their kids when crunch was on.

It's good to love your work. But, normally you trade your time and effort to someone so they can (hopefully adequately) pay you. You're trading part of your life so you can live the other part better. It's not you or your cow-orkers responsibility to make up for management or reality, and such attitudes (while vainfully heroic) are the reason projects fail. If it can't be done on time, either cancel it or move the dealine. Don't kill yourself for a 'consensual hallucination.'

So what? Someone developed a clock that is super-accurate. But my telephone company, local TV station, and bus service still don't know anything about clock accuracy.

As seen on this blog and here, people who run time services don't even know how to implement NTP!

You've got to understand that in Japan, the keitai (the web-enabled cellphone) is not just a product, but rather a phenomenon that has given rise to its own user-culture of "thumb tribes" -- eighty percent of the people 1,500 people who walk across Shibuya Crossing at every light change carry a mobile phone. Japan's primary cellular network service was reengineered in the mid-90's to a digital model that freed up so much bandwidth that it left the company with the challenge of coming up with new services that consumers would be willing to pay for. Their target market, primarily young women, were not already Internet users through desktops and PCs; furthermore, the kind of web content that would appeal to this particular demographic was not as readily accessible as it is today. Knowing this, the company opted to actually sell people content such as horoscopes and dating sites rather than advertise keitai as an explicitly technological product. This, in turn, allowed keitai to be viewed as the kind of fun, convenient, and easy-to-use product that can be flipped out of your pocket and used any day, any time, anywhere. The product was a success, because, as one of its designers notes, "Our time is so limited. During the few minutes of waiting for someone or a train, people loved being able to do something - and so much - in that tiny space of time." Hence, while you might use your phone strictly for making voice calls, the advent of new technologies like miniaturized cameras or video streaming only further the ability of the keitai to carry out its particular purpose.

From Oddpost's Oddblog back in July:

"May we please pay you $75 for the simple privelege of watching you use Oddpost for about an hour and a half? Yahoo! is conducting an Oddpost usability study at their headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA."

Watch for Yahoo! mail changes coming soon...

Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio agrees. "There's a dearth of skilled Linux administrators, by comparison to the more-mature Windows, Unix, NetWare, and Macintosh environments," she says. And what happens when too much demand meets too little supply? "They can command a premium," DiDio says. "They get a 20% to 30% salary premium in the large metropolitan markets."

Mature? Please. When you consider that one good Unix guru can do the work of five Winblows admins, the 30% "premium" for higher skills is worth it and that's why people pay it. But surprise, surprise, you won't cost yourself any more if you don't hire new people but let the ones you have do what they have been recommending for years.

This is the kind of stellar logic we can expect from the person who actually signed SCO's nasty NDA and came out blithering about what a strong case SCO had, when in fact SCO has nothing. Her shilling knows no bounds and we can expect her to faithfully echo whatever M$ is saying at anytime. Why do people ask her anything anymore?

Don't forget that this is a "one time deal" that no one else can get if they want to build an Apple-based supercomputer.

As this article states, the $5.8 million cost was calculated by adding a $600,000 upgrade cost to the $5.2 million cost of the original PowerMac-based System X. As Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan said in this article, the original System X cost $3.2 million for cluster hardware plus $2 million for facilities upgrades.

The $600,000 upgrade to System X included upgrading all 1100 PowerMacs to dual 2.3GHz Xserves, plus 50 additional nodes. Note that the fastest Xserves Apple sells to everyone else are only 2.0GHz, so System X got "extreme" versions of the Xserve.

A dual 2.0GHz Xserve "Cluster Node" starts at $2999 at the Apple Store. Since each node has 4GB RAM and the cheapest 4GB RAM upgrade costs $1450 at the Apple store, that makes it $4449 per node. According to this article, Small Tree's InfiniBand cards cost $1095 each, so that makes it $5544 per node (without cables). Therefore, Virginia Tech should have spent at least $277,200 for the additional 50 nodes.

That leaves at most $322,800 to upgrade the 1100 PowerMacs to the special 2.3GHz Xserves. That's about $245 per node, not including any additional costs I can't quantify like labor, additional hardware, and facilities upgrades (if needed).

No one else can buy 1100 dual 2.0GHz PowerMacs and expect to upgrade them all to dual 2.3GHz Xserves (with ECC memory) for only $245 per node (including labor). Comparing the cost/teraflop of System X with non-comparable government-funded, high-bandwidth supercomputers seems silly to me.

When speaking to a newbie group I provide an overview of what blogs are, along with concepts/sites built around participatory journalism.

As a previous poster said a blog is basically CMS for the common person. The blog has added comments and trackbacks (most corporate sites I see built with CMS don't allow any user to just comment).

However more corporations are using blogs now to 'connect' with the consumer (check out Scoble's manifesto), so in that sense the blog being a CMS for a common person is no longer valid.

I would say that Slashdot is part blog, part news site, part participatory journalism, part forum, part community (think moderation) and a few other things.

I hate to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think many 'new' users to Slashdot have no idea that there is more to Slashdot than the list of articles on the home page. So to them Slashdot is just another CNN.

Bloggers: 43 Folders, Kris Dresden, Diane Duane, Paul Ford, Neil Gaiman, Michael Hanscom, Jason Kottke, Anne Murphy, Jessamyn North, Alia Phibes, Quentin Tarantino, and Wil Wheaton.

Linklogs: Anil Dash, Best of Craigslist, Boing Boing, CoolGov, Daze Reader, Fazed, Kottke Remainders, LinkMachineGo, MetaJournal, Michael Hanscom's Linklog, Museum of Hoaxes, NewYorkish, Paul Ford's Linklog, Snopes: New, SubText, and UFies.org.

Chicago: Chicagoist, jamas.org, CHICAGO.Metroblogging, Chicago Snapshot, CTA Tattler, Gapers' Block, and L or El.

Miscellaneous: Ask Slashdot, Citying, Cult of the One-Eyed Cat, Good Plastic Surgery, I Work With Fools, Schmo Blog, TeeVee, This Is Broken, Today In Alternate History, and x-entertainment.

Apple Bloggers: Buzz Andersen, Bill Bumgarner, Todd Dominey, Folklore, Steven Frank, John Gruber, Dave Hyatt, Brent Simmons,

Because if the group doing the integrating decides you dont need it, you dont get it.

Unless the group doing the integrating decides, on a lark, to join, embrace, and even contribute to the open standard/software movement. 'Cause then you might be able to still decide what you want or need.

But that couldn't possibly come from some over priced, consumer-electronic excuse for a computer, now could it? No way.

Just keep doing yer thing, man...

The header of this fella's article is the same as groklaw... is that a template or a blatant ripoff?

No, you silly, we saw it here first! Roland forever!

"There are now some 21,000 "service robots" in use, carrying out tasks such as milking cows, handling toxic waste, ferrying medicine around hospitals and assisting surgeons. The number is set to reach a total of 75,000 by 2007, the study says."

A group of 250 students from many European universities has collectively designed a satellite by using a dedicated news server and weekly chats on Internet. By using the Web, the virtual team was able to move from design to construction in less than a year. The SSETI Express is currently under integration in one of the technology centers of the European Space Agency (ESA) in the Netherlands. Only a few selected members of the team will attend the launch which will be part of the Russian mission Cosmos DMC-3 in May 2005. The SSETI Express will embark three mini 'cubesats' for specific experiments whilethe main satellitewill test a propulsion system and act as a transponder for amateur radio users. I sure hope that this collaborative action will be successful. Read more...

Here is what ESA says about this collective work over Internet.

Scattered in universities across Europe, a 250-strong team of students have never collectively met in person, but between them they have built a space-ready satellite.

Collaboration between the pan-European network of students, universities and experts involved in the Student Space Education and Technology Initiative (SSETI) has been carried out via the internet.

Now that the completed subsystems are being delivered to ESA's European Space Technology Centre ( ESTEC ) in the Netherlands, remote participants from Italy to Denmark are eagerly following the integration process through daily photo updates, the integration logbook, and even a webcam.

What is the mission of this satellite?

Like a Russian doll, SSETI Express will carry inside it three smaller 'cubesats' -- 10-centimetre cube technology testers built respectively by universities in Germany, Japan and Norway -- for deployment when in orbit. The main SSETI Express satellite itself will test and characterise a propulsion system, return images of the Earth and serve as a transponder for amateur radio users.

The SSETI team is already working on another satellite, the European Student Earth Orbiter (ESEO). This one will be more complex than Express, weigh 100 kilograms, and it will be launched by an Ariane 5 rocket in 2007.

Besides these two satellites, the ESA looks at the future.

Coordination between groups is carried out using a dedicated news server and weekly Internet Relay Chats (IRCs) as well as the SSETI website. Face-to-face meetings are the exception rather than the rule, with group representatives meeting every six months for a workshop at ESTEC.

Beyond Express and ESEO, SSETI has hopes of becoming a fully-fledged facilitation network for all student space activity, with members carrying out detailed feasibility studies for a European Student Moon Orbiter (ESMO) a European Student Moon Rover (ESMR) and even an orbiter for Mars.

And here is the conclusion of Philippe Willekens of the ESA Education Department.

"This unique opportunity for students is also a unique opportunity for ESA to see how the young generation is working through a wide internet-distributed system, with little resources, but great enthusiasm and energy."

Good luck to all!

Source: European Space Agency news release, October 19, 2004

The best part of the whole thing is he couldn't even be bothered to put together his own site layout and graphics, he ripped it from Groklaw. Here's his site for comparison.

Roland Piquepaille writes: "Welcome to the world of 'Slashdot Mining'! The millions of slashbots that reside there love to click on links. Using this power, along with a backdoor relationship with Slashdot, to make MILLIONS!!!! All you need to do is plagarize a bunch of material, write a shitty summation, become an editor (and pretend your not one) and YOU ARE IN!!! All you have to do is site back and the money will roll in!

I've wondered what the deal was with "the Piquepaille content filter" /. occasionally applies to article postings.

Roland's penchant for lifting text is legendary. It appears he has diversified and now rips-off graphics and layout from other popular sites as well.

I, for one, welcome our shameless plugging overlords..at least when they have something interesting to say like Xamlon.

You know, I tend to agree. If he wants to get his story posted to Slashdot, he shouldn't submit it here. He should do what everyone else does. Send his story to Roland Piquepaille. Roland will then be the person to merely copy all of the inforamation, add no useful points or tips, and submit the information to Slashdot via his own blog.

Come on People, don't you know the Standard Operating Procedure around here?

There is no denying that Roland Piquepaille has an inordinate number of posted stories, but other than jealously (hey, I've had plenty of good rejected stories, too), I don't know why people complain.

In general, not only does RP submit fairly interesting articles (most have 100+ replies), but he also does a better than average job writing up a concise summary of said article.

Imagine you are a Slashdot editor going through the submission queue. Not only do you have to find a steady stream of News For Nerds and Stuff That Matters(tm), but you also have to find well-written submissions that aren't going to take significant work to fix spelling and grammar errors (at least I assume they try to fix those - I haven't seen much evidence so far). When you find a RP submission in the queue, there is a very good chance that you can just cut-n-paste it into a story. Slashdot editors are lazy, just like everyone else...

The only thing you can really fault RP for is the gratuitous links back to his blog. On the other hand, he does provide additional details, as promised, and generally does provide an original link in the summary.

So if you want to complain about RP, go right ahead. But his frequently accepted stories are more likely due to the quality and reliability of his submissions, rather than payola or a conspiracy.

• michael shows favoritism to Roland Piquepaille
• 
  
  Facts
  michael is constantly posting stories from Roland Piquepaille [slashdot.org]'s blog [weblogs.com].
  Compare Google search 'site:slashdot.org "Posted by michael" "Roland Piquepaille writes"' [google.com] to any of the other mods. michael nearly doubles the number of the next highest Roland spammer, simoniker [google.com].
  
  Commentary
  Why the obvious favoritism to Roland Piquepaille? Either Piquepaille is in cahoots with michael, or he just knows how to press his buttons. In either case, an questionable degree of preferential treatment is being shown.
  
  
  
• Michael links to 40MB file on /. front page
• 
  
  Facts
  
  Michael links to a 40MB file on the front page of Slashdot, leading to a massive Slashdotting of a NASA server. [slashdot.org]
  
  Commentary
  
  You have to wonder what michael's intentions were in placing such a link? This kind of crap has been going on for a long time- front page links are made without regard to the server, file type, or file size. This time, it is impacting a taxpayer-funded government agency.
  

Does anyone else detect a certain similarity between the blog at the 'read more' link from the original post, and Groklaw?

Is this a third-party template that they both happen to use, or did somebody just rip Groklaw's design?

I have been known to make a few anti-Roland posts in the past. When I first started paying attention to Roland's posts, I couldn't understand why many people hated him, either. But, now, I understand why. On one hand, Maybe part of it is overexposure. However, I think more of it has to do with his neverending spam and questionable approach to copyright law.

If you look here, you will see the T's & C's for using information from the source of Roland's story. If you read the fine print, you will see a sentence that reads "Use of this material for commercial purposes without explicit, written permission from Technology Research News, LLC is strictly prohibited".

Roland's blog is purely a commercial enterprise. He uses the ads on his blog to collect money. By copying and pasting entire paragraphs from the Technology Research News article, he is breaking the copyright.

Of course, maybe he does have 'explicit written permission'. But I doubt it. Why do I say this? Look at how he writes the article. Where is isn't copying and pasting, he is purely summarizing what was originally written by anybody else. Now, look at this link. Look at how he writes. No new information. he just collects information from dozens of web sites and either plagiarizes those sites or points to them through his blog. He must be collecting dozens of RSS feeds and picking and choosing what he thinks are the best.

Even worse, some of his posts are nothing but advertisements for products.

Now, let us say Roland DOES have legal explicit permission from all of those sites to copy and paste articles for his personal profit. I could live with that, IF he was adding additional insight into technology. Unfortunately, he isn't. His blog adds nothing to society.

No insight. No thoughts on where technology is heading. No review of how technology has come this far. He is just parroting what somebody else has written. The only logical explanation for him even having a web log is for the hope that you will be dumb enough to click one of his revenue-generating ads.

I have been known to make a few anti-Roland posts in the past. When I first started paying attention to Roland's posts, I couldn't understand why many people hated him, either. But, now, I understand why. On one hand, Maybe part of it is overexposure. However, I think more of it has to do with his neverending spam and questionable approach to copyright law.

If you look here, you will see the T's & C's for using information from the source of Roland's story. If you read the fine print, you will see a sentence that reads "Use of this material for commercial purposes without explicit, written permission from Technology Research News, LLC is strictly prohibited".

Roland's blog is purely a commercial enterprise. He uses the ads on his blog to collect money. By copying and pasting entire paragraphs from the Technology Research News article, he is breaking the copyright.

Of course, maybe he does have 'explicit written permission'. But I doubt it. Why do I say this? Look at how he writes the article. Where is isn't copying and pasting, he is purely summarizing what was originally written by anybody else. Now, look at this link. Look at how he writes. No new information. he just collects information from dozens of web sites and either plagiarizes those sites or points to them through his blog. He must be collecting dozens of RSS feeds and picking and choosing what he thinks are the best.

Even worse, some of his posts are nothing but advertisements for products.

Now, let us say Roland DOES have legal explicit permission from all of those sites to copy and paste articles for his personal profit. I could live with that, IF he was adding additional insight into technology. Unfortunately, he isn't. His blog adds nothing to society.

No insight. No thoughts on where technology is heading. No review of how technology has come this far. He is just parroting what somebody else has written. The only logical explanation for him even having a web log is for the hope that you will be dumb enough to click one of his revenue-generating ads.

That robotic hand looks a lot like C3P0!

LS