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Penguins Invade the North Pole

An Anonymous Coward writes "Thanks to a project of the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a webcam has for the first time been installed at the North Pole -- one which runs on Embedded Linux (uClinux), no less! The device was installed on April 28, 2002 and is now logging four images a day, which are available for viewing on NOAA's publicly accessible website. This article at LinuxDevices.com describes the Linux-based webcam (called the NetCam), opens up the device to see what embedded hardware and software are inside, and explains why the NetCam's developers used Embedded Linux as the basis of their design."

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  1. Re:Finally! by rmohr02 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, it wouldn't have screwed up our moment of inertia because moment of inertia only depends on the shape of the object, the mass of the object, and the distance from the axis of rotation (pretty much 0 in this case) (or I=?*m*r^2). Since the distance from the axis of rotation wouldn't have changed, the moment of inertia wouldn't have changed.

    Unless you mean in relation to the sun. We are at a 22.5 degree angle (or something like that), and that would mess up our moment of inertia just slightly--at some points penguins would be slightly closer to the sun and at some points farther away, with no counteractin penguins on the other pole to counteract them. Thank goodness we finally fixed this.