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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."
its really "cool" in all senses of the word:):)
however i wonder how cool the webserver of NOAA is
Vikram
... Cause I don't see anything that looks like elves.
remember, tundra is the eskimo word for 'nothing' (dave barry joke)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Penguins at the North Pole! It's about time we counteracted the mass of all those penguins sitting in Antarctica, screwing up our moment of inertia!
Jouster
Did anyone else notice that at the bottom of the web page it says "the images are transmitted using the Iridium network"?
Neat.
This is the most exciting webcam since the coffee machine one
Bite-sized snack food for polar bears!
Phear the day someone introduces a mated pair of polar bears to the south pole.
What time zone is the north poll in? All of them? None of them? I see the pics say GMT...
Morphing Software
Wow, Linux really has had a polarizing effect on the computer world.
Penguins are no match for a Boa.
but what about the predators. Any insight?
Betcha the polar bears would enjoy the change from seals and garbage.
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Hopefully all their studies work out and they determine that the north pole is livable. Then I finally might be able to boot my damn AMD box without turning my room into hell.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
A great (and probably the only) opportunity to run a fanless Athlon and they select a puny Motorola. Duh!
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Four pictures a day? Jeni-cam shelled more pics in 1997 than these guys.
;-D
Besides, all the pictures are from the same place and angle, that is boring.
I suggest they ditch the pinguin and come up with a mobile cam, mounted on a
remote controlled mouse.
Better yet, mice, and GPL the SDK for the controller, and doom3 will not
sell a copy
--
Where is the power coming from? I read the article, and it is not explained where does this device get it's power. I imagine that should be quite a challenge by itself, since
a) at those low temperatures batteries do not work at all.
b) 6 months in a row each year it's dark, so solar panels are not a viable source of energy.
What, then? Quite an engineering problem, huh?
Sigged!
I thought polar bears also subsisted on canadians...
It's great the images have the temperatures on them
on THIS ONE the temp got up to a blistering
20.5 F -- but most are around 8-15 degrees.
I wonder how long the hardware will last in extremes like that.
A year? two?
Doubt whether the North Pole is quite as big as the Chinese market, but hey!
they should strap cameras on the backs of
penguins with wireless remote connections.
Give them a combination of solar power and a
little propeller that spins when the penguin
swims to generate electricity. It would
have to be waterproof, but you could get
lots of different pics from real penguin
colonies....
I think we're about to slashdot the north pole for the first time in history!
Hope it doesn't make the ozone hole bigger...
You can find penguins in certain parts of Australia as well.
As to North Pole predators, the penguins would have to do plenty of running from polar bears and artic foxes.
Am I the only one who thought that penguins actually did start migrating to the North Pole?(Due to global warming?) Had me worried for a while there...
There are penguins native to New Zealand waters too. I have even seen penguins in the Auckland harbour, when out kayaking in it. Just little ones, very cute. They look like ducks, and are about the same size, though they do have front flippers.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Wasn't there a Slashdot article about StarDot not making their GPL embedded webcam source available about a year ago?
This could be one of those times where overheating isn't such a bad thing...
Who knows, maybe it will engourage people who own land on other confluences to put web cams there.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Yeah, I'm a geek.
Is this the geographic or the magnetic north
pole we're talking about?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
First he tries to destroy Gotham City, and now he's going after Santa? What is that wacky Penguin guy up for next? Suing Linus for the rights on his logo?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
The Axis 2400 video server also uses embedded Linux, not sure which flavor.
We have an older 2400 and when I recently upgraded the firmware they had switch from whatever they were using to Linux. I was impressed. In addition to adding a number of new features, including a doubling of the frame rate, I got a command line on the server!
The server is used to post images on a weather site here
Well I know it points south. Um, which direction is it pointing anyways, by some more useful reference I wonder?
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
What about the 1/2 year that there isn't any light? Even though the images would also be dark, I want to see the stars above the horizon!!
take off eh?
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
> the temp got up to a blistering 20.5 F. I wonder how long the hardware will last in extremes like that.
:)
I've been living in Wisconsin for 23 years. It can get that cold or colder from around December through March - 4 months for argument. 23*4/12 = 7.6 years that I have been exposed to that kind of cold. I figure if I can do it, so can the equipment.
Seriously though, I'm sure it will need maintenance at least once a year assuming it isn't disturbed by anything more than weather.
So now polar bears face their toughest competitors...
Well, they would have used Embedded XP, but there was no browser. :)
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I never knew there were parts of the North Pole that had trees and grass!
4 11-1914.jpg.tmp 4 11-0144.jpg 4 11-0149.jpg 4 16-1632.jpg
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/npole/images/noaa-2002-0
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/npole/images/noaa-2002-0
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/npole/images/noaa-2002-0
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/npole/images/noaa-2002-0
It looks like a nice place to live, actually.
I keep expecting to see desperate, lost explorers begging and messaging for help in front of the camera.
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
How great! It's the same damned picture...every time.
Hugo
Not trying to troll here... I really do mean this...
:)
But isn't this like... a really boring use of technology? I looked at a few of the photos... they all look exactly the same except time of day...
I could understand maybe using a motion detector to catch some sort of activity but uh...
But eh... *confused look*...
Maybe I am just not understanding the significance of this?
Maybe there are some photos that have something of interest in them, anyone care to post links? Personally I don't really care to go through a bunch of similar photos looking for that one unique one *smiles*
It is pretty out there though...
Luke
Enlighten us instead
Infuriate left and right
They are the little blue penguins. According to previous estimation, there are about 10000 of those in New Zealand. Yellow-eye penguin is the rarer (rarest?) species. Tourists can meet them in a reserve in Dunedin.
Penguins are quite cute and can potentially cause "big damage". When I was travelling in a eco-tour somewhere in the South Island of New Zealand, I met a retired professor. She told me that she visited Fiordland to watch glacier on a sightseeing boat the day before. Her boat was tilted severely when every tourists suddenly rushed to one side of the boad to watch a swimming penguin. The captain yelled at the tourists to come back to their seat in panic...
I couldn't see either superman's home or santa clauses home in any of the photos!
When I read the title, I think NOAA is going to release penguins to North Pole again. I was a little bit disappeared, it is penguin the sofware, rather than the bird...
,then taken the bird to a pub and said something like "What's wrong with that fat, stupid bird? It can't fly!!"
;London : Whittet, 1994.
IIRC, there was an attempt to release penguins to Sweden (or may be another Scandinavian countries) just before WW2. About 40 birds were released to somewhere near an arctic fishing village. All of them were killed within 60 days: penguins did not know polar bear would attack, fisherman did not know what it was...
The fate of the last bird was like this: A fisherman's wife hacked the last penguin to death
From "Penguins", John A. Love
It always seems to point south. Bah!
;-)
enough said.
The journey is better then the end.
Hu ... everybody knows that Penguins only live at the south pole(and in the arctic streams comming from there) ... so I click as fast as possible on that miracle link that they now inhabit the north pole also just to realize that the Linux Penguin is ment .... does the posters have no clue?
Linux invades north pole would have been a much cooler headline.
BTW: The physics research center at University of Strasbourg, France (in case you are ignnorant), has linux boxes running Debian 1.x or Slackware 0.93 since about 9 years in the automatic weather reporting stations planted everywhre in the arctic and antarctic ice deserts.
So that NEWS is a pretty old storry.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
from the not-as-good-as-jennycam dept.
I believe you were referring to Jennicam and not a porn site, right?
right?
:-P
"Man", I thought, "this is gonna be cool!"
So, I hurried and clicked on the link...
...and all I saw was snow.
Oh well.
-brain
There is a study that is monitoring the north pole, yet all you can think about is your stupid linux? Get a life... linux isn't as great as you all make it out to be...
The USians are invading Canada! Surely this is simply a ploy by the military-industrial complex to use the "NOAA" (an organization known for its close ties to the Bush administration!) as a front for surveilance of soverign Canadian territory!
How to they make sure the camera remains at the north pole? It's just sitting on an ice flow in the Arctic Ocean, a flow which moves with the currents...
Anyway, great idea. The world needs more webcams in remote areas... Soon we'll replace 'Global Village' with 'Global Desktop' (yes, Katz, you'll have to get my perission to use that phrase).
The land mass located at the geographic north pole moves between 5 and 10 miles per day... Do they have someone that will be moving the webcam to account for the ice cap drift??? What about during the summer when the ice becomes dangerous that walking on it is a hazard????
Good idea, but hard work!
Let's see...
4 images a *day*... that makes 1 image every 6 weeks, right?
T'would be cheaper to send a photographer for that.
Geez.
Penguins can't survive in the arctic because of predatory birds that eat their eggs and chicks. In terms of climate and food, they would to fine.
That seems to be one of the very first pictures that the webcam took... It was probably when they tested it someplace else, before it found its way to the North Pole.
Particularily interesting is the below picture, which shows a temperature of over 120 degrees F!!! WTF is that at, Arizona?
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/npole/images/noaa-2002- 04 11-0149.jpg
Wow! Looking at those pictures sure makes me glad I live in Florida!
No matter where you go... there you are.
They say they are goign to gie us different pictures. Yeah right, the whole thing is a hoax. Some guy took one picture and is gonna leave it on the website the whole time. No need to change it, everythign look the same in the artic anyway!
Why don't polar bears eat penguins?
- Polar bears don't come from next door, they come from the antarctic.
- They can't get the tins open
and a brand new option...
They can't get through the shell.
Boom boom!
I thought that even in the US, the scientific establishment uses either Kelvin or Celsius, so why do I see Farenheit in the bottom right?
Reading the headline I thought they were populating the north pole with real penguins (animals). Luckily, it seems I'm not such a Linux geek after all.
Pokey The Penguin already lives in the Arctic Circle with his delicious Arctic Circle Candy. Tux is an Italian.
PRAY FOR MOJO
Penguins live throughout the colder regions of the Southern Hemisphere. And they don't live at the South Pole, seeing as how they eat fish and there are no fish within 500 miles of the South Pole.
Two cock in my pussy! It feel so good!
What happens when the penguins poop on the solar panel?
What a feat for mankind.
On that topic. Can anyone actually give reasons why uClinux is better than other embedded systems? OTHER than "It's free man!" because we all know that already.
In this 21st. century you'd expect UTC for time and either Kelvin or at least Celsius for temperature.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
They've been there for years, didnt you ever read the book "Mr Popper's Penguins" when you were kids :-P
Besides, the South Pole is a point in the middle of a big friggin glacier. At least 1000 km to the closest ocean and much colder than the coast. They would either strarve or freeze to death there.
...um...like...a sig...