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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."
... 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.
Did anyone else notice that at the bottom of the web page it says "the images are transmitted using the Iridium network"?
Neat.
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.
I thought polar bears also subsisted on canadians...
Then we can finally watch the mice while they rebuild the earth from the top down :)
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?
It only produces 4 pictures per day because it's run off of solar power; they're being smart and conserving electricity. Besides, it has to upload the pictures over a 2400-baud modem through a satellite uplink, which is bound to take up more juice than the CCD and JPEG compression combined.
Overall, I'd say they're being pretty smart -- you're not going to run streaming video through 802.11b running on a nine volt battery at the north pole.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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!!
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.
Enlighten us instead
Infuriate left and right
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!
;-)
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.
Well suppose theres a scandinavian northpole expedition that dies under suspicious circumstances.
Suppose they were killed by an allien that can enter the bodies of others.
Now suppose that allien has entered the body of a dog and is trying to attack an american station.
Now the scandinavians will try to kill the dog with a helicopter but that can be pretty tricky.
But if someone was watching the webcam, they would see the whole thing happen and alert the americans.
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!
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.
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