Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Tableturkey, Stromlo, Mandrake
The silver lining.dragonsister writes "Regarding the recent slashdot story on Mount Stromlo Observatory being hit by fire, it seems the damage is not nearly as extensive as it might have been. The Australian National University has posted details here. In particular, the office buildings were spared, meaning that the work of staff and students is safe, and the many years worth of data collected should still be usable. The main question remaining in my mind is whether or not there were backups of the data on the computers that were actually located in the telescope buildings themselves, as these contained information crucial to the interpretation of some of the data. The importance of off-site backups has just been demonstrated. Everybody backup now!"
And blakduk writes "We were able to enter the site and retrieve computing equipment that survived the fire. This enabled us to set up our servers and have all staff back on-line within 24 hours."
Other than that, how was the parade? Back in November, I posted an article about the DocuNote, an inexpensive tablet PC available with Linux. According to richardbondi , maybe "cheap" would be a better word. He writes:
"I bought one, it arrived today. It was clearly used, not new, and didn't work. If you tilted it, it hung. I gave up after a dozen reboots. Only purchasable from www.microsono.com, where all sales are final.The handwriting recognition software turned out to be trialware.
And although the stepupcomputing.com site says it works with Windows 2000, it came with a note that said now it has to be OEM installed.
One user's bad experience -- bad hardware, deceptive advertising re software."
Looks nice over two monitors, too. Znonymous Coward writes "Mandrake is trying to prove it's not dead yet. Yesterday[Note: the 19th, that is], they released Beta 2 of Mandrake 9.1. You can get the 2 ISO images from the usual mirrors." There's a (critical but mostly positive) review of this 2nd beta running at DistroWatch, too.
Once this starts it always gets messy. Per Hansson writes
"Yesterday we at Techspot posted a Interview with Nvidia plus high-resolution pictures of the Geforce FX.A few sites rightfully claimed that this material had been stolen from Nordichardware however this was not the case, we interviewed Nvidia at the same time and therefore our Interviews looks so similar."
Anton Nilsson, assistant editor in chief of Nordic Hardware writes, in contrast,
"... [I]t seems as if they have used my material as found here.I've spoken to the TechSpot staff and the person who reported the news item to you and it seems as if they overheard me doing my interview with nVidia at Comdex. Since they didn't want to bug nVidia with the same questions again they later on read the interview at my page and then posted it on theirs. Still that doesn't make up a fair excuse in my opinion."
You'll have to make up your own mind on this.
Does not jive with the warranty. A sale is either final or not final.
If you have a problem with this device, contact your friendly credit-card issuer to dispute the charge or take them to small claims court.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Weren't tablet PCs supposed to change the geometry from portrait to landscape (and back) when the display was tilted in the appropriate direction?
Sounds like buggy X drivers, to me. My laptop resizes the geometry fine when I switch from the LCD display to the external VGA port.
What's this Submit thingy do?
You know the whole backup thing at the 90 inch only works if you remember to bring tapes up with you (which I forget on a regular basis but you know I'm a closet blonde). I just sftp my data back to multiple computers back at Steward to take care of the problem :0
The KPNO system is very nice- the Save the Bits archive makes multiple tapes of the data that get stored in the 4 meter and down in town and data gets ftp'd down to one of the NOAO Tucson servers as well. So it's on hard drive in multiple places as well as on tape in multiple places as well.
As to Stromlo- somebody brought down all the backup tapes to Canberra on Friday (the day before the fire) so most of the data was saved.
Unfortunately though a lot of us astro people are going to suffer in the near future when DAT drives stop being the best way to store our data. . .hell I have a desk drawer of DAT and DLT tapes as well as CD ROMs with data right now!
What I think is the most impressive quote from the Stromlo emails I've seen lately: "The telescopes are all still "hanging" on their mounts, but are not recoverable. The 50" looks like it is parked, but the lower end of the mount is melted and the mirror is a pile of goo on the floor, the Yale lens is on the floor, and the 74" mirror is damaged far beyond repair. " The amount of heat needed to flash melt a 50" diameter piece of glass that was probably about a foot thick is impressive and ungodly at the same time. . .