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A Geek On Everest
mysterious_mark writes "Recently I was recruited by Altitude Films to be the IT geek for a filming expedition to the north side of Mount Everest. I have written an account of my experience. It is a tale of high latency, low bandwidth, blown hard drives, and frozen fingers. Summit day is June 14th. See the expedition's site for the overall picture (caution: total Flash site)."
ip over sherpa carriers with quality of service
liqbase
What a self masturbatory article ....
> See the expedition's site ... (caution: total Flash site).
Then, no, I won't visit your site.
Max.
"Half way up mount everest, you insensitive clod".
If it was me, I wouldn't have filmed on the side of Mt. Everest. If I ever get the time and money, I'm going to climb to the top of The Mountain with a laptop and a monster of a directional wifi antenna, sit at its peak, come to slashdot, and comment "frist pots frum EVEREST."
You will all envy me. Or mod me as troll. I'M THE MOUNTAIN TROLL.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
From the article:
Apparently all he's missing a cape with a big fat S on his chest.
So, how much for a helicopter ride straight to the top so I can snap a few pictures and say I was there? B)
I don't want to sound like an ass but they're only currently at an advanced base camp according to their flash site. They've traveled (vertically) 1,200m so far and they have another 2,400m to go. It only gets worse and steeper the higher up you climb too. So you've spent 30 days so far according to your clock & you want to hit that summit by June 14th? Good luck and may god (of your choice) be with you, hundreds of people have lost their lives due to stupidity & ill preparation.
I can't say I've ever done anything like this, though I've read a lot of books about it. For public consumption, I heavily recommend "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. Read it before the movie comes out--movies are always so much worse than books.
And depending on the make and model, the second failure mode, the batteries bursting into flames, will keep you warm on those chilly Everest nights.
It is safe to say that climbing Everest has no more significance now than parking your car. Every year, a cavalcade of people charge up the mountain, to the point there are actual people jams at the approach to the summit. Ho hum.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
We should all know by now if he were truly a geek he would have at least spelled 31337 correctly.
Infiltrated dot Net
I liked the article, but I really wanted to hear more about the particular problems he experienced with the equipment, and what (if any) type of workaround he used to get them back into shape. In such extreme weather, he HAD to have more failures or problems other than that one hard drive. On the other hand, he didn't go above a certain altitude, and maybe everything was fine and dandy. For that, I can think of the ads now: "ABC Corp's hard disks survived EVEREST - put them to work in your demanding data center today!"
df -h
Anybody else read that when they saw the headline? I was like "A Geek on Everquest? Tell me something I don't know!" :-D
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I havent RTFA but I cant help thinking that when someone puts so much money and effort to climb everest why the hell dont they carry a "Flash" drive? Ran out of money?
Meanwhile, a bunch of IT dorks who a) have a 70% chance of developing a basic LAMP site correctly at sea level and b) a 15% chance of walking around the block without stopping for breath are sneering at him for -- using Flash.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
That's wonderful!! Be safe & careful. I hope you're taking lots of pics.
... don't code in Flash. They write their own CMS or handcode XHTML + CSS.
A geek on Everest??? Why is his moms basement all the way up there?!
we want to see you update ya wiki from the point - mofo
Beats previous 2006 record of 480 summits. Gets pretty crowded on top when the 1-2 week weather window opens in late May. This year the window was unusally long, so more peole had second chances. Theres a second, much smaller season in October for a handful of remaining summits.
The factor that greater increased climbers was the entry of cut-rate Chinese climbing companies from the north. Nepal permits cost about $10K per climber, total expedition is $20K - $60K. China cost be below $10K, thus attracting hordes. 2006 had the second highest death total (8), mostly blamed on the shortcuts and inexperience of Chinese companies. I saw (6) so far in 2007.
Since their HD failure rate is so high due to the thin, cold air, why are they even using them? You can buy fully solid state flash hard drives these days. The capacity is limited and they are expensive, but it's nothing compared to a trip up Everest. Buy a bunch of the 64GB ones, spend some time cutting down a copy of Windows to the absolute mininmum that you can work with and you'll still have space for Photoshop, some video editing stuff and the content.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Non-Flamebait: A lot of interesting information in the website, and the photographs are excellent, good luck with the expedition!
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Over 500 people have climbed Everest THIS YEAR. Not only that, but they pay over $40,000 to do so. Basically, if you've got money.. they'll make sure you get there. If you want to be stupid and fuck around with a computer while you're up there, don't act like you're cool because you did.
If he wants to be impressive and tell a story about something that people haven't heard before, he should try to climb the East face of K2, THEN get back to us.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
> My data center is COLDER than the summit of Everest.
A hilltop like that will both be cold and have thin air, but there's a difference between the two.
When laptops were fairly new (early 90's), Toshiba made some headlines by having a laptop used by an arctic team. Low temperatures on an arctic scale do strange things to components (besides mild natural overclocking?), and keeping the LCD liquid was by itself a feat.
However, as stated by others, temperatures are not the only, or greatest, problem. Low pressures cause negligible difference in coolant airflow (esp. as the air is cool), but hard drives DO require air pressure bocause the read/write heads hover above the platters on a tiny cushion of air caused by the rotation speed (not totally unlike dolphins surfing on the bow wave of a vessel). Run a hard drive in vacuum, and you're as good as certain to have a disk head crash.
"Good news, everyone!"
The expedition just found a yeti with a laptop playing a game that involved a human being whacking pigeons down a shopping mall...
It's how we roll. Check out the comment linked to in my sig for the best flame on this issue.
Best Slashdot Co
And you've got a better video codec that can be seen by the majority of web users..?
Kind of like shagging Paris Hilton????
I'm not saying everyone on the planet could pull it off (perhaps only a handful of Slashdot readers), but when it happens it's not exactly big news, is it????
I personally would recommend using 'noclip', and 'iddqd' (just incase!).
Spawning at the top could lead to all sorts of clipping problems if he gets the coords wrong...
You misspelled Everquest.
ONLY geeks climb the Everest, normal people dont do that. There is no news here, geeks have climbed the Everest for ages, from the first British surveyors (read geeks) in the 1850s up to now.
As surveyors they needed to know how to do triangulation, draw maps, use a little bit of trigonometry; all these are geeky things, jocks would not cope with them.
They did a story in the kcstar.com about it. Story mentioned a highschool girl and also playboy playmate climbing it. The prices have come down and that has opened the flood gates. Another point of the article is that there are like 70 dead bodies up there and no one will help you if you get into trouble, instead just ignore you until you die.
I don't care how much equipment this guy totes up the side of a mountain while being passed by the couple of thousand other tourists heading up to the summit.
If you use Flash for your website, you lose your geek credentials. You aren't a geek-- you're a graphic artist who knows enough about computers to be dangerous.
End of fucking story.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
My favorite windows system info utility. Everest Ultimate Edition. http://www.lavalys.com/
lp0 frozen over!
This is a cool project. In similar conditions, but on a much more difficult mountain, these guys are in the middle of a high tech summit attempt of K2.
http://sharedsummits.com/
Using inexpensive off-the-shelf gear they managed to broadcast a live video of the protest before the Chinese "People's Armed Police" caught wind of the "evil Freedom banner" they were holding and quickly grabbed them into custody. But the video had already been streamed into safety and in near real-time uploaded to various video-streaming sites.
Being protected by foreign passports the protesters had to only endure verbal threats, separation from fellow protesters, sleep depravation etc. for less then three days before being deported from the Chinese-occupied Tibet. However for the exiled Tibetan member of the crew the price of taking part in the protest was far heavier since he would now be banned from returning to his homeland... until Tibet regains it freedom, or at least until the Chinese people change their criminal and expansionist CCP regime to one which doesn't commit systematic genocide against China's historical neighbours.
For indigenous Tibetans living under Chinese oppression any action calling for freedom in Tibet will without exception result in far more horrifying treatment involving unimaginable forms of torture and years, even decades of imprisonment in one of the many Chinese concentration camps like Drapchi outside Lhasa. More than a few Tibetans - often young buddhist nuns or monks - have died in the Chinese gulags and this horror show has continued for several decades. Even people like the visiting EU Commissioner for Human Rights is denied access to these Tibetan prisoners of conscience.
More information about this Base Camp protest and the Tibetan struggle in general can be found from the Students For A Free Tibet and Phayul websites.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
He starts the article with "As an IT professional, I rarely get out of the office." Then a wee bit further down says "...Ive gotten above 10,000 feet in the Sierra almost weekly for the past seven years." Still, I enjoyed the read. That's some good company leading the way.
However, Sticktion was not a problem.
-- My Sig is a P228.
From personal experience, my 3rd gen iPod had hard drive failure at 4500m on my first trip in that area. Which was disappointing. I did however manage to get it working again back at home as long as I only half filled the drive. On a trip to get to Everest via the 1922 reconnaisance route, I decided to take it again. Managed to have it working at 5100m with power from a solar panel. 'Voodoo Chile' in the lower Kharta valley was quite an experience. Result - iPod developed a few more glitches. Altitude related probably, but it was also bumped around in the cold on the back of yaks in a bag fairly extensively. Flash memory based mp3 players apparently do well at altitude. The hard drives for iPods were rated with a maximum operating altitude of 4000m.
I like Apple. They make nice stuff which works most of the time.
because Adobe refuses to allow flash on my platform - and, also, I don't want the fucking thing in the first place.
Why are they using 'normal' laptops, seems a bit dumb to me. You can get sealed (pressurised) hard drives for high altitude work, or go solid state. And they'll likely have a lot more issues when the temperature really drops, the machines may well just refuse to start. They should be using something easier to boot from different media too, if one of my linux machines fails to boot, I can stick in a USB drive and boot a complete distro from there, or use a live CD, can't do that with windows.
I remember once setting up an old laptop (maybe a pentium III 600mhz) to do some network bridging and a few other things (firewalling, file-serving, etc). The network bridging was between a cable and wireless network, and to get a wireless signal it had to go in the attic space of one building (connecting to the other wirelessly). Anyway, one day in winter I had to do something physical to it, so I climbed up to the attic and opened it up, the TFT screen was almost unusable, slow refresh, very pale etc. I had to take a heater up there and warm the screen up to the point that I could see what it was doing. Now that was in winter in England, it was maybe about -5 deg C at the time, wouldn't have worked on Everest, that's for damned sure!
I can use my brain even if my ass is fat.
Climbing mount Everest is not what it used to be.
It is becoming a high risk holiday, perhaps similar to swimming with sharks or bungee jumping, or perhaps more dangerous than that, but the point is that we are not talking Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary here anymore, it gets so crowded up there that rubbish is becoming a real issue now.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.