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ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."
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Synthetic Aperture Radar
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
A not totally off-topic question: Can anyone recommend a free data visualization and analysis/plotting package? Something a bit more powerful than gnuplot :)
Um, what? OS X, while I personally rather dislike the "can't install our OS on non-Mac-approved hardware..." ... it DOES support that Mac-approved hardware, it seems.
Vista is usable.
XP is quite usable on the desktop, I've used it for quite a few years now.
Ubuntu is usable too, at least by most people with standard hardware. It's when you buy new hardware (like... a printer) that normal users can really run into problems.
Saying Ubuntu is more ready than XP is ... um... un-informed, IMO. Of course, we may have different definitions of the word ready.
"Ready for us" (meaning, I suppoce, one to four desktop computers, probably fairly standard bought-from-Dell or something?) does not equal "more ready for the desktop [generic] than XP."
My parents use SuSE 11.0 (will upgrade to 11.1 as soon as I try it out and make sure it works well enough for them), but I usually have to go "fix" things now and then. Something doesn't display, audio isn't playing, the printer didn't work, how do I listen to music (no iTunes), etc.
I don't know exactly what your grandma, mom, and sister use it for, but I know that it doesn't take too many slightly-specialized (i.e., not just "check my e-mail") needs to make it a lot harder to set up for someone.
ESA has been sponsoring FOSS projects for years; I worked on the GPL'ed BEAT software no less than seven years ago that was commissioned by ESA (disclosure: I am no longer with the company that develops it).
See here for more examples of open source software funded by ESA. They are really ahead of the pack in this respect.
I don't know about Vista, but installing XP on new hardware can be a painful experience.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft