Slashdot Mirror
Recomputing the Sky
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. This so-called 'TeraPixel' sky map was generated with the help of some of Microsoft's latest HPC and parallel software assets. Quoting: 'Compared to the old sky image, the TeraPixel version is much more refined. With all the artifacts, seams and inconsistencies processed away, it looks like a true unified image of the sky above. It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s.'" You can view the image at Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope site — it requires the Silverlight plugin for Windows or Mac. No word at the site about Linux or whether Moonlight works there.
It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s
Oh, I see what you did there. Here, let me try:
It's like going from gaming on Windows 1.0 in 1985 to 1985-era Nintendo consoles
Or what about
It's like going from a red ring of death on an XBox console to Gran Turismo 3 on a Playstation 2
Oh and I also enjoy that you used your Space Act Agreement with NASA to "make planetary images and data available via the Internet to the public" and also promote the download and installation of silvercrap. Can't do something for the public without advertising and pushing proprietary software on people, can we? I hope Google gets the chance to do this with HTML5.
My work here is dung.
Don't worry, they can't take the sky from you.
I hope you're wrong too :-)
Oh wait... the source material from the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) runs the hardware with the help of... drum roll... Linux (ref page 24)
BAM!
Help me understand how installing a free broswer plugin distributed by Microsoft, in order to view a single image on a web site, constitutes selling my soul.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.
This is one of the handful of things that Silverlight does really well.
Because of that, I wouldn't be surprised if this project was less a "We've got this cool thing, what Microsoft technology can we push with it?" and more "What's a thing we could do that would really show off a strength of Silverlight?"
Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.
Actually you're trolling more than playing devil's advocate. There's a sh*tload of zoom & pan-enabled image viewing libraries, both in JS and Flash, all using tiles just like Silverlight -- try to google some.
And for that matter it's trivial to DIY from scratch using canvas, which of course IE conveniently doesn't support, but that problem was solved too long ago. OpenLayers, which you might have seen at work at OpenStreetMap, includes a VML rendering backend, besides canvas and SVG.
The really funny part about your "advocating" is that MS has an Ajax library that does exactly the same thing as its Silverlight counterpart: http://www.seadragon.com/developer/ajax/