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The Hackers Who Recovered NASA's Lost Lunar Photos
An anonymous reader sends this story from Wired:
"The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise. Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it's being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. ... The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten. ... The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties."
Given the negative connotations of the word "hackers" - how about "dedicated engineers" instead?
It probably went something like this.
"Old School" FTW!!
This is why there has always been a distinction among the technocrati between hackers (people who like figuring things out) and crackers (who figure out the exploits for personal gain).
You're absolutely and completely positively right, "hacker" can't have two meanings... except that there are many words in the dictionary with 2 or more meanings.
The technocrati dislike words with multiple meanings, so they tried to make multiple words for the concepts. But nobody listened, and now we're stuck with it. Want to fight it? Use the words as originally designated, not as mispopularized.
Of course, that would mean that you would have to back off from your misunderstanding, and there's no possible way you could ever be wrong, so we have to deal with the impreciseness.
Good job.
After reading the headline I thought that the lost Lunar landing footage was recovered, but it is sadly not the case.
The actual story is still pretty cool, however.
Check your dictionary. Lots of things have two or more meanings.
Among readers here, the preferred IT meaning is roughly "an expert who uses his knowledge to do things requiring extraordinary skills." It's not "the kid who tricked you into giving him your Facebook password."
I'm curious, are you just a confused child, or a troll?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
So hard to do this tape chit and yet, 45 years ago Neil and Buzz walked on the mooh. Forty-Five Motherfucking Years Ago. Forest, meet tree.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
you mean somebody or a group of people broke into NASA's servers and stole the photos? Will the thieves be prosecuted or arrested?
"Hacker" can't have two meanings
Which of course is why "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is not a valid sentence. Or, as Samuel L. Jackson would say, "English motherfucker! Do you speak it?"
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Probably.
Is it as satisfying? No. I say it's time we go back for another firsthand look. Perhaps even land there and start doing more research - not into "what is the moon made of" or "where did the moon come from". More along the lines of "how can I build a profitable luxury hotel here?"
If you actually used that sentence in public they'd have you committed.
I am a confused child who thinks that hacking has a negative connotation as in: a computer nerd who attempts to gain unauthorized access to computer systems.
Don't worry, there will still be people who claim the moon landings were faked.
Ah. Well, that's one of many. You'll also find "a person who chops wood", and the occasional uses of "a low quality writer" and "a taxi driver" Those last two are usually hacks, not hackers, but I've heard them referred to both ways.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I've never heard Samuel L. Jackson say that, although I have heard him say, "English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?"
...of what's to come.
This data's barely 50 years old, of extremely high value (thus worth the extraordinary effort), and relatively low Size.
We're talking about a couple of thousand high-resolution pictures, so what, each is perhaps what, 10 megabytes (they're all b&w)? So total of 20 gigs of images?
I know people that take more picture data than that in a single 1st birthday party.
And in 50 years, will it be gone?
-Styopa
I'm curious, are you just a confused child, or a troll?
Troll, clearly. An unsubtle, but successful, troll.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The brilliant and ballsy engineering was typical of NASA during its golden age, a time when it was also more closely linked to other government agencies with an interest in taking pictures from space.
“These guys were operating right at the edge,” Cowing says with a reverence for these NASA engineers that’s shared by his team. “There’s a certain spy program heritage to all this, but these guys went above that, because those spy satellites would send their images back. These didn’t. They couldn’t. They were in lunar orbit.”
So NASA sent a few extra spy satellites to the Moon to do a little snooping around. That makes this even better.
We are in an era known as the digital dark age.
Sometimes the comma gets lost in an accent.
Oh it's okay, I'm takin it back! - Randall G.
But remember to keep the phone sanitizers.
"Hacker" can't have two meanings... stealing other people's shit.
"Shit" can't have two meanings and the efforts to muddy the definition is a transparent attempt to lessen the stigma attached to excrement. So, obviously, you mean to say that "hackers" are hellbent on stealing the feces of strangers, to which I am not in a position to either prove nor disprove, but wrinkle my nose to it just the same.
Where is Victor Borge when we need him?
Have gnu, will travel.
I think your comment is the epitome of the evolving idiocracy that ignorance and anonymity allows. What's it like to be on the cutting edge of stupid?
Long before you even heard the word "Hacker" the saying went You hack to learn, you don't learn to hack. Repeat this over and over.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I've never heard Samuel L. Jackson say that, although I have heard him say, "English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?"
You know, I noticed the missing comma the second after I hit submit, and, this being slashdot, I was absolutely sure someone would call me on it. Punctuation is the difference between saying, "Let's eat, grandma," and "Let's eat grandma!" just like capitalization is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse, and helping your uncle jack off a horse.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Where is Victor Borge when we need him?
Phonetic punctuation... I'm here for you...
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Electronic readout of on-board film processing was not a new idea, even at the time.
Brett
But the negative connotation has been associated with the word hacker from it's first printed use in the 60s. Checkmate Athiests.
A tittle or superscript dot is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages. In most languages, the tittle of i or j is omitted when a diacritic is placed in the tittle's usual position, but not when the diacritic appears elsewhere.
I wouldn't want to be the one to give an estimate on how much bytes are required to adequately store the analogue data on the tapes. It could very well be ten times as much or even more. Depending on the quality of the recording, it could very well be that you'd need 32 bits per pixel and the sample rate you could achieve might mean there could be billions of pixels per image in useful data in the recordings. All of a sudden you could be dealing with multiple gigabytes per image in raw data. Derivatives with processed image data might raise that number substantially again.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
A hacker is someone that hacks things together. It's not about talent, it's about organizing coding as a rough and ready jumble.
When I got into computing in the mid-'90s 'hacker' was synonymous with 'computer wizard'. Good or bad, didn't matter. Of course computing included a lot more hardware then than it does now, so the term was being extended to hardware hackers of various types, even including radio hams. Now Hollyweird has taken a perfectly good word and changed it to suit their dramatic needs.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The term "Hacker" has multiple meanings, but in this context it originally referred to hardware guru's,
eg, Amateur Radio enthusiasts, etc. It dates back to well before software hobbyists.
I remember a wonderful electronics hardware shop that called itself "Hacker's Heaven".
Apparently it had to change it's name when the idiot media gave the term a negative context.
In defense of those 'misusing' the word, the line between the two is thin and blurry in a lot of cases both historical and current. Hackers have always had a tendency to at least bend the rules in pursuit of knowledge. Only in the world of computers do we differentiate people who break into your computer by their intentions. We don't have white hat burglars or white hate rapists, but white hat hackers will sure as hell download your credit card details, 'to prove they can'.
Check your dictionary. Lots of things have two or more meanings.
Indeed. As explained by Barry Crocker and the Doug Anthony Allstars. ;-)
What on earth has Atheism to do with this piece of terminology?
Even the article you link to, states that the word is used by both groups to self-identify.
> so the term was being extended to hardware hackers of various types,
In the 60's and 70's the term applied exclusively to hardware types.
The Original Meaning of "Hacker" (Score:-1)
Wow... Suggest that everyone's happy delusion might actually be false and not only do you get no evidence to the contrary of your suggestion, but you get modded down as a troll as well. So much for discussion and the search for truth. I guess I'll have to find another web site if I want that.
I don't think that's what they did though; early spy satellites didn't process the film onboard, they dropped it for recovery and processing on Earth. It sounds like these guys used the optics they had and coupled them to some kind of analog sensors.
Who think Hacker is a good term. Ask anyone passingly familiar with computers what the words means and they'll tell you, some fuck who breaks into other people's computers and steals their shit. All your bullshit won't change that.
And it's clear that the idiot who posted the story with that headline was trying to portray hackers in a good light.
So fuck you all, and may your dicks rot off.
Just another brilliant Microsofter.