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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?
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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.
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
Sometimes the comma gets lost in an accent.
But remember to keep the phone sanitizers.
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?
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?
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.