Even better, COS (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph) should be installed, as it was going to be on SM4. I find it particularly ironic that the fact sheet on COS has this sadly prescient quote in it (my emph):
Although not possessing a wide variety of observing modes, COS will outperform STIS in the key areas for which it was designed, and in many others
will provide limited back-up capabilities should the STIS Side 2 electronics (and hence the instrument itself) fail in the future.
I'm going to trash all my spent moderating points on this thread to reply to this...
Actually, as an aside, I Like AAC. Take away the DRM, and I'd probably use that over OGG, even (I know, heresy ). But the encoding process takes hours per song, and I don't have the time (or a lab over which to distribute the load) to re-rip my entire collection that slowly.
1) AAC has no DRM. Apple's FairPlay is built on top of it. I re-ripped all my CDs to AAC. They have no DRM whatsoever. Any other software program or device that plays AAC (i.e. MPEG-4 audio, a standard) will play my files. Nobody has to license from Apple or even look in their direction to make such a player or app.
2) HOURS per song?!? What the heck are you using? I have an ancient, nearly 2 yr old 800MHz Ti PB and it can rip a whole CD at 160 kbps at 3-5x play speed, at my last remembrance. Even my 5-ish year old 400 MHz G3 can do it faster than the CD plays. Where are you getting hours per song? I don't find it any worse than high-bitrate MP3 ripping.
3) While I do in general agree with the idea that you should be able to play anything on your iPod that's encoded in any format it plays, it's good to bear in mind here echoed by many previous posters, that in essence this is Real wanting to lock you into their DRM. If they are so into choice, why are they not providing us lowly consumers of choice with a Real to MP3/AAC (un-DRM) format? Oh, wait, the RIAA might not like that? Tough luck. They signed the contract with them to distribute their songs with DRM.
Hounding Apple to license FairPlay was the tactic Real should have stuck with. Anything else is just desperation sour grapes in the face of not getting this market cornered before Apple. Apple, for their part, would have probably looked better just mentioning frankly that they won't be supporting such files in the least and if they break, tough luck. They shouldn't have brought up DCMA at all at this early stage--if it's going to even apply at all.
I, the lowly consumer, still have a very viable, if slightly more expensive choice to retain my 'audio format rights': walk out the door and buy the CD at my favorite local music store.
That's why I'm always eating garlicky foods. 'Cause everyone knows that the vampiric aliens can't stand the smell of garlic. But... if they're not undead, I guess I'm screwed.
Now add the ability to control iTunes remotely (say from a Palm or PocketPC) and we've got a product.
Now, I haven't done this with my setup yet, but IIRC, there are at least a few share/freeware things floating out there that allow you to control iTunes from a web page (served from the same Mac). If your Palm or PocketPC has WiFi web access and said control page is simple enough to be used on such a device, you're golden.
Sure it might be slick to have Apple package all that, but the tools are floating around already, I believe.
Interestingly enough for me, my laptop is used more and is more portable typically than my iPod. So, although the Airport Express is a wickedly cool little toy, I've been pretty happy just hooking up my iPod to the stereo so far.
You know, if you really hate it, go and change your preferences to not show Apple stories. Is there really a dearth of other/. stories these days? Sheesh...
They (Apple dev-heads) agree with you (and me). That's why the Tiger widgets only appear when you hit a button. They are completely off-screen otherwise. You only see them when you need them.
But I'll tell you what's different in this particular case. On a Tuesday this November, the jury of peers is going to be a bit larger than 12. Even if the punishment is "just" a kick in the ego and removal of fingers from the power pie, we--well, a lot of the we's here--can say something individually and directly about what we think in this "case".
Don't blow it off this year. Don't be "too busy." Get out, get registered, and vote.
The original evidence for the fine structure constant changing are now in question with recent observations released this year. New limits put tighter constraints on the constant further back in time.
A good summary can be found here with the recent press release here.
Are you talking about the "Optimizing System" phase? As far as I know, that updates binary-library prebindings--not fragmentation. You can read more about it here:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Perform an ce/Conceptual/LaunchTime/Tasks/Prebinding.html
In theory, when you install anything (on any system) and have a reasonable amount of contiguous free space on your disk, the installed files should always be unfragmented since I believe that's what most file systems look for first to allocate: a large chunk of contiguous space.
Fragmentation typically occurs more when you open a file, increase its size, and write it back out. But operations that write large files to disk that do not know beforehand what the final size may also do this to some files that were only written once to your disk. For example, some of the largest fragmented files on my HFS+ volume are things snagged with BitTorrent. The fragments in these files are very regular chunks of blocks, which could be the typical 'buffer' size BT grabs when writing.
If Apple were to lock out Linux via hardware DRM (can they do this with Darwin being opensource?), well, think about how it might affect their position in the marketplace.. For Apple it might not be such a bad move.
What?
What would they possibly have to gain by doing such a thing? Linux, especially on PPC, is not a threat to OS X in the least. If anything, they are mutually beneficial to each other since they can share code bases that are 99% the same.
But none of that makes any difference since Apple's profit is coming from you buying the machine, not the OS. Whether you actually use OS X or Linux on the box is only secondary in some respects to get to think about their other application offerings. But honestly some of those (say iLife) are likely loss-leaders themselves to get you to want to buy a machine--not the actual software.
Apple makes hardware and to sell that hardware, they make good software to make you want to buy their hardware. You buy the hardware, they're happy.
You're also getting _propriatary_ hardware (and for the most part more expensive). As a geek on a budget who dosn't mind getting his hands dirty (and a _huge_ OS X fan) I can tell you it'll be a cold day in hell before I buy apple computer hardware. Their OS, however.....:-)
What are you talking about? So maybe you have to start with their box, but not much of that is Apple proprietary. Even my laptop has ATI, IBM, and Matshita for it's major components. I could swap those around myself if I fancied. And heck, my original B&W G3 at home has been upgraded many times with non-Apple hardware. Cheap crap too.
So, yeah, I agree you have to play their game a little and buy their box, but saying it's "proprietary," at least from the Apple trademark, is limited to the main board. Go buy a used, year old box and rip the guts out and reconfigure.
Sorry if you feel it's too strangling to play, but I guess Apple feels they like the revenue to make good software. Years ago, I'd agree it wasn't working. Now, I think it's kicking major booty. I'm happy, even if I can't tweak as much as I used to. I'm getting much more done!
I sure as hell try to avoid spending any extra pennies of my hard earned tax-supported grant money to support M$. There are much more responsible things to spend it on.
That reminds me... my iPod is getting kind of full. Time to upgrade!
If UV spectrascopy was a requirement for JWST the capability would be there. IR requirements apparently superceded it.
UV does not primarily aid the major science goals of JWST. That does not mean UV is suddenly a useless waveband. IR is only superior to UV for answering particular questions. JWST does not have the goals that HST did. The point is that JWST is not a replacement for HST.
Is the UV capability worth a $1G shuttle flight?
Alone? Maybe. With all the other enhancements and longevity provided by the servicing mission? Absolutely.
Regardless of the fact that most of the money for the new instruments, training, software, etc. has already been spent, upgrading Hubble one more time would have not only added more new science to its long resume, but nearly guaranteed an overlap between two space telescopes with at least some overlap in capabilities. The boon for the first wave of JWST science results who could turn to HST for adjunct physical studies and the confidence level for the early calibration of JWST's instruments would be quite high.
Hubble is used by a large community of scientists whose interests are entrenched. Whether the physics is worth the continuing investment is debatable.
Although a large number of astronomers have used Hubble data directly, a large number have not. My own research does not use HST data, and I have barely worked with any HST data directly since about 1995. My project is entirely funded by NSF and has been for the last 15 years.
So, all my comments in the previous post are from one of those non-entrenched astronomers who would be scientifically and financially unaffected if aliens came and abducted every NASA facility and employee.
However, if by entrenched you mean a researcher who cares about other facilities and research projects that can tell us all something fascinating about my chosen sub-topic of focus, well then... guilty as charged.
You are correct. For several years now there has been a diminishing of Hubble science. No knock against Hubble. The instrument has been used to its full capability. There is not much more to be got out of it.
Wow. Now that's talking out of your butt.
Hubble doesn't only take pictures. Those are what most of the public are familiar with, but an impressive number of other instruments have been used on Hubble at one time or another. Take a look here for a full rundown.
Spectroscopy is a close second to imaging for Hubble. Instead of just showing us what something looks like, we get a chance to see what that something is made of, what kind of environment it's sitting in, how it's moving, and what the physical conditions are of that thing (density, temperature, pressure, etc.). Pretty pictures are a good first step for astronomy, but to know what (astro)physics is going on out there, most of the time we have to turn to spectroscopy. The canceled servicing mission was going to install the third major spectroscopy instrument on Hubble. It has never been without one.
Yes, we can do some spectroscopy from the ground. Molecular spectroscopy is mostly done with radio telescopes. But, most atomic spectroscopy is done in the very blue optical to UV. That's where atoms in energetic environments resonate. You can not do any UV spectroscopy from the ground. Period. JWST will not fill this gap.
Ending Hubble's life early will seriously restrict the amount of physics that we can learn from all the pretty pictures that have come out. Such an action nullifies the large investment we've already made. For each public release photo by STSCI, there's a myriad of hard-core followup scientific studies done, many times with Hubble's other instruments. Many of these never hit the NY Times, but they are sometimes more invaluable to the field than the original pictures themselves.
Worse, the release of UDF data was clearly staged to garner political support.
Really? The data started being taken last September. The planning started way before then. Are you suggesting that particular working team knew all along that Bush was going to announce his plan and that O'Keefe was going to can Hubble a week later? Wow.
The real shame for the astronomical community is the delay and poor planning for the Hubble successor. That can hardly be blamed on O'Keefe or President Bush.
Right.
When someone effectively cancels the last 20-25% of the lifetime of your current mission, you're supposed to be planning for that years in advance. All the planning and all the money was pre-designated with the last servicing mission and the instruments that were to be installed on HST during that trip in mind. Frankly, ending HST early wasn't even though about seriously until the shuttle accident. If memory serves, that was only a year ago.
And you should probably be aware that the "astronomical community" that's working on the JWST bits right now is for the most part (a) contained within a NASA division; (b) has funding from NASA; and/or (c) being done by a contractor. There are certainly a few astronomers involved and invested, but that cross-section certainly does not represent the "community" as a whole.
So, sorry, I certainly will blame NASA's top dog and the fellow that choose him to be head of NASA for not seeming to try very hard to maintain the planned life of the best, most versatile space telescope the world has built.
I think that's a tad misleading. It implies that somehow Hubble is doing something new. The fact is, we're seeing 186,000 miles further every second, because light takes time to get places. A more accurate headline would be we're seeing older things than we've ever seen.
Uh, er, uh. No.
These images are seeing further than we've ever seen before because Hubble is using a more sensitive camera than the previous HDF. It's not because they sat on our butts for a few years and the 'horizon' expanded.
Er, no. The Webb telescope will not be up before 2011. So, we're talking a minimum of 7. Likely, that will slip.
Without a boost, I believe Hubble will be down or need to be brought down before then.
The real shame, in addition to loosing UV astronomy--especially spectroscopy, which was planned to be a focus after the servicing mission with COS (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph)--is that there will likely be no overlap between JWST and Hubble. That's a real missed opportunity for interesting joint observations of the hot topics of the day from two instruments with slightly different instrumental focuses.
Remember, we're talking about science nearly a *decade* from now. FUSE (a far-UV spectrometer) has a current end-time around 2007 if everything goes smoothly. Spitzer has about a 6-year lifetime just from the cryostat, so even that might not make it past 2010. Chandra has a max of 10 years that people will mention, but it is nominally 5. Again, it will be tough to make 2010.
We face a real possibility that *no* major US space observatory currently in orbit will make it to overlap with JWST.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, COS (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph) should be installed, as it was going to be on SM4. I find it particularly ironic that the fact sheet on COS has this sadly prescient quote in it (my emph):
Which is exactly what has happened
Personally - I'm a scientist, and a Christian.
As am I. I couldn't agree with you more, and I certainly couldn't have said it that well. Where's those mod points when I need them... grumble...
...I did, but none of my applications ran on it :-(
That's one of the positive features.
I'm going to trash all my spent moderating points on this thread to reply to this...
Actually, as an aside, I Like AAC. Take away the DRM, and I'd probably use that over OGG, even (I know, heresy ). But the encoding process takes hours per song, and I don't have the time (or a lab over which to distribute the load) to re-rip my entire collection that slowly.
1) AAC has no DRM. Apple's FairPlay is built on top of it. I re-ripped all my CDs to AAC. They have no DRM whatsoever. Any other software program or device that plays AAC (i.e. MPEG-4 audio, a standard) will play my files. Nobody has to license from Apple or even look in their direction to make such a player or app.
2) HOURS per song?!? What the heck are you using? I have an ancient, nearly 2 yr old 800MHz Ti PB and it can rip a whole CD at 160 kbps at 3-5x play speed, at my last remembrance. Even my 5-ish year old 400 MHz G3 can do it faster than the CD plays. Where are you getting hours per song? I don't find it any worse than high-bitrate MP3 ripping.
3) While I do in general agree with the idea that you should be able to play anything on your iPod that's encoded in any format it plays, it's good to bear in mind here echoed by many previous posters, that in essence this is Real wanting to lock you into their DRM. If they are so into choice, why are they not providing us lowly consumers of choice with a Real to MP3/AAC (un-DRM) format? Oh, wait, the RIAA might not like that? Tough luck. They signed the contract with them to distribute their songs with DRM.
Hounding Apple to license FairPlay was the tactic Real should have stuck with. Anything else is just desperation sour grapes in the face of not getting this market cornered before Apple. Apple, for their part, would have probably looked better just mentioning frankly that they won't be supporting such files in the least and if they break, tough luck. They shouldn't have brought up DCMA at all at this early stage--if it's going to even apply at all.
I, the lowly consumer, still have a very viable, if slightly more expensive choice to retain my 'audio format rights': walk out the door and buy the CD at my favorite local music store.
That's why I'm always eating garlicky foods. 'Cause everyone knows that the vampiric aliens can't stand the smell of garlic. But... if they're not undead, I guess I'm screwed.
Now add the ability to control iTunes remotely (say from a Palm or PocketPC) and we've got a product.
Now, I haven't done this with my setup yet, but IIRC, there are at least a few share/freeware things floating out there that allow you to control iTunes from a web page (served from the same Mac). If your Palm or PocketPC has WiFi web access and said control page is simple enough to be used on such a device, you're golden.
Sure it might be slick to have Apple package all that, but the tools are floating around already, I believe.
Interestingly enough for me, my laptop is used more and is more portable typically than my iPod. So, although the Airport Express is a wickedly cool little toy, I've been pretty happy just hooking up my iPod to the stereo so far.
You know, if you really hate it, go and change your preferences to not show Apple stories. Is there really a dearth of other /. stories these days? Sheesh...
"...both ate up all my real-estate."
They (Apple dev-heads) agree with you (and me). That's why the Tiger widgets only appear when you hit a button. They are completely off-screen otherwise. You only see them when you need them.
mh
But I'll tell you what's different in this particular case. On a Tuesday this November, the jury of peers is going to be a bit larger than 12. Even if the punishment is "just" a kick in the ego and removal of fingers from the power pie, we--well, a lot of the we's here--can say something individually and directly about what we think in this "case".
Don't blow it off this year. Don't be "too busy." Get out, get registered, and vote.
Someone needs to come up with a way to recycle the heat back into power that's burning my thighs when number crunching or playing games.
Stupid entropy.
Playing minesweeper all day doesn't count as 'using' your machine. ;)
The original evidence for the fine structure constant changing are now in question with recent observations released this year. New limits put tighter constraints on the constant further back in time.
A good summary can be found here with the recent press release here.
mh
Oh, nice! Thanks for the tip. Boy, did that URL (in my parent post) get mangled... suck.
Are you talking about the "Optimizing System" phase? As far as I know, that updates binary-library prebindings--not fragmentation. You can read more about it here:
m an ce/Conceptual/LaunchTime/Tasks/Prebinding.html
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Perfor
In theory, when you install anything (on any system) and have a reasonable amount of contiguous free space on your disk, the installed files should always be unfragmented since I believe that's what most file systems look for first to allocate: a large chunk of contiguous space.
Fragmentation typically occurs more when you open a file, increase its size, and write it back out. But operations that write large files to disk that do not know beforehand what the final size may also do this to some files that were only written once to your disk. For example, some of the largest fragmented files on my HFS+ volume are things snagged with BitTorrent. The fragments in these files are very regular chunks of blocks, which could be the typical 'buffer' size BT grabs when writing.
I have! I have!
Fortunately, she has 25 GB+ of Rendezvous'ed iTunes music on it. And I'm on the same LAN. Rockin'!
Scarcasm: witty language used to convey insults or scorn delivered from a moving vehicle.
Ahhh. Gotcha.
Well I hear a good crowbar and a black outfit can net you a dual-processor G5 these days too. Still in the box no less!
What?
What would they possibly have to gain by doing such a thing? Linux, especially on PPC, is not a threat to OS X in the least. If anything, they are mutually beneficial to each other since they can share code bases that are 99% the same.
But none of that makes any difference since Apple's profit is coming from you buying the machine, not the OS. Whether you actually use OS X or Linux on the box is only secondary in some respects to get to think about their other application offerings. But honestly some of those (say iLife) are likely loss-leaders themselves to get you to want to buy a machine--not the actual software.
Apple makes hardware and to sell that hardware, they make good software to make you want to buy their hardware. You buy the hardware, they're happy.
What are you talking about? So maybe you have to start with their box, but not much of that is Apple proprietary. Even my laptop has ATI, IBM, and Matshita for it's major components. I could swap those around myself if I fancied. And heck, my original B&W G3 at home has been upgraded many times with non-Apple hardware. Cheap crap too.
So, yeah, I agree you have to play their game a little and buy their box, but saying it's "proprietary," at least from the Apple trademark, is limited to the main board. Go buy a used, year old box and rip the guts out and reconfigure.
Sorry if you feel it's too strangling to play, but I guess Apple feels they like the revenue to make good software. Years ago, I'd agree it wasn't working. Now, I think it's kicking major booty. I'm happy, even if I can't tweak as much as I used to. I'm getting much more done!
I sure as hell try to avoid spending any extra pennies of my hard earned tax-supported grant money to support M$. There are much more responsible things to spend it on.
That reminds me... my iPod is getting kind of full. Time to upgrade!
UV does not primarily aid the major science goals of JWST. That does not mean UV is suddenly a useless waveband. IR is only superior to UV for answering particular questions. JWST does not have the goals that HST did. The point is that JWST is not a replacement for HST.
Alone? Maybe. With all the other enhancements and longevity provided by the servicing mission? Absolutely.
Regardless of the fact that most of the money for the new instruments, training, software, etc. has already been spent, upgrading Hubble one more time would have not only added more new science to its long resume, but nearly guaranteed an overlap between two space telescopes with at least some overlap in capabilities. The boon for the first wave of JWST science results who could turn to HST for adjunct physical studies and the confidence level for the early calibration of JWST's instruments would be quite high.
Although a large number of astronomers have used Hubble data directly, a large number have not. My own research does not use HST data, and I have barely worked with any HST data directly since about 1995. My project is entirely funded by NSF and has been for the last 15 years.
So, all my comments in the previous post are from one of those non-entrenched astronomers who would be scientifically and financially unaffected if aliens came and abducted every NASA facility and employee.
However, if by entrenched you mean a researcher who cares about other facilities and research projects that can tell us all something fascinating about my chosen sub-topic of focus, well then... guilty as charged.
Wow. Now that's talking out of your butt.
Hubble doesn't only take pictures. Those are what most of the public are familiar with, but an impressive number of other instruments have been used on Hubble at one time or another. Take a look here for a full rundown.
Spectroscopy is a close second to imaging for Hubble. Instead of just showing us what something looks like, we get a chance to see what that something is made of, what kind of environment it's sitting in, how it's moving, and what the physical conditions are of that thing (density, temperature, pressure, etc.). Pretty pictures are a good first step for astronomy, but to know what (astro)physics is going on out there, most of the time we have to turn to spectroscopy. The canceled servicing mission was going to install the third major spectroscopy instrument on Hubble. It has never been without one.
Yes, we can do some spectroscopy from the ground. Molecular spectroscopy is mostly done with radio telescopes. But, most atomic spectroscopy is done in the very blue optical to UV. That's where atoms in energetic environments resonate. You can not do any UV spectroscopy from the ground. Period. JWST will not fill this gap.
Ending Hubble's life early will seriously restrict the amount of physics that we can learn from all the pretty pictures that have come out. Such an action nullifies the large investment we've already made. For each public release photo by STSCI, there's a myriad of hard-core followup scientific studies done, many times with Hubble's other instruments. Many of these never hit the NY Times, but they are sometimes more invaluable to the field than the original pictures themselves.
Really? The data started being taken last September. The planning started way before then. Are you suggesting that particular working team knew all along that Bush was going to announce his plan and that O'Keefe was going to can Hubble a week later? Wow.
Right.
When someone effectively cancels the last 20-25% of the lifetime of your current mission, you're supposed to be planning for that years in advance. All the planning and all the money was pre-designated with the last servicing mission and the instruments that were to be installed on HST during that trip in mind. Frankly, ending HST early wasn't even though about seriously until the shuttle accident. If memory serves, that was only a year ago.
And you should probably be aware that the "astronomical community" that's working on the JWST bits right now is for the most part (a) contained within a NASA division; (b) has funding from NASA; and/or (c) being done by a contractor. There are certainly a few astronomers involved and invested, but that cross-section certainly does not represent the "community" as a whole.
So, sorry, I certainly will blame NASA's top dog and the fellow that choose him to be head of NASA for not seeming to try very hard to maintain the planned life of the best, most versatile space telescope the world has built.
Uh, er, uh. No.
These images are seeing further than we've ever seen before because Hubble is using a more sensitive camera than the previous HDF. It's not because they sat on our butts for a few years and the 'horizon' expanded.
Er, no. The Webb telescope will not be up before 2011. So, we're talking a minimum of 7. Likely, that will slip.
Without a boost, I believe Hubble will be down or need to be brought down before then.
The real shame, in addition to loosing UV astronomy--especially spectroscopy, which was planned to be a focus after the servicing mission with COS (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph)--is that there will likely be no overlap between JWST and Hubble. That's a real missed opportunity for interesting joint observations of the hot topics of the day from two instruments with slightly different instrumental focuses.
Remember, we're talking about science nearly a *decade* from now. FUSE (a far-UV spectrometer) has a current end-time around 2007 if everything goes smoothly. Spitzer has about a 6-year lifetime just from the cryostat, so even that might not make it past 2010. Chandra has a max of 10 years that people will mention, but it is nominally 5. Again, it will be tough to make 2010.
We face a real possibility that *no* major US space observatory currently in orbit will make it to overlap with JWST.