Then there are the guys who distribute phase-coherent millimeter wave LOs for hundreds of meters over fiber optics, and when they can't buy a mixer at Mini-Circuits that does what they want, they grow one from a freakin' crystal. Those guys all seem to end up at NRAO, even though there's no money in radio astronomy and even less glory.
Probably because it's the kind of environment that values damn-good research above all else, be it in RF, astrophysics, astrochemistry or even in IT (where I work). I've gone from job-hopping every 3-18 months at my previous employers to staying at NRAO for 6 years now. And every year at the annual service awards presentation they give out 30 or even 40-year service awards. Sure, there's no money in astronomy and our budget is projected flat for the next what... 5 years or something, but even with that people like it here and stick around.
Proof (IMO) that you can develop and sustain a great R&D culture on a limited budget!
There's lots more info on the transporters available on the ALMA web site. The two antenna transporters, named "Otto" and "Lore", have their own page at http://almaobservatory.org/en/technology/transporters. Each transporter actually has 2 500kW power plants (for redundancy) and cooling them at 5km altitude is a major challenge (actually, the datacenter has the same problem -- there's just not enough air up there to remove the heat).
As a sysadmin for an astronomy observatory I find this laughable. FITS was designed to store every last detail about an image (and frequencies for radio astronomy) and it seems WAY overkill to burn that many bits digitizing manuscripts.
But hey, who am I to question the word of the church?:)
You seem to be able to disable root CAs in firefox. In "preferences" > "advanced" > "view certificates" > "authorities". FreeSSL is in there, listed as "startcom ltd". I guess we might all want to remove that now?
It's web-based for file restores and I can grant permissions to inidividual system operators to restore files for only their systems. It connects using rsync so no other agent is required on the backed-up host. It's running on a 1-U server with 4 SATA disks in a software raid-5 and backing up 20 servers without difficulty.
Wow - this could be a real win for scientific computing. Traditional GPU-based computation is hindered by the poor I/O (I guess PCI-e is fixing this but I don't know). And PS3-based cell computation is hindered by lack of RAM _and_ poor I/O. But this thing looks like it's hooked up to some nice RAM and a PCI-e bus and could really crunch some FFTs.
We have an experimental PS3-based cell data reduction system here but it's just too slow. I can almost hear my phone ringing as one of our scientists starts asking to buy one of these guys...
According to the article (and hinted by the summary), the thing has an ordinary Intel Core2Duo CPU. I'm assuming the cell is the "Toshiba quad code HD Processor" mentioned in the article. So it's a co-processor, then. My best guess it it's a 4-SPU cell processor without the PowerPC core.
Weird...
I've had it with this hugely confusing system of names and TLDs, so here's my proposal:
We drop DNS completely and establish a completely numerical system of finding things on the internet. Each machine will just get a simple number. No more wondering what everything is called - just type in the number and presto - you're there! No fighting, no trademarks, no registrations, just "Here's your number pal, have fun."
I'm sorry - but that's simply not true. Sure, there are audio gear collectors who obsess over specs, price, reputation, etc. (the electronics equivalent of people who buy gucchi[sp?] handbags)...
BUT - true audiophiles know that great sound is important, AND it can be has on a relatively shoestring budget. I've put less than $1000 into my stereo and continue to tinker with parts, build components and troll the local pawn shops in search of gear to try next. It really is about the sound.
Also, consider homebrewing your own gear. There are a TON of great designs on the web with parts costs of less than $200. It's fun and it sounds great.:)
Actually, in a great feat of irony, I was listening to some Jeroen Tel right as I saw this story pop up. The High-Voltage SID Collection has a huge amount of C64 tunes available for download -- and quickly too since the files are around 5 to 50KB for a song.
Sidplay 2 does a great job playing them and there's a plugin for XMMS.
Now THAT is funny considering almost everybody who composes these files means to share them. There are huge repositories of them on the web. And why do they include only a few of these obscure formats and not others? What about fasttracker? I can share those but not IT?
Okay - somebody is definitely on crack over there.
...actually - his car is the one that got "clotheslined" in the link from the summary.
--- BEGIN 644 conspiracytheory.txt --- Anyway - I heard Wed. that they were out of the competition - more-or-less arbitrarily. It sounds to me like DARPA already knew, going in to this, who they wanted the finalists to be. Stanford (the previous winner), CMU, Oshkosh - they're all there.
Last time DARPA basically did the same thing to Team Jefferson. They just said "you guys are done" when they showed up to re-try a test -- after they'd spent 30+ hours doing energency repairs after hitting a barrier. I'm getting the distinct impression they don't want anybody small in this thing. TJ has spent a fraction of the other teams' development costs and for some reason that scares DARPA.
Fine - at first I didn't think it worth the effort to respond to some of these posts, but...oh hell:
Regarding "lamp cord" as speaker cables - YES, there is a difference. I, too was skeptical, but after 10 years of using high-grade speaker cable ($2/foot - not this psycho shit) I am certain it does perform better and there are reasons for it.
1) At high audio frequencies, electrons travel more efficiently on the _surface_ of a conductor. Using speaker cable with a high number of strands (hundreds as apposed to 20 or so in the twist) provides more surface area for conduction.
2) OFC cable (Oxygen free copper) is more flexible, making it easier to lay, strip and terminate. Better termination reduces resistance and gives better bass response (again - more surface area in contact with the speaker terminals, etc.)
This is not voodoo - it's physics.
That said, I do find it vastly humorous what lengths some people (not me) will go to on their stereos. My father has put together a great system that is vastly superior to any consumer-marketed equipment, but at a microscopic fraction of the cost of the upper-eschelon hi-fi (I think he has maybe $700 in it). Of course, he likes to build his own equipment -- you can find GREAT designs for IC-based power amps and pre-amps on the 'net.
Although autism is generally more prevalent in males (and there seems to be a biological reason for this) females can develop it - and typically when the do, it's BAD.
My sister's case is quite bad.
Oh - and not all autistic people are savants, either; most are completely without function.
No! Don't get rid of that key. It's a nice, large, pinky-accessible key that should be used....for CONTROL! Bring back control to its rightful place on the keyboard. Don't get rid of the key just make it do something more useful..Xmodmaprc:
F-Secure's blog says Blacklight can detect this kit - but can't remove it. The instructions for removing it involve booting from recovery console and using some arcance incantatio of the copy command to splat garbage over the ADS. I'd call that "cannot remove this virus".
Despite the debate about the OS being GNU/Linux, your _kernel_ is called "Linux". GNU's kernel is called "hurd" and I'm willing to bet you don't use it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Then there are the guys who distribute phase-coherent millimeter wave LOs for hundreds of meters over fiber optics, and when they can't buy a mixer at Mini-Circuits that does what they want, they grow one from a freakin' crystal. Those guys all seem to end up at NRAO, even though there's no money in radio astronomy and even less glory.
Probably because it's the kind of environment that values damn-good research above all else, be it in RF, astrophysics, astrochemistry or even in IT (where I work). I've gone from job-hopping every 3-18 months at my previous employers to staying at NRAO for 6 years now. And every year at the annual service awards presentation they give out 30 or even 40-year service awards. Sure, there's no money in astronomy and our budget is projected flat for the next what... 5 years or something, but even with that people like it here and stick around.
Proof (IMO) that you can develop and sustain a great R&D culture on a limited budget!
Disclaimer: I work for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (the US partner for ALMA).
There's lots more info on the transporters available on the ALMA web site. The two antenna transporters, named "Otto" and "Lore", have their own page at http://almaobservatory.org/en/technology/transporters. Each transporter actually has 2 500kW power plants (for redundancy) and cooling them at 5km altitude is a major challenge (actually, the datacenter has the same problem -- there's just not enough air up there to remove the heat).
There's lots more pictures of them carrying antennas there, too.
Finally, a video of the transporter taking the first ALMA antenna to the high site .
Yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise
And apparently he won an award for his work on Tron, too.
Yes :) FITS files are HUGE!
As a sysadmin for an astronomy observatory I find this laughable. FITS was designed to store every last detail about an image (and frequencies for radio astronomy) and it seems WAY overkill to burn that many bits digitizing manuscripts.
But hey, who am I to question the word of the church? :)
Which made me wonder why Disney would need an semiconductor manufacturing company? Especially one without a fab.
Yes, that's right - not all slashdotters care about comics. /me defends his geek card against the ensuing calls to surrender it
You seem to be able to disable root CAs in firefox. In "preferences" > "advanced" > "view certificates" > "authorities". FreeSSL is in there, listed as "startcom ltd". I guess we might all want to remove that now?
Ah yes - forgot to mention the de-duplication in my earlier post. Thank you.
I've been running backuppc where I work for a while and am nothing but pleased with it.
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
It's web-based for file restores and I can grant permissions to inidividual system operators to restore files for only their systems. It connects using rsync so no other agent is required on the backed-up host. It's running on a 1-U server with 4 SATA disks in a software raid-5 and backing up 20 servers without difficulty.
From wikipedia:
Geoffrey A. Landis works as a scientist and writer of science fiction.
This just smells of thiotimoline to me...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline
We have an experimental PS3-based cell data reduction system here but it's just too slow. I can almost hear my phone ringing as one of our scientists starts asking to buy one of these guys...
According to the article (and hinted by the summary), the thing has an ordinary Intel Core2Duo CPU. I'm assuming the cell is the "Toshiba quad code HD Processor" mentioned in the article. So it's a co-processor, then. My best guess it it's a 4-SPU cell processor without the PowerPC core. Weird...
-1 didntgetit
I've had it with this hugely confusing system of names and TLDs, so here's my proposal:
We drop DNS completely and establish a completely numerical system of finding things on the internet. Each machine will just get a simple number. No more wondering what everything is called - just type in the number and presto - you're there! No fighting, no trademarks, no registrations, just "Here's your number pal, have fun."
Should work fine - right?
BUT - true audiophiles know that great sound is important, AND it can be has on a relatively shoestring budget. I've put less than $1000 into my stereo and continue to tinker with parts, build components and troll the local pawn shops in search of gear to try next. It really is about the sound.
Also, consider homebrewing your own gear. There are a TON of great designs on the web with parts costs of less than $200. It's fun and it sounds great. :)
Yeah - me too. Course, I used to work with a guy who worked on those - even had posters of some connection machines in the office. :)
Actually, in a great feat of irony, I was listening to some Jeroen Tel right as I saw this story pop up. The High-Voltage SID Collection has a huge amount of C64 tunes available for download -- and quickly too since the files are around 5 to 50KB for a song.
Sidplay 2 does a great job playing them and there's a plugin for XMMS.
-Josh
Impulse Tracker?!? Oktalyzer?!? They're restricting demoscene tracker modules...
Now THAT is funny considering almost everybody who composes these files means to share them. There are huge repositories of them on the web. And why do they include only a few of these obscure formats and not others? What about fasttracker? I can share those but not IT?
Okay - somebody is definitely on crack over there.
...actually - his car is the one that got "clotheslined" in the link from the summary.
--- BEGIN 644 conspiracytheory.txt ---
Anyway - I heard Wed. that they were out of the competition - more-or-less arbitrarily. It sounds to me like DARPA already knew, going in to this, who they wanted the finalists to be. Stanford (the previous winner), CMU, Oshkosh - they're all there.
Last time DARPA basically did the same thing to Team Jefferson. They just said "you guys are done" when they showed up to re-try a test -- after they'd spent 30+ hours doing energency repairs after hitting a barrier. I'm getting the distinct impression they don't want anybody small in this thing. TJ has spent a fraction of the other teams' development costs and for some reason that scares DARPA.
Regarding "lamp cord" as speaker cables - YES, there is a difference. I, too was skeptical, but after 10 years of using high-grade speaker cable ($2/foot - not this psycho shit) I am certain it does perform better and there are reasons for it.
1) At high audio frequencies, electrons travel more efficiently on the _surface_ of a conductor. Using speaker cable with a high number of strands (hundreds as apposed to 20 or so in the twist) provides more surface area for conduction.
2) OFC cable (Oxygen free copper) is more flexible, making it easier to lay, strip and terminate. Better termination reduces resistance and gives better bass response (again - more surface area in contact with the speaker terminals, etc.)
This is not voodoo - it's physics.
That said, I do find it vastly humorous what lengths some people (not me) will go to on their stereos. My father has put together a great system that is vastly superior to any consumer-marketed equipment, but at a microscopic fraction of the cost of the upper-eschelon hi-fi (I think he has maybe $700 in it). Of course, he likes to build his own equipment -- you can find GREAT designs for IC-based power amps and pre-amps on the 'net.
-Josh
RAID 11? Or, more to the point, how would I implement a mirror, but with 3 drives? Does linux 'md' do this? How about any controllers?
After all, we're supposed to replicate data 3 times, right?
I'd be happy to introduce you to one: my sister.
Although autism is generally more prevalent in males (and there seems to be a biological reason for this) females can develop it - and typically when the do, it's BAD.
My sister's case is quite bad.
Oh - and not all autistic people are savants, either; most are completely without function.
No! Don't get rid of that key. It's a nice, large, pinky-accessible key that should be used....for CONTROL! Bring back control to its rightful place on the keyboard. Don't get rid of the key just make it do something more useful. .Xmodmaprc:
/etc/X11/xorg.conf:
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
add Control = Control_L
Or,
Section "InputDevice"
Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps"
EndSection
-Josh
F-Secure's blog says Blacklight can detect this kit - but can't remove it. The instructions for removing it involve booting from recovery console and using some arcance incantatio of the copy command to splat garbage over the ADS. I'd call that "cannot remove this virus".
Despite the debate about the OS being GNU/Linux, your _kernel_ is called "Linux". GNU's kernel is called "hurd" and I'm willing to bet you don't use it.
Monthy circular image
"You've got questions - we've got cellphones" -- and now, not-cheap-enough computers, too.