Your argument is no more credible than the curmudgeons who said that an electric piano sounds so unlike a real piano that it's a total waste, and nobody would ever perform a legitimate creative work using one.
Think "new tools at an artist's disposal", and "dawn of a new type of digital instrument" instead.
Yeah, except that as others have already pointed out, this is far from the first vocal synthesizer. It's at best an incremental improvement over the previous successes.
Besides VocalWriter, which has been around since 1997 (and hasn't been updated in that time, unfortunately), I'm not aware of any other easy-to-use singing synthesizers that are aimed at the average user or even average musician. But just about every speech synthesizer out there has been hacked to sing, e.g. Apple's Macintalk or Festival's Flinger.
Yamaha's Vocaloid might sound better than those, but it's not about to fool anyone paying attention. Nor is it likely to be used as a musical instrument the way other synthesizers are. Why? Because there's no way to dynamically control what it says the way you can dynamically control a keyboard synthesizer or any other musical instrument, whether acoustic or electronic.
Thus the only way it could be used is in a recording studio, where it would have to be programmed carefully to "sing" a particular song.
Sorry about the rant. I love new technology, I just hate it when people claim things are the first ever or revolutionary when they're really just incremental improvements.
Disclaimer: I work at JPL, but not on the Mars rovers...
Why don't they automate the mission control tech a bit more...
General observation about JPL and NASA: they're slow to adopt new technology. This is a good thing. They tend to wait until a particular technology is very mature and clearly useful before adopting it in a mission-critical environment. Individual scientists and engineers are welcome to experiment with all sorts of cutting-edge tools for number crunching, visualization, simulations, etc. - and they do - but mission-critical technology is kept deliberately as simple as possible.
(a) voice comm may still be useful, but why not use IM for a group of people to "chat." Is the voice feed for the media?
Honestly I think that voice communication is far more efficient - most people can talk faster than they can type, and when you know the other person you gain more information from their tone of voice, etc.
(b) why not "follow the procedure" with some online, multi-user app that checks off the steps done on some browser sort of app? The engineering specs have to be changing up to the last minute; why commit to paper something that becomes obsolete once you press Print?
I can think of many reasons:
1. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): If you relied on software to make sure you were following the procedures, that software now becomes mission-critical. The software has to be totally foolproof. It takes about 10x as much effort to write robust, clean, documented, verified code as it does to toss off a quick web app.
2. An online form or "procedure wizard" couldn't possibly be smart enough to anticipate any possible deviation from the rules that might be necessary.
3. With rules printed on paper, you can spread them all out in front of you. You can circle things with a pencil. You can make corrections or notes.
4. You don't have to waste valuable computer screen real-estate. Even though many of the mission people have 2 or 3 monitors, they want every last pixel displaying interactive real-time information, not opened to a web browser displaying a list of rules.
I don't know about any of you, but "Froogle" hasn't impressed me yet. I am a frequent user of pricewatch and techbargains, and Froogle hasn't even come close to matching these.
That's not what Froogle is for. When you know exactly what you want, and want the best possible price, sites like pricewatch, techbargains, mysimon, epinions, etc. are great for this. When you don't know exactly what you want, or don't know what it's called, or don't know what category it would be in, Froogle is excellent.
Indeed, I just got back from a trip to London where my parents had bought a 5 megapixel camera. The images looked fine on a computer, but I just had 4x6 prints made, and they look like complete ass.
Something's wrong with your software or your printer.
300 dpi of full-color is quite high resolution. For a 4x6 image at 300 dpi, you only need a 1200x1600 digital image, or about 2 megapixels. Your 5 megapixel camera has more than enough resolution for a high-quality 4x6 print.
SCO bills NASA! (suspects Linux installed on Mars Rover)
The Mars Rovers run VxWorks, though there is heavy use of Linux elsewhere at NASA. There have been a couple of very preliminary studies of the possible use of real-time Java on Linux for future rovers and other spacecraft.
1. Manned space flight will be NASAs only priority. Almost all non-manned projects will done away with or rolled into the manned program if appropriate.
Oh God, that would be so sad. I'm all in favor of manned flights, but it would be silly to cancel unmanned exploration in order to make that happen. The unmanned spacecraft are the ones that allow us to learn all about the other planets and moons before we risk human lives. Besides, it's ridiculously cheaper - easily 10 unmanned flights for the price of one manned, if not even more.
Disclaimer: I work at JPL, the NASA center whose primary mission is the robotic exploration of the solar system. If all of NASA's unmanned programs were cancelled, a good fraction of the 5,000 people at JPL would either be out of a job, or at best would get transferred to a manned mission, giving up on years of dedication and experience.
One thing that was good for the industry was to move away from the complex instruction set (CISC) towards a reduced set of instructions (RISC), and we have seen the speed improvements as well as a general reduction in hardware bugs since that time.
You do realize that Intel x86 processors are still CISC, right? (OK, actually internally they do execute things very much like a RISC chip, but the instruction set is still CISC, and modern x86 processors are certainly not any _simpler_ for having some RISC-like elements to them.
Besides, RISC chips don't actually have fewer instructions. Most of them these days have more. The difference between CISC and RISC is that RISC chips don't have certain complicated, slow instructions, but rather break these up into smaller pieces. For example, CISC processors usually have an instruction to move memory-to-memory while RISC only moves memory-to-register and register-to-memory. Also, CISC processors often have a division instruction while many RISC processors instead just have a multiplicitive inverse instruction (so to compute a/b you instead compute a*inv(b)).
But to add Hyperthreading, an untested and unproven technology which can guarantee no more than a 12% speed improvement, is folly. Better to amp the CPU clock and deal with a known like heat than to risk your company's livelihood on letting the CPU figure out which thread is which. That is something an OS is much more reliable in handling.
Now that's just ridiculous. Hyperthreading is not untested or unproven. Similar ideas have been discussed in academic papers for years; Intel was just the first to put it into a modern CPU. It's hardly untested, either - Intel started seeding the first Hyperthreading-capable processors what, two years ago now? At that point I wouldn't have suggested running a mission-critical application on a machine with Hyperthreading enabled, but now? You'd be crazy not to if it actually speeds up the application you need to run.
The reality is that in order to advance the speed of computer processors, it's necessary to make them more complicated.
I think if you spoke to any linguistics major, they would disagree. If you are interested in structures in human languages, a good place to start is with any of Chomsky's linguistics work, because he studied how words combine into phrases and phrases into sentences (think of it as a tree).
Learning about Linguistics by starting with Chomsky is kind of like studying Evolution by reading Lamarck. Virtually all modern linguists acknowledge that Chomsky was pretty much dead wrong. The main problem was that Chomsky was not fluent in any language other than English, and he knew nothing at all about some of the more unusual languages of the world.
To pick a specific example, read a little bit about Inuit (Eskimo) - that should convince you that not only do some languages not share our concepts of noun phrases and verb phrases, but that languages don't even have to have the same concept of a word that we do.
A "good" college is one that has a reputation; it's all a huge system for keeping money in the hands of the wealthy and putting the poor on the streets where they belong. The classes that you take at X Community College will be no worse than those at Princeton.
The material in the classes will be pretty similar, especially for your first 2 years in college, but there's a huge difference between your local community college and a school with a good reputation: your classmates. When you go to a good school, your classmates will tend to be more bright, motivated to do well, and ambitious to succeed in life after college. You'll learn at least as much from your fellow classmates as you will from professors, and many of your friends will end up doing great things. Your fellow alums will help you find jobs for the rest of your life.
If you're self-motivated, you can get an excellent education at a community college and then a cheap 4-year school, and the degree is worth almost as much. In fact, the degree is worth the same as from the good school after you've been out of school for 5 years because by that point your work experience counts more than your education.
So it depends on what you want. If you want to be intellectually challenged, both in and out of the classroom, and if you're ambitious with your life plans after college, you should definitely consider going to a "good" school. Not because they'll teach you more. But because everyone else who's ambitious and smart will be there, too.
I've been mirroring all of the official images from SpaceFlightNow.com and www.jpl.nasa.gov plus some screenshots from the NASA TV stream and the Planetary Society stream:
Click here for an official images! I've mirrored it in my directory too...the official one is called firstimage1.jpg, but it's obvious because it's much higher-quality than the screenshot I grabbed earlier...
This is ridiculously low-quality, but here's a screenshot of RealPlayer's stream of NASA TV from a few minutes ago. I'll post more pictures if I get anything good, but probably the real, high-quality images will be online within the hour. The first image here is of one of the mission control computer screens showing the images downloaded, including one image of the rover itself.
Perhaps it's a sign we'll get back some of the 2/3 cut in spending Clinton did. Since that cut we've lost several lives & probes. You can't do rocket science on entry lvl I.T. salaries.
It's also a good sign that putting more spending in the program by Bush actually helped.
I hate to break it to you, but the Mars Exploration Rover budget was set years ago, long before Bush took office. It's definitely part of the "better, faster, cheaper" program, with a budget of well under a billion dollars. There's virtually nothing Bush could have done - throwing more money at it couldn't have increased the chance of success, and there would have been no way to take money away without basically cancelling the whole mission. Maybe sending one rover instead of two, but that wouldn't have saved much except the fuel.
The total daily data for a single Martian day, direct-to-Earth and orbiter relay potential combined, is on the order of 17MB. The total data for the entire mission is on the order of 1,550MB.
Note that with multiple cameras at 1024x1024 resolution, the Mars Exploration Rovers could easily send quite a bit more information than that if the bandwith was available. I work in the Machine Learning Systems group at JPL, and one of our goals is to eventually put some artificial intelligence software onto a future Mars rover so that it can take far more pictures than could ever be transmitted, analyze them onboard, and send only the most interesting ones back. It's very tricky to pin down exactly what makes one image more interesting than another, of course, so that's the real challenge...
I was curious about the base petal down stop - was there any kind of design (like weighting) to "encourage" it to stop that way, or was it basically like rolling a die and seeing where it landed?
Disclaimer: I work at JPL, but not on the Mars Exploration Rovers.
From what I understand, it's basically like rolling a die - there may be a slightly higher probability of landing on some of the sides due to weight distribution, but not enough that anyone was counting on it landing base petal down.
With any of the other three orientations, it wouldn't have been a problem - by deflating the airbags in just the right order and using other devices to reorient it, it's designed to end up right-side-up eventually. All of the possible scenarios were simulated and tested extensively at JPL. Remember that this was the same trick used successfully by the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997. Some improvements have been made, but it's the same idea.
The fact that it happened to land right-side-up just means that it will take less time, and probably use less power, to unwrap everything, and also that the overall chance of success is slightly higher just because there's one less thing to worry about going wrong.
My opinion of Slashdot's user community, on the other hand, has gone down considerably after reading the sour bitch-fest that some people have been posting.
It shouldn't. A few hours later, and all of the bitching has been modded down. A few legitimate questions and concerns about Wikipedia remain, most with great responses, and all of the naive or ignorant posts are fading into the background.
Don't judge the "Slashdot User Community" by the idiots who shout insensitive, ignorant comments. Judge it by the end result - the overall picture of the story you get when you browse nested comments with a threshold of +3, for example.
Then again, Slashdot does have its quirks. I could have given myself an immediate '+5, Funny' simply by responding to your post with "You're new around here, aren't you?"
I can't figure out the pricing in that review anyway, I just went to the xicomputer.com website and configured the same system and came up with $3236, not $4107. I'm not sure if I missed an option or something, but maybe they just bought their system a long time ago before prices dropped (maybe before AMD released the Opteron 248, the 246 which was tested isn't even their fastest chip anymore.
You're definitely missing something. I just went to xicomputer.com and configured the same system for $3868 (or $4066 with the Opteron 248's instead of the 246's). The price may have dropped since the review (from $4107 to $3868), but $3236 is way too low for that box!
Did you forget the ATI RADEON 9800 PRO? Or Windows XP Pro? Or the 250 GB HD? Or the dual processors?
I find this a bit sad. My first computer had 1k of RAM and was a 4 Megahertz Z80 processor. With this I learned to program in basic, play games, do word puzzles to improve spelling and maths.
Why should a 166MHz machine that would have been some futuristic dream to me be any less use to kids today?
Part of it is just the resources available. Back when your 166MHz machine was a futurustic dream, all of the software you could buy in a computer store would run on it, you could buy accessories and replacement parts for it, etc.
Keep in mind that kids are exposed to lots of electronics with about that amount of computing power - in game boys, cell phones, graphing calculators, etc.
You could give your old systems away to schools and such. The schools with younger kids (up to the age of 10-12) are still able to do a lot of things with older systems, like grammar and mathematics educational games, requiring not more than MS-DOS. Of course there are enough schools with a rather big IT budget, but there also enough school who have to do it with less, is my experience. And they will really be glad with your donations.
Please don't donate very old hardware to schools. Many schools have policies that require them to accept donations like this, and others might accept the computers because they don't realize how old and worthless they are (remember, the article mentioned "older than a Pentium-166").
All you're doing is shifting the disposal cost to the school, which may end up costing them more than the value of the computer itself.
Keep in mind that schools typically do not have a staff of IT people to repair computers, install software, train teachers, etc. I wouldn't argue if you wanted to take an old but perfectly working computer, load it up with educational software appropriate for a particular grade level, donate it to a specific teacher who's interested, and train him/her on how to use it. But my guess is that's not what you had in mind.
Just reading their questions makes it abundantly clear to me that they don't understand the potential of Linux:
2.What best describes your involvment with Linux?
Hobbyist End user Informal team computer expert Front lines IT support IT administrator Developer of internally used applications Developer of applications for sale IT manager Consultant
I'm focusing in particular on "Developer of internally used applications" vs "Developer of applications for sale". In Microsoft's world, those are the only two alternatives. In the world of open-source, there's a wonderfully happy medium in-between. What about the growing group of developers whose job is to take existing open-source software, improve it for internal use, then release it back to the community (like RedHat, Apple, AOL, RealNetworks, NASA, etc.)? What about developers who write free, open-source software to work with the hardware that their company produces (like Myricom)?
In Microsoft's world, the only reasons to develop software are for your own personal needs, or to sell to make a profit.
The reasons are pretty straightforward -- people who are well off and have high-end salaried jobs are more likely to be able to get past registration barriers and to take time off from their weekday jobs (which are salaried, not hourly) to vote. By comparison, the less well-off are typically less educated and less likely to be able to take time to vote without a financial hit.
Now, the interesting thing about all of this analysis is that it's kind of backwards, because, IIRC, the more education and (to a point) income someone has, the less likely they are to vote conservative, and vice versa.
Huh? What are you talking about? Most people I know with high income vote conservative, because they perceive it as lowering their taxes and eliminating social services that they'd never use anyway. Sad but true.
Let's not forget advertising; The iTMS is loaded with ads for new songs/artists, and I'm sure the labels pay a generous kickback for time in the spotlight. Couple that with the $0.35 or so that Apple keeps per track ($0.65 goes to the label) and it's really not too bad a deal. As long as they stay above cost, it's just that much more incentive to snag an iPod.
At one point Apple said that it would not accept advertising dollars to promote certain songs; all of their 'picks' are from their own editors or celebrity playlists. All ads are for related products (like iPods). I wonder how long this will stay true...
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument is no more credible than the curmudgeons who said that an electric piano sounds so unlike a real piano that it's a total waste, and nobody would ever perform a legitimate creative work using one.
Think "new tools at an artist's disposal", and "dawn of a new type of digital instrument" instead.
Yeah, except that as others have already pointed out, this is far from the first vocal synthesizer. It's at best an incremental improvement over the previous successes.
Besides VocalWriter, which has been around since 1997 (and hasn't been updated in that time, unfortunately), I'm not aware of any other easy-to-use singing synthesizers that are aimed at the average user or even average musician. But just about every speech synthesizer out there has been hacked to sing, e.g. Apple's Macintalk or Festival's
Flinger.
Yamaha's Vocaloid might sound better than those, but it's not about to fool anyone paying attention. Nor is it likely to be used as a musical instrument the way other synthesizers are. Why? Because there's no way to dynamically control what it says the way you can dynamically control a keyboard synthesizer or any other musical instrument, whether acoustic or electronic.
Thus the only way it could be used is in a recording studio, where it would have to be programmed carefully to "sing" a particular song.
Sorry about the rant. I love new technology, I just hate it when people claim things are the first ever or revolutionary when they're really just incremental improvements.
Disclaimer: I work at JPL, but not on the Mars rovers...
Why don't they automate the mission control tech a bit more...
General observation about JPL and NASA: they're slow to adopt new technology. This is a good thing. They tend to wait until a particular technology is very mature and clearly useful before adopting it in a mission-critical environment. Individual scientists and engineers are welcome to experiment with all sorts of cutting-edge tools for number crunching, visualization, simulations, etc. - and they do - but mission-critical technology is kept deliberately as simple as possible.
(a) voice comm may still be useful, but why not use IM for a group of people to "chat." Is the voice feed for the media?
Honestly I think that voice communication is far more efficient - most people can talk faster than they can type, and when you know the other person you gain more information from their tone of voice, etc.
(b) why not "follow the procedure" with some online, multi-user app that checks off the steps done on some browser sort of app? The engineering specs have to be changing up to the last minute; why commit to paper something that becomes obsolete once you press Print?
I can think of many reasons:
1. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): If you relied on software to make sure you were following the procedures, that software now becomes mission-critical. The software has to be totally foolproof. It takes about 10x as much effort to write robust, clean, documented, verified code as it does to toss off a quick web app.
2. An online form or "procedure wizard" couldn't possibly be smart enough to anticipate any possible deviation from the rules that might be necessary.
3. With rules printed on paper, you can spread them all out in front of you. You can circle things with a pencil. You can make corrections or notes.
4. You don't have to waste valuable computer screen real-estate. Even though many of the mission people have 2 or 3 monitors, they want every last pixel displaying interactive real-time information, not opened to a web browser displaying a list of rules.
I don't know about any of you, but "Froogle" hasn't impressed me yet. I am a frequent user of pricewatch and techbargains, and Froogle hasn't even come close to matching these.
That's not what Froogle is for. When you know exactly what you want, and want the best possible price, sites like pricewatch, techbargains, mysimon, epinions, etc. are great for this. When you don't know exactly what you want, or don't know what it's called, or don't know what category it would be in, Froogle is excellent.
Indeed, I just got back from a trip to London where my parents had bought a 5 megapixel camera. The images looked fine on a computer, but I just had 4x6 prints made, and they look like complete ass.
Something's wrong with your software or your printer.
300 dpi of full-color is quite high resolution. For a 4x6 image at 300 dpi, you only need a 1200x1600 digital image, or about 2 megapixels. Your 5 megapixel camera has more than enough resolution for a high-quality 4x6 print.
Want digital photos to just work? Get a Mac.
I do know one way in which WMA is superior to both MP3 and AAC. There's support for lossless compression in WMA.
What good is a "lossless" format if the file format is closed and not supported on a significant fraction of systems and devices?
SCO bills NASA! (suspects Linux installed on Mars Rover)
The Mars Rovers run VxWorks, though there is heavy use of Linux elsewhere at NASA. There have been a couple of very preliminary studies of the possible use of real-time Java on Linux for future rovers and other spacecraft.
1. Manned space flight will be NASAs only priority. Almost all non-manned projects will done away with or rolled into the manned program if appropriate.
Oh God, that would be so sad. I'm all in favor of manned flights, but it would be silly to cancel unmanned exploration in order to make that happen. The unmanned spacecraft are the ones that allow us to learn all about the other planets and moons before we risk human lives. Besides, it's ridiculously cheaper - easily 10 unmanned flights for the price of one manned, if not even more.
Disclaimer: I work at JPL, the NASA center whose primary mission is the robotic exploration of the solar system. If all of NASA's unmanned programs were cancelled, a good fraction of the 5,000 people at JPL would either be out of a job, or at best would get transferred to a manned mission, giving up on years of dedication and experience.
Whether it's something obvious like the Pentium off by 1+1=1.9999943 error
The Pentium math bug was with division, not addition, and it only occurred in very specific circumstances. So while it supports your general point that complicated systems are more difficult to debug, that wasn't a very good example of an "obvious" bug. Careless, yes.
One thing that was good for the industry was to move away from the complex instruction set (CISC) towards a reduced set of instructions (RISC), and we have seen the speed improvements as well as a general reduction in hardware bugs since that time.
You do realize that Intel x86 processors are still CISC, right? (OK, actually internally they do execute things very much like a RISC chip, but the instruction set is still CISC, and modern x86 processors are certainly not any _simpler_ for having some RISC-like elements to them.
Besides, RISC chips don't actually have fewer instructions. Most of them these days have more. The difference between CISC and RISC is that RISC chips don't have certain complicated, slow instructions, but rather break these up into smaller pieces. For example, CISC processors usually have an instruction to move memory-to-memory while RISC only moves memory-to-register and register-to-memory. Also, CISC processors often have a division instruction while many RISC processors instead just have a multiplicitive inverse instruction (so to compute a/b you instead compute a*inv(b)).
But to add Hyperthreading, an untested and unproven technology which can guarantee no more than a 12% speed improvement, is folly. Better to amp the CPU clock and deal with a known like heat than to risk your company's livelihood on letting the CPU figure out which thread is which. That is something an OS is much more reliable in handling.
Now that's just ridiculous. Hyperthreading is not untested or unproven. Similar ideas have been discussed in academic papers for years; Intel was just the first to put it into a modern CPU. It's hardly untested, either - Intel started seeding the first Hyperthreading-capable processors what, two years ago now? At that point I wouldn't have suggested running a mission-critical application on a machine with Hyperthreading enabled, but now? You'd be crazy not to if it actually speeds up the application you need to run.
The reality is that in order to advance the speed of computer processors, it's necessary to make them more complicated.
I think if you spoke to any linguistics major, they would disagree. If you are interested in structures in human languages, a good place to start is with any of Chomsky's linguistics work, because he studied how words combine into phrases and phrases into sentences (think of it as a tree).
Learning about Linguistics by starting with Chomsky is kind of like studying Evolution by reading Lamarck. Virtually all modern linguists acknowledge that Chomsky was pretty much dead wrong. The main problem was that Chomsky was not fluent in any language other than English, and he knew nothing at all about some of the more unusual languages of the world.
To pick a specific example, read a little bit about Inuit (Eskimo) - that should convince you that not only do some languages not share our concepts of noun phrases and verb phrases, but that languages don't even have to have the same concept of a word that we do.
A "good" college is one that has a reputation; it's all a huge system for keeping money in the hands of the wealthy and putting the poor on the streets where they belong. The classes that you take at X Community College will be no worse than those at Princeton.
The material in the classes will be pretty similar, especially for your first 2 years in college, but there's a huge difference between your local community college and a school with a good reputation: your classmates. When you go to a good school, your classmates will tend to be more bright, motivated to do well, and ambitious to succeed in life after college. You'll learn at least as much from your fellow classmates as you will from professors, and many of your friends will end up doing great things. Your fellow alums will help you find jobs for the rest of your life.
If you're self-motivated, you can get an excellent education at a community college and then a cheap 4-year school, and the degree is worth almost as much. In fact, the degree is worth the same as from the good school after you've been out of school for 5 years because by that point your work experience counts more than your education.
So it depends on what you want. If you want to be intellectually challenged, both in and out of the classroom, and if you're ambitious with your life plans after college, you should definitely consider going to a "good" school. Not because they'll teach you more. But because everyone else who's ambitious and smart will be there, too.
I've been mirroring all of the official images from SpaceFlightNow.com and www.jpl.nasa.gov plus some screenshots from the NASA TV stream and the Planetary Society stream:
http://spaghetticode.org/spirit/
Click here for an official images! I've mirrored it in my directory too...the official one is called firstimage1.jpg, but it's obvious because it's much higher-quality than the screenshot I grabbed earlier...
This is ridiculously low-quality, but here's a screenshot of RealPlayer's stream of NASA TV from a few minutes ago. I'll post more pictures if I get anything good, but probably the real, high-quality images will be online within the hour. The first image here is of one of the mission control computer screens showing the images downloaded, including one image of the rover itself.
Perhaps it's a sign we'll get back some of the 2/3 cut in spending Clinton did. Since that cut we've lost several lives & probes. You can't do rocket science on entry lvl I.T. salaries.
It's also a good sign that putting more spending in the program by Bush actually helped.
I hate to break it to you, but the Mars Exploration Rover budget was set years ago, long before Bush took office. It's definitely part of the "better, faster, cheaper" program, with a budget of well under a billion dollars. There's virtually nothing Bush could have done - throwing more money at it couldn't have increased the chance of success, and there would have been no way to take money away without basically cancelling the whole mission. Maybe sending one rover instead of two, but that wouldn't have saved much except the fuel.
The total daily data for a single Martian day, direct-to-Earth and orbiter relay potential combined, is on the order of 17MB. The total data for the entire mission is on the order of 1,550MB.
Note that with multiple cameras at 1024x1024 resolution, the Mars Exploration Rovers could easily send quite a bit more information than that if the bandwith was available. I work in the Machine Learning Systems group at JPL, and one of our goals is to eventually put some artificial intelligence software onto a future Mars rover so that it can take far more pictures than could ever be transmitted, analyze them onboard, and send only the most interesting ones back. It's very tricky to pin down exactly what makes one image more interesting than another, of course, so that's the real challenge...
I was curious about the base petal down stop - was there any kind of design (like weighting) to "encourage" it to stop that way, or was it basically like rolling a die and seeing where it landed?
Disclaimer: I work at JPL, but not on the Mars Exploration Rovers.
From what I understand, it's basically like rolling a die - there may be a slightly higher probability of landing on some of the sides due to weight distribution, but not enough that anyone was counting on it landing base petal down.
With any of the other three orientations, it wouldn't have been a problem - by deflating the airbags in just the right order and using other devices to reorient it, it's designed to end up right-side-up eventually. All of the possible scenarios were simulated and tested extensively at JPL. Remember that this was the same trick used successfully by the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997. Some improvements have been made, but it's the same idea.
The fact that it happened to land right-side-up just means that it will take less time, and probably use less power, to unwrap everything, and also that the overall chance of success is slightly higher just because there's one less thing to worry about going wrong.
My opinion of Slashdot's user community, on the other hand, has gone down considerably after reading the sour bitch-fest that some people have been posting.
It shouldn't. A few hours later, and all of the bitching has been modded down. A few legitimate questions and concerns about Wikipedia remain, most with great responses, and all of the naive or ignorant posts are fading into the background.
Don't judge the "Slashdot User Community" by the idiots who shout insensitive, ignorant comments. Judge it by the end result - the overall picture of the story you get when you browse nested comments with a threshold of +3, for example.
Then again, Slashdot does have its quirks. I could have given myself an immediate '+5, Funny' simply by responding to your post with "You're new around here, aren't you?"
I can't figure out the pricing in that review anyway, I just went to the xicomputer.com website and configured the same system and came up with $3236, not $4107. I'm not sure if I missed an option or something, but maybe they just bought their system a long time ago before prices dropped (maybe before AMD released the Opteron 248, the 246 which was tested isn't even their fastest chip anymore.
You're definitely missing something. I just went to xicomputer.com and configured the same system for $3868 (or $4066 with the Opteron 248's instead of the 246's). The price may have dropped since the review (from $4107 to $3868), but $3236 is way too low for that box!
Did you forget the ATI RADEON 9800 PRO? Or Windows XP Pro? Or the 250 GB HD? Or the dual processors?
I find this a bit sad. My first computer had 1k of RAM and was a 4 Megahertz Z80 processor. With this I learned to program in basic, play games, do word puzzles to improve spelling and maths.
Why should a 166MHz machine that would have been some futuristic dream to me be any less use to kids today?
Part of it is just the resources available. Back when your 166MHz machine was a futurustic dream, all of the software you could buy in a computer store would run on it, you could buy accessories and replacement parts for it, etc.
Keep in mind that kids are exposed to lots of electronics with about that amount of computing power - in game boys, cell phones, graphing calculators, etc.
You could give your old systems away to schools and such. The schools with younger kids (up to the age of 10-12) are still able to do a lot of things with older systems, like grammar and mathematics educational games, requiring not more than MS-DOS. Of course there are enough schools with a rather big IT budget, but there also enough school who have to do it with less, is my experience. And they will really be glad with your donations.
Please don't donate very old hardware to schools. Many schools have policies that require them to accept donations like this, and others might accept the computers because they don't realize how old and worthless they are (remember, the article mentioned "older than a Pentium-166").
All you're doing is shifting the disposal cost to the school, which may end up costing them more than the value of the computer itself.
Keep in mind that schools typically do not have a staff of IT people to repair computers, install software, train teachers, etc. I wouldn't argue if you wanted to take an old but perfectly working computer, load it up with educational software appropriate for a particular grade level, donate it to a specific teacher who's interested, and train him/her on how to use it. But my guess is that's not what you had in mind.
return is not a function. HTH.
The code still compiles and does what you'd expect it does. HTH.
Just reading their questions makes it abundantly clear to me that they don't understand the potential of Linux:
2.What best describes your involvment with Linux?
Hobbyist
End user
Informal team computer expert
Front lines IT support
IT administrator
Developer of internally used applications
Developer of applications for sale
IT manager
Consultant
I'm focusing in particular on "Developer of internally used applications" vs "Developer of applications for sale". In Microsoft's world, those are the only two alternatives. In the world of open-source, there's a wonderfully happy medium in-between. What about the growing group of developers whose job is to take existing open-source software, improve it for internal use, then release it back to the community (like RedHat, Apple, AOL, RealNetworks, NASA, etc.)? What about developers who write free, open-source software to work with the hardware that their company produces (like Myricom)?
In Microsoft's world, the only reasons to develop software are for your own personal needs, or to sell to make a profit.
FireWire - 400Mb/s
USB 2.0 - 480Mb/s
I guess this means FireWire is really really slow.
The technologies are completely different. In real-world usage, FireWire is significantly faster than USB 2.0.
- Dominic
The reasons are pretty straightforward -- people who are well off and have high-end salaried jobs are more likely to be able to get past registration barriers and to take time off from their weekday jobs (which are salaried, not hourly) to vote. By comparison, the less well-off are typically less educated and less likely to be able to take time to vote without a financial hit.
Now, the interesting thing about all of this analysis is that it's kind of backwards, because, IIRC, the more education and (to a point) income someone has, the less likely they are to vote conservative, and vice versa.
Huh? What are you talking about? Most people I know with high income vote conservative, because they perceive it as lowering their taxes and eliminating social services that they'd never use anyway. Sad but true.
Let's not forget advertising; The iTMS is loaded with ads for new songs/artists, and I'm sure the labels pay a generous kickback for time in the spotlight. Couple that with the $0.35 or so that Apple keeps per track ($0.65 goes to the label) and it's really not too bad a deal. As long as they stay above cost, it's just that much more incentive to snag an iPod.
At one point Apple said that it would not accept advertising dollars to promote certain songs; all of their 'picks' are from their own editors or celebrity playlists. All ads are for related products (like iPods). I wonder how long this will stay true...