Hubble releases public images, but much of the research is just that - research - done by labs who are trying to maintain the integrity and proprietary nature of their work. Hubble data is supposed to go to the researcher first and the public second. IIRC it's a default six month delay unless overridden by the lab collecting the data. It's not censorship so much as embargo, and it's really no different from what any researcher does in order to not be scooped on the research they're doing.
What with the High Def photography standards and all...
Definitions aside, you'd think the HD Photo site could at least show some examples, blowups of a given resolution with different codecs and graphs of the files size implications so we could be interested in using the standard.
Instead, one dry page. And seamonkey at that: it starts out by saying it's new, ends by saying it's really just the new name for wmphoto and in between claims "more than twice the quality of jpeg". Huh? Are they using smaller pixels? Will my quality slider in Photoshop now go to 24?
With implementation and marketing like this, you can see why the Zune will soon be the AMC Pacer of gadgets.
They need to stick to incremental moves for the products that already have users by the neck.
As noted on another thread, I spent a week running my iBook G4 (HD died...) with an Ubuntu LiveCD. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, flash drive. It did 90% of what I needed to get my job and life done, and with less speed bumps than swapping over to a standard windows XP Pro for the subsequent week the machine was in the shop. Very impressive.
Vista? (Insert Sideshow Bob shudder here)
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
I'm decompressing from a week with XP alone. My iBook's hard drive gradually went kaput. While arranging the repair, I ran an Ubuntu LiveCD on it and a flash drive. Wow, even when not in a bind.
While it was on its round trip to Apple, I had to make do with another portable. Toshiba Portege 2000, 512, XP Pro - should be decent, so here goes:
Spend an entire afternoon getting it to do what I need, which is pretty modest: - Install a real browser (fFox) and a real mail app (tBird), - and office (OOo), iTunes and Picasa. - Protect it from the hordes (Grisoft). - Add a few conveniences and an actual calculator from this century (Yahoo Widgets) - Print on the three printers I use at work and home (2 trips to HP, one to Canon). Are we there yet? Nope: - Dial down XP so it performs faster than my other possible backup, my trusty PowerBook 1400/266 running OS9.
For a week I felt like Ginger Rogers - doing everything backwards in high heels. The iBook is back, and once again I feel like Fred Astaire.
10 minutes in the comfy chair outside the Apple store and I had user, web, mail & docs back in play thanks to.mac Another 20 minutes back in the office, and music/photos/movies were restored from an external drive. Half a day to get the XP usable, half an hour for the Mac.
My new found order of preference for an out of the box OS? OSX, Ubuntu and a distant third, XP Pro. I'm not sure I'm up to wrestling with Vista.
It was ahead of its time, as were the General Magic devices, but they were novel and were still in the nether land for size. GM also had very decent phone integration near the end - I spent a two week vacation without any computer use, using only their voice email (TTS from them to you, WAV voice messages from you to them). I have three Palms in a drawer somewhere, none of which do significantly enough more than my phone to carry yet another thing. I routinely troop out my old Newton and Magic Link for classes on technology, and have a hard time prying them out of the students' hands, whereas they look at the palm, shrug a bit of indifferent recognition, and move on. I dare say the latest iteration of a Newton OS in a blackberry-sized case would still have some traction. Unfortunately that traction might be under the wheels of the cell/smartphone bus.
(For example - if you wear a spacesuit designed for the Moon on Mars, you'll die. Period. The two suits, among many other things, require very different insulation, joint design, and cooling methods.)
What? Let's see some backup on this claim. They use both suits on the earth in testing, so I'd have to see some hard info. You also might want to ring up NASA and tell them their people are apparently spouting nonsense that's 180 degrees from what you believe is needed.
As the folks at Goddard expained it during the Moon Math student competition, "When you go camping, isn't it a good idea to try setting up the campsite in your backyard first, 600 inches away, so you can try out everything, or run back in the house if you forgot your flashlight, make sure you remember to bring everything, and *THEN* go camping for real to somewhere 600 miles away?"
That's a largely non-obvious reason for using the same basic vehicle for both mission sets.
But you need to read up on the reality of fixing things to, from and on orbit and beyond - and the engineering that goes into a lot of it. Chariots for Apollo comes to mind, most of what happened on certain Gemini flights, lots of Skylab, and the ups and downs of cold and hot soaks to make things behave. So how do you make sure the radioactive thermocouple generators on board Galileo don't get cracked in manufacturing? They're plutonium ceramic encased in iridium - good luck x-raying that for defects.
Check out how bad the CT State police got the past few years. Assault, battery, sexual assault, fraud, murder, larceny, DUI. And not just the isloated anecdotal case involving someone with an axe to grind. 4 DUIs and one guy's still on the force. They've beaten their girlfriends, and two murder+suicides by CSP, one killed his civilian wife, the other his local PD girlfriend. And no one saw it coming or stepped into admittedly bizarre behavior. They had to call in the IAD department of the New York State Police to untangle this one. The current explanation seems to be that there are 99 ways the CSP can get in trouble, and that's too confusing, they n eed it down to 21. I am not making this up. And the higher-ups looked at each incident and did nothing to stop or prosecute these. Go back two decades til you find the part where one of the finest lawyers (yes, I'm serious) to ever practice law was in charge of straightening out the CSP as the Chief State's Attorney, and they made him go away in a very public and very ugly fashion.
"The size and age of the universe suggest..." which is french for "I kinda think.." and actually doing the math. I would venture that Fermi was really trying to get people to think about it, rather than assume rigor on his assumptions. If he's just jousting, or we're stumped on how to look, or the physical limits are more real than certain TV series would suggest, there's no paradox.
I had a student who log ago built his own Apple II replica - used the ROMs from a real one and got it working. Night before the science fair he decided he needed a quick disconnect for the cassette interface instead of a permanent line. He figured the cheapest easiest solution on his bench was the lightweight AC extension cord, cut the middle and soldered the bare ends to the computer board and the cassette innards, leaving the plug/receptacle in the middle. Guess which end was on the computer side? Guess what the first science fair judge did when he saw a dangling mains cord?
Michael is a gifted writer. However this needs to be see in a light that includes :
(1) he has a new book out about it, so this is prolly a junket piece (2) he wrote "State of Fear" as a novel and further believes it reflects a sensible attitude (3) he wrote this: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/features/spoonbendi ng.html and believes it.
Interestingly according to WHO, there were 4000+ SARS cases, 252 died, 2000+ recovered, apparently ~1500 fell off the planet.
It's not like they're not on the net while at work, and this certainly won't affect any manual laborers. And evenings are pretty much the sandbox for this, with little effect.
Calm down. It was a joke. Dude, you have to check out the "funny" mods. Have you noticed they contain humor?
With a kernel of truth - this would in essence be the easiest way to get the largest number of high quality MP3s on the sharing networks, and then if all the common/. assumptions about DRM being evil and no one wanting to pay Apple money for music and "information wants to be free ". then good luck selling those files again.
Slashdot Mirror
Hubble releases public images, but much of the research is just that - research - done by labs who are trying to maintain the integrity and proprietary nature of their work. Hubble data is supposed to go to the researcher first and the public second. IIRC it's a default six month delay unless overridden by the lab collecting the data. It's not censorship so much as embargo, and it's really no different from what any researcher does in order to not be scooped on the research they're doing.
What with the High Def photography standards and all...
Definitions aside, you'd think the HD Photo site could at least show some examples, blowups of a given resolution with different codecs and graphs of the files size implications so we could be interested in using the standard.
Instead, one dry page. And seamonkey at that: it starts out by saying it's new, ends by saying it's really just the new name for wmphoto and in between claims "more than twice the quality of jpeg". Huh? Are they using smaller pixels? Will my quality slider in Photoshop now go to 24?
With implementation and marketing like this, you can see why the Zune will soon be the AMC Pacer of gadgets.
They need to stick to incremental moves for the products that already have users by the neck.
There. All better.
"We did not get pubic lice from other hominids. We got them from the ancestors of gorillas."
#10. Speak for yourself, professor.
#9. "coyote-ugly", move over...
#8. Shhh... Hear that? I think Dave Attell's head just exploded.
#7. Why is the waiting room empty? All I said was we...
#6. "Scratch-a while you can, monkey-boy!"
#5. Next on Springer...
#4. Time to bring the crab-infested brass monkeys in off the back porch, Radar.
#3. Yes, you heard me right, I need to get into those crabs' genes.
#2. Let's say we ask Jocelyn Elders to weigh in on this one.
and #1... Well I'll be a monkey's uncle, and a mighty itchy one at that.
(N.B., I know gorillas are apes not monkeys, so save the posting effort, it's just a freaking joke...)
We have Chloe O'Brian and they don't.
With the earlier owners standing at the back of the auction screaming "THIS IS NOT THE CLOAK YOU'RE LOOKING FOR!!!"
So you mean we probably shouldn't have carved *all* our names in the *same* RTG boom with the dremel?
We weren't supposed to do that?
As noted on another thread, I spent a week running my iBook G4 (HD died...) with an Ubuntu LiveCD. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, flash drive. It did 90% of what I needed to get my job and life done, and with less speed bumps than swapping over to a standard windows XP Pro for the subsequent week the machine was in the shop. Very impressive.
I'm decompressing from a week with XP alone.
.mac
My iBook's hard drive gradually went kaput.
While arranging the repair, I ran an Ubuntu LiveCD on it and a flash drive.
Wow, even when not in a bind.
While it was on its round trip to Apple, I had to make do with another portable.
Toshiba Portege 2000, 512, XP Pro - should be decent, so here goes:
Spend an entire afternoon getting it to do what I need, which is pretty modest:
- Install a real browser (fFox) and a real mail app (tBird),
- and office (OOo), iTunes and Picasa.
- Protect it from the hordes (Grisoft).
- Add a few conveniences and an actual calculator from this century (Yahoo Widgets)
- Print on the three printers I use at work and home (2 trips to HP, one to Canon).
Are we there yet? Nope:
- Dial down XP so it performs faster than my other possible backup, my trusty PowerBook 1400/266 running OS9.
For a week I felt like Ginger Rogers - doing everything backwards in high heels.
The iBook is back, and once again I feel like Fred Astaire.
10 minutes in the comfy chair outside the Apple store and I had user, web, mail & docs back in play thanks to
Another 20 minutes back in the office, and music/photos/movies were restored from an external drive.
Half a day to get the XP usable, half an hour for the Mac.
My new found order of preference for an out of the box OS?
OSX, Ubuntu and a distant third, XP Pro.
I'm not sure I'm up to wrestling with Vista.
It was ahead of its time, as were the General Magic devices, but they were novel and were still in the nether land for size.
GM also had very decent phone integration near the end - I spent a two week vacation without any computer use, using only their voice email (TTS from them to you, WAV voice messages from you to them).
I have three Palms in a drawer somewhere, none of which do significantly enough more than my phone to carry yet another thing.
I routinely troop out my old Newton and Magic Link for classes on technology, and have a hard time prying them out of the students' hands, whereas they look at the palm, shrug a bit of indifferent recognition, and move on.
I dare say the latest iteration of a Newton OS in a blackberry-sized case would still have some traction.
Unfortunately that traction might be under the wheels of the cell/smartphone bus.
See? Wasn't that easy?
(For example - if you wear a spacesuit designed for the Moon on Mars, you'll die. Period. The two suits, among many other things, require very different insulation, joint design, and cooling methods.)
What? Let's see some backup on this claim. They use both suits on the earth in testing, so I'd have to see some hard info. You also might want to ring up NASA and tell them their people are apparently spouting nonsense that's 180 degrees from what you believe is needed.
As the folks at Goddard expained it during the Moon Math student competition, "When you go camping, isn't it a good idea to try setting up the campsite in your backyard first, 600 inches away, so you can try out everything, or run back in the house if you forgot your flashlight, make sure you remember to bring everything, and *THEN* go camping for real to somewhere 600 miles away?"
That's a largely non-obvious reason for using the same basic vehicle for both mission sets.
But you need to read up on the reality of fixing things to, from and on orbit and beyond - and the engineering that goes into a lot of it. Chariots for Apollo comes to mind, most of what happened on certain Gemini flights, lots of Skylab, and the ups and downs of cold and hot soaks to make things behave. So how do you make sure the radioactive thermocouple generators on board Galileo don't get cracked in manufacturing? They're plutonium ceramic encased in iridium - good luck x-raying that for defects.
Won't this just be recordings of Gordon Bell recording Gordon Bell?
...only outlaws will have incandescent bulbs.
Why not just tax the daylight - er - well, you know - out of them?
Check out how bad the CT State police got the past few years. Assault, battery, sexual assault, fraud, murder, larceny, DUI. And not just the isloated anecdotal case involving someone with an axe to grind. 4 DUIs and one guy's still on the force. They've beaten their girlfriends, and two murder+suicides by CSP, one killed his civilian wife, the other his local PD girlfriend. And no one saw it coming or stepped into admittedly bizarre behavior. They had to call in the IAD department of the New York State Police to untangle this one. The current explanation seems to be that there are 99 ways the CSP can get in trouble, and that's too confusing, they n eed it down to 21. I am not making this up. And the higher-ups looked at each incident and did nothing to stop or prosecute these. Go back two decades til you find the part where one of the finest lawyers (yes, I'm serious) to ever practice law was in charge of straightening out the CSP as the Chief State's Attorney, and they made him go away in a very public and very ugly fashion.
"The size and age of the universe suggest..." which is french for "I kinda think.." and actually doing the math.
I would venture that Fermi was really trying to get people to think about it, rather than assume rigor on his assumptions.
If he's just jousting, or we're stumped on how to look, or the physical limits are more real than certain TV series would suggest, there's no paradox.
make that "Thunn-nunnn-nuhnn-nuhhnn-nuhnn.." sound?
I had a student who log ago built his own Apple II replica - used the ROMs from a real one and got it working.
Night before the science fair he decided he needed a quick disconnect for the cassette interface instead of a permanent line. He figured the cheapest easiest solution on his bench was the lightweight AC extension cord, cut the middle and soldered the bare ends to the computer board and the cassette innards, leaving the plug/receptacle in the middle.
Guess which end was on the computer side? Guess what the first science fair judge did when he saw a dangling mains cord?
.. to title this story "Brussels Sprouts Stink"
Michael is a gifted writer. However this needs to be see in a light that includes :
i ng.html and believes it.
(1) he has a new book out about it, so this is prolly a junket piece
(2) he wrote "State of Fear" as a novel and further believes it reflects a sensible attitude
(3) he wrote this: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/features/spoonbend
Interestingly according to WHO, there were 4000+ SARS cases, 252 died, 2000+ recovered, apparently ~1500 fell off the planet.
It's not like they're not on the net while at work, and this certainly won't affect any manual laborers.
And evenings are pretty much the sandbox for this, with little effect.
Calm down. It was a joke. Dude, you have to check out the "funny" mods. Have you noticed they contain humor?
/. assumptions about DRM being evil and no one wanting to pay Apple money for music and "information wants to be free ". then good luck selling those files again.
With a kernel of truth - this would in essence be the easiest way to get the largest number of high quality MP3s on the sharing networks, and then if all the common
Rrrrrrright.
On a Wal-Mart $300 PC?
OSX running full-blown on a 2GHz Celeron in 256MB.
Oh, the humanity.
"My father sold his entire music collection to the public in MP3 form without Digital Rights Management restrictions... ONCE."