We got one of the earlier Onyx machines (creatively named onyx.astro.wisc.edu) back in 1993. It was pretty novel with its dual processors and fast OpenGL hardware. When some SGI programmers ported Doom (and later Quake) to the MIPS chip, some of us grad students used to play on the dept SGI boxes, including that dorm-fridge-sized machine. But for all its lofty framerate scores, our Onyx had no sound, so the poor sucker sitting at that terminal often got fragged with no warning.
But alas, the proprietary $15,000 memory module fried itself after the warranty expired and the machine was sold (for parts, I guess). No heated footstools in our computer room any more...
I think the key solution to these problems is to have a voice-augmented GUI. That is, you can do anything with keyboard and mouse, but you can shortcut to some tasks by a verbal command. I envision that you would do most of your office work silently, but you might so the occasional one of the following:
"Lockscreen" as you walk away from your cube
"Mute" to silence your music when a colleague stops by to talk
"Raise" to bring a window to the front without moving your hands from the keyboard
"Print" when you're to lazy to type CTRL-P
All of these are low-mental-energy ways of doing things you can already do with a normal GUI. Just like the mouse simplified some aspects of the pure-CLI interface (think copy-and-paste), even sparse voice input can improve the current state of GUIs.
My experience with voice systems is pure hobby and very rudimentary, but I think I've read that simple keyword-driven voice systems are MUCH simpler free-dictation systems needed for, say, word processing via spoken word, so the examples above should be feasible now.
I think the "quick shortcuts" paradigm of speech in UI is vastly underestimated. For example, think about how much mental energy/concentration it would save to be able to just say
"Play U2"
instead of:
find MP3 player icon, deiconize, click load, click U2 playlist, click OK, click play, iconize, put mouse back in editor window, recommence hacking
I think the quick verbal shortcut causes a much smaller disruption of concentration and saves a tone of screen real estate. For those of us insane people who have 6-7 emacs windows, 2-3 netscape windows and 3-4 xterms going on 4 virtual desks, this would be a HUGE benefit.
I can't tell you how much mental energy I have saved since I got a box with external volume control instead of a GUI volume tool. I think a voice interface would help in similar ways.
So, I think voice-assisted GUIs would be great, accelerating the experience just like keyboard shortcuts help keep experienced users sane today.
This is something I've been looking forward to for a while. In my astronomy research, I usually work with images from digital cameras with 2048x2048 pixel resolution. Even with my 1280x1024 monitor, I either have to shrink the image (losing detail) or do a lot of panning to see the whole thing. A monitor more closely matched to the image size would help.
As consumer digital cameras approach 2048x2048 resolution, I'm sure graphic artists will start to want high-end monitors like this one, too.
However current top-end astronomy CCDs are using chips of up to 4096x4096 pixels and new cameras are using arrays of 2-16 of these large format chips. This spring I worked on some data from an 8192x8192 mosaic imager and, boy, was it hard to work with images shrunk by a factor of 8x8 to make them fit on my current-generation screen!
is this unmanned? russia is the leader in unmanned spaceflight methinks.
Yes, it is unmanned for now, but it is intended to support people later. No, Russia is more often considered the leader in manned spaceflight, with their extensive experience with Mir. The longest a person had remained in space in a NASA spacecraft in the last two decades is about 2 weeks, compared to Mir which was continuously occupied for about 10 years.
It's not exactly charity, but the most fulfilling computer-related not-for-profit work I've done is to create a simple web page on stars and constellations. It started as a hobby, but it turned into a service when I put my email address on the page. For a while I was answering up to 50 email questions per week, mainly from students and curious adults. It had some ego-boo too (I was referenced in a textbook, and my pages are often linked from Astro Pic of the Day) but the best part is the gratitude I get from people whose questions I answered.
Lately, I've had to remove my email address from the page while I am finishing up my thesis (and to avoid spam), but I hope to get back to it soon.
If you have a particular area of knowledge or passion, share it with others online. It's rewarding in both you and your readers. A particular area that seems to be in BIG demand is online lesson plans for elementary school teachers. I used to get constant requests for such tools.
Have you tuned TUX for any particular benchmarks, or do you just write it as best you can and throw it in the ring? If it's tuned to some benchmarks, does that hurt its performance on other benchmarks?
Have any benchmark tests ever been particularly useful for revealing bugs/inefficiencies in your code? That is, are the benchmarks tools to you, or are they just the end product?
Your HTML ideas are very interesting, especially the redundant image sources.
However, BXXP is a protocol (like HTTP) not an authoring language (like HTML). HTTP and HTML have nothing to do with each other, except that they are both very popular standards for online content. Thus, your post is off-topic.
Since it's XML (i.e. decipherable) and *if* the you can designate your own prefs server, it shouldn't be super-hard to make something like this work cross-platform for at least some of the prefs. For example, if you have set your windows background image to some jpeg on the web with this, you could buld a prefs manager for X which parsed the same online prefs file to get the same background image.
Certainly some prefs would be platform specific (like the location of the "Documents" directory), but others (like email address or screen saver delay time or mouse-focus method) are equally useable on any platform.
And since it should be extensible, one should be able to add X-specific prefs to the list.
This could actually be a very nice cross-platform feature, given full-time net accessibility.
"[W]e encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can."
"Except for one special situation, the... GPL has no requirements about how much you can charge for distributing a copy of free software. You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace... The one exception is in the case where binaries are distributed without the corresponding complete source code."
I think Microsoft is right to demand the removal of copyright material. And as other have said, Slashdot should have a policy in place for which posts they will refuse to serve.
For example, if I posted a UUencoded copy of a Metallica MP3 song, would Slashdot allow that? What if I posted Stephen King's e-novel?
Slashdot says that readers own their own posts, but this is not always true. If they post material owned by someone else without permission they are plagiarizing. If the New York Times published a Slashdot editorial verbatim without attribution, do you think they could get away with it by saying their articles are owned by their reporters? Nope.
it doesn't seem to me that this first observation can give terribly accurate measures of the _quantities_ of the interglalactic gas
On the contrary, the whole point is to study the quantities of of the gas. For many, many years folks have been studying neutral (cold) hydrogen and measuring its quantity by seeing how much quasar light was absorbed.
This work is special because it extends to hot hydrogen as well. The problem is that hot hydrogen is almost totally transparent, so instead of looking for the hydrogen itself, you look for other matter whoch co-exists with the hydrogen. This study (by Todd Trip [my former officemate], Ed Jenkins and Blair Savage [who is down the hall from me]) found intergalactic oxygen. They measured the abundance of the oxygen and, by estimating the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen, they computed the quantity of hydrogen. One of the hardest parts is getting this ratio, but Todd is a very smart guy and hard worker, so I'll bet he's done it well.
Todd Tripp (the main author of this work) was my office mate until a few years ago and his collaborator Blair Savage is just down the hall from me.
The problem is that we can only directly see matter which is giving off light (i.e. stars). How do we study the cold, non-glowing matter in the universe? The solution is that you find a very bright, very far away source to act as a light bulb. In this case it is a quasar. The quasar itself it not important. If there is anything in between us and the quasar, it might block some of the light. However, this is tricky because different matter aborbs different light.
Normal hydrogen (one proton and one electron) is good at absorbing some visible light. When the light hits, it energizes the electron. After some random time, the electron calms down and re-emits the light, but usually not in the same direction from which it came. Thus, you lose a lot of light along the original line of sight.
However, in hot gas, there is thermal energy to knock the electrons entirely free. (picture hydrogen atoms smacking into each other very hard) In this case, the protons and electrons alone are terrible at blocking incoming light: they are nearly transparent. The trick that many spectroscopists use is to look for "tracers." A tracer is a substance that coexists with hydrogen but is much less transparent.
In this case, oxygen is the tracer. Oxygen is usually about 1500 times less common than hydrogen in our solar system and about 6000 times less commmon in typical interstellar gas clouds in our galaxy. One of the difficulties in this work is to figure out what is the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen. For intergalactic gas it is almost certainly lower than the above numbers (because oxygen comes primarily from stars and there are virtually no stars in intergalactic space). If you think you know this number, you can extrapolate how much hydrogen is there by measuring the amount of oxygen. We can guess this ratio by looking at the ratio of oxygen to other elements, like iron, nitrogen, etc -- whatever is available to be seen. But it's *very* difficult work.
Previous studies found tons of cold, normal hydrogen, but this one is special because it looked for the hot gas and found it.
To make it really superb, add a wireless LAN receiver so when your car is parked out front, it can download a new batch of MP3s from your PC. Perhaps if you automated this (car flags songs as "played", requests new ones whenever it detects the LAN again) you wouldn't need 140 hours of storage, just 8-10 hours or so.
Imagine: gnutella for your car wireless LAN so you can swap songs with the guy in the car next to you on the highway/at the stoplight.
The mozilla port to SGI is still very broken (and has been for more than six months since the SGI maintainer took off). That's disappointing since my box at work is an O2. But get this: I just downloaded the Linux M15 and ran it on a linux box displayed remotely on my SGI. Mozilla remote is FASTER than Netscape 4.7 running locally. Sheesh. Mozilla seems very nice despite the minor cosmetic bugs. If the SGI port worked minimally, I would join in the hacking effort.
It appears that the main problems with the SGI port are in the assembly code in the xpcom module. That, of course, is the heart of the port. I've seen posts on the Mozilla newsgroups from SGI management saying that they would like to make the SGI mozilla port a priority, but it seems that hasn't happened. Personally, I'm undecided about whether I'd rather see SGI programmers working on Netscape or on XFS for Linux, etc. I'm probably going to switching to a Linux box in the near future anyway. So the big question is whether less common boxes like SGIs will eventually join the future of software like Mozilla or if they will become like the Amiga or the NeXT: Loved by those who like their unique software but loathed by those who have gotten used to software on other boxes.
Doesn't the search for heavenly bodies require analysis over time, and not simply an image?
Not necessarily. One of the single most useful sky surveys ever performed was the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey which took deep photographs of the entire northern hemisphere sky in the 1950s. Those photos were re-analyzed by folks at the US Naval Observatory in the 1990s to create the largest database of stars ever created: 526,230,881 stars, all in the Milky Way. In addition, the Hubble team digitized all the POSS photos and put them on the web, which has generated an explosion of new research from folks who may not have had access to copies of the old photographic plates.
The Sloan survey will do a similar thing, but it is digital and can detect objects much fainter. By the end we may have a catalog of galaxies outside our Milky Way which rivals the size of the USNO stellar database.
Note, I can't say much about the Microsoft effort. I just know that NASA/USNO work with the POSS have been enormously valuable to astronomers, and I hope that Microsoft makes this new access method for the Sloan Survey as useful.
...suppose one of them entered out system? i suppose it would be captured and begin orbiting our sun...
No, it would be very unlikely that our solar system could capture one of these, and absolutely the Sun couldn't do it alone (Jupiter or some other planet would have to help).
It's like the very long, elliptical orbit of comets. What keeps them from being captured into nice, circular orbits near the Sun? It has to do with momentum. Something falling into our solar system from a great distance builds up a lot of speed as the Sun's gravity tugs on it. By the time it reaches the inner solar system, it's got so much momentum that it swings around and shoots back out to where it came from.
Yes, a rogue planet falling into our solar system could do some damage. But that damage would be in the form of perturbing the orbits of some of the planets/moons/asteroids/comets in our solar family. The odds of collision are astoundingly small.
Lithium is also one of the (many) ways we know the Orion Nebula is young. The smallest of the Orion Nebula stars are too young to have started fusion, so many still have lithium. However, all of them more massive than brown dwarfs will eventually start fusion and the lithium will vanish (in a hundred million years or so).
Conceivably yes, but the odds of two free-floating planets colliding is probably smaller than the odds of a couple hundred 747s colliding in midair and falling on your head. The combination of two big bodies (stars, planets) is called coalescence and has never been observed. Space is very big and planets are very small. Very nearly all of the mass concentration happens during the earliest stages of stellar birth.
Tristrom Cooke has been collecting votes for the top sci-fi/fantasy novels for years. Over 2500 voters later, Tristrom has a weekly-updated, weighted average list of the most popular books. See the latest list at THE INTERNET TOP 100 SF/FANTASY LIST. I've been reading my way down this list and have found a lot of winners (as well as a few duds).
I also wonder whether it can multitask between different instruction sets. I guess the task switching overhead would be pretty brutal if here isn't room onchip for multiple instruction sets.
My understanding from the articles I have read is that maybe, eventually, but right now it only emulates x86.
Details aside, I think an idea like this could work well in the right context. Namely for a document which you don't want to contain nuance, for example, international law or multilingual web pages, etc.
Here's how it might work:
Write your document in your native language
Translate it out to "Universal"
Translate back to native
Look for mistranslations and change the original to avoid this
Repeat until the out-and-back translation conveys the same meaning as the original
When you are happy, post the Universal version on your web site (and maybe ask a friend who speaks another language to read it once in her language)
Hope that the other deconverters are as good as yours
This has the disadvantage that you lose some flexibility, subtlety and art in your writing, but you decided to give that up when you decided to go multilingual, right?
The point is that if you write text specifically so that can go to one foreign language and back smoothly, it's probably pretty translatable to many languages, I'm guessing.
You can try this now with Babelfish. Take a passage of text you wrote in English, convert it to something (e.g. French) and back. Then edit the original until the English that comes back is decent. This will force you to remove colloquialisms and force you to work around deficiencies in the translation program, but isn't this worth it for a good translateable piece of text?
Final note: We have all seen Babelfish make funny translations. There will always be some words/phrases that software cannot translate perfectly without AI. But certainly, we are all smart enough to craft text that software can translate well! As the software gets better, we can put less and less effort into this.
Many have commented on the 1-m resolution of this spacecraft. This does not mean that each pixel is one meter. In fact, for best results, you usually want 2-3 pixels per resolution element. The reason is the the Nyquist frequency (the fastest you can distinguish details) is a factor of two off from your sampling frequency.
What this means is that if you have 1-m resolution with 0.5-m pixels, it is just a good quality as 0.5-m resolution with 0.5-m pixels. The reason is that if your resolution matches your pixel density too closely, then the fact that pixels are discrete (or quantized, you might say) becomes very relevent and the image does not look smooth.
Also, I'd link to post a link to the TerraServer web page which has older pictures covering a LOT of the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
We got one of the earlier Onyx machines (creatively named onyx.astro.wisc.edu) back in 1993. It was pretty novel with its dual processors and fast OpenGL hardware. When some SGI programmers ported Doom (and later Quake) to the MIPS chip, some of us grad students used to play on the dept SGI boxes, including that dorm-fridge-sized machine. But for all its lofty framerate scores, our Onyx had no sound, so the poor sucker sitting at that terminal often got fragged with no warning.
But alas, the proprietary $15,000 memory module fried itself after the warranty expired and the machine was sold (for parts, I guess). No heated footstools in our computer room any more...
I think the key solution to these problems is to have a voice-augmented GUI. That is, you can do anything with keyboard and mouse, but you can shortcut to some tasks by a verbal command. I envision that you would do most of your office work silently, but you might so the occasional one of the following:
"Lockscreen" as you walk away from your cube
"Mute" to silence your music when a colleague stops by to talk
"Raise" to bring a window to the front without moving your hands from the keyboard
"Print" when you're to lazy to type CTRL-P
All of these are low-mental-energy ways of doing things you can already do with a normal GUI. Just like the mouse simplified some aspects of the pure-CLI interface (think copy-and-paste), even sparse voice input can improve the current state of GUIs.
My experience with voice systems is pure hobby and very rudimentary, but I think I've read that simple keyword-driven voice systems are MUCH simpler free-dictation systems needed for, say, word processing via spoken word, so the examples above should be feasible now.
I think the "quick shortcuts" paradigm of speech in UI is vastly underestimated. For example, think about how much mental energy/concentration it would save to be able to just say
"Play U2"
instead of:
find MP3 player icon, deiconize, click load, click U2 playlist, click OK, click play, iconize, put mouse back in editor window, recommence hacking
I think the quick verbal shortcut causes a much smaller disruption of concentration and saves a tone of screen real estate. For those of us insane people who have 6-7 emacs windows, 2-3 netscape windows and 3-4 xterms going on 4 virtual desks, this would be a HUGE benefit.
I can't tell you how much mental energy I have saved since I got a box with external volume control instead of a GUI volume tool. I think a voice interface would help in similar ways.
So, I think voice-assisted GUIs would be great, accelerating the experience just like keyboard shortcuts help keep experienced users sane today.
This is something I've been looking forward to for a while. In my astronomy research, I usually work with images from digital cameras with 2048x2048 pixel resolution. Even with my 1280x1024 monitor, I either have to shrink the image (losing detail) or do a lot of panning to see the whole thing. A monitor more closely matched to the image size would help.
As consumer digital cameras approach 2048x2048 resolution, I'm sure graphic artists will start to want high-end monitors like this one, too.
However current top-end astronomy CCDs are using chips of up to 4096x4096 pixels and new cameras are using arrays of 2-16 of these large format chips. This spring I worked on some data from an 8192x8192 mosaic imager and, boy, was it hard to work with images shrunk by a factor of 8x8 to make them fit on my current-generation screen!
is this unmanned? russia is the leader in unmanned spaceflight methinks.
Yes, it is unmanned for now, but it is intended to support people later. No, Russia is more often considered the leader in manned spaceflight, with their extensive experience with Mir. The longest a person had remained in space in a NASA spacecraft in the last two decades is about 2 weeks, compared to Mir which was continuously occupied for about 10 years.
It's not exactly charity, but the most fulfilling computer-related not-for-profit work I've done is to create a simple web page on stars and constellations. It started as a hobby, but it turned into a service when I put my email address on the page. For a while I was answering up to 50 email questions per week, mainly from students and curious adults. It had some ego-boo too (I was referenced in a textbook, and my pages are often linked from Astro Pic of the Day) but the best part is the gratitude I get from people whose questions I answered.
Lately, I've had to remove my email address from the page while I am finishing up my thesis (and to avoid spam), but I hope to get back to it soon.
If you have a particular area of knowledge or passion, share it with others online. It's rewarding in both you and your readers. A particular area that seems to be in BIG demand is online lesson plans for elementary school teachers. I used to get constant requests for such tools.
Have you tuned TUX for any particular benchmarks, or do you just write it as best you can and throw it in the ring? If it's tuned to some benchmarks, does that hurt its performance on other benchmarks?
Have any benchmark tests ever been particularly useful for revealing bugs/inefficiencies in your code? That is, are the benchmarks tools to you, or are they just the end product?
If it's not in orbit, it's not a satellite.
All the spacecraft mentioned in the article are in orbit around either the Earth or the Sun. Thus, they are all satellites.
Chris Dolan
Your HTML ideas are very interesting, especially the redundant image sources.
However, BXXP is a protocol (like HTTP) not an authoring language (like HTML). HTTP and HTML have nothing to do with each other, except that they are both very popular standards for online content. Thus, your post is off-topic.
Since it's XML (i.e. decipherable) and *if* the you can designate your own prefs server, it shouldn't be super-hard to make something like this work cross-platform for at least some of the prefs. For example, if you have set your windows background image to some jpeg on the web with this, you could buld a prefs manager for X which parsed the same online prefs file to get the same background image.
Certainly some prefs would be platform specific (like the location of the "Documents" directory), but others (like email address or screen saver delay time or mouse-focus method) are equally useable on any platform.
And since it should be extensible, one should be able to add X-specific prefs to the list.
This could actually be a very nice cross-platform feature, given full-time net accessibility.
Meyer states "The GNU and FSF view is that it is OK to sell anything except software." (Section 4)
... GPL has no requirements about how much you can charge for distributing a copy of free software. You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace... The one exception is in the case where binaries are distributed without the corresponding complete source code."
This is totally incorrect!!! On the web page http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.ht ml, Richard Stallman writes:
"[W]e encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can."
"Except for one special situation, the
Chris Dolan
I think Microsoft is right to demand the removal of copyright material. And as other have said, Slashdot should have a policy in place for which posts they will refuse to serve.
For example, if I posted a UUencoded copy of a Metallica MP3 song, would Slashdot allow that? What if I posted Stephen King's e-novel?
Slashdot says that readers own their own posts, but this is not always true. If they post material owned by someone else without permission they are plagiarizing. If the New York Times published a Slashdot editorial verbatim without attribution, do you think they could get away with it by saying their articles are owned by their reporters? Nope.
Chris Dolan
Chris Dolan
it doesn't seem to me that this first observation can give terribly accurate measures of
the _quantities_ of the interglalactic gas
On the contrary, the whole point is to study the quantities of of the gas. For many, many years folks have been studying neutral (cold) hydrogen and measuring its quantity by seeing how much quasar light was absorbed.
This work is special because it extends to hot hydrogen as well. The problem is that hot hydrogen is almost totally transparent, so instead of looking for the hydrogen itself, you look for other matter whoch co-exists with the hydrogen. This study (by Todd Trip [my former officemate], Ed Jenkins and Blair Savage [who is down the hall from me]) found intergalactic oxygen. They measured the abundance of the oxygen and, by estimating the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen, they computed the quantity of hydrogen. One of the hardest parts is getting this ratio, but Todd is a very smart guy and hard worker, so I'll bet he's done it well.
Chris Dolan
Todd Tripp (the main author of this work) was my office mate until a few years ago and his collaborator Blair Savage is just down the hall from me.
The problem is that we can only directly see matter which is giving off light (i.e. stars). How do we study the cold, non-glowing matter in the universe? The solution is that you find a very bright, very far away source to act as a light bulb. In this case it is a quasar. The quasar itself it not important. If there is anything in between us and the quasar, it might block some of the light. However, this is tricky because different matter aborbs different light.
Normal hydrogen (one proton and one electron) is good at absorbing some visible light. When the light hits, it energizes the electron. After some random time, the electron calms down and re-emits the light, but usually not in the same direction from which it came. Thus, you lose a lot of light along the original line of sight.
However, in hot gas, there is thermal energy to knock the electrons entirely free. (picture hydrogen atoms smacking into each other very hard) In this case, the protons and electrons alone are terrible at blocking incoming light: they are nearly transparent. The trick that many spectroscopists use is to look for "tracers." A tracer is a substance that coexists with hydrogen but is much less transparent.
In this case, oxygen is the tracer. Oxygen is usually about 1500 times less common than hydrogen in our solar system and about 6000 times less commmon in typical interstellar gas clouds in our galaxy. One of the difficulties in this work is to figure out what is the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen. For intergalactic gas it is almost certainly lower than the above numbers (because oxygen comes primarily from stars and there are virtually no stars in intergalactic space). If you think you know this number, you can extrapolate how much hydrogen is there by measuring the amount of oxygen. We can guess this ratio by looking at the ratio of oxygen to other elements, like iron, nitrogen, etc -- whatever is available to be seen. But it's *very* difficult work.
Previous studies found tons of cold, normal hydrogen, but this one is special because it looked for the hot gas and found it.
Chris Dolan, astro grad student
To make it really superb, add a wireless LAN receiver so when your car is parked out front, it can download a new batch of MP3s from your PC. Perhaps if you automated this (car flags songs as "played", requests new ones whenever it detects the LAN again) you wouldn't need 140 hours of storage, just 8-10 hours or so.
Imagine: gnutella for your car wireless LAN so you can swap songs with the guy in the car next to you on the highway/at the stoplight.
The mozilla port to SGI is still very broken (and has been for more than six months since the SGI maintainer took off). That's disappointing since my box at work is an O2. But get this: I just downloaded the Linux M15 and ran it on a linux box displayed remotely on my SGI. Mozilla remote is FASTER than Netscape 4.7 running locally. Sheesh. Mozilla seems very nice despite the minor cosmetic bugs. If the SGI port worked minimally, I would join in the hacking effort.
It appears that the main problems with the SGI port are in the assembly code in the xpcom module. That, of course, is the heart of the port. I've seen posts on the Mozilla newsgroups from SGI management saying that they would like to make the SGI mozilla port a priority, but it seems that hasn't happened. Personally, I'm undecided about whether I'd rather see SGI programmers working on Netscape or on XFS for Linux, etc. I'm probably going to switching to a Linux box in the near future anyway. So the big question is whether less common boxes like SGIs will eventually join the future of software like Mozilla or if they will become like the Amiga or the NeXT: Loved by those who like their unique software but loathed by those who have gotten used to software on other boxes.
Doesn't the search for heavenly bodies require analysis over time, and not simply an image?
Not necessarily. One of the single most useful sky surveys ever performed was the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey which took deep photographs of the entire northern hemisphere sky in the 1950s. Those photos were re-analyzed by folks at the US Naval Observatory in the 1990s to create the largest database of stars ever created: 526,230,881 stars, all in the Milky Way. In addition, the Hubble team digitized all the POSS photos and put them on the web, which has generated an explosion of new research from folks who may not have had access to copies of the old photographic plates.
The Sloan survey will do a similar thing, but it is digital and can detect objects much fainter. By the end we may have a catalog of galaxies outside our Milky Way which rivals the size of the USNO stellar database.
USNO database: http://ftp.nofs.navy.mil/projects/pmm/
Note, I can't say much about the Microsoft effort. I just know that NASA/USNO work with the POSS have been enormously valuable to astronomers, and I hope that Microsoft makes this new access method for the Sloan Survey as useful.
...suppose one of them entered out system? i suppose it would be captured and begin orbiting our sun...
No, it would be very unlikely that our solar system could capture one of these, and absolutely the Sun couldn't do it alone (Jupiter or some other planet would have to help).
It's like the very long, elliptical orbit of comets. What keeps them from being captured into nice, circular orbits near the Sun? It has to do with momentum. Something falling into our solar system from a great distance builds up a lot of speed as the Sun's gravity tugs on it. By the time it reaches the inner solar system, it's got so much momentum that it swings around and shoots back out to where it came from.
Yes, a rogue planet falling into our solar system could do some damage. But that damage would be in the form of perturbing the orbits of some of the planets/moons/asteroids/comets in our solar family. The odds of collision are astoundingly small.
Lithium is also one of the (many) ways we know the Orion Nebula is young. The smallest of the Orion Nebula stars are too young to have started fusion, so many still have lithium. However, all of them more massive than brown dwarfs will eventually start fusion and the lithium will vanish (in a hundred million years or so).
Nice haiku. Sorry I can't respond in kind. :)
Conceivably yes, but the odds of two free-floating planets colliding is probably smaller than the odds of a couple hundred 747s colliding in midair and falling on your head. The combination of two big bodies (stars, planets) is called coalescence and has never been observed. Space is very big and planets are very small. Very nearly all of the mass concentration happens during the earliest stages of stellar birth.
Tristrom Cooke has been collecting votes for the top sci-fi/fantasy novels for years. Over 2500 voters later, Tristrom has a weekly-updated, weighted average list of the most popular books. See the latest list at THE INTERNET TOP 100 SF/FANTASY LIST. I've been reading my way down this list and have found a lot of winners (as well as a few duds).
I also wonder whether it can multitask between different instruction sets. I guess the task switching overhead would be pretty brutal if here isn't room onchip for multiple instruction sets.
My understanding from the articles I have read is that maybe, eventually, but right now it only emulates x86.
Here's how it might work:
This has the disadvantage that you lose some flexibility, subtlety and art in your writing, but you decided to give that up when you decided to go multilingual, right?
The point is that if you write text specifically so that can go to one foreign language and back smoothly, it's probably pretty translatable to many languages, I'm guessing.
You can try this now with Babelfish. Take a passage of text you wrote in English, convert it to something (e.g. French) and back. Then edit the original until the English that comes back is decent. This will force you to remove colloquialisms and force you to work around deficiencies in the translation program, but isn't this worth it for a good translateable piece of text?
Final note: We have all seen Babelfish make funny translations. There will always be some words/phrases that software cannot translate perfectly without AI. But certainly, we are all smart enough to craft text that software can translate well! As the software gets better, we can put less and less effort into this.
Many have commented on the 1-m resolution of this spacecraft. This does not mean that each pixel is one meter. In fact, for best results, you usually want 2-3 pixels per resolution element. The reason is the the Nyquist frequency (the fastest you can distinguish details) is a factor of two off from your sampling frequency.
:-)
What this means is that if you have 1-m resolution with 0.5-m pixels, it is just a good quality as 0.5-m resolution with 0.5-m pixels. The reason is that if your resolution matches your pixel density too closely, then the fact that pixels are discrete (or quantized, you might say) becomes very relevent and the image does not look smooth.
Also, I'd link to post a link to the TerraServer web page which has older pictures covering a LOT of the United States.
Forgive me for promoting a Microsoft page!
This already exists. A photodiode and a light-emitting diode (LED) are more-or-less the same piece of hardware with the voltage reversed.
:)
Granted, they are silicon and not buckyballs, so that's boring, right?