I can't speak for everyone here, but I'd have to say a good ole university education and degree in computer science helps quite alot if you're in a good program that exposes you to different architectures, different ideas and intelligent professors who can guide you through the pitfalls and real world examples and point out misconceptions. And of course, actually learning how a computer works beyond the source, both electrically and theoretically helps avoid silly guffaws that you read here that get modded up.. like someone suggesting solid state harddrives that use SCSI (if you know your bus specs and you know how fast solid state ram works, you know why SCSI isn't an ideal choice - yes I know there are fast flavors of SCSI, but you still would want something not based around mechanical drive device access)
at the very least it will hopefully mitigate that terrible "I don't understand what this article is about so I will criticize it blindly" attitude that pervades slashdot. Though I don't think you need a good CS education to see that's not exactly a good approach to new ideas in the world.
I'm getting off on a rant here but I guess what annoys me the most about slashdot is the cynical close minded attitude toward everything - even new technology, which just seems oxymoronic to me. And its almost always based in sheer ignorance.
i don't know why i'm replying to this post, but if you're really curious I used this nick long before that silly movie came out, much less slashdot arriving in the world.
And i believe it was something along the lines of "zero cool" in the movie wasn't it? I saw it once many a year ago...
I wonder why the disparity in price? By the mid-80s the big TV "feature" here was whether it was "cable-ready" or not by being able to tune in higher channels and using the F-type connector or even RCA cable inputs for really fancy models!
I can recall seeing a full sized 28" B&W TV with wood cabinet and all at my grandparents as late as 1997 in a spare room... I think it had to been of the last produced and at least 25 years old.
hubble service missions have all been very difficult ones, and have all pushed the envelope on EVA work in space. They've set records for EVA excursions to work on them. Remember, these service missions consist of the astronauts actually going out in a suit and manually disassembling, installing and reassembling the telescope parts for several hours at a time in a pretty vulnerable way.
and though they can simulate the mission dozens of times on earth, you can't get the same effect as in space flying around at 17,000 mph. Nuts and screws have to be undone, drills operated and so forth. Pieces do break off and go beyond the astronaut's grasp. One slip and you can puncture a suit or send the spacecraft careening in unexpected ways.
The risks and rewards have to be carefully balanced, perhaps the work needed to be done on the next SM was especially tricky and for less reward of science.
through the use of modern adaptive and active optics technology, the latest ground based telescopes can resolve to around what hubble can. By the end of hubble's life they'll meet or exceed its capabilities.
However, ground based telescopes cannot operate in infrared (telescopes in extremely dry high altitude areas can do some limited infrared)
HST has outlived its original design lifetime. We can do better than it. Keeping it around is really just an exercise in nostalgia for all the great things it has done for us.
It's the remaining fears from the anti-nuke baby boomer generation that had difficulty telling the difference between "atomic bomb" and "atomic reactor"
Incidents like chernobyl and TMI didn't help, but in those cases stemmed from remarkably foolish human operator error and antiquated reactor design. Neither of which are likely to happen again with a modern plant design and especially in a nuclear rocket which would be fully automated and designed for only a few minutes of full power usage.
RTG's have been coming up alot on here lately, I should really save this and copy it...
RTG's are very, very, very safe. The poisonous gasses released by a rocket explosion are far worse than what an RTG can do. Here's why.
RTG's contain Plutonium 238, (an isotope which cannot be used in fissile weapons, its too unstable) that generate lots of heat which is how they work. Now a note about the safety of Pu238.
Plutonium is among the safest to handle radioactive elements. It only generates alpha particles which are stopped by a sheet of paper, your skin, etc. You could eat a piece of Pu and suffer few effects because it would pass through you before the damage would have time to accumulate to something serious. Compare this to other, much more common elements used in medicine that generate gamma rays and other nastiness.
It is only dangerous in dust particles that are small enough to get embedded in the lungs and stay there. Now to address this issue, Pu238 readily binds into an oxide and is turned into a ceramic for RTG's which makes it very resistant to forming particles that small in the event of an explosion.
Now this small amount of material is then encased in a very strong canister designed to survive accidental reentry and explosion. So in the unlikely event of the explosion and then even unlikelyer event the canister is broken open, its even more unlikely that small dangerous dust particles will be generated in sufficient volume to cause serious harm to humans. This depends on your area of disaster, but as I said, rockets contain very noxious chemicals that pose a far greater risk to the public than the Pu238.
people who blather on and on about the 'resolution required to match film' don't seem to understand the different grain sizes between film ISO's...
And I agree there is fine art exhibits done with digital. Have you seen fotolog? Lots of digital amateur photography artists there. One of my favorites on this log is this guy (Note: fotolog rescales and recompresses severely) My personal log is at here. Some of them are taken with my crude phone cam.
but thats more of "current state of the art" in the products available at the consumer level than a fundamental limitation. Certainly there are digital cameras out there which will achieve excellent DoF results.
obviously if you're going to compare medium or large format, you should compare to the digital offerings available for those, which there are plenty of. Large format digital inserts use a type of light scanning, but theres a bunch of ways being experimented with.
Film doesn't necessarily have a higher "resolution" - you can't really talk about it in terms like that. Film has different grain size, certainly which limits how far you can blow an image up without the grain becoming too visible. Which is why there are large and medium format film cameras, and why there are now digital backs available for those too.
In the end it depends on what you want to do with your pictures. If you want to blow a 35 mm up to 8 x 10 and also blow a 5 mp up to 8 x 10, with the correct software you'll notice little difference on the final print between the two.
Here's a good review of kodak's medium format digital offerings along with example photos: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/ mfd-field.shtml
And there are digital large format inserts for large format cameras, like Better Light... http://www.digital-photography.org/BetterLight_600 0_scan_back/PhaseOne_BetterLight_CCD.html
film will always be there for the hobbyist, just like there are people who still do daguerrotypes, but...
Quality: The best digital camera pictures still have lose when you get into fine detail.
So does film. You zoom in on a film scan enough and you'll see the grains - and I don't mean microscope. If you're using high ISO film your grains are visible to the naked eye.
Unless you store a printed picture from a digital camera in a very dark, vaccum container of some sort, the colors will fade faster over time than film (just look at some of the movie posters in some dirt-mall video store).
Not true. Print it on archive paper (readily available at any photo store) with pigment inks (latest epson printers have these) and put it behind glass and it will last you over 100 years in normal display situations with no fading. 200 years if you put it in the dark. A movie poster isn't meant to be kept that long so they don't have the same quality of inks or paper.
Different Formats: In the film world, you have a choice of sizes for cameras. You have small (15mm to 35mm) Medium (36mm to 4") and Large(4" plus). Tell me where I can find a large format digital camera right now. A digital that can take a picture with no loss at 11"x17" in size. This is where film will domminate for years to come, the medium and large format cameras. And for you who don't know what a meduim or large format camera is, A Hasselbald is a medium format camera (those are the cameras used for the moon landings.) and large format is what Ansel Adams used for his stunning photos of landscapes.
Fuji recently introduced a medium format CCD that goes straight into their medium format bodies. For others you can combine several small CCD's if you so choose into acting like one very large one. This is how astronomical CCD arrays work... I don't know of any large format digital cameras offhand (aside from astronomical specialty ones), but there is no technical reason it can't be done.
I have a 4 mp digital camera and I can get prints out of it that look as good as any film camera.
There are a few keys to making good prints from digital:
Good software. To make a print from digital to printer requires scaling and interpolation of the digital data from the camera's resolution to the printer's native resolution (ie 720 dpi) and the paper dimensions. There are half a dozen interpolation algorithms I can think off the top of my head (ie, bicubic, lanczos etc) and the quality of your print *depends* on these. My personal favorite printing software is QImage which uses Lanczos, and feeds the data to a printer driver in managable chunks rather than a quick dump, among other things. Its way, way better than choosing the simple "print" from photoshop.
You also need a properly calibrated printer and print profiles for the specific paper and ink you're using. Any decent commercial service should have this done already, but sometimes the button-pushers at your one-hour photomat don't really know what they're doing.
carbon life needs water to form hydrocarbons which are the building blocks of the complex molecules of life.
its hypothesized you could base life on some other elements (like silicon), but since we've never seen it, we wouldn't even know *how* to look for it, much less recognize it if we did, short of a silicon based life form seen moving around...
the cost of product tie-ins. Those involve extremely large sums of money.
Reminds me of the Journey atari videogame... the game was crap and was made in a week, but the company went under because it had cost them enormous sums of money to license the name of Journey.
until a couple of weeks ago when I saw an ad in Time for the Honda Element. The element pictured was actually built out of the blocks, with a small note in the corner that it was megabloks it was built out of.
They also have those tv commercials where the element is built up using stop motion photography out of the blocks also - along with a note it is Megabloks.
Something of a PR coup to megabloks in a way there...
Slashdot Mirror
I can't speak for everyone here, but I'd have to say a good ole university education and degree in computer science helps quite alot if you're in a good program that exposes you to different architectures, different ideas and intelligent professors who can guide you through the pitfalls and real world examples and point out misconceptions. And of course, actually learning how a computer works beyond the source, both electrically and theoretically helps avoid silly guffaws that you read here that get modded up.. like someone suggesting solid state harddrives that use SCSI (if you know your bus specs and you know how fast solid state ram works, you know why SCSI isn't an ideal choice - yes I know there are fast flavors of SCSI, but you still would want something not based around mechanical drive device access)
at the very least it will hopefully mitigate that terrible "I don't understand what this article is about so I will criticize it blindly" attitude that pervades slashdot. Though I don't think you need a good CS education to see that's not exactly a good approach to new ideas in the world.
I'm getting off on a rant here but I guess what annoys me the most about slashdot is the cynical close minded attitude toward everything - even new technology, which just seems oxymoronic to me. And its almost always based in sheer ignorance.
i don't know why i'm replying to this post, but if you're really curious I used this nick long before that silly movie came out, much less slashdot arriving in the world.
And i believe it was something along the lines of "zero cool" in the movie wasn't it? I saw it once many a year ago...
I wonder why the disparity in price? By the mid-80s the big TV "feature" here was whether it was "cable-ready" or not by being able to tune in higher channels and using the F-type connector or even RCA cable inputs for really fancy models!
I can recall seeing a full sized 28" B&W TV with wood cabinet and all at my grandparents as late as 1997 in a spare room... I think it had to been of the last produced and at least 25 years old.
More like 99%.. for supposed nerds, you'd think more of them would have more of a clue about the various facets of computing.
Like colour television, people started to get those in the middle of the 80s!
What country are you from? In the US color tv's came about in the late 60s and were commonplace in the early 70s.
hubble service missions have all been very difficult ones, and have all pushed the envelope on EVA work in space. They've set records for EVA excursions to work on them. Remember, these service missions consist of the astronauts actually going out in a suit and manually disassembling, installing and reassembling the telescope parts for several hours at a time in a pretty vulnerable way.
and though they can simulate the mission dozens of times on earth, you can't get the same effect as in space flying around at 17,000 mph. Nuts and screws have to be undone, drills operated and so forth. Pieces do break off and go beyond the astronaut's grasp. One slip and you can puncture a suit or send the spacecraft careening in unexpected ways.
The risks and rewards have to be carefully balanced, perhaps the work needed to be done on the next SM was especially tricky and for less reward of science.
through the use of modern adaptive and active optics technology, the latest ground based telescopes can resolve to around what hubble can. By the end of hubble's life they'll meet or exceed its capabilities.
However, ground based telescopes cannot operate in infrared (telescopes in extremely dry high altitude areas can do some limited infrared)
HST has outlived its original design lifetime. We can do better than it. Keeping it around is really just an exercise in nostalgia for all the great things it has done for us.
It's the remaining fears from the anti-nuke baby boomer generation that had difficulty telling the difference between "atomic bomb" and "atomic reactor"
Incidents like chernobyl and TMI didn't help, but in those cases stemmed from remarkably foolish human operator error and antiquated reactor design. Neither of which are likely to happen again with a modern plant design and especially in a nuclear rocket which would be fully automated and designed for only a few minutes of full power usage.
RTG's have been coming up alot on here lately, I should really save this and copy it...
RTG's are very, very, very safe. The poisonous gasses released by a rocket explosion are far worse than what an RTG can do. Here's why.
RTG's contain Plutonium 238, (an isotope which cannot be used in fissile weapons, its too unstable) that generate lots of heat which is how they work. Now a note about the safety of Pu238.
Plutonium is among the safest to handle radioactive elements. It only generates alpha particles which are stopped by a sheet of paper, your skin, etc. You could eat a piece of Pu and suffer few effects because it would pass through you before the damage would have time to accumulate to something serious. Compare this to other, much more common elements used in medicine that generate gamma rays and other nastiness.
It is only dangerous in dust particles that are small enough to get embedded in the lungs and stay there. Now to address this issue, Pu238 readily binds into an oxide and is turned into a ceramic for RTG's which makes it very resistant to forming particles that small in the event of an explosion.
Now this small amount of material is then encased in a very strong canister designed to survive accidental reentry and explosion. So in the unlikely event of the explosion and then even unlikelyer event the canister is broken open, its even more unlikely that small dangerous dust particles will be generated in sufficient volume to cause serious harm to humans. This depends on your area of disaster, but as I said, rockets contain very noxious chemicals that pose a far greater risk to the public than the Pu238.
people who blather on and on about the 'resolution required to match film' don't seem to understand the different grain sizes between film ISO's...
And I agree there is fine art exhibits done with digital. Have you seen fotolog? Lots of digital amateur photography artists there. One of my favorites on this log is this guy (Note: fotolog rescales and recompresses severely) My personal log is at here. Some of them are taken with my crude phone cam.
at current state of the art, affordable CCD's are small. as they grow in size and decrease in price, the issue will be mitigated.
but thats more of "current state of the art" in the products available at the consumer level than a fundamental limitation. Certainly there are digital cameras out there which will achieve excellent DoF results.
i meant "consumer level 35 mm camera". I should've been more specific.
obviously if you're going to compare medium or large format, you should compare to the digital offerings available for those, which there are plenty of. Large format digital inserts use a type of light scanning, but theres a bunch of ways being experimented with.
Film doesn't necessarily have a higher "resolution" - you can't really talk about it in terms like that. Film has different grain size, certainly which limits how far you can blow an image up without the grain becoming too visible. Which is why there are large and medium format film cameras, and why there are now digital backs available for those too.
In the end it depends on what you want to do with your pictures. If you want to blow a 35 mm up to 8 x 10 and also blow a 5 mp up to 8 x 10, with the correct software you'll notice little difference on the final print between the two.
getting them printed. I much prefer viewing photos as prints anyway...
slashdot inserted a space between the / and mfd-field on the first link
Here's a good review of kodak's medium format digital offerings along with example photos: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/ mfd-field.shtml
0 0_scan_back/PhaseOne_BetterLight_CCD.html
And there are digital large format inserts for large format cameras, like Better Light... http://www.digital-photography.org/BetterLight_60
film will always be there for the hobbyist, just like there are people who still do daguerrotypes, but...
Quality: The best digital camera pictures still have lose when you get into fine detail.
So does film. You zoom in on a film scan enough and you'll see the grains - and I don't mean microscope. If you're using high ISO film your grains are visible to the naked eye.
Unless you store a printed picture from a digital camera in a very dark, vaccum container of some sort, the colors will fade faster over time than film (just look at some of the movie posters in some dirt-mall video store).
Not true. Print it on archive paper (readily available at any photo store) with pigment inks (latest epson printers have these) and put it behind glass and it will last you over 100 years in normal display situations with no fading. 200 years if you put it in the dark. A movie poster isn't meant to be kept that long so they don't have the same quality of inks or paper.
Different Formats: In the film world, you have a choice of sizes for cameras. You have small (15mm to 35mm) Medium (36mm to 4") and Large(4" plus). Tell me where I can find a large format digital camera right now. A digital that can take a picture with no loss at 11"x17" in size. This is where film will domminate for years to come, the medium and large format cameras. And for you who don't know what a meduim or large format camera is, A Hasselbald is a medium format camera (those are the cameras used for the moon landings.) and large format is what Ansel Adams used for his stunning photos of landscapes.
Fuji recently introduced a medium format CCD that goes straight into their medium format bodies. For others you can combine several small CCD's if you so choose into acting like one very large one. This is how astronomical CCD arrays work...
I don't know of any large format digital cameras offhand (aside from astronomical specialty ones), but there is no technical reason it can't be done.
I have a 4 mp digital camera and I can get prints out of it that look as good as any film camera.
There are a few keys to making good prints from digital:
Good software. To make a print from digital to printer requires scaling and interpolation of the digital data from the camera's resolution to the printer's native resolution (ie 720 dpi) and the paper dimensions. There are half a dozen interpolation algorithms I can think off the top of my head (ie, bicubic, lanczos etc) and the quality of your print *depends* on these. My personal favorite printing software is QImage which uses Lanczos, and feeds the data to a printer driver in managable chunks rather than a quick dump, among other things. Its way, way better than choosing the simple "print" from photoshop.
You also need a properly calibrated printer and print profiles for the specific paper and ink you're using. Any decent commercial service should have this done already, but sometimes the button-pushers at your one-hour photomat don't really know what they're doing.
as you may recall from high school physics, if you lower the air pressure enough, water will boil away at low temperatures.
Mars has 1% of earth's atmosphere which means any liquid water on the surface would instantly boil off, especially at the warmer equatorial regions.
carbon life needs water to form hydrocarbons which are the building blocks of the complex molecules of life.
its hypothesized you could base life on some other elements (like silicon), but since we've never seen it, we wouldn't even know *how* to look for it, much less recognize it if we did, short of a silicon based life form seen moving around...
the cost of product tie-ins. Those involve extremely large sums of money.
Reminds me of the Journey atari videogame... the game was crap and was made in a week, but the company went under because it had cost them enormous sums of money to license the name of Journey.
http://www.x-entertainment.com/messages/472.htm
until a couple of weeks ago when I saw an ad in Time for the Honda Element. The element pictured was actually built out of the blocks, with a small note in the corner that it was megabloks it was built out of.
They also have those tv commercials where the element is built up using stop motion photography out of the blocks also - along with a note it is Megabloks.
Something of a PR coup to megabloks in a way there...
it would be useful in a computer of today. Clock rates are high enough now it is impossible to send a signal across the core in a single tick.
'Graviton' is not just a star trek word...