It's odd that the news in TFA is mainly about OpenGeo, but it doesn't link to http://opengeo.org/
The article says "using OpenGeo, an open-source visualization tool for GeoServer data", but OpenGeo's website says it's consulting and support services, not a tool.
I suspect the journalist just got confused?
I live on Hawaii island and study the energy issue so i can give some perspective.
First, to dispense with the false choice in the summary: It's not "car charging network" vs. "solar and wind". Of course we need both. Renewables are held back for both political reasons (no carbon penalty, 'avoided cost', slow bureaucracy) and physical reasons (no storage, no renewable baseload except geothermal on this island). There are a _lot_ of important-but-unpopular things the State could do to really make a difference - like tax gasoline and the importation of food - which they will never do because they don't have the guts.
However, we could do every possible thing - give away electric cars, tax the hell out of fossil fuels, put solar and wind and geothermal in every possible place, grow biodiesel crops for liquid fuel, burn biomass for carbon-neutral baseload electricity, wave power, condemn car-dependent suburbs - all of which we should do - and Hawaii would _still_ be a totally unsustainable place. Oil permeates every single bit of our culture, such as our 95% imported food.
Anything short of a mass exodus (not exactly a popular idea) and a return to a semi-agrarian lifestyle (not particular popular either) is not sustainable. Very few people in Hawaii realize it, and of the few educated people, many are in denial or hold out unrealistic optimist for a silver bullet ("fuel from algae will save us!")
I'm happy for the server-side people if this is progress on replacing Exchange, but what about replacing Outlook itself? It's one of the 3-4 missing apps that prevent me from moving to Linux. I mean, how hard can it be, to implement an email client with integrated calendar and contacts? It doesn't need every single bell and whistle - just the few features i depend on (rich text in contact memo fields, savable contact searches). I'd happily buy such an app for Linux (at, say, the same price as Outlook.) Outlook's been around for what, 11 years? And in all that time, nobody's thought to make a viable Linux alternative?
I agree about the individual bands being important. However, a great deal of LandSat _is_ available freely through GLCF ESDI (http://glcfapp.umiacs.umd.edu:8080/esdi/index.jsp), with all its bands, and has been for years. So while most of the posters here aren't quite informed, their basic question is relevant: Why is NASA making this new website? I can imagine a few possible reasons. 1. They want to do GLCF a favor by offloading their servers? 2. Maybe they will offer more complete set of LandSat with different timestamps? 3. Some political reason? -Ben
I suspect it might be fairly common for seat-back computers to crash? I don't know enough about Linux to understand what it said on my screen when it was trying (and failing) to boot back up again: http://washedashore.com/misc/inflight_error.jpg (This was April 23, 2005, on a flight from Bucuresti Romania to NYC.) -Ben
Apple had no presence in the portables market prior to 1992
Where's the historical perspective? It may come as a surprise to some, but Apple actually made computers *before* the Macintosh. The Apple IIc was compact and roughly portable; although i couldn't tell you for sure (i was a C64 hacker at the time) we all assumed the Apple IIc was a portable because we see it being used on a beach in the movie "2010". Although looking back now, one has to wonder where the battery is in that compact little case.
I installed and the beta and tried it. First thing i tried to do was "dir", which showed me just a few of the files in the current directory, one per line. OK, i thought, that's a poor choice of default behavior, but surely there are command-line arguments to show hidden files and display more than one item per line, like "dir/w" or "ls -a".
So, i typed "help dir". Nothing in the help implied either option exists for MSH's "get-childitem" command!
It appears that MSH has taken a big step toward making every command general-purpose, but in doing so, they've made it really painful or non-obvious to do common things. Do i really have to write my own batch script to get the equivalent of "ls" default behavior?!
I intalled Columba to try it out. Sad to say, it looks really tiny. I tried to add a Contact, and found there were no fields for basic things like Phone Number. (!) I'm puzzled how people can talk about software like this as some kind of alternative to Outlook. I'd LOVE to leave Outlook behind, but nothing comes close to matching its important features - not Thunderbird, not Evolution, and _definitely_ not little Columba.
Thanks for the plug, Alexandre. As a not-for-profit in the public interest, TOPP/VTP needs all the help it can get.
This news about millions of dollars going to There.com is both good, and disappointing. It's good in that any increase in the funding and attention for modelling the earth is, in general, a good thing.
It's disappointing in that There.com is a highly secretive, closed, proprietary environment, which guarantees that none of these millions of taxpayer dollars will actually bring the public closer to having a model of the earth.
I remember they left 3D accel out of RH8 (deliberately!) for some reason. I see mention of ATI in the RH9 release notes, but nothing about NVidia cards.
To me, Linux can never compete with a Microsoft OS so long as i have to *compile something into the kernel* just to get 3D acceleration.
If RH9 still doesn't do this out of the box, is there ANY distro that does?
It's no secret where their data comes from. The details of who Keyhole licensed imagery from (Space Image, AirPhoto USA etc.) can all be found by digging around on their site.
As for elevation, you're correct that SRTM isn't usable yet. Keyhole simply doesn't have better than the usual free 1km elevation data outside the USA. And 1km looks as bad as you might think.
For those who care, see the review of EarthViewer 3D that i wrote last year. I don't believe much has changed except the price dropping in desperation.
That SGI demo evolved into the GeoFusion technology. Doesn't require SGI Big Iron anymore.
The author, Paul Hansen, is really smart and a great guy too.
Actually Napster would a great analogy to follow, most of the terrain data in the world is proprietary and expensive, tightly controlled by the governments and big companies that produce it. Not that i'm suggesting anything , but P2P would be interesting way around that situation. The data only has to leak once for the genie to get out of the bottle..
Actually, Yes. The fossil fuel industry is the biggest proponent and developer of underground terrain visualization. They have huge, multi-million dollar visualization facilities dedicated to interactive 3d rendering of subterranean geological features.
If Dubya has half a clue, he should be just as enthusiastic as Gore about virtual terrain.
Slashdot Mirror
It's odd that the news in TFA is mainly about OpenGeo, but it doesn't link to http://opengeo.org/ The article says "using OpenGeo, an open-source visualization tool for GeoServer data", but OpenGeo's website says it's consulting and support services, not a tool. I suspect the journalist just got confused?
I live on Hawaii island and study the energy issue so i can give some perspective.
First, to dispense with the false choice in the summary: It's not "car charging network" vs. "solar and wind". Of course we need both. Renewables are held back for both political reasons (no carbon penalty, 'avoided cost', slow bureaucracy) and physical reasons (no storage, no renewable baseload except geothermal on this island). There are a _lot_ of important-but-unpopular things the State could do to really make a difference - like tax gasoline and the importation of food - which they will never do because they don't have the guts.
However, we could do every possible thing - give away electric cars, tax the hell out of fossil fuels, put solar and wind and geothermal in every possible place, grow biodiesel crops for liquid fuel, burn biomass for carbon-neutral baseload electricity, wave power, condemn car-dependent suburbs - all of which we should do - and Hawaii would _still_ be a totally unsustainable place. Oil permeates every single bit of our culture, such as our 95% imported food.
Anything short of a mass exodus (not exactly a popular idea) and a return to a semi-agrarian lifestyle (not particular popular either) is not sustainable. Very few people in Hawaii realize it, and of the few educated people, many are in denial or hold out unrealistic optimist for a silver bullet ("fuel from algae will save us!")
For more info, see my biofuel notes
I'm happy for the server-side people if this is progress on replacing Exchange, but what about replacing Outlook itself?
It's one of the 3-4 missing apps that prevent me from moving to Linux. I mean, how hard can it be, to implement an email client with integrated calendar and contacts? It doesn't need every single bell and whistle - just the few features i depend on (rich text in contact memo fields, savable contact searches). I'd happily buy such an app for Linux (at, say, the same price as Outlook.) Outlook's been around for what, 11 years? And in all that time, nobody's thought to make a viable Linux alternative?
I agree about the individual bands being important.p ), with all its bands, and has been for years. So while most of the posters here aren't quite informed, their basic question is relevant: Why is NASA making this new website? I can imagine a few possible reasons.
However, a great deal of LandSat _is_ available freely through GLCF ESDI (http://glcfapp.umiacs.umd.edu:8080/esdi/index.js
1. They want to do GLCF a favor by offloading their servers?
2. Maybe they will offer more complete set of LandSat with different timestamps?
3. Some political reason?
-Ben
I suspect it might be fairly common for seat-back computers to crash?
I don't know enough about Linux to understand what it said on my screen when it was trying (and failing) to boot back up again:
http://washedashore.com/misc/inflight_error.jpg
(This was April 23, 2005, on a flight from Bucuresti Romania to NYC.)
-Ben
Apple had no presence in the portables market prior to 1992
Where's the historical perspective? It may come as a surprise to some, but Apple actually made computers *before* the Macintosh. The Apple IIc was compact and roughly portable; although i couldn't tell you for sure (i was a C64 hacker at the time) we all assumed the Apple IIc was a portable because we see it being used on a beach in the movie "2010". Although looking back now, one has to wonder where the battery is in that compact little case.
I installed and the beta and tried it. First thing i tried to do was "dir", which showed me just a few of the files in the current directory, one per line. OK, i thought, that's a poor choice of default behavior, but surely there are command-line arguments to show hidden files and display more than one item per line, like "dir /w" or "ls -a".
So, i typed "help dir". Nothing in the help implied either option exists for MSH's "get-childitem" command!
It appears that MSH has taken a big step toward making every command general-purpose, but in doing so, they've made it really painful or non-obvious to do common things. Do i really have to write my own batch script to get the equivalent of "ls" default behavior?!
I intalled Columba to try it out. Sad to say, it looks really tiny. I tried to add a Contact, and found there were no fields for basic things like Phone Number. (!)
I'm puzzled how people can talk about software like this as some kind of alternative to Outlook. I'd LOVE to leave Outlook behind, but nothing comes close to matching its important features - not Thunderbird, not Evolution, and _definitely_ not little Columba.
Thanks for the plug, Alexandre. As a not-for-profit in the public interest, TOPP/VTP needs all the help it can get.
This news about millions of dollars going to There.com is both good, and disappointing. It's good in that any increase in the funding and attention for modelling the earth is, in general, a good thing.
It's disappointing in that There.com is a highly secretive, closed, proprietary environment, which guarantees that none of these millions of taxpayer dollars will actually bring the public closer to having a model of the earth.
-Ben Discoe, Project Manager, VTP
I remember they left 3D accel out of RH8 (deliberately!) for some reason. I see mention of ATI in the RH9 release notes, but nothing about NVidia cards.
To me, Linux can never compete with a Microsoft OS so long as i have to *compile something into the kernel* just to get 3D acceleration.
If RH9 still doesn't do this out of the box, is there ANY distro that does?
Thanks in advance.
It's no secret where their data comes from. The details of who Keyhole licensed imagery from (Space Image, AirPhoto USA etc.) can all be found by digging around on their site.
As for elevation, you're correct that SRTM isn't usable yet. Keyhole simply doesn't have better than the usual free 1km elevation data outside the USA. And 1km looks as bad as you might think.
For those who care, see the review of EarthViewer 3D that i wrote last year. I don't believe much has changed except the price dropping in desperation.
That SGI demo evolved into the GeoFusion technology. Doesn't require SGI Big Iron anymore. The author, Paul Hansen, is really smart and a great guy too.
DEMster? Yes, well, here are the possibilities: Global Data Sharing/Referencing
Actually Napster would a great analogy to follow, most of the terrain data in the world is proprietary and expensive, tightly controlled by the governments and big companies that produce it. Not that i'm suggesting anything , but P2P would be interesting way around that situation. The data only has to leak once for the genie to get out of the bottle..
-Ben>
Actually, Yes. The fossil fuel industry is the biggest proponent and developer of underground terrain visualization. They have huge, multi-million dollar visualization facilities dedicated to interactive 3d rendering of subterranean geological features.
If Dubya has half a clue, he should be just as enthusiastic as Gore about virtual terrain.
-Ben
Please don't use direct links into the VTP site!
Use the proper page to request a VTP distribution.
Thanks,
Ben Discoe
Project Manager, VTP