I think the new Battlestar stinks - especially as it's nothing new (more of a cross between the original series and the books).
Actually, you should forget the original series or the books ever existed. They were used to provide inspiration for this show, and not too much else.
Ron Moore realized that the thing keeping most science fiction shows from true greatness is an over-reliance on technology to drive stories and solve problems (e.g., "Captain, I redirected the proton flux through the transdynamic warp core shunt and used temporal simulspacing to realign the cosmic strings into a cross-dimensional pan-galactic wormhole and ejected the plasma cascade into it!"). He intentionally reworked the basic premise and the characters to provide the most opportunity for character-based plot development and interesting conflicts.
In the original show, Baltar was a one-dimensional villain, and a clown at that. Starbuck and Apollo had a safe and non-threatening relationship, and were generally bland (outside of the humor Starbuck's womanizing occasionally generated). Colonel Tigh was a boring second-in-command, and Commander Adama was a Moses figure--beyond reproach and able to command enormous respect without doing anything to really deserve it.
By contrast, the new Baltar is a seriously flawed human, but not a pure villain. Apollo and Starbuck have a very contentious relationship, which is flavored by their memories of Apollo's dead younger brother, and also the inevitable sexual tension between them. Colonel Tigh is a great officer, but a lousy person, and his interactions with Adama and the crew reflect that. Likewise, Adama's a grizzled veteran and a smart man, but he's not perfect and he's got a lot of emotional baggage.
I like the new show, and my wife and I can't wait for each new episode to appear. She's a bigger addict than I am. She'll be thrilled when I tell her the news.
Re:Intuition: Just another (blackbox) data point
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Blink, Take 2
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Maybe the bigger point is that intuition is just another datapoint. As such it can be good or bad, precise or noisy, accurate or biased....The core problem with intuition is that it seldom yields to analytical introspection.
I personally believe that one's intuition is the result of background processing going on in one's brain. I cannot count the number of times I've intuitively known something without being able to explain why, only to later reason through the whole process and come to the same conclusion I reached intuitively.
This specifically works best for me in "smell test" scenarios. I may intuitively know that something is a good idea or a bad idea, but I won't know why until I sit down and think through all of the possible steps and consequences. This can take days or weeks, and sometimes, the reason I didn't like something or knew that a specific option was the best will burst into my consciousness without warning when I'm thinking about something completely unrelated.
The only explanation I can come up with is that intuition is a lot like getting the Cliff's Notes version of a thought process. You know how it ends, but you don't necessarily know all the details that led to that point.
For that reason, intuition can be good or bad. If your thought processes are muddy and undisciplined in conscious thought, it's tough to imagine your intuition will race quickly to a significantly better conclusion on a consistent basis. If your mind is cluttered with subliminally-planted falsehoods, such as "tall people are more trustworthy and people with narrow-set eyes are untrustworthy," then you're likely to intuit the wrong answer a lot of the time. This is the danger of modern advertising and political campaigning.
Today's advertisers and political strategists no longer try to lure consumers and voters with facts or details. They work overtime to find words with positive connotations, and then use those words to build unconscious positive feelings for the associated products or candidates.
Why do we elect morons, or buy overpriced toothpaste? Because experts have figured out how to make us feel better about ourselves when we select their candidates or products.
The quick version of what I've written (for those of you skipping to the end) is: I trust my intuition most of the time--it's hardly ever steered me wrong, and most of the time, I can eventually reason through to the same answer. Your mileage may vary, so you should be cautious because anyone's intuition can be manipulated (and is being manipulated every day).
My knowledge of Clarke isn't very good, did he politicise himself or was he politicised by the Bush administration ?
Clarke was a civil servant/bureacrat during his time working in the US government. He never ran for office and his service was never a sinecure in exchange for political contributions. He served in various capacities under three Presidents (Bush the Elder, Clinton and Bush the Younger). It wasn't until he had spent time working for Bush the Younger that he began publicly criticizing anybody in the US government. He did so after resigning from government service.
Bush the Younger's entourage began to politicize Clarke and his work in an attempt to discredit him. It didn't work particularly well, although for some reason, US voters chose not to punish their President for his lousy track record on terror.
Anybody who has read Clarke's book can see for themselves that he is not some raving madman. He's a professional who has made a career out of imagining the worst, figuring out who's likely to do bad things, and then trying to get others to do what's necessary to prevent the bad things or capture/arrest/kill the bad people. His failure, if you can call it that, is that he was unable to get the current US President to take al Qaeda and the threat of International Terror seriously until after 9/11, and even then, the President was more worried about Saddam Hussein and Iraq than he was about Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.
I re-read the book when the movie came out and, yes, Bombadil bored me shitless. In fact, in many areas Tolkien just went on and on and on with no apparent sense of direction. He needed good editor.
I haven't read the LOTR trilogy in over 20 years (coming up on 25 years since I read it, at this point). One of the reasons I haven't been in a big hurry to re-read it is the memory of the horribly boring parts. Tom Bombadil's part just completely flummoxed me when I read FOTR, and the endless elven songs and poems that go on for pages and pages just bored the snot out of me. Even the descriptions of the physical locations could drag on for pages.
I have the extended DVDs of all three movies, and I remember on one of the documentaries, they talked about moving Shelob's Lair from TTT to ROTK. They described how Tolkien pretty much abandoned Frodo and Sam for the first half of ROTK, and how that worked in the book, but you could never get away with that in a movie.
Well, I'm here to say that it pissed me off when I read the books. I couldn't believe Tolkien was wasting so much time on other stuff when Frodo and Sam were SO CLOSE to Mount Doom. By the time I got to the end of ROTK, I was relieved to be done with the trilogy, not excited about the greatness of what I'd read. Tolkien definitely needed some editing, and that's what Peter Jackson & Co. did. I thought their results were terrific. Anybody who wants the unvarnished, original Tolkien can still go buy the books.
He wrote A screenplay, not this screenplay. He wrote what HE considered the final draft. And then, he died.
You should read the rather funny self-interview conducted by the guy who wrote the final screenplay. It's apparent from that interview--without being explicitly stated--that Adams's final draft was never going to be filmed without further modification. That's just the way the movie business works. Even the "final" approved script gets changed during filming because of (A) inspiration of the director to expand a scene, add a new scene, etc., or (B) the discovery that a scene that reads brilliantly on the page just doesn't work when filmed.
Douglas Adams wrote a lot of great stuff, but he couldn't figure out how to structure it to make it work as brilliantly in movie form as it had in book and radio play form. The eventual screenplay consisted largely of reorganizing Adams's own material into a shootable script. Where changes deviating from Adams's own writings had to be made, they deferred to his intentions as much as possible, by referring to his notes, unfinished musings, half-written scenes, etc.
Is there some stuff in the script that wasn't written by Douglas Adams himself? Definitely. Did they likely cut out stuff Adams would have kept? Probably. Did they put back in stuff that Adams had cut? Definitely.
Unfortunately, due to his untimely death, we'll never know what Douglas Adams himself would have thought of this movie. If you'd asked me five years ago if a movie of HHGG could ever be anything other than horrible, I'd have answered with an unequivocal NO. But Peter Jackson's version of The Lord of the Rings has made me change my mind. I think it can be good. Will it? I don't know, but I'll withhold my judgement until I actually see it.
NPR had a story about this last month. First off, it's Oregon that's driving this project, not California, although California's interested in Oregon's results. Second, Oregon is currently testing a system that will work much like Mobil's SpeedPass system. Essentially, you'll have a GPS device in your car that'll keep track of where you drive. It can log your miles into zones. When you buy gas, it uploads the mileage info to the pump which then automagically adds the appropriate tax to your gas purchase.
The system as it is currently envisioned won't necessarily track exactly where you've been--just whether it was in-state or out-of-state. However, it promises to be able to do far more than simply track in-state or out-of-state mileage. It can also track whether any of your mileage was logged in a highly-congested area (much like London's congestion tax for driving in certain congested parts of the city), or during high congestion times (a rush-hour tax to encourage off-hours commuting), and tax you accordingly.
It remains to be seen whether the added cost of putting the devices in cars and equipping gas pumps with the readers is worth it, though.
And dude, if i had a $10m house, i wouldnt waste 27k, id rather do it myself for 3k, and spend the other 24k on my friends/relos/birthdays.
That is precisely why you'll never have a $10M house. You have no concept of economics. Somebody with a $10M house is going to waste far more than $100,000 of his own time setting up a hack-it-together system such as the one you describe, so he's going to pay someone else to do it for him. Now, which do you think he'll choose? Will he bankroll a from-the-ground-up project to come up with a custom UI and a custom hardware config, and probably have something that's still damn buggy? Or will he pay his electronics installers to bundle in something like the Kaleidescape that's already available off-the-shelf?
People who make lots of money generally understand that it's cheaper to pay an expert to do something for you than to waste your own time trying to do something yourself. Now, if you're an entrepeneur who's starting a business to sell a competing system that's superior in every way to Kaleidescape, and you're using your own house as a testbed, that's an entirely different scenario. But that's not what you appear to have been proposing.
Know better? They don't give a shit. When your house costs $10 million, and you've got $500,000 worth of custom-installed home theater gear, plasma screen TVs, multiroom audio and video, etc., an additional $27k or even $100k isn't that much to spend to ensure that you can watch any of your movies from any of your screens any time you want. It's a helluvalot more elegant and intuitive than some hack-it-together-yourself DVR or DVD caching box. Besides, you're going to be taking your family on a holiday to Barcelona or Shanghai or Aspen during the couple of weeks it takes to get that whole thing installed, configured, tested and debugged. And you probably will pay Kaleidescape the money to duplicate your entire DVD collection onto the hard drives so you don't have reload them yourself, or have your personal electrical engineer spend a week loading your DVDs onto the system.
Besides, if I'm some rich guy who's spent that much on his house and electronics, I'm showing off my latest "I'm cooler-than-you" gadgets to my other ultra-rich friends before we head off to cruise the Mediterranean in my private yacht. The people who buy this are the same people who buy the Ford GT (~$140k), the Mercedes SL65 AMG (~$140k), the Bentley Arnage T (~$250k), the Maybach 57 ($~$330k) or the Porsche Carrera GT (~$440k). The cost is irrelevant--it's all about the cool.
BTW: The CEO of the company I work for has recently bought both a Ford GT (~$140k) and a Mercedes SL65AMG (~$140k). That's to go along with the BMW 760Li (~$90k) he already owns, his $14 million Learjet, his $12 million house, etc.
No kidding. The damn thing goes on and on and on. Worse, he apparently planned to talk to high school kids with the assumption that all of them would immediately proceed to college. I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, and I think barely half of my high school graduating class planned to go on to any kind of higher education (such as community college).
His speech would have been much better if he'd shortened it to something like this:
Here's what I most wish I'd known in high school:
Find challenging and rewarding things to do that expand your options, rather than close them.
Keep your options open because you're likely to find that the career you think you want to pursue looks very different once you know what it's actually like
Remember that the greatest rewards take the most patience to achieve.
Understand that the most desirable or glamorous jobs will attract a lot of people, which means that the path to getting one of those jobs is usually long, arduous and filled with seemingly-irrelevant sidetracks. This is to weed out those who lack sufficient desire.
By the same token, don't assume that a willingness to endure drudgery and a passion for the job is all that is required to succeed. You must find within yourself a talent for doing the job well, and you must work to grow that talent.
When you are doing a job, don't just do it well enough to meet the minimum requirements. This is not a call to perfectionism--it's simply an observation that those who do the job better than they have to tend to excel and surpass their peers.
Never stop learning. Graduating from school should be seen as the beginning of a new phase in your education, not the completion of it.
Remember that the job market is a vast competition. If you want the best jobs, you need to give yourself every possible advantage over your competition: More skills, more knowledge, etc.
Don't forget that people make hiring decisions, and people sometimes allow their personal likes and dislikes to color the hiring process. You can deal with this in one of two ways: Either develop the personal skills and charm you need to schmooze those people; or realize that there are a lot of options open to you in the job market, and there are often numerous ways to get the job you desire.
Build a diverse network of friends who respect your abilities and your work. Sometimes, your job opportunities grow from your network of contacts as much as from your own jobhunting efforts.
Be creative. Don't get locked into a single way of doing things. Always look for a novel approach to solving problems.
Learn to think critically. Challenge your assumptions. Always ask why something is done a certain way, and don't settle for, "It's the way we've always done it." Chances are there was once a very good reason for doing things that way, and that reason may still be a good reason. But oftentimes, people get used to doing something a certain way and don't bother questioning why, even long after the original reason no longer makes sense.
And finally, don't make the mistake of assuming that money==happiness. If you work in a well-paying job that makes you miserable, you owe it to yourself to find a job that makes you happy, even if that means you need to make less money while doing so. Don't be afraid to take a pay cut to get into a field you enjoy.
This probable isn't american airlines fault, but more due to government regulation.
Did you RTFA? The person in question was never asked those questions when flying on USAir, and when American Airlines discovered he was an AAdvantage Platinum member, they immediately changed their tune and told him they no longer needed to ask those questions.
If it's a government regulation, then why didn't he have to comply with it when he flew USAir? Why didn't he have to comply with it because he had Platinum status in American's frequent flyer program?
Oh, and when an airline loses your luggage, you generally have a good idea they've done that before you leave the baggage claim at your destination airport. You have to file a claim for your missing bag (description, etc.) and they collect contact information at that time. There's no need to collect that up front.
From the article: "I finally located their CEO's cellphone in an investor-relations web page." That would be why the CEO was involved, so his involvement illustrates nothing about the company's laziness or otherwise
As a Panix subscriber (and submitter of this topic), I have seen informal update posts made to internal (Panix-only) newsgroups by Panix staff during and since the crisis.
Not only did Panix get MelbourneIT's CEO's cellphone number from a web page, but when they contacted him, he was most unhelpful and even directed MelbourneIT's corporate counsel to contact Panix and set them straight.
If this is the kind of leadership MelbourneIT shows in times of crisis, I pity anyone who has to depend on them--whether by their own choice or through someone else's--to do the right thing in a pinch.
It would be around 270ms for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a bit more for a router on the moon.:)
That's a one-way trip. Meaning that traffic only goes to the satellite and back to earth once. That's great if you've got some sort of instrumented satellite up there and you're trying to query it for data, or if you're broadcasting (one way). But because this thing's a router, that implies that traffic will be two-way.
This means you're going to have that minimum 270ms lag on the outbound leg, but you've got to take into account the return trip, which doubles the minimum latency to 540ms (that's a half-second to you and me). If there's even typical latency on the terrestrial side (at both ends), you're probably talking another 50-60ms, so a typical ping time will most likely be 600ms or more.
Of course, this assumes that the space router satellite will be placed in geosynchronous orbit., but there's nothing in TFA to indicate that's how it'll be used. It might be placed in a lower orbit, as part of a constellation of satellites, the way Teledesic had planned to do, in which case, the latency would be much lower.
All the more if they offer a "lifetime" subscription where you pay up front.
I bought my first TiVo about five years ago. I started out using the "ten day trial" they offered back then. It took me three days to realize you could have my TiVo when you pried it from my cold, dead fingers. I bought the lifetime subscription, which, at that time, was $199. Monthly service at the time cost $10. I figured my ROI would take two years tops, even accounting for the time-value-of-money issue. This was before the monthly service went to $13 a month.
So I've owned a TiVo box for five years, with fully-paid service. By going with the lifetime option, I've saved over $500, because the monthly service went to $13 a month before my original two year ROI period.
Say what you will about the value of a TiVo lifetime subscription if you buy one today, but for us early adopters, lifetime service was a bargain and a half.
It no longer has an entry on IMDB, but a remake of Logan's Run is still in the works for X-Men director Bryan Singer. See this interview on Ain't It Cool News. He's planning to do Logan's Run after Superman Returns
As others have pointed out, you can buy USB-to-PS/2 adapters, but I bought the Belkin OmniView SOHO 4-port KVM with PS/2, USB, audio and VGA. You plug a PS/2 keyboard and mouse into it and you connect it up to PCs or Macs with PS/2 or USB cables. It also switches your microphone and audio out. It's pretty handy. It comes in two or four port versions.
This means you're spending 13 full days (here by "day" I mean 24 hours) of your life every year watching this bullshit. Think about it.
The only bullshit I'm smelling here is your insistence that I'm wasting my time. Take your head out of your ass and realize that most people actually enjoy watching entertaining programs on TV, and there are actually a lot of good shows to watch. To me, building tube amps or playing guitar would be unenjoyable experiences. Does that mean I think you wasted your time on bullshit? No, because I'm not an elitist asshole. I listen to NPR too, but that doesn't make me too smug for television.
Enjoy your morally-superior lifestyle. I'll enjoy mine without the snotty attitude.
Your superiority complex just drips from your keyboard. My wife and I have a seven-month-old who's just beginning to explore the house, and yes, he's a source of endless entertainment. We don't watch much TV, but we do like to watch quality TV when we have the chance (an hour a night, on average). After all, kids need their sleep and they can't be awake every minute we both are.
I'm so happy for you and your fulfilling lifestyle. I just don't buy your premise that the money I spend on TV is a waste. It's part of my overall entertainment budget (including music concerts, comedy shows, movies, sporting events, books, CDs and DVDs). You don't see the value in it. Fine. I do see value in what I spend for TV. Your smugness doesn't change that.
Let's face facts: You're in love with your TV-free lifestyle and you smugly believe it somehow makes you superior to those of us who actually use TV for entertainment and education. I lived for over a year without a TV once, and I really didn't miss it at the time. However, I did entertain myself in other ways, including going to bars with my friends, buying music, playing video games, etc. Oh, and I worked about 70 hours a week, so I didn't have all that much free time to get bored in the first place. I know for a fact I blew more than $70 a month on alcohol and strippers during that timeframe, though.
Maybe you really only pay $10 a month to entertain yourself, but somehow, I doubt that. Methinks you've got other investments in entertainment, because if you're only renting two or three DVDs a month, you've got a lot of time on your hands in which to get bored, and there's only so much masturbating one can do before one's genitals rebel from overuse. Music (recorded and live), movies (DVD rentals and those viewed in a theater), live theater and other live entertainment events, alcohol, drugs, books, magazines, sporting events, video games, art supplies, pr0n, etc. all count in your entertainment budget. And if you're only consuming what you can get for "free," then you've still got an investment in your computer, its peripherals, your Internet connection, and any recordable media you use.
Whatever you do to entertain yourself is your choice. The fact that your entertainment options exclude TV does not make you somehow superior to those of us who've discovered that there's plenty of stuff on TV that's worth watching because it's (A) entertaining, (B) informative or (C) both. I can afford $70 a month to entertain myself and my family. It's a lot cheaper than many of the other things we do for entertainment (live comedy shows, sporting events, road and plane trips, riding roller coasters, etc.).
I do pay about $70 a month for TV, including $5 a month for TiVo service (through DirecTV). Why? I'll tell you why: 90% of TV is crap, and the 10% that's worth watching is either (A) on channels other than the ones you can watch for free or (B) on at times I'm not home or not awake. Some of that good 10% is actually great. Mythbusters on Discovery is a terrific show. The Sopranos is probably the best TV drama I've ever seen. The Daily Show is brilliant. Penn & Teller's Bullshit is historically great.
Thanks to TiVo, I can setup wishlists for stuff I want to see, like movies directed by Akira Kurosawa (not likely to see many of those on free TV). And TiVo will occasionally suggest other shows it thinks I might like (I found Good Eats that way).
So let's lose the elitist bullshit attitude, shall we? Those of us who value our time understand that great entertainment can be had from television, but you need to invest in channels and a DVR to get the most of out your viewing time.
BTW: There are shows worth watching on free TV. Nova, Frontline and Scientific American Frontiers on PBS, for example. The Simpsons is back from the dead and as good as it has ever been, and while Arrested Development didn't light my fire, a lot of people love it. As much as I love watching the good shows on free TV, I don't normally have time to watch them when they're being broadcast. A DVR is even more important if you're going to limit yourself to what's available on free TV.
Maybe you enjoy spending 90% of your TV-watching time on the crap that's on when you have time to watch. If that's the case, then bully for you, but you can drop the elitist asshole attitude towards those of us who pay for good programming and a DVR to ensure we can watch it.
If all you ever want to use is the kit lens, you'd probably be more satisfied with a prosumer 8mp or something.
Sorry, but I briefly owned an 8MP prosumer (the KonicaMinolta Dimage A2) and returned it. I've been much happier with the Digital Rebel, even with just the kit lens.
Why? The short answer is picture quality. The A2 took some really lousy pictures for me. It took some really nice ones, too, but I got very inconsistent performance, and in low-ish light, the picture was very noisy. I got visible (and objectionable) noise even at ISO 200, and at ISO 400, the picture was far too noisy.
It wasn't just noise, though. The camera itself must have had about two dozen knobs, switches, dials and buttons on it, and every single one of them did more than one thing. It's nice to have a really configurable camera, but when you need to snap some photos and you don't want to futz with the settings, it's nice to have a camera you can count on to take a high-quality picture without much intervention. The A2 failed miserably in that regard.
At least 15% of the pictures I took with the A2 were out of focus or suffered from motion blur. The out-of-focus problem was inexcusable because it wasn't possible to easily tell whether a photo was in focus when I took it, and it was tough to tell in the viewfinder what the camera had chosen to focus on. The motion blur problem was caused by the sensor's poor light sensitivity, which led to needing longer exposures in any given situation.
The objectionable noise and the motion blur were both the result of the small sensor and its high resolution. Essentially, each photosite (pixel) gets smaller as the sensor size shrinks or the resolution of the sensor increases. When you put a small, 8 MP sensor in a camera, you have really tiny photosites. Those photosites can't gather as much light as larger photosites, so when the signal is amplified, there's more noise.
The 6MP sensor of a Digital Rebel is about 6 times the size of the 8MP sensor in the Dimage A2. Factoring in the difference in resolution, each photosite on the sensor of the DR is about EIGHT times as big as each photosite on the sensor for the A2 or any other prosumer 8MP camera. The end result is that the DR doesn't need to amplify the signal as much, and introduces less noise. I see less noise on the DR at ISO 1600 than I did on the A2 at ISO 400.
The end result is that, especially in low or natural light, the image quality is noticeably better on the Digital Rebel with the kit lens than it was on the A2.
Oh, and one other point in favor of the DR. It's actually much simpler to use than the A2. My wife (no photography nut) has no problem using the DR to take great shots of our six-month-old.
Currently the Hubble robotics mission is going forward.
If, when you say the "mission is going forward," you mean "NASA is spending the time and money to plan/design a mission," then you're correct. If you mean that the budget has been approved to actually build a robot and fly the mission, then you're incorrect. They're in the early exploratory phase, here. If they run into problems, O'Keefe will probably scrap it.
It would be nice if they'd find a way to repair or replace the Hubble Space Telescope, though.
Funny you should mention that. NPR's "Morning Edition" program reported this morning that NASA hired a company called The Aerospace Corporation to conduct a confidential study to determine the best way to deal with Hubble, including two completed instruments that were originally supposed to fly to Hubble aboard the Space Shuttle.
The conclusion? Well, the report itself is confidential and won't ever see the light of day. The executive summary, however, has been obtained through a FOIA request. In short, they don't think a robotic servicing mission could be completed before Hubble dies. They recommend flying a new bare-bones replacement for Hubble with the two new instruments onboard. In their opinion, it'll be cheaper and it's more likely to work.
Of course, there are those who dispute the study's findings. They say that there already exists a robot of sufficient dexterity for performing the mission. It was designed to fly on the ISS and last ten years. A Hubble service mission would last at most a few months.
First off, I'd like to state that this isn't exactly a convincing argument.
Secondly, I'd like to point out that Solaris is one helluvagood operating system. I used to work at a place where we moved our production database from an Ultra 1/170 to an Ultra 2/2200 with no glitches. We didn't recompile anything, we didn't have to reconfigure anything. We moved the boot drive and RAM from one chassis to another, moved the SCSI cable for the external RAID chassis to the new box, and powered up.
Needless to say, it was easier than moving a Windows installation by a huge margin. It was easier than any machine migration I've ever witnessed. Everything automatically recognized the fact that we'd gone from a single processor box to a multiprocessor box.
Now I realize that Solaris on SPARC had the advantage of going from one Sun-engineered box to another, making it likely that the underlying chipsets and such were identical or at least compatible, but the point is that the OS was rock-solid on a single-processor box and it was rock-solid after being migrated to a dual-processor box with no configuration changes.
That said, in spite of all of Solaris's goodness (and there's plenty of it), I seriously doubt even an open source Solaris will kill off Linux. Why? Freedom (as in speech).
Let's face it: Linux isn't the only open source-licensed Unix or Unix-like OS available. So why the hell is it so popular? Obviously, Linus is a huge reason why Linux is popular, but the GPL sure doesn't hurt. Contributors to Linux know that their contributions are being used by others who are required by the terms of the license to contribute any improvements they make back to the kernel. Nobody can take the source and close it off from the rest of us. Nobody can build proprietary extensions to the kernel.
There's no way in Hell that Sun's license will be anywhere near as free as the GPL. This is why open source Solaris can't kill Linux.
A few questions: What does noise look like on photographs? What causes noise when you take photographs? Why are digitals better at handling noise?
Depending on whether you're talking about a digital original or a film original, noise looks different from one to the other. On a digital original, noise shows up as "blotchiness" for lack of a better description. Shoot a field of something that's generally the same color (a baseball field at night, for instance) on a digital camera at its highest ISO setting. If the noise is noticeable (which it is on most digital cameras), you'll see random patches where the color doesn't quite match.
Noise in film is different. I'm no photographic expert, but as I understand it film noise is usually caused by the grain itself obscuring some of the detail in the photograph. The shape of the grain is not 100% uniform, and neither is the orientation of the individual grain particles. So you won't get consistent detail throughout an image. I might be wrong on this, but that's my understanding. Regardless, the higher the ISO of the film, the higher the noise level.
Keep in mind that even those photographers who shoot film usually end up needing to get those film negatives scanned so that the photographs can be digitally manipulated. It's a rare photographer these days who can shoot, develop, print and enlarge exclusively with optics and chemicals. The scanning process itself introduces some noise into the photo image, further reducing the quality of the film image, and even the best optics introduce some noise into an image, so people using optical technologies stick to first-generation copies whenever possible.
In a digital camera, the sensor has a fixed amount of light-gathering capability. At higher ISO equivalency settings, the effective sensitivity of the sensor is increased by amplifying whatever signal is detected. The signals are amplified somewhat at all ISO settings on most digital cameras, but the amplification level is higher at higher ISOs. It's this amplification process that introduces noise in a digital camera.
BTW: Digitals aren't automatically better at handling noise than film cameras. It depends on the sensor in the digital and the film used in the film camera.
The larger the sensor is in a digital camera, the more native light-gathering capability it has, and the less amplification is required to get a usable signal from the sensor. This leads to lower noise in the image at any ISO. For instance, Canon's Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) digital SLR has an APS-C-sized sensor (370 sq mm) with 6.3MP, while Sony, Olympus and even Canon sell "prosumer" digital cameras that use sensors that are 2/3" in size (58 sq mm). The 2/3" sensor's got about 1/6th the total area of the 300D's APS-C sensor. Factoring in the difference in resolution, that means that the 300D's APS-sized sensor has a little more than 8 times the area per pixel for gathering light than does a "prosumer" 2/3" 8MP sensor. This adds up to dramatically lower noise for the 300D at any ISO, as I can personally attest. I bought a KonicaMinolta Dimage A2 and returned it because the noise at virtually all ISO settings was objectionable (all my pictures looked blotchy). The Canon 300D has lower noise than the A2 at all settings, and the noisiest the Canon ever gets (1600 ISO) is still lower than the noise levels I saw from the A2 at 400 ISO.
Now, imagine going from an APS-C sized sensor (370 sq mm) to a full-frame 35mm sensor (864 sq mm). That 35mm sensor is about 2.3 times bigger than the APS-C sensor. Even with 2.7 times as many pixels, the 35mm sensor still has enormous light-gathering power per pixel. In addition, I'm betting that Canon's putting its most advanced sensor technology in the 1Ds Mark II, meaning that the sensor is more sensitive than the sensors used in most other cameras, again requiring less amplification and thus generating less noise.
Compared with a comparable Canon 35mm body with the same lens, a picture sho
Re-read the original post, please. HP is discontinuing Itanium workstations, not servers.
For all its flaws, Itanium does have more headroom to grow than the x86-64 architecture. The whole reason HP and Intel got into bed over Itanium and its EPIC architecture was because it's getting harder and harder to wring more performance out of a chip by adding parallel instruction pipelines. In order to crank clockspeeds higher, those pipelines have to get longer and longer (witness Prescott's 31-stage pipeline). The more pipelines you have and the longer they are, the worse is the penalty for branch misprediction.
It's this problem that led HP and Intel to VLIW, where the parallelism is explicitly compiled into the code, reducing or eliminating the need for a lot of transistors that currently break code down into parallel-izable chunks and try to predict branches.
Unless somebody invents a new way of architecting chips that will eliminate or substantially reduce the branch misprediction penalty without substantially breaking x86 compatibility, Itanium (or something like it) will eventually reign supreme.
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I think the new Battlestar stinks - especially as it's nothing new (more of a cross between the original series and the books).
Actually, you should forget the original series or the books ever existed. They were used to provide inspiration for this show, and not too much else.
Ron Moore realized that the thing keeping most science fiction shows from true greatness is an over-reliance on technology to drive stories and solve problems (e.g., "Captain, I redirected the proton flux through the transdynamic warp core shunt and used temporal simulspacing to realign the cosmic strings into a cross-dimensional pan-galactic wormhole and ejected the plasma cascade into it!"). He intentionally reworked the basic premise and the characters to provide the most opportunity for character-based plot development and interesting conflicts.
In the original show, Baltar was a one-dimensional villain, and a clown at that. Starbuck and Apollo had a safe and non-threatening relationship, and were generally bland (outside of the humor Starbuck's womanizing occasionally generated). Colonel Tigh was a boring second-in-command, and Commander Adama was a Moses figure--beyond reproach and able to command enormous respect without doing anything to really deserve it.
By contrast, the new Baltar is a seriously flawed human, but not a pure villain. Apollo and Starbuck have a very contentious relationship, which is flavored by their memories of Apollo's dead younger brother, and also the inevitable sexual tension between them. Colonel Tigh is a great officer, but a lousy person, and his interactions with Adama and the crew reflect that. Likewise, Adama's a grizzled veteran and a smart man, but he's not perfect and he's got a lot of emotional baggage.
I like the new show, and my wife and I can't wait for each new episode to appear. She's a bigger addict than I am. She'll be thrilled when I tell her the news.
Maybe the bigger point is that intuition is just another datapoint. As such it can be good or bad, precise or noisy, accurate or biased....The core problem with intuition is that it seldom yields to analytical introspection.
I personally believe that one's intuition is the result of background processing going on in one's brain. I cannot count the number of times I've intuitively known something without being able to explain why, only to later reason through the whole process and come to the same conclusion I reached intuitively.
This specifically works best for me in "smell test" scenarios. I may intuitively know that something is a good idea or a bad idea, but I won't know why until I sit down and think through all of the possible steps and consequences. This can take days or weeks, and sometimes, the reason I didn't like something or knew that a specific option was the best will burst into my consciousness without warning when I'm thinking about something completely unrelated.
The only explanation I can come up with is that intuition is a lot like getting the Cliff's Notes version of a thought process. You know how it ends, but you don't necessarily know all the details that led to that point.
For that reason, intuition can be good or bad. If your thought processes are muddy and undisciplined in conscious thought, it's tough to imagine your intuition will race quickly to a significantly better conclusion on a consistent basis. If your mind is cluttered with subliminally-planted falsehoods, such as "tall people are more trustworthy and people with narrow-set eyes are untrustworthy," then you're likely to intuit the wrong answer a lot of the time. This is the danger of modern advertising and political campaigning.
Today's advertisers and political strategists no longer try to lure consumers and voters with facts or details. They work overtime to find words with positive connotations, and then use those words to build unconscious positive feelings for the associated products or candidates.
Why do we elect morons, or buy overpriced toothpaste? Because experts have figured out how to make us feel better about ourselves when we select their candidates or products.
The quick version of what I've written (for those of you skipping to the end) is: I trust my intuition most of the time--it's hardly ever steered me wrong, and most of the time, I can eventually reason through to the same answer. Your mileage may vary, so you should be cautious because anyone's intuition can be manipulated (and is being manipulated every day).
My knowledge of Clarke isn't very good, did he politicise himself or was he politicised by the Bush administration ?
Clarke was a civil servant/bureacrat during his time working in the US government. He never ran for office and his service was never a sinecure in exchange for political contributions. He served in various capacities under three Presidents (Bush the Elder, Clinton and Bush the Younger). It wasn't until he had spent time working for Bush the Younger that he began publicly criticizing anybody in the US government. He did so after resigning from government service.
Bush the Younger's entourage began to politicize Clarke and his work in an attempt to discredit him. It didn't work particularly well, although for some reason, US voters chose not to punish their President for his lousy track record on terror.
Anybody who has read Clarke's book can see for themselves that he is not some raving madman. He's a professional who has made a career out of imagining the worst, figuring out who's likely to do bad things, and then trying to get others to do what's necessary to prevent the bad things or capture/arrest/kill the bad people. His failure, if you can call it that, is that he was unable to get the current US President to take al Qaeda and the threat of International Terror seriously until after 9/11, and even then, the President was more worried about Saddam Hussein and Iraq than he was about Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.
I re-read the book when the movie came out and, yes, Bombadil bored me shitless. In fact, in many areas Tolkien just went on and on and on with no apparent sense of direction. He needed good editor.
I haven't read the LOTR trilogy in over 20 years (coming up on 25 years since I read it, at this point). One of the reasons I haven't been in a big hurry to re-read it is the memory of the horribly boring parts. Tom Bombadil's part just completely flummoxed me when I read FOTR, and the endless elven songs and poems that go on for pages and pages just bored the snot out of me. Even the descriptions of the physical locations could drag on for pages.
I have the extended DVDs of all three movies, and I remember on one of the documentaries, they talked about moving Shelob's Lair from TTT to ROTK. They described how Tolkien pretty much abandoned Frodo and Sam for the first half of ROTK, and how that worked in the book, but you could never get away with that in a movie.
Well, I'm here to say that it pissed me off when I read the books. I couldn't believe Tolkien was wasting so much time on other stuff when Frodo and Sam were SO CLOSE to Mount Doom. By the time I got to the end of ROTK, I was relieved to be done with the trilogy, not excited about the greatness of what I'd read. Tolkien definitely needed some editing, and that's what Peter Jackson & Co. did. I thought their results were terrific. Anybody who wants the unvarnished, original Tolkien can still go buy the books.
He wrote A screenplay, not this screenplay. He wrote what HE considered the final draft. And then, he died.
You should read the rather funny self-interview conducted by the guy who wrote the final screenplay. It's apparent from that interview--without being explicitly stated--that Adams's final draft was never going to be filmed without further modification. That's just the way the movie business works. Even the "final" approved script gets changed during filming because of (A) inspiration of the director to expand a scene, add a new scene, etc., or (B) the discovery that a scene that reads brilliantly on the page just doesn't work when filmed.
Douglas Adams wrote a lot of great stuff, but he couldn't figure out how to structure it to make it work as brilliantly in movie form as it had in book and radio play form. The eventual screenplay consisted largely of reorganizing Adams's own material into a shootable script. Where changes deviating from Adams's own writings had to be made, they deferred to his intentions as much as possible, by referring to his notes, unfinished musings, half-written scenes, etc.
Is there some stuff in the script that wasn't written by Douglas Adams himself? Definitely. Did they likely cut out stuff Adams would have kept? Probably. Did they put back in stuff that Adams had cut? Definitely.
Unfortunately, due to his untimely death, we'll never know what Douglas Adams himself would have thought of this movie. If you'd asked me five years ago if a movie of HHGG could ever be anything other than horrible, I'd have answered with an unequivocal NO. But Peter Jackson's version of The Lord of the Rings has made me change my mind. I think it can be good. Will it? I don't know, but I'll withhold my judgement until I actually see it.
NPR had a story about this last month. First off, it's Oregon that's driving this project, not California, although California's interested in Oregon's results. Second, Oregon is currently testing a system that will work much like Mobil's SpeedPass system. Essentially, you'll have a GPS device in your car that'll keep track of where you drive. It can log your miles into zones. When you buy gas, it uploads the mileage info to the pump which then automagically adds the appropriate tax to your gas purchase.
The system as it is currently envisioned won't necessarily track exactly where you've been--just whether it was in-state or out-of-state. However, it promises to be able to do far more than simply track in-state or out-of-state mileage. It can also track whether any of your mileage was logged in a highly-congested area (much like London's congestion tax for driving in certain congested parts of the city), or during high congestion times (a rush-hour tax to encourage off-hours commuting), and tax you accordingly.
It remains to be seen whether the added cost of putting the devices in cars and equipping gas pumps with the readers is worth it, though.
And dude, if i had a $10m house, i wouldnt waste 27k, id rather do it myself for 3k, and spend the other 24k on my friends/relos/birthdays.
That is precisely why you'll never have a $10M house. You have no concept of economics. Somebody with a $10M house is going to waste far more than $100,000 of his own time setting up a hack-it-together system such as the one you describe, so he's going to pay someone else to do it for him. Now, which do you think he'll choose? Will he bankroll a from-the-ground-up project to come up with a custom UI and a custom hardware config, and probably have something that's still damn buggy? Or will he pay his electronics installers to bundle in something like the Kaleidescape that's already available off-the-shelf?
People who make lots of money generally understand that it's cheaper to pay an expert to do something for you than to waste your own time trying to do something yourself. Now, if you're an entrepeneur who's starting a business to sell a competing system that's superior in every way to Kaleidescape, and you're using your own house as a testbed, that's an entirely different scenario. But that's not what you appear to have been proposing.
Rich people don't know better.
Know better? They don't give a shit. When your house costs $10 million, and you've got $500,000 worth of custom-installed home theater gear, plasma screen TVs, multiroom audio and video, etc., an additional $27k or even $100k isn't that much to spend to ensure that you can watch any of your movies from any of your screens any time you want. It's a helluvalot more elegant and intuitive than some hack-it-together-yourself DVR or DVD caching box. Besides, you're going to be taking your family on a holiday to Barcelona or Shanghai or Aspen during the couple of weeks it takes to get that whole thing installed, configured, tested and debugged. And you probably will pay Kaleidescape the money to duplicate your entire DVD collection onto the hard drives so you don't have reload them yourself, or have your personal electrical engineer spend a week loading your DVDs onto the system.
Besides, if I'm some rich guy who's spent that much on his house and electronics, I'm showing off my latest "I'm cooler-than-you" gadgets to my other ultra-rich friends before we head off to cruise the Mediterranean in my private yacht. The people who buy this are the same people who buy the Ford GT (~$140k), the Mercedes SL65 AMG (~$140k), the Bentley Arnage T (~$250k), the Maybach 57 ($~$330k) or the Porsche Carrera GT (~$440k). The cost is irrelevant--it's all about the cool.
BTW: The CEO of the company I work for has recently bought both a Ford GT (~$140k) and a Mercedes SL65AMG (~$140k). That's to go along with the BMW 760Li (~$90k) he already owns, his $14 million Learjet, his $12 million house, etc.
How about Brevity?
No kidding. The damn thing goes on and on and on. Worse, he apparently planned to talk to high school kids with the assumption that all of them would immediately proceed to college. I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, and I think barely half of my high school graduating class planned to go on to any kind of higher education (such as community college).
His speech would have been much better if he'd shortened it to something like this:
Here's what I most wish I'd known in high school:
This probable isn't american airlines fault, but more due to government regulation.
Did you RTFA? The person in question was never asked those questions when flying on USAir, and when American Airlines discovered he was an AAdvantage Platinum member, they immediately changed their tune and told him they no longer needed to ask those questions.
If it's a government regulation, then why didn't he have to comply with it when he flew USAir? Why didn't he have to comply with it because he had Platinum status in American's frequent flyer program?
Oh, and when an airline loses your luggage, you generally have a good idea they've done that before you leave the baggage claim at your destination airport. You have to file a claim for your missing bag (description, etc.) and they collect contact information at that time. There's no need to collect that up front.
From the article: "I finally located their CEO's cellphone in an investor-relations web page."
That would be why the CEO was involved, so his involvement illustrates nothing about the company's laziness or otherwise
As a Panix subscriber (and submitter of this topic), I have seen informal update posts made to internal (Panix-only) newsgroups by Panix staff during and since the crisis.
Not only did Panix get MelbourneIT's CEO's cellphone number from a web page, but when they contacted him, he was most unhelpful and even directed MelbourneIT's corporate counsel to contact Panix and set them straight.
If this is the kind of leadership MelbourneIT shows in times of crisis, I pity anyone who has to depend on them--whether by their own choice or through someone else's--to do the right thing in a pinch.
It would be around 270ms for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a bit more for a router on the moon. :)
That's a one-way trip. Meaning that traffic only goes to the satellite and back to earth once. That's great if you've got some sort of instrumented satellite up there and you're trying to query it for data, or if you're broadcasting (one way). But because this thing's a router, that implies that traffic will be two-way.
This means you're going to have that minimum 270ms lag on the outbound leg, but you've got to take into account the return trip, which doubles the minimum latency to 540ms (that's a half-second to you and me). If there's even typical latency on the terrestrial side (at both ends), you're probably talking another 50-60ms, so a typical ping time will most likely be 600ms or more.
Of course, this assumes that the space router satellite will be placed in geosynchronous orbit., but there's nothing in TFA to indicate that's how it'll be used. It might be placed in a lower orbit, as part of a constellation of satellites, the way Teledesic had planned to do, in which case, the latency would be much lower.
All the more if they offer a "lifetime" subscription where you pay up front.
I bought my first TiVo about five years ago. I started out using the "ten day trial" they offered back then. It took me three days to realize you could have my TiVo when you pried it from my cold, dead fingers. I bought the lifetime subscription, which, at that time, was $199. Monthly service at the time cost $10. I figured my ROI would take two years tops, even accounting for the time-value-of-money issue. This was before the monthly service went to $13 a month.
So I've owned a TiVo box for five years, with fully-paid service. By going with the lifetime option, I've saved over $500, because the monthly service went to $13 a month before my original two year ROI period.
Say what you will about the value of a TiVo lifetime subscription if you buy one today, but for us early adopters, lifetime service was a bargain and a half.
Yah, they should do Logan's Run
It no longer has an entry on IMDB, but a remake of Logan's Run is still in the works for X-Men director Bryan Singer. See this interview on Ain't It Cool News. He's planning to do Logan's Run after Superman Returns
As others have pointed out, you can buy USB-to-PS/2 adapters, but I bought the Belkin OmniView SOHO 4-port KVM with PS/2, USB, audio and VGA. You plug a PS/2 keyboard and mouse into it and you connect it up to PCs or Macs with PS/2 or USB cables. It also switches your microphone and audio out. It's pretty handy. It comes in two or four port versions.
This means you're spending 13 full days (here by "day" I mean 24 hours) of your life every year watching this bullshit. Think about it.
The only bullshit I'm smelling here is your insistence that I'm wasting my time. Take your head out of your ass and realize that most people actually enjoy watching entertaining programs on TV, and there are actually a lot of good shows to watch. To me, building tube amps or playing guitar would be unenjoyable experiences. Does that mean I think you wasted your time on bullshit? No, because I'm not an elitist asshole. I listen to NPR too, but that doesn't make me too smug for television.
Enjoy your morally-superior lifestyle. I'll enjoy mine without the snotty attitude.
Your superiority complex just drips from your keyboard. My wife and I have a seven-month-old who's just beginning to explore the house, and yes, he's a source of endless entertainment. We don't watch much TV, but we do like to watch quality TV when we have the chance (an hour a night, on average). After all, kids need their sleep and they can't be awake every minute we both are.
I'm so happy for you and your fulfilling lifestyle. I just don't buy your premise that the money I spend on TV is a waste. It's part of my overall entertainment budget (including music concerts, comedy shows, movies, sporting events, books, CDs and DVDs). You don't see the value in it. Fine. I do see value in what I spend for TV. Your smugness doesn't change that.
Let's face facts: You're in love with your TV-free lifestyle and you smugly believe it somehow makes you superior to those of us who actually use TV for entertainment and education. I lived for over a year without a TV once, and I really didn't miss it at the time. However, I did entertain myself in other ways, including going to bars with my friends, buying music, playing video games, etc. Oh, and I worked about 70 hours a week, so I didn't have all that much free time to get bored in the first place. I know for a fact I blew more than $70 a month on alcohol and strippers during that timeframe, though.
Maybe you really only pay $10 a month to entertain yourself, but somehow, I doubt that. Methinks you've got other investments in entertainment, because if you're only renting two or three DVDs a month, you've got a lot of time on your hands in which to get bored, and there's only so much masturbating one can do before one's genitals rebel from overuse. Music (recorded and live), movies (DVD rentals and those viewed in a theater), live theater and other live entertainment events, alcohol, drugs, books, magazines, sporting events, video games, art supplies, pr0n, etc. all count in your entertainment budget. And if you're only consuming what you can get for "free," then you've still got an investment in your computer, its peripherals, your Internet connection, and any recordable media you use.
Whatever you do to entertain yourself is your choice. The fact that your entertainment options exclude TV does not make you somehow superior to those of us who've discovered that there's plenty of stuff on TV that's worth watching because it's (A) entertaining, (B) informative or (C) both. I can afford $70 a month to entertain myself and my family. It's a lot cheaper than many of the other things we do for entertainment (live comedy shows, sporting events, road and plane trips, riding roller coasters, etc.).
I do pay about $70 a month for TV, including $5 a month for TiVo service (through DirecTV). Why? I'll tell you why: 90% of TV is crap, and the 10% that's worth watching is either (A) on channels other than the ones you can watch for free or (B) on at times I'm not home or not awake. Some of that good 10% is actually great. Mythbusters on Discovery is a terrific show. The Sopranos is probably the best TV drama I've ever seen. The Daily Show is brilliant. Penn & Teller's Bullshit is historically great.
Thanks to TiVo, I can setup wishlists for stuff I want to see, like movies directed by Akira Kurosawa (not likely to see many of those on free TV). And TiVo will occasionally suggest other shows it thinks I might like (I found Good Eats that way).
So let's lose the elitist bullshit attitude, shall we? Those of us who value our time understand that great entertainment can be had from television, but you need to invest in channels and a DVR to get the most of out your viewing time.
BTW: There are shows worth watching on free TV. Nova, Frontline and Scientific American Frontiers on PBS, for example. The Simpsons is back from the dead and as good as it has ever been, and while Arrested Development didn't light my fire, a lot of people love it. As much as I love watching the good shows on free TV, I don't normally have time to watch them when they're being broadcast. A DVR is even more important if you're going to limit yourself to what's available on free TV.
Maybe you enjoy spending 90% of your TV-watching time on the crap that's on when you have time to watch. If that's the case, then bully for you, but you can drop the elitist asshole attitude towards those of us who pay for good programming and a DVR to ensure we can watch it.
If all you ever want to use is the kit lens, you'd probably be more satisfied with a prosumer 8mp or something.
Sorry, but I briefly owned an 8MP prosumer (the KonicaMinolta Dimage A2) and returned it. I've been much happier with the Digital Rebel, even with just the kit lens.
Why? The short answer is picture quality. The A2 took some really lousy pictures for me. It took some really nice ones, too, but I got very inconsistent performance, and in low-ish light, the picture was very noisy. I got visible (and objectionable) noise even at ISO 200, and at ISO 400, the picture was far too noisy.
It wasn't just noise, though. The camera itself must have had about two dozen knobs, switches, dials and buttons on it, and every single one of them did more than one thing. It's nice to have a really configurable camera, but when you need to snap some photos and you don't want to futz with the settings, it's nice to have a camera you can count on to take a high-quality picture without much intervention. The A2 failed miserably in that regard.
At least 15% of the pictures I took with the A2 were out of focus or suffered from motion blur. The out-of-focus problem was inexcusable because it wasn't possible to easily tell whether a photo was in focus when I took it, and it was tough to tell in the viewfinder what the camera had chosen to focus on. The motion blur problem was caused by the sensor's poor light sensitivity, which led to needing longer exposures in any given situation.
The objectionable noise and the motion blur were both the result of the small sensor and its high resolution. Essentially, each photosite (pixel) gets smaller as the sensor size shrinks or the resolution of the sensor increases. When you put a small, 8 MP sensor in a camera, you have really tiny photosites. Those photosites can't gather as much light as larger photosites, so when the signal is amplified, there's more noise.
The 6MP sensor of a Digital Rebel is about 6 times the size of the 8MP sensor in the Dimage A2. Factoring in the difference in resolution, each photosite on the sensor of the DR is about EIGHT times as big as each photosite on the sensor for the A2 or any other prosumer 8MP camera. The end result is that the DR doesn't need to amplify the signal as much, and introduces less noise. I see less noise on the DR at ISO 1600 than I did on the A2 at ISO 400.
The end result is that, especially in low or natural light, the image quality is noticeably better on the Digital Rebel with the kit lens than it was on the A2.
Oh, and one other point in favor of the DR. It's actually much simpler to use than the A2. My wife (no photography nut) has no problem using the DR to take great shots of our six-month-old.
Currently the Hubble robotics mission is going forward.
If, when you say the "mission is going forward," you mean "NASA is spending the time and money to plan/design a mission," then you're correct. If you mean that the budget has been approved to actually build a robot and fly the mission, then you're incorrect. They're in the early exploratory phase, here. If they run into problems, O'Keefe will probably scrap it.
It would be nice if they'd find a way to repair or replace the Hubble Space Telescope, though.
Funny you should mention that. NPR's "Morning Edition" program reported this morning that NASA hired a company called The Aerospace Corporation to conduct a confidential study to determine the best way to deal with Hubble, including two completed instruments that were originally supposed to fly to Hubble aboard the Space Shuttle.
The conclusion? Well, the report itself is confidential and won't ever see the light of day. The executive summary, however, has been obtained through a FOIA request. In short, they don't think a robotic servicing mission could be completed before Hubble dies. They recommend flying a new bare-bones replacement for Hubble with the two new instruments onboard. In their opinion, it'll be cheaper and it's more likely to work.
Of course, there are those who dispute the study's findings. They say that there already exists a robot of sufficient dexterity for performing the mission. It was designed to fly on the ISS and last ten years. A Hubble service mission would last at most a few months.
"Will Open Source Solaris Kill Linux?"
No.
First off, I'd like to state that this isn't exactly a convincing argument.
Secondly, I'd like to point out that Solaris is one helluvagood operating system. I used to work at a place where we moved our production database from an Ultra 1/170 to an Ultra 2/2200 with no glitches. We didn't recompile anything, we didn't have to reconfigure anything. We moved the boot drive and RAM from one chassis to another, moved the SCSI cable for the external RAID chassis to the new box, and powered up.
Needless to say, it was easier than moving a Windows installation by a huge margin. It was easier than any machine migration I've ever witnessed. Everything automatically recognized the fact that we'd gone from a single processor box to a multiprocessor box.
Now I realize that Solaris on SPARC had the advantage of going from one Sun-engineered box to another, making it likely that the underlying chipsets and such were identical or at least compatible, but the point is that the OS was rock-solid on a single-processor box and it was rock-solid after being migrated to a dual-processor box with no configuration changes.
That said, in spite of all of Solaris's goodness (and there's plenty of it), I seriously doubt even an open source Solaris will kill off Linux. Why? Freedom (as in speech).
Let's face it: Linux isn't the only open source-licensed Unix or Unix-like OS available. So why the hell is it so popular? Obviously, Linus is a huge reason why Linux is popular, but the GPL sure doesn't hurt. Contributors to Linux know that their contributions are being used by others who are required by the terms of the license to contribute any improvements they make back to the kernel. Nobody can take the source and close it off from the rest of us. Nobody can build proprietary extensions to the kernel.
There's no way in Hell that Sun's license will be anywhere near as free as the GPL. This is why open source Solaris can't kill Linux.
A few questions: What does noise look like on photographs? What causes noise when you take photographs? Why are digitals better at handling noise?
Depending on whether you're talking about a digital original or a film original, noise looks different from one to the other. On a digital original, noise shows up as "blotchiness" for lack of a better description. Shoot a field of something that's generally the same color (a baseball field at night, for instance) on a digital camera at its highest ISO setting. If the noise is noticeable (which it is on most digital cameras), you'll see random patches where the color doesn't quite match.
Noise in film is different. I'm no photographic expert, but as I understand it film noise is usually caused by the grain itself obscuring some of the detail in the photograph. The shape of the grain is not 100% uniform, and neither is the orientation of the individual grain particles. So you won't get consistent detail throughout an image. I might be wrong on this, but that's my understanding. Regardless, the higher the ISO of the film, the higher the noise level.
Keep in mind that even those photographers who shoot film usually end up needing to get those film negatives scanned so that the photographs can be digitally manipulated. It's a rare photographer these days who can shoot, develop, print and enlarge exclusively with optics and chemicals. The scanning process itself introduces some noise into the photo image, further reducing the quality of the film image, and even the best optics introduce some noise into an image, so people using optical technologies stick to first-generation copies whenever possible.
In a digital camera, the sensor has a fixed amount of light-gathering capability. At higher ISO equivalency settings, the effective sensitivity of the sensor is increased by amplifying whatever signal is detected. The signals are amplified somewhat at all ISO settings on most digital cameras, but the amplification level is higher at higher ISOs. It's this amplification process that introduces noise in a digital camera.
BTW: Digitals aren't automatically better at handling noise than film cameras. It depends on the sensor in the digital and the film used in the film camera.
The larger the sensor is in a digital camera, the more native light-gathering capability it has, and the less amplification is required to get a usable signal from the sensor. This leads to lower noise in the image at any ISO. For instance, Canon's Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) digital SLR has an APS-C-sized sensor (370 sq mm) with 6.3MP, while Sony, Olympus and even Canon sell "prosumer" digital cameras that use sensors that are 2/3" in size (58 sq mm). The 2/3" sensor's got about 1/6th the total area of the 300D's APS-C sensor. Factoring in the difference in resolution, that means that the 300D's APS-sized sensor has a little more than 8 times the area per pixel for gathering light than does a "prosumer" 2/3" 8MP sensor. This adds up to dramatically lower noise for the 300D at any ISO, as I can personally attest. I bought a KonicaMinolta Dimage A2 and returned it because the noise at virtually all ISO settings was objectionable (all my pictures looked blotchy). The Canon 300D has lower noise than the A2 at all settings, and the noisiest the Canon ever gets (1600 ISO) is still lower than the noise levels I saw from the A2 at 400 ISO.
Now, imagine going from an APS-C sized sensor (370 sq mm) to a full-frame 35mm sensor (864 sq mm). That 35mm sensor is about 2.3 times bigger than the APS-C sensor. Even with 2.7 times as many pixels, the 35mm sensor still has enormous light-gathering power per pixel. In addition, I'm betting that Canon's putting its most advanced sensor technology in the 1Ds Mark II, meaning that the sensor is more sensitive than the sensors used in most other cameras, again requiring less amplification and thus generating less noise.
Compared with a comparable Canon 35mm body with the same lens, a picture sho
Now that HP will stop making Itanium servers...
Re-read the original post, please. HP is discontinuing Itanium workstations, not servers.
For all its flaws, Itanium does have more headroom to grow than the x86-64 architecture. The whole reason HP and Intel got into bed over Itanium and its EPIC architecture was because it's getting harder and harder to wring more performance out of a chip by adding parallel instruction pipelines. In order to crank clockspeeds higher, those pipelines have to get longer and longer (witness Prescott's 31-stage pipeline). The more pipelines you have and the longer they are, the worse is the penalty for branch misprediction.
It's this problem that led HP and Intel to VLIW, where the parallelism is explicitly compiled into the code, reducing or eliminating the need for a lot of transistors that currently break code down into parallel-izable chunks and try to predict branches.
Unless somebody invents a new way of architecting chips that will eliminate or substantially reduce the branch misprediction penalty without substantially breaking x86 compatibility, Itanium (or something like it) will eventually reign supreme.