One of the best things that Apple has going for it (IMHO) is the look of its products, aside from the God-awful new iMac (a.k.a. iLamp). The iPod is very, very, very good looking and sleek. This thing just looks cheap by comparison. Now, it's certainly cool that it's cheaper and people are going to be more able to afford it, but I think that it is cheaper at the expense of looking cheaper and losing a lot of the "cool" factor that the iPod has.
I think it's pretty clear that there is one thing this is not: a mistake. Even if they only did this once, I don't see how it could be a mistake. I mean, when was the last time you saw a news story from a legitimate news outlet that linked DIRECTLY to an executable file?
News.com is, perhaps, setting up for a court battle ('cause they want to challenge the DMCA) or this guy is trying to make some sort of point.
This is quite possibly the funniest thing I have ever read on slashdot. "Open on time"?!?!?!? How can you say that for a project that is already years behind schedule and billions (or maybe just millions) of dollars over budget?!
No one knows with certainty. There does appear to be very strong evidence that there was (or still is; althought this is probably not as likely) life on Mars. That's what science is about! Trying to put together the data to figure out something about the universe, the human body, social interactions, the cell, or whatever. No one KNOWS that there was (or is) life on Mars, but there are some interesting data (such as dried "riverbeds" and ice caps on the poles). This is just the reason that we need to keep going to Mars and keep exploring: we don't know.
Imaging expert?!?! It is shockingly easy to do it yourself. Here is a quick recipe of how I made an animated gif of the images that the students took at the WIYN 0.9m (I'm a student at Yale as well):
1. Make sure the files have sequential names (i.e. frame001.fits, frame002.fits, frame003.fits. . . ) 2. Go to your favorite Linux box (preferably one with a lot of RAM. . . those images are pretty big) that has the ImageMagick tools installed (which I believe is in the standard RH install) and type: convert -normalize -delay 20 -geometry 50% *.fits movie.gif
Of course, you may want to change those flags, but I found that the images need to be normalized and convert does a pretty good job and that any larger than 50% makes a pretty unweildy animated gif.
In theory, you could do all sorts of other outputs too. Mpeg, mov, etc. . .
No, I said I'm meet you by the other telescope! Reader Dan Yocum points out that the skyward-gazing Yalies who captured asteroid 2002 NY40 digitally did so with a different telescope than the one reported. He writes: "They weren't even using WIYN. They were using the 0.9M that's next to it (about 50yd away)." Thanks for the correction!
Nope. The story was right the first time. It refered to the "WIYN 0.9m". The WIYN consortium (of which Yale is a member) recently took over the 0.9m (which had previously been operated by NOAO). As a result, one now needs to differentiate between the WIYN 3.5m and the WIYN 0.9m.
To be fair, when one says just "WIYN", one is usually refering to the 3.5m, but the original story clearly states "WIYN 0.9m."
* Your targets set an hour before dawn or rise an hour after sunset
This was the case here. They had plenty of objects to observe for the first part of the night, but had nothing to observe for the second half. They tried desperately to find some "real science" targets, but in the end realized that "real science" could be done with a time series of an asteroid (and it made for a cool movie).
. . . and they were on a long-ass observing run and decided it would be fun to take some exposures of the asteroid. The movie on the NOAO site doesn't really do the original images justice, but our sysadmin won't let me put up a larger animation in order to see if our system can survive a slashdotting.
(now I know someone is going to attack with some PC crap about the word fag -- get over yourself, that was what really happened, and it was funny, and I dont wanna hear it:)
The point is, regardless of whether or not it happened, it was still an incredibly offensive thing to say and you have admitted that you took part in this. The point is not that someone being a "fag" is a bad thing (as the word has come to mean in popular usage); the point is that it is used (and continues to be used) in an incredibly vicious way attacking people who are gay.
And I'm really sick of people accusing other people who speak out about these things as being wrapped up in some "PC crap." For me, this is exactly the same as the people who would get labeled as "too sensitive" when, about 40 years ago, they would object to people using the word "nigger." Now, there certainly are cases where people get upset for the sake of being upset (and are overly politically correct), but this just is not one of them. It's incredibly offensive and you shouldn't take pride in the fact that you joined in with it.
Yes. I found that ironic as well: the cards fail on the most likely browser that the sysadmins are using. And I really think lynx would have trouble with that page.
There are a lot of people on here complaining that gigabit just isn't good for anything and no one needs a connection that fast. While I agree that is true in general, there are (non-porn) uses for the connections that universities can really use. For example, I'm a student in an astronomy department. An image from an average-sized digital detector is, oh, 300 MB. Before people start yelling about compression, realize that we have to retain all the information. Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that there are mosaic cameras that put out a few gigs per image. So, as you can see, a night of 40 images or so can really add up. For us, it makes sense to not only have lots of storage space (mmmmm. . . 1 TB array), but also to have fast connections. We are just starting to experiment with gigabit-over-copper now, and I must say that, so far, it seems to be totally worth it. Having to wait 30 seconds for an image to display on your screen (because it's stored on the disk array at the other end of the office) is a huge pain.
So, I'm not saying that CWRU needs to wire all of their dorms, but gigabit certainly makes sense in some areas.
As far as I'm concerned, air conditioning is the SINGLE GREATEST INVENTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY. Yes. I know this is/. so I should be singing the praises of Linux, but I would willingly hand over my computer; they'd have to rip my A/C from my cold, dead hands.
Of course, if I were back in the Bay Area (where I'm orignially from), I may feel differently (I'm in the northeast now).
I had a friend who was doing website upkeep (among other things) for a (rather major) company. www.XXXX.com took you to their (normal) site, but wwww.XXXX.com took you to his (personal) site.
Huh? Is this some sort of meta-story? Did you mean to say a 'starry new bookshelf...' or more like just 'a story about a new...'
I should point out that it was at least made up of real sentences when I submitted it. It must have gone throught the "garble" filter before it was posted, though.:-)
Very well put. I guess that I wasn't very exact in what I said. Putting large (>5m) telescopes together to do interferometry and "real science" just isn't really possible yet.
You can integrate the images from lots of smaller mirrors pretty easily in software
Actually, that's hideously hard. Despite the suggestion made (by both the people running the VLT along with the/. post), I don't know that anyone has actually used either Keck or the VLT in multi-telescope mode for "real science". It turns out that optical interferometry is much harder than radio interferometry (see the VLA) and no one has successfully done it in any sort of regular way yet (I believe that they've done it once on Keck and once using two of the VLA telescopes, but never using all four).
In short, people are discovering that doing optical interferometry is REALLY hard and building one, large telescope saves a lot of headaches (but, of course, is a lot more expensive).
Finally, having a telescope in space really does help out a lot for getting better resolution, but there is something to be said for large telescopes on the ground. They are able to gather more light and, hence, able to get a higher signal-to-noise ratio than a smaller, space-based telescope.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the best things that Apple has going for it (IMHO) is the look of its products, aside from the God-awful new iMac (a.k.a. iLamp). The iPod is very, very, very good looking and sleek. This thing just looks cheap by comparison. Now, it's certainly cool that it's cheaper and people are going to be more able to afford it, but I think that it is cheaper at the expense of looking cheaper and losing a lot of the "cool" factor that the iPod has.
An honest mistake?
I think it's pretty clear that there is one thing this is not: a mistake. Even if they only did this once, I don't see how it could be a mistake. I mean, when was the last time you saw a news story from a legitimate news outlet that linked DIRECTLY to an executable file?
News.com is, perhaps, setting up for a court battle ('cause they want to challenge the DMCA) or this guy is trying to make some sort of point.
Boston's Big Dig will be ready to open on time
This is quite possibly the funniest thing I have ever read on slashdot. "Open on time"?!?!?!? How can you say that for a project that is already years behind schedule and billions (or maybe just millions) of dollars over budget?!
Now they just need to get CygWin running under Windows. THEN, they could run an Xbox emulator. . .
And is it just me, or do most of CNN's stories not display properly under Mozilla?
I think it's just you. Works fine for me (using Mozilla 1.1 in KDE).
No one knows with certainty. There does appear to be very strong evidence that there was (or still is; althought this is probably not as likely) life on Mars. That's what science is about! Trying to put together the data to figure out something about the universe, the human body, social interactions, the cell, or whatever. No one KNOWS that there was (or is) life on Mars, but there are some interesting data (such as dried "riverbeds" and ice caps on the poles). This is just the reason that we need to keep going to Mars and keep exploring: we don't know.
NASA could pull my dollars directly if they were to include an IMAX camera setup on their future space missions
Done.
When can NASA expect your check in the mail?
Strictly, yes. It is ~4x faster. It runs at ~4x the clock speed.
:-)
Now, if you ask if it can do the same job in 1/4 the time. . . that's another story. . .
Rather than answer my specific questions, maybe you can recommend a good book?
"The Whole Shebang" by Timothy Ferris
or, at a singificantly higher level (i.e. used in my graduate Cosmology course):
"Cosmological Physics" by John A. Peacock
Imaging expert?!?! It is shockingly easy to do it yourself. Here is a quick recipe of how I made an animated gif of the images that the students took at the WIYN 0.9m (I'm a student at Yale as well):
1. Make sure the files have sequential names (i.e. frame001.fits, frame002.fits, frame003.fits. . . )
2. Go to your favorite Linux box (preferably one with a lot of RAM. . . those images are pretty big) that has the ImageMagick tools installed (which I believe is in the standard RH install) and type:
convert -normalize -delay 20 -geometry 50% *.fits movie.gif
Of course, you may want to change those flags, but I found that the images need to be normalized and convert does a pretty good job and that any larger than 50% makes a pretty unweildy animated gif.
In theory, you could do all sorts of other outputs too. Mpeg, mov, etc. . .
No, I said I'm meet you by the other telescope! Reader Dan Yocum points out that the skyward-gazing Yalies who captured asteroid 2002 NY40 digitally did so with a different telescope than the one reported. He writes: "They weren't even using WIYN. They were using the 0.9M that's next to it (about 50yd away)." Thanks for the correction!
Nope. The story was right the first time. It refered to the "WIYN 0.9m". The WIYN consortium (of which Yale is a member) recently took over the 0.9m (which had previously been operated by NOAO). As a result, one now needs to differentiate between the WIYN 3.5m and the WIYN 0.9m.
To be fair, when one says just "WIYN", one is usually refering to the 3.5m, but the original story clearly states "WIYN 0.9m."
* Your targets set an hour before dawn or rise an hour after sunset
This was the case here. They had plenty of objects to observe for the first part of the night, but had nothing to observe for the second half. They tried desperately to find some "real science" targets, but in the end realized that "real science" could be done with a time series of an asteroid (and it made for a cool movie).
. . . and they were on a long-ass observing run and decided it would be fun to take some exposures of the asteroid. The movie on the NOAO site doesn't really do the original images justice, but our sysadmin won't let me put up a larger animation in order to see if our system can survive a slashdotting.
RTFA yourself. And RTFC while you're at it.
The previous poster was refering to the original judge. This is the appellate court that they argued in front of most recently.
(now I know someone is going to attack with some PC crap about the word fag -- get over yourself, that was what really happened, and it was funny, and I dont wanna hear it :)
The point is, regardless of whether or not it happened, it was still an incredibly offensive thing to say and you have admitted that you took part in this. The point is not that someone being a "fag" is a bad thing (as the word has come to mean in popular usage); the point is that it is used (and continues to be used) in an incredibly vicious way attacking people who are gay.
And I'm really sick of people accusing other people who speak out about these things as being wrapped up in some "PC crap." For me, this is exactly the same as the people who would get labeled as "too sensitive" when, about 40 years ago, they would object to people using the word "nigger." Now, there certainly are cases where people get upset for the sake of being upset (and are overly politically correct), but this just is not one of them. It's incredibly offensive and you shouldn't take pride in the fact that you joined in with it.
The software program they talk about can be found on (an almost all Thai) web site here.
Yes. I found that ironic as well: the cards fail on the most likely browser that the sysadmins are using. And I really think lynx would have trouble with that page.
The instant I saw this I did a "df".
96%
There are a lot of people on here complaining that gigabit just isn't good for anything and no one needs a connection that fast. While I agree that is true in general, there are (non-porn) uses for the connections that universities can really use. For example, I'm a student in an astronomy department. An image from an average-sized digital detector is, oh, 300 MB. Before people start yelling about compression, realize that we have to retain all the information. Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that there are mosaic cameras that put out a few gigs per image. So, as you can see, a night of 40 images or so can really add up. For us, it makes sense to not only have lots of storage space (mmmmm. . . 1 TB array), but also to have fast connections. We are just starting to experiment with gigabit-over-copper now, and I must say that, so far, it seems to be totally worth it. Having to wait 30 seconds for an image to display on your screen (because it's stored on the disk array at the other end of the office) is a huge pain.
So, I'm not saying that CWRU needs to wire all of their dorms, but gigabit certainly makes sense in some areas.
As far as I'm concerned, air conditioning is the SINGLE GREATEST INVENTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY. Yes. I know this is /. so I should be singing the praises of Linux, but I would willingly hand over my computer; they'd have to rip my A/C from my cold, dead hands.
Of course, if I were back in the Bay Area (where I'm orignially from), I may feel differently (I'm in the northeast now).
Basically, a recipe is like an open source app that nobody's willing to muck with
I mean, I know it's slashdot, but c'mon. Alton Brown is geeky enough without having to force the matter.
I had a friend who was doing website upkeep (among other things) for a (rather major) company. www.XXXX.com took you to their (normal) site, but wwww.XXXX.com took you to his (personal) site.
Huh? Is this some sort of meta-story? Did you mean to say a 'starry new bookshelf...' or more like just 'a story about a new...'
:-)
I should point out that it was at least made up of real sentences when I submitted it. It must have gone throught the "garble" filter before it was posted, though.
Very well put. I guess that I wasn't very exact in what I said. Putting large (>5m) telescopes together to do interferometry and "real science" just isn't really possible yet.
You can integrate the images from lots of smaller mirrors pretty easily in software
/. post), I don't know that anyone has actually used either Keck or the VLT in multi-telescope mode for "real science". It turns out that optical interferometry is much harder than radio interferometry (see the VLA) and no one has successfully done it in any sort of regular way yet (I believe that they've done it once on Keck and once using two of the VLA telescopes, but never using all four).
Actually, that's hideously hard. Despite the suggestion made (by both the people running the VLT along with the
In short, people are discovering that doing optical interferometry is REALLY hard and building one, large telescope saves a lot of headaches (but, of course, is a lot more expensive).
Finally, having a telescope in space really does help out a lot for getting better resolution, but there is something to be said for large telescopes on the ground. They are able to gather more light and, hence, able to get a higher signal-to-noise ratio than a smaller, space-based telescope.