Sure, but by the time LSST goes online (2014), PS1 (the prototype on Maui, assuming that the full PS4 system is never even built) will have tiled the entire visible sky (90N to I dunno, -60 to -75S, I'd imagine) something like 120 times... so LSST can just look for whatever's left.:)
And it's not like these are the first, of course, NASA JPL's NEAT (Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking) system has been running for years and years.
One thing to consider, though - automated survey systems like these don't just find things that are moving in the sky, they also find things that are changing.
NEAT images, fed into the pipeline of the Nearby Supernova Factory collaboration, get analyzed for "bright spots that weren't there in the last photo." The last few years, that pipeline has found about as many supernovae as, well, everyone else combined.
Survey data can be similarly analyzed to find variable stars, extrasolar planets (through occlusion), any visible-wavelength light related to gamma ray bursts, etc. There's even a slight chance of finding new asteroids, moons of outer planets, plutoids, etc (although since those have proper motion, if you really wanted to find them you'd go about things differently).
Survey scopes aren't much use if you want to do deep study of one particular object, but if you want to find a whole bunch of something-or-other, survey scopes, even smallish ones, are really handy. Then you go apply for the time on the 3+ meter ones to do your in-depth study.:)
(Full disclosure: I work in a different department of the institute that operates Pan-STARRS, and am an associate member of the Nearby Supernova Factory.)
Apple bought PA Semi not long ago, and there have been rumors that they might go with a non-Intel chipset (not the CPU, but the bridge chips) designed in-house.
If they pull that off, and make future versions of OS X require those proprietary chips, it'd be like the old days of needing an "Apple ROM" for your emulator.:)
I'm not sure how feasible it would be for them to do that while maintaining compatibility with non-Apple OSes, though.
"seven tip calculators, three flashlight applications, nine Bible-related entries, two Zen garden applications, five blackjack games..."
This seems to happen to any "dominant" platform that offers developers a low enough cost of entry. I remember the days when people would praise Windows for having so much software available, failing to notice that in each case where 50 programs did the same thing (and there were plenty such cases), 48 were complete rubbish.
I've been to Uganda (and Kenya) a few times, and there are some things I'd like to see in the US.
1. Basically all phones are sold unlocked, from the cheapest to the most full-featured. 2. A SIM card, usually with an hour's service on it, costs about $1. (Pertinent to the article, I have friends who have 1 phone and multiple SIMs - one for work, one for personal use) 3. Reasonably priced prepaid service is widely available. 4. Incoming calls don't cost money. 5. International texts are at most twice the cost of domestic ones.
In Uganda - and a lot of other developing countries - people are a lot more likely to have mobiles than landlines anyway. If you've got electricity, and cell coverage, that mobile is pretty handy, since the telco will want an arm and a leg to actually run wires out to your place.
more and more I'm seeing businesses ask for extremely rich interface intranet-ish apps to be done as web apps, and then be frustrated when the standards/JavaScript/etc. solution either is quirky or non-performant in some way that really matters to them. I think this kind of app is going to be done more and more with Flex or Silverlight or something similar in the next few years, and I don't see SproutCore as seriously competing in that space. Back when I first started getting paid to do web stuff (early 1995) businesses routinely asked for things that made no sense for the web, and couldn't be done cross-platform with out-of-the-box browers.
It's so nice to see that businesses still haven't gotten a clue, and prefer technologies that will isolate chunks of their potential customer base.
(Remember, when you code something for Flash N, all those people with Flash N-1 or N-2 are screwed until they install the new version, presuming the new version's available for their platform.)
Yeah, JavaScript sucks. So does Flash. So does all software. The only difference is how.
it's that video of a guy about to wank in a field, then a donkey spots him and tries to rape him. It's quite funny actually. Huh... didn't know they let donkeys post on here.
It's going to come down to TCO. When Jobs first talked about the roadmap earlier this year, one point was that Crackberries require a server in between the phone and the Exchange server, while the iPhone won't. And I think Enterprise has standardized on Exchange a lot more than on Crackberry.
So it sounds like Enterprise can allow iPhones to trickle in, with direct Exchange access, and if there's a Crackberry server sitting there too, evaluate the cost over time of keeping it around.
It may very well end up being similar to the way in which Macs have recently infiltrated the Enterprise. A few employees ask if they can please, please, please have one; IT and management eventually say "sure, but you have to provide your own support," and next thing you know, one-third of the organization (or two-thirds, in some cases) have them.
Yeah, and while you're at it, get one with the "universal" outlets in case you need to plug local kit in as well.
I am currently being happy because the last 110V-only POS I had to carry around (NetGear FWG114P) has been handed off to another less fortunate colleague (and having it, she's even less fortunate!) and I'm now lugging universal-voltage kit at 1/3 the weight and volume.
To be a little more specific... 5-10mW green lasers (the wavelength is more visible to the eye) are often used in amateur astronomy for "star and constellation tours."
Lasers are also used as part of the adaptive optics systems at large professional observatories, but those tend to be a different wavelength (589nm) and 5-20W with - no "m" before the "W";)
I do occasional laser safety work at a couple such observatories (here's a picture), where "safety" involves making sure we don't beam any of the Qantas flights that fly over our general vicinity nightly. (Fortunately, they usually have the sense to miss us by 100km to one side or the other. ANZ, on the other hand, have been known to fly right over us.)
Well, when you have something equal to around a 20 billion yottaton nuclear explosion... you tend to sit back and watch from a safe distance.
The heat really doesn't bother me much from a few hundred million light years away. At that distance, you can't roast marshmallows, even on the double-degenerate (super-Chandrasekhar-mass) ones like SN2007if.
Why would the two stars not simply merge into a single star with a greater rotational speed Presumably they're at a distance, and orbiting each other at a speed, that prevents that from happening (at least in the short term).
Some types of supernovae (like the IA's I mentioned earlier) do involve a small white dwarf accreting material from another larger star until it passes a critical mass, then blowing itself to bits. (Or, in so far rarely seen cases, the possibility of two white dwarves colliding.)
The article unfortunately doesn't say what rare type of supernovae these rare stars become. After a quick google I'm guessing they may be the type IIP ones, but I'm only familiar with type IA ones personally (and for relatively low values of "familiar" at that). We get our own not-quite-unique things over in type-IA land, too, like the super-Chandrasekhar-mass ones. SN2007if, discovered last year, was only the second one of those to be found.
Yep - I fly them all the time, and on my last flight to Hawaii, they rebooted a whole cabin.
I think actually the AVOD manufacturer (Panasonic, maybe) chose Linux. And yeah, it's not necessarily as stable as your typical Linux desktop or laptop... but then, I haven't seen a Linux laptop with that cool "follow the plane" map program on it just yet.;)
"World Business Class" has a lot of cool technology, between the AVOD (which is touch-screen, too) and the seat. NW's back-office IS/IT is even cooler, as far as I've been able to determine. Guess I'm one of the few to choose an airline because of a shared love of shiny tech stuff.:)
my laptop MUST have a built in DVD drive as I use it as an entertainment station for the kids while we're away, and having a separate drive hanging off on a usb cable is a big NO NO. Would you seriously letting your kids watch DVDs on a laptop for which you paid a minimum of $2700, and quite possibly well over $3000?:)
The temperatures were around -30C, which isn't much of an issue at low wind speeds. The altitude (4090m) is more of a problem, as it makes physical work exhausting, and there are difficulties with sleeping, mental acuity, etc. You Aussies fund a share of the Gemini observatories - should've come hung out with all of us at 4200+m for practice!:)
(Admittedly, we don't get to -30C. -10C is unusually cold for us.)
Ironically, of course, after 50 years of the space age, the Earth is surrounded by a growing number of killer bits of space debris - but it's our own fault.:)
I have to say one thing. The iPhone came in the nicest box and packaging I've ever seen. If you (despite hating Apple) ever buy another product from them, I think you'll find that this is their normal approach to things. Look at it this way: They've gone to the trouble of hiring award-winning industrial designers to create products that are aesthetically pleasing and easy to use - why should the way those products are presented suck?
I seriously can't bring myself to throw it away. It's utterly useless at this point, but it's so nice, it feels like I'm being wasteful by putting in the trash. Sort of like the little felt-lined case that a fine pen (Cross, Mont Blanc, etc) comes in. You don't want to keep the pen in there, because then you have to get it out every time you need it, and put it back when you're done, and so on.
I tend to hand onto the original packaging from Apple products because it's a nice way to pack them up if I'm selling them used after getting something new. Just a thought.
As part of my karmic payment for some particularly heinous deeds in a past life, I was root on a SCO OpenSewer box from about 2002-2005. If you have any doubt that my past-life deeds were, in fact, heinous, it was also running a pre-D3 version of the PICK OS/database on top of SCO. And I won't even go into the hardware...
The mere thought that the machine is probably now deservedly rusting away in the county landfill almost makes me happy.
I don't understand why anyone still rents. I think Steve Jobs pretty much nailed it when he introduced the rental feature on Tuesday:
"Now, we've never offered a rental model in music, because we don't think people want to rent their music. Every time we go out and ask them, they want to own their music, because you listen to your favorite song thousands of times in your life. But your favorite movie? Most of us watch movies once - maybe a few times - and renting is a great way to do it. It's less expensive; it doesn't take up space on our hard drive when we're done; it's a great way to look at movies."
If I'm not so absolutely sure a movie rules that I'll pay $7-8 to see it in the theater, I'm not going to pay $7 or more to buy it, either. That $3 to rent a movie I may only want to see once sounds like a good deal to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but by the time LSST goes online (2014), PS1 (the prototype on Maui, assuming that the full PS4 system is never even built) will have tiled the entire visible sky (90N to I dunno, -60 to -75S, I'd imagine) something like 120 times... so LSST can just look for whatever's left. :)
And it's not like these are the first, of course, NASA JPL's NEAT (Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking) system has been running for years and years.
One thing to consider, though - automated survey systems like these don't just find things that are moving in the sky, they also find things that are changing.
NEAT images, fed into the pipeline of the Nearby Supernova Factory collaboration, get analyzed for "bright spots that weren't there in the last photo." The last few years, that pipeline has found about as many supernovae as, well, everyone else combined.
Survey data can be similarly analyzed to find variable stars, extrasolar planets (through occlusion), any visible-wavelength light related to gamma ray bursts, etc. There's even a slight chance of finding new asteroids, moons of outer planets, plutoids, etc (although since those have proper motion, if you really wanted to find them you'd go about things differently).
Survey scopes aren't much use if you want to do deep study of one particular object, but if you want to find a whole bunch of something-or-other, survey scopes, even smallish ones, are really handy. Then you go apply for the time on the 3+ meter ones to do your in-depth study. :)
(Full disclosure: I work in a different department of the institute that operates Pan-STARRS, and am an associate member of the Nearby Supernova Factory.)
Apple bought PA Semi not long ago, and there have been rumors that they might go with a non-Intel chipset (not the CPU, but the bridge chips) designed in-house.
If they pull that off, and make future versions of OS X require those proprietary chips, it'd be like the old days of needing an "Apple ROM" for your emulator. :)
I'm not sure how feasible it would be for them to do that while maintaining compatibility with non-Apple OSes, though.
"seven tip calculators, three flashlight applications, nine Bible-related entries, two Zen garden applications, five blackjack games..."
This seems to happen to any "dominant" platform that offers developers a low enough cost of entry. I remember the days when people would praise Windows for having so much software available, failing to notice that in each case where 50 programs did the same thing (and there were plenty such cases), 48 were complete rubbish.
I've been to Uganda (and Kenya) a few times, and there are some things I'd like to see in the US.
1. Basically all phones are sold unlocked, from the cheapest to the most full-featured.
2. A SIM card, usually with an hour's service on it, costs about $1. (Pertinent to the article, I have friends who have 1 phone and multiple SIMs - one for work, one for personal use)
3. Reasonably priced prepaid service is widely available.
4. Incoming calls don't cost money.
5. International texts are at most twice the cost of domestic ones.
In Uganda - and a lot of other developing countries - people are a lot more likely to have mobiles than landlines anyway. If you've got electricity, and cell coverage, that mobile is pretty handy, since the telco will want an arm and a leg to actually run wires out to your place.
It's so nice to see that businesses still haven't gotten a clue, and prefer technologies that will isolate chunks of their potential customer base.
(Remember, when you code something for Flash N, all those people with Flash N-1 or N-2 are screwed until they install the new version, presuming the new version's available for their platform.)
Yeah, JavaScript sucks. So does Flash. So does all software. The only difference is how.
It's going to come down to TCO. When Jobs first talked about the roadmap earlier this year, one point was that Crackberries require a server in between the phone and the Exchange server, while the iPhone won't. And I think Enterprise has standardized on Exchange a lot more than on Crackberry.
So it sounds like Enterprise can allow iPhones to trickle in, with direct Exchange access, and if there's a Crackberry server sitting there too, evaluate the cost over time of keeping it around.
It may very well end up being similar to the way in which Macs have recently infiltrated the Enterprise. A few employees ask if they can please, please, please have one; IT and management eventually say "sure, but you have to provide your own support," and next thing you know, one-third of the organization (or two-thirds, in some cases) have them.
Yeah, and while you're at it, get one with the "universal" outlets in case you need to plug local kit in as well.
I am currently being happy because the last 110V-only POS I had to carry around (NetGear FWG114P) has been handed off to another less fortunate colleague (and having it, she's even less fortunate!) and I'm now lugging universal-voltage kit at 1/3 the weight and volume.
Some of us actually do live on volcanoes (you insensitive clod).
To be a little more specific... 5-10mW green lasers (the wavelength is more visible to the eye) are often used in amateur astronomy for "star and constellation tours."
;)
Lasers are also used as part of the adaptive optics systems at large professional observatories, but those tend to be a different wavelength (589nm) and 5-20W with - no "m" before the "W"
I do occasional laser safety work at a couple such observatories (here's a picture), where "safety" involves making sure we don't beam any of the Qantas flights that fly over our general vicinity nightly. (Fortunately, they usually have the sense to miss us by 100km to one side or the other. ANZ, on the other hand, have been known to fly right over us.)
Well, when you have something equal to around a 20 billion yottaton nuclear explosion... you tend to sit back and watch from a safe distance. The heat really doesn't bother me much from a few hundred million light years away. At that distance, you can't roast marshmallows, even on the double-degenerate (super-Chandrasekhar-mass) ones like SN2007if.
Some types of supernovae (like the IA's I mentioned earlier) do involve a small white dwarf accreting material from another larger star until it passes a critical mass, then blowing itself to bits. (Or, in so far rarely seen cases, the possibility of two white dwarves colliding.)
The article unfortunately doesn't say what rare type of supernovae these rare stars become. After a quick google I'm guessing they may be the type IIP ones, but I'm only familiar with type IA ones personally (and for relatively low values of "familiar" at that). We get our own not-quite-unique things over in type-IA land, too, like the super-Chandrasekhar-mass ones. SN2007if, discovered last year, was only the second one of those to be found.
Yep - I fly them all the time, and on my last flight to Hawaii, they rebooted a whole cabin.
;)
:)
I think actually the AVOD manufacturer (Panasonic, maybe) chose Linux. And yeah, it's not necessarily as stable as your typical Linux desktop or laptop... but then, I haven't seen a Linux laptop with that cool "follow the plane" map program on it just yet.
"World Business Class" has a lot of cool technology, between the AVOD (which is touch-screen, too) and the seat. NW's back-office IS/IT is even cooler, as far as I've been able to determine. Guess I'm one of the few to choose an airline because of a shared love of shiny tech stuff.
For a moment I thought I wasn't the only one to mis-read it "Should Scientologists date..."
(Admittedly, we don't get to -30C. -10C is unusually cold for us.)
Ironically, of course, after 50 years of the space age, the Earth is surrounded by a growing number of killer bits of space debris - but it's our own fault. :)
I'm just a pawn in a complicated scheme to surreptitiously move money from my employers to my creditors. And there are thousands of others like me.
I tend to hand onto the original packaging from Apple products because it's a nice way to pack them up if I'm selling them used after getting something new. Just a thought.
Maybe we forgot to shutter the laser again...
Apparently all "A" companies are afflicted with this problem, since Acer and AOpen also appear to sell systems with Matshita slot-load drives.
Apple is using Panasonic slot-load drives.
Not sure whether either company is representing them as able to do anything with ecodiscs.
As part of my karmic payment for some particularly heinous deeds in a past life, I was root on a SCO OpenSewer box from about 2002-2005. If you have any doubt that my past-life deeds were, in fact, heinous, it was also running a pre-D3 version of the PICK OS/database on top of SCO. And I won't even go into the hardware...
The mere thought that the machine is probably now deservedly rusting away in the county landfill almost makes me happy.