Using USB for storage devices is perverted and wrong; it's synchronous, so your practical bandwidth is limited by the length of your cable and the response time of the nodes at either side. On the other hand, a design like that is pretty great for things like user input devices, which is one reason nobody ever talks about making FireWire mice. Somewhere out there, a hardcore gamer is bemoaning the slowness of his USB mouse, and wishing there were FireWire mice.
If you are a frequent traveler, you will have your laptop in a laptop bag where you can comfortably carry much more than a 5 lb laptop. Hi. I flew 135,000 miles last year. I don't use a laptop bag. My MacBook lives in a WaterField sleeve that rides in a messenger-type bag I got at a conference in Switzerland. This works well since I bike to work. I routinely have to travel with a WiFi router, a portable inkjet, a DSLR with 4 lenses, and my laptop.
I may be able to more or less "comfortably" carry much more than a 5 pound laptop, but my gear alone is somewhere around 15-20 pounds, and if I had it in a laptop bag on my shoulder, I'd have back problems by now.
As far as size goes, you still have the same L x W which means it will take up roughly the same amount of space. It only got smaller in the thickness, and frankly, thats the least important when considering effective size. Except you can fit two MacBook Airs in one bag;)
I'm considering the Air. The dearth of USB ports is a bit of a concern since I have 3 USB devices (camera, iPod, headset for VOIP) and would also need the ethernet dongle when I work at facilities where WiFi is forbidden. The aluminum case is a big plus, since it should give better build quality and durability (my current black MacBook has cracks along the edges due to poor design/construction). The weight reduction would be nice, the style of it is awesome. I'm willing to lose some CPU and spindle speed because I'd be upgrading to Adobe CS 3 and MS Office 2008, from non-Intel-native versions of them, which would help balance the performance difference.
As far as the battery, I'll want to know whether it's something where I have to mail it in, or whether I can just take it to a Genius Bar.
You know, almost all of those astronomical images are artificially colored and enhanced to maximize their ascetic appeal.
The images have to be artificially colored because more often than not the images are put together from images outside the visible wavelength. While a lot of imaging is done in wavelengths outside the visible portion of the spectrum, there's plenty done with visible light, too. The actual "problem" arises because astronomers taking photometric measurements of things want to know how many photons are hitting each pixel on the CCD, and they want a nice range of numbers. So instead of building CCDs with red, green and blue pixels each reading out a number from 0 to 255, like you'd have in your digital camera, they build monochromatic CCDs where each pixel reads out a number from 0 to 65536.
Of course, astronomers do care about color - sort of, anyway. They want to know how many photons hit the chip if they filter out all but certain wavebands. So, ta-dah, they take the same picture through different colored filters. If you want to do visible light imaging of stuff, you'll probably use the popular Bessell BVRI filter set (except maybe without the I since that's for infrared). B is blue, R is red, and V is "visible" which is sort of the yellowish-green part of the spectrum. Stack those images, colorize them, and what've you got? A full-color image.
Anyway, if you're imaging at frequencies outside the visible spectrum then yes, it can be difficult to figure out what color a non-visible frequency of light should be! But if you're imaging in the visible spectrum, with a knwon filter set, the results should be much more predictable.
For example, here are four images of M76, the Little Dumbbell Nebula:
The telescope, camera, sky conditions, location and exposure times are different for each of those - for example, the first and last were taken with 20" and 14" telescopes, respectively, using exposures tens of minutes long, and probably cropped down from a much wider field of view, while I took the third one with a 2+ meter telescope (narrower field of view, just like a longer telephoto lens on a camera) using 30-second exposures. And each observer used whatever software they liked, on whatever computer they liked (quite possibly with no calibration) to process the monochromatic images and colorize things in a way that (they hoped) resulted in the best detail and color they could get.
Yes, there's some variation in the particular shades of red or blue. But there's no disagreement over whether those parts should be, respectively, red and blue!
Completely in agreement. Even as recently as 5 years ago (think "pre-G5") scientists I know tended to have a SPARC for their scientific numbercrunching, a Windows PC for Office stuff, and maybe a Mac laptop of some sort. Now, they buy a Mac desktop and spend the different on big LCD panels.
As tech gets less annoying to deal with, other things are shifting too. Everyone where I work knows how to use PolyCom video-conferencing beasties, but they're seeing less use as more people use Skype, iChat, or whatever. I know of one somewhat isolated NASA research facility that has a PolyCom, but also has a Mac and an iSight since iChat has become popular.
the only people who upgrade all the time are gamers. Fixed that for you. I spent years as a sysadmin, and believe me, anyone who's been a sysadmin for a few years does not upgrade all the time. That entails actual (and quite possibly unnecessary) work, which is anathema to sysadmins. We get it built, get it stable, automate as much as possible with shell scripts, and then leave it alone unless it breaks or misbehaves. Although our tinkering skills are probably far superior to yours, tinkering to us is nothing but a means to an end, not a raison d'etre - and worse yet, it's something that cuts into time we could be spending doing other things, like playing games, reading slashdot, watching movies, eating, or sleeping.
Oh, and this goes double for our own machines. If I've just spent 8+ hours making sure some company's computers work, the last thing I want to do when i get home is tinker with my own.
Except that goolge will silently add a header to your email which contains the GMail address which it was sent from: "Sender:"
No, Not "Sender." Actually all Google tacks on is "Return Path," in your email's full header, which is both an accurate and elegant approach to what's being done.
Did you, oh, I dunno, actually look at headers from Gmail before posting this? I just did, and Gmail is putting in both Return-Path: and Sender: headers.
Mind you, I agree that this is entirely appropriate behavior - but claiming it doesn't do it would be wrong. And no, I'm not looking at it in Hotmail, and my MUA doesn't display either of those headers by default (only in full-source view).
And they're two and a half years behind Philip Ball's "Critical Mass" which won the Aventis Prize for science books that year. Of course, CM dealt with a lot more than traffic jams - but they were in there. (In fact, from the new story's summary, it sounds like the researchers may have read it.)
This is the probe that previously released an impactor to, uh, impact deep into the nucleus of another comet. Uh... no. A chunk of the metal the size of a dishwasher doesn't get far into a nucleus the size of a small city. And it didn't even crack it open enough to find any volatile compounds inside (if there were any). But it did kick up some dust so we (astronomy types) could all take pictures and spectra, yay.
One of these days, I'm going to "build" the little fold-up paper model of it that's at home...:)
like me, started using facebook because it's a walled-garden with well segregated networks? It's a what? Since when? Or are you talking about back when you had to have an email address in one of a few hundred.edu domains to join?
I mean, I don't want to pervert457 or randomperson223 to be able to view my profile, or try to flood my inbox (or wall, I suppose)... Now-a-day, facebook seems to become exceeding bloated with random apps. I just want to check what's up with my friend and his profile takes eons to load (partly his fault of course). So... you want better privacy/security controls, but don't want to be notified that 5 of your friends have added the OMG Ponies! app and one of their ponies wants to bite you and turn you into a pony? Read/Write Web just had a blurb yesterday about Multiply, suggesting that it might be a good alternative.
(I use both Facebook and Multiply, for different reasons.)
I am blind and use a screen reader, and I find Leopard's screen reader, Voiceover, will randomly freeze for a couple of seconds when browsing web pages.
Have you tried picking a different synthesized voice option? A lot of people don't like the pauses that are part of the new default voice in 10.5, "James... T. Kirk"
...they standardize poor service for all customers uniformly. Exactly the same as both wired and wireless phone companies and also all the major brand PC makers too. A couple years ago, I would have agreed. But most airlines have these things called "frequent flyer programs" and if you do participate in them, the service becomes a bit less poor. Hotels and car-rental companies have similar programs.
That said, there certainly are a lot of companies that don't treat you any better no matter regardless of how much money (for any amount a normal person could ever give them) they get from you. You're right about the phone companies - and I suspect most other "utilities" like electric, cable, and so on. Ditto for computer and electronics brands.
If you're a big corporate account, you probably get more personalized treatment... but it would be interesting to see more companies start offering perks (beyond supermarket "let us track all your purchases and we'll give you discounts" loyalty cards) for their better customers.
For example, at the local Arby's there's one girl who knows what I usually order (down to 1 or 2 choices) and always gives me a smile if she sees me, even if she's not the one taking my order. If Arby's had a "frequent eater" program, where I earned points for eating there, and could redeem them for free food or whatever, and maybe if I ate there often enough, I got to go to the "elite" register, where the smiling girl would only wait on "good" customers like me... I'd definitely eat there more than I do now (which is pretty infrequent, so the fact that she remembers really stands out). Oh, sure, I'd have a heart attack within a year, but at least I'd be getting waited on by a smiling girl.
You're talking about price, not service. I've flown 100K+ miles this year in a single airline alliance, and will happily compare the level of service I get to that received by your token infrequent-flyer.
=I can't think of a dedicated microwave telescope that isn't atop a fairly inaccessible mountain, ideally somewhere extremely dry (such as Atacoma). Fairly inaccessible? The summit of Mauna Kea is only 2 hours from the beach - and that's counting 30 minutes of acclimatizing. And we don't even have to have the Unimogs plow the road open in the spring like Mt. Evans.;)
Areas away from civilization are popular for other reasons, and OVRO and BIMA don't appear to have been built at very high altitudes. Maybe a thousand or so meters? Not sure about the site of the combined CARMA array, though.
Yes ALMA is insanely high. CSO, JCMT and SMA, less so.
We have one of those in Seattle, and Minnesota had a freeway bridge collapse in August.
And what do those places have in common? They're both near Canada. See? It's a proximity thing. The closer you get, the more crumbling viaducts and things like that there are. Out here on the Big Island of Hawaii, we don't even have viaducts or freeway bridges, because we're further from Canada. It all makes perfect sense.
(Not to say that you should all move here, mind you. Relatively few Canadians have lava flows slowly creeping toward them.)
What he's saying here, folks, is "ultraviolet, x-ray and gamma ray." Also infrared and microwave (BOOMERANG was in the latter region of the spectrum). Well... given enough atmosphere you can get basically opaque in those wavelengths, sure.
But while leading Saturday's summit tour on Mauna Kea, before the Slashdot 10th Anniversary not-quite-a-party, I intend to show the gathered geeks and tourists things like:
ULBCAM, the 16-megapixel testbed for the sensor technology being used in NIRCAM on JWST UKIRT, the largest (for now) dedicated infrared telescope in the world (3.8m) NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) (3.0m) CalTech Submillimeter Observatory (10.4m) James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (15m), the largest microwave dish in the world The Harvard-Smithsonian-Taiwan Submillimeter Array
Admittedly, these are above 40% of the atmosphere, and 90% of the water vapor in the atmosphere, but they are all very much on the ground, and no balloons are involved, and they seem to work fairly well.:)
While the scope and precision of this project appears to be admirable and new And price, one would hope...
much of the initial attempts to view the universe through non-optical, non-radio wavelengths (the ones where our atmosphere is basically opaque) What he's saying here, folks, is "ultraviolet, x-ray and gamma ray."
Pesky atmosphere. Always getting in the way of the observing and keeping us from getting to the 0.3" limit of our optics!:(
Slashdot Mirror
I may be able to more or less "comfortably" carry much more than a 5 pound laptop, but my gear alone is somewhere around 15-20 pounds, and if I had it in a laptop bag on my shoulder, I'd have back problems by now. As far as size goes, you still have the same L x W which means it will take up roughly the same amount of space. It only got smaller in the thickness, and frankly, thats the least important when considering effective size. Except you can fit two MacBook Airs in one bag
I'm considering the Air. The dearth of USB ports is a bit of a concern since I have 3 USB devices (camera, iPod, headset for VOIP) and would also need the ethernet dongle when I work at facilities where WiFi is forbidden. The aluminum case is a big plus, since it should give better build quality and durability (my current black MacBook has cracks along the edges due to poor design/construction). The weight reduction would be nice, the style of it is awesome. I'm willing to lose some CPU and spindle speed because I'd be upgrading to Adobe CS 3 and MS Office 2008, from non-Intel-native versions of them, which would help balance the performance difference.
As far as the battery, I'll want to know whether it's something where I have to mail it in, or whether I can just take it to a Genius Bar.
Of course, astronomers do care about color - sort of, anyway. They want to know how many photons hit the chip if they filter out all but certain wavebands. So, ta-dah, they take the same picture through different colored filters. If you want to do visible light imaging of stuff, you'll probably use the popular Bessell BVRI filter set (except maybe without the I since that's for infrared). B is blue, R is red, and V is "visible" which is sort of the yellowish-green part of the spectrum. Stack those images, colorize them, and what've you got? A full-color image.
Interestingly, this approach was used terrestrially before color film, let alone CCDs, even existed!
Anyway, if you're imaging at frequencies outside the visible spectrum then yes, it can be difficult to figure out what color a non-visible frequency of light should be! But if you're imaging in the visible spectrum, with a knwon filter set, the results should be much more predictable.
For example, here are four images of M76, the Little Dumbbell Nebula:
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/m76blocks.jpg
http://www.nightskyinfo.com/archive/m76_planetary_nebula/m76.jpg
http://ifa.hawaii.edu/~birchall/pix/m76.jpg
http://www.utahskies.org/report/20011214/m76wcmyl.jpg
The telescope, camera, sky conditions, location and exposure times are different for each of those - for example, the first and last were taken with 20" and 14" telescopes, respectively, using exposures tens of minutes long, and probably cropped down from a much wider field of view, while I took the third one with a 2+ meter telescope (narrower field of view, just like a longer telephoto lens on a camera) using 30-second exposures. And each observer used whatever software they liked, on whatever computer they liked (quite possibly with no calibration) to process the monochromatic images and colorize things in a way that (they hoped) resulted in the best detail and color they could get.
Yes, there's some variation in the particular shades of red or blue. But there's no disagreement over whether those parts should be, respectively, red and blue!
Completely in agreement. Even as recently as 5 years ago (think "pre-G5") scientists I know tended to have a SPARC for their scientific numbercrunching, a Windows PC for Office stuff, and maybe a Mac laptop of some sort. Now, they buy a Mac desktop and spend the different on big LCD panels.
As tech gets less annoying to deal with, other things are shifting too. Everyone where I work knows how to use PolyCom video-conferencing beasties, but they're seeing less use as more people use Skype, iChat, or whatever. I know of one somewhat isolated NASA research facility that has a PolyCom, but also has a Mac and an iSight since iChat has become popular.
Oh, and this goes double for our own machines. If I've just spent 8+ hours making sure some company's computers work, the last thing I want to do when i get home is tinker with my own.
Please don't group us with gamers.
Did you, oh, I dunno, actually look at headers from Gmail before posting this? I just did, and Gmail is putting in both Return-Path: and Sender: headers.No, Not "Sender." Actually all Google tacks on is "Return Path," in your email's full header, which is both an accurate and elegant approach to what's being done.
Mind you, I agree that this is entirely appropriate behavior - but claiming it doesn't do it would be wrong. And no, I'm not looking at it in Hotmail, and my MUA doesn't display either of those headers by default (only in full-source view).
Clearly, "America's Top 40" is pirated music.
I'm a little confused. Do those fall under "news for nerds," or "stuff that matters?"
And they're two and a half years behind Philip Ball's "Critical Mass" which won the Aventis Prize for science books that year. Of course, CM dealt with a lot more than traffic jams - but they were in there. (In fact, from the new story's summary, it sounds like the researchers may have read it.)
One of these days, I'm going to "build" the little fold-up paper model of it that's at home...
Especially the vivisection of live prisoners? ;)
Nope... and I rather consistently spell it that way when chatting about it with a girl I know who works there. She doesn't appear to mind.
(I use both Facebook and Multiply, for different reasons.)
I am blind and use a screen reader, and I find Leopard's screen reader, Voiceover, will randomly freeze for a couple of seconds when browsing web pages.
Have you tried picking a different synthesized voice option? A lot of people don't like the pauses that are part of the new default voice in 10.5, "James... T. Kirk"
...they standardize poor service for all customers uniformly. Exactly the same as both wired and wireless phone companies and also all the major brand PC makers too. A couple years ago, I would have agreed. But most airlines have these things called "frequent flyer programs" and if you do participate in them, the service becomes a bit less poor. Hotels and car-rental companies have similar programs.That said, there certainly are a lot of companies that don't treat you any better no matter regardless of how much money (for any amount a normal person could ever give them) they get from you. You're right about the phone companies - and I suspect most other "utilities" like electric, cable, and so on. Ditto for computer and electronics brands.
If you're a big corporate account, you probably get more personalized treatment... but it would be interesting to see more companies start offering perks (beyond supermarket "let us track all your purchases and we'll give you discounts" loyalty cards) for their better customers.
For example, at the local Arby's there's one girl who knows what I usually order (down to 1 or 2 choices) and always gives me a smile if she sees me, even if she's not the one taking my order. If Arby's had a "frequent eater" program, where I earned points for eating there, and could redeem them for free food or whatever, and maybe if I ate there often enough, I got to go to the "elite" register, where the smiling girl would only wait on "good" customers like me... I'd definitely eat there more than I do now (which is pretty infrequent, so the fact that she remembers really stands out). Oh, sure, I'd have a heart attack within a year, but at least I'd be getting waited on by a smiling girl.
You're talking about price, not service. I've flown 100K+ miles this year in a single airline alliance, and will happily compare the level of service I get to that received by your token infrequent-flyer.
(The definition about being in accord or agreeing.)
It's an easy typo... but a lot of people just don't realize those are two very different words.
Areas away from civilization are popular for other reasons, and OVRO and BIMA don't appear to have been built at very high altitudes. Maybe a thousand or so meters? Not sure about the site of the combined CARMA array, though.
Yes ALMA is insanely high. CSO, JCMT and SMA, less so.
This is just what we've needed since 1966 - a way for the non-directional therapist to see facial expressions.
We have one of those in Seattle, and Minnesota had a freeway bridge collapse in August.
And what do those places have in common? They're both near Canada. See? It's a proximity thing. The closer you get, the more crumbling viaducts and things like that there are. Out here on the Big Island of Hawaii, we don't even have viaducts or freeway bridges, because we're further from Canada. It all makes perfect sense.(Not to say that you should all move here, mind you. Relatively few Canadians have lava flows slowly creeping toward them.)
But while leading Saturday's summit tour on Mauna Kea, before the Slashdot 10th Anniversary not-quite-a-party, I intend to show the gathered geeks and tourists things like:
ULBCAM, the 16-megapixel testbed for the sensor technology being used in NIRCAM on JWST
UKIRT, the largest (for now) dedicated infrared telescope in the world (3.8m)
NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) (3.0m)
CalTech Submillimeter Observatory (10.4m)
James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (15m), the largest microwave dish in the world
The Harvard-Smithsonian-Taiwan Submillimeter Array
Admittedly, these are above 40% of the atmosphere, and 90% of the water vapor in the atmosphere, but they are all very much on the ground, and no balloons are involved, and they seem to work fairly well.
Pesky atmosphere. Always getting in the way of the observing and keeping us from getting to the 0.3" limit of our optics!
Yeah, sheesh. I remember 8-9 years ago when they were doing the whole clustering thing. That was about the only interesting idea they ever had.
(I was a tester. Actually deployed a commercial website on it, too. Somewhere, there are news clippings...)