I wonder if Fujitsu might consider offering Linux as an alternative to Solaris on some of their 64-way SPARC-based beasts, as well. I believe those are the PrimePower family.
My wife and daughter went to the outreach event at U of Hawaii - Hilo campus. I was handling all the video and communications at a parallel event at Maui Community College. There were also events at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and on Waikiki Beach.
I've read that the Waikiki Beach event attracted 10,000 people. I'm not sure how many usually show up for the free "Sunset on the Beach" movies, though, so I don't know what the delta was there. I don't have numbers for Bishop either.
Hilo and Maui each had hundreds of attendees, were standing (or sitting on the floor) room only, had to open extra rooms for NASA TV streams, and still had people standing outside looking in the doors. The Keck headquarters in Waimea got about twice as many people as could fit inside.
Of course, anybody with enough bandwidth can watch NASA TV, but in our main program space (far too small, alas!) we also had a few other attractions:
Lots of free posters, stickers, etc.
Professional astronomers Shadia Habbal, J.D. Armstrong and Jonathan Williams fielding questions and, in Jon's case, giving a presentation.
Live video links (via iChat AV) with a group of students from Hawaii and Iceland who were one floor above us, remotely operating the Faulkes telescope on Haleakala as part of a workshop with educators from the US, Iceland and the UK.
Display of up-to-the-minute images off Faulkes. (Yes, the comet got a whole lot brighter!)
Live video links with, and a presentation from, Mike Martin of Boeing (which provided the rocket), who was on the summit of Haleakala.
Live video chat with Mike Maberry, Assistant Director for Maui at the U. of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, also on the summit of Haleakala.
Live video chat with Bill Giebink of the IfA, who was on the summit of Haleakala to keep an eye on Faulkes. (And who, I might note, showed up on video with his granddaughter sitting on his shoulders.)
Live video chat with Glenn at the Smithsonian-Harvard-Taiwan submillimeter array on Mauna Kea
Live video chat with Hiroko at the Caltech submillimeter observatory on Mauna Kea
A couple brief bits of live streaming video from Japan's Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea.
The Maui News said something about "live television feeds" - nope, all the people we were talking to were over iChat AV.:)
But if you wanted to try to see it pre-impact, you'd look (with a telescope or binoculars - it shouldn't be naked-eye) near Spica in the constellation Virgo; the comet will be near it, in the direction of Arcturus in the constellation Bootes.
If you have no idea where Spica and Arcturus are... find the Big Dipper. Follow the curve of its handle, and look across the sky a ways for a bright kinda yellowish star. That's Arcturus. Then look about that far again for a bright bluish star. That's Spica.
Or, get yourself on a flight to Maui ASAP and head over to Maui Community College, where a bunch of us will be doing a public outreach program featuring things like NASA people, live video links to observatories on Mauna Kea and Haleakala, and so on and so forth. And freebies.:)
I've only been involved with DI-related stuff for 10 months (as a telescope operator, and now for outreach) but some folks I work with have been on this for the better part of 10 years, so I hope everything goes well!
While I have to agree that an unfortunate percentage of people in the technology field who (are presumed to) have English as their native tongue haven't particularly mastered it, I haven't seen any indication that people in other fields are doing any better.
My mother was a sometime proofreader, my father a sometime typesetter. I received what I can only presume was at best a typical language education in school from the late 1970s to late 1980s, read an awful lot of books, and wound up with grammar and spelling abilities that seemed a bit "above average" at the time, but now seem freakish.
Given any English-language newspaper from anywhere in the world, I will probably find errors in grammar or spelling. They're not quite as ubiquitous in books, but it's not uncommon for the typical 200-page work to have an error or two. Computer programs, web pages and the like are typically held to a lower standard, so I'm not the least bit surprised when they contain language errors.
That said, might English speakers actually have it better than people who prefer other languages? Most application interfaces are initially written in English, and sloppy translation during the "internationalization" process could have amusing or embarrassing results.
... the PowerBooks all my UNIX-using, mobility-desiring scientific and technical colleagues seem to have already bought. But I guess there's a niche if Sun comes out with a better screen than Apple has, or if those chips are all 64-bit.
Unfortunately, mobile phones that "just ring" don't really "ring" most of the time; they do some sort of synthesized trilling beep or whatever. They can't even do one of those purring noises that some European and African phones do. So having a better synthesizer and the ability to support ringtones can be handy if one wants the sound of an actual bell instead.
I much prefer the classic bell sound, so since my mobile ringing usually means something is horribly hosed somewhere in the world, I opted for a ringtone that begins with a telephone bell, before segueing into the well-known theme from "Mission Impossible."
I tend to be the only one in the room who has that, and it draws a smile from colleagues.
Although they may be "very excited and looking forward to the encounter", they won't be able to see the results very well.
Well... actually, it depends on how you define "they." And if "they" are "everyone on the science and engineering teams," that includes a lot of people who aren't hunkered down over screens at JPL. In fact, academics outnumber NASA folks on the science team.
I only know the whereabouts of one science team member on that fateful night - my colleague at U. of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, Karen Meech. She'll be at one of the observatories on Mauna Kea, which, like all the others up there, and at least one over on Haleakala, will be watching the impact in whatever wavelengths work best.
Given that the impact has been timed to make it observable from Hawaii, it's a fairly big deal out here. I'll be part of the public outreach program over on Maui that night, and my only regret is that I'll have to miss the program here in Hilo to do that.
(I wouldn't really be at all surprised if some other science team members are out here for the impact - I've seen more than one astronomer from far away point out that the advantages of siting telescopes in Hawaii include periodically having to take a trip to Hawaii.)
There are a couple different factors in play here.
First, there's the need to keep things around long-term.
Second, there's the need to have things protected from disaster in the short term.
I once used an external firewire HD for backup, and was reminded of the importance of burning things as well when that HD went tango-uniform on me, destroying months of work.
I'd suggest looking into some sort of RAID - even just a simple mirror - for the short-term protection. That way you don't have quite as much a single point of failure that can wipe out your data, so you can do backups more because you need the space than because you need to sleep well at night.
As for the backups, optical discs are very convenient, but magnetic tape might have a longer lifetime depending on environmental conditions, and although I've seen CD-R comparisons, I've yet to see something similar for DVDs.
There are times where a high-capacity removable hard disk looks very attractive. Shades of the old Bernoulli's or whatever.
(This may not be first post, though there were none when I started. Maybe I'll have to settle for first useful post.)
The compiled-vs-interpreted bit might make it a non-port, but other than that, implementing the same thing on a different CPU architecture, potentially with different RAM limits, sounds like a port to me. *shrug*
They have done it from day 1, nearly 25 years ago, in purchasing QDOS.
Young whippersnapper! Day 1 was more like 30 years ago, when they took BASIC (which had been developed a decade earlier at Dartmouth) and ported it to... what was it, the Altair? Then they licensed it, presumably for money - and that was Microsoft's true "innovation" - taking something that people had created for free and finding a way to charge money for it.
Given some atrocities are still around, I don't expect Quark to go away quickly. But with InDesign probably getting the PageMaker users, yeah, I think Quark will have a hard time against Adobe.
One organization I have ties to used to have separate camps of Quark and PageMaker users (pretty weird as it was a rather small organization!) but last September decided to ditch both in favor of InDesign, partly because it was easier to just pick up Creative Suite.
Yes, some old-timers bitched and moaned, but InDesign has worked out well for their modest needs. I've actually thought of trying to reproduce some of their templates in Apple's "Pages" but haven't done so yet.
If the hardware business becomes unprofitable, Apple can always become a software company at a moment's notice.
Sure. After all, it worked for NeXT, and when it stopped working, they just got themselves bought by a company that needed a better OS.
So in a few years, Steve will be calling Bill Gates on stage to announce that Microsoft has bought Apple, and that OS X will now have 100% market share...;)
Based on some rough calculations I'm estimating it'd be 9.5-10.5 pounds, and a similarly sized PowerBook would be about 8.5 pounds.
My 17" PowerBook's screen is plenty big - I just wish it were 1920x1200 instead of 1440x900. If I got a larger screen, I'd have to pay first-class airfare to be able to use it on planes.
The 17" PowerBook weighs in at, if I recall, 6.9 pounds. And that's counting the battery and both spindles, since it doesn't have a drive bay. The lightest 17" PC notebook I've seen is something on the order of 7.85 pounds, and most are heavier still - heck, there are 15" PC notebooks out there that weigh in at more than a 17" PowerBook. A 17" Dell is likely somewhere over 8 pounds.
A 19" screen is about 23% larger in area than a 17" screen, so a laptop would probably be about 23% wider and deeper as well, though the thickness might be kept the same. Assuming laptops of uniform density (but not, sad to say, spherical ones!) it would thus weigh about 23% more as well.
So a 19" PowerBook might weigh about 8.48 pounds - which is probably about what a 17" Dell weighs. And a 19" Dell might weigh about 9.5-10.5 pounds.
Slashdot Mirror
Vail is apparently also a fairly good place to be into astronomy, if one local resident is any indication.
I wonder if Fujitsu might consider offering Linux as an alternative to Solaris on some of their 64-way SPARC-based beasts, as well. I believe those are the PrimePower family.
Now if they could just get steady pricing as well, so the Brits would stop whinging about paying more. :)
I've read that the Waikiki Beach event attracted 10,000 people. I'm not sure how many usually show up for the free "Sunset on the Beach" movies, though, so I don't know what the delta was there. I don't have numbers for Bishop either.
Hilo and Maui each had hundreds of attendees, were standing (or sitting on the floor) room only, had to open extra rooms for NASA TV streams, and still had people standing outside looking in the doors. The Keck headquarters in Waimea got about twice as many people as could fit inside.
Of course, anybody with enough bandwidth can watch NASA TV, but in our main program space (far too small, alas!) we also had a few other attractions:
- Lots of free posters, stickers, etc.
- Professional astronomers Shadia Habbal, J.D. Armstrong and Jonathan Williams fielding questions and, in Jon's case, giving a presentation.
- Live video links (via iChat AV) with a group of students from Hawaii and Iceland who were one floor above us, remotely operating the Faulkes telescope on Haleakala as part of a workshop with educators from the US, Iceland and the UK.
- Display of up-to-the-minute images off Faulkes. (Yes, the comet got a whole lot brighter!)
- Live video links with, and a presentation from, Mike Martin of Boeing (which provided the rocket), who was on the summit of Haleakala.
- Live video chat with Mike Maberry, Assistant Director for Maui at the U. of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, also on the summit of Haleakala.
- Live video chat with Bill Giebink of the IfA, who was on the summit of Haleakala to keep an eye on Faulkes. (And who, I might note, showed up on video with his granddaughter sitting on his shoulders.)
- Live video chat with Glenn at the Smithsonian-Harvard-Taiwan submillimeter array on Mauna Kea
- Live video chat with Hiroko at the Caltech submillimeter observatory on Mauna Kea
- A couple brief bits of live streaming video from Japan's Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea.
The Maui News said something about "live television feeds" - nope, all the people we were talking to were over iChat AV.But if you wanted to try to see it pre-impact, you'd look (with a telescope or binoculars - it shouldn't be naked-eye) near Spica in the constellation Virgo; the comet will be near it, in the direction of Arcturus in the constellation Bootes.
If you have no idea where Spica and Arcturus are... find the Big Dipper. Follow the curve of its handle, and look across the sky a ways for a bright kinda yellowish star. That's Arcturus. Then look about that far again for a bright bluish star. That's Spica.
Or, get yourself on a flight to Maui ASAP and head over to Maui Community College, where a bunch of us will be doing a public outreach program featuring things like NASA people, live video links to observatories on Mauna Kea and Haleakala, and so on and so forth. And freebies. :)
I've only been involved with DI-related stuff for 10 months (as a telescope operator, and now for outreach) but some folks I work with have been on this for the better part of 10 years, so I hope everything goes well!
This seems scripted...
While I have to agree that an unfortunate percentage of people in the technology field who (are presumed to) have English as their native tongue haven't particularly mastered it, I haven't seen any indication that people in other fields are doing any better.
My mother was a sometime proofreader, my father a sometime typesetter. I received what I can only presume was at best a typical language education in school from the late 1970s to late 1980s, read an awful lot of books, and wound up with grammar and spelling abilities that seemed a bit "above average" at the time, but now seem freakish.
Given any English-language newspaper from anywhere in the world, I will probably find errors in grammar or spelling. They're not quite as ubiquitous in books, but it's not uncommon for the typical 200-page work to have an error or two. Computer programs, web pages and the like are typically held to a lower standard, so I'm not the least bit surprised when they contain language errors.
That said, might English speakers actually have it better than people who prefer other languages? Most application interfaces are initially written in English, and sloppy translation during the "internationalization" process could have amusing or embarrassing results.
"It's not fair! Everyone else gets to use laptops!"
... the PowerBooks all my UNIX-using, mobility-desiring scientific and technical colleagues seem to have already bought. But I guess there's a niche if Sun comes out with a better screen than Apple has, or if those chips are all 64-bit.
Unfortunately, mobile phones that "just ring" don't really "ring" most of the time; they do some sort of synthesized trilling beep or whatever. They can't even do one of those purring noises that some European and African phones do. So having a better synthesizer and the ability to support ringtones can be handy if one wants the sound of an actual bell instead.
I much prefer the classic bell sound, so since my mobile ringing usually means something is horribly hosed somewhere in the world, I opted for a ringtone that begins with a telephone bell, before segueing into the well-known theme from "Mission Impossible."
I tend to be the only one in the room who has that, and it draws a smile from colleagues.
Why are you still using BIOS?
Why are you still using floppies?
Yeah. Or to word it differently:
Look! This thing that is not a helicopter is not subject to the limitations of helicopters!
Next they're going to tell me that these newfangled horseless carriages can do things my bicycle can't.
I only know the whereabouts of one science team member on that fateful night - my colleague at U. of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, Karen Meech. She'll be at one of the observatories on Mauna Kea, which, like all the others up there, and at least one over on Haleakala, will be watching the impact in whatever wavelengths work best.
Given that the impact has been timed to make it observable from Hawaii, it's a fairly big deal out here. I'll be part of the public outreach program over on Maui that night, and my only regret is that I'll have to miss the program here in Hilo to do that.
(I wouldn't really be at all surprised if some other science team members are out here for the impact - I've seen more than one astronomer from far away point out that the advantages of siting telescopes in Hawaii include periodically having to take a trip to Hawaii.)
First, there's the need to keep things around long-term. Second, there's the need to have things protected from disaster in the short term.
I once used an external firewire HD for backup, and was reminded of the importance of burning things as well when that HD went tango-uniform on me, destroying months of work.
I'd suggest looking into some sort of RAID - even just a simple mirror - for the short-term protection. That way you don't have quite as much a single point of failure that can wipe out your data, so you can do backups more because you need the space than because you need to sleep well at night.
As for the backups, optical discs are very convenient, but magnetic tape might have a longer lifetime depending on environmental conditions, and although I've seen CD-R comparisons, I've yet to see something similar for DVDs.
There are times where a high-capacity removable hard disk looks very attractive. Shades of the old Bernoulli's or whatever.
(This may not be first post, though there were none when I started. Maybe I'll have to settle for first useful post.)
The compiled-vs-interpreted bit might make it a non-port, but other than that, implementing the same thing on a different CPU architecture, potentially with different RAM limits, sounds like a port to me. *shrug*
1GB? What is it, a Goatse billboard?
One organization I have ties to used to have separate camps of Quark and PageMaker users (pretty weird as it was a rather small organization!) but last September decided to ditch both in favor of InDesign, partly because it was easier to just pick up Creative Suite.
Yes, some old-timers bitched and moaned, but InDesign has worked out well for their modest needs. I've actually thought of trying to reproduce some of their templates in Apple's "Pages" but haven't done so yet.
So in a few years, Steve will be calling Bill Gates on stage to announce that Microsoft has bought Apple, and that OS X will now have 100% market share... ;)
My 17" PowerBook's screen is plenty big - I just wish it were 1920x1200 instead of 1440x900. If I got a larger screen, I'd have to pay first-class airfare to be able to use it on planes.
Erm.
I meant "11% wider and 11% deeper, for a total increase in top-side area when closed of 23%." Just in case anyone else noticed that.
The 17" PowerBook weighs in at, if I recall, 6.9 pounds. And that's counting the battery and both spindles, since it doesn't have a drive bay. The lightest 17" PC notebook I've seen is something on the order of 7.85 pounds, and most are heavier still - heck, there are 15" PC notebooks out there that weigh in at more than a 17" PowerBook. A 17" Dell is likely somewhere over 8 pounds.
A 19" screen is about 23% larger in area than a 17" screen, so a laptop would probably be about 23% wider and deeper as well, though the thickness might be kept the same. Assuming laptops of uniform density (but not, sad to say, spherical ones!) it would thus weigh about 23% more as well.
So a 19" PowerBook might weigh about 8.48 pounds - which is probably about what a 17" Dell weighs. And a 19" Dell might weigh about 9.5-10.5 pounds.