As much as I like Cygwin (I use it daily and install it on every machine I touch), it's pretty slow. If you want a fast and robust copy, use Robocopy.exe, a command line tool you can download from Microsoft (or various other sites). It will copy across samba shares, retry failed copies, resume interrupted copies, mirror entire trees, keep NTFS permissions (or clean them), do CRC checks, exclude arbitrary files or directories, etc... I use it for anything that involves more than a few files or for backup. The only things missing are ssh and regex (use cygwin's rsync for that).
Hello Michael,
are you still running your experiments at Dome C ? I haven't been there since late 2005 and I haven't been following closely.
Do you expect the seeing to be significantly better at Dome A than Dome C ? Do you know if the turbulent layer is lower than the 30m of Dome C ? Is there winter weather information available since the chinese first set foot there in 2005 (I'd expect they left an AWS) ?
I hope you have improved the reliability of your equipment and that it didn't get too banged up during transportation. Anyway, good luck with this experiment. Has the traverse team turned tail already ?
In the meanwhile other countries are moving along nicely with high-speed trains. The new AGV was presented a few days ago in France with a cruise speed of 360km/h. And it's not some vaporware, there are already hundreds of trains daily that cruise at 320km/h. And finally about security, the number of accidents is ridiculously low. I don't think there's been a single high-speed train going out of its tracks in France (I know at least one Pendolino in Italy). And when terrorists(TM) tried to blow one up a long time ago, the roof of a wagon blew up, killing most of the passenger, but the train stayed on the tracks and nobody was harmed in the other wagons.
Anyway, not trying to flamebait, trains and planes are pretty much complementary, there's just a certain distance over which planes are better, but this distance increases overtime. It's probably in the 500~1000km nowadays.
No more RTG in Antarctica since the last signup of the Antarctic Treaty. There used to be automated weather stations (AWS) on the high plateau using RTG of the same generation as what is currently powering the Voyager spacecrafts, but they had to be removed over a decade ago and replaced by large batteries and a combination of wind and solar power.
As for astronomy, the team running this automated experiment at Dome A did it previously at Dome C. I was on the first winterover team in 2005 and monitoring the turbulence for astronomy was one of the main goals. Bigger telescopes are being installed as we speak in time for the start of the 4th winterover in a few days.
Dome A is 1000m higher than Dome C (4200m vs 3200m) but is even harder to reach and the temperature in winter borders on the insane: we had -78C during our winterover so I'll let you imagine at Dome A...
When I use Linux, the single thing I miss the most is... Windows Explorer. Yes, the simple presentation with folders as a tree structure on the left, files on the right and a space to copy/paste the path on top. I cannot figure out how to set up Konqueror to work the same way. It kind of looks the same, but if I double click a folder on the right it won't update the tree on the left and a whole bunch of other annoying quirks. No, it's not just a question of getting used to it, I've been using it for several years and I still can't do anything useful with it.
And where is the 'Send pathname(s) to clipboard' option when you right-click on files in Konqueror ? It's an inf file I've been installing on every system since Win95 and cannot live without it.
I'm sure there are plenty of custom configurations of Konkeror, so if someone can point me in the right direction, thank you.
On my ADSL router, there are 3 accounts. One I cannot access/modify. One I have full control (including password change) but it's a useless account (hardly any control). One I can control the router, but the password changes don't stick... Apparently they don't allow password changes so that they can remotely update the firmware (which happens regularly). Gee, I wait for the day when a hacked firmware will be pushed to N million subscribers. And it's basically undetectable even by careful users since it won't affect your PC. The Morris worm will pale in comparison.
Yes, my site is amateurish and has been like that since, oh, 1996. When I looked at the XHTML+CSS specs my only thought was "WTF, this can only be written by a code generator". I write my HTML by hand as the original web intended. Yes, I forget to close some tags and the presentation is kind of sucky. So what, I still get 10000 visitors a day. At least with HTML4/5, I know what the tags mean. Not so with XHTML. And XHTML never validates, period. I'd say HTML5 is a realistic implementation for old-style web pages.
At some point when the glacier melts enough, that whole layer becomes visible and thus the reflection of sunlight from the glacier surface diminishes. Antarctic glaciers melt from the bottom due to pressure and geothermal fluxes... like being heated from below by a volcano ! While snow accumulates on top.
Indeed, will they be able to follow it somehow ? Radar comes to mind if it's made out of aluminium. But then at sharp angles like this it will reflect radar like an F117 !
And while you are at it, make some good science: a liquid-mirror azimuthal telescope near the pole, a giant network of Seti radiotelescopes on the far and quiet side of the moon, automated titanium mining for local use, etc...
In the category "movies that make you physically sick", I nominate Richard Linklater. I had to leave after 15 minutes the flickering fuckfest of Waking Life (and cheap philosophy 101 theme). I thought my eyes were going to pop off their sockets from trying to focus on this mess. A Scanner Darkly was slightly more watchable but I had to regularly keep my eyes closed in order to finish the movie.
It also pisses me off greatly when newsreaders append their own opinion to the end of a news story I often appreciate that and would like to see it more often, provided the opinion is clearly delineated from the facts. When you know nothing of a subject, a previous opinion is a good way to get started thinking about it, and then feel free to agree or not. When I was in the US I hated reporters like Dan Rather who would just stand there all self-important stating a few facts from the AP release and then... nothing. Tell us what it may mean, what it could imply, what possible consequences there are, etc...
I worked for many years in Antarctica. After we pulled out a 3km long ice core (nicknamed a 'carrot'), there were a bunch of phone interviews. The result ? First page of the italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera: "Million year old frozen carrots discovered 3km deep under the Antarctic ice"...
Proof that science is a good thing, news reporting is a good thing, but mixing both together not necessarily...
Funny. I had a similar experience recently in a hotel in Croatia. I asked something in english to the guy cleaning the corridor (don't remember what it was), and by sign he made it clear he didn't know english, but asked me to follow him. He then asked another person and his sentence which lasted a good minute was something like: "Brrrrrkrkrkrkrkrrrrrrrbbbbbbbbbrkrkrkrkr". I swear, it was like a chainsaw going off without a single vowel. Foreign languages can sound so alien sometimes.
Cows are 100% dependent on humans for survival Not 100%. The only wild cow herd on the planet is on tiny Amsterdam Island, although it doesn't say so on the Wikipedia article. It's very interesting to note that in a century they have reverted to many attributes of their auroch ancestors. The history of that island is fascinating.
Fortunately 64-bit numbers can now be handled by pcs [...] Most operating systems have already been converted Bzzzt, wrong. It's a problem above all at the programming language level, for instance even C standard 99 keeps time_t explicitely as a 32-bit integer. The problem is cluless programmers saving this time_t into file fields, making the transformation to a 64-bit field nearly impossible. C and other languages need to add a time_t64 quickly so that we programmers can at least start the transition.
We have an ISO standard (YYYY-MM-DD) for dates, let's use it Sure, as soon as the US finishes adopting the metric system... I say this in jest, but time/date is a lot harder to standardize than other measurement units and a lot of thought have poured into it. During the french revolution they tried to standardize all units, even time. They succeeded for all, except for time and and the US.
Having also driven in the US and Oz, I agree that 4-way stop signs are completely stupid, unless you _want_ to make drivers waste their time and gas and CO2 in urban areas (but still, at 3am, what's the point). And yes, one shouldn't 'trust' signs, but take them for what they are worth: an indication. There sure is a balance between information overload and lack of it. I don't speak German and was in Austria last week: I was left wondering at how they manage to have the time to read street signs that spawn 3 lines with 120 consonants and 2 vowels...
You know, there have been numerous suppressed studies demonstrating that road rules and signs actually make driving less safe because they give a false sense of security. I've read such a study and I find it highly suspect. Case in point, I drive often in 3 different countries. One of those doesn't put arrows to indicate steep curves on mountain roads. When driving at night (and even during the day) I regularly get surprised when getting into curves that weren't readily apparent and have to slam the brakes, even at low speed. I fail to see how that's an improvement in respect to seeing a number of arrows that tell you in advance what the safe speed will be. And it saves time too.
Go drive in a third world country and then we'll talk about signs and road safety.
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Excuse me for asking, but what's a wire recorder ?
As much as I like Cygwin (I use it daily and install it on every machine I touch), it's pretty slow. If you want a fast and robust copy, use Robocopy.exe, a command line tool you can download from Microsoft (or various other sites). It will copy across samba shares, retry failed copies, resume interrupted copies, mirror entire trees, keep NTFS permissions (or clean them), do CRC checks, exclude arbitrary files or directories, etc... I use it for anything that involves more than a few files or for backup. The only things missing are ssh and regex (use cygwin's rsync for that).
Yes, but that's record speed, not cruise speed. Still mighty impressive though.
Also these species of transparent fishes native of Antarctica. Harder to keep in a tank though.
Do you expect the seeing to be significantly better at Dome A than Dome C ? Do you know if the turbulent layer is lower than the 30m of Dome C ? Is there winter weather information available since the chinese first set foot there in 2005 (I'd expect they left an AWS) ?
I hope you have improved the reliability of your equipment and that it didn't get too banged up during transportation. Anyway, good luck with this experiment. Has the traverse team turned tail already ?
Anyway, not trying to flamebait, trains and planes are pretty much complementary, there's just a certain distance over which planes are better, but this distance increases overtime. It's probably in the 500~1000km nowadays.
As for astronomy, the team running this automated experiment at Dome A did it previously at Dome C. I was on the first winterover team in 2005 and monitoring the turbulence for astronomy was one of the main goals. Bigger telescopes are being installed as we speak in time for the start of the 4th winterover in a few days.
Dome A is 1000m higher than Dome C (4200m vs 3200m) but is even harder to reach and the temperature in winter borders on the insane: we had -78C during our winterover so I'll let you imagine at Dome A...
When I use Linux, the single thing I miss the most is... Windows Explorer. Yes, the simple presentation with folders as a tree structure on the left, files on the right and a space to copy/paste the path on top. I cannot figure out how to set up Konqueror to work the same way. It kind of looks the same, but if I double click a folder on the right it won't update the tree on the left and a whole bunch of other annoying quirks. No, it's not just a question of getting used to it, I've been using it for several years and I still can't do anything useful with it.
And where is the 'Send pathname(s) to clipboard' option when you right-click on files in Konqueror ? It's an inf file I've been installing on every system since Win95 and cannot live without it.
I'm sure there are plenty of custom configurations of Konkeror, so if someone can point me in the right direction, thank you.
On my ADSL router, there are 3 accounts. One I cannot access/modify. One I have full control (including password change) but it's a useless account (hardly any control). One I can control the router, but the password changes don't stick... Apparently they don't allow password changes so that they can remotely update the firmware (which happens regularly). Gee, I wait for the day when a hacked firmware will be pushed to N million subscribers. And it's basically undetectable even by careful users since it won't affect your PC. The Morris worm will pale in comparison.
Yes, my site is amateurish and has been like that since, oh, 1996. When I looked at the XHTML+CSS specs my only thought was "WTF, this can only be written by a code generator". I write my HTML by hand as the original web intended. Yes, I forget to close some tags and the presentation is kind of sucky. So what, I still get 10000 visitors a day. At least with HTML4/5, I know what the tags mean. Not so with XHTML. And XHTML never validates, period. I'd say HTML5 is a realistic implementation for old-style web pages.
Indeed, will they be able to follow it somehow ? Radar comes to mind if it's made out of aluminium. But then at sharp angles like this it will reflect radar like an F117 !
And while you are at it, make some good science: a liquid-mirror azimuthal telescope near the pole, a giant network of Seti radiotelescopes on the far and quiet side of the moon, automated titanium mining for local use, etc...
In the category "movies that make you physically sick", I nominate Richard Linklater. I had to leave after 15 minutes the flickering fuckfest of Waking Life (and cheap philosophy 101 theme). I thought my eyes were going to pop off their sockets from trying to focus on this mess. A Scanner Darkly was slightly more watchable but I had to regularly keep my eyes closed in order to finish the movie.
Proof that science is a good thing, news reporting is a good thing, but mixing both together not necessarily...
Funny. I had a similar experience recently in a hotel in Croatia. I asked something in english to the guy cleaning the corridor (don't remember what it was), and by sign he made it clear he didn't know english, but asked me to follow him. He then asked another person and his sentence which lasted a good minute was something like: "Brrrrrkrkrkrkrkrrrrrrrbbbbbbbbbrkrkrkrkr". I swear, it was like a chainsaw going off without a single vowel. Foreign languages can sound so alien sometimes.
France has a very conservative and simultaneously pro and anti-ecologic "Chasse, Peche et Tradition" (hunting, fishing and tradition) party
I think Nigeria is the only other holdout... As for the pint, it works fine and is unit-neutral if you just order a 'glass'... C;-)
Having also driven in the US and Oz, I agree that 4-way stop signs are completely stupid, unless you _want_ to make drivers waste their time and gas and CO2 in urban areas (but still, at 3am, what's the point). And yes, one shouldn't 'trust' signs, but take them for what they are worth: an indication. There sure is a balance between information overload and lack of it. I don't speak German and was in Austria last week: I was left wondering at how they manage to have the time to read street signs that spawn 3 lines with 120 consonants and 2 vowels...
Go drive in a third world country and then we'll talk about signs and road safety.