Periodically, (wo)men magazines run contests similar to: which actress/actor/personality has the most beautiful eyes; the best lips; cheeks; tits; etc...
Then they have someone photoshop the results together on a single picture. I have always found the results strangely unatractive, and I wonder if this is due to lack of quality in the stitching job or to some more fundamental property of 'beauty'.
This morning when I heard the news, I was just getting started on the chapter "We're on fire!" of the book Flight, My life in mission control by Chris Kraft. This book provides a very interesting alternative viewpoint to the manned spaced program than the usual journalistic lack of information or astronauts famed biographies.
Here we get plenty of gritty details, in particular all the technical problems that they had during flights, and there were plenty. The well publicised Apolo 13 was only one of them, as virtually every mission was riddled with loss of control, loss of comunication, targetting error, or even worse, like rocket misfire on the pad with astronauts on top ! Just to show how close they were many times from major failure. Today was just one step over the limit.
A very recommended read for all you engineering types. And the others.
THe americans will only start doing what the russians have been doing for 40 years to reach Vostok (I have a picture here showing the route itself), and what the french have been doing for 13 years to reach Dome C / Concordia.
The only difference is that until now the americans were rich enough to carry everything by plane and new experiments like the IceCube will require much more weight. Other countries not as rich have much more experience doing those 'traverses'. The term ice route is misleading, as other posters have pointed out. The route is nothing more than a list of GPS waypoint for reuse every year (it's easier to use the same track every year as the terrain is fairly soft outside of them).
The Iditabike is a bike race in winter in Alaska at the same place than the more famous Iditarod (dog sled race). I have some friends who took part several times, with custom bikes using 2 or 3 wheels welded together.
A few years ago a group tried to bike to the North pole. It was probably the shortest lived expedition of the history of polar adventure: after 2 hours they were turned around by the soft snow.
A friend of mine tried biking on Antarctic ice and gave up quickly. He was using a normal mountain bike though (he also tried a custom sail sled). This guy seems much more prepared and I wish him good luck: the snow in the center is often crusty with a soft underlayer... Yes, I've been there.
Yesterday I went and saw James Bond. There was a whole bunch of action movie previews (including LOTR) before that, where you could (barely) tell that all the action sequences were CGI... And I thought that now that they can do basically anything with CGI we are going to go back to good story lines to distinguish movies. No more 'the story was so-so but the effects where great'. Now that all the movies have effects for anything (explosions, fights, monsters, impossible scenes, dead actors...) they won't be able to do better only based on the effects. The newer Star Wars proved that. As effects become more commonspread and cheaper, I hope the money goes to the (good) story writers.
Not only do I post something advertising my own site, but I also reply to myself, bad, bad karma... The link was wrong, there are pinguins there but the large pictures are all on a separate wallpaper page. And as another poster pointed out, yes you can gimp "Linux" on them...
...I had a visit from my friendly SGi representative and he was trying to sell me... this thing after I asked about Linux clusters. I didn't pay too much attention but he was all hush-hush about it, saying that it hadn't been announced yet. It seems impressive. The smallest machine will have 16 nodes and NumaFlex certainly beats the shit out of a Gb Ethernet. He couldn't quote prices, not that I wanted to know...
I read a newspaper article a few months ago that was written exactly like he had just died. I couldn't confirm it in other news. Is he alive or dead ?
"If you can't beat your computer at chess, do what I did try kick-boxing." Matt Larson.
"Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time." George Bernard Shaw.
A precise film: do not use 3200iso: 100/200iso slide film is best, although that's counter-intuitive.
Do long exposures if you are in a pretty dark area (20 minutes), no more than 5 minutes if near a city. The stars will rotate on the picture but it's no big deal.
And here is the result (see the shooting star on the right of the picture ?). Pic taken in Utah.
I'm a software engineer and sysadmin. On my desk I have a G4 with OS-X, a Gateway with Win2000 and no less than a 4 processor SGI 2100. Oh, and also a Linux box used only as a server. Guess wich one I use ? The PC. Win2k is, once configured properly, an excellent no-nonsense user interface, and once completed with Apache, ActivePerl and Cygwin there's nothing missing.
The Mac is a waste of time: software that you can't configure because you don't have any damn option or it's too 'experimental'... Sugary sweet interface that makes it unusable (semi tranparent windows ?!? Anti aliased [=blured] fonts !?!?!? are they on acid or what ?)
The SGI and linux boxes are good for computations, grepping log files, servers and such but... user pleasure is just not there. Windows come with long delays and plenty of other UIR little things that tell you that it's just not quite right.
Halfway through I could imagine Assembler showing up with long blond hair, a torque, a hammer and lightning strikes...
Re:Easy prediction: It'll Never Happen.
on
The Coming Air Age
·
· Score: 2
NO, the helocopter dies, and you autorotate down to the ground
Yeah, right, tell that to my friends... And he was one of the very best pilots ever, having flown thousands of rescue missions in heinous weathers in the Alps. Power cut-off while taking off --> immediate crash.
As a mountain climber I often sleep out and high up, so have an excellent view of shooting stars. But the weirdest of all looks like that report. It was 54 years ago in central Italy, driving at night on a desert mountain road. I saw a fiery fireball in the sky, moving slowly from left to right.
I had the time to: understand (maybe) what it was, wake up my wife, stop the car, get out an look. Total time maybe 20 seconds. The 'object' was moving slowly, spewing green flames and eaving a long lasting orange trail behind. Trajectory was more or less horizontal. It disapeared in a flash. I tried to listen but there wasn't any noise besides the cooling car engine.
The words capitalism and profit are not in the US constitution. Oversight? Mistake? Good thing? Maybe the founding fathers just didn't know better, or maybe they did. You be the judge.
Then you are a very uninformed amateur photographer and whoever modded this up as 'insightfull' is wrong.
In most countries (US, Europe...), the law says that you can take pictures in public places, but selling them or broadcasting them is something else entirely: anyone who can recognise himself on a picture can oppose its use. 'Recognisable' must be taken in a very broad sense, for instance if you take a picture of Big Ben at 2:13 on a given day and there's one tiny person at the bottom, that person will be able to say: 'it was me waiting there at that time', then you need that person's permission.
This means that whenever you take a picture with someone in it, you should have them sign a 'limited time use' form (unlimited has no value).
So the person who takes the picture owns it, but the person on it can oppose its use. This means that if you take a picture in a crowd and a dork goes: "Hey you! You can't take my picture, gimme that film !", he has no right to ask you for the film, although all you can do with the pic is look at it at home.
That doesn't help the current argument much though.
I partially make a living by debugging scientific fortran code. I cannot understand why they finally 'enhance' fortran with things that have existed in other languages for decades. Not that it doesn't need them (dynamic allocation of arrays... I just had to extend the kernel stack to 2Gb so we could run some old badly written fortran code).
No, what I don't understand about keeping fortran alive is because its users (scientists mostly) are people who refuse to use something new and better. They all use fortran 77 the way they learnt it through a 10 hour university course. I tried to get some of my users to use fortran 90 or 95 and failed pathetically. As my boss said: "if you think you have a clever programming trick, forget it !"
So what is the point of extending fortran with polymorphism and such ? They'll never use it. As a pro developper I'll never use it (I have the right tools already: C/C++/Java/assembler/perl depending on the job).
What is the point ? So they can sell expensive compilers with the new Fortran2000 sticker on it that nobody will ever use ? Marketting gimmick ?
Vostok not breached yet...
on
Life on Pluto?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Life has NOT been found in Vostok lake (yet). The ice coring has been stopped 50 meters from the lake which is 4km under the ice to avoid contamination until a method can be found to decontaminate the drill.
Now this is becoming interesting... Part of my job is administering a group of scientist who run CPU-intensive models. We traditionally do it two different ways:
run it on your own PC while you work at other things, hopping that it won't crash for the next 3 to 5 days or
buy a cluster or parallel machine (currently expensive SGIs) and let the OS handle the Fortran code and make the best use of CPUs it can.
The third way is the Seti@home way: write a distributed client and spread it on plenty of machine. Ever since I heard of seti@home I've been wondering why no-one had come with the following way: a distributed client, but distributed only on your own organisation's PCs. Come on, we buy computers to use the CPU ourself, not to run other people's programs. But our PCs are just glorified typewriters while our mainframes are totally saturated. Why not run our stuff on the secretaries 2GHz PCs while they type away ?
Maybe this should have been an ask.slashdot question a long time ago, but is there a very simple toolkit that will allow one to write a distributed app and put it on whatever PCs you have available ? Requirements are: load balancing, automated distribution and result gathering, ability to have several jobs per machine, access to common resources like a central RAID disk, crash recovery. No need for interprocess communication. Possibility to run any kind of exe would be awesome (yes, we still use fortran, sigh), or at least only link a special library to your prog and that's it.
I've heard of Jini here on/., but it looked very very basic to say the least and at the time there weren't any examples of code.
I can provide more information on that project. As a former geek in Antarctica I was recently contacted by the company doing the bidding for this cable where they asked me for more information.
I went to Dome C, now renamed Concordia, twice, in 1997 and 2000 to install some atmospheric physics experiments. I had to lay some cable there. Although it doesn't snow much (at most one mm / day), after 2 months the cables were buried and difficult to remove. We have to use expensive teflon coated cables so they won't break from the cold (-25~-50C in summer and down to -80C in winter, colder than South pole itself).
They want to lay the cable between Concordia and South pole for various reasons: Concordia is a joint French/Italian project that started in 1997 and should be operational for winterover in 2004. The french have lots of experience with ground raids to resupply station from the coast (Dumont d'Urville); while the Americans always fly C-130 to the Pole.
There has never been any land raid between Dome C and South pole, although a woman skied it alone in 1999 (pictures on my site as well). The flow of ice is non-existent at Dome C, for the simple reason that the several 'domes' are local ice summits from which the ice flows. They will certainly run into problems of stretching cables nearer to the pole though.
But from Dome C to where ? Right now the communications are very limited: one email connection a day, expensive NOAA phone calls/fax, Irridium when they are not bankrupt... It would be impossible to lay another cable between DC and the coast for the simple reason that the ice accelerates it's flow and it gets full of crevasses... Maybe a dedicated antenna can reach a geostationary satellite, but that's not the way it works right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Periodically, (wo)men magazines run contests similar to: which actress/actor/personality has the most beautiful eyes; the best lips; cheeks; tits; etc...
Then they have someone photoshop the results together on a single picture. I have always found the results strangely unatractive, and I wonder if this is due to lack of quality in the stitching job or to some more fundamental property of 'beauty'.
...all you needed to do was ask: plenty of "pictures of mountains" on my site. And, no, this is not a troll.
This morning when I heard the news, I was just getting started on the chapter "We're on fire!" of the book Flight, My life in mission control by Chris Kraft. This book provides a very interesting alternative viewpoint to the manned spaced program than the usual journalistic lack of information or astronauts famed biographies.
Here we get plenty of gritty details, in particular all the technical problems that they had during flights, and there were plenty. The well publicised Apolo 13 was only one of them, as virtually every mission was riddled with loss of control, loss of comunication, targetting error, or even worse, like rocket misfire on the pad with astronauts on top ! Just to show how close they were many times from major failure. Today was just one step over the limit.
A very recommended read for all you engineering types. And the others.
THe americans will only start doing what the russians have been doing for 40 years to reach Vostok (I have a picture here showing the route itself), and what the french have been doing for 13 years to reach Dome C / Concordia.
The only difference is that until now the americans were rich enough to carry everything by plane and new experiments like the IceCube will require much more weight. Other countries not as rich have much more experience doing those 'traverses'. The term ice route is misleading, as other posters have pointed out. The route is nothing more than a list of GPS waypoint for reuse every year (it's easier to use the same track every year as the terrain is fairly soft outside of them).
The Iditabike is a bike race in winter in Alaska at the same place than the more famous Iditarod (dog sled race). I have some friends who took part several times, with custom bikes using 2 or 3 wheels welded together.
A few years ago a group tried to bike to the North pole. It was probably the shortest lived expedition of the history of polar adventure: after 2 hours they were turned around by the soft snow.
A friend of mine tried biking on Antarctic ice and gave up quickly. He was using a normal mountain bike though (he also tried a custom sail sled). This guy seems much more prepared and I wish him good luck: the snow in the center is often crusty with a soft underlayer... Yes, I've been there.
Yesterday I went and saw James Bond. There was a whole bunch of action movie previews (including LOTR) before that, where you could (barely) tell that all the action sequences were CGI... And I thought that now that they can do basically anything with CGI we are going to go back to good story lines to distinguish movies. No more 'the story was so-so but the effects where great'. Now that all the movies have effects for anything (explosions, fights, monsters, impossible scenes, dead actors...) they won't be able to do better only based on the effects. The newer Star Wars proved that. As effects become more commonspread and cheaper, I hope the money goes to the (good) story writers.
Not only do I post something advertising my own site, but I also reply to myself, bad, bad karma... The link was wrong, there are pinguins there but the large pictures are all on a separate wallpaper page. And as another poster pointed out, yes you can gimp "Linux" on them...
If all you want are penguin pictures, feel free to get them from my site. You can even photoshop "Linux" on them if you want !
...I had a visit from my friendly SGi representative and he was trying to sell me... this thing after I asked about Linux clusters. I didn't pay too much attention but he was all hush-hush about it, saying that it hadn't been announced yet. It seems impressive. The smallest machine will have 16 nodes and NumaFlex certainly beats the shit out of a Gb Ethernet. He couldn't quote prices, not that I wanted to know...
Does that mean I get first post ?!? And a bond gadget ? Or a Bond girl ?!?
- a stable tripod
- a cable release (if not, use the delay)
- a WIDE ANGLE (20mm or 24mm)
- A fast lens (f2.8 or better).
- A precise film: do not use 3200iso: 100/200iso slide film is best, although that's counter-intuitive.
Do long exposures if you are in a pretty dark area (20 minutes), no more than 5 minutes if near a city. The stars will rotate on the picture but it's no big deal.And here is the result (see the shooting star on the right of the picture ?). Pic taken in Utah.
The Mac is a waste of time: software that you can't configure because you don't have any damn option or it's too 'experimental'... Sugary sweet interface that makes it unusable (semi tranparent windows ?!? Anti aliased [=blured] fonts !?!?!? are they on acid or what ?)
The SGI and linux boxes are good for computations, grepping log files, servers and such but... user pleasure is just not there. Windows come with long delays and plenty of other UIR little things that tell you that it's just not quite right.
Anyway, that was just one more opinion.
I have a question...
What is the oldest still working computer ? Even if it's only turned on once a year for exhibits...
What is the oldest computer still in real use ? Pioneer I or some old bank datacore ?
OK, that was two questions...
Halfway through I could imagine Assembler showing up with long blond hair, a torque, a hammer and lightning strikes...
Yeah, right, tell that to my friends... And he was one of the very best pilots ever, having flown thousands of rescue missions in heinous weathers in the Alps. Power cut-off while taking off --> immediate crash.
I had the time to: understand (maybe) what it was, wake up my wife, stop the car, get out an look. Total time maybe 20 seconds. The 'object' was moving slowly, spewing green flames and eaving a long lasting orange trail behind. Trajectory was more or less horizontal. It disapeared in a flash. I tried to listen but there wasn't any noise besides the cooling car engine.
The words capitalism and profit are not in the US constitution. Oversight? Mistake? Good thing? Maybe the founding fathers just didn't know better, or maybe they did. You be the judge.
In most countries (US, Europe...), the law says that you can take pictures in public places, but selling them or broadcasting them is something else entirely: anyone who can recognise himself on a picture can oppose its use. 'Recognisable' must be taken in a very broad sense, for instance if you take a picture of Big Ben at 2:13 on a given day and there's one tiny person at the bottom, that person will be able to say: 'it was me waiting there at that time', then you need that person's permission.
This means that whenever you take a picture with someone in it, you should have them sign a 'limited time use' form (unlimited has no value).
So the person who takes the picture owns it, but the person on it can oppose its use. This means that if you take a picture in a crowd and a dork goes: "Hey you! You can't take my picture, gimme that film !", he has no right to ask you for the film, although all you can do with the pic is look at it at home.
That doesn't help the current argument much though.
No, what I don't understand about keeping fortran alive is because its users (scientists mostly) are people who refuse to use something new and better. They all use fortran 77 the way they learnt it through a 10 hour university course. I tried to get some of my users to use fortran 90 or 95 and failed pathetically. As my boss said: "if you think you have a clever programming trick, forget it !"
So what is the point of extending fortran with polymorphism and such ? They'll never use it. As a pro developper I'll never use it (I have the right tools already: C/C++/Java/assembler/perl depending on the job).
What is the point ? So they can sell expensive compilers with the new Fortran2000 sticker on it that nobody will ever use ? Marketting gimmick ?
Radar images of Antarctica, including Vostok.
Read this and this and have a good laugh. Go Buzz, go !!!
- run it on your own PC while you work at other things, hopping that it won't crash for the next 3 to 5 days or
- buy a cluster or parallel machine (currently expensive SGIs) and let the OS handle the Fortran code and make the best use of CPUs it can.
The third way is the Seti@home way: write a distributed client and spread it on plenty of machine. Ever since I heard of seti@home I've been wondering why no-one had come with the following way: a distributed client, but distributed only on your own organisation's PCs. Come on, we buy computers to use the CPU ourself, not to run other people's programs. But our PCs are just glorified typewriters while our mainframes are totally saturated. Why not run our stuff on the secretaries 2GHz PCs while they type away ?Maybe this should have been an ask.slashdot question a long time ago, but is there a very simple toolkit that will allow one to write a distributed app and put it on whatever PCs you have available ? Requirements are: load balancing, automated distribution and result gathering, ability to have several jobs per machine, access to common resources like a central RAID disk, crash recovery. No need for interprocess communication. Possibility to run any kind of exe would be awesome (yes, we still use fortran, sigh), or at least only link a special library to your prog and that's it.
I've heard of Jini here on /., but it looked very very basic to say the least and at the time there weren't any examples of code.
I went to Dome C, now renamed Concordia, twice, in 1997 and 2000 to install some atmospheric physics experiments. I had to lay some cable there. Although it doesn't snow much (at most one mm / day), after 2 months the cables were buried and difficult to remove. We have to use expensive teflon coated cables so they won't break from the cold (-25~-50C in summer and down to -80C in winter, colder than South pole itself).
They want to lay the cable between Concordia and South pole for various reasons: Concordia is a joint French/Italian project that started in 1997 and should be operational for winterover in 2004. The french have lots of experience with ground raids to resupply station from the coast (Dumont d'Urville); while the Americans always fly C-130 to the Pole.
There has never been any land raid between Dome C and South pole, although a woman skied it alone in 1999 (pictures on my site as well). The flow of ice is non-existent at Dome C, for the simple reason that the several 'domes' are local ice summits from which the ice flows. They will certainly run into problems of stretching cables nearer to the pole though.
But from Dome C to where ? Right now the communications are very limited: one email connection a day, expensive NOAA phone calls/fax, Irridium when they are not bankrupt... It would be impossible to lay another cable between DC and the coast for the simple reason that the ice accelerates it's flow and it gets full of crevasses... Maybe a dedicated antenna can reach a geostationary satellite, but that's not the way it works right now.