Though my fantasyThough my fantasy is to see them use Qt.
Well, you already have KDE for that don't you?:-) What I really wish they sussed out once and for all, is freedesktop.org, so you can use whichever desktop you want with whatever tools you want, and it all works. They already co-operate a bit, but I'm not entirely sure how deep it goes in many ways.../p
I remember this being done with Earth Observation satellites. The EO satellite beams data using an optical link to a satellite that is in geostationary orbit. This satellite then beams the information down through a microwave link. This frees the EO satellite (that producue huge amounts of data) of the need of high-power consuming RF transceivers, reduces the need for ground stations, and is seriously cool. This was done in 2001 between SPOT 4 and Artemis (Press release). Note that SPOT sits in an orbit around 800km, and Artemis is geostationary... They then did the same with an aircraft (see here).
So it is really quite useful. When you consider the amount of data the sensors on board ENVISAT (or even MODIS) produce, this is an important tool.
Yes, which then goes to feed more biomass- the idea is to match our logrithmic curve of carbon production with a logrithmic curve of biomass creation.
Or it just stays in the atmosphere, increasing the concentration of either CH4 or CO2. There is only that much CO2 that can be absorbed by forests. Firstly, we cannot grow more forests than land surface available (or we might not want to), and secondly, it is very uncertain how much CO2 a forests "sinks", as it depends on climate, age and phenology. The carbon cycle is poorly understood, and the uncertainties associated with forests (especifically boreal forests) in the Carbon cycle are massive.
Given all this, how do you plan to match the growth in emissions, when deforestation not only leads to loss of green cover, but to loss of soil through erosion (this is particularly acute in tropical areas)? That area is very hard to recolonise by dense vegetation of the sort hat might be useful (but more on that further down). If we were to get a new glaciation, maybe after it would we recover those soils:D
Actually, if you could just replace the area lost in the Brazilian rain forest in the last 3 years, you'd do more than 20 Kyoto Accords put together.
The Kyoto Protocol is a start, and as all globally negotiated agreementes, it is probably a watered down version of what "scientific consensus" would probably opt for. But the Brazilian rainforest, important as it is, is not the best example.
Trees are *extremely* efficient in this, and some trees that we've found that grow here in America can survive up to 20 centuries if taken care of
Trees might buy you time. You can contain the CO2 by planting more trees _IF_ these trees act as global sinks. Now, research has shown that due to the processes related to soil bacteria thriving with new planted trees, new forests might act as CO2 sources for a number of years (around 15-20 years), whereafter they act as sinks. So you need to absorb back all those 15-20 years of new-trees emissions before they have an overall sink effect. These initial emissions are strongly dependent on the soil type. If you are planting new trees on peaty soils, the source effect will be augmented. so yes, we can keep some trees there for 20 centuries (if we're lucky), but can we wait that long? Nasty scenarios are on the century scale (often less), by the time you get there, your newly planted trees would have done pretty much nothing by themselves in soaking up emissions.
Bottom line is we need to curb emissions, and effectively manage land processes, of which we know preciously little about.
The problem with NASA is that NASA is science focused. ESA, on the other hand, is still thinking what they are good for. So, NASA decides that anyone should use their data for science and applications. When the technology is mature, it's up to NOAA, the USGS or whoever, to, take the technology and make commercially viable.
No ESA or NASA here, but a commercial company in the like of SPOT. These are for-profit companies, where you get to pay good money for your images. You get several tries and so on. But this is not the market we are looking at, this is so 1990:).
Consider just the agriculture bit. France is an EU country, where things are moving from production scale, to agroenvironmental rules, water and air quality, erosion monitoring, Nitrogen limits... Israel, on the other hand, has one of the most advanced precision agricultures in the world (if not the most). We are moving from simple uses of Remote Sensing as a qualitative tool, useful for the administrations the world over, to keep tabs on things, to an end-user centric view of the world, Ideally, farmer John has a plot of land with crop A. He wants a target yield of 8 Tons/Ha. Fine. He wants to minimise fertiliser and/or irrigation (in other words, "optimise" his labouring). He gets a map in digital format for the areas which need more irrigation, more fertilisation, and so on. This map goes directly to his tractor (or probably, a tractor subcontracted for this task) in digital format, and we close the loop throwing GALILEO in. In fact, people are doing just that using SPOT images. Presently, our understanding of optica data is far more advanced than what most people think: you can invert canopy reflectance models and estimate (with a high level of accuracy) useful biophysical parameters which are then coupled into agrometeo models, and which allow a number of these things to take place. To improve this, a sensor configuration like that of VENUS (5ish meter resolution, loads of useful bands in the VIS and NIR/MIR...) are useful. You need the 5m resolution to get a swath big enough so that things start becoming economical (say, some 80km?). You no longer sell images, but products tailored to the end user. And people are doing this for 10/Ha already.
Radarsat2 is different can of fish. To start with, it is a SAR. SARs have a number of military applications, and as I understand it, it is these which are going to provide a major part of the income. Other sources are going to be civil engineering-like (land subsidence applications, natural hazards), and some of the cash will come from marine and coastal applications. End-user applications are not even half as developed for SAR as they are for optical, and until TerraSAR-X comes along in 2008ish, we won't see major shifts in this. And yes, I am a big SAR fan, and wholly looking forward to TerraSAR-X, TerraSAR-L (if it ever comes) and TandemX.
To make the difference between these VENUS people and similar American consortia, let's just say that Europe is getting ahead in the end-user part of the applications, with derived products (companies like RapidEye AG will launch a constellation of satellites in the next couple of years, and do not plan to sell imagery, but products). American commercial companies have focused more on very high resolution imagery (QuickBird et al.), small swaths. The European model is, if anything, a tribute to NASA's vision that people want "products" and not images (just Google for MODIS list of data products, and see LAI, fAPAR and other biophysical variables, derived from the images on a global scale).
This is a very valid point. Note that in the 15 centres they selected, the staff would have been either Linux knowledgeable, or very keen to use Linux for a number of reasons. This makes the statff in these institutions quite willing to take risks when implementing the change.
In Andalucia (South of Spain), local government decided to produce their own Linux Distro for education. While the local government (whose in charge of education) does provide centralised configuration of computer labs, the training they provide teachers with is quite poor. Therefore, a number of staff are very disattisfied with this approach, as it's being rammed down their throats with little preparation, and you need to be very careful with these changes.
You see, I work with data from both ESA and NASA for Earth Observation. And many of the people of the communities which would be served by these data are annoyed by the attitude. The way NASA works is to produce a number of products for scientific and research based work, and chuck'em into some web site. You go and download. ESA, on the other hand, requires you to write a proposal, which is peer reviewed and blah blah blah. Eventually, they send you a bunch of CDs with the data you didn't want, 2 years later than expected and to an address in Italy when you wanted them in the UK (personal experience). They claim the peer review stage and proposal submission help to show decision makers (politicos) in member states the useful and brilliant things people do with the technology they invested their cash on. The result is an infrautilisation of the ESA data, or it's very limited use in research environments.
On the other hand, NASA gives the data away, people download it, piss about with it for a few days, and from time to time, you get businesses using it, people realising they can get a paper out of it... Essentially, it gets used.
To be fair with ESA, they are making efforts to streamline the processes, but management seems to work that way. Due to its transnational nature, ESA is a bit like the EU: no country wants to pay in, but everybody wants subsidies, contracts... ESA is just the same, which is sad. A far stronger scientific presence at the top would greatly improve things...
The difference between stuff like google maps, and that sort of data (from the Quickbird or Ikonos satellites, with resolutions better than a meter) and MERIS (the instrument used for GLOBCOVER) or MODIS (the NASA equivalent. There before MODIS, slightly lower resolution, but you can get the data for the FTP site without the hassles you have to go through to get MERIS data. But I rant...) have poorer spatial resolution (MERIS full resolution is 300m, and MODIS is 500m), but better spectral and temporal sampling.
In other words, the stuff often available from the very high resolution sensors is mostly equivalent to aerial photography (albeit from a bit higher up than your normal plane): RGB and a panchromatic image. In the case of MERIS and MODIS (and NOAA's AVHRR, Landsat, etc) you do get the extra spectral information which helps to improve classifications and do all sorts of funky other things. GLOBCOVER thus needs to be compared with stuff like this rather than with photogrammetric maps.
I believe that, politically, GLOBCOVER is just an ESA posterboy to show MERIS off. While MERIS is a nice instrument (very nice indeed), it's just an improved MODIS, and ESA seems worried that few people are making operational use of MERIS. This has a number of reasons. In many cases, environmental monitoring and modelling communities are encumbered by the lack of high level products (they are given a set of images and told: try your best to estimate the fraction of photosynthetically absorbed radiation). MODIS solves this by actually making these interesting measurement available.
Carbon sinks are still an active area of research. What seems interesting is that just taking a sink as a combination of trees is simplistic. Some research has shown (and I haven't got quotes in here, but bear with me!) that a new forest will act as a source of C for around 12-15 years, at which point will start absorbing C, reaching a threshold at around 20-25 years. The variables here are many: from soil type, rainfall and other weather variables... But soil is a major source of concern. That means thatjust growing loads of trees in boreal regions (when they were not there anyway) can be counterproductive, as the process might liberate a lot of C safely tuck away in very peaty soils.
Without going into further elucidations on the veracity of this claims, this unexpected rise in C could be due to vast forest fires in Siberia (2003 was a particularly nasty year), which have been documented (though not properly quantified) by some researchers.
No one seems to realise that a very fast and nice concoction of Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox's rendering engine) with a simplistic Win32 UI called K-Meleon is available and provides a very fast and snappy browser in Windows. Since it uses quicklaunch, you don't need to wait for ages to start it, as oppossed to FireFox. I like it anyway:)
I have to use Windows at work, and what puts me off Firefox is the slow startup-times. Mozilla used to have QuickLaunch, and the problem was solved, but Firefox doesn't, and it takes an eternity to come up with a browser window. Back in the data, there was kmeleon, which provided a barebones UI on top of Gecko. It was fast, but the latest release is from December. So still with Opera here!
While I tend to use LaTeX for everything, I understand that after all, Knoppix is a distro that enables loads of new users to try Linux for the first time and so on. They are not going to use LaTeX. Otoh, LaTeX (and a flurry of other scientific applications) would benefit from their own liveCD. And you know what? It exists!!!! It's called Quantian, and hopefully, a new version (based on Knoppix 3.4) will be out soon. Loads of math/engineering programs, TeX, LyX, Texmacs, scipy... Unfortunately, this project is not as visible as Knoppix (it's a derivative, after all).
Me, and I suspect, many others have to write documents as part of teams, and these documents travel backwards and forwards through e-mail. These documents aren't just ASCII 7-bit; there are graphs, equations, images, citations, cross-references... In a perfect world (or when I have to produce the document on my own), I'd use LaTeX, and export as a PDF. However, you can't force people to learn LaTeX and so on. They will still use Word. Since MS output will always be problematic, we should get all virus writers to write a plugin for Word (PPoint etc) that saves the document in an OASIS approved format. People use Word because they like it. As far as I'm concerned, they can keep it, if they were to save their documents (that I need to edit) in sxw format.
...if the support for.doc files were good. Why? Right now, I am forced to use Word to communicate with my colleagues. We do maths, and need both graphs and equations. Word is hopeless in this, but it's what other people I work with (and for:-D) require. OOo isn't good enough at translating the documents to/from doc (even though inputting equations is more similar to LaTeX than Word!). It takes forever to start-up, eats up a lot of memory, and seems awkward to use . I would buy Corel WP (which I had for the Amiga, v 5.1. Excellent!) if:
MS filters are good enough (they can sign an NDA, can't they?:D)
It's light(ish) on resources. WP8 was adequate on this respect
The UI needs to be simpler than that of OOo
Good equation support. In previous versions, it was quite good (at least on Windows)
Clearly, a good understanding of SXW is needed. After all people use OOo/SO on Linux now!
If they cater for the users with PII and little memory (loads of offices, NGOs...), then I think they have a reasonable chance of success.
Due to work reasons, I have to use a number of numerical packages, such as Octave, GNU R (I don't feel like typing URLs; use google), python, and other stuff (like yacas, maxima, lyx/latex, GRASS...). For these purposes, Quantian is a superb Knoppix remaster. With some work files on a USB keyring (or on a website), I have my own personalised desktop to carry around. And I can do OpenMosix as well, should the need arise!
Re:Update on Novell/Ximian/SUSE situation
on
Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Not to appear as a troll, but wasn't it about time that someone noticed that SuSE had a product which is very well received in a lot of environments (read companies), and Ximian have a few (admittedly) "killer" apps? If SuSE's got a system that works for their clients, why break it? Enhance it, by all means, but if you're buying a KDE-centric distribution, why would you like to throw all the work done in it away?
It's interesting that one of ESA's greatest achievement areas, namely Earth Observation (things like ERS 1/2, Envisat) are not mentioned. This is an important area, with all the exciting stuff about oceans rising and engulfing towns and the Seychelles (serves them right for living in a bloody paradise:D). There are a large number of unknowns regarding the Earth's environment that could be alleviated by a (relatively) cheap fleet of EO microsatellites. I don't know whether ESA wants do commit more budget to these areas (after all, a lot of the stuff on Envisat is only of very limited commercial interest, and they seem to be pushing for commercial use), but it certainly would help. On the other hand, looking at the deforestation rate over Siberia might not be as cool as putting some gimp on the Moon...
Vector Linux is good because there are still loads of P2-2xx/3xx around. While you can always run XFCE on them, dillo and so on, they do have hardware limitations which might be difficult to overcome in order to have something normal people can use. If you get a distro that runs a modern desktop (KDE, GNOME) with some response (this is what the reviewer says; what he means is anyone's guess), then you can effectively extend the life of these older machines, save money, and so on. While many gamers may not be aware of this, people in small/family-run companies could definitely use something like vector for these purposes.
Unfortunately, I think that most of the people who would benefit most from things like Vector will never hear of it, and if they do, they will probably be overwhelmed by difficult installers and so on. If the VL people could come up with their distro packaged so that it effectively is a domestic distro (put CD in, wait, enjoy), then they would have a great product that many SMEs would use. They might also want to get some other software (accounting and that sort of stuff), but there is definitely a niche there for them to occupy. I wish them well:-)
You do have a point. It seems that the general perception is that as long as you make it look like the stuff everyone is used to, then mass migration will switfly occur.
With different success rates, I've been hearing that
fvwm95 makes Linux use identical to win9x
KDE is easier to use than Windows!
GNOME is easer to use than Windows!
Variations of the above (i.e., KDE{1,2,3}, GNOME{1.2, 2.2, 2.4}
I think the first people that realised that a system needed to be easy for desktop use were the chaps at Corel. They did an amazing installer that dropped you in the desktop in no time at all. At that point, they didn't think of centralised user management, groupware, and networky things (SMB wasn't too hot, ISTR). Most other distros have tried to cater both for desktop and server use (no, you don't need apache in your desktop. And if you do, use debian;D), rather than providing:
A server "distro" for the system administrator that centralises evertything that can be centralised
A desktop distro that installs everything in two clicks and uses the centralised system for everything.
If Sun manage to bring out something like this (say using Solaris on the server and Linux on the desktop), all integrated and polished, then that's great news. If not, well, tough luck.
As you point out, they could invest money in innovation of the UI, but I don't think that's the point. The point is that users can get used to new settings relatively easy in a lot of situations. If you are investing cash, you should end up with a product like this, you should try to lure the system administrator, as well as the end user. "Dumbing down" the UI is part of the process:D, but a robust, secure and simple approach to large deployments is the difference between Corel 1.0 and success.
(and for the record, I think Xandros were thinking along the same lines; I don't know what came out of that, though)
True, it is a lot of work, but when 3.0 (not sure about the version) was released, a LiveCD was duly put out to demonstrate the software. It didn't take too long, if I remember correctly.
Maybe an alpha release isn't the best place to do this on, but what about the betas? The more eyeballs you have looking at the GUI, the nicer the background picture:-)))
I think it would be advantageous to provide a Live CD with the alpha/beta releases, so that people can get into debugging the code straight away (I for instance, cannot download, compile and use KDE easily due to disk space, bandwidth problems. I could however, use a Knoppix version with the alpha release to test around).
Searching around shows the DragOS Project, but I haven't had time to check it. Does anyone know of similar efforts?
The site seems to be./ed, but it looks like a good thing. In particular, I like the fact that they have realised that people might want to change Exchange (pun not intended) for a free alternative, but do not necessarily want to change the clients, and want to have all the bells and whistles of calenaring, room bookings et al.
A similar effort is Kolab, which has been sponsored by some German government department, and where they are trying to integrate both Outlook (the client) and Exchange (the server). While this is a sexy-looking project, clients using Windows do need to buy the binary connector, which isn't free (or cheap, for that matter).
I hope that these two groups co-operate, so that we can have a good working solution ASAP
..but coverage is also important. While the commercial EO satellite market seems to cater for very commercial applications (surveying and other civil engineering efforts, for example), in other applications (in fact, some of the most interesting ones), global coverage at any available resolution is far more important.
For example, while estimating the biomass of the whole northern hemisphere with sub-millimetre accuracy would be cool, knowing it with a ~10 km accuracy is more than acceptable.
Oh, well, yes, and I do work with microwave radar, and I obviously loathe the high resolution optical (bleurgh!!!) lot:-)))))
Wasn't AtheOS the OS that was all being done by that one guy and had the amiga-like GUI with the nice c++ API?
Yes, the same. The main developer stopped working on the project (at least, stopped posting to mailing-lists and the such), and after some time, people decided to fork Atheos to make syllable. It seems most of the former atheos community has moved over to Syllable. Another similar project used the Linux kernel with a BeOS like interface on top, this is Cosmoe. I am not familiar with the latter, though.
Well, I don't know about how mature/not mature Scientific Python or Octave are with respect to PDL, but I like Python better and I was used to Matlab in the past anyway.
At present, I am using Scipy, a nice more complete version of Numerical Python. Together with IPython, I get a very nice numerical environment. Unfortunately, while Scipy is very nice, it is still a bit of a bleeding edge product. But it is **very** fast for large array computations. I also like the fact that you can link fortran routines easily (yes, people still use fortran, it's useful and easy).
I also use Octave because I miss the ease of generating plots in Matlab (yes, I could do this with scipy, but somehow, I resort to using Octave). It is a very complete program, with many toolboxes. Given that some of the Matlab toolboxes can also be incorporated, there is a vast array of functions for you to play around with.
On the other hand, I think that none of the "established languages" are a good comparison. IDL is extremely powerful for Remote Sensing/Image Processing tasks (my area of research). It is simple to use, and a bit of a standard in the field. From the PDL changelog, the cartographic features in PDL amount to no more than transformations... Mathematica is extremely powerful in symbolic Maths, which as far as I can tell, is not what pdl is about. And Matlab is turning into the VB of scientists (at least, it is multiplatform:D)
Slashdot Mirror
Though my fantasyThough my fantasy is to see them use Qt.
Well, you already have KDE for that don't you? :-) What I really wish they sussed out once and for all, is freedesktop.org, so you can use whichever desktop you want with whatever tools you want, and it all works. They already co-operate a bit, but I'm not entirely sure how deep it goes in many ways.../p
I remember this being done with Earth Observation satellites. The EO satellite beams data using an optical link to a satellite that is in geostationary orbit. This satellite then beams the information down through a microwave link. This frees the EO satellite (that producue huge amounts of data) of the need of high-power consuming RF transceivers, reduces the need for ground stations, and is seriously cool. This was done in 2001 between SPOT 4 and Artemis (Press release). Note that SPOT sits in an orbit around 800km, and Artemis is geostationary... They then did the same with an aircraft (see here).
So it is really quite useful. When you consider the amount of data the sensors on board ENVISAT (or even MODIS) produce, this is an important tool.
Or it just stays in the atmosphere, increasing the concentration of either CH4 or CO2. There is only that much CO2 that can be absorbed by forests. Firstly, we cannot grow more forests than land surface available (or we might not want to), and secondly, it is very uncertain how much CO2 a forests "sinks", as it depends on climate, age and phenology. The carbon cycle is poorly understood, and the uncertainties associated with forests (especifically boreal forests) in the Carbon cycle are massive.
Given all this, how do you plan to match the growth in emissions, when deforestation not only leads to loss of green cover, but to loss of soil through erosion (this is particularly acute in tropical areas)? That area is very hard to recolonise by dense vegetation of the sort hat might be useful (but more on that further down). If we were to get a new glaciation, maybe after it would we recover those soils :D
The Kyoto Protocol is a start, and as all globally negotiated agreementes, it is probably a watered down version of what "scientific consensus" would probably opt for. But the Brazilian rainforest, important as it is, is not the best example.
Trees might buy you time. You can contain the CO2 by planting more trees _IF_ these trees act as global sinks. Now, research has shown that due to the processes related to soil bacteria thriving with new planted trees, new forests might act as CO2 sources for a number of years (around 15-20 years), whereafter they act as sinks. So you need to absorb back all those 15-20 years of new-trees emissions before they have an overall sink effect. These initial emissions are strongly dependent on the soil type. If you are planting new trees on peaty soils, the source effect will be augmented. so yes, we can keep some trees there for 20 centuries (if we're lucky), but can we wait that long? Nasty scenarios are on the century scale (often less), by the time you get there, your newly planted trees would have done pretty much nothing by themselves in soaking up emissions.
Bottom line is we need to curb emissions, and effectively manage land processes, of which we know preciously little about.
The problem with NASA is that NASA is science focused. ESA, on the other hand, is still thinking what they are good for. So, NASA decides that anyone should use their data for science and applications. When the technology is mature, it's up to NOAA, the USGS or whoever, to, take the technology and make commercially viable.
No ESA or NASA here, but a commercial company in the like of SPOT. These are for-profit companies, where you get to pay good money for your images. You get several tries and so on. But this is not the market we are looking at, this is so 1990 :).
Consider just the agriculture bit. France is an EU country, where things are moving from production scale, to agroenvironmental rules, water and air quality, erosion monitoring, Nitrogen limits... Israel, on the other hand, has one of the most advanced precision agricultures in the world (if not the most). We are moving from simple uses of Remote Sensing as a qualitative tool, useful for the administrations the world over, to keep tabs on things, to an end-user centric view of the world, Ideally, farmer John has a plot of land with crop A. He wants a target yield of 8 Tons/Ha. Fine. He wants to minimise fertiliser and/or irrigation (in other words, "optimise" his labouring). He gets a map in digital format for the areas which need more irrigation, more fertilisation, and so on. This map goes directly to his tractor (or probably, a tractor subcontracted for this task) in digital format, and we close the loop throwing GALILEO in. In fact, people are doing just that using SPOT images. Presently, our understanding of optica data is far more advanced than what most people think: you can invert canopy reflectance models and estimate (with a high level of accuracy) useful biophysical parameters which are then coupled into agrometeo models, and which allow a number of these things to take place. To improve this, a sensor configuration like that of VENUS (5ish meter resolution, loads of useful bands in the VIS and NIR/MIR...) are useful. You need the 5m resolution to get a swath big enough so that things start becoming economical (say, some 80km?). You no longer sell images, but products tailored to the end user. And people are doing this for 10/Ha already.
Radarsat2 is different can of fish. To start with, it is a SAR. SARs have a number of military applications, and as I understand it, it is these which are going to provide a major part of the income. Other sources are going to be civil engineering-like (land subsidence applications, natural hazards), and some of the cash will come from marine and coastal applications. End-user applications are not even half as developed for SAR as they are for optical, and until TerraSAR-X comes along in 2008ish, we won't see major shifts in this. And yes, I am a big SAR fan, and wholly looking forward to TerraSAR-X, TerraSAR-L (if it ever comes) and TandemX.
To make the difference between these VENUS people and similar American consortia, let's just say that Europe is getting ahead in the end-user part of the applications, with derived products (companies like RapidEye AG will launch a constellation of satellites in the next couple of years, and do not plan to sell imagery, but products). American commercial companies have focused more on very high resolution imagery (QuickBird et al.), small swaths. The European model is, if anything, a tribute to NASA's vision that people want "products" and not images (just Google for MODIS list of data products, and see LAI, fAPAR and other biophysical variables, derived from the images on a global scale).
This is a very valid point. Note that in the 15 centres they selected, the staff would have been either Linux knowledgeable, or very keen to use Linux for a number of reasons. This makes the statff in these institutions quite willing to take risks when implementing the change.
In Andalucia (South of Spain), local government decided to produce their own Linux Distro for education. While the local government (whose in charge of education) does provide centralised configuration of computer labs, the training they provide teachers with is quite poor. Therefore, a number of staff are very disattisfied with this approach, as it's being rammed down their throats with little preparation, and you need to be very careful with these changes.
You see, I work with data from both ESA and NASA for Earth Observation. And many of the people of the communities which would be served by these data are annoyed by the attitude. The way NASA works is to produce a number of products for scientific and research based work, and chuck'em into some web site. You go and download. ESA, on the other hand, requires you to write a proposal, which is peer reviewed and blah blah blah. Eventually, they send you a bunch of CDs with the data you didn't want, 2 years later than expected and to an address in Italy when you wanted them in the UK (personal experience). They claim the peer review stage and proposal submission help to show decision makers (politicos) in member states the useful and brilliant things people do with the technology they invested their cash on. The result is an infrautilisation of the ESA data, or it's very limited use in research environments.
On the other hand, NASA gives the data away, people download it, piss about with it for a few days, and from time to time, you get businesses using it, people realising they can get a paper out of it... Essentially, it gets used.
To be fair with ESA, they are making efforts to streamline the processes, but management seems to work that way. Due to its transnational nature, ESA is a bit like the EU: no country wants to pay in, but everybody wants subsidies, contracts... ESA is just the same, which is sad. A far stronger scientific presence at the top would greatly improve things...
The difference between stuff like google maps, and that sort of data (from the Quickbird or Ikonos satellites, with resolutions better than a meter) and MERIS (the instrument used for GLOBCOVER) or MODIS (the NASA equivalent. There before MODIS, slightly lower resolution, but you can get the data for the FTP site without the hassles you have to go through to get MERIS data. But I rant...) have poorer spatial resolution (MERIS full resolution is 300m, and MODIS is 500m), but better spectral and temporal sampling.
In other words, the stuff often available from the very high resolution sensors is mostly equivalent to aerial photography (albeit from a bit higher up than your normal plane): RGB and a panchromatic image. In the case of MERIS and MODIS (and NOAA's AVHRR, Landsat, etc) you do get the extra spectral information which helps to improve classifications and do all sorts of funky other things. GLOBCOVER thus needs to be compared with stuff like this rather than with photogrammetric maps.
I believe that, politically, GLOBCOVER is just an ESA posterboy to show MERIS off. While MERIS is a nice instrument (very nice indeed), it's just an improved MODIS, and ESA seems worried that few people are making operational use of MERIS. This has a number of reasons. In many cases, environmental monitoring and modelling communities are encumbered by the lack of high level products (they are given a set of images and told: try your best to estimate the fraction of photosynthetically absorbed radiation). MODIS solves this by actually making these interesting measurement available.
That was a bit of a rant, wasn't it?
Carbon sinks are still an active area of research. What seems interesting is that just taking a sink as a combination of trees is simplistic. Some research has shown (and I haven't got quotes in here, but bear with me!) that a new forest will act as a source of C for around 12-15 years, at which point will start absorbing C, reaching a threshold at around 20-25 years. The variables here are many: from soil type, rainfall and other weather variables... But soil is a major source of concern. That means thatjust growing loads of trees in boreal regions (when they were not there anyway) can be counterproductive, as the process might liberate a lot of C safely tuck away in very peaty soils.
Without going into further elucidations on the veracity of this claims, this unexpected rise in C could be due to vast forest fires in Siberia (2003 was a particularly nasty year), which have been documented (though not properly quantified) by some researchers.
No one seems to realise that a very fast and nice concoction of Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox's rendering engine) with a simplistic Win32 UI called K-Meleon is available and provides a very fast and snappy browser in Windows. Since it uses quicklaunch, you don't need to wait for ages to start it, as oppossed to FireFox. I like it anyway :)
I have to use Windows at work, and what puts me off Firefox is the slow startup-times. Mozilla used to have QuickLaunch, and the problem was solved, but Firefox doesn't, and it takes an eternity to come up with a browser window. Back in the data, there was kmeleon, which provided a barebones UI on top of Gecko. It was fast, but the latest release is from December. So still with Opera here!
While I tend to use LaTeX for everything, I understand that after all, Knoppix is a distro that enables loads of new users to try Linux for the first time and so on. They are not going to use LaTeX. Otoh, LaTeX (and a flurry of other scientific applications) would benefit from their own liveCD. And you know what? It exists!!!! It's called Quantian, and hopefully, a new version (based on Knoppix 3.4) will be out soon. Loads of math/engineering programs, TeX, LyX, Texmacs, scipy... Unfortunately, this project is not as visible as Knoppix (it's a derivative, after all).
Me, and I suspect, many others have to write documents as part of teams, and these documents travel backwards and forwards through e-mail. These documents aren't just ASCII 7-bit; there are graphs, equations, images, citations, cross-references... In a perfect world (or when I have to produce the document on my own), I'd use LaTeX, and export as a PDF. However, you can't force people to learn LaTeX and so on. They will still use Word. Since MS output will always be problematic, we should get all virus writers to write a plugin for Word (PPoint etc) that saves the document in an OASIS approved format. People use Word because they like it. As far as I'm concerned, they can keep it, if they were to save their documents (that I need to edit) in sxw format.
...if the support for .doc files were good. Why? Right now, I am forced to use Word to communicate with my colleagues. We do maths, and need both graphs and equations. Word is hopeless in this, but it's what other people I work with (and for :-D) require. OOo isn't good enough at translating the documents to/from doc (even though inputting equations is more similar to LaTeX than Word!). It takes forever to start-up, eats up a lot of memory, and seems awkward to use . I would buy Corel WP (which I had for the Amiga, v 5.1. Excellent!) if:
If they cater for the users with PII and little memory (loads of offices, NGOs...), then I think they have a reasonable chance of success.
Due to work reasons, I have to use a number of numerical packages, such as Octave, GNU R (I don't feel like typing URLs; use google), python, and other stuff (like yacas, maxima, lyx/latex, GRASS...). For these purposes, Quantian is a superb Knoppix remaster. With some work files on a USB keyring (or on a website), I have my own personalised desktop to carry around. And I can do OpenMosix as well, should the need arise!
Not to appear as a troll, but wasn't it about time that someone noticed that SuSE had a product which is very well received in a lot of environments (read companies), and Ximian have a few (admittedly) "killer" apps? If SuSE's got a system that works for their clients, why break it? Enhance it, by all means, but if you're buying a KDE-centric distribution, why would you like to throw all the work done in it away?
It's interesting that one of ESA's greatest achievement areas, namely Earth Observation (things like ERS 1/2, Envisat) are not mentioned. This is an important area, with all the exciting stuff about oceans rising and engulfing towns and the Seychelles (serves them right for living in a bloody paradise :D). There are a large number of unknowns regarding the Earth's environment that could be alleviated by a (relatively) cheap fleet of EO microsatellites. I don't know whether ESA wants do commit more budget to these areas (after all, a lot of the stuff on Envisat is only of very limited commercial interest, and they seem to be pushing for commercial use), but it certainly would help. On the other hand, looking at the deforestation rate over Siberia might not be as cool as putting some gimp on the Moon...
Vector Linux is good because there are still loads of P2-2xx/3xx around. While you can always run XFCE on them, dillo and so on, they do have hardware limitations which might be difficult to overcome in order to have something normal people can use. If you get a distro that runs a modern desktop (KDE, GNOME) with some response (this is what the reviewer says; what he means is anyone's guess), then you can effectively extend the life of these older machines, save money, and so on. While many gamers may not be aware of this, people in small/family-run companies could definitely use something like vector for these purposes.
Unfortunately, I think that most of the people who would benefit most from things like Vector will never hear of it, and if they do, they will probably be overwhelmed by difficult installers and so on. If the VL people could come up with their distro packaged so that it effectively is a domestic distro (put CD in, wait, enjoy), then they would have a great product that many SMEs would use. They might also want to get some other software (accounting and that sort of stuff), but there is definitely a niche there for them to occupy. I wish them well :-)
You do have a point. It seems that the general perception is that as long as you make it look like the stuff everyone is used to, then mass migration will switfly occur.
With different success rates, I've been hearing that
I think the first people that realised that a system needed to be easy for desktop use were the chaps at Corel. They did an amazing installer that dropped you in the desktop in no time at all. At that point, they didn't think of centralised user management, groupware, and networky things (SMB wasn't too hot, ISTR). Most other distros have tried to cater both for desktop and server use (no, you don't need apache in your desktop. And if you do, use debian ;D), rather than providing:
- A server "distro" for the system administrator that centralises evertything that can be centralised
- A desktop distro that installs everything in two clicks and uses the centralised system for everything.
If Sun manage to bring out something like this (say using Solaris on the server and Linux on the desktop), all integrated and polished, then that's great news. If not, well, tough luck.As you point out, they could invest money in innovation of the UI, but I don't think that's the point. The point is that users can get used to new settings relatively easy in a lot of situations. If you are investing cash, you should end up with a product like this, you should try to lure the system administrator, as well as the end user. "Dumbing down" the UI is part of the process :D, but a robust, secure and simple approach to large deployments is the difference between Corel 1.0 and success.
(and for the record, I think Xandros were thinking along the same lines; I don't know what came out of that, though)
True, it is a lot of work, but when 3.0 (not sure about the version) was released, a LiveCD was duly put out to demonstrate the software. It didn't take too long, if I remember correctly.
Maybe an alpha release isn't the best place to do this on, but what about the betas? The more eyeballs you have looking at the GUI, the nicer the background picture :-)))
I think it would be advantageous to provide a Live CD with the alpha/beta releases, so that people can get into debugging the code straight away (I for instance, cannot download, compile and use KDE easily due to disk space, bandwidth problems. I could however, use a Knoppix version with the alpha release to test around).
Searching around shows the DragOS Project, but I haven't had time to check it. Does anyone know of similar efforts?
The site seems to be ./ed, but it looks like a good thing. In particular, I like the fact that they have realised that people might want to change Exchange (pun not intended) for a free alternative, but do not necessarily want to change the clients, and want to have all the bells and whistles of calenaring, room bookings et al.
A similar effort is Kolab, which has been sponsored by some German government department, and where they are trying to integrate both Outlook (the client) and Exchange (the server). While this is a sexy-looking project, clients using Windows do need to buy the binary connector, which isn't free (or cheap, for that matter).
I hope that these two groups co-operate, so that we can have a good working solution ASAP
..but coverage is also important. While the commercial EO satellite market seems to cater for very commercial applications (surveying and other civil engineering efforts, for example), in other applications (in fact, some of the most interesting ones), global coverage at any available resolution is far more important.
For example, while estimating the biomass of the whole northern hemisphere with sub-millimetre accuracy would be cool, knowing it with a ~10 km accuracy is more than acceptable.
Oh, well, yes, and I do work with microwave radar, and I obviously loathe the high resolution optical (bleurgh!!!) lot :-)))))
Well, I am pretty sure that that is a fine achievement, but it looks like one of those scary organical molecules to me :-)
Well, I don't know about how mature/not mature Scientific Python or Octave are with respect to PDL, but I like Python better and I was used to Matlab in the past anyway.
At present, I am using Scipy, a nice more complete version of Numerical Python. Together with IPython, I get a very nice numerical environment. Unfortunately, while Scipy is very nice, it is still a bit of a bleeding edge product. But it is **very** fast for large array computations. I also like the fact that you can link fortran routines easily (yes, people still use fortran, it's useful and easy).
I also use Octave because I miss the ease of generating plots in Matlab (yes, I could do this with scipy, but somehow, I resort to using Octave). It is a very complete program, with many toolboxes. Given that some of the Matlab toolboxes can also be incorporated, there is a vast array of functions for you to play around with.
On the other hand, I think that none of the "established languages" are a good comparison. IDL is extremely powerful for Remote Sensing/Image Processing tasks (my area of research). It is simple to use, and a bit of a standard in the field. From the PDL changelog, the cartographic features in PDL amount to no more than transformations... Mathematica is extremely powerful in symbolic Maths, which as far as I can tell, is not what pdl is about. And Matlab is turning into the VB of scientists (at least, it is multiplatform :D)
Oh well, I'll have to give it a go :-D