Terrestrial soil is of course in most places a very complicated biological artifact. But, on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids, where ever we have landed we have found
in many places a similar mixture of particles of
different sizes that looks and acts (from an engineering perspective) a lot like terrestrial soil, so that's what it is commonly called in planetary work, without implying that it is of biological origin.
If you want to be picky, it should be called regolith away from the Earth, which certainly sounds more geological, but means the same thing.
If I remember I will, but there is nothing secret about it.
These details are openly available in a bunch of places. It just that at the time those of us working on Viking (I was at MIT) followed the tests closely, and at least to me it seemed very disappointing that it passed the tests, but the announcement was of no life, which really sucked the press interest out of the story, and the mission.
What followed was a real gutting of the US Martian research community - most of people I knew at JPL were gone by 1980.
Yes, I know he has since, but I don't remember him doing so at any of the press conferences at the time. However, he may have and I missed it. He has certainly been consistent in recent times.
My point wasn't that this proved that there was life, but that they set up a scientific protocol and then violated it as soon as the results made them nervous. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that if the mass spectrometer had detected organics, they would have claimed the detection of life. If the only real test was the mass spectrometer, why spend the better part of a billion dollars (total mission cost was $ 2 billion 1970 dollars) building the biology experiement ?
Viking was a huge gamble to justify a planetary exploration program based on biology. They (we) spent the money, went all the way, were fantastically successfull (landing on Mars is hard), and then suffered a failure of nerve... and the next US lander was 20 years later. And now, 31 years later, we (the US) still haven't done any more biological tests. While the mission was successful, it also has to be viewed as a huge strategic failure of the US space effort.
Lander 1 was supposed to land on July 4, 1976, but was delayed a few weeks. Lander 2 was just a little later.
The Viking lander bit rate was low, and there was only comminucation when the Earth was above the horizon, and the radio bandwidth was only 2 MHz, so the data return was pretty tiny by modern standards (from the Landers - the orbiter data rate was consderably larger). My back of the envelope calculations says that the total Lander data return was on the order of a few hundred GB. (Also, in the extended mission, the data collection was slowed, I believe to once per week.)
Of course, these data are still being mined, and are absolutely crucial to our understanding of Mars dynamics, among other things.
I worked on the Viking Lander project (but not on the biology side). Before the landing, NASA published and sent around little promo phamplets describing
what a positive (biological) response would be from each of the 3 biological experiments. (Along the lines of, add nutrients to a soil sample, get CO2 out, sterilize the next soil
sample, add nutrients, get no CO2, that is evidence for life. No CO2, or CO2 with a sterlized sample, not evidence for life.) I still have mine in my basement.
Each of the two landers had 3 biological experiements. All six worked fine. All six had a positive response based on the criteria published before landing.
However, because the mass spectrometer detected no organic molecules (not one of the pre-published tests), these results were ascribed to non-biological causes.
I could never understand why one of the biological researchers didn't just say, "we have detected life, by our published criteria, but we don't understand it." However, none did.
Science doesn't always move in the nice linear fashion described in the text books...
Many petabytes of astronomical data have been collected. It is a good bet that all or almost all of it have been analyzed for some purpose (whatever paid for the data collection), but there is no limit to the ways that things can be analyzed (did it change strenght with time ? Is it in other catalogs ? Is it stronger in some wavelength than usual ? etc. etc.) So, in that sense the surface has hardly been scratched and this work will literally never be completed.
There is lots of room for amateurs to make discoveries in these "virtual telescopes," and you can expect some cool discoveries to come from guys running software in their basement.
You can certainly use multicast to pre-cache a good chunk of the Video on Demand out there. Check out, for example,
Arootz, an Israeli company which is planning to do exactly that.
And, of course, channels are certainly not going to go away...
5.) Require you to provide full information to your problem to a gatekeeper even if you know where your call should be directed, and even
though the gatekeeper does nothing with the information requested.
Bonus points if the gatekeeper has no clue what you are talking about, so you have to educate them about their product or service before
they will forward you to the department that you already knew you wanted.
Mega bonus points if they insist on forwarding you to another department besides the one that you need, and that one informs you that they cannot
help you.
I also find email can be a stress reliever. I get a lot of emails that deal with routine issues. If I have some complicated decision or other
source of stress, it can be useful to just devote half an hour or so to dealing with routine stuff, which is varied enough
to take my mind off of the day's crisis. Frequently, by the time I'm done, the answer I am seeking pops into my head.
I see no reason why you couldn't use Quicktime to play back H.264 encoded HD content. (Go, for example, to the Apple Movie Trailers site - a good amount of that is in HD.) I haven't
heard anyone complaining about that.
He may of course have been misquoted, but this is simply not coherent :
"There are some things that Windows does pretty well," Zemlin said. Microsoft for instance has excelled in marketing the operating system, and has a good track record in fending off competition.'"
Uh, Microsoft's marketing abilities and competitive instinct are attributes of the company, not the OS.
Neither was the IBM 360 or 370 OS, VAX VMS, Dec PDP, etc., etc. In fact, by that standard, no computer
that I have ever used on a regular basis had an operating system, except for Linux. Hmm...
Of course cosmic rays generate anti-matter; a few nanograms of anti-matter isn't going to destroy the Earth.
It is interesting, however, that none of them seem to be anti-matter.
In any case, I think you are referring to the possible generation of mini-black holes, which has been worried about
in connection with high energy physics.
Just go ahead and make your case. Talk total cost of ownership (generally the purchase price is a small fraction of the TCO). Will, for example, you have to hire people to provide maintenance and troubleshooting ? Also talk about security. Most windows shops I know wind up devoting more and more of effort into security, and thius is also a part of the TCO. Use your industry knowledge (have your competitors been recently compromised or hacked ? Did the OS play a role in that ?).
You also need to figure out how much more things will cost after the transistion and make a case for those moneys too, in case things don't go your way.
Be realistic and objective, and make your case. Good management will appreciate this, even if they don't agree with you. You will probably learn a lot about the hierarchy in your company by the reaction you get, and that may be useful in your planning for the future as well.
I have come to feel that the public would be best served by only granting monopolies for 14 years, as was the original US term. Current terms are much too long, and
result in a great mass of material from the past that is blocked.
Mac OS X upgrades are not viewed as that big a deal. I still have the Mac's I bought in 2000 and 2001 in production use (encoding), running 10.4.10. They are a little slow by modern standards but still work just fine.
I think, though, that he meant upgrade the box, not the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Terrestrial soil is of course in most places a very complicated biological artifact. But, on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids, where ever we have landed we have found in many places a similar mixture of particles of different sizes that looks and acts (from an engineering perspective) a lot like terrestrial soil, so that's what it is commonly called in planetary work, without implying that it is of biological origin.
If you want to be picky, it should be called regolith away from the Earth, which certainly sounds more geological, but means the same thing.
If I remember I will, but there is nothing secret about it.
These details are openly available in a bunch of places. It just that at the time those
of us working on Viking (I was at MIT) followed the tests closely, and at least to me it seemed very disappointing that it passed the tests, but the
announcement was of no life, which really sucked the press interest out of the story, and the mission.
What followed was a real gutting of the US Martian research community - most of people I knew at JPL were gone by 1980.
Yes, I know he has since, but I don't remember him doing so at any of the press conferences at the time. However, he may have and I missed it. He has
certainly been consistent in recent times.
My point wasn't that this proved that there was life, but that they set up a scientific protocol and then violated it as soon as the results
made them nervous. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that if the mass spectrometer had detected organics, they would have claimed
the detection of life. If the only real test was the mass spectrometer, why spend the better part of a billion dollars (total mission cost was $ 2 billion 1970 dollars)
building the biology experiement ?
Viking was a huge gamble to justify a planetary exploration program based on biology. They (we) spent the money, went all the way, were fantastically successfull (landing on Mars is hard), and then suffered a failure of nerve... and the next US lander was 20 years later. And now, 31 years later, we (the US) still haven't done any more biological tests. While the mission was successful, it also has to be viewed as a huge strategic failure of the US space effort.
At least the data from the experiment I worked on is still very much with us and in use.
Lander 1 was supposed to land on July 4, 1976, but was delayed a few weeks. Lander 2 was just a little later.
The Viking lander bit rate was low, and there was only comminucation when the Earth was above the horizon, and the radio bandwidth was only 2 MHz, so the data return was pretty tiny by modern standards (from the Landers - the orbiter data rate was consderably larger). My back of the envelope calculations says that the total Lander data return was on the order of a few hundred GB. (Also, in the extended mission, the data collection was slowed, I believe to once per week.)
Of course, these data are still being mined, and are absolutely crucial to our understanding of Mars dynamics, among other things.
I worked on the Viking Lander project (but not on the biology side). Before the landing, NASA published and sent around little promo phamplets describing what a positive (biological) response would be from each of the 3 biological experiments. (Along the lines of, add nutrients to a soil sample, get CO2 out, sterilize the next soil sample, add nutrients, get no CO2, that is evidence for life. No CO2, or CO2 with a sterlized sample, not evidence for life.) I still have mine in my basement.
Each of the two landers had 3 biological experiements. All six worked fine. All six had a positive response based on the criteria published before landing.
However, because the mass spectrometer detected no organic molecules (not one of the pre-published tests), these results were ascribed to non-biological causes.
I could never understand why one of the biological researchers didn't just say, "we have detected life, by our published criteria, but we don't understand it." However, none did.
Science doesn't always move in the nice linear fashion described in the text books...
Not everyone uses the sewer...
Many petabytes of astronomical data have been collected. It is a good bet that all or almost all of it have been analyzed for some purpose (whatever paid for the
data collection), but there is no limit to the ways that things can be analyzed (did it change strenght with time ? Is it in other catalogs ? Is it stronger
in some wavelength than usual ? etc. etc.) So, in that sense the surface has hardly been scratched and this work will literally never be completed.
There is lots of room for amateurs to make discoveries in these "virtual telescopes," and you can expect some cool discoveries to come from guys running software in their basement.
You can certainly use multicast to pre-cache a good chunk of the Video on Demand out there. Check out, for example, Arootz, an Israeli company which is planning to do exactly that.
And, of course, channels are certainly not going to go away...
Pretty much continuously since 1988, the last time it crashed.
They certainly have had time to deploy it.
for the moment. Ask them if they think that the Earth is older than one billion years old.
5.) Require you to provide full information to your problem to a gatekeeper even if you know where your call should be directed, and even though the gatekeeper does nothing with the information requested. Bonus points if the gatekeeper has no clue what you are talking about, so you have to educate them about their product or service before they will forward you to the department that you already knew you wanted. Mega bonus points if they insist on forwarding you to another department besides the one that you need, and that one informs you that they cannot help you.
I also find email can be a stress reliever. I get a lot of emails that deal with routine issues. If I have some complicated decision or other source of stress, it can be useful to just devote half an hour or so to dealing with routine stuff, which is varied enough to take my mind off of the day's crisis. Frequently, by the time I'm done, the answer I am seeking pops into my head.
I see no reason why you couldn't use Quicktime to play back H.264 encoded HD content. (Go, for example, to the Apple Movie Trailers site - a good amount of that is in HD.) I haven't heard anyone complaining about that.
He may of course have been misquoted, but this is simply not coherent :
"There are some things that Windows does pretty well," Zemlin said. Microsoft for instance has excelled in marketing the operating system, and has a good track record in fending off competition.'"
Uh, Microsoft's marketing abilities and competitive instinct are attributes of the company, not the OS.
Neither was the IBM 360 or 370 OS, VAX VMS, Dec PDP, etc., etc. In fact, by that standard, no computer that I have ever used on a regular basis had an operating system, except for Linux. Hmm...
It does indeed, especially as material is transmitted between the Earth and Mars by meteor strikes.
Of course cosmic rays generate anti-matter; a few nanograms of anti-matter isn't going to destroy the Earth. It is interesting, however, that none of them seem to be anti-matter.
In any case, I think you are referring to the possible generation of mini-black holes, which has been worried about in connection with high energy physics.
Just go ahead and make your case. Talk total cost of ownership (generally the purchase price is a small fraction of the TCO).
Will, for example, you have to hire people to provide maintenance and troubleshooting ? Also talk about security.
Most windows shops I know wind up devoting more and more of effort into security, and thius is also a part of the TCO.
Use your industry knowledge (have your competitors been recently compromised or hacked ? Did the OS play a role in that ?).
You also need to figure out how much more things will cost after the transistion and make a case for those moneys too, in case things don't go your way.
Be realistic and objective, and make your case. Good management will appreciate this, even if they don't agree with you. You will probably learn a lot
about the hierarchy in your company by the reaction you get, and that may be useful in your planning for the future as well.
I went to MIT, and, trust me, the lack of sex in the human male can lead to some wird pathologies.
(This may get modded as funny, but it is the literal truth.)
They weighed 5 tons. and the B-29's had to be specially outfitted to carry them. That works out to about 800 pounds per kiloton.
"Modern" weapon design (early 1960's) produces yields somewhere in the 1 kiloton per pound to 1 kiloton per kilogram range.
Anyone port VLC to the iPhone ? Its lack of RTP support was my biggest disappointment about it.
I have come to feel that the public would be best served by only granting monopolies for 14 years, as was the original US term. Current terms are much too long, and result in a great mass of material from the past that is blocked.
Mac OS X upgrades are not viewed as that big a deal. I still have the Mac's I bought in 2000 and 2001 in production use (encoding), running 10.4.10. They are a little slow by modern standards but still work just fine.
I think, though, that he meant upgrade the box, not the OS.