One spacecraft (Hidalgo) will impact an asteroid, the other (Sancho) will arrive earlier at the target asteroid, rendezvous and orbit the asteroid for several months, observing it before and after the impact to detect any changes in its orbit.
Presumably Sancho gets to hold the spare lance, and the Ariane 5 rocket will hail to "Rocinante"...
Rocín means "nag" (a low-grade horse) (From "Rocinante").
Colin Pillinger had to lobby like mad literally just to get Beagle off the ground. Without a coherent strategy for planetary exploration and the money to match, the blame for the failure of brave projects like Beagle lies fair and square at the feet of ESA administrators. Shame on them : respect to Dr P and the Beaglenauts and their future plans.
And contrary to what Charlie Brown sez, Beagles are not "a dime a dozen" but actually work out at about 65 million each - bit of a boost for Snoopy's ego there:-)
The Vikings both went for about 4 years if I recall.
The Viking 1 lander touched down on 20 July 1976 and operated until 13 November 1982 when "a faulty command sent by ground control resulted in loss of contact" (doh!).
The Viking 2 lander touched down on 3 September 1976 and operated until 11 April 1980 when its batteries failed.
Well, if we're doomed to be toasted by 100+MeV protons, it'd be quite a cool and spectacular way to go. I stood on my balcony in the middle of Copenhagen watching the Northern Lights last week for about 3 hours. Oh, pretty pink and green lights in the Sky - take me now!!!.../**brightflash**/...
It's not like London of 1605 was anything like the London of today.
Sixty one years later the Great Fire of London destroyed 80% of the city or "... over 13,000 houses, 89 churches and 52 Company (Guild) Halls. [including] Old St. Paul's Cathedral..." Link
OK, it's not a blink of the eye, but it's almost the same length of time between the London of the Blitz and the London of today...
Agreed. The creation of artificial "commodities" purely for trading purposes (like CO2 credits or electricity) looks less and less like sound sense, other than from a narrow economic perspective. Companies with the same solid sense of moral purpose as Enron will grow up around CO2 credit trading in exactly the same way as they did with electricity trading, and we will see the same devious and cynical manipulation of channels of distribution and control of CO2 credits as we did with electricity, but instead of brownouts and blackouts we'll see the opposite (brownins? blackins?:-). The only sense in which it will be a success will be measurable by the wads of dosh pouring into the pockets of officers of those companies...
[The Restaurant at the End of the Universe]
Arthur Dent: What's the Big Bang, then?
Ford Prefect: OK. Imagine this knife and this fork...
Zaphod Beeblebrox: Hey, man, leggo - that's my steak knife!
Ford Prefect: OK, *this* knife and this fork as one pair of hyperdimeni-.. hyperdismen-... weird shaped goal posts...
Arthur Dent: I see
Ford Prefect:... and this salt and pepper set as the other pair.
Arthur Dent: I see
Ford Prefect: Now the whole setup is on a... weird shaped pitch.
Arthur Dent: Ford, what does "Match of the Day" have to do with anything?
Ford Prefect: Shhh! It's a clever analogy for the continiew-... continyoyo-... continuum of universes. Where was I?
Arthur Dent: You were talking about football.
Ford Prefect: Oh, yeah... so then you take this football which represents the pandimenshional nested Ur-entity which extrudes itself into our space-time continyoyoum as our universe...
Arthur Dent: Clever
Ford Prefect: I haven't got to the clever bit yet. Anyway, you get two teams of pandimensional Brockian Ultracricket players in the off season to kick it around a bit, and each pass is a macroscopic state evolution of the universe, and each goal is a non-refractable probabilistic state collapse of a local domain... or something
Arthur Dent: Clever
Ford Prefect: No, the clever bit is you televise it and sell the viewing rights for billions. I think I lost track of what I was saying.
Y'know - GFS vs OpenGFS vs OCFS vs OpenAFS etc
Problem with these benchmarks is they're out of context - there's never going to be a clear winner in all categories. Small number of big files/large number of small files, mostly reads/mostly writes, mostly random/mostly sequential access. And when you chuck in robustness and performance, it's even less clear.
Please could someone come up with a set of application-specific fs benchmarks - departmental file server/app server/database server/mail server/web server - and do a clustered version to boot?
read Arthur Winfree's book "The Geometry of Biological Time" (Springer-Verlag 1980) [OK, not so new...]
This stuff isn't so obvious. Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch physicist, couldn't get the Royal Society to pay attention to his observation that two pendulum clocks hanging on the same wooden beam eventually adopted the same rhythm. That was in 1665. Next stop : the 1960s, when Winfree started looking at coupled oscillators as an explanation for fireflies synchronizing their flashes. Still plenty of stuff to find out here.
I for one don't begrudge a student winning a prize for this.
A great pity. RH gave me the inspiration (=greed) to start my own company... and run up huge debts before selling it at a bargain basement price. VC was (and is) hard to come by in Wivenhoe, North Essex, England. Maybe if I'd started up in Cambridge, or London, the story might be different... we'll never know, eh? Farewell RH. RIP.
Slashdot Mirror
I demand that we teach Intelligent Slowing in the classroom
...
Nah, no need. The slowdown is because the elastic limit of the Noodly Appendage He snagged the probe with has been exceeded
One spacecraft (Hidalgo) will impact an asteroid, the other (Sancho) will arrive earlier at the target asteroid, rendezvous and orbit the asteroid for several months, observing it before and after the impact to detect any changes in its orbit.
...
Presumably Sancho gets to hold the spare lance, and the Ariane 5 rocket will hail to "Rocinante"
Rocín means "nag" (a low-grade horse)
(From "Rocinante").
Colin Pillinger had to lobby like mad literally just to get Beagle off the ground. Without a coherent strategy for planetary exploration and the money to match, the blame for the failure of brave projects like Beagle lies fair and square at the feet of ESA administrators. Shame on them : respect to Dr P and the Beaglenauts and their future plans. And contrary to what Charlie Brown sez, Beagles are not "a dime a dozen" but actually work out at about 65 million each - bit of a boost for Snoopy's ego there :-)
imagine aluminum vs aluminium
That's actually due to Sir Humphrey Davy's indecisiveness. See the fascinating story here...
The Viking 1 lander touched down on 20 July 1976 and operated until 13 November 1982 when "a faulty command sent by ground control resulted in loss of contact" (doh!).
The Viking 2 lander touched down on 3 September 1976 and operated until 11 April 1980 when its batteries failed.
Source: NSSDC Viking Mission to Mars pages
Well, if we're doomed to be toasted by 100+MeV protons, it'd be quite a cool and spectacular way to go. I stood on my balcony in the middle of Copenhagen watching the Northern Lights last week for about 3 hours. Oh, pretty pink and green lights in the Sky - take me now!!! .../**brightflash**/ ...
Here are the 25th anniversary radio scripts. Very good. Very funny.
It's not like London of 1605 was anything like the London of today.
..." Link
...
Sixty one years later the Great Fire of London destroyed 80% of the city or "... over 13,000 houses, 89 churches and 52 Company (Guild) Halls. [including] Old St. Paul's Cathedral
OK, it's not a blink of the eye, but it's almost the same length of time between the London of the Blitz and the London of today
the stupid thing is you can TRADE them
:-). The only sense in which it will be a success will be measurable by the wads of dosh pouring into the pockets of officers of those companies ...
Agreed. The creation of artificial "commodities" purely for trading purposes (like CO2 credits or electricity) looks less and less like sound sense, other than from a narrow economic perspective. Companies with the same solid sense of moral purpose as Enron will grow up around CO2 credit trading in exactly the same way as they did with electricity trading, and we will see the same devious and cynical manipulation of channels of distribution and control of CO2 credits as we did with electricity, but instead of brownouts and blackouts we'll see the opposite (brownins? blackins?
[The Restaurant at the End of the Universe] Arthur Dent: What's the Big Bang, then? Ford Prefect: OK. Imagine this knife and this fork ...
Zaphod Beeblebrox: Hey, man, leggo - that's my steak knife!
Ford Prefect: OK, *this* knife and this fork as one pair of hyperdimeni- .. hyperdismen- ... weird shaped goal posts ...
Arthur Dent: I see
Ford Prefect: ... and this salt and pepper set as the other pair.
Arthur Dent: I see
Ford Prefect: Now the whole setup is on a ... weird shaped pitch.
Arthur Dent: Ford, what does "Match of the Day" have to do with anything?
Ford Prefect: Shhh! It's a clever analogy for the continiew- ... continyoyo- ... continuum of universes. Where was I?
Arthur Dent: You were talking about football.
Ford Prefect: Oh, yeah ... so then you take this football which represents the pandimenshional nested Ur-entity which extrudes itself into our space-time continyoyoum as our universe ...
Arthur Dent: Clever
Ford Prefect: I haven't got to the clever bit yet. Anyway, you get two teams of pandimensional Brockian Ultracricket players in the off season to kick it around a bit, and each pass is a macroscopic state evolution of the universe, and each goal is a non-refractable probabilistic state collapse of a local domain ... or something
Arthur Dent: Clever
Ford Prefect: No, the clever bit is you televise it and sell the viewing rights for billions. I think I lost track of what I was saying.
Y'know - GFS vs OpenGFS vs OCFS vs OpenAFS etc Problem with these benchmarks is they're out of context - there's never going to be a clear winner in all categories. Small number of big files/large number of small files, mostly reads/mostly writes, mostly random/mostly sequential access. And when you chuck in robustness and performance, it's even less clear. Please could someone come up with a set of application-specific fs benchmarks - departmental file server/app server/database server/mail server/web server - and do a clustered version to boot?
Aye, but it's one thing to have the idea, another to actually knuckle down and make it work.
> The idea of complex adaptive systems composed of a swarm of simple nodes with very simple rules is neither new or interesting in and of itself.
There is a lot of new and interesting stuff going on in that area, tho'
last week's "Nature" (vol 421, p 780) had a news feature on how systems of multiple units achieve synchrony ;
check out Steve Strogatz work ;
read Arthur Winfree's book "The Geometry of Biological Time" (Springer-Verlag 1980) [OK, not so new ...]
This stuff isn't so obvious. Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch physicist, couldn't get the Royal Society to pay attention to his observation that two pendulum clocks hanging on the same wooden beam eventually adopted the same rhythm. That was in 1665. Next stop : the 1960s, when Winfree started looking at coupled oscillators as an explanation for fireflies synchronizing their flashes. Still plenty of stuff to find out here.
I for one don't begrudge a student winning a prize for this.
A great pity. RH gave me the inspiration (=greed) to start my own company ... and run up huge debts before selling it at a bargain basement price. VC was (and is) hard to come by in Wivenhoe, North Essex, England. Maybe if I'd started up in Cambridge, or London, the story might be different ... we'll never know, eh? Farewell RH. RIP.