A lot of the comments make the point that doing "real" science at home is pretty much impossible now due to the need for expensive equipment, and decades of experience. As a professional scientist I think that's nonsense. I think what people are missing is the shifting paradigm of how things are measured. I'm really excited by the possibilities suggested by (for instance) the next generation of smart phones, that hopefully might have many more sensors embedded (RFID, gas sensors, temperature/pressure)... and for the large scale distributed sensor networks that might result. The web of things, ubiquitous computing and widespread availability of cheap hardware that makes good enough (not excellent, but good enough) measurements over a wide scale are going to give professional (and amateur) scientists a whole new lever on the world.
Additionally some scientific disciplines (like astronomy oddly enough) have become data rich in the last few years, I literally have tapes and discs containing data I'll likely never get round to analysing because I don't have time. Likewise for all my colleagues, who have similar piles in their offices. The arrival of the new generation of all-sky telescopes (like the LSST) which will give us access to the sky in the time-domain isn't really going to change that, it's only going to get worse in fact.
All of which puts doing "real" science at home well in the reach of most (educated) amateurs.
Students are beginning to work with data sets like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the largest public data set in the world. The telescope takes detailed images of large chunks of the sky and produces about 30 terabytes of data each night.
Err no it doesn't, and no they aren't. The telescope hasn't been built yet? First light isn't scheduled until late in 2015.
I'm continually amazed what American's are prepared to pay for cellphones, landlines and broadband. I get all of the above on an 8Mb connection for 16 here in the UK, and I'm with an expensive provider that actually has decent tech support...
The last thing Bruce Schneier is, is an idiot. He might be wrong in this case. I must admit I can't see a better solution that Brin's transparent society, and I can see much worse case outcomes. But he's not an idiot. You only have to read Applied Cryptography to figure that out...
An interesting point is that the base 17-inch model no longer comes with an Apple Remote by default, you have to cough up another $29 to get that bit of Apple goodness. Fine for those of us that have quite a few of them lying around, but not so good for people buying their first iMac. An odd choice for Apple IMHO.
The article had no substance, and now this Formitchev guy earns thousands of pageviews worth of ad revenue from all the Slashdot users expecting to see something new and interesting about Leopard. Seriously, what a scam.
I agree to a certain extent, the article has no content, however I've been Slashdotted on several occasions and you get no significant increase in advertising revenue from the incoming hordes. Traffic can spike to ×10 to ×50 normal levels and, if anything, your ad revenue drops. Slashdot users don't click on ads, or more probably, use ad blocking software and don't see them in the first place.
This is such old news, it was initially worked over by The Guardian at the start of the month, and it even got picked up by Slashdot. But it was old news even then, you've been able to do this sort of thing for years. I've talked about it a lot in my blog...
Sail enthusiasts have faced continued disappointment from the early days; with the failure of Znamya, to the more recent failure of the Cosmos-1 spacecraft. Lets hope NASA has more luck than everyone else, despite the recently announced budget cuts for science funding in favour of the manned programme.
This has been rattling around various blogs for a couple of days now, even making an appearance in the Guardian. It's interesting that it seems to be being posted as "news", as there has been user level access to this stuff since around 1995 when digital networks started rolling out properly. I'm not sure what's going, presumably it's one of those meme things...
The rumours in the Mac community are hinting that key products were missing from the Steve's keynote speech due to supply issues with the new Intel Core Duo chips. I'm starting to winder whether it wasn't the Core Duo chips that were in short supply. There were predictions and rumours of "instant-on" hard drive less Macs based on flash chips in the run up to Macworld. Perhaps we still have "One more thing..." still to come?
I blogged this back at the end of 2004 when the Russians first rolled the Kliper mockup out. This recent BBC story does seem really weirdly timed. I figured something "new" must have happened but I can't seem to find anything. Someone had a press conference perhaps?
Al.
Re:CA doesn't get it re: GPL and "viral"
on
Fun Stuff at OSCON 2005
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No, I think the CA stand in the exhibit hall made it very clear that CA just "doesn't get it", they were treating OSCON like a normal industry trade show rather than trying to sell themselves technically, which is pretty much the only way to do it at OSCON.
Of course, if their exhibit hall stand didn't show it, their awful keynote talk surely did...
I found this video back in February, isn't this a dupe? Anyway my blog post about it also has a link to good paper on the Google File System written up for the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, along with video of the talk the Google guys gave at the symposium.
You might also want to have a look at my post on Eric Schmidt talking about Google to the Stanford Business School. The post also has a link to a video of Urs Hölzle talking to the University of Washington about clustering at Google.
Well I know this was one of them, as it was my site. I'm afraid I don't recall what the other stories were, I think one of them was something to do with wireless networking, I don't recall the other at all. Both pointed to other virtual hosts on the same server located in a co-lo rack somewhere in Sheffield.
I suppose if you dig around enough you could find the other two stories on that day where the site hosting the content resolved back to the same address. Although I think the server has been moved since then, so YMMV.
For those of you who couldn't manage to scrape a connection to the live feed, and I know I had a lot of difficulty, I've put some images captures of the take off on Monday, the flight [1, 2] itself, the decent and of course the landing up on my blog.
The machine these are sitting on once hosted three front page Slashdot stories simultaneously so I'm not too worried about posting this... err, I think I'll just mail my sysadmin.
I'll be sure to tell the Poles, Aussies, Brits, South Koreans and Japanese that they don't count as part of the international community.
While you're at it you could tell the British Government that half of their population disagreed with their support of the US led invasion of Iraq... no, hang on. Don't bother, we've already tried.
I ordered an iBook a few weeks ago and they have changed my order to reflect this change, which is nice since I'm now getting a faster processor and a bigger hard drive for the same price.
Yup, they seem to be good about such things. The same thing happend to me when they introduced the new PowerBooks a week or so after I placed my order for the older model.
The ISP is based in the Netherlands, by handing out data about one of their subscribers without a court order they have violated EU data protection laws. That's a crimial offence...
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the comments make the point that doing "real" science at home is pretty much impossible now due to the need for expensive equipment, and decades of experience. As a professional scientist I think that's nonsense. I think what people are missing is the shifting paradigm of how things are measured. I'm really excited by the possibilities suggested by (for instance) the next generation of smart phones, that hopefully might have many more sensors embedded (RFID, gas sensors, temperature/pressure)... and for the large scale distributed sensor networks that might result. The web of things, ubiquitous computing and widespread availability of cheap hardware that makes good enough (not excellent, but good enough) measurements over a wide scale are going to give professional (and amateur) scientists a whole new lever on the world. Additionally some scientific disciplines (like astronomy oddly enough) have become data rich in the last few years, I literally have tapes and discs containing data I'll likely never get round to analysing because I don't have time. Likewise for all my colleagues, who have similar piles in their offices. The arrival of the new generation of all-sky telescopes (like the LSST) which will give us access to the sky in the time-domain isn't really going to change that, it's only going to get worse in fact. All of which puts doing "real" science at home well in the reach of most (educated) amateurs.
Students are beginning to work with data sets like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the largest public data set in the world. The telescope takes detailed images of large chunks of the sky and produces about 30 terabytes of data each night.
Err no it doesn't, and no they aren't. The telescope hasn't been built yet? First light isn't scheduled until late in 2015.
Al.
I'm continually amazed what American's are prepared to pay for cellphones, landlines and broadband. I get all of the above on an 8Mb connection for 16 here in the UK, and I'm with an expensive provider that actually has decent tech support...
The guy who wrote that article is an idiot...
The last thing Bruce Schneier is, is an idiot. He might be wrong in this case. I must admit I can't see a better solution that Brin's transparent society, and I can see much worse case outcomes. But he's not an idiot. You only have to read Applied Cryptography to figure that out...
...and to the Mac mini page. Interestingly it looks like the mini now comes with Bluetooth and Airport Extreme by default, which is good. I never understood why they didn't do that originally...
Al.An interesting point is that the base 17-inch model no longer comes with an Apple Remote by default, you have to cough up another $29 to get that bit of Apple goodness. Fine for those of us that have quite a few of them lying around, but not so good for people buying their first iMac. An odd choice for Apple IMHO.
Al.Actually the bulk of the funding for the IRA did come from the US...
Al.The article had no substance, and now this Formitchev guy earns thousands of pageviews worth of ad revenue from all the Slashdot users expecting to see something new and interesting about Leopard. Seriously, what a scam.
I agree to a certain extent, the article has no content, however I've been Slashdotted on several occasions and you get no significant increase in advertising revenue from the incoming hordes. Traffic can spike to ×10 to ×50 normal levels and, if anything, your ad revenue drops. Slashdot users don't click on ads, or more probably, use ad blocking software and don't see them in the first place.
Al.
This is such old news, it was initially worked over by The Guardian at the start of the month, and it even got picked up by Slashdot. But it was old news even then, you've been able to do this sort of thing for years. I've talked about it a lot in my blog...
Al.Okay, fair point. I actually do point that out elsewhere, I guess I summarised a bit too far...
Al.Sail enthusiasts have faced continued disappointment from the early days; with the failure of Znamya, to the more recent failure of the Cosmos-1 spacecraft. Lets hope NASA has more luck than everyone else, despite the recently announced budget cuts for science funding in favour of the manned programme.
Al.That needs to be in the forehead, or the left hand, like this guy...
Al.This has been rattling around various blogs for a couple of days now, even making an appearance in the Guardian. It's interesting that it seems to be being posted as "news", as there has been user level access to this stuff since around 1995 when digital networks started rolling out properly. I'm not sure what's going, presumably it's one of those meme things...
Al.The rumours in the Mac community are hinting that key products were missing from the Steve's keynote speech due to supply issues with the new Intel Core Duo chips. I'm starting to winder whether it wasn't the Core Duo chips that were in short supply. There were predictions and rumours of "instant-on" hard drive less Macs based on flash chips in the run up to Macworld. Perhaps we still have "One more thing..." still to come?
It'd certainly fit with my own speculations about the Mac Pro line...
Al.I blogged this back at the end of 2004 when the Russians first rolled the Kliper mockup out. This recent BBC story does seem really weirdly timed. I figured something "new" must have happened but I can't seem to find anything. Someone had a press conference perhaps?
Al.No, I think the CA stand in the exhibit hall made it very clear that CA just "doesn't get it", they were treating OSCON like a normal industry trade show rather than trying to sell themselves technically, which is pretty much the only way to do it at OSCON.
Of course, if their exhibit hall stand didn't show it, their awful keynote talk surely did...
Al.Did Larry Wall give a State of the Onion this year? I can't find any reference to it.
Yes, Larry gave a State of the Onion talk during the Tuesday Night Extravaganza.
Al....and blogged the conference, some of the more interesting bits below,
Amazing conference, if you weren't there, you should have been...
Al.I found this video back in February, isn't this a dupe? Anyway my blog post about it also has a link to good paper on the Google File System written up for the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, along with video of the talk the Google guys gave at the symposium.
You might also want to have a look at my post on Eric Schmidt talking about Google to the Stanford Business School. The post also has a link to a video of Urs Hölzle talking to the University of Washington about clustering at Google.
Both are worth watching...
Al.Well I know this was one of them, as it was my site. I'm afraid I don't recall what the other stories were, I think one of them was something to do with wireless networking, I don't recall the other at all. Both pointed to other virtual hosts on the same server located in a co-lo rack somewhere in Sheffield.
I suppose if you dig around enough you could find the other two stories on that day where the site hosting the content resolved back to the same address. Although I think the server has been moved since then, so YMMV.
Al.For those of you who couldn't manage to scrape a connection to the live feed, and I know I had a lot of difficulty, I've put some images captures of the take off on Monday, the flight [1, 2] itself, the decent and of course the landing up on my blog.
The machine these are sitting on once hosted three front page Slashdot stories simultaneously so I'm not too worried about posting this... err, I think I'll just mail my sysadmin.
Al.I'll be sure to tell the Poles, Aussies, Brits, South Koreans and Japanese that they don't count as part of the international community.
While you're at it you could tell the British Government that half of their population disagreed with their support of the US led invasion of Iraq... no, hang on. Don't bother, we've already tried.
Al.And I'm also certian that the US didn't just complete the first non-government manned space flight and doesn't have billions of dollars going to develop private space flight.
Actually, the Virgin group of companies is British...
Al.I ordered an iBook a few weeks ago and they have changed my order to reflect this change, which is nice since I'm now getting a faster processor and a bigger hard drive for the same price.
Yup, they seem to be good about such things. The same thing happend to me when they introduced the new PowerBooks a week or so after I placed my order for the older model.
Al.Why? What crime have they committed?
The ISP is based in the Netherlands, by handing out data about one of their subscribers without a court order they have violated EU data protection laws. That's a crimial offence...
Al.