Viagra sales have surged over 3000% due to fears in the male population that a failure at the wrong moment could spark a fatal combination of adjectives for describing the male genitalia in relation to its size and smoothness.
Our resident lawyer advices to be careful, as the most likely settlement would be for the Redmondon company to claim ownership over the offending appendix, thus requiring either a rental fee or the removal and return of the assets in question.
We're still investigating if the raise of online combined orders for grinding paper and glue are also related to this incident.
Sorry, I don't have anywhere to mirror this with images and all (anywhere that would survive an/. that is;) )
TOP STORY: NASA Is Not Altering Mars Colors.
Posted by: Kano
On: Sun January, 18 2004 @ 03:34 GMT
This article is a brief summarised explanation of how the PanCam on the Mars Spirit Rover operates, in relation to the strange appearance of the calibration sundial in some pictures. The question was first raised by ATS member AArchAngel, and has been discussed at length in this AboveTopSecret forum thread and ATSNN story:
thread
Mars Spirit Rover Picture analysis.
In this thread I will attempt to summarise my posts to the larger thread.
What are you talking about?
Ok, the initial alarm was raised after it was noticed that the color-calibration sundial mounted on the rover, looked quite markedly different in the Mars-Panorama shots compared to its regular appearance.
Immediately wide-ranging theories began to pop up. At this stage I knew very little of the particulars of the PanCam so I decided to go and see what the Horses mouth had to say. I sent out a swag of emails to the NASA marsrover team, the Athena Instrument team at Cornell University, and the long shot, an email to Assoc. Professor James Bell. Who is the Pancam Payload Element Lead for the mission.
Now, getting no response from the Athena team, and an automated response from the NASA team. I was amazed and delighted to see that Dr. Bell had indeed taken the time out of his busy schedule to help explain this quirk in the panorama pictures. His email response is below:
quote:
--------
Thanks for writing. The answer is that the color chips on the sundial have different colors in the near-infrared range of Pancam filters. For example, the blue chip is dark near 600 nm, where humans see red light, but is especially bright at 750 nm, which is used as "red" for many Pancam images. So it appears pink in RGB composites. We chose the pigments for the chips on purpose this way, so they could provide different patterns of brightnesses regardless of which filters we used. The details of the colors of the pigments are published in a paper I wrote in the December issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research (Planets), in case you want more details...
All of us tired folks on the team are really happy that so many people around the world are following the mission and sending their support and encouragement...
Thanks,
Jim Bell
Cornell U.
-------
Now, as far as the pink tab where the blue one should be, that email is infact the complete answer. But its not easily understandable to the layman. Below I will attempt to explain why this occurs.
Click here to read comments or post your own.
Displaying the first 12 replies to this news story...
Posted by: Kano
On: Sun January, 18 2004 @ 03:35 GMT
Digital Cameras
Firstly, we need to understand how the PanCam, and indeed digital photography in general works.
Luckily for us we have our good friends at http://www.howstuffworks.com to turn to.
How Digital Cameras Work
It would be worthwhile to read the entire article on howstuffworks, for a fuller understanding of the processes at work. But because I know you are all busy (lazy?) I will summarise.
Basically, the heart of a digital camera is the charge coupled device or CCD. This CCD converts light hitting it into electrical impulses, the brighter the light, the stronger the impulse. Now, CCD's are color-blind. All they do is signal how bright the light hitting them is. All well and good for black and white photography. But for color we need to do more. To get a color-picture. We need to record images via the CCD using a series of 3 filters. A Red filter, a Green filter, and a Blue filter. These are then recombined afterwards to give a color-representation of the picture. (Note, cheaper options
All I need is a link to read slashdot faster than the stories get posted;)
Chances are I would never make a "First!!" reply to any topic anymore though. But I would sign up for that one way ticket. In case NASA is reading: I'm a bioinformatician, and I know Perl, you know anything can be solved with Perl, so I would be the most valuable asset in that mission.
You might have heard that in some countries (Canada and Spain come to mind, I'm sure they're not the only ones) the big record labels have put a levy on blank media because of supposed losses over piracy. They no longer bitch about it because, want it or not, they're already getting your money without your knowledge.
Recently, the SGAE (RIAA equivalent in Spain) managed to get a levy imposed on all CD and DVD blank media to pay for Piracy. At the same time, the AntiSGAE (a consummers assotiation) decided to use that newly paid privilege to share their music for free, since it was already paid for. They organized a CD-Crossing event, in which they invited people to copy their music CDs in one of these newly taxed blank discs and leave them in random places all over for anyone to grab and use.
In short, invite people to get your whole music library in their portable MP3 players, since, after all, you're paying for it. Don't charge for it though, that's still illegal.
Yeah, I'm sure every user has a monstercock.dll file in their windows folder;)
Game mods are the best card for PC games
on
NYT on Game Mods
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
And NOT trying to start a PC vs. Console war, game mods are one of the most important features that keep the PC gamers coming for more and paying big bucks for hardware (well, compared to consoles that are sold at a loss).
On the other hand, mods (and in general, user-created content) are responsible for the metamorphosis of the computer games industry since the early 8-bit era to what it is today. No longer can you sell a hit game every 6 months , due to this extra content the average life of a good game has increased immensely, and thus, game companies now have to think carefully about their plans and development programs.
With an Athlon under the hood I guess there're at least a couple of fans attached to the whole thing. How noisy is it? Is that much power really necessary? Is it not a factor for the purpose of this particular gizmo?
Consider the fact that their 'off' hours are usually away from home. There is a LOT of work that they do outside of flying. This doesn't count in their per-hour charge.
Consider the fact that our off hours are usually away from society, wasting time in stupid things like Internet discussion forums and such. There's a lot of work to be done outside of the regular programming hours, such as fixing someone's computer, programming a VCR, and so on.
They spend a lot of time gaining hours in small aircraft and as co-pilots of large aircraft. And they get dirt-pay for that.
We spend a lot of time doing hundreds of lines of code for totally cryptic crap such as "Biojava Protease Factory Method Implementation" being paid nothing.
They can't drink 12 hours before going on the job.
I asume you're referring to alcohol. Most of us are only addicted to caffeine anyway.
They work odd hours.
You bet.
They are controlling a big gas tank with an aluminum shell and 300 people inside, all while moving 600+ mph in weather conditions that prevent you from seeing out side.
That sounds like the slashdot effect to me;)
Road transport is already highly controlled, specially for hazardous materials. Things as (the terms might be off since I'm a Spaniard and I'm not sure how it is exactly in English) the driver's log book, tachometer register and tracking, and so on. Neither of these have made their way into "normal" vehicles (your car or mine, that is).
As the rest of the replies to your post said, it's not about "the planet is not getting warmer!" (which in absolute terms it is, duh!), it's about WHY, and we don't really have a clue about how the complex system works, far from enough to make any reliable "models".
According to Meristation, Virgin PLAY, who was going to distribute the GP32 in Spain due to Mitsui ignoring the country, says they're still going to carry it.
Link is in Spanish, so babelfish the link if you can't understand it;)
It'd be much better if that money could buy me time alone with the spammer that sent me the mail, in a basement. I'll bring my own cane.
If they could guarantee I'd get that every time someone spams me I'd pay a buck per mail and not even blink.
Which is very cute and all, except that they're using big word sizes (the default size for BLASTN is 11, where the difference is surprisingly only 2 times better for the G4; typical word size for fine-tuned matches is 7; word size for protein databases is only 2), and SPECIALLY cutting off with a big threshold of 10e-8 (when the standard BLAST E-value cutoff is 10, there you lose a LOT more time if you have to extend lower quality matches, guess that doesn't play so nice with their velocity engine).
So yeah, BLAST is insanely faster when doing queries that fit specifically to where their architecture is better. Whoop-de-doo. I don't care about how fast it is at doing something I'll very rarely need.
Then there's the sciences, which if you'd read the article is one of the very things being tested on this monster. I've got a friend who works in bioinformatics, and I can't wait to tell him that BLAST is being compiled for the dual G5. He will curse me as he picks up the phone to call Apple =]
Not bloody likely. I should know, I do bioinformatics for a living. I haven't met many people who use macs for BLASTing stuff, specially for big jobs. Everyone and their mothers (who do any serious sequence matching and number crunching) use Linux clusters over the cheapest hardware they can find, and nowadays that means x86.
Anyone who makes big Bioinformatics jobs has to build clusters. Once you're building your cluster cost is an important factor, and if for the same price 2 dual-x86 machines are going to do the same job as a single dual G5 in less time (which, so far, holds true), then Apple loses.
I read on an onboard magazine in Icelandair a couple of years ago that many big corporations were purchasing aircrafts and putting pilots in their payrolls because it was cheaper than paying for all the flights some of their executives had to do. Not only that, baring certain high-traffic routes, it's also faster to travel with your own airplane than depend on pre-defined routes and connections.
I think that the ESA agrees with you. The SMART-1 is out to test new technology, not only to collect data on the moon. The cost of the SMART mission is around 110 million , about a fifth of the usual cost of the big ESA projects. The SMART-1 is set to get a real test of what they found out with the Artemis, when they used that new propulsion to correct the orbit error (more than it was originally intended to do).
It's all about the technology. And a couple of extra satellites to justify the cost of launching the Ariane of course;)
Neat way to get nerdy types to buy plants for the house.
Being a Biologist/Biochemist/Bioinformatician myself this looks like an interesting addition to my house, I'm sold! Now, I wonder of there will be a sequencing project for it or I'll have to wait until the technology is cheap enough to do it myself...
I mean, it's the best way to make sure it really is a Jurassic plant and not something that merely looks like it. Sequence the sucker and throw a massive multiple alignment into ClustalW. I wonder what I'll have to wait for, sequencing being cheap enough or terabytes of memory being commonplace.
Get your own installation of the ensembl genome browser and related apps. Why? Just because it's cool to have half a dozen genomes in your computer to play with:)
Slashdot Mirror
when they pry the delete key out of my cold, dead finger.
Not that I watch porn of course. Not me, nope, not one bit. None.
Viagra sales have surged over 3000% due to fears in the male population that a failure at the wrong moment could spark a fatal combination of adjectives for describing the male genitalia in relation to its size and smoothness.
Our resident lawyer advices to be careful, as the most likely settlement would be for the Redmondon company to claim ownership over the offending appendix, thus requiring either a rental fee or the removal and return of the assets in question.
We're still investigating if the raise of online combined orders for grinding paper and glue are also related to this incident.
Sorry, I don't have anywhere to mirror this with images and all (anywhere that would survive an /. that is ;) )
TOP STORY: NASA Is Not Altering Mars Colors.
Posted by: Kano On: Sun January, 18 2004 @ 03:34 GMT This article is a brief summarised explanation of how the PanCam on the Mars Spirit Rover operates, in relation to the strange appearance of the calibration sundial in some pictures. The question was first raised by ATS member AArchAngel, and has been discussed at length in this AboveTopSecret forum thread and ATSNN story: thread
Mars Spirit Rover Picture analysis.
In this thread I will attempt to summarise my posts to the larger thread.
What are you talking about?
Ok, the initial alarm was raised after it was noticed that the color-calibration sundial mounted on the rover, looked quite markedly different in the Mars-Panorama shots compared to its regular appearance.
Immediately wide-ranging theories began to pop up. At this stage I knew very little of the particulars of the PanCam so I decided to go and see what the Horses mouth had to say. I sent out a swag of emails to the NASA marsrover team, the Athena Instrument team at Cornell University, and the long shot, an email to Assoc. Professor James Bell. Who is the Pancam Payload Element Lead for the mission.
Now, getting no response from the Athena team, and an automated response from the NASA team. I was amazed and delighted to see that Dr. Bell had indeed taken the time out of his busy schedule to help explain this quirk in the panorama pictures. His email response is below:
quote:
--------
Thanks for writing. The answer is that the color chips on the sundial have different colors in the near-infrared range of Pancam filters. For example, the blue chip is dark near 600 nm, where humans see red light, but is especially bright at 750 nm, which is used as "red" for many Pancam images. So it appears pink in RGB composites. We chose the pigments for the chips on purpose this way, so they could provide different patterns of brightnesses regardless of which filters we used. The details of the colors of the pigments are published in a paper I wrote in the December issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research (Planets), in case you want more details...
All of us tired folks on the team are really happy that so many people around the world are following the mission and sending their support and encouragement...
Thanks,
Jim Bell
Cornell U.
-------
Now, as far as the pink tab where the blue one should be, that email is infact the complete answer. But its not easily understandable to the layman. Below I will attempt to explain why this occurs.
Click here to read comments or post your own.
Displaying the first 12 replies to this news story...
Posted by: Kano
On: Sun January, 18 2004 @ 03:35 GMT
Digital Cameras
Firstly, we need to understand how the PanCam, and indeed digital photography in general works.
Luckily for us we have our good friends at http://www.howstuffworks.com to turn to.
How Digital Cameras Work
It would be worthwhile to read the entire article on howstuffworks, for a fuller understanding of the processes at work. But because I know you are all busy (lazy?) I will summarise.
Basically, the heart of a digital camera is the charge coupled device or CCD. This CCD converts light hitting it into electrical impulses, the brighter the light, the stronger the impulse. Now, CCD's are color-blind. All they do is signal how bright the light hitting them is. All well and good for black and white photography. But for color we need to do more. To get a color-picture. We need to record images via the CCD using a series of 3 filters. A Red filter, a Green filter, and a Blue filter. These are then recombined afterwards to give a color-representation of the picture. (Note, cheaper options
All I need is a link to read slashdot faster than the stories get posted ;)
Chances are I would never make a "First!!" reply to any topic anymore though. But I would sign up for that one way ticket. In case NASA is reading: I'm a bioinformatician, and I know Perl, you know anything can be solved with Perl, so I would be the most valuable asset in that mission.
You might have heard that in some countries (Canada and Spain come to mind, I'm sure they're not the only ones) the big record labels have put a levy on blank media because of supposed losses over piracy. They no longer bitch about it because, want it or not, they're already getting your money without your knowledge.
Recently, the SGAE (RIAA equivalent in Spain) managed to get a levy imposed on all CD and DVD blank media to pay for Piracy. At the same time, the AntiSGAE (a consummers assotiation) decided to use that newly paid privilege to share their music for free, since it was already paid for. They organized a CD-Crossing event, in which they invited people to copy their music CDs in one of these newly taxed blank discs and leave them in random places all over for anyone to grab and use.
Linky (in Spanish I'm afraid).
Gotta love their logo.
In short, invite people to get your whole music library in their portable MP3 players, since, after all, you're paying for it. Don't charge for it though, that's still illegal.
OSS forks.
Windows borks.
Apple is for dorks.
Now choose!
(Wonder if I'll be modded down by mac users with no sense of humor...)
Yeah, I'm sure every user has a monstercock.dll file in their windows folder ;)
And NOT trying to start a PC vs. Console war, game mods are one of the most important features that keep the PC gamers coming for more and paying big bucks for hardware (well, compared to consoles that are sold at a loss).
On the other hand, mods (and in general, user-created content) are responsible for the metamorphosis of the computer games industry since the early 8-bit era to what it is today. No longer can you sell a hit game every 6 months , due to this extra content the average life of a good game has increased immensely, and thus, game companies now have to think carefully about their plans and development programs.
Linky, although it's not exactly a driver.
More likely we'll start seing unformatted drives and memory sticks/cards all over the place.
To access the 60 gigs of porn they have downloaded with Kazza under windows XP? Dunno, just tossing ideas around...
With an Athlon under the hood I guess there're at least a couple of fans attached to the whole thing. How noisy is it? Is that much power really necessary? Is it not a factor for the purpose of this particular gizmo?
Consider the fact that their 'off' hours are usually away from home. There is a LOT of work that they do outside of flying. This doesn't count in their per-hour charge.
;)
Consider the fact that our off hours are usually away from society, wasting time in stupid things like Internet discussion forums and such. There's a lot of work to be done outside of the regular programming hours, such as fixing someone's computer, programming a VCR, and so on.
They spend a lot of time gaining hours in small aircraft and as co-pilots of large aircraft. And they get dirt-pay for that.
We spend a lot of time doing hundreds of lines of code for totally cryptic crap such as "Biojava Protease Factory Method Implementation" being paid nothing.
They can't drink 12 hours before going on the job.
I asume you're referring to alcohol. Most of us are only addicted to caffeine anyway.
They work odd hours.
You bet.
They are controlling a big gas tank with an aluminum shell and 300 people inside, all while moving 600+ mph in weather conditions that prevent you from seeing out side.
That sounds like the slashdot effect to me
Road transport is already highly controlled, specially for hazardous materials. Things as (the terms might be off since I'm a Spaniard and I'm not sure how it is exactly in English) the driver's log book, tachometer register and tracking, and so on. Neither of these have made their way into "normal" vehicles (your car or mine, that is).
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/climate/clim ate.jsp?id=ns99992958
m ate.jsp?id=ns99992249
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/climate/cli
As the rest of the replies to your post said, it's not about "the planet is not getting warmer!" (which in absolute terms it is, duh!), it's about WHY, and we don't really have a clue about how the complex system works, far from enough to make any reliable "models".
According to Meristation, Virgin PLAY, who was going to distribute the GP32 in Spain due to Mitsui ignoring the country, says they're still going to carry it.
;)
Link is in Spanish, so babelfish the link if you can't understand it
Thigs that can go wrong: when your new box gets slashdotted!
There are 13 registered and 7025 anonymous users currently online. Current bandwidth usage: 1949.91 kbit/s
It'd be much better if that money could buy me time alone with the spammer that sent me the mail, in a basement. I'll bring my own cane. If they could guarantee I'd get that every time someone spams me I'd pay a buck per mail and not even blink.
I take you're referring to this?
t a18Apr02.pdf
http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/pdf/PerfDa
Which is very cute and all, except that they're using big word sizes (the default size for BLASTN is 11, where the difference is surprisingly only 2 times better for the G4; typical word size for fine-tuned matches is 7; word size for protein databases is only 2), and SPECIALLY cutting off with a big threshold of 10e-8 (when the standard BLAST E-value cutoff is 10, there you lose a LOT more time if you have to extend lower quality matches, guess that doesn't play so nice with their velocity engine).
So yeah, BLAST is insanely faster when doing queries that fit specifically to where their architecture is better. Whoop-de-doo. I don't care about how fast it is at doing something I'll very rarely need.
Then there's the sciences, which if you'd read the article is one of the very things being tested on this monster. I've got a friend who works in bioinformatics, and I can't wait to tell him that BLAST is being compiled for the dual G5. He will curse me as he picks up the phone to call Apple =]
Not bloody likely. I should know, I do bioinformatics for a living. I haven't met many people who use macs for BLASTing stuff, specially for big jobs. Everyone and their mothers (who do any serious sequence matching and number crunching) use Linux clusters over the cheapest hardware they can find, and nowadays that means x86.
Anyone who makes big Bioinformatics jobs has to build clusters. Once you're building your cluster cost is an important factor, and if for the same price 2 dual-x86 machines are going to do the same job as a single dual G5 in less time (which, so far, holds true), then Apple loses.
I read on an onboard magazine in Icelandair a couple of years ago that many big corporations were purchasing aircrafts and putting pilots in their payrolls because it was cheaper than paying for all the flights some of their executives had to do. Not only that, baring certain high-traffic routes, it's also faster to travel with your own airplane than depend on pre-defined routes and connections.
I think that the ESA agrees with you. The SMART-1 is out to test new technology, not only to collect data on the moon. The cost of the SMART mission is around 110 million , about a fifth of the usual cost of the big ESA projects. The SMART-1 is set to get a real test of what they found out with the Artemis, when they used that new propulsion to correct the orbit error (more than it was originally intended to do).
;)
It's all about the technology. And a couple of extra satellites to justify the cost of launching the Ariane of course
Neat way to get nerdy types to buy plants for the house.
Being a Biologist/Biochemist/Bioinformatician myself this looks like an interesting addition to my house, I'm sold! Now, I wonder of there will be a sequencing project for it or I'll have to wait until the technology is cheap enough to do it myself...
I mean, it's the best way to make sure it really is a Jurassic plant and not something that merely looks like it. Sequence the sucker and throw a massive multiple alignment into ClustalW. I wonder what I'll have to wait for, sequencing being cheap enough or terabytes of memory being commonplace.
If you're thinking that the Via C3 is enough for your drive bay you have a solution already:
http://www.cappuccinopc.com/1baypc.asp
They even sell them as barebones. There's also a 2-bay one with a P4.
Get your own installation of the ensembl genome browser and related apps. Why? Just because it's cool to have half a dozen genomes in your computer to play with :)