>Excuse my cynicism (and my poor spelling), but they're trying to tell us that they're capturing light that was generated billions of years ago. Enough light to charge an optical receiver. I'm currently working on a project that has to generate laser light down a fiber, and pick up the signal after on a few miles, and we're having problems doing that.
Do you have surface 78 square meters to collect the light? (the size of the Keck telescope that took the spectra) Or a surface 3.2 square meters but that doesn't have any obstructions in the way? (HST, which took the image) Do you have blank backgrounds all around that you can compare against? Do you have years to analyze the data, or do you need to do it real time? It's a very very different kind of problem.
>Simple noise would be the first one
Looking at the images, they look like they've got pretty good S/N. I haven't seen the spectra, so I can't comment on that, but if they have spectra for the two different images that both give the same redshift, that's not likely noise.
>A body that is much closer but shrouded by some sort of haze is another.
Then it's haze that happens to shift all of the photons redward by a factor of 6.58. In both images independently. And doesn't make them fainter.
>Even if space were nearly completely empty, wouldn't there be enough dust after a few zillion miles to make it opaque.
That's an interesting topic. All dust that we see in the universe is inside of galaxies, and preferentially blocks red light. So the places that you'd expect dust to make a difference is in the galaxy itself, in the Milky Way, or maybe in the cluster that's lensing the images (if you can come up with a way of expelling the dust out of a galaxy into the intracluster medium without destroying the dust, which isn't easy to do - dust is pretty fragile)
The only possible evidence for gray dust in the voids between large scale structure is as a way out of having the Type Ia Supernova measurements argue for the existence of a positive cosmological constant - some have argued that the reason that the supernovae are fainter isn't that they're farther away, it's that there's some fairly uniform gray dust (it can't be normal dust because then it would preferentially block red light, and we don't see that happening) that is absorbing some of the light. But there is plenty of other evidence pointing towards a positive cosmological constant, so the dust explanation is unlikely.
When the universe was two billion years old, no one object could receive information about anything farther than two billion light years away. But a billion years later, there is time for information to have come from objects that were originally outside of its light cone, but the light cone (in this case called a horizon, because it can't be seen beyond) has expanded beyond them.
The current best estimate of the universe, mainly from measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background and Type Ia Supernovae, consistently give results around 14-15 billion years, leaning towards the lower half of that range.
In any case, the number "13.6 billion light years" is relative to the actual age of the universe. What was measured was a redshift of 5.58. You can map that into a lookback time, but it depends on the cosmological parameters you assume. The beginning of the universe is at redshift infinity, which will give you another lookback time (ie. age of the universe) that depends on the cosmological parameters.
I don't know what particular cosmology was used to map z=5.58 to 13.6 billion years lookback time, but the STScI press release mentions that the cosmology they used gives an age of the universe of 14 billion years. It's probably a "concordance model" flat universe with 0.3 of the closure density coming from matter and the rest from the cosmological constant, with a Hubble constant around 65-70 km/s/Mpc.
Sims and Civs were definitely what leapt to mind for me. Devastatingly addictive, so they won't complain about being bored. Not violent (certainly not in an FPS way, in any case... you let them play Risk? You'll let them play Civ). They'll spend a long time strategizing. Great combination!
It doesn't even have to be good beer, it is really the idea that counts
I've got to disagree there. I wouldn't be offended by a $10 cheque, but I would be by a case of Coors.;-)
Or... if you like the project, send a case of Coors. If you really like the project, send half a case of Coors.;-)
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CR written by a linux zealot?
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 2
It occurs to me...
Let's say you read/.. And let's say you're a Linux zealot. but I repeat myself.;-)
I've seen the sentiment expressed here before that the only way to drive into the world's consciousness that MS make shoddy products is for a massive vulnerability to hit everyone really badly. For a large number of people to lose data because of a major flaw in an MS product.
Now I see speculation of CR IV (or whatever number version you want to call it) that collects IP addresses of CR II compromised machines from all attempts on its own machine and uses the root script to run "format c:" on each of them. It doesn't exist yet... but will it? I'm sure. Probably even before CRI goes dormant next weekend.
This looks suspiciously like what an unscrupulous/. Linux zealot might wish for in their wildest dreams. I don't necessarily think the original CR was written by one, but I wouldn't be surprised if the more virulant strains were/are/will be.
If you're reading this and you're thinking about this is a suggestion, please don't. Lost or corrupt data is a scourge. The tech industry is having enough problems right now as it is without needing to deal with massive data loss. MS's PR so far has been doing an admirable job of damage control, but the last few mainstream articles I've read have stopped referring to it as an Internet problem and started referring to it as an IIS problem. Sufficient damage has already been done to MS. Don't make the situation any worse.
Which club? I used to know a lot of the Pittsburgh goth scene before they all up and moved away...
I'm going to have to check in again at 1h just to see if I know anyone.:-)=
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Re:We haven't done this yet..
on
Broadband Crackdown
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Which accomplishes NOTHING for the current ituation. Blocking inbound port 80 to the infected is worthless - they are ALREADY infected. Blocking outbound port 80, which WOULD do some good, will also stop them from using a web browser, which is bound to piss them off.
Sure it pisses them off. So they call you up and say "Why can't I access the web?". And you look up their ISP and say "Because your computer is infected with a worm that is taking up significant bandwidth and trying to infect other computers to do the same. If you fix that, we'll let you surf the web again."
At least if they're pissed off, they'll go and get the fix so they can surf to their pr0n again.
If anyone can explain a good reason for banning servers rather than limiting data volumes, I'm all ears. I think it's either a combination of laziness and sloppy thinking on the part of the providers, or a desire to force the "users" to also be "content consumers" rather than "content providers". Hanlon's razor, I believe, favours the former explanation.
No, the second is closer to the truth. It's the same reason why companies can't buy a residential phone line. The vast majority of people who want to run servers want to do it for commercial reasons. And therefore have money to pay for a more expensive connection than cheap broadband. By forbidding the use of servers on the residential cable/DSL service, they force all the companies to use the (more expensive) business services. Voila, more money for them, and the only people who get screwed are the relatively small number of us who are poor individuals but who want to run services on priveleged ports on our home boxen.
Hey, under this law anyone who spams someone at a computer account in a school will get 10 years jail time! I knew there had to be some redeeming feature to it...;-)
Third voice no longer exists. I have not been able to find any hard data on what the conclusions of the lawsuits filed against thirdvoice were. Either way, it is not important; Wired says that 3rdvoice went down for the sole reason that the web advertising market is shit, and legal harrassment was not involved. Sad; it was a nifty idea. Maybe someday we will see a GPLed equivilent?
Crit has been around for a long time and is still going.
"These companies are preying on us people who are into using computers, but not so tech savvy that we know what we're doing," Hoppe said.
It preys on people who are into using computers but don't know what they're doing. As much as I think these things and MicroSoftSmartOverUseOfCapitaliZationTags are evil, it does sound like a group of people waiting to be taken advantage of. I have trouble working up a lot of sympathy for an argument that analogizes well to "Those cops who give you fines for going through red lights are preying on us people who are into using cars, but not so automotively savvy that we know what we're doing."
As for its legality... as underhanded as it may be, it's probably legal. A piece of software you chose to install (though perhaps not realizing at the time that that was what you were doing) on your computer is adding a new function (though not one you necessarily want) to the way you browse the web. Functionally, it's pretty similar to JunkBuster.
I'd be a lot more likely to sign that declaration if there weren't myriad grammatical mistakes in it. Did no one proof it? Did the 9000+ signatories read it thoroughly?:-b
Yes and no. They purposely phrase it such that you realize that many of the DLLs will still be there. Why do you think they say you can remove "end-user access to the Internet Explorer components of the operating system" instead of saying you can remove "Internet Explorer"? They've implied that all you're doing is removing the ability to run the browser. But the browser's code will still be there. So if it's already taking up hard drive space, why would you remove functionality by forcing yourself to not be able to run the browser?
It will be interesting to test out exactly what gets removed and how much disk space is freed up. I'm going to guess it's a lot less than you'd naively expect from "removing IE".:-(
No, not witty quips. Purposely bad quips. From the canada.com article: "The tiny dog formed the basis of her winning entry Monday in the 20th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - given to the writer who can come up with the worst beginning to an imaginary novel."
It's named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who really did start off a novel (Paul Clifford) with the line "It was a dark and stormy night".
Probably because we're not convinced that the lockout works properly on the GRAPE5s. I know it works well on the GRAPE3, but VE and MS have done some tests on the GRAPE5 where they've tried hammering it with 2 different jobs, and the results haven't been kosher.
Anyone have experience with GRAPE5 and notice this? Anything that could be changed in the API? I suppose we could write a wrapper around the g5_open and g5_close calls that does additional locking, but that seems inelegant.
(actually some of them do SPH (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) as well)
The boards themselves don't do the SPH calculations. What they do is return neighbour lists for each particle, which reduces the load necessary to compute the hydro forces.
As a matter of fact, my advisor (who's at that conference - leaving me back here to play with my new laptop while my workstation analyzes simulations for me) has one. Just 4 nodes with one board each for now to get the code working, but will be scaled up when we're confident in the code.:-)=
Slashdot Mirror
D'oh! Had reddening on the brain, and the word "red" came out instead of "blue". :-)= Thanks for noticing that oops.
;-)
If only we were talking about X-rays, what I wrote would have actually been right.
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Looking at the images, they look like they've got pretty good S/N. I haven't seen the spectra, so I can't comment on that, but if they have spectra for the two different images that both give the same redshift, that's not likely noise.
Then it's haze that happens to shift all of the photons redward by a factor of 6.58. In both images independently. And doesn't make them fainter.
That's an interesting topic. All dust that we see in the universe is inside of galaxies, and preferentially blocks red light. So the places that you'd expect dust to make a difference is in the galaxy itself, in the Milky Way, or maybe in the cluster that's lensing the images (if you can come up with a way of expelling the dust out of a galaxy into the intracluster medium without destroying the dust, which isn't easy to do - dust is pretty fragile)
The only possible evidence for gray dust in the voids between large scale structure is as a way out of having the Type Ia Supernova measurements argue for the existence of a positive cosmological constant - some have argued that the reason that the supernovae are fainter isn't that they're farther away, it's that there's some fairly uniform gray dust (it can't be normal dust because then it would preferentially block red light, and we don't see that happening) that is absorbing some of the light. But there is plenty of other evidence pointing towards a positive cosmological constant, so the dust explanation is unlikely.
Hope that helps.
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The horizon expands.
When the universe was two billion years old, no one object could receive information about anything farther than two billion light years away. But a billion years later, there is time for information to have come from objects that were originally outside of its light cone, but the light cone (in this case called a horizon, because it can't be seen beyond) has expanded beyond them.
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The current best estimate of the universe, mainly from measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background and Type Ia Supernovae, consistently give results around 14-15 billion years, leaning towards the lower half of that range.
In any case, the number "13.6 billion light years" is relative to the actual age of the universe. What was measured was a redshift of 5.58. You can map that into a lookback time, but it depends on the cosmological parameters you assume. The beginning of the universe is at redshift infinity, which will give you another lookback time (ie. age of the universe) that depends on the cosmological parameters.
I don't know what particular cosmology was used to map z=5.58 to 13.6 billion years lookback time, but the STScI press release mentions that the cosmology they used gives an age of the universe of 14 billion years. It's probably a "concordance model" flat universe with 0.3 of the closure density coming from matter and the rest from the cosmological constant, with a Hubble constant around 65-70 km/s/Mpc.
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Segfault had a classic article about the First Annual Readable Perl Contest about a year ago... :-)=
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Sims and Civs were definitely what leapt to mind for me. Devastatingly addictive, so they won't complain about being bored. Not violent (certainly not in an FPS way, in any case... you let them play Risk? You'll let them play Civ). They'll spend a long time strategizing. Great combination!
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208.48.26.212 www.nytimes.com
Enjoy.
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I've got to disagree there. I wouldn't be offended by a $10 cheque, but I would be by a case of Coors. ;-)
Or... if you like the project, send a case of Coors. If you really like the project, send half a case of Coors. ;-)
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It occurs to me...
/.. And let's say you're a Linux zealot. but I repeat myself. ;-)
/. Linux zealot might wish for in their wildest dreams. I don't necessarily think the original CR was written by one, but I wouldn't be surprised if the more virulant strains were/are/will be.
Let's say you read
I've seen the sentiment expressed here before that the only way to drive into the world's consciousness that MS make shoddy products is for a massive vulnerability to hit everyone really badly. For a large number of people to lose data because of a major flaw in an MS product.
Now I see speculation of CR IV (or whatever number version you want to call it) that collects IP addresses of CR II compromised machines from all attempts on its own machine and uses the root script to run "format c:" on each of them. It doesn't exist yet... but will it? I'm sure. Probably even before CRI goes dormant next weekend.
This looks suspiciously like what an unscrupulous
If you're reading this and you're thinking about this is a suggestion, please don't. Lost or corrupt data is a scourge. The tech industry is having enough problems right now as it is without needing to deal with massive data loss. MS's PR so far has been doing an admirable job of damage control, but the last few mainstream articles I've read have stopped referring to it as an Internet problem and started referring to it as an IIS problem. Sufficient damage has already been done to MS. Don't make the situation any worse.
[TMB]
Which club? I used to know a lot of the Pittsburgh goth scene before they all up and moved away...
:-)=
I'm going to have to check in again at 1h just to see if I know anyone.
[TMB]
Sure it pisses them off. So they call you up and say "Why can't I access the web?". And you look up their ISP and say "Because your computer is infected with a worm that is taking up significant bandwidth and trying to infect other computers to do the same. If you fix that, we'll let you surf the web again."
At least if they're pissed off, they'll go and get the fix so they can surf to their pr0n again.
[TMB]
No, the second is closer to the truth. It's the same reason why companies can't buy a residential phone line. The vast majority of people who want to run servers want to do it for commercial reasons. And therefore have money to pay for a more expensive connection than cheap broadband. By forbidding the use of servers on the residential cable/DSL service, they force all the companies to use the (more expensive) business services. Voila, more money for them, and the only people who get screwed are the relatively small number of us who are poor individuals but who want to run services on priveleged ports on our home boxen.
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Hey, under this law anyone who spams someone at a computer account in a school will get 10 years jail time! I knew there had to be some redeeming feature to it... ;-)
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They probably renamed it to reduce complaints about the mine fscking around all the time. ;-)
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"No, I'm just fingering my server." ;-)
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Crit has been around for a long time and is still going.
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From the SFC article:
It preys on people who are into using computers but don't know what they're doing. As much as I think these things and MicroSoftSmartOverUseOfCapitaliZationTags are evil, it does sound like a group of people waiting to be taken advantage of. I have trouble working up a lot of sympathy for an argument that analogizes well to "Those cops who give you fines for going through red lights are preying on us people who are into using cars, but not so automotively savvy that we know what we're doing."
As for its legality... as underhanded as it may be, it's probably legal. A piece of software you chose to install (though perhaps not realizing at the time that that was what you were doing) on your computer is adding a new function (though not one you necessarily want) to the way you browse the web. Functionally, it's pretty similar to JunkBuster.
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I'd be a lot more likely to sign that declaration if there weren't myriad grammatical mistakes in it. Did no one proof it? Did the 9000+ signatories read it thoroughly? :-b
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Non-government compulsary license for music would not be a new concept. That's how radio stations function.
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Judge Patel is a woman.
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Yes and no. They purposely phrase it such that you realize that many of the DLLs will still be there. Why do you think they say you can remove "end-user access to the Internet Explorer components of the operating system" instead of saying you can remove "Internet Explorer"? They've implied that all you're doing is removing the ability to run the browser. But the browser's code will still be there. So if it's already taking up hard drive space, why would you remove functionality by forcing yourself to not be able to run the browser?
:-(
It will be interesting to test out exactly what gets removed and how much disk space is freed up. I'm going to guess it's a lot less than you'd naively expect from "removing IE".
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(nice try)
No, not witty quips. Purposely bad quips. From the canada.com article: "The tiny dog formed the basis of her winning entry Monday in the 20th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - given to the writer who can come up with the worst beginning to an imaginary novel."
It's named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who really did start off a novel (Paul Clifford) with the line "It was a dark and stormy night".
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Probably because we're not convinced that the lockout works properly on the GRAPE5s. I know it works well on the GRAPE3, but VE and MS have done some tests on the GRAPE5 where they've tried hammering it with 2 different jobs, and the results haven't been kosher.
Anyone have experience with GRAPE5 and notice this? Anything that could be changed in the API? I suppose we could write a wrapper around the g5_open and g5_close calls that does additional locking, but that seems inelegant.
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Hi Doug! :-)=
Just a clarification:
The boards themselves don't do the SPH calculations. What they do is return neighbour lists for each particle, which reduces the load necessary to compute the hydro forces.
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As a matter of fact, my advisor (who's at that conference - leaving me back here to play with my new laptop while my workstation analyzes simulations for me) has one. Just 4 nodes with one board each for now to get the code working, but will be scaled up when we're confident in the code. :-)=
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