Do the Slashdot editors really need to call it News.com.com.com when it's clearly news.com.com (or just type news.com in the bloomin' browser...). The joke was funny, once, but now it's wearing a little thin. So CNET owns com.com. Big deal. Slashdot still wins the award for most unpronounceable web address! (Also, before you moderate, this comment is not offtopic...)
Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it's lossless. The pictures (no matter how snazzy they look) are intended for scientific research. There wouldn't be much point spending millions on optics to ruin pictures with decompression artefacts.
As for the actual encoding -- considering the article states that the cameras don't work like normal cameras and instead red, green, blue components are built up separately -- I'd say it's something NASA cooked up just for these probes.
Now that I have RTFA, I see that Eugenia herself didn't write it (I don't bother to look any more since OSNews seems to be a one-woman show most of the time), but my point about POSIX and the results under Windows stand. As an aside, I wonder how Mono would perform?
That's a good question, and I'd like to find out the reason. Is it possible that they're using different methods to compute the functions? There are several ways you can compute trig values, such as using taylor series approximations (e.g. sin(x) = x + x^3/3! + x^5/5! + x^7/7!...) or complex exponentials (sin(x) = (e^(jx) - e^(-jx))/(2j) ). I don't know which method is generally accepted as best for computer calculations. Maybe Java computes the approximations in Java code while in the CLR the function that actually computes sin(x) is unmanaged assembly code. I don't know.
I see once again that Eugenia (a supposed pro-Linux pro-BeOS person who doesn't use Windows) has done all her benchmarks [i]under[/i] Windows. I have a feeling that Python would perform a lot better if it was running in a proper POSIX environment (linked against Linux's libraries instead of the Cygwin libs). Probably the C code compiled with GCC would perform a fair bit better too.
Many GUI or web-based interfaces don't require the ";". The projects I've worked on haven't ever requried anything more serious than MySQL or Postgres, for which I generally employ PHPMyAdmin or PHPPgAdmin.
I've done similarly stupid things when trying to fix live databases. Typing in things like "DELETE FROM accounts", then switching to another screen to find the account details, switching back, and watching in horror as the query executes without giving me the chance to enter "WHERE account_id = 184"....
Your "intuitiveness" about MDI applications is false intuitiveness brought on by using too much Windows software. MDI applications are horrendous for inexperienced users, and even Microsoft tried to phase them out (witness Word 2000). Macs and most X windows toolkits don't even have them. Tabbed user interfaces are generally considered better (but aren't great).
You know, I'm sure this story is a dupe, and I'm sure I've seen it before, but nonetheless, it's still pretty darned amazing to see the universe like that. The number of times you have to zoom out to see the Galaxy from the roof of the laboratory shows you just how small we really are. No wonder we haven't met any extraterrestrials yet, our society, our entire civilisation has literally no impact on even our own solar system, let alone anything further out. Definitely puts my 10AM deadline in to perspective.
For people interested primarily in astronomy, there's a similar thing here which gives a count of the number of stars at different zoom levels. Interestingly, there are only 33 stars within 12.5ly, but there are 250,000 within 250ly. I don't think that sort of distance will be beyond us in a few centuries, if we get our act together. That's an awful lot of exploring to do...
As a sidenote, I would have loved to be the undergraduate student with the digital camera who got that assignment for his final year project!
Unfortunately this is job-unfriendly unless you happen to be on flexitime. With my previous employer, which was a small company that didn't care when you turned up provided you worked X hours a week at home or in the office, I could and did try the 25-hour-a-day thing. Didn't work well for me, but I know others who have seen benefits. Now I have a 9-4 job, there's no fookin chance!
Gets progressively louder until snoozed. Starts louder with each successive snooze.
Not quite, but the bleep noise is painful and they get more and more frequent until you shut the damned thing off.
Max volume slightly painful, but not physiologically dangerous. An air compressor and train whistle is probably overkill.
See above.
Easy to snooze, but hard to accidentally turn off completely. Bonus points if turning it off means being cognizant enough to operate a screwdriver or tool of some kind.
Snooze = hit the thing on the top, turn off = small button not easily found in the dark. The thing has two separate alarms, I usually set one about 30 minutes after the first.
Snooze time gets geometrically shorter each iteration (e.g., half as long as the previous) so that there's a maximum total snooze time that can be approached assymptotically.
Not quite that complicated, but since it has two alarms, you can set one after the other (see above), so if you space them sensibly you can approximate this equation;).
Has battery backup so that it will operate during a power outage, at least to keep time. (I _could_ just stick it on the UPS, but do I really want to spend a UPS outlet for an alarm clock?) This is a feature my current clock has (takes a nine-volt battery), but even better would be a rechargeable that will even operate the alarm during a power outage.
It's battery operated.
Has some kind of cool feature with geek appeal -- but not binary time display; I need to be able to read the time when mostly asleep.
It projects the time on to a surface (such as your wall or roof) with big red numbers. If you focus it properly, and make it sufficiently far away so that it's nice and big, I can see and read the time despite being nastily shortsighted.
Not sure what you mean. It could well be GNOME, but I would have thought an entire desktop environment would be slight overkill for machines that spend their days doing the same thing over and over again. These are work machines, after all, not home desktops. Also NASA is on a budget, and probably doesn't replace machines as frequently as you or I. Newer desktop environments choke on older hardware, but a basic X server with a lightweight window manager will work very well indeed.
Windows (with a capital W) generally refers to Microsoft Windows... I have no idea whether they have a trademark on the term or whether it's too generic.
X Windows is what everbody seems to incorrectly call the X Windowing System. If you want to abbreviate, call it X, or call it by the name of the server actually being used, e.g. XFree.
In the late 80s, when we said "it's using windows" with a small 'W', we'd mean it's using any WIMP (windows, icons, mouse & pointer) system, such as Mac OS, X, early MS Windows, whatever.
No I don't think this works at all. In the absence of repugnant EULA agreements from certain companies like Microsoft I can modify and combine software however I want on my own machine to suit my own needs. The GPL doesn't say you must make the source code available if you modify, it says you must make the source code available if you distribute. I can (and do) modify GPL and LGPL software to suit my needs on my own machine without any intention of ever redistributing these modifications, mostly because they're silly and complete messes (for example I've hacked various bits of GNOME's panel system to suit my own needs, such as removing the "Actions" menu from the Foobar).
Hence if I take commercial GTK applications and GPL'd GTK applications and commercial QT applications and GPL'd QT applications and install them on my own machine, I can install whatever the heck I like to change and/or modify their behaviours at runtime. This themeing engine doesn't have licensing issues at all.
CF already is ahead of its competitors in terms of cents per megabyte. This is largely because it's physically bigger, I guess. Too big for a lot of handhelds and smartphones, which tend to go for something smaller these days like SD/MMC.
Who cares what format is "top" anyway? Provided the cards are still made by a large number of people and supported by lots of companies and hence are at a reasonable price (I'm talking to you, Sony Memory Stick!) a few million in sales one way or the other doesn't really matter, does it?
Just for reference, The NPD Group reckons SD has 30% of the market, CF has 28.8% and MemoryStick has 22%, in the United States.
You guys do know that getting the KBE is completely different to becoming a Knight and being called "Sir", don't you? I couldn't care less (down with the Monarchy), but if you really want to know the BBC explains it all as usual.
No offense but I wouldn't want to try passing you in the fast lane! Various governments are banning mobile phones whilst driving for a reason, God knows what a distraction a PC running Linux would be for a driver!
Officer: Sir, could you please explain how you managed to swerve across three lanes of traffic in the rush hour?!
Me: Of course! I was just trying to reload my kernel radio transmitter driver so I could continue listening to "Life in the Fastlane". Do you know how difficult typing "rmmod...; modprobe...; xmms" whilst driving at 55?!
Officer: Step out of the vehicle please...
Me: I would if I could but it looks like my Linux-powered central locking has just segfaulted...
I'm sure there's some truth in this rumor, but isn't it possible that some "hack journalist" at the Evening Standard read these rumors (maybe even at Slashdot, if so HI!) and is just giving them more credence than they should receive so he or she scores "a scoop". It wouldn't be the first time a journo has been duped in this manner!
when did it happen before this that we had so many probes heading on the same planet?
Despite the failure rate, it's a sign that unmanned flight to the red planet is becoming routine. Any nation can do it, even if they don't have a great deal of spacefairing experience (e.g. Britain, the ESA). Hence countries seeking a challenge might want to go further to avoid the "yet another Mars probe" view the public is developing. Hopefully a manned mission isn't too far away.
If you honestly think the government can't and don't watch anything we do whenever they like, you're being naieve. At least with these monitoring systems being public knowledge we can avoid being arrested under terrorism legislation for accidentally browsing on to www.gov.ch and clicking "Communism".
Well, circumnavigation around the equator should be fairly easy to calculate since they get 12 hours of daylight pretty much the whole year around.
Obviously the team will need to compensate for when it's going to be day or night, but this won't be hard. Though I doubt the thing will fly around the globe in 24 hours - most likely it'll have rechargable batteries for the nighttime.
Slashdot Mirror
Do the Slashdot editors really need to call it News.com.com.com when it's clearly news.com.com (or just type news.com in the bloomin' browser...). The joke was funny, once, but now it's wearing a little thin. So CNET owns com.com. Big deal. Slashdot still wins the award for most unpronounceable web address! (Also, before you moderate, this comment is not offtopic...)
Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it's lossless. The pictures (no matter how snazzy they look) are intended for scientific research. There wouldn't be much point spending millions on optics to ruin pictures with decompression artefacts.
As for the actual encoding -- considering the article states that the cameras don't work like normal cameras and instead red, green, blue components are built up separately -- I'd say it's something NASA cooked up just for these probes.
Now that I have RTFA, I see that Eugenia herself didn't write it (I don't bother to look any more since OSNews seems to be a one-woman show most of the time), but my point about POSIX and the results under Windows stand. As an aside, I wonder how Mono would perform?
That's a good question, and I'd like to find out the reason. Is it possible that they're using different methods to compute the functions? There are several ways you can compute trig values, such as using taylor series approximations (e.g. sin(x) = x + x^3/3! + x^5/5! + x^7/7!...) or complex exponentials (sin(x) = (e^(jx) - e^(-jx))/(2j) ). I don't know which method is generally accepted as best for computer calculations. Maybe Java computes the approximations in Java code while in the CLR the function that actually computes sin(x) is unmanaged assembly code. I don't know.
I see once again that Eugenia (a supposed pro-Linux pro-BeOS person who doesn't use Windows) has done all her benchmarks [i]under[/i] Windows. I have a feeling that Python would perform a lot better if it was running in a proper POSIX environment (linked against Linux's libraries instead of the Cygwin libs). Probably the C code compiled with GCC would perform a fair bit better too.
Many GUI or web-based interfaces don't require the ";". The projects I've worked on haven't ever requried anything more serious than MySQL or Postgres, for which I generally employ PHPMyAdmin or PHPPgAdmin.
I've done similarly stupid things when trying to fix live databases. Typing in things like "DELETE FROM accounts", then switching to another screen to find the account details, switching back, and watching in horror as the query executes without giving me the chance to enter "WHERE account_id = 184"....
Your "intuitiveness" about MDI applications is false intuitiveness brought on by using too much Windows software. MDI applications are horrendous for inexperienced users, and even Microsoft tried to phase them out (witness Word 2000). Macs and most X windows toolkits don't even have them. Tabbed user interfaces are generally considered better (but aren't great).
Windowshade, I believe.
You know, I'm sure this story is a dupe, and I'm sure I've seen it before, but nonetheless, it's still pretty darned amazing to see the universe like that. The number of times you have to zoom out to see the Galaxy from the roof of the laboratory shows you just how small we really are. No wonder we haven't met any extraterrestrials yet, our society, our entire civilisation has literally no impact on even our own solar system, let alone anything further out. Definitely puts my 10AM deadline in to perspective.
For people interested primarily in astronomy, there's a similar thing here which gives a count of the number of stars at different zoom levels. Interestingly, there are only 33 stars within 12.5ly, but there are 250,000 within 250ly. I don't think that sort of distance will be beyond us in a few centuries, if we get our act together. That's an awful lot of exploring to do...
As a sidenote, I would have loved to be the undergraduate student with the digital camera who got that assignment for his final year project!
Unfortunately this is job-unfriendly unless you happen to be on flexitime. With my previous employer, which was a small company that didn't care when you turned up provided you worked X hours a week at home or in the office, I could and did try the 25-hour-a-day thing. Didn't work well for me, but I know others who have seen benefits. Now I have a 9-4 job, there's no fookin chance!
Not sure what you mean. It could well be GNOME, but I would have thought an entire desktop environment would be slight overkill for machines that spend their days doing the same thing over and over again. These are work machines, after all, not home desktops. Also NASA is on a budget, and probably doesn't replace machines as frequently as you or I. Newer desktop environments choke on older hardware, but a basic X server with a lightweight window manager will work very well indeed.
Windows (with a capital W) generally refers to Microsoft Windows... I have no idea whether they have a trademark on the term or whether it's too generic.
X Windows is what everbody seems to incorrectly call the X Windowing System. If you want to abbreviate, call it X, or call it by the name of the server actually being used, e.g. XFree.
In the late 80s, when we said "it's using windows" with a small 'W', we'd mean it's using any WIMP (windows, icons, mouse & pointer) system, such as Mac OS, X, early MS Windows, whatever.
No I don't think this works at all. In the absence of repugnant EULA agreements from certain companies like Microsoft I can modify and combine software however I want on my own machine to suit my own needs. The GPL doesn't say you must make the source code available if you modify, it says you must make the source code available if you distribute. I can (and do) modify GPL and LGPL software to suit my needs on my own machine without any intention of ever redistributing these modifications, mostly because they're silly and complete messes (for example I've hacked various bits of GNOME's panel system to suit my own needs, such as removing the "Actions" menu from the Foobar).
Hence if I take commercial GTK applications and GPL'd GTK applications and commercial QT applications and GPL'd QT applications and install them on my own machine, I can install whatever the heck I like to change and/or modify their behaviours at runtime. This themeing engine doesn't have licensing issues at all.
None of them. It's probably an X server with some lightweight window manager they've been using since the 80s.
CF already is ahead of its competitors in terms of cents per megabyte. This is largely because it's physically bigger, I guess. Too big for a lot of handhelds and smartphones, which tend to go for something smaller these days like SD/MMC.
Who cares what format is "top" anyway? Provided the cards are still made by a large number of people and supported by lots of companies and hence are at a reasonable price (I'm talking to you, Sony Memory Stick!) a few million in sales one way or the other doesn't really matter, does it?
Just for reference, The NPD Group reckons SD has 30% of the market, CF has 28.8% and MemoryStick has 22%, in the United States.
... and here's the actual link I failed to put into my original post.
You guys do know that getting the KBE is completely different to becoming a Knight and being called "Sir", don't you? I couldn't care less (down with the Monarchy), but if you really want to know the BBC explains it all as usual.
No offense but I wouldn't want to try passing you in the fast lane! Various governments are banning mobile phones whilst driving for a reason, God knows what a distraction a PC running Linux would be for a driver!
...; modprobe ...; xmms" whilst driving at 55?!
Officer: Sir, could you please explain how you managed to swerve across three lanes of traffic in the rush hour?!
Me: Of course! I was just trying to reload my kernel radio transmitter driver so I could continue listening to "Life in the Fastlane". Do you know how difficult typing "rmmod
Officer: Step out of the vehicle please...
Me: I would if I could but it looks like my Linux-powered central locking has just segfaulted...
I'm sure there's some truth in this rumor, but isn't it possible that some "hack journalist" at the Evening Standard read these rumors (maybe even at Slashdot, if so HI!) and is just giving them more credence than they should receive so he or she scores "a scoop". It wouldn't be the first time a journo has been duped in this manner!
If you honestly think the government can't and don't watch anything we do whenever they like, you're being naieve. At least with these monitoring systems being public knowledge we can avoid being arrested under terrorism legislation for accidentally browsing on to www.gov.ch and clicking "Communism".
No, last week^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HOceania has been our friend and ally for many years.
Well, circumnavigation around the equator should be fairly easy to calculate since they get 12 hours of daylight pretty much the whole year around.
Obviously the team will need to compensate for when it's going to be day or night, but this won't be hard. Though I doubt the thing will fly around the globe in 24 hours - most likely it'll have rechargable batteries for the nighttime.