Around 1 mbps, but with *huge* round-trip times (over 1000 ms). Additionally, geosync sats are below the horizon (their coverage is only from ~80N-80S and nobody else in the world lives between 80-90), so they have to use deprecated sats that aren't in the "groove" anymore, Iridium sats, and NASA's TDRSS network. Those old sats and the TDRSS birds are only above the horizon for a few hours at a time, but Iridium is a full constellation, providing 24/7 coverage. The costs are such that Iridium is used for textual emails when the other sats are not visible (there's a filter on the mail server and messages of a few K bytes are pushed over the Iridium equivalent of SMS via several modems in parallel) but the phone bill would be too expensive for megabit service 24/7.
I also worked for UW between 2003-2009, for the same department, and was on the other end of those racks (among other things, I spec'ed out and ordered the individual shipping crates for the HP servers), and installed equipment, and ran the detector for two winters. If Gherald's immediate boss was Australian, we worked for the same guy. I mention the dates because over that time frame, while I was there, the drive mechanism on the 10m comms dish broke multiple times (which affected bandwidth and uptime because they couldn't track on the sats), two birds were splashed (MARISAT-2 and one of the oldest TDRSS birds) and one reallocated by the DoD (LES9). We had wild flucuations of how many hours per day we were online, sometimes as little as 2-3, sometimes as much as 10-11.
The previous record is a matter of record: +7.5F in December, 1978. A few summers ago, we had a very warm week and we hit +7.0F in the middle of several days of above-zero temps. While I'm not a Global Warming denier by any means, the specific cause of these record and near-record temps is weather - specifically large masses of warm(er) air coming in from the coast.
Normally, the weather at Pole is so predictable it follows a simple pie chart hanging up in the Meteorology office - the chart divides the wind direction into dominant categories such that you can look at the reading from the wind vanes and make a pretty good prediction of the present and impending weather (mostly, winds out of Grid North bring in clearer and drier air; winds out of Grid West are warmer and moister; and winds out of Grid South are infrequent and bring unsettled conditions). This is in part because most of the time, the air movement is katabatic, meaning it's rolling downhill, and the terrain around Pole favors winds from Grid North. While thermally-induced winds are not unknown, they aren't the dominant force. It takes a lot of energy to disrupt the usual patterns; that's part of what "Global Warming" means - the entire atmosphere has more (thermal) energy, so there's more available force to create disruptions on a global scale.
Apparently, according to her own words, Renee is already acclimated at about 10,000 feet. Wikipedia confirms that Amundsen-Scott station is at an altitude of 9,301 feet.
That's the GPS altitude, but the density altitude (because of the low temperature of the air) fluctuates between about 9300 feet and 14,000 feet (approx 630 millibars to just over 700 millibars), hovering in the 10K-11K range most of the time.
You can't just strap skis on a C-130 and make it into an LC-130 - it's a different plane, structurally. For a C-130, the gear is retractable; on an LC-130, the gear is fixed and the skis go up and down around the tires, allowing it to land on snow or hard surfaces on any flight.
The differences start at the keel. They have the same exterior shape, but internally, the LC-130 and C-130 aren't identical and aren't convertible.
Twin Otters and Baslers (stretched DC-3s) have strap-on skis. For Antarctic operations, they land at Rothera Station on gravel, are towed to snow, and are equipped in the field with skis and spend the entire summer landing on snow. At the end of the summer, they do the process in reverse, occasionally passing through Pole a day or two after the last LC-130 flight in mid-February.
That landing was at McMurdo, on an Ice runway. The C-17 has made airdrops to Pole (summer and winter), but it can't land there.
And years before that C-17 landing, they landed a Twin Otter at Pole in April, weeks into winter darkness. The "first" was the night vision goggles, not the landing in the dark. In any case, the sun has been up at Pole for two weeks. It's about temps and visibility and has been since 4 weeks after her stroke.
And -50F in the original article is incorrect. It's -50C / -65F that's the floor for LC-130 ops. Between 15 Oct and 1 Nov, the temp at Pole hovers right around there. It's been ordinary over the past 15 years to schedule station opening before 1 Nov and it's also ordinary to have issues right up to Halloween.
The problem is that the C-17's have wheels. Unless things have changed recently, Amundsen only has a snow field, not an ice runway like McMurdo. Landing anything other than a twin-otter or LC-130...
Another issue is that the LC-130 doesn't have the legs to make CHC-Amundsen-CHC non-stop. Therefore, it has to land at McMurdo at least once. That means that the weather has to be agreeable to allow the mission to happen (putting aside the issues with fuel jelling and gasket failure at the Amundsen temperatures). In early October, some days the weather at McMurdo is good, but it's not the rule. Nasty storms this time of year.
Pole still has a packed-snow skifield. No jets, no tires. Skis only. That means an LC-130 or Twin Otter (as you mention) or a Basler BT-67 (upgraded and stretched DC-3). Of the three, only the LC-130 is pressurized, and, yes, Hercs have a 9-10-hour flight range, so it uses one load of fuel to get from CHC to McMurdo (9.5 hrs), then another to get from McMurdo to Pole and back to McMurdo (6-7 hrs). They'd use a C-17 for the McMurdo-to-CHC return this time of year - it's faster and roomier for all involved (faster matters double because you have to have good weather at the flight endpoints throughout the flight in case you have to abort-to-departure, or "boomerang"). There's also the requirement for an additional plane on standby in case it has to be sent out for Search-and-Rescue if the first plane goes down. They never operate only one LC-130 at a time. There have to be two or perhaps three present and functional to launch the primary mission.
The issue with temps below -50C is more about seals and gaskets than gelled fuel. They got a waiver in 2004 to open the station with LC-130s at -57C. I watched as one of the planes taxied back from an aborted take-off and spent 3 hours in the pit cycling its engines. They did eventually take off and arrive at McMurdo successfully, but after that incident, the Air Guard became unwilling to operate the planes when the ground temps at Pole were below -50C (and in 2005, I watched the third station-opening flight turn back because it got too cold between #2 and #3. It was 6 days and two more attempts before it returned). In 2006, station opening was delayed 10 days due to weather (visibility or temps - ISTR it varied from day to day).
I've wintered at Pole multiple times. It's a very different place than Troll or McMurdo. The coldest coastal temps are like a warm October or February day at Pole. It's not practical to deploy electric cables in those temps (80F to -100F late in the winter and into sunrise). For airdrops (and the April, 2001, medevac via Twin Otter), they use "burn barrels" to mark out the skiway.
Wind and visibility is indeed an important factor, though unlike a hard-surface runway, you don't clear the snow off of the skiway so much as grade and shape the snow pack so the skis don't sink in. They have limited equipment and limited qualified personnel in the winter (usually 1-3 people) and it takes weeks to take the skiway from mid-winter conditions to ready-for-station-opening condition, and one storm can demolish a week's work.
I'm not there this year and can't comment on specific issues with Renee's situation. Once the Winter is over. I'm sure we'll hear more about how things got to this point, but right now, from 10,000 miles away, our speculation here can't possibly be based on enough facts to be remotely viable.
I worked in the same building in 03/04 and 05/06, though the last few months it was just to clear stuff before they demolished it. The commute from my room upstairs was nice and short - a bonus.
As cramped as it was, it was still great to work there.
Having done so several times, yes, between about late-October/early-November and mid-February, you can "just fly" to the South Pole. The trip can take as little as 5 days, but 8-10 days is more ordinary. I've been around for periods in the summer where nothing came and went from McMurdo (the logistics hub at the coast, and one node on the trip) for 10 days in a row (and that's not the record).
So for 1/3 of the year, you can get on a succession of airplanes and, weather permitting, get to the Pole in 1-2 weeks. For 2/3 of the year, it's a major, major undertaking to get there (try landing a plane at -85F in the dark... they did that in April, 2001; the other "mid-winter rescues" were after the sun was up but before the regular summer season started).
Even once you are there, it's not exactly a stroll in the park - the data center is a hike out from the main station (15 minutes when it's light, a lot longer in the dark). Yes, we walk. In the winter it gets too cold for weeks at a time to safely operate machinery (below -60F it had better be important, below -85F it had better be an emergency).
Not all the neutrinos, just nearly all. The moon is large enough to catch a statistically discernible (to IceCube) amount of neutrinos, casting a "neutrino shadow" on the Earth.
But that's what it sees - the sensors point at the Earth and the filter software discards muon events that track from the sky, keeping events that come from underneath since muons coming from the Northern Hemisphere decay long before they can reach the detector. Neutrinos survive passing through thousands of miles of rock, so if it comes from the middle of the Earth, it's a neutrino. If it comes from the sky, it could be a neutrino, but chances are, it's a muon.
Check that cable before you assume anything - telephone cable is frequently Cat3, not Cat5 - 10Mbps, not 100Mbps (if you can't find "Cat-anything" on the jacket, it's just about guaranteed to be no better than Cat3). On top of that, household phone wiring topology is room-to-room daisychain, with multiple legs tied back to a common point before going to the demarcation point. Nothing like endpoint-to-endpoint-with-no-branches-or-spurs UTP topology.
You can violate many physical network standards if your runs are short enough. Just don't expect it to be robust.
I used to work in the department that created the software that billed those rebate customers if they did happen to cancel early.
Some of us were creating content back then
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 1
While I accept that most folks in 1996 did spend 30 minutes a day or less and had dial-up and used AOL, most is not all. I published my first web page in March, 1995, but the oldest copy of my 'homepage' I can find on archive.org is from October, 1996, archived December, 1996.
As for "blogging", I was writing about my day-to-day experiences starting from the day I put up those webpages 14 years ago. It's all still online, along with newer stuff.
I'm curious which one you got and how easy it is to control via the USB port. Someone else here already mentioned LCDproc (which is included in Debian, at least, and is easy to get for other distros and OSes). I'm guessing there isn't already a driver for it, but one of the aims of LCDproc is to make it easy to write drivers for.
Once you have something like LCDproc talking to your device, it's easy to write client programs in Perl or Python or any language that can open a socket and keep it open and have the client programs do what you want. I have written Perl clients to monitor work processes, keep me updated on current weather conditions, what's playing on xmms, the time of day in multiple timezones, etc.
Since the OP merely mentioned "old formats", it would, perhaps, be helpful for the OP to have mentioned a sampling of what sorts of media formats he was interested in.
I am not aware of any USB-attached 5.25" or 8" drives on the market, and that is only two of the dominant physical formats of the past 30 years. Within that scope alone, there are many, many logical formats, FM, MFM, and GCR being the most common encoding methods, not to mention a myriad of filesystems. It's difficult (impossible?) to find FM support for any commodity motherboard with an onboard floppy controller. It's much simpler if you are allowed to reach back to the ISA days and select a suitable floppy controller card.
It's possible to cobble up an ISA PC that can support a wide variety of floppy media, but there were so many tricky ways of talking to floppies in the pre-IBM-PC era that it would be a challenge to support more than 95% of all floppy formats without something like a Catweasel controller (Amiga, Mac 400K/800K, Commodore 2040/4040/2031/1541/1571/8050/8250/etc/etc)
So, again, depending on how "old" one cares to get, there are many varieties of removable 14"-diameter hard drive media that are very, very difficult to read without contemporary CPUs and controllers - just in the DEC line alone, there's RK01, RK05, RL01, and RL02 single-platter media; RK06 and RK07 double-platter media; RM03, RM05, RP04, RP06, RA60, and more, multi-platter media; and that's not counting smaller removable media (RC25) or 3rd-party disks that were common in the day.
1/2" magtape has fewer variations - 9-track being the most common for the 1980s and beyond (in various densities from 800 bpi to 6250 bpi), but 7-track was once dominant, and now difficult to find working transports for. Fortunately, it's still somewhat easy to find a SCSI-interfaced 9-track drive that reads/writes 1600 and 6250 bpi. 800 bpi support is somewhat rarer.
Fortunately, papertape and punched cards aren't as diverse as disk packs - but there's 5-level and 8-level 1" papertape, and several varieties of punched card (both number and shape of the punched holes as well as character set, but at least character set variations can be handled in software once you get the pattern of the punched holes, however many columns, into memory).
And, yes, in case you were wondering, I can read and write most of the formats I've described, though not with PC hardware.
Three or four of the old markers are still on the old poles and can be seen and photographed by anyone here. The ones older than that are in a display case in the entrance hallway of the new station, along with some other artifacts from the past few decades here.
It's more than just cold and windy in the winter. The temperature floor for an LC-130 (C-130 with skis) is -50C. Even in the summer, they don't land when it's colder than that. The various hydraulic systems (including the ski-retraction mechanism) don't work well when it's too cold. As for "leaving the engines running", they do that in the summer.
To come down here in the middle of winter, they would do what they did in April, 2001 for a medevac of a different doctor, send a Twin Otter from Canada. It has a shorter range than an LC-130, so it has to fly down the Americas, hop over to Antarctica at the Drake Passage, refuel and switch from tires to skis at Rothera Base, then fly to Pole and refuel here. They do that at the beginning of every season, then reverse it to go home.
The situation you mention was in 1999, and involved an air-drop of supplies from a C-141, then a C-130 showing up about two weeks early, in mid-October, weeks after the sun rose. The Twin Otter medevac was in full dark and around -80F.
All that being said, yes, it is difficult, and it is risky. It had better be a matter of life or death to bring a plane here between late February and early October. If the station did blow up, and there were no immediate life-threatening injuries, there are plans to be able to survive for weeks/months in either the B-wing of the new station (it can be split in half for a catastrophic fire in the A-wing) or in other buildings that can be heated without depending on the main power plant. The winter crews are large enough that it would take five or six Twin Otter flights to evacuate the station. That would be incredibly tricky to accomplish. An air-drop would be orders of magnitude easier, especially since until 1995, they used to do that every winter.
There is only one Geographic South Pole, but the sign now has the legend on both sides. One side faces the station, the other side faces away, with a view of, essentially, the polar plateau in the general direction of the departure-end of the skiway.
Also, from looking at the Pole markers in each picture (we get a new one every January), it looks to me as if the #1 shot was taken in either March, 2004 (around sunset) or September, 2004 (around sunrise), and the #7 shot was taken this summer season, sometime since mid-October, 2007. If the #7 picture were high enough resolution, you could see my signature on the aluminum plate on the Pole itself.
Slashdot Mirror
"Intel Security" was chosen because Batshit-crazy Security was already taken.
Around 1 mbps, but with *huge* round-trip times (over 1000 ms). Additionally, geosync sats are below the horizon (their coverage is only from ~80N-80S and nobody else in the world lives between 80-90), so they have to use deprecated sats that aren't in the "groove" anymore, Iridium sats, and NASA's TDRSS network. Those old sats and the TDRSS birds are only above the horizon for a few hours at a time, but Iridium is a full constellation, providing 24/7 coverage. The costs are such that Iridium is used for textual emails when the other sats are not visible (there's a filter on the mail server and messages of a few K bytes are pushed over the Iridium equivalent of SMS via several modems in parallel) but the phone bill would be too expensive for megabit service 24/7.
I also worked for UW between 2003-2009, for the same department, and was on the other end of those racks (among other things, I spec'ed out and ordered the individual shipping crates for the HP servers), and installed equipment, and ran the detector for two winters. If Gherald's immediate boss was Australian, we worked for the same guy. I mention the dates because over that time frame, while I was there, the drive mechanism on the 10m comms dish broke multiple times (which affected bandwidth and uptime because they couldn't track on the sats), two birds were splashed (MARISAT-2 and one of the oldest TDRSS birds) and one reallocated by the DoD (LES9). We had wild flucuations of how many hours per day we were online, sometimes as little as 2-3, sometimes as much as 10-11.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040921&mode=classic
The previous record is a matter of record: +7.5F in December, 1978. A few summers ago, we had a very warm week and we hit +7.0F in the middle of several days of above-zero temps. While I'm not a Global Warming denier by any means, the specific cause of these record and near-record temps is weather - specifically large masses of warm(er) air coming in from the coast.
Normally, the weather at Pole is so predictable it follows a simple pie chart hanging up in the Meteorology office - the chart divides the wind direction into dominant categories such that you can look at the reading from the wind vanes and make a pretty good prediction of the present and impending weather (mostly, winds out of Grid North bring in clearer and drier air; winds out of Grid West are warmer and moister; and winds out of Grid South are infrequent and bring unsettled conditions). This is in part because most of the time, the air movement is katabatic, meaning it's rolling downhill, and the terrain around Pole favors winds from Grid North. While thermally-induced winds are not unknown, they aren't the dominant force. It takes a lot of energy to disrupt the usual patterns; that's part of what "Global Warming" means - the entire atmosphere has more (thermal) energy, so there's more available force to create disruptions on a global scale.
Apparently, according to her own words, Renee is already acclimated at about 10,000 feet. Wikipedia confirms that Amundsen-Scott station is at an altitude of 9,301 feet.
That's the GPS altitude, but the density altitude (because of the low temperature of the air) fluctuates between about 9300 feet and 14,000 feet (approx 630 millibars to just over 700 millibars), hovering in the 10K-11K range most of the time.
You can't just strap skis on a C-130 and make it into an LC-130 - it's a different plane, structurally. For a C-130, the gear is retractable; on an LC-130, the gear is fixed and the skis go up and down around the tires, allowing it to land on snow or hard surfaces on any flight.
The differences start at the keel. They have the same exterior shape, but internally, the LC-130 and C-130 aren't identical and aren't convertible.
Twin Otters and Baslers (stretched DC-3s) have strap-on skis. For Antarctic operations, they land at Rothera Station on gravel, are towed to snow, and are equipped in the field with skis and spend the entire summer landing on snow. At the end of the summer, they do the process in reverse, occasionally passing through Pole a day or two after the last LC-130 flight in mid-February.
That landing was at McMurdo, on an Ice runway. The C-17 has made airdrops to Pole (summer and winter), but it can't land there.
And years before that C-17 landing, they landed a Twin Otter at Pole in April, weeks into winter darkness. The "first" was the night vision goggles, not the landing in the dark. In any case, the sun has been up at Pole for two weeks. It's about temps and visibility and has been since 4 weeks after her stroke.
And -50F in the original article is incorrect. It's -50C / -65F that's the floor for LC-130 ops. Between 15 Oct and 1 Nov, the temp at Pole hovers right around there. It's been ordinary over the past 15 years to schedule station opening before 1 Nov and it's also ordinary to have issues right up to Halloween.
The problem is that the C-17's have wheels. Unless things have changed recently, Amundsen only has a snow field, not an ice runway like McMurdo. Landing anything other than a twin-otter or LC-130...
Another issue is that the LC-130 doesn't have the legs to make CHC-Amundsen-CHC non-stop. Therefore, it has to land at McMurdo at least once. That means that the weather has to be agreeable to allow the mission to happen (putting aside the issues with fuel jelling and gasket failure at the Amundsen temperatures). In early October, some days the weather at McMurdo is good, but it's not the rule. Nasty storms this time of year.
Pole still has a packed-snow skifield. No jets, no tires. Skis only. That means an LC-130 or Twin Otter (as you mention) or a Basler BT-67 (upgraded and stretched DC-3). Of the three, only the LC-130 is pressurized, and, yes, Hercs have a 9-10-hour flight range, so it uses one load of fuel to get from CHC to McMurdo (9.5 hrs), then another to get from McMurdo to Pole and back to McMurdo (6-7 hrs). They'd use a C-17 for the McMurdo-to-CHC return this time of year - it's faster and roomier for all involved (faster matters double because you have to have good weather at the flight endpoints throughout the flight in case you have to abort-to-departure, or "boomerang"). There's also the requirement for an additional plane on standby in case it has to be sent out for Search-and-Rescue if the first plane goes down. They never operate only one LC-130 at a time. There have to be two or perhaps three present and functional to launch the primary mission.
The issue with temps below -50C is more about seals and gaskets than gelled fuel. They got a waiver in 2004 to open the station with LC-130s at -57C. I watched as one of the planes taxied back from an aborted take-off and spent 3 hours in the pit cycling its engines. They did eventually take off and arrive at McMurdo successfully, but after that incident, the Air Guard became unwilling to operate the planes when the ground temps at Pole were below -50C (and in 2005, I watched the third station-opening flight turn back because it got too cold between #2 and #3. It was 6 days and two more attempts before it returned). In 2006, station opening was delayed 10 days due to weather (visibility or temps - ISTR it varied from day to day).
I've wintered at Pole multiple times. It's a very different place than Troll or McMurdo. The coldest coastal temps are like a warm October or February day at Pole. It's not practical to deploy electric cables in those temps (80F to -100F late in the winter and into sunrise). For airdrops (and the April, 2001, medevac via Twin Otter), they use "burn barrels" to mark out the skiway.
Wind and visibility is indeed an important factor, though unlike a hard-surface runway, you don't clear the snow off of the skiway so much as grade and shape the snow pack so the skis don't sink in. They have limited equipment and limited qualified personnel in the winter (usually 1-3 people) and it takes weeks to take the skiway from mid-winter conditions to ready-for-station-opening condition, and one storm can demolish a week's work.
I'm not there this year and can't comment on specific issues with Renee's situation. Once the Winter is over. I'm sure we'll hear more about how things got to this point, but right now, from 10,000 miles away, our speculation here can't possibly be based on enough facts to be remotely viable.
So will the lack of satellite connectivity for over 12 hrs per day.
Been there, done that, loved it.
Question 0: How do you set up a website to survive the Slashdot effect?
I worked in the same building in 03/04 and 05/06, though the last few months it was just to clear stuff before they demolished it. The commute from my room upstairs was nice and short - a bonus.
As cramped as it was, it was still great to work there.
Having done so several times, yes, between about late-October/early-November and mid-February, you can "just fly" to the South Pole. The trip can take as little as 5 days, but 8-10 days is more ordinary. I've been around for periods in the summer where nothing came and went from McMurdo (the logistics hub at the coast, and one node on the trip) for 10 days in a row (and that's not the record).
So for 1/3 of the year, you can get on a succession of airplanes and, weather permitting, get to the Pole in 1-2 weeks. For 2/3 of the year, it's a major, major undertaking to get there (try landing a plane at -85F in the dark... they did that in April, 2001; the other "mid-winter rescues" were after the sun was up but before the regular summer season started).
Even once you are there, it's not exactly a stroll in the park - the data center is a hike out from the main station (15 minutes when it's light, a lot longer in the dark). Yes, we walk. In the winter it gets too cold for weeks at a time to safely operate machinery (below -60F it had better be important, below -85F it had better be an emergency).
Not all the neutrinos, just nearly all. The moon is large enough to catch a statistically discernible (to IceCube) amount of neutrinos, casting a "neutrino shadow" on the Earth.
Yep... and since the density of water is ~1g/cm^3 (1000kg/m^3), it's a *billion tons* of water perfused with sensors.
But that's what it sees - the sensors point at the Earth and the filter software discards muon events that track from the sky, keeping events that come from underneath since muons coming from the Northern Hemisphere decay long before they can reach the detector. Neutrinos survive passing through thousands of miles of rock, so if it comes from the middle of the Earth, it's a neutrino. If it comes from the sky, it could be a neutrino, but chances are, it's a muon.
Check that cable before you assume anything - telephone cable is frequently Cat3, not Cat5 - 10Mbps, not 100Mbps (if you can't find "Cat-anything" on the jacket, it's just about guaranteed to be no better than Cat3). On top of that, household phone wiring topology is room-to-room daisychain, with multiple legs tied back to a common point before going to the demarcation point. Nothing like endpoint-to-endpoint-with-no-branches-or-spurs UTP topology.
You can violate many physical network standards if your runs are short enough. Just don't expect it to be robust.
I used to work in the department that created the software that billed those rebate customers if they did happen to cancel early.
While I accept that most folks in 1996 did spend 30 minutes a day or less and had dial-up and used AOL, most is not all. I published my first web page in March, 1995, but the oldest copy of my 'homepage' I can find on archive.org is from October, 1996, archived December, 1996.
penguincentral.com in late 1996
As for "blogging", I was writing about my day-to-day experiences starting from the day I put up those webpages 14 years ago. It's all still online, along with newer stuff.
I'm curious which one you got and how easy it is to control via the USB port. Someone else here already mentioned LCDproc (which is included in Debian, at least, and is easy to get for other distros and OSes). I'm guessing there isn't already a driver for it, but one of the aims of LCDproc is to make it easy to write drivers for.
Once you have something like LCDproc talking to your device, it's easy to write client programs in Perl or Python or any language that can open a socket and keep it open and have the client programs do what you want. I have written Perl clients to monitor work processes, keep me updated on current weather conditions, what's playing on xmms, the time of day in multiple timezones, etc.
Since the OP merely mentioned "old formats", it would, perhaps, be helpful for the OP to have mentioned a sampling of what sorts of media formats he was interested in.
I am not aware of any USB-attached 5.25" or 8" drives on the market, and that is only two of the dominant physical formats of the past 30 years. Within that scope alone, there are many, many logical formats, FM, MFM, and GCR being the most common encoding methods, not to mention a myriad of filesystems. It's difficult (impossible?) to find FM support for any commodity motherboard with an onboard floppy controller. It's much simpler if you are allowed to reach back to the ISA days and select a suitable floppy controller card.
It's possible to cobble up an ISA PC that can support a wide variety of floppy media, but there were so many tricky ways of talking to floppies in the pre-IBM-PC era that it would be a challenge to support more than 95% of all floppy formats without something like a Catweasel controller (Amiga, Mac 400K/800K, Commodore 2040/4040/2031/1541/1571/8050/8250/etc/etc)
So, again, depending on how "old" one cares to get, there are many varieties of removable 14"-diameter hard drive media that are very, very difficult to read without contemporary CPUs and controllers - just in the DEC line alone, there's RK01, RK05, RL01, and RL02 single-platter media; RK06 and RK07 double-platter media; RM03, RM05, RP04, RP06, RA60, and more, multi-platter media; and that's not counting smaller removable media (RC25) or 3rd-party disks that were common in the day.
1/2" magtape has fewer variations - 9-track being the most common for the 1980s and beyond (in various densities from 800 bpi to 6250 bpi), but 7-track was once dominant, and now difficult to find working transports for. Fortunately, it's still somewhat easy to find a SCSI-interfaced 9-track drive that reads/writes 1600 and 6250 bpi. 800 bpi support is somewhat rarer.
Fortunately, papertape and punched cards aren't as diverse as disk packs - but there's 5-level and 8-level 1" papertape, and several varieties of punched card (both number and shape of the punched holes as well as character set, but at least character set variations can be handled in software once you get the pattern of the punched holes, however many columns, into memory).
And, yes, in case you were wondering, I can read and write most of the formats I've described, though not with PC hardware.
Three or four of the old markers are still on the old poles and can be seen and photographed by anyone here. The ones older than that are in a display case in the entrance hallway of the new station, along with some other artifacts from the past few decades here.
No, you can't have one.
It's more than just cold and windy in the winter. The temperature floor for an LC-130 (C-130 with skis) is -50C. Even in the summer, they don't land when it's colder than that. The various hydraulic systems (including the ski-retraction mechanism) don't work well when it's too cold. As for "leaving the engines running", they do that in the summer.
To come down here in the middle of winter, they would do what they did in April, 2001 for a medevac of a different doctor, send a Twin Otter from Canada. It has a shorter range than an LC-130, so it has to fly down the Americas, hop over to Antarctica at the Drake Passage, refuel and switch from tires to skis at Rothera Base, then fly to Pole and refuel here. They do that at the beginning of every season, then reverse it to go home.
The situation you mention was in 1999, and involved an air-drop of supplies from a C-141, then a C-130 showing up about two weeks early, in mid-October, weeks after the sun rose. The Twin Otter medevac was in full dark and around -80F.
All that being said, yes, it is difficult, and it is risky. It had better be a matter of life or death to bring a plane here between late February and early October. If the station did blow up, and there were no immediate life-threatening injuries, there are plans to be able to survive for weeks/months in either the B-wing of the new station (it can be split in half for a catastrophic fire in the A-wing) or in other buildings that can be heated without depending on the main power plant. The winter crews are large enough that it would take five or six Twin Otter flights to evacuate the station. That would be incredibly tricky to accomplish. An air-drop would be orders of magnitude easier, especially since until 1995, they used to do that every winter.
There is only one Geographic South Pole, but the sign now has the legend on both sides. One side faces the station, the other side faces away, with a view of, essentially, the polar plateau in the general direction of the departure-end of the skiway.
Also, from looking at the Pole markers in each picture (we get a new one every January), it looks to me as if the #1 shot was taken in either March, 2004 (around sunset) or September, 2004 (around sunrise), and the #7 shot was taken this summer season, sometime since mid-October, 2007. If the #7 picture were high enough resolution, you could see my signature on the aluminum plate on the Pole itself.