This is Apple we're talking about. Give it 6 months and they'll release a one button remote with a USB receiver
This could actually happen. In fact, the two-button version already exists, and would work with the Mini just fine. The technology behind it is available for developers to use in their own products.
He was expecting to spend the next couple of years analyze the details.
In that case, he can still do it with the Earth radio telescope data. If most of his work involved how to analyse the data, then it is still applicable, just with a different data set and more of a challenge. He's not out of the race yet and he can still cross the finish line.
The unfortunate thing is David Atkinson spent 18 years of his life on #1, which is what the article was mainly about. And from what I gather the information for it would have been more accurate if Cassini had measured the doppler shift rather than the Earth radio telescopes. Hopefully his work also involved the telescopes and signal analysis, rather than just the Huygens-Cassini link, so his work would not have been in vain. And perhaps there is a chance that the telescopes could have been just as accurate, despite the distance.
Someone submitted a comment with a link to an article in Nature that says it is the latter. The Doppler Wind Experiment is described at the bottom of the page as measurements of variations in the microwave signal between the Huygens probe and Cassini orbiter. Too bad. If it was the former, this guys 18 years of work could still have been salvaged.
An experiment onboard the Huygens probe didn't run as planned because someone forgot to turn it on.
But I got this out of your linked article...
Huygens was programmed to transmit telemetry and scientific data to NASA's Cassini Saturn orbiter for relay to Earth using two redundant S-band radio systems. Channel A was the sole path for an experiment to measure wind speeds by studying tiny frequency changes caused by Huygens' motion. In one other deliberate departure from full redundancy, pictures from Tomasko's descent imager were split up, with each channel carrying 350 pictures.
As it turned out, Cassini never listened to channel A because of a software commanding error. The receiver on the orbiter was never commanded to turn on, according to officials with the European Space Agency. ...
Even the lost wind measurement data will be made up, thanks to a remarkable effort on the ground to monitor a faint carrier signal broadcast by Huygens - the equivalent of a cell phone call at a distance of 751 million miles - using a network of 18 radio telescopes around the world. That data, which not as precise as the Doppler information that was lost, should fill in the blanks.
And I also found this article online. Here's an excerpt...
Atkinson had a Doppler wind experiment onboard the probe which landed on Saturn's moon Titan after dropping from the Cassini spacecraft. Atkinson and other team members estimate they had put in nearly eighty- man years to bring that experiment to a conclusion this past weekend.
However, a command to turn on the instrument being used by Atkinson's team was not in the command sequence. The entire experiment was lost. There is some hope that some transmitted data was picked up by radio telescopes back here on earth, and if so, then an Earth- based version of the Doppler experiment may still be possible....
The Cassini mission, he says, has been incredibly successful, and he says eventually they'll get the wind measurements they needed, but definitely not how they planned, and he says it will take a long, long time.
The reports are confusing and I can't tell what happened. Was there a measurement device onboard the Huygens probe gathering data and transmitting it (like the Slashdot story suggests), or was the data supposed to come from the measurement of the signal from the Huygens probe in relation to the Cassini orbiter?
If it was the former, is the data not as good because the Earth radio telescopes didn't pick up the entire signal, because there was signal degradation, or because they have to piece all the data together from all the different radio telescopes? If it was the latter, is the data not as precise because of the proximity from the transmitter to the receiver?
Either way, the Slashdot post is wrong. If it was a measurement device solely on the Huygens probe, it was turned on- it was the relay onboard the Cassini orbiter that wasn't turned on. If the data was meant to be gathered from the proximity of the transmitter to the receiver, then the experiment wasn't onboard the Huygens probe but was actually meant to be a collaboration between the probe and the orbiter.
I'm sorry to hear of what happened to you. Have you heard of this lab-grown skin technology? Here is another article. I believe it is now being used by a company called Stratatech. The patents have the title "Immortalized human keratinocyte cell line". The article says most lab-grown cells last only 15 weeks, while these accidentally discovered cells have lasted for years, since 1996 if I'm not mistaken. I'm not sure, but I think one of it's intended uses is to eliminate the need for donor sites for skin grafts for wounds and burn victims. I haven't read anything else about it other than what is in those articles, so I don't know if it has passed human trials for its intended uses yet, or how well it works, if at all.
What about those 3d-object printers. Sure, they're used in labs somewhere, but when will these things become commercially viable and available?
I have a jaw problems, so I went and got a CT scan of my head. The results were given to me on a CD-ROM in a standard format called DICOM. I had the data converted into an STL file format mesh of my skull using software called Mimics (google cache, site seems to be down at the moment). I then had it output on a Z-printer, which is one of those 3D printers your talking about, I presume. So basically, I now have an anatomically correct life-size model of my skull. The data conversion and the printing cost me around $500 US each. At first I thought it was so cool to be able to do this with technology now and that it was a work of art, but then I started to get the creeps after it sunk in that I was holding an actual copy of my skull.
visions of the body reconstructed by that machine...
The images used for the cross-sections of the human body were derived from the Visible Human Male data set of the National Institute of Health's Visible Human Project. It was a guy. Not that there's anything wrong with it:P
This is not a slashdot issue. Just because the people are writing software, doesn't mean it is a technological issue.
TIME magazine published a good article on the blog phenomenon which actually mentions Slashdot indirectly by the second sentence. With around half a million viewers a day, it is one of the most influential blogs on the net, and posting "Ask Slashdot" stories draws upon the collective participation of that large userbase. Despite the flaming and trolling, it is pretty fascinating to see the occasional informative comment in discussions that sometimes go beyond the scope of technological topics. There have already been several replies to this submission from people who have been in the same situation. I've personally been surprised by comments; I once suddenly found myself in an informative discussion, getting some really good advice from a surgeon about my dad's osteoarthritis just in the comments section.
I don't recall how I came across Ted Nelson's book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines mentioned earlier, but it was some time in the early 90's. I believe he has been credited with inventing the phrase "Hypertext". Just the title "Computer Lib" seems to connote a feeling of some kind of 60's movement like Women's Lib, Woodstock, or the Civil Rights Movement in the US, with Ted Nelson as the Timothy Leary of computers. In my opinion, he is possibly a visionary who's contributions may not be given the proper recognition in his lifetime, like those whose names are cluttered throughout history. I'm surprised that he hasn't received more recognition, especially from computer enthusiasts like slashdotters (you!). I think his name should be as recognisable as Linus Trovalds, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. And his work deserves a slashdotting if only to get the word out there into the collective consciousness for a brief moment.
Some earlier comments have already brought up information about how his proposed concepts involve a royalty payment system. Given the controversy of displaying contents from other sites in frames, the proposed micropayment system, and digital rights management, it seems his ideas were decades before their time. As much as the term "DRM" causes people to cringe, the missing integration of a royalty payment system with the internet is what has prevented it from being a replacement for print publishing, as well as other forms of media. The web seemed to hold a promise of becoming a repository for literature and information when it first became popular, like a library, but more easily accessible worldwide. However it has yet to fulfill that promise with the available content.
I can recall from what I've read about him that Nelson veered from hierarchical structures of data, choosing instead to have information interconnected in a more free-form fashion, much like the hyperlink interconnections of the web. However, the evolution of the web involving inherently hierarchical data such as SGML and now XML seems to contradict his elusive vision of what the internet should be. He came up with a basic data structure which he called the "enfilade" which would accomplish it, but kept the specifics of the enfilade private. I'm sure it has been implemented in his derivative work, ZigZag, and is now more accessible.
An allegedly less than flattering article published in Wired magazine, also mentioned earlier, gives an inkling of Nelson's possible contributions (I say allegedly because when I read it I actually thought it cast Nelson in a positive light). Xanadu is just the beginning. It is what is needed to organise the cumulative archive of brainstorming work he has done over his lifetime, to make it accessible and usable. Only when technology catches up with his amassed information and allows it to become applicable will his true body of work be recognised. Leonardo da Vinci accumulated 13,000 p
Strange. Maybe it was marketed differently around the world. All I can recall was that as a kid, I always knew there was this place called "LegoLand" in Denmark from the little pamphlets in the sets. Come to think of it, I can vaguely recall that the sets they sold in the US were different from other countries. For example, a gas station would have the "Shell" brand name, but when I got ahold of a US booklet, I saw the ones there were "Exxon".
I recall learning in an astronomy course that helium street lighting was encouraged in some areas, not just because it consumed less energy, but also because it only emitted spectral lines instead of a full spectrum. The spectral lines could be easily filtered by observatories, so all the ambient light reflected around the atmosphere from street lighting in highly populated areas could be cancelled out, and the stars would be highly visible.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Apple we're talking about. Give it 6 months and they'll release a one button remote with a USB receiver
This could actually happen. In fact, the two-button version already exists, and would work with the Mini just fine. The technology behind it is available for developers to use in their own products.
Of course the mini is not a "media center solution" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean). It's a computer.
Did you read this story posted a week ago? It's not a "product" anymore. It's a "solution".
He was expecting to spend the next couple of years analyze the details.
In that case, he can still do it with the Earth radio telescope data. If most of his work involved how to analyse the data, then it is still applicable, just with a different data set and more of a challenge. He's not out of the race yet and he can still cross the finish line.
the whole thing could have just plain entirely failed
True. The glass is half full.
The unfortunate thing is David Atkinson spent 18 years of his life on #1, which is what the article was mainly about. And from what I gather the information for it would have been more accurate if Cassini had measured the doppler shift rather than the Earth radio telescopes. Hopefully his work also involved the telescopes and signal analysis, rather than just the Huygens-Cassini link, so his work would not have been in vain. And perhaps there is a chance that the telescopes could have been just as accurate, despite the distance.
Someone submitted a comment with a link to an article in Nature that says it is the latter. The Doppler Wind Experiment is described at the bottom of the page as measurements of variations in the microwave signal between the Huygens probe and Cassini orbiter. Too bad. If it was the former, this guys 18 years of work could still have been salvaged.
This is what the slashdot post says...
But I got this out of your linked article...
And I also found this article online. Here's an excerpt...The reports are confusing and I can't tell what happened. Was there a measurement device onboard the Huygens probe gathering data and transmitting it (like the Slashdot story suggests), or was the data supposed to come from the measurement of the signal from the Huygens probe in relation to the Cassini orbiter?
If it was the former, is the data not as good because the Earth radio telescopes didn't pick up the entire signal, because there was signal degradation, or because they have to piece all the data together from all the different radio telescopes? If it was the latter, is the data not as precise because of the proximity from the transmitter to the receiver?
Either way, the Slashdot post is wrong. If it was a measurement device solely on the Huygens probe, it was turned on- it was the relay onboard the Cassini orbiter that wasn't turned on. If the data was meant to be gathered from the proximity of the transmitter to the receiver, then the experiment wasn't onboard the Huygens probe but was actually meant to be a collaboration between the probe and the orbiter.
I'm sorry to hear of what happened to you. Have you heard of this lab-grown skin technology? Here is another article. I believe it is now being used by a company called Stratatech. The patents have the title "Immortalized human keratinocyte cell line". The article says most lab-grown cells last only 15 weeks, while these accidentally discovered cells have lasted for years, since 1996 if I'm not mistaken. I'm not sure, but I think one of it's intended uses is to eliminate the need for donor sites for skin grafts for wounds and burn victims. I haven't read anything else about it other than what is in those articles, so I don't know if it has passed human trials for its intended uses yet, or how well it works, if at all.
Wonder if there will be a human skin recycle bin like the paper recycle bin next to most printers.
Chances are it will end up in the cafeteria :P
What about those 3d-object printers. Sure, they're used in labs somewhere, but when will these things become commercially viable and available?
I have a jaw problems, so I went and got a CT scan of my head. The results were given to me on a CD-ROM in a standard format called DICOM. I had the data converted into an STL file format mesh of my skull using software called Mimics (google cache, site seems to be down at the moment). I then had it output on a Z-printer, which is one of those 3D printers your talking about, I presume. So basically, I now have an anatomically correct life-size model of my skull. The data conversion and the printing cost me around $500 US each. At first I thought it was so cool to be able to do this with technology now and that it was a work of art, but then I started to get the creeps after it sunk in that I was holding an actual copy of my skull.
visions of the body reconstructed by that machine...
The images used for the cross-sections of the human body were derived from the Visible Human Male data set of the National Institute of Health's Visible Human Project. It was a guy. Not that there's anything wrong with it :P
Could it lead to a fax machine for complete living organisms?
Ouch. That would be one painful transporter.
6: Charge admission
7: Profit!
...Chicken Little says "the sky is falling"
We will definately not be still alive by the time the universe ends.
Did Netcraft confirm that?
This is not a slashdot issue. Just because the people are writing software, doesn't mean it is a technological issue.
TIME magazine published a good article on the blog phenomenon which actually mentions Slashdot indirectly by the second sentence. With around half a million viewers a day, it is one of the most influential blogs on the net, and posting "Ask Slashdot" stories draws upon the collective participation of that large userbase. Despite the flaming and trolling, it is pretty fascinating to see the occasional informative comment in discussions that sometimes go beyond the scope of technological topics. There have already been several replies to this submission from people who have been in the same situation. I've personally been surprised by comments; I once suddenly found myself in an informative discussion, getting some really good advice from a surgeon about my dad's osteoarthritis just in the comments section.
Shame on you.
It's nicer to end comments with a smiley :)
I don't recall how I came across Ted Nelson's book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines mentioned earlier, but it was some time in the early 90's. I believe he has been credited with inventing the phrase "Hypertext". Just the title "Computer Lib" seems to connote a feeling of some kind of 60's movement like Women's Lib, Woodstock, or the Civil Rights Movement in the US, with Ted Nelson as the Timothy Leary of computers. In my opinion, he is possibly a visionary who's contributions may not be given the proper recognition in his lifetime, like those whose names are cluttered throughout history. I'm surprised that he hasn't received more recognition, especially from computer enthusiasts like slashdotters (you!). I think his name should be as recognisable as Linus Trovalds, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. And his work deserves a slashdotting if only to get the word out there into the collective consciousness for a brief moment.
Some earlier comments have already brought up information about how his proposed concepts involve a royalty payment system. Given the controversy of displaying contents from other sites in frames, the proposed micropayment system, and digital rights management, it seems his ideas were decades before their time. As much as the term "DRM" causes people to cringe, the missing integration of a royalty payment system with the internet is what has prevented it from being a replacement for print publishing, as well as other forms of media. The web seemed to hold a promise of becoming a repository for literature and information when it first became popular, like a library, but more easily accessible worldwide. However it has yet to fulfill that promise with the available content.
I can recall from what I've read about him that Nelson veered from hierarchical structures of data, choosing instead to have information interconnected in a more free-form fashion, much like the hyperlink interconnections of the web. However, the evolution of the web involving inherently hierarchical data such as SGML and now XML seems to contradict his elusive vision of what the internet should be. He came up with a basic data structure which he called the "enfilade" which would accomplish it, but kept the specifics of the enfilade private. I'm sure it has been implemented in his derivative work, ZigZag, and is now more accessible.
An allegedly less than flattering article published in Wired magazine, also mentioned earlier, gives an inkling of Nelson's possible contributions (I say allegedly because when I read it I actually thought it cast Nelson in a positive light). Xanadu is just the beginning. It is what is needed to organise the cumulative archive of brainstorming work he has done over his lifetime, to make it accessible and usable. Only when technology catches up with his amassed information and allows it to become applicable will his true body of work be recognised. Leonardo da Vinci accumulated 13,000 p
TN finally opened up the sourcecode for Xanadu under the somewhat bizare name of Udanax.
It's not really that bizarre, considering it's simply Xanadu spelled backwards.
Duchovny's career... it's gone downhill quickly.
Down a hill? A cliff would be more like it.
Whatever they do to the franchise, I still wish they would just get Majel Barrett's voice onto OS X's speech synthesis, and other platforms as well.
You realize that Shatner is bisexual IRL?
So... he likes to boldly goes where no man has gone before?
he couldn't understand why the film didnt do well
I was under the impression that much of the reason it didn't do well was bad timing. Its release was overshadowed by the releases of The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Strange. Maybe it was marketed differently around the world. All I can recall was that as a kid, I always knew there was this place called "LegoLand" in Denmark from the little pamphlets in the sets. Come to think of it, I can vaguely recall that the sets they sold in the US were different from other countries. For example, a gas station would have the "Shell" brand name, but when I got ahold of a US booklet, I saw the ones there were "Exxon".
I stand corrected, it was over a decade ago when I heard about it
I recall learning in an astronomy course that helium street lighting was encouraged in some areas, not just because it consumed less energy, but also because it only emitted spectral lines instead of a full spectrum. The spectral lines could be easily filtered by observatories, so all the ambient light reflected around the atmosphere from street lighting in highly populated areas could be cancelled out, and the stars would be highly visible.