Second, we are proceeding at a glacial pace! And even if we launched a fleet every two years, we are still communicating at a top speed of 8 kilobits a second. We've high def cameras that can transmit 4K, yet we are still looking at 1976 Viking-speed photos slowly uploading from Curiosity. What use is this? We can't see nary a damned thing. We need a high speed relay in orbit around Mars, preferably nuclear powered, to beam back a laser signal, or at least short wavelength radio. This is ridiculous. We were supposed to launch one, but, no money. A trillion for other things tho...
Good news! NASA already has a high-speed relay in orbit around Mars - the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Speeds of up to 6Mbit/s from the orbiter back to Earth (it went past a hundred terabits total a few years ago), and up to 2Mbit/s as a relay for surface probes such as, erm, Curiosity.
NASA's Mars Odyssey and ESA's Mars Express orbiters can also act as data relays. Bandwidth is still a definite problem for Curiosity and the like, but it's already sent back some pretty impressive imagery that's somewhat above Viking-level...
If you want more data, get some geostationary (areostationary?) communications satellites around Mars - currently surface probes are limited to relaying data when a probe is visible in the sky - and invest in the Deep Space Network back on Earth.
If mobile devices had decent terminal emulators, I might still be using local mail on a machine somewhere.
Have you heard of IMAP? Use the local email clients on your laptop, mobile phone, desktop and whatever to access a single email account. I've got Dovecot running on a virtual server, and access it from numerous devices. I've also got Roundcube installed on the server, for a webmail interface.
(I've been running my own email system for some years now - and it's been surprisingly straightforward to admin. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but I like having an alternative to all the big, ad-funded webmail services...)
Arduino Ethernet: my little HTTP server is utterly idiotic, waiting for a blank line followed by a newline then assuming a GET and spamming out data streamed in from the Micro-SD card. I even managed to run as far as a 64-byte buffer to speed up transmission to numerous kilobytes per second. 2KiB RAM, 32KiB flash program memory. (The microcontroller can't run code from the SD card without somehow reflashing itself.) The SD card library takes a big chunk of the RAM and flash. Interfacing a 3.3v serial JPEG camera (for taking a year-long timelapse, one shot a minute) was piss-easy, with the Arduino bit-banging serial on some of its GPIO. An analogue-to-digital converter allows a CdS cell as a light meter, also ridiculously easy to interface. Lives on a breadboard, held together with Blu-Tack.
Raspberry Pi: I've got Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.5 (stop laughing) and PHP 5.4 (ditto) chuntering away quite happily. Installing APC seriously improved page load times - currently set to a 32 megabyte cache. 256MiB RAM, 8GiB flash. I even had it loading the test version of my blog-thing running on the Pi in Midori, a modern graphical browser running on the Pi. GPIO is much more fragile, and libraries and kernel support really isn't done yet.
In other words, they're in very different worlds. They're very likely to complement each other, though...
If it were a more standard flavor of Linux, like a regular Debian kernel, I'd definitely prefer it over Android.
You're in luck - the Debian image is currently the recommended one on the downloads page.
(I've no idea what the 'official' educational version will be running, but from the distributions I've played round with so far, Debian is probably the most complete. Although I have switched to the go-faster-stripes Raspbian, which is very similar from a usage point of view.)
The uptime on mine is over a week and it's still showing the correct time. Actually, an especially correct time - I haven't got round to changing it from BST to PDT.
(My internal body-clock still runs on British Time, unfortunately.)
Absolutely this. The point of the Pi isn't that computers are inaccessible to these children, it's that they can have one each to play around with at their own speed.
While most of the devices will probably just collect dust, there'll be some kids who'll go crazy with the things. Break the OS? Really quick to reimage the SD card. Break the device? Cheap enough to get a new one. Its theirs to play with, and theirs to break.
I ordered on the same launch day - and had a Raspberry Pi arrive in the US in early May. And the following day had a second Raspberry Pi arrive. Oops.
(Wracked with guilt, I donated the second one to the Raspbian project, which is a nifty recompilation of Debian to take full advantage of the Pi's FPU. On floating-point-heavy stuff, there are quite dramatic improvements...)
How to tell if there's a partial solar eclipse occurring in Seattle: the weather looks even greyer than usual.
(It looked a bit dark out gone 6pm, the sun being completely hidden by clouds rather than just the moon. I think it got a bit brighter again afterwards, although that might have been wishful thinking.)
The August 21st, 2017 eclipse has a big long smear of totality across the northern USA. Seriously, drop whatever you're doing and go and see it. I saw the August 11th, 1999 eclipse from a patch of woodland somewhere on the French-Belgian border, and despite heavy cloud it was an amazing experience. The whole thing about birds going into trees to roost? Absolutely true. I've yet to decide where to go to see the 2017 eclipse, but it's going to be somewhere cloudless and definitely non-Belgian.
Erm... Alternating current? Also, it's 110V AC rms, so it peaks at +/- 110*sqrt(2) = 155V.
Also, one slightly sweaty hand contacting a neutral pin while the other slightly sweaty hand touching a screwdriver touching live equals the possibility of a nice, healthy current across the heart.
(Admittedly I was brought up on manly European electricity instead of this puny American stuff, but I still wouldn't risk it.)
I managed to pre-order one in the USA through the Farnell export site; this was about 8:20am GMT. The page has now gone to a register-your-interest form, so probably not much use now.
Price GBP 24.55, estimated delivery date 16/04/2012. No idea what postage will cost, I'm prepared for something horrendous to get it to Seattle.
What people are missing is that they're now build-to-order. Instead of before, where the Raspberry Pi organisation had an initial batch of 10,000, the sale of which would fund the next batch to arrive at some indeterminate point in the future - RS and Farnell are ordering the things from the manufacturers themselves.
I was watching with amazement as both RS and Farnell got nuked off the intertubes within seconds of the announcement. This board is popular. The previous plans for ordering wouldn't have worked at all.
Would Apple have coped better with such a launch? Probably. But as the Raspberry Pi twitter feed says: "Apple has a market cap of $500bn. We have Liz's collection of fridge magnets and a few coins down the back of the sofa."
I'm really looking forwards to my Pi arriving. Given that I was expecting to wait at least until the summer to get one, things are going well!
Extremely fun games, raving reviews, appallingly bad graphics.
Erm... I bought my delightfully GREEN boxed copy of Darwinia partly because it had wonderful visuals (and audio). It's got great graphics. Most definitely not photorealistic, but for some reason 'photorealism' is the only thing that equates to 'good graphics' in many people's minds.
World of Goo? Lovely smooth bouncily awesome. Machinarium? Gorgeous hand-drawn beauty. And so on.
No, it's not - I've got that exact one and it's shitting terrible. 'Unstable' is an understatement - it'll randomly lock-up and not take calls whenever it feels like it, refuses to connect to random WiFi devices that work perfectly with everything else, run out of battery after not really doing anything, crash whenever it feels like it, suffer from poor audio quality (and, until a firmware update vaguely fixed it, terrible echo), you name it...
Wondering if it was a new model, or at least the old model with updated firmware - I checked the downloads. The latest firmware's from 2007, and from experience I can tell you is still as buggy as anything.
My second-generation iPod Touch running Skype felt like a wondrous device from the distant future in comparison - that is, until I left it on a bus. Also, it wouldn't really act as a phone - no Skype running in the background, and so on...
So, after the second one, he continued to throw more money at the same combination? Isn't that the definition of insanity?
I've got this nasty habit of buying high-quality CompactFlash cards for my cameras. Despite trying many things, including not bothering to copy new photos onto other media each day, changing cards in extremely damp or dusty environments or even running one through the laundry, I've failed to lose any data.
Dear Slashdot, how do I jolt myself from this utter complacency about the reliability of flash media and rediscover the joyous horror of data-loss?
What I have for my British Nationwide account (a building society rather than a bank, but that's mainly semantics) is a small, calculator-lookalike card-reader that takes my ATM card and PIN and is used to sign any transactions or other significant operations involving money.
Say I want to transfer money to a non-Nationwide account, I have to:
Login by entering my customer number, passphrase and three randomly selected digits of a secret six-digit code, Set up the transfer, put my ATM card (with chip) into the card-reader and enter my PIN. Press 'Sign', enter the reference (typically the account number), press OK, enter the amount of money being transferred, press OK and then type the eight-digit code it gives me into the online banking service to authorise the transfer.
It's still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, but someone would have to be a bit thick to wonder why what appears to be their online banking service suddenly wants them to transfer lots of money somewhere.
a bunch of maps put together in your free time, no matter how awesome, are not likely going to do well against another applicant who has paid experience. "Look at this cool map I made for X game" is not nearly as eye catching on a resume as "Worked on X game, Y game, Z game...." even minor jobs look better when you have been paid for it.
Counter-example - I found myself with a job at some company called 'Valve' after releasing a couple of maps put together in my free time. I didn't even apply for said job, they found (and interviewed) me...
The short-lived, dual-format ST/Amiga Format magazine from the late 1980s also had an appropriately dual-format cover-disk - somehow combining the apparently wildly-incompatible ST and Amiga floppy disk formats.
I've no idea how it was done (although the fact that many STs had single-sided floppy drives may have had something to do with it) - and while it could have been extremely useful to publish games in such a manner at the time, I don't know that was ever done either.
I get the impression that there was a lot of deep magic involved in these enhanced disk formats, copy protection systems and so on. I'm sure the name Rob Northen appeared on the front of a later ST Format cover disk - as the supplier of the fancy files-limited-to-particular-sides-of-disk format used to not deprive single-sided drive owners the contents of the entire double-sided disk...
They have loads of features, yes - but reliability often hasn't been high on the agenda, assuming it's been on the agenda at all. Random outages lasting much of the day, the aforementioned billing issues, you name it. Cheap, cheerful and easy to do stuff with, but don't use it for anything remotely serious.
Plus, my IMAP email stuff is about eleventy billion times faster and more reliable since I moved to a virtual server somewhere else entirely.
I'm betting it takes at least that much work to get the web server running on a fresh-out-of-the-box Apple machine, since I find it hard to believe that every single Mac out there is throwing away memory and cycles on a webserver by default, even if it's being used for video editing.
Apache isn't running as default - you need to check the box marked 'Web Sharing' in the 'Sharing' panel of System Preferences to get it to run.
Getting an OpenSSH daemon to run is similarly complicated - there's a 'Remote Login' box to click. Basically all the available-but-not-running desktop servery stuff is like that...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still hoping for a phone that takes CompactFlash cards. :-(
Nah, he/she/it must know where all the Martians are hiding - in the lava tubes.
Ignore his/her/its attempts to mislead our might Earthly robotic investigators!
Good news! NASA already has a high-speed relay in orbit around Mars - the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Speeds of up to 6Mbit/s from the orbiter back to Earth (it went past a hundred terabits total a few years ago), and up to 2Mbit/s as a relay for surface probes such as, erm, Curiosity.
NASA's Mars Odyssey and ESA's Mars Express orbiters can also act as data relays. Bandwidth is still a definite problem for Curiosity and the like, but it's already sent back some pretty impressive imagery that's somewhat above Viking-level...
If you want more data, get some geostationary (areostationary?) communications satellites around Mars - currently surface probes are limited to relaying data when a probe is visible in the sky - and invest in the Deep Space Network back on Earth.
Here's the rock's Twitter account.
If mobile devices had decent terminal emulators, I might still be using local mail on a machine somewhere.
Have you heard of IMAP? Use the local email clients on your laptop, mobile phone, desktop and whatever to access a single email account. I've got Dovecot running on a virtual server, and access it from numerous devices. I've also got Roundcube installed on the server, for a webmail interface.
(I've been running my own email system for some years now - and it's been surprisingly straightforward to admin. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but I like having an alternative to all the big, ad-funded webmail services...)
There's the Delete Button, but for some reason it's hard to find.
Arduino Ethernet: my little HTTP server is utterly idiotic, waiting for a blank line followed by a newline then assuming a GET and spamming out data streamed in from the Micro-SD card. I even managed to run as far as a 64-byte buffer to speed up transmission to numerous kilobytes per second. 2KiB RAM, 32KiB flash program memory. (The microcontroller can't run code from the SD card without somehow reflashing itself.) The SD card library takes a big chunk of the RAM and flash. Interfacing a 3.3v serial JPEG camera (for taking a year-long timelapse, one shot a minute) was piss-easy, with the Arduino bit-banging serial on some of its GPIO. An analogue-to-digital converter allows a CdS cell as a light meter, also ridiculously easy to interface. Lives on a breadboard, held together with Blu-Tack.
Raspberry Pi: I've got Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.5 (stop laughing) and PHP 5.4 (ditto) chuntering away quite happily. Installing APC seriously improved page load times - currently set to a 32 megabyte cache. 256MiB RAM, 8GiB flash. I even had it loading the test version of my blog-thing running on the Pi in Midori, a modern graphical browser running on the Pi. GPIO is much more fragile, and libraries and kernel support really isn't done yet.
In other words, they're in very different worlds. They're very likely to complement each other, though...
You're in luck - the Debian image is currently the recommended one on the downloads page.
(I've no idea what the 'official' educational version will be running, but from the distributions I've played round with so far, Debian is probably the most complete. Although I have switched to the go-faster-stripes Raspbian, which is very similar from a usage point of view.)
The uptime on mine is over a week and it's still showing the correct time. Actually, an especially correct time - I haven't got round to changing it from BST to PDT.
(My internal body-clock still runs on British Time, unfortunately.)
Absolutely this. The point of the Pi isn't that computers are inaccessible to these children, it's that they can have one each to play around with at their own speed.
While most of the devices will probably just collect dust, there'll be some kids who'll go crazy with the things. Break the OS? Really quick to reimage the SD card. Break the device? Cheap enough to get a new one. Its theirs to play with, and theirs to break.
You can even write code for the Arduinos on the Pi itself if you're so inclined.
(Kind of ridiculous for heavyweight embedded purposes, but could be good for kids playing around with hardware.)
I ordered on the same launch day - and had a Raspberry Pi arrive in the US in early May. And the following day had a second Raspberry Pi arrive. Oops.
(Wracked with guilt, I donated the second one to the Raspbian project, which is a nifty recompilation of Debian to take full advantage of the Pi's FPU. On floating-point-heavy stuff, there are quite dramatic improvements...)
How to tell if there's a partial solar eclipse occurring in Seattle: the weather looks even greyer than usual.
(It looked a bit dark out gone 6pm, the sun being completely hidden by clouds rather than just the moon. I think it got a bit brighter again afterwards, although that might have been wishful thinking.)
The August 21st, 2017 eclipse has a big long smear of totality across the northern USA. Seriously, drop whatever you're doing and go and see it. I saw the August 11th, 1999 eclipse from a patch of woodland somewhere on the French-Belgian border, and despite heavy cloud it was an amazing experience. The whole thing about birds going into trees to roost? Absolutely true. I've yet to decide where to go to see the 2017 eclipse, but it's going to be somewhere cloudless and definitely non-Belgian.
No, 110*sqrt(2) as I originally had it. My error-checking has errors. AAAARGH.
That's 110/sqrt(2). My typing is defective.
Erm... Alternating current? Also, it's 110V AC rms, so it peaks at +/- 110*sqrt(2) = 155V.
Also, one slightly sweaty hand contacting a neutral pin while the other slightly sweaty hand touching a screwdriver touching live equals the possibility of a nice, healthy current across the heart.
(Admittedly I was brought up on manly European electricity instead of this puny American stuff, but I still wouldn't risk it.)
I managed to pre-order one in the USA through the Farnell export site; this was about 8:20am GMT. The page has now gone to a register-your-interest form, so probably not much use now.
Price GBP 24.55, estimated delivery date 16/04/2012. No idea what postage will cost, I'm prepared for something horrendous to get it to Seattle.
What people are missing is that they're now build-to-order. Instead of before, where the Raspberry Pi organisation had an initial batch of 10,000, the sale of which would fund the next batch to arrive at some indeterminate point in the future - RS and Farnell are ordering the things from the manufacturers themselves.
I was watching with amazement as both RS and Farnell got nuked off the intertubes within seconds of the announcement. This board is popular. The previous plans for ordering wouldn't have worked at all.
Would Apple have coped better with such a launch? Probably. But as the Raspberry Pi twitter feed says: "Apple has a market cap of $500bn. We have Liz's collection of fridge magnets and a few coins down the back of the sofa."
I'm really looking forwards to my Pi arriving. Given that I was expecting to wait at least until the summer to get one, things are going well!
Erm... I bought my delightfully GREEN boxed copy of Darwinia partly because it had wonderful visuals (and audio). It's got great graphics. Most definitely not photorealistic, but for some reason 'photorealism' is the only thing that equates to 'good graphics' in many people's minds.
World of Goo? Lovely smooth bouncily awesome. Machinarium? Gorgeous hand-drawn beauty. And so on.
No, it's not - I've got that exact one and it's shitting terrible. 'Unstable' is an understatement - it'll randomly lock-up and not take calls whenever it feels like it, refuses to connect to random WiFi devices that work perfectly with everything else, run out of battery after not really doing anything, crash whenever it feels like it, suffer from poor audio quality (and, until a firmware update vaguely fixed it, terrible echo), you name it...
Wondering if it was a new model, or at least the old model with updated firmware - I checked the downloads. The latest firmware's from 2007, and from experience I can tell you is still as buggy as anything.
My second-generation iPod Touch running Skype felt like a wondrous device from the distant future in comparison - that is, until I left it on a bus. Also, it wouldn't really act as a phone - no Skype running in the background, and so on...
I make do with a laptop these days.
I've got this nasty habit of buying high-quality CompactFlash cards for my cameras. Despite trying many things, including not bothering to copy new photos onto other media each day, changing cards in extremely damp or dusty environments or even running one through the laundry, I've failed to lose any data.
Dear Slashdot, how do I jolt myself from this utter complacency about the reliability of flash media and rediscover the joyous horror of data-loss?
What I have for my British Nationwide account (a building society rather than a bank, but that's mainly semantics) is a small, calculator-lookalike card-reader that takes my ATM card and PIN and is used to sign any transactions or other significant operations involving money.
Say I want to transfer money to a non-Nationwide account, I have to:
Login by entering my customer number, passphrase and three randomly selected digits of a secret six-digit code,
Set up the transfer, put my ATM card (with chip) into the card-reader and enter my PIN.
Press 'Sign', enter the reference (typically the account number), press OK, enter the amount of money being transferred, press OK and then type the eight-digit code it gives me into the online banking service to authorise the transfer.
It's still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, but someone would have to be a bit thick to wonder why what appears to be their online banking service suddenly wants them to transfer lots of money somewhere.
Also, yes, it takes forever to do anything.
Counter-example - I found myself with a job at some company called 'Valve' after releasing a couple of maps put together in my free time. I didn't even apply for said job, they found (and interviewed) me...
Previous games industry experience: zero.
University degree: physics.
The short-lived, dual-format ST/Amiga Format magazine from the late 1980s also had an appropriately dual-format cover-disk - somehow combining the apparently wildly-incompatible ST and Amiga floppy disk formats.
I've no idea how it was done (although the fact that many STs had single-sided floppy drives may have had something to do with it) - and while it could have been extremely useful to publish games in such a manner at the time, I don't know that was ever done either.
I get the impression that there was a lot of deep magic involved in these enhanced disk formats, copy protection systems and so on. I'm sure the name Rob Northen appeared on the front of a later ST Format cover disk - as the supplier of the fancy files-limited-to-particular-sides-of-disk format used to not deprive single-sided drive owners the contents of the entire double-sided disk...
What about their, um, minor billing issues earlier this year?
They have loads of features, yes - but reliability often hasn't been high on the agenda, assuming it's been on the agenda at all. Random outages lasting much of the day, the aforementioned billing issues, you name it. Cheap, cheerful and easy to do stuff with, but don't use it for anything remotely serious.
Plus, my IMAP email stuff is about eleventy billion times faster and more reliable since I moved to a virtual server somewhere else entirely.
Apache isn't running as default - you need to check the box marked 'Web Sharing' in the 'Sharing' panel of System Preferences to get it to run.
Getting an OpenSSH daemon to run is similarly complicated - there's a 'Remote Login' box to click. Basically all the available-but-not-running desktop servery stuff is like that...