Recomputing the Sky 205
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. This so-called 'TeraPixel' sky map was generated with the help of some of Microsoft's latest HPC and parallel software assets. Quoting: 'Compared to the old sky image, the TeraPixel version is much more refined. With all the artifacts, seams and inconsistencies processed away, it looks like a true unified image of the sky above. It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s.'" You can view the image at Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope site — it requires the Silverlight plugin for Windows or Mac. No word at the site about Linux or whether Moonlight works there.
Getting ready for the MS bash (Score:4, Insightful)
So this looks like a really cool thing that MS did, so I'm going to wait in wide eyed anticipation at how the slashdot community is going to trash it because it's from Microsoft and not Google (or at least be more overly critical of it). I do hope I'm wrong though.
Re:Getting ready for the MS bash (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a cool thing, yes. It is, however, NOT cool that it requires Silverlight to view. There's no reason it should require that.
Where's the JPEG? BMP? PNG? ANYTHING? (Score:1, Insightful)
I can view the image? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can view the image at Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope site — it requires the Silverlight plugin for Windows or Mac.
These two statements appear to contradict each other.
If it requires Silverlight, then I can't view it, because I don't want that cock on my computer.
Re:It's now clear where M$ is headed to! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's now clear where M$ is headed to! (Score:3, Insightful)
My initial reaction to seeing mention of silverlight was "well damn..." If I were running Windows, I still would not install silverlight. So now I am here seeking to find if anyone has ripped the data accessible through silverlight and converted it or made it available in some other way.
Re:Getting ready for the MS bash (Score:5, Insightful)
Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.
This is one of the handful of things that Silverlight does really well.
Because of that, I wouldn't be surprised if this project was less a "We've got this cool thing, what Microsoft technology can we push with it?" and more "What's a thing we could do that would really show off a strength of Silverlight?"
Re:It's interesting where a lot of the time went (Score:5, Insightful)
They must have been using Vista Explorer pre SP-1 to do the file copy.
Hmm? Transferring 802 GB over a 1 Gbps link is going to take 1.78 hours as a bare minimum and assuming you lose some time on the overhead and don’t necessarily have 100% of the network’s bandwidth available to you the whole time, 2.5 hours doesn’t seem terribly long.
Re:Beware... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's FOX's job.
Re:Moonlight 3.0.40818.0 on Linux here (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Getting ready for the MS bash (Score:5, Insightful)
Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.
Actually you're trolling more than playing devil's advocate. There's a sh*tload of zoom & pan-enabled image viewing libraries, both in JS and Flash, all using tiles just like Silverlight -- try to google some.
And for that matter it's trivial to DIY from scratch using canvas, which of course IE conveniently doesn't support, but that problem was solved too long ago. OpenLayers [openlayers.org], which you might have seen at work at OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org], includes a VML rendering backend, besides canvas and SVG.
The really funny part about your "advocating" is that MS has an Ajax library that does exactly the same thing as its Silverlight counterpart: http://www.seadragon.com/developer/ajax/ [seadragon.com]
Re:It's now clear where M$ is headed to! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, trolling slashdot nerds to install silverlight to view the image out of uncontrollable curiousity.
Someone at M$ is now chuckling while you sell your soul clicking "install silverlight plugin": trolled hard.
It already worked on me when Microsoft put a series of Richard Feynman lectures online. Alas, Moonlight is too "advanced [angryflower.com]" to load the app. T_T
And I'm not getting trolled all the way into installing a MS operating system!
Re:Getting ready for the MS bash (Score:5, Insightful)
20 years of watching these people operate points me to these kinds of conclusions.
LoB
Requires Silverlight? Yeah you can shove that (Score:2, Insightful)
I already have Flash and that's bad enough, thank you, I don't need two companies competing for who can screw me the hardest.
Re:Google Maps (Score:4, Insightful)
There's some latency as the site fetches images and scales images. Overall works pretty well.
Bing:
The site asks me to download and install Silverlight.exe which doesn't work on my operating system.
Perhaps I'm not as easily impressed as you?