Slow and steady development. Nothing big on a global scale will happen, some small changes locally, but that's it. Mobile phones will get smaller and get more features, HD video will become even more common-place on the internet.

Atheism will continue to rise, the lines might be drawn more sharply between invasive islamic and christian countries, the rest of us will be caught in the middle. No global war yet though, just a lot of huffing and puffing on all sides.

As ABSOLUTELY AMAZING as this is, my first question remains. Why is NASA not videoing at insanely high resolution. We should be seeing this in 1080p at a 10x compression from their original video files... not blurry 640x480 crap. Video technology has come a LOOONNNGGG way since 1970 and we should see that. If (read "when") there is another trip to the moon, I expect to see perfect video... On top of that, EVERY SINGLE VIDEO we see from the ISS should be in absolutely perfect HD with HD quality sound. Why, in 2009, are we still seeing fuzzy video with telephone-quality sound from our astronauts? Better, why are our astronauts apparently communicating via completely low-rez, almost incomprehensible quality CB-style radio? It should look and sound like they are in the next room... heck, our webcams are better quality than what we get from the ISS. As it appears to me, that would seem to be an additional 1 pound of technology in terms of the cams and only maybe 1000x the bandwidth they sent to earth in the 70's, and if they can't send that amount of data down today, than they need to rethink things a bit. psh. psh I say. I simply unimpressed by NASA's PR department. As a scientist I'm profoundly affected by their work, but as a citizen AND a scientist, I'm uni pressed with the way they've presented what they've been doing to the general public.

For goodness sake, SHOW US SOME COOL STUFF!! It's not that hard. Show us video from the moon. Show us video from the probes, show us video from deeps space. Show us ANYTHING! It is not that hard people. Think of us curious folks who just want to see things and know things. No more of these "artistic renderings" of everything you discover. Plug some damn HD video cams on your dang equipment for goodness sake.

Disclaimer: I recognize that I know jack-shit about space technology, and that I don't understand how exactly we get information direct from from outerspace installations and etc... but seriously, come on. 30 years and no improvement?

>> ^blankfist:
If only you could sync sound with these DSLRs, they'd put the movie industry on its head. Beautiful footage. I am amazed.


The Canon 5D Mark II helped "HD video in DSLR" take off, but AFAIK you still have problems with stuff like rolling shutter in the video... its good quality video but not as good as a dedicated video camera.

Is there a non-YouTube HD video of this?

Okay, the music was pretty damn funny.

deathcow: HD video, really? Impressed. I run XP in a Virtualbox on my Core 2 Duo linux machine, and it's pretty tough to play even simple games (I just use it to get at MS Office). Any experience running non-7 OSes, to know if this is because 7 plays that nicely with Vbox, or is it running-Windows-on-Windows, or what?

>> ^deathcow:
I've been running Windows 7 x64 in a virtualbox session for a week now.
First blue screen - I found it ran a bit slower when I allowed it access to all 8 CPU threads (i7 processor = 4 core + 4 HT) So I changed virtualbox settings to only give it 4 cores. Blue screen, unrepairable. Rebuild.
Second bluescreen was trying to find audio drivers for Intel motherboard (again through virtualbox). This I used windows restore point for and it did restore. Still no audio though.
I think these are both my fault, as its a bit unfair to fluidly adjust the number of CPU in your system and expect Windows to compensate. And, virtualbox audio drivers are a bit weird I guess so i cant fault it there. Still, a bit disheartening to see blue screens still, you would have thought they would have at least changed the color to get away from the stigma of it : )
On the plus side its very responsive even though running in a virt machine. I am able to play HD video for example. The core i7 cpu has VtX extensions which I suppose help a lot. I am not used to all the new interface quirks yet.

well, you are running thro virtualisation.

Apparently you can put it on shite little netbooks, that impresses me.

I've been running Windows 7 x64 in a virtualbox session for a week now.

First blue screen - I found it ran a bit slower when I allowed it access to all 8 CPU threads (i7 processor = 4 core + 4 HT) So I changed virtualbox settings to only give it 4 cores. Blue screen, unrepairable. Rebuild.

Second bluescreen was trying to find audio drivers for Intel motherboard (again through virtualbox). This I used windows restore point for and it did restore. Still no audio though.

I think these are both my fault, as its a bit unfair to fluidly adjust the number of CPU in your system and expect Windows to compensate. And, virtualbox audio drivers are a bit weird I guess so i cant fault it there. Still, a bit disheartening to see blue screens still, you would have thought they would have at least changed the color to get away from the stigma of it : )

On the plus side its very responsive even though running in a virt machine. I am able to play HD video for example. The core i7 cpu has VtX extensions which I suppose help a lot. I am not used to all the new interface quirks yet.

It's too bad they didn't have and HD video camera to capture it with.

This video also applies to Internet video.

Why can't they have a standard in viewing video, but no every site has to have there fucked up way to do stuff. Thinking is original.

Its like youtube saying they have HD video now, its not fucking HD its just slightly better. Its just a turd with perfume on it. Its not even fucking 720p.

Or you get the ass ads on the video. Or websites that direct you to websites that autoplay video crap so when you are reading or watching another video that window is in background playing some fucking "Congrates you won a Ipod" sound.


Give me a fucking website that has fucking video that does not have fucking ads in it, if i like your fucking site I will glading pay $1 a month to visit your fucking site, if your site fucking sucks you think "learn how to whiten my teeth for $10" ads is going to make me want to click it?

Lots of sites i visit are ad free and fucking live on since the 90s still cause they fucking get donations from people who like the fucking site.

>> ^Deano:
I hate being reminded my processor isn't fast enough for HD video.


If by "processor" you mean "penis" and by "fast enough for HD video" you mean "big enough for satisfying sex" then I hate being reminded that, too.

I hate being reminded my processor isn't fast enough for HD video.

What, did the Dag eat your harddrive?

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Jesus, you're killing me, teach. Can I get an extension on my paper?

In reply to this comment by srd:
Hmm, ok. No stutter with other apps means that the sound subsystem is basically ok, so it isn't a driver or a hardware issue.

Flash under Linux has always been treated a bit as a lead paint chip eating "special" relative by adobe, so things flash tend to run less smoothly anyway. Thing's I've observed:
Flash is a lot more CPU intensive under linux than under windows; they seem to have implemented especially the flash movie decoding and rendering rather inefficiently. But basic CPU speed shouldn't be a problem in your case, since you have a brand new dual core machine. My EEEBox croaks on HD videos

Flash movies aren't streamed from memory, they're first saved in /tmp, then played back from there once enough is buffered there. This means you have several things going on simultaneously: the flash stream coming in from the network, the flash stream being written to disk, the flash stream being read from disk and finally the decoding and rendering. The last part should be ok. Getting the flash via the network should be OK too, since I'm guessing you can tell the difference between stutter and repeated buffering pauses

So, what we have left is (barring other CPU tasks running that you didn't tell me about): the harddisk. This meshes somewhat with your observations that the problems get worse if lots of movement takes place: the bitrate of the video goes up and more data needs to be read from the disk and processed by the CPUs.

So things you could check (Homework Paintchipboy!): is there another harddisk intensive programm running (to verify my diagnosis: start up a big program like staroffice or the gimp when you're playing a video. Does stutter get worse?)? Is the partition your /tmp directory is on full? Is the harddisk being addressed in UDMA mode (sudo apt-get install hdparm; sudo hdparm /dev/sda - sorry this is keyboard work Fire up 'top' in a console. In the third row from the top you'll see a line of CPU stats. The %wa entry would be interesting while you're experiencing stutter. That's the time the CPU waits for requested data from a storage medium aka Wait Time. You can quit top by pressing 'q'.

I'm guessing your harddisk is basically ok and not damaged because you'd have tons of other problems then.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Sorry it took so long to get back to you - been kind of busy. Anyway I haven't noticed the problem with other apps. I've played other audio and video files, and they all seem to wotk fine. It's just Flash video that's the problem. It gets worse with with HD flash. If the images are relatively static there's no problem, but if there's a lot of motion then stuttering occurs.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Are you experiencing stutter with other apps? Playing mp3s for e.g.

Jesus, you're killing me, teach. Can I get an extension on my paper?

In reply to this comment by srd:
Hmm, ok. No stutter with other apps means that the sound subsystem is basically ok, so it isn't a driver or a hardware issue.

Flash under Linux has always been treated a bit as a lead paint chip eating "special" relative by adobe, so things flash tend to run less smoothly anyway. Thing's I've observed:
Flash is a lot more CPU intensive under linux than under windows; they seem to have implemented especially the flash movie decoding and rendering rather inefficiently. But basic CPU speed shouldn't be a problem in your case, since you have a brand new dual core machine. My EEEBox croaks on HD videos

Flash movies aren't streamed from memory, they're first saved in /tmp, then played back from there once enough is buffered there. This means you have several things going on simultaneously: the flash stream coming in from the network, the flash stream being written to disk, the flash stream being read from disk and finally the decoding and rendering. The last part should be ok. Getting the flash via the network should be OK too, since I'm guessing you can tell the difference between stutter and repeated buffering pauses

So, what we have left is (barring other CPU tasks running that you didn't tell me about): the harddisk. This meshes somewhat with your observations that the problems get worse if lots of movement takes place: the bitrate of the video goes up and more data needs to be read from the disk and processed by the CPUs.

So things you could check (Homework Paintchipboy!): is there another harddisk intensive programm running (to verify my diagnosis: start up a big program like staroffice or the gimp when you're playing a video. Does stutter get worse?)? Is the partition your /tmp directory is on full? Is the harddisk being addressed in UDMA mode (sudo apt-get install hdparm; sudo hdparm /dev/sda - sorry this is keyboard work Fire up 'top' in a console. In the third row from the top you'll see a line of CPU stats. The %wa entry would be interesting while you're experiencing stutter. That's the time the CPU waits for requested data from a storage medium aka Wait Time. You can quit top by pressing 'q'.

I'm guessing your harddisk is basically ok and not damaged because you'd have tons of other problems then.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Sorry it took so long to get back to you - been kind of busy. Anyway I haven't noticed the problem with other apps. I've played other audio and video files, and they all seem to wotk fine. It's just Flash video that's the problem. It gets worse with with HD flash. If the images are relatively static there's no problem, but if there's a lot of motion then stuttering occurs.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Are you experiencing stutter with other apps? Playing mp3s for e.g.

Hmm, ok. No stutter with other apps means that the sound subsystem is basically ok, so it isn't a driver or a hardware issue.

Flash under Linux has always been treated a bit as a lead paint chip eating "special" relative by adobe, so things flash tend to run less smoothly anyway. Thing's I've observed:
Flash is a lot more CPU intensive under linux than under windows; they seem to have implemented especially the flash movie decoding and rendering rather inefficiently. But basic CPU speed shouldn't be a problem in your case, since you have a brand new dual core machine. My EEEBox croaks on HD videos

Flash movies aren't streamed from memory, they're first saved in /tmp, then played back from there once enough is buffered there. This means you have several things going on simultaneously: the flash stream coming in from the network, the flash stream being written to disk, the flash stream being read from disk and finally the decoding and rendering. The last part should be ok. Getting the flash via the network should be OK too, since I'm guessing you can tell the difference between stutter and repeated buffering pauses

So, what we have left is (barring other CPU tasks running that you didn't tell me about): the harddisk. This meshes somewhat with your observations that the problems get worse if lots of movement takes place: the bitrate of the video goes up and more data needs to be read from the disk and processed by the CPUs.

So things you could check (Homework Paintchipboy!): is there another harddisk intensive programm running (to verify my diagnosis: start up a big program like staroffice or the gimp when you're playing a video. Does stutter get worse?)? Is the partition your /tmp directory is on full? Is the harddisk being addressed in UDMA mode (sudo apt-get install hdparm; sudo hdparm /dev/sda - sorry this is keyboard work Fire up 'top' in a console. In the third row from the top you'll see a line of CPU stats. The %wa entry would be interesting while you're experiencing stutter. That's the time the CPU waits for requested data from a storage medium aka Wait Time. You can quit top by pressing 'q'.

I'm guessing your harddisk is basically ok and not damaged because you'd have tons of other problems then.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Sorry it took so long to get back to you - been kind of busy. Anyway I haven't noticed the problem with other apps. I've played other audio and video files, and they all seem to wotk fine. It's just Flash video that's the problem. It gets worse with with HD flash. If the images are relatively static there's no problem, but if there's a lot of motion then stuttering occurs.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Are you experiencing stutter with other apps? Playing mp3s for e.g.

Forget a ride to the international space station, i want me one of these!

Put HD video screens on all the sideas and show flight footage going over rolling hills, beaches, mountains, whatever.

Those dreams of running along, jumping up and flying would come true!