[h4yn0nnym0u5e]

My colleagues and I went to the pub after we put together a 730Tb blade server array...we will NEVER fill that thing up. [Though my entire film/digital archive is teetering on the 100Tb milestone.]

You obviously don't image black holes using VLBI then. Apparently that took about 5000Tb of data, flown around the world on helium-filled drive arrays... and that was for just one image.

Cheers

Jonathan

[Racer X 69]

That's another great idea. I like your thinking.

In a crazy coincidence, I was cleaning out a drawer a couple of days ago and I found a half empty box of 3.5" floppies, but it never occurred to me to put one of the little metal slidy bits to that use. But at least I had enough sense to hang onto them, even though I haven't owned a 3.5" floppy drive since well back in the last century(*). Sometimes being an instinctive hoarder with a general love of old technology has its advantages.


(For our younger viewers: a 3.5" floppy was an advanced data storage solution from the 1980s that could hold a massive 720kb on a single disk. A huge improvement over the 8" single-sided 180kb disks that I'd started out with in my own early days with computers. And now someone even older than me is going to come along and tell you about tape drives and magnetic core memory. . .)


(*) Well darn, I've just remembered that I HAVE got a 3.5" floppy drive from an ancient laptop in my box of old disk drives after all.

I have an early version of AutoCAD on a bunch of 3.5" 1.44 mb floppy disks..

And I have three desktop computers that have floppy disk drives, and two of those machines still run. One is running Windows 2000, the other has Windows XP Pro.

[Digitalis]

You obviously don't image black holes using VLBI then.

I do own a noctilux. Get me close enough to Sagittarius A* in a sustainable environment, I can handle the rest. Calculating the correct exposure in the presence of time dilation from being close to such a massive dense object would be interesting.

[Not a Number]

The desktop I'm running Windows 10, 7 and XP (multboot) right now has a functioning 3.5" floppy drive in it. I even have a few working 5.25" floppy drives around (and tons of software on 5.25" discs).

[Digitalis]

I got a copy of DOS 6.22 and through that, Windows 3.11 running on a VM on one of my NAS devices....just seeing it brings back memories. I have a heap of Abandonia games for that era that only work on that OS, this could be fun.

[h4yn0nnym0u5e]

I do own a noctilux. Get me close enough to Sagittarius A* in a sustainable environment, I can handle the rest. Calculating the correct exposure in the presence of time dilation from being close to such a massive dense object would be interesting.

Good point. According to an external observer you'd appear to be suffering from reciprocity failure...

I think we've gone a tiny bit OT here, but least Dave got his question answered before the wheels came off. And metals are formed in stars, so there is a tenuous connection.

Cheers

Jonathan

[Dartmoor Dave]

I love the way this thread has turned into a freewheeling interplay of ideas among a bunch of highly intelligent and knowledgeable people. I've got the answers I've needed, and the rest of it is a joy.

And time dilation is a photographic concern that hasn't been given enough acknowledgement yet. Imagine all those luxury space cruise passengers of the future snapping shots of the rings of Saturn as they zoom past faster than the speed of light, only to discover that the results are blank because they've outrun the photons. Or would time dilation fix that? Any theoretical physicists in the room (and yes, I know you can't actually go faster than light)?


Edit: extra points for any answer beginning: "Assuming a spherical photographer in a vacuum. . . "

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Last edited by Dartmoor Dave; 01-20-2020 at 02:06 AM.

[Serkevan]

Why would you ever assume a spherical photographer? Clearly, math in the 21st century is advanced enough to solve the problem for a cylinder!

---------- Post added 01-20-20 at 04:57 AM ----------

I got a copy of DOS 6.22 and through that, Windows 3.11 running on a VM on one of my NAS devices....just seeing it brings back memories. I have a heap of Abandonia games for that era that only work on that OS, this could be fun.

When I was an undergrad, our engineering school had to ask the Chemistry faculty for space for our lab sessions in the Analytical Chemistry subjects. They only let us use the one with the VERY old equipment. Point in case: the gas spectrometer only had one output, namely printing a two meter long graph. There was also a very old HPLC that refused to work on anything else other whan Win 3.1, so it needed floppy discs - so one of my classmates had to run out and search for two hours for a store where they sold the darned things. And THEN we had to ask our IT guys to bring out one of the old PCs that still had the floppy drives so we could use the data

[Digitalis]

There was also a very old HPLC that refused to work on anything else other whan Win 3.1, so it needed floppy discs - so one of my classmates had to run out and search for two hours for a store where they sold the darned things.

Kudos for the perseverance it took to find 3.5" floppy disks for sale. I have worked with old NMR equipment and Raman spectrophotometers that used Windows 3.11/ NT. When I was at University we had some analytical equipment that used OS/2 Warp and output was performed on a dot matrix printer.

The best piece of equipment I have ever worked with was on a project where I had to isolate an unexpectedly toxic substance* using a chromatography column set up that automatically collected the fractions....talk about time saving technology, I always hated packing and running columns manually.


* It turned out to be two compounds that were quite nasty, the worst one was a polymorph that was typically sensitive to temperature and PH the company ended up ditching the compound because of it.. turns out synthesizing the compound on a large scale would involve some really frisky solvents and complex thermoregulation.

[photoptimist]

"Assuming a spherical photographer in a vacuum. . . "

This sounds like a line from a sci-fi space opera involving too much LBA, too many SMUs, and an irate SWMBO.