NASA maps Mars with NASA is outsourcing laborious Martian cartography to Earth children with a website that entices users to make a game out of sorting through the space agency's hundreds of thousands images of the Red Planet. In collaboration with Microsoft, NASA has created the "Be a Martian" website, where helping to improve Mars map data …
NASA FAIL: what about browser and platform neutrality?
NASA should not allow its educational outreach programme to become embroiled in the machinations of the monopolistic Megacorp and its propriatery software 'standards'.
"Both companies hope the website will inspire youngsters to grow up to be part of their payroll."
Is there a payrolled top shelf, under the counter, back room, Adults Only version ........ for Presently Intrepid Future XPerienced Explorers?
"Both companies hope the website will inspire youngsters to grow up to be part of their payroll."
Hey kids, now that you've seen how much fun it is spending hours in mindless repetitive digital drudgery in return for meaningless rewards, why not come and work for us, and spend the rest of your life doing it !
Yeah, right. I'm off to join the NLRA.
Good to see Microsoft putting the world's children to work, and paying them less than even the most crazed Victorian industrialist's wet dreams would have pictured. Get the little bastards working productively. We don't want them having any chance to exercise their creativities or free wills; get them used to the yoke of corporate predation nice and early. Spend your life in a cubicle! You can earn badges! Work, little Monkey. WORK!
Last spring I'd suggested to the good folks who are cleaning up the sea near Sellafield that they might consider turning the hunt for hot particles into some sort of game; or putting one of the undersea cameras online when the went to clean up the pipeline dump. As with mapping Mars, this would promote the industry and encourage youngsters to take part etc..
Hmm. The front-line engineer to whom I spoke took the point, but I got short shrift from them upstairs.
http://www.sellafieldsites.com/what-we-do/featured-projects/beach-monitoring
1. It's suffering from the slashdot effect - it's slow and/or frequently unavailable
2. It requires an MS proprietary plugin that's not available on many architectures
3. it doesn't award rep points per the spec
4. sometimes it doesn't even give you an image to align
5. there's no way to flag that you can't find the location
Try Galaxy Zoo instead, it's way better.
I'm guessing that NASA got a large "non profit organisation discount" or similar -- pretty clever marketing by Microsoft really.
It's a shame, because this sounds like the kind of thing that would be useful for passing a few hours while upgrading an OS at home or sitting around waiting for jobs to finish at work.
Took me about 12 attempts to register, dog slow, then connection timeouts. Then I discover it needs silverlight which isn't supported on my Mac OS version (2 years old) which I found out after I downloaded it.
Now I like MS, but this is the biggest pile of hot turd I have ever come across.
And judging by the style and wording (if you actually get a display) you need a lobotomy to become a member....who runs this the Scientologists?
"Moonlight is the non-MS open-source client for Silverlight"
But the site doesn't work with it! I tried. Still shows "Get Silverlight" boxes on the interesting sub-pages. Actually I'm not surprised. "Moonlight" is always behind "Silverlight" in the level of features it supports. Contrast this with Flash, where Adobe officially supports multiple platforms, and the Linux version is not far behind the Windows version. Even better still would have been to implement this with "AJAX" techniques, or Java.
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