Gates and space-ace Simonyi gift $30m for giant telescope

The currently terrestrial Bill Gates and his former (and space-faring) Microsoft colleague, Charles Simonyi, have donated a cool $30m to a project that aims to build "the world's largest survey telescope" (cleverly) called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. On Thursday, the group said that Gates and Simonyi had donated $10m and $20m respectively to help develop the telescope, which Gates says "is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore." The 8.4-meter telescope, which sports three large mirrors and three refractive lenses, will be built on a mountain in northern Chile and is scheduled to decimate the magic of your astronomy club in 2014.

[N30 G30 @ Jan 5th 2008 11:19PM]

Gates is the coolest billionaire ever.

(I'm not an MS fanboy, I love OS X.)

[ethana2 @ Jan 6th 2008 2:40AM]

Ubuntu needs a solid iLife counter!
...I've been wondering what it was!

And if the open source laptop idea resurrects PPC in a serious way, well, it will be interesting.
I hope it does.

...and at least Bill Gates isn't as insane as Ballmer. Still, once a monopolist, alwa--- well, we'll see, won't we?

[silverblackvoid @ Jan 6th 2008 3:34AM]

yeah man, i agree.

[BananaBoat @ Jan 5th 2008 11:40PM]

Now the only problem will be keeping people from constantly pointing this thing at Uranus.

[BobTurbo @ Jan 6th 2008 1:24AM]

Somebody will aim it back down towards the horiztonal and perve in everybody's houses.

[ethana2 @ Jan 6th 2008 2:43AM]

Who owns the copyright to the images it produces? Are they all public domain? CC perhaps?

[IndiaTech @ Jan 6th 2008 3:17AM]

Hmmm... This is how Mr. Gates plans to spy on Cupertino all the way from Seattle... Way to Go, Bill!!!

[france.justin @ Jan 6th 2008 4:29AM]

If it was truly an internet telescope it'd, uh, compress them Terabytes of data down a bit. Quite a stupid statement, if you stop and think about it.

[Andrew @ Jan 6th 2008 10:31AM]

How do you know how many bytes this thing will upload? It's a high resolution telescope, as in large photos. Compressed or uncompressed (and I'm going to assume most astronomers worth their weight in salt would take their images RAW over JPG), high resolution pictures of our cosmos could easily take terrabytes of space. In the future, keep your quite stupid statements to yourself.

[Andrew @ Jan 6th 2008 10:31AM]

How do you know how many bytes this thing will upload? It's a high resolution telescope, as in large photos. Compressed or uncompressed (and I'm going to assume most astronomers worth their weight in salt would take their images RAW over JPG), high resolution pictures of our cosmos could easily take terrabytes of space. In the future, keep your quite stupid statements to yourself.

[Andrew @ Jan 6th 2008 10:31AM]

How do you know how many bytes this thing will upload? It's a high resolution telescope, as in large photos. Compressed or uncompressed (and I'm going to assume most astronomers worth their weight in salt would take their images RAW over JPG), high resolution pictures of our cosmos could easily take terrabytes of space. In the future, keep your quite stupid statements to yourself.

[Andrew @ Jan 6th 2008 10:39AM]

Holy triple post Batman! I wish we had the ability to delete.

[Mic2000 @ Jan 6th 2008 5:58AM]

That picture was well placed ;). Also as a non fanboy of Vista, i'm really looking forward to Windows 7. As they told, it is buildup from the ground, i really have some high hopes that the people at Microsoft finally deliver some good OS.


Ooh btw, what i was wondering, Windows Vista was build upon XP?, XP on 2000?, 2000 on NT? NT on 95 / 98? 95 on 3.x?(i always founded stuff in 95 from 3.x) Please correct me if i'm wrong, but does this mean that Windows Vista is still based of Windows 3.x that was in stores in 1990?

[Jeff Lewis @ Jan 6th 2008 6:25AM]

Actually, WinNT OSes have essentially nothing in common with Win95 class OSes other than broadly similar features.

In fact, WinNT has more in common with OS/2.

As for Vista, while it wasn't 'rebuilt from scratch', it has massive changes in some of the most basic parts. Its display system is quite different now and resembles X11's display or MacOS's display manager system more than anything else.

More of the driver architecture has been moved out of the Kernel making the OS stabler.

Of course, all of this also makes it harder to support old apps and drivers - which is what's causing most of the frustration with Vista.

Believe me, if Win7 is 'completely rewritten', Vista will look like a cakewalk compared to it. Hopefully they'll get integrated virtualisation of WinXP and WinVista into it by then.

[Mic2000 @ Jan 6th 2008 6:35AM]

Allright, well that makes things more clear, thnx Jeff!

[Ghen @ Jan 6th 2008 9:01AM]

Vista is the ME of 2007+. Sure, you could get it in working order and make a great OS out of it, but if I wanted to tinker that much I'd install Linux.

[Jeff Lewis @ Jan 6th 2008 6:28AM]

The images aren't terabytes in size, they mean they'll be pulling terabytes OF images down every night.

They'll almost certainly be compressed in multiple formats and multiple resolutions. Some people will want the images in as close to unprocessed format as possible. Other people will just want to look at the nice pictures.

That alone will contribute to the terabytes per day.