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Earth Science

World's Largest Flower Blooming In Streaming HD 61

Posted by timothy from the fortune-is-in-the-nose-of-the-beholder dept.
npongratz writes "Standing at six feet tall and growing an inch per hour, a corpse flower is set to bloom at the Milwaukee Public Museum. You can keep tabs on this once-in-six-years event in streaming 1080p HD (using VLC), or a lower-bandwidth image feed. A live feed from the smelloscope is unfortunately a few centuries away from being invented."
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World's Largest Flower Blooming In Streaming HD More

World's Largest Flower Blooming In Streaming HD

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  • Great idea for an article (Score:5, Funny)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @11:50AM (#25626975) Journal

    I've been watching this thing for about 10 minutes thinking. In about 9 minutes, everyone on slashdot will see a link for "High Def live video feed" and click on it. Suddenly, the server running this stream will start trying to transfer 50GB/sec (100,000+ users) and this thing WILL JUST DIE. Here we go.

    Disclaimer: I know they couldn't transfer 50GB/sec or even 1GB per second.

    • Yep, a wiser idea would have been using some distributed network like Akamai, and cutting the feed off before it get past the 95th percentile (36 hours IIRC) to avoid being charged for it :)

    • Lasted 15 minutes (Score:3, Informative)

      by suso ( 153703 ) *

      It was impressive that it lasted longer than 10, but then it just started getting worse and worse until bam, disconnect.

    • Re:Great idea for an article (Score:5, Funny)

      by Ngarrang ( 1023425 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @12:09PM (#25627413) Journal

      Is this how slow of a news day we are to expect? Watching plants grow...in HD?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by JohnSearle ( 923936 )

      I've been watching this thing for about 10 minutes thinking. In about 9 minutes, everyone on slashdot will see a link for "High Def live video feed" and click on it. Suddenly, the server running this stream will start trying to transfer 50GB/sec (100,000+ users) and this thing WILL JUST DIE. Here we go.

      So you've turned the countdown to bloom into the countdown for slashdotting. hmm...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by WK2 ( 1072560 )

      You called it. I was only going to watch the image feed for a few seconds, but that's gone.

    • I didn't even bother with the video feed for a number of reasons, although probably the most relevant is I'm transferring a large file over an already slow VPN link as is.

      Watching the image feed, I can't help but think to myself "Feed me Seymour!".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jkerman ( 74317 )

      I know ideas of wisconsin bring up mental images of endless fields and cows. But we do have a world-class university here, with a world class data network. GB/s? thats /nothin/

      • But we do have a world-class university here, with a world class data network. GB/s? thats /nothin/

        Of course! How could I forget? You have that next-gen wonder, the GossipNet, which is rumored to be capable of delivering terabytes/second to any point in the state with perfect reliability

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bozo88 ( 116173 )

      Actually, they happen to have a 10Gig link on that system but they can't get the code ( VLC? OS X? ) to be efficient enough to saturate the link before they run into another bottleneck. However they are doing their best to make it possible for everyone to watch this in HD. For me on a multicast enabled internet2 connection, the 20 MBit HD stream looks great!

    • For something like a flower, though, I'd imagine that the bandwidth requirements could be pretty trivial, with the right codec. Send a keyframe every 10 minutes and nobody would even notice.
    • the preferred transmission is multicast. for unicast, we now have 5 servers in rotation: 3- dual 3.4 GHz Xeon boxes - with 1 Gbps Ethernet 1- Mac Pro dual 3.0 MHz quadcore Xeon - with 10 Gbps Ethenet 1- xServe dual 3.0 MHz quadcore Xeon - with 1 Gbps Ethernet they are in my office. it is hot.

  • Seriously? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ccguy ( 1116865 ) * on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @11:51AM (#25626989) Homepage
    I can't believe this is news. Every TV brand uses flowers to demo the greatness of their products.

    In fact, Whenever a friend comes home I share the pain by bragging about my TV by playing a few dozens of these so called 'flower demos'. Not a movie, not a sport event, not a TV show. Flowers. This always make them want to go to closest TV shop.
    • This is for the republicans who have been following the election. The corpse flower will be adopted, at least for the time, for the party emblem.
  • "FEED ME SEYMOUR!!!"
  • when I watched Dennis the Menace on Blu-ray.
  • I lived in Milwaukee for a few years, and if I recall, the room this is housed is right next to the cafe. Lovely!

    Also, it appears the site MPM site has been Slashdotted.
  • There's a reason why they call these things corpse-flowers.

  • http://kona.doit.wisc.edu:8044

    There. Fixed that for ya...

  • Not only are we watching a flower bloom in HD, the plant is named after a Giant Misshapen Phallus which when blooming gives off a smell resembling rotting meat that can be smelled for miles..

    So we'll see guys in white suits incinerating it with flamethrowers? GG, Slashdot!

  • Frankly, I'm glad there is no smell-o-scope or smell-o-vision. There is a reason its called a corpse flower. It smells like rotting meat, or if you're lucky, cookies.

  • This is almost as exciting as ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @12:25PM (#25627769) Homepage
    watching grass grow [www.watching-grass-grow]

    P.S. Some dude with a balding spot is in front of the corpse flower right now.

  • Smelloscope? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kozar_The_Malignant ( 738483 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @12:28PM (#25627827)

    >A live feed from the smelloscope is unfortunately a few centuries away from being invented."

    In this case, that is NOT unfortunate.

  • Thank God nobody ever invented Smellovision.

  • Smell-o-vision (Score:3, Interesting)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @01:12PM (#25628695) Homepage Journal

    It's just not the same without Smell-o-vision [temple.edu].

    Thank gawd.

  • ... I can't watch for too long or I risk exceeding my bandwidth limit. Chilling effect? I think so. Someday an alternative will present itself (FiOS hopefully) and I'll jump as fast as I can.

  • of my cap will I use up [slashdot.org] if I watch this?

  • Too bad it chose today to bloom, what with the election and all. Next year probably would have been better.

  • Oh man... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Khyber ( 864651 ) <techkitsune@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @03:42PM (#25631385) Homepage Journal

    When it blooms, there will be NOBODY in that building to CARE.

    We had one of those at the Kirby High Greenhouse. Right as it bloomed we had to get pictures of it and kill it off, because the stench was so bad it hit the cafeteria on the other side of school, and students were puking.

    I feel sorry for the guys that have to deal with this, even once every six years!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Lijemo ( 740145 )

      We had one of those at the Kirby High Greenhouse. Right as it bloomed we had to get pictures of it and kill it off, because the stench was so bad it hit the cafeteria on the other side of school, and students were puking.

      They killed a plant so rare that there are fewer than 200 (two-hundred) known specimens in the world, rather than vacate the premises for the few hours that the bloom lasts?!?!?!?

      If they can't deal with closing the school one day to avoid the few hours every six years that the bloom is open, then why the heck did the school have one in the first place? Give it to another school, museum, or research center!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Khyber ( 864651 )

        we were responsible for thousands of clones of the same plant, so it was really no big deal.

        And the plant is NOT as rare as it's made out to be, although the HABITAT is endangered.

        Clones of these plants are ungodly hardy. We've put it in soils of below 5.5 pH and it loved it, whereas most plants would die off. It doesn't seem to care about ANYTHING and is adapted to many, many environments. I have a cousin of it growing in my indoor garden (granted it's not endangered or even threatened) but this thing stil

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Khyber ( 864651 )

          bad form, I know, replying to myself - Thousands of clones really only = about 200 clones surviving then dying upon transport to other greenhouse environments. We've done cloning for years in this crap ass greenhouse, and it's still been used for many oddball and important projects, even after the school turned city and voted (and failed) to close the greenhouse down.

          I used to help teach (as a student that already knew the entire Hort. Sci course from last year) and we did loads of amazing things. That corp

  • This is one of those rarer shots, and I'd like to know if anybody has/can/will record this so we can all enjoy it a few years down the line. I know right now not only do I not have the power to run a 1080p video stream, I don't have the connection bw, or a monitor capable of streaming it. But it would be nice to come back on this one day.

    Unless it's almost a given it's going to be on the pirate bay?

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