ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox 62
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."
Visualization (Score:4, Interesting)
A not totally off-topic question: Can anyone recommend a free data visualization and analysis/plotting package? Something a bit more powerful than gnuplot :)
Re:FINALLY !!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, what? OS X, while I personally rather dislike the "can't install our OS on non-Mac-approved hardware..." ... it DOES support that Mac-approved hardware, it seems.
Vista is usable.
XP is quite usable on the desktop, I've used it for quite a few years now.
Ubuntu is usable too, at least by most people with standard hardware. It's when you buy new hardware (like... a printer) that normal users can really run into problems.
Saying Ubuntu is more ready than XP is ... um... un-informed, IMO. Of course, we may have different definitions of the word ready.
Re:FINALLY !!! (Score:3, Interesting)
"Ready for us" (meaning, I suppoce, one to four desktop computers, probably fairly standard bought-from-Dell or something?) does not equal "more ready for the desktop [generic] than XP."
My parents use SuSE 11.0 (will upgrade to 11.1 as soon as I try it out and make sure it works well enough for them), but I usually have to go "fix" things now and then. Something doesn't display, audio isn't playing, the printer didn't work, how do I listen to music (no iTunes), etc.
I don't know exactly what your grandma, mom, and sister use it for, but I know that it doesn't take too many slightly-specialized (i.e., not just "check my e-mail") needs to make it a lot harder to set up for someone.
Open Hardware also from the ESA (Score:1, Interesting)
Originally, the LEON SPARC clone was from ESA.
Before that, there was the ESA ERC32 SPARC processor.
Now the project is sponsored by ESA and done by www.gaisler.com
Re:ESA has been doing this for years (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately ESA has a data policy which is lightyears behind that of NASA. While NASA data are just a click away, ESA data are tied up in red tape.
At least that was my experience some years ago.