Dang Kids Today!

>helping to improve Mars map data earns participants "points" and "badges" as well as a heady sense of aiding humanity's exploration of distant worlds

They should be outside... breaking shop windows and mugging pensioners.

Bleh

What are they, underfunded? Can we at least use this to create interesting structures on Mars?

I'm in, where do I sign up

Mars needs you!

Another example Micro$oft has contrived to force users to install silverlight.

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'.

Flash Travellers ..... Warp Opportunists ..... Power Entrepreneurs

"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?

It's a NASA trap...

NASA will invite the heads of Microsoft to be the first to land on the red planet. They'll give them a few days on Mars and then announce someone forgot to fuel the return stage. "Sorry, a problem with Outlook calendar reminders and Windows 7 apparently."

Oh, if only...

Microsoft Martians

I looked forward to trying it and introducing it to my boy, but found the site requires MS Silverlight. I run Linux (no computer in my house will run Windows, ever!), so that was that.

A very good idea, but why did they have to spoil it with Microsoft-only crap? Idiots.

personal time?

"a standup sort willing to donate your personal* time to Mars science"

* I'm donating the firm's time and bandwidth to this enterprise, actually.

the entire surface?

including the normally omitted 'uninteresting' 2 small polar regions usually (conveniently) not mapped for some reason or another ?

i somehow doubt that and think only certain pre-selected areas will be shown to the public.

Damn right.

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!

NASA as MS marketing tool

Not only that, the site is dog slow. Must be running ms servers also.

Azure? Eek! Silverlight, oh noes....

"The website is built on Microsoft's Windows Azure platform"

which probably accounts for how slow it is....

I was interested in it until I read that (and other commenters saying it needs Sluglight).. will now avoid at all costs.

It's useless

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.

How much discount did Microsoft give them then?

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.

oh

Oh, it needs silverlight. They made that clear. Not.

Guess I'll go back to Galaxy Zoo then.

@MacroRodent & @Tom Chiverton 1

Moonlight is the non-MS open-source client for Silverlight

A waste of time and space

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?

We need help with Mars

And we understand your paperwork is right on target with Uranus.

@ Ryan 7

"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.