Slashdot Mirror

that's the great thing about working at a national lab - in my office i have a gigabit network connection straight to the backbone (the advantages to being tech-savvy in a generally retarded department..."oh come on, the 100/1000 card is like $25 more than the 10/100...and it's not your money anyway"). wonder how long before they upgrade the network, those iso's take *forever* at 700KB/s...
yes, i know i'm not pushing my connection at all @ 700K, and i know 10-gig ethernet wouldn't make a rat's ass of a difference, but i like to gloat (/. on mozilla 1.0 takes, oh, 0.981 seconds to load and render)

up here at Brookhaven, when they want to run the RHIC (world's largest particle accelerator), they need to truck in a whole shitload of liquid helium, since our (fscking HUGE) LHe plant can only put out enough to fill 50% of the magnets, and it absolutely sucks power from the grid (i believe it's electric consumption alone when it's running at 100% is seriously pushing a gigawatt). RHIC is slightly over 2.5 miles (4km) around.
there aren't any practical superconducting wires that will work at 77K (LN2 temp); RHIC uses specially extruded NbTi wires, which 'go' at 11K. so let's say somebody somewhere, europe, japan, usa, antarctica, wherever, builds a 200-km maglev track. where are they going to get the constant helium supply to cool the magnets? i suppose you could build LHe plants the size of ours and put them every 3km, but they'd have to be cranking at probably 70-80% 24/7 to keep the magnets full, and that's gonna hurt the power grid. let alone the riders, who are going to end up footing the power bill.
and i don't think we can run the plants off lighting bolts, yet :) (jiggawatts!!)

This isn't exactly what happens.
Warning: ebuild spoiler follows

1. ebuild to be processed is read/parsed
2. Required filenames (i.e. basename file) parsed from download URLs
3. mirror locations are checked (GENTOO_MIRROR iirc) in your /etc/make.conf & /etc/make.globals
4. ebuild will try do download required source from mirrors in GENTOO_MIRROR
5. If the above locations do not provide the file, then the original URL is attempted (we download source from upstream

In conclusion, I'm sorry, but there will be no Gentoo Effect.

Kain

Nice unsubstantiated claim there...

(speaking as one who is trained to fight fires including the use of installed Halon systems)

Oh, appeal to authority too... good one! Got Documentation(tm)?

• Exposure to 7% halon for 8 hours produces no ill effects.
• Since low concentrations of Halon 1301 are required to extinguish most fires, and as the agent has a low degree of inhalation toxicity in its natural state, it can be successfully used to attack fires quickly in normally occupied areas.
• Halon 1301 ... a medium for extinguishing fires by inhibiting the chemical chain reaction of fuel and oxygen.
• Most authorities agree that the Halon acts as a chain breaker.

The way Halon puts out a fire, quite simply, is to smother it

If that were the case, how does it manage to work in such low concentrations? It shouldn't be any better than flooding the room with CO2, nitrogen, or some other gas that doesn't support combustion. Tell me, what's the minimum concentration of CO2 needed to put out a fire? At least 34%, perhaps? How about Halon 1301? 5% or so.

So, I am a PhD student and my work requires me to travel to Brookhaven Nat. Lab synchrotron occasionally. Anyway I went there with my boss, Dr. D, who appeared in Vogue for being one of the sexiest professional women ( ./ babe!).

Anyway the night watchman (guy there just in case the x-ray beam explodes), Bob or Bill was trying real hard to get in my boss's pants. So, he brought up the fact that his dad is Steve Russell. Then he proceeds to look up all these webpages dedicated to dad. Of course, now I have a tainted view of the situation, because he wouldn't leave from midnight to 8:00 am when the morning guy arrived.

It was interesting to here the story of the original game maker. Apparently the were just bored one day and had lots of CRT technology around.

Anyway that's my story. Sorry its not so cool.

-vossman

The slashdot effect has been analyzed:

Traffic increase from slashdot effect
Increase in hits and bandwith requirements of a Linux related story being featured on Slashdot
Analysis of several stories making it to the frontpage of Slashdot and other newslogs.

Especially the second link shows that the Slashdot effect can look very much like a DDoS attack. The severance depends on the story, probably on the time of day and of course on the link and hardware powering the /.ed site.

If you pay by the gigabyte for your webtraffic (who doesn't), the /. effect can be a financial DoS attack much more than a technical DoS.

Here's a nicely formatted list of mirrors for you lazy bastards ;)
Let's make the slashdot effect on xfree86.org a little more bearable :)
ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/mirrors/xfree86
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/XFree86
ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/XFree86
ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/XFree86
ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/XFree86
ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/XFree86
ftp://mirror.sftw.com/pub/XFree86
ftp://phyppro1.phy.bnl.gov/pub/XFree86
ftp://ftp.rge.com/pub/X/XFree86
ftp://ftp.valinux.com/pub/mirrors/xfree86

Plutonium releases alphas. ( http://www2.bnl.gov/CoN/nuc/P/Pu239.shtml)

The kind of instrument described, I believe, is for deep tissue dose, or, gamma rays (http://www.netechnology.co.uk/bicdrm.html)

W

NT4 ran on the Alpha, Mips, and (i think) PPC.

Would have chosen MIPS too only they're getting kind of hard to get. I remember something from about a year ago to do with a MIPS-based ATX motherboard, though.

IA64 Linux is now shipping from several places. The next release of Mandrake looks set to ship for at least IA32, IA64, PPC and Alpha, if Cooker is any good as an indication. There's also some discussion of a 386/486 backport (standard Mandrake needs at least a Pentium).

There is a great deal of activity here in the US w.r.t. the transfer of large amounts of data via advanced networks. Internet2 is working with the International Physics community from the US side. The HENP Networking Working Group (High Energy and Nuclear Physics). Additionally, there is work with with the National Earthquake Engineering Simulation Grid. NEES is going to be collecting similar amounts of information from earthquake simulation experiments.

Some of the most interesting work is being done by those involved with the End to End Performance Initiative. These folks are trying to figure out what it takes to support the data transfer rates that will soon be necessary.

It continues to amaze me that it is now possible to use a network to transfer data to a disk/array faster than the disk/array can process it. I believe that many have pointed out that hardware (in terms of Moore's law and data acquisition/processing) has is not keeping up with the rate of data creation. But that is prob a bit obvious to most of us.

• In June we got the news from the Sudbury Neutrino Oscilloscope that from the detection rates of muon-type and electron-type neutrino's coming from the Sun we should conclude that neutrinos oscillate (change type) and are therefore massive, which is in full contradiction with the SM.
• In March this year the results of the 1999 data of the muon g-2 measurement at Brookhaven National Laboratory showed that the (anomalous) magnetic moment of the muon is not described correctly by the SM. This 'magnetic moment' indicates how much the spin of a muon is affected by a magnetic field (a bit like how quickly a compass needle reacts to a new orientation of the compass). This measurement generated lots of theoretical ideas for mods of the SM and/or signs of supersymmetry and what not.
• The Standard Model is ugly.

• Tech Talk About C++ and C
  
• PGI Workstation User's Guide
  
• Fortran and C/C++ Mixed Programming
  

There's already (at least) 5 states of matter: solid, gas, liquid, plasma (gas so hot that it gets ionized - the sun's made out of it), and the recently confirmed Bose-Einstein Condensate [colorado.edu] (gas so cold that weird quantum things start to happen).

There are also higher temperature states above plasma. A plasma is a gas that's so hot the kinetic energy of the atoms is larger than the binding energy of the electrons and they get stripped.

If you raise the temperature more (a lot more) above the binding energy of nucleons in the nucleus, all nuclei break down and you have a gas of just protons and electrons.

Beyond that, there might be a state where the nucleons themselves break apart into a "quark-gluon plasma". This hasn't been experimentally discovered yet, but it's what they're looking for at RHIC.

[warning: I am participating in GRID activities and research with my current job. These opinions are my own.]

It is important to note that the GRID currently is not aiming to satisfy a "business case". Specifically, it is a research tool that is designed to aid scientists address problems that can not (easily) be solved using existing solutions. There are many good explanations of the GRID around the net, one of them is at the Globus site.

There are a few examples of where the GRID is being used or will soon be used in the research community:

- NEES: National Earthquake Engineering Simulation GRID
- HENP: High Energy Nuclear Physics working group
- Internet2: How the Internet2 infrastructure is being used in the development of various GRID projects.

Now, there are additional reasons as to why businesses might be interested in projects such as the GRID. I come from a FEA background and it would be useful to many organizations to be able to harness multiple systems to complete some of the CPU, data and time intensive tasks that the GRID proposes to address.

Further, the GRID's long term goal is to provide the ability to offer compute cycles and storage in a way that the current electrical power grid does. I am sure we can all imagine personal uses for this sort of power. Creating a viable business end for this is the question that I can not answer (and that you are asking). However, creating this system will help researchers. Once it is available, creating consumer level benefits should not be difficult.

Finally, you mention some of the policy issues, particularly concerning data storage. One of the key parts of the GRID work involves ACLs, distributed directory services, and the like. It is important to note that organizations in GRID projects (and corporations of the future who might use GRID like services) will have the ability to grant/deny access to their systems. There is a great deal of effort currently under way to make sure that the grid is not going to become a general purpose storage system for everyone's generic data. Some of the work on this type of middleware is available at the Internet2 middleware site.

Not very recent, but still informative:
http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/SDE/ SlashDotEffect.html

Spoke too soon.

The next guy who talked was Jose Munoz from DOE. He did a Dave Letterman by going through the top 10 reason why Open Source software is bad in reverse order. The last one being, or rather item #1, the question "Would you want to fly in an airplane whose complete flight system was developed using Open Source by the lowest bidder?", followed by a bullet reading "Whom do you sue when the thing goes wrong? (assuming you're a survivor)". It's unfortunate that the guy who works for the same government agency which provides my paycheck gave such a negative perspective to this issue. It was good to listen to one of the members of the audience make a statement, at the end of the session, that if given a choice between the plane running open source software or something running under a Microsoft OS, he would much prefer the open source one, given the track record of Microsoft software. There were a couple of chuckles in the audience and a blushed smile from Todd of Microsoft.
Note: You can find Jose Munoz's full presentation in this .pdf file.

Anyway, I would be more worried about this. If thats what they do with fibers on the ground, imagine what the inside of a satillite looks like.

Spoke too soon.

The next guy who talked was Jose Munoz from DOE. He did a Dave Letterman by going through the top 10 reason why Open Source software is bad in reverse order. The last one being, or rather item #1, the question "Would you want to fly in an airplane whose complete flight system was developed using Open Source by the lowest bidder?", followed by a bullet reading "Whom do you sue when the thing goes wrong? (assuming you're a survivor)". It's unfortunate that the guy who works for the same government agency which provides my paycheck gave such a negative perspective to this issue. It was good to listen to one of the members of the audience make a statement, at the end of the session, that if given a choice between the plane running open source software or something running under a Microsoft OS, he would much prefer the open source one, given the track record of Microsoft software. There were a couple of chuckles in the audience and a blushed smile from Todd of Microsoft.
Note: You can find Jose Munoz's full presentation in this .pdf file.

Anyway, I would be more worried about this. If thats what they do with fibers on the ground, imagine what the inside of a satillite looks like.

Actually this reminds me of something else...

I'm willing to bet that it can be made far more reliable than the big accelerators of today: it has many fewer parts, and they are all much more accessible. You're also not subject to overbearing safety rules that make everything take much longer than it really needs to (without providing much improvement in safety). For reference, during operating periods, the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory tries to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. On average, beam is delivered successfully for about 100 out of those 168 hours.

If your friend is going to run this cyclotron, I recommend that he learn about radiation safety and put together a radiation monitoring system.

MSN will disconnect your modem if there is no web activity within 10 minutes, a feature that ruins gaming.

I have seen 1.5Gb/s HDTV streams (and interactive video) at SC2000 (this particular demo wasn't over IP; University of Washington uses Gigabit Ethernet cards and interlaced HDTV: roughly 700Mb/s). It's quite impressive; now I know why I never want to watch movies on regular TV.

Isn't this the facility that was supposed to create a black hole and destroy the earth? Here's the report that Brookhaven had to research to quiet the fears of the folks concerned about the RHIC's disaster potential.

I work at a synchrotron facility that will go online in 3 years and the beamlines people tell me that the protein crystallography guys take data at 150 MB/s, or 1 TB/2 h. By the time we are supplying beam, it'll be 4 TB/h or ~100 TB/day! Now where the heck am I suppose to cache that?!

Another shot of the Itanium cluster and a neat photo of the Origin 3000:

http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/pictures/rac kofcpu3.jpg

http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/pictures/rac kofcpu4.jpg

Another shot of the Itanium cluster and a neat photo of the Origin 3000:

http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/pictures/rac kofcpu3.jpg

http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/pictures/rac kofcpu4.jpg

"imagine a beowulf of these"

Well, SGI did.

http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/pictures/rac kofcpu2.jpg

Here's another one.

I'm a graduate student who works on the experiment to which this thread is alluding. It is the muon g-2 experiment.

The post to which I am responding contains several factual errors:

• There is about a 1 or 2 percent (rather than 10 percent) probability of obtaining this result by chance if the "true" value is given by the Standard Model. In any event, this is a probability of obtaining the result because of a statistical fluctuation, rather than a mistake (as implied by the phrase "their data is incorrect).
• We actually use GNU/Linux for the vast majority of our data analysis! Our data acquisition system, which moves the raw data from the electronics to DLT tapes, is based on vxWorks. Essentially every other step in the analysis chain runs on Linux machines, either at Brookhaven or one of the collaboration institutions. For instance, we have a cluster with twelve dual 500 MHz Linux machines in our group here at the University of Illinois.
• In some sense, the experiment has already been repeated. The result that we recently announced was based on an analysis of only about 20 percent of the data that we currently have on tape. We're working hard on getting the rest of it analyzed, though: hopefully we'll have an answer by the end of the year. Then I can write my thesis, add "Ph.D." to my name, and start collecting the kind of salary that IT people make straight out of high school. :-)

Thanks,
Fred Gray

--

The first link is slide from a Brookhaven talk. Not much useful info here, and the picture doesn't match what the other links describe. The entire slide show is fairly interesting, though.

The second link is PDF whitepaper discussing the commercial production of such cable. A great read, if you have the time to wade through it.

The third link is an article from the Nov. 18, 2000, issue of "Science News" on the same subject as the Knight-Ridder article. Much more technical details.

There are some signs of bad science on the CNN site though. I don't believe Eros is in danger of hitting the earth because it has a stable orbit. I hate it when the news over-exagerates dangers, such as when the researcher from the RHIC said there is a small possibility of a black hole being created. Because of that, everyone was sure a giant movie-like black hole would be created at Brookhaven. Next, we'll be hearing that the NEAR landing might have pushed the rock off course, allowing it to hit the earth and destroy everything.

Just hope we can find a bunch of movie stars to quickly blow it up!

--
Gonzo Granzeau

Tau would have produced a more measurable result (I assume), but crunching the numbers on it might be a nightmare
In the paper, they say that the effect scales as the square of the mass, so yes, the tau would have produced a bigger effect. I'd guess the reason they didn't use taus is simply that their accelerator didn't have enough energy to produce taus. I don't see why "crunching the numbers" would be an issue. If you have a computer program set up to calculate the g-2 of the electron or muon, then I think all you should really have to do is change one variable to calculate g-2 of the tau. Anyhow, this is an experimental paper. The relevant calculations have been understood for a long time.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

It's most common decay mode is gamma radiation, so I don't know how useful it would be for fission, but the only other Am242 nuclides are the one with the aforementioned 16-hour half-life and one with a half-life of 14 ms, so I figure this must be it.

Consult the nuclear physicist in your family for more details.

OK,
- B
--

The actual author of this post is not Maldivian, but rather... er... well, I don't know, but the original article is here: http://www.dne.bnl.gov/atd-mag/chernobyl.html.

Apparently Maldivian is making a career out of earning /. karma by lifting other peoples work. See his user info for other examples.

That's really pathetic, man.

> If the slashdot effect really exists

It does, according to this and this.

This obvious answer to your question is about Slashdot never falling victim to the slashdot effect is that the Slashdot server(s) is (are) superior to the other servers that are getting slashdotted. As well, I would imagine that Slashdot's connection/bandwidth is pretty impressive.

> If the slashdot effect really exists

It does, according to this and this.

This obvious answer to your question is about Slashdot never falling victim to the slashdot effect is that the Slashdot server(s) is (are) superior to the other servers that are getting slashdotted. As well, I would imagine that Slashdot's connection/bandwidth is pretty impressive.

so, does this software block geek porn?

Not sure what this has to do with supercomputing, but there are picture of IBMs new $20k monitor in the "geek porn" section.

http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/sc2kpg2.html

Milinar

Let a lower powered accelerator attempt to find the Higgs, I STILL don't believe it will be discovered, because it's been stated over and over 'we just need a little more power to find the Higgs boson!'. The problem is that all of these vast teams are lead by one or two scientists, who desperately want the Nobel Prize. Hence, good science is sometimes ignored in favor of the limelight... I'm just glad 'good physics' prevailed this time around.

I had hoped to talk about this on BottomQuark but lost all my research midway through the discussion. whoops. `8r) I wonder if there is such a thing as an amateur partical physics person....

--
Gonzo Granzeau

Tritium releases low-energy beta particles as it decays. A beta particle is an electron -- no different from normal electrons other than its source. Low-energy beta particles can be shielded by skin, paper, or 6mm of air.

Tritium is already used in iso-luminence products, usually taking the form of EXIT signs and aisle marker lights in movie theaters. No batteries, no wires, easy installation.

Tritium has a half-life of ~12.6 years IIRC, so your EXIT sign will be half as bright every ~12.6 years. Lots of informative websites on this. Simply type in *tritium exit* and you'll get a bunch of good hits (though they might be a little weak on the science, since most of the sites are wholesalers selling iso-lights).

Here's a decent science intro site on Tritium:
Brookhaven National Laboratory: Introduction to Tritium and Radioactivity.

One last thing: I suspect that if radiation exposure standards were lower, tritium isoluminent products could be made for less money, perhaps cheap enough to allow their ubiquitous spread through society and reducing night-time/low-light accidents to a point where the safety they provide would outweigh radiation dangers. Example, clothes would be made with isoluminent things sown into them -- when you are driving your car or riding your bike around at night, every ped/biker out there with you would be glowing. Much safer IMO!

(Free the tritium!)
-Zoyd

I know why DC is afraid to sue /. They fear it, as well they should. The fear... THE SLASHDOT EFFECT *DUM DUM DUUUUM*

Go to http://www.rhic.bnl.gov/html2/primer.html to get a simple intro into the quark-gluon plasma.

I hear if you find a deer tick, you can put it in an envelope and mail it to them and they'll tell you if it has Lyme's disease. But, does the tick have to be alive when you mail it?

I haven't been able to confirm this stuff at their site.

w

They should have linked to the RHIC web site: www.rhic.bnl.gov.

Um, I can't find any plutonium that emits He-3, maybe you ought to check a table before making such claims.

Also, there is no way that fusing He-3 gets you water and hyrogen. What it does get you (when you do He-3 + H-2) is a proton (i.e. a hyrdogen nucleus) which can be chemically burned to form water at the expense of your breathing oxygen. Not a good deal for long term space travel.

I highly doubt that He-3 + He-3 fusions gets you oxygen. If you think that it does, please show me a source.

For a nice article on simulations performed for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider:

A Taste of Quark Soup

BTW, this research was done a T3E (which uses Alphas).

Sean

• Australiasia
  
  • Japan
    
    
  • ftp://ftp.netlab.is.tsukuba.ac.jp/pub /XFree86
  • ftp://ftp.iij.ad.jp/pub/X/XFree86
  
  
• Korea
  
  • ftp://ftp.kreonet.re.kr/pub/Linux/xfree86
  
  
• Australia
  
  • ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/XFree86
    
  • ftp://x.physics.usyd.edu.au/pub/XFree86
  
  

US

• ftp://phyppro1.phy.bnl.gov/pub/XFree86
  
• ftp://ftp.rge.com/pub/X/XFree86
• ftp://ftp.varesearch.com/pub/mirrors/x free86
• ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/XFr ee86
• ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/m irrors/xfree86
• ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/XFree86
• 
  ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/mirrors/xfree86
  
  

Europe

• Austria
  
  • ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/hci/X11/XFree86
    
    
  
  
• Finland
  • ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/X11/XFree86
• France
  • ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/X11/XFree86
  
  
• Germany
  • ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/xfree86/XFree86
    
  • ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/X/XFree86
• Italy
  • ftp://ftp.unina.it/pub/XFree86
• Norway
  • ftp://sunsite.uio.no/pub/XFree86
  
  
• United Kingdom
  • ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/XFr ee86

There was a big to-do a couple of years ago about a cluster of unusual cancers near
Brookhaven National Laboratory (site of the RHIC).

IIRC these were possibly connected to leakage of tritium and various nasty chemicals into the ground. There was speculation that this led to contamination of the local water supplies.

I don't recall any allegations of this being directly related to the lab's research, just to poor handling of hazardous material. The scandal led to the replacement of the lab's management team.

See http://www.oer.dir.bnl.gov/ for more information on their cleanup efforts.