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Aalto University Internet access is through Funet, the Finnish University and Research Network. The block does not apply to Funet at all. However, my Saunalahti residential ADSL is provided by Elisa and has both DNS and IP traffic blocks active; traceroute shows packets failing to make the jump from the last elisa.net node to eunetip.net. In other words, Elisa seems to be filtering inbound and/or outbound traffic by IP.

Elmer from http://www.csc.fi/english/pages/elmer ... free, windows executable available, MPI capable. Geometric model has to be made separately I believe.

Isn't the real science not happening for like another 11 months?

"It has been estimated that the particle tests will generate approximately 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of measuring data. This amount of data will be decentralized by utilizing data networks into several computation centers all around the world."

Due to this huge amount of data scientists had to create new ways of sending large volumes of traffic over conventional networks (by software/hardware).

The probability of finding the Higgs boson in once collision depends on the energy at which the Higgs boson can be created (if it exists). The faster the particles hit each other the higher the energy.

If the scientists are really unlucky, the Higgs boson could have been "discovered" in the experiment some months from now and go unnoticed in the sea of data for years (assuming the Higgs Boson is to be found somewhere at the upper limit of the energies provided and in the last to be checked data).

The problem with open source tools is that the graphical user interface is a bit lacking. On the other hand, if you really want to do something worthwhile, you won't be able to do it with a GUI -- after all, it isn't really a Turing complete way of interacting. All the necessary libraries are open source. There are some nice frameworks that use these libraries, and Elmer (http://www.csc.fi/elmer) is a nice one, and it is also GPL.

juha

I've just downloaded Elmer, which looks promissing.
http://www.csc.fi/elmer/

Funet network, used by universities in Finland (and had about 300,000 users in 2003), currently has a 10 Gbps connection to the outside world as shown in: http://www.csc.fi/suomi/funet/verkko.html.fi Eunet, a commercial provider for SMEs, has a 2.5 Gbps connection to Stockholm: http://www.eunet.fi/yritys/verkko/

The university network, FUNET, has 10Gbps. In addition several other ISPs have their own backbone lines out of the country. Some of them are listed at the Finnish Communication and Internet Exchange (look at the statistics). I have no idea what the total bandwith of all these operators is.

You must be thinking of FUNET's connections (one 10 Gb/s and two 2.5 Gb/s connections for backup). That leaves out the commercial operators' connections to the world.

Uh. No. The moment there was more than two people together, there was politics. With the emergence of the first shamans, wise-men, tribal leaders and priests, the fight for socioeconomical control within the group just became more formalized. You're right in saying that the way how politics works has changed during our social evolution, but as one of the fundamental ways of how we organize ourselves, it will never go away.

I have no problem with spam.

I do and it has nothing to do with my mail-box getting clogged by spam. It hinders my work, because these days when I send critical work related information to someone by e-mail, I also have to fax it and sometimes even phone the recipient to make sure that he/she has got the information. Where do the e-mails go then? They disappear into spam filtters or simply get accidentally deleted when the recipient is purging his mailbox manually. The e-mail as a means for communication is getting more and more useless every year.

Saying that spam is not out of control or that it isn't costing the infrastructure money is just wrong. Hiding your head in the sand won't make the problem disappear.

The UN is politico organistation with aims and goals, they engage in PR. Do you think they publish every piece of information they recieve?

Of course not. Why should they? It wouldn't serve any purpose. Withholding sensitive information from people who're not entitled to it is not censorship, but common sense. Any government does it and it's a good thing. If you want direct access to such information, get yourself involved in politics - if, like me, you don't want to do that, you'll just have to trust your elected representatives.

Or are you going to tell me these services work and are worth money they cost?

Where I live, they work and I would be willing to pay even more taxes to expand them. It would be horrific to live in a society where you'd be denied medical help just because "you haven't paid the last installment as specified in your contract with MediCorp(tm)".

The question is did the goverment help or hinder the development?

The Finnish internet backbone (funet.fi) is a state sponsored infrastructure into which all the stream from private ISPs eventually flows. I'd say that the government involvement has significantly helped our access to the internet.

• Linux IPv6 howto
• Redhat 6to4 HowTo
• Debian 'howto' (actually mailing list post)
• Aaron Swartz's how to enable IPv6 in OSX

The fact that Microsoft is connected to Internet2 doesn't give you 1meg/s transfer speed from windowsupdate.

They have probably hunderds of mirrors around the world where the actual wares is downloaded from, you're automatically redirected to the closest one.

Works pretty fine here, they have one mirror in the same facility as where the Finnish University and Research Network backbone is located, this gives me 4-5meg/s transfer speed from windowsupdate to my dorm at the campus of Helsinki University of Technology :)

Older RS/6000 boxes included a 3 digit LED on the front of the case, Intended for diagnostics, it would show (lots!) of codes as the system ran thru the boot sequence.

So naturally a hacker in .fi put together a set of tools that included the ability to drop the load average to the LED.

The coolest thing about this was the inevitable reaction if an IBM-er were ever in to do support work.

Normally you see the LED would be blank after boot *unless* the system crashed in which case it was used to display diagnostic codes (the dreaded 'flashing 888').

So the IBM-ers would always do a big double-take, 'cause that meant 'dead-box' to them ;-).

Since I haven't seen it, here are several free programs useful for computational chemistry:

GAMESS Free Electronic Structure Package

ViewmolMany types of visualization

gOpenMolVisualization and property Calculation

RasMolVisualization

EgoMolecular Dynamics Program

TinkerMultifacited Package

X-PLORMolecular Dynamics Tailored for Biological Systems

Here is some information on FUNET with nice map of connections and speeds, http://www.csc.fi/suomi/funet/verkko.html.en

So since we don't have faster processors (relatively) we will have more and more processors.

I do not advocate spending Billions on teaching how parallel programming works and how to use PVM and MPI effectively, but I do think it is time that it become a standard theme at the college level CS world. That means that the professors learn how it works and then have access to equipment that allows everyone to have the experience.

-- Multics

The first electronic ID card (in the world): "The aim of the project is to develop an
electronic ID card for university staff and students. The project is scheduled for
completion by the end of 2001. The target is to be able to implement the university
ID card in fall 2002."

The rest is here.

I realize there are a decent amount of posts about why this strategy is good for Linux, but maybe a closer look reveals why this is so good.

SGI, currently, has two things Linux desperately needs. The first is a journaling file system. I don't think I really need to explain why this is a good thing; all it takes is one bluescreen with NT and you'll understand me completely. SGI's is mature and stable, and has a very good reputation among the workstation community. Nuff said.

The second, IMHO, is even more important. SGI has (again IMHO) the most outstanding implementation of thread-level parallel processing. Almost all the other platforms you care to look at (IBM, older Sequent, Sun) either depend on MPI coding or are designed using close-coupled SMP, which tend to reach their limits quickly. It seems SGI has profited greatly from their acquisition of Cray Research.

SGI has a great thread library which they have mapped to their NUMA implementation, which scales a little better than SMP does (I'll skip the technical explanation here in favor of the point). SGI's extensive knowledge with multiprocessing comes at the perfect time for Linux, which is this very minute undergoing heavy kernel modifications to better facilitate thread level parallelism.

SGI has so much to offer in terms of technical skill that Linux could absorb at this point in time. Make no mistake, this is a perfect opportunity for Linux to milk the expertise from SGI, who needs Linux to survive.