Slashdot Mirror

HughPickens.com writes: Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser write in the NY Times that two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, recently published a controversial piece called "Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics," that criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today's most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are "sufficiently elegant and explanatory." Whether or not you agree with them, Ellis and Silk have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given physics its credibility.

Quoting: "Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts. These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any."

Richard Dawid argues that physics, or at least parts of it, are about to enter an era of post-empirical science. "How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally," ask Frank and Gleiser. "Are superstrings and the multiverse, painstakingly theorized by hundreds of brilliant scientists, anything more than modern-day epicycles?"

astroengine writes: An airborne survey of a presumably dry Antarctic valley revealed a stunning and unexpected interconnected subsurface briny aquifer deep beneath the frozen tundra, a finding that not only has implications for understanding extreme habitats for life on Earth, but the potential for life elsewhere in the solar system, particularly Mars. The briny liquid — about twice as salty as seawater — was discovered about 200 miles underground in a region known as Taylor Valley. The aquifer is widespread, extending from the Ross Sea's McMurdo Sound more than 11 miles into the eastern part of valley. A second system was found connecting Taylor Glacier with the ice-cover Lake Bonney. But the survey, which covered 114 square miles, may have just uncovered the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

pfaffman sends us word of a two-part article in LinuxInsider that lays out to an audience of non-tech educators a cogent argument for using F/OSS in schools. The piece was written by a University of Tennessee professor for the education journal TechTrends. It makes the case that proprietary software is inconvenient and that when schools choose to use proprietary products they spend their constituents' money. The article won't contain a whole lot of surprises for Linux initiates (save perhaps some software recommendations for educational use), but it's interesting to see these ideas presented so clearly to a wider, and influential, audience."

OnePragmatist writes "Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch is reporting that BlueGene/L has nearly doubled its performance to 135.3 Teraflops by doubling its processors. That seems likely to keep it at no. 1 on the Top500 when the next round comes out in June. But it will be interesting to see how it does when they finally get around to testing it against the HPC Challenge benchmark, which has gained adherents as being more indicative of how a HPC system will peform with various different types of applicatoins."

Daniel Bowen writes "Tonight's Willow Brook Elementary School star party will have decidedly more technology in use than previous years. In addition to a fleet of telescopes and astronomers for the children, this year there will be a live webcam connected to a telescope, operated by Roane State college astronomers, and hosted by the University of Tennessee Sunsite. The telescope image will also be projected onto the outside wall of the gymnasium in a 50 foot diagonal image alongside a Starry Night sky map. With cooperation from the City of Oak Ridge, TN, all streetlights in the neighborhood will be turned off, giving the giant projections clarity from the school yard, and night vision a chance. For one night out of the year, this suburban elementary school soccer field should have a beautiful nighttime sky, and a chance to inspire hundreds of children."

Daniel Bowen writes "Tonight's Willow Brook Elementary School star party will have decidedly more technology in use than previous years. In addition to a fleet of telescopes and astronomers for the children, this year there will be a live webcam connected to a telescope, operated by Roane State college astronomers, and hosted by the University of Tennessee Sunsite. The telescope image will also be projected onto the outside wall of the gymnasium in a 50 foot diagonal image alongside a Starry Night sky map. With cooperation from the City of Oak Ridge, TN, all streetlights in the neighborhood will be turned off, giving the giant projections clarity from the school yard, and night vision a chance. For one night out of the year, this suburban elementary school soccer field should have a beautiful nighttime sky, and a chance to inspire hundreds of children."

blamanj writes "Over 400 years ago, a supernova was visible in Nothern Europe. Astronomer Tycho Brahe helped bring about the collapse of the Ptolemaic system by showing that the 'new star' was not a local phenomena like a comet, but actually existed in (supposedly) unchanging heavens. The star that went nova was part of a binary system, and the supernova explosion sent the companion star shooting off into space. Now, that companion star has been found."

neutron_p writes "On Jan. 14, 2005, Huygens probe will plow into the orange atmosphere of Saturn's moon, Titan. It will be flying blind through hydrocarbon haze and methane clouds to a surface that could consist of seven-kilometer-high ice mountains and liquid methane seas. Scientists hope that Huygens will survive the plunge. I hope too, especially after Genesis mission accident, although condition were much better."

JabbaTheFart writes "The Guardian is writing that something strange is tugging at America's oldest spacecraft. As the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes head towards distant stars, scientists have discovered that the craft - launched more than 30 years ago - appear to be in the grip of a mysterious force that is holding them back as they sweep out of the solar system. Some researchers say unseen 'dark matter' may permeate the universe and that this is affecting the Pioneers' passage. Others say flaws in our understanding of the laws of gravity best explain the crafts' wayward behaviour."

FastDownload writes "New technology for doing mulitsource/multithread downloads of ISOs is making Linux users on Internet2 happy. It's called Logistical Networking and is being developed at the University of Tennessee. Though there are some obvious similarities to Bit Torrent, Logistical Networking uses fixed, shared infrastructure instead of being peer-to-peer, which makes it useful for moving big content even when no peers are available."

FastDownload writes "New technology for doing mulitsource/multithread downloads of ISOs is making Linux users on Internet2 happy. It's called Logistical Networking and is being developed at the University of Tennessee. Though there are some obvious similarities to Bit Torrent, Logistical Networking uses fixed, shared infrastructure instead of being peer-to-peer, which makes it useful for moving big content even when no peers are available."

FastDownload writes "New technology for doing mulitsource/multithread downloads of ISOs is making Linux users on Internet2 happy. It's called Logistical Networking and is being developed at the University of Tennessee. Though there are some obvious similarities to Bit Torrent, Logistical Networking uses fixed, shared infrastructure instead of being peer-to-peer, which makes it useful for moving big content even when no peers are available."

FastDownload writes "New technology for doing mulitsource/multithread downloads of ISOs is making Linux users on Internet2 happy. It's called Logistical Networking and is being developed at the University of Tennessee. Though there are some obvious similarities to Bit Torrent, Logistical Networking uses fixed, shared infrastructure instead of being peer-to-peer, which makes it useful for moving big content even when no peers are available."

leighklotz writes "Debian developer and Internet Mail Archive founder Jeff Breidenbach of PARC has made GlyphChess, a chess-playing copier using Python, GNU Chess and DataGlyphs attached to the bottom of the pieces. DataGlyphs are cool 2D barcodes made out of / and \ marks for ones and zeros that use the coding from CDs for error coding. If you don't happen to have a Xerox machine at home, it also works with SANE..."

Reivec writes "I was having a discussion with Keith Packard on IRC about the current developments in the XFree86 Saga and politics already discussed here earlier, and I learned many interesting things. The project has a new website, xwin, and things are getting underway. 'We're in the process of building community, from that we can construct a government. It's a hard process to construct a representative system from what we have now, so it will take a bit of time. Weeks, not months. --Keith'" Read on for some more details. Update: 04/13 03:30 GMT by T : Reader Khalid points to this informative interview with Packard at Linux Weekly News, too. " The site is has only been up a day or so and there isn't a lot on it right now, but he would like to see a lot of community involvement on the site and many user submitted stories to get conversation rolling. A french site has already taken notice and posted some information on xwin as well. Since such a fork could make a large impact on many *NIX users, I felt the need to ask, 'assuming you had an active fork under development, how interchangable would you expect it to be with Xfree (assuming release builds). Do you think distros would be quick to change if it offered improvements? Or could they provide both and have the user choose upon installation?' Keith replied, 'Given that distros will have input into how it gets built, I expect they'd be interested in a version closer to what they need. And, given that RH and Debian maintainers are both actively encouraging changes, it's hard to see how they wouldn't want to follow. (or lead).' So if you have had any interest at all in the XFree86 development, this is definitely a community site you should take advantage of."

gleeklet writes "Has anyone else seen that there is a need for inexpensive 3D visualization software for presentations and classroom lectures? There is a Chemical Engineering package available but compared to video game software, the graphics are a bit lacking. My goal was to create a chemical plant with the process control algorithms coded into the Quake II source. As a short demo I spent several hours creating a unit cell demo Quake II level to demonstrate the use of open source video game technology, which I found was well received by undergrads. Has anyone used video game technology as an education tool for science or engineering?"

gleeklet writes "Has anyone else seen that there is a need for inexpensive 3D visualization software for presentations and classroom lectures? There is a Chemical Engineering package available but compared to video game software, the graphics are a bit lacking. My goal was to create a chemical plant with the process control algorithms coded into the Quake II source. As a short demo I spent several hours creating a unit cell demo Quake II level to demonstrate the use of open source video game technology, which I found was well received by undergrads. Has anyone used video game technology as an education tool for science or engineering?"

gleeklet writes "Has anyone else seen that there is a need for inexpensive 3D visualization software for presentations and classroom lectures? There is a Chemical Engineering package available but compared to video game software, the graphics are a bit lacking. My goal was to create a chemical plant with the process control algorithms coded into the Quake II source. As a short demo I spent several hours creating a unit cell demo Quake II level to demonstrate the use of open source video game technology, which I found was well received by undergrads. Has anyone used video game technology as an education tool for science or engineering?"

The Ape With No Name writes: "I work as a network technician at a major Southern university and we are gearing up for what is lovingly called "Dorm Storm," aka the weekend the students return to their dorm rooms, ethernet connections and BearShare. We'll move in approx. 3500 students, install and configure 1500 or so network cards and troubleshoot hundreds of circuit, switch and routing problems over the course of the next two weeks (with less than 50 people or so). I was wondering if anybody out in the academic computing community had some advice, stories to relate, yarns to spin for the rest of Slashdot with regard to other universities and their networking for students. You might think you have had a hell of a time setting up machines for users, but this becomes a Sisyphean task when you face a wireless, IP only, Novell setup for a grumpy architecture student on a budget Win2K laptop - one after another after another!"

The Ape With No Name writes: "I work as a network technician at a major Southern university and we are gearing up for what is lovingly called "Dorm Storm," aka the weekend the students return to their dorm rooms, ethernet connections and BearShare. We'll move in approx. 3500 students, install and configure 1500 or so network cards and troubleshoot hundreds of circuit, switch and routing problems over the course of the next two weeks (with less than 50 people or so). I was wondering if anybody out in the academic computing community had some advice, stories to relate, yarns to spin for the rest of Slashdot with regard to other universities and their networking for students. You might think you have had a hell of a time setting up machines for users, but this becomes a Sisyphean task when you face a wireless, IP only, Novell setup for a grumpy architecture student on a budget Win2K laptop - one after another after another!"

The Ape With No Name writes: "I work as a network technician at a major Southern university and we are gearing up for what is lovingly called "Dorm Storm," aka the weekend the students return to their dorm rooms, ethernet connections and BearShare. We'll move in approx. 3500 students, install and configure 1500 or so network cards and troubleshoot hundreds of circuit, switch and routing problems over the course of the next two weeks (with less than 50 people or so). I was wondering if anybody out in the academic computing community had some advice, stories to relate, yarns to spin for the rest of Slashdot with regard to other universities and their networking for students. You might think you have had a hell of a time setting up machines for users, but this becomes a Sisyphean task when you face a wireless, IP only, Novell setup for a grumpy architecture student on a budget Win2K laptop - one after another after another!"

The Ape With No Name writes: "I work as a network technician at a major Southern university and we are gearing up for what is lovingly called "Dorm Storm," aka the weekend the students return to their dorm rooms, ethernet connections and BearShare. We'll move in approx. 3500 students, install and configure 1500 or so network cards and troubleshoot hundreds of circuit, switch and routing problems over the course of the next two weeks (with less than 50 people or so). I was wondering if anybody out in the academic computing community had some advice, stories to relate, yarns to spin for the rest of Slashdot with regard to other universities and their networking for students. You might think you have had a hell of a time setting up machines for users, but this becomes a Sisyphean task when you face a wireless, IP only, Novell setup for a grumpy architecture student on a budget Win2K laptop - one after another after another!"

thefin asks: "My research group has finally received funding (~$200K) for a single SMP box. I've looked over the offerings from SUN, IBM and Compaq. I was wondering what others think of the SMP offerings and in particular, opinions of Linux as a SMP OS. What should we know before purchasing such a machine? What should we look for and what should we avoid? We will be using the box for large, individual based ecological modeling efforts. These models are CPU intensive, and make heavy use of inter-node communications. In particular, inter-node communication can be a serious bottle-neck in our models."

Jeb Campbell asks: "Has anyone tried to install on the only hard drive on their system, with that drive hooked up to an ATA/66 Card? I had RH 6.1 on before I switched hard drives and it worked fine, but when I tried to reinstall, my system no longer recognized the card. Anybody done this? I figure I can put another old hard drive in and install, then dump it to the new hard drive, but I don't know if it will recognize the card (www.dr-tech.com) but their ATA/66, card isn't there)." (Read more.)

The trick is to realize that you might have to fiddle with the motherboard/controller BIOS before you get the proper boot order. ATA/66 chains are treated like SCSI chains on some machines, which means you have to explicitly tell it to boot from there before it will. For some cards, you might need to boot from another partition or a floppy, then LOADLIN in to the install image.

Any other suggestions?

Gina writes "The guys over at Ars Technica have an interesting story regarding the schemes that marketing types try to combat bad hype. The story started last week in one of the Ars Comdex reports, when Hannibal said that ArtX's Alladin chipset didn't look too hot, and continued in an email dialog between Hannibal and Rick Calle. The story gets really weird when Mr. Calle went on Ars' forum and started posting stories discounting Hannibal's take on the situation as two different anonymous cowards. How'd Hannibal know it was Mr. Calle? The IPs of users are automatically logged (you know this before you submit your post) and both the anonymous cowards turned out to be from the same IP, which resolved to artxinc.com. Here's Mr. Calle's response to the allegations, "P.S. you're good. snagged my IP, huh?! i'm rotfl - rick." "

rousseau writes "S.u.S.E continues to provide webspace for the dosemu development team, but now they have their very own domain. The page seems to be undergoing a facelift, so don't be afraid to check back every once in a while :) "

Keith Moore was the first reader to write in and announce that Des-2-II has officially been broken. And not by distributed.net. The winner was a custom $250k box. The controlling box supposedly ran Linux too. You can read an article at eff.org or The NY Times .

Jamie Zawinksi wrote in to tell me to tell everyone to lay off Mozilla.org and try one of the many mirrors- the huge demand has crippled the machine. Hit the link below to get a decent list of com and edu mirrors. Update:Couple of neato things, A screenshot of NS5 was sent in by Christopher Blizzard, and an insider who requested anonymity sent us a picture from this mornings big event, wrote "The main three people in this picture are Jim Barksdale, Jamie, and Tara Hernandez. Tara is manager of the build team. Just to the left of JimB is Jim Roskind, who led the Java-ectomy." Thanks guys.

ftp://odin.appliedtheory.com/pub/mirrors/mozilla/

http://www.gbnet.net/public/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.landfield.com/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.epix.net/pub/mozilla/

ftp://netscape.primehost.com/pub/ftp.mozilla.org/

ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/packages/www/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.muc.muohio.edu/pub/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.bogalusa.com/mozilla/

ftp://sod.off.net:211/pub/mozilla/

ftp://mirrors.javanet.net/pub/mirrors/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/net/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.cache-world.com/mirror/mozilla.org/

ftp://ftp.dqc.org/pub/

ftp://powermike.com/powermike.com/pub/ftp.mozilla.org

ftp://ftp.tos.net/pub/ftp.mozilla.org/

ftp://pfaffben.user.msu.edu/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.shuttle.org/mozilla/

ftp://mirror.neosoft.com/pub/mozilla/

http://www.us.inside.net/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu/pub/mozilla/

http://sunsite.utk.edu/ftp/netscape-source/

ftp://mirror.tummy.com/pub/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.one.net/pub/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.mindwell.com/pub/mirrors/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.ntr.net/pub/mozilla/

ftp://ftp-netscape.connectnet.com/pub/netscape/source/

ftp://mozilla.meer.net/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.inetdev.org/mirrors/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/mirrors/site/ftp.mozilla.org/pub/

ftp://mozilla.savages.com/

ftp://mirrors.xmission.com/mozilla/

ftp://ftp.dsnet.net/pub/

Raymond Fellers writes "A few months ago, Intel released the Math Kernel Library which provide level 1,2,&3 BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) and FFTs tuned for Pentium Pros and IIs. Unfortunately, the MKL was only available for Windows. Recently, a group of Intel employees working on the ASCI Red supercomputer released a Linux version of the MKL. " You can read more here.