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Of course, during his time, he had no idea that technology would ever develop at the pace that it did in the 20th century and that it will in the 21st century. On the other hand, even if he could imagine such unimaginable technological growth rates as we have seen in the last hundred years, no one from his time could imagine such prohibitive measures being taken to prevent technological advancement in today's world.

The popular opinion regarding Malthusian theory of economic growth is that Malthus had it backwards -- his prediction that man's consumption would strip the earth of its resources failed to consider (1) technological growth and (2) that man's wants and needs evolve as well as anything else. In other words, as our resources change, our wants and needs are at least partially shaped by what we can possibly provide. We adjust to the environment in which we live. (Agent Smith says, "There is another organism on this planet...")

The question I would like to pose to Slashdot's readership is this: To what degree was Malthus right considering man's habits of mass consumption and self-imposed barriers to innovation such as copyright laws, and to what degree was Malthus wrong considering technological and other innovations? (Hmm. Ask Slashdot?)

• Because Portland didn't do it. If you want to do it, get to work, and you can do it too.

• Because Bellingham's already been doing it.
• Because Bellingham is cooler than Portland.
• Because the Cocoanut Grove is within walking distance from BTC (Portland can not say the same thing, btw).
• Because Bellingham is much closer to Illiad.
• Because Bellingham is much cooler than Tacoma (and safer if you're not packing heat). It even smells better since they closed the toxic waste incinerator.

• Fairhaven
• Red Square
• the site of the gas pipeline rupture/explosion
• a view of Lummi Island
• The World Famous Up and Up
• Rumors
• Railroad Avenue
• Bellweather on the Bay
• The Parkade
• Casa Que Pasa (home of the potato burrito)
• Ski to Sea
• the Peace Vigil
• George "Pinky" Nelson
• a view of Mt. Baker
• Boulevard Park
• Samish Drive-in
• GP
• Mark Asmundson
• the most exciting radio talk north of Sedro-Wooley
• Sudden Valley
• Chuckanut Drive
• Bellis Fair
• REI
• The Bagelry
• the Storm
• the (no longer red) Raiders
• the Mariners
• the Horseshoe Cafe
• Bucks/BBBC/3Bs/Whatever they call it now
• Stanellos

• Because Portland didn't do it. If you want to do it, get to work, and you can do it too.

• Because Bellingham's already been doing it.
• Because Bellingham is cooler than Portland.
• Because the Cocoanut Grove is within walking distance from BTC (Portland can not say the same thing, btw).
• Because Bellingham is much closer to Illiad.
• Because Bellingham is much cooler than Tacoma (and safer if you're not packing heat). It even smells better since they closed the toxic waste incinerator.

• Fairhaven
• Red Square
• the site of the gas pipeline rupture/explosion
• a view of Lummi Island
• The World Famous Up and Up
• Rumors
• Railroad Avenue
• Bellweather on the Bay
• The Parkade
• Casa Que Pasa (home of the potato burrito)
• Ski to Sea
• the Peace Vigil
• George "Pinky" Nelson
• a view of Mt. Baker
• Boulevard Park
• Samish Drive-in
• GP
• Mark Asmundson
• the most exciting radio talk north of Sedro-Wooley
• Sudden Valley
• Chuckanut Drive
• Bellis Fair
• REI
• The Bagelry
• the Storm
• the (no longer red) Raiders
• the Mariners
• the Horseshoe Cafe
• Bucks/BBBC/3Bs/Whatever they call it now
• Stanellos

I go to Western Washington University in Washington state and the Art History 270 course (India, Japan, China) taught by Momi Naughton takes an entire lecture period to talk about anime with a self-professed anime maniac, whose name I forget. He goes way back to influences such as Hokusai and brings basically the entire span of what we learned in the class and how if affected the development of anime. Quite interesting...

WWU blocks everybody that scans them. They wont even accept telnet/ssh connections unless you are a registered domain

I attend Western Washington University, and we've been using Packeteer for (if memory serves) a year now. Our situation is a little different, let me explain why.

First off, Western isn't a small school, but with about 12,000 enrolled, it's not small either. About 3,500 live on campus and on the WWU LAN. The internet connection afforded to the residence halls is in the form of a fractional T3, of which we lease a 1.5mbyte/sec connection. Back in 2000, when school started we had less than half that connection, and Napster was at its peak. It's probably not necessary to say that our network connection was completely laid to waste by the massive amount of traffic requested of it.

When Packeteer was introduced at the beginning of last year, things seemed mostly normal. HTTP traffic moved along nicely. Then, ResTek (the group who handles the residential network) decided to limit our traffic to 300MB a day, and if you went over it more than once, you would get your port pulled. However, this was made tolerable because from 2am to 10am, you could rape the internet as much as you damn well pleased without repercussion.

After massive complaining, though, they started implementing this homebrew traffic limiter which sharply cut your bandwidth as you downloaded, and quickly made online gaming impossible.

However, we've began to cope with it. We have local game servers, and a local DirectConnect hub which has become a good place to hang out, meet people, and exchange files.

I'm curious though, what kind of connections other colleges of our size have. 1.5MB/s seems quite measly for 3,500 people (granted, not all of them use the net for much more than email).

If you head over to ResTek's webpage, check out the bandwidth section, specifically the FAQ and see what you all think. I'm curious.

I think even Malthus (see http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.h tml) would be turning over in his grave from this bullshit. His initial predictions from the late 1700s always gave "generations" until the human race would die from overpopulation and overplundering of natural resources. Of course, that hasn't happened yet thanks to technological advances and such. However, in this latest DOOMSDAY ALERT we seem to have around 48 years.

Is this just viral marketing for Lost in Space 2? Or maybe Odyssey 5?

Not to dismiss this study out of hand, but this prediction has been made in the past many times, most famously by the economist Thomas Malthus in 1798 entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus predicted man would outgrow it's resources within ~50 years if strict population checks were not enforced. However, he did not take into account the pace of technological change and food production far exceeded his estimates for the time frame.

It is very difficult to predict the future, especially almost 50 years out. As stock brokers are supposed to say "Past performance is no guarantee of future performance." Or something like that.

In my experience, it's easier for a developer on a closed-source project to sneak stuff in, than on an open-source project.

Heck, there is an entire flight simulator embedded in MS Excel 97, try and do that on an open source project.

This is what Western Washington University's Vehicle Research Institute did with one of their cars at competition recently. A buddy of mine is graduating this year and showed me the car last night. Pretty interesting concept and they use 100% bio-diesel rather than a mixture.

Yes it's a Mediterranean herb (Mandragora officinarum) of the nightshade family with ovate leaves, yellowish or purple flowers, and a large forked root traditionally credited with human attributes b : the root of a mandrake formerly used especially to promote conception, as a cathartic, or as a narcotic and soporific

Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root
Donne

hahaha, how knotty

I'll include some great war stories from the dorm trenches at my particular university:

The Residential Technology department (ResTek) has a program called TekHelps... 8-12 volunteers for each hall process work tickets for students needing to hook up ethernet for the first 2 weeks of school. We moved in 2 days early for training. Their policy was "TekHelps can touch the computer", which meant the user had to sit their and possibly learn how to operate the computer Daddy had bought for them. Cons: no pay, too much work. Pros: experience for resume, early move-in, many ignorant dorm honies. (Many of the girls I helped continued contacting me throughout the school year for my geek prowess.)

As far as ResTek themselves, they wouldn't hire me into a paid position (despite my previous experience as a lab consultant at a previous university). I later discovered they had a policy of avoiding people with experience, and preferred people-skills. They figured they can train them later and be friendly for now. This is what happens when non-techie managers are in charge.

This ignorance extends to their ethernet network. All the residence halls are either 10 mbit or 100 mbit depending. Internal LAN thoroughput is dandy... I was pulling, umm, academic documents off people's FTP servers at 1-2 mbits. Once you left the LAN and went out through the ResTek Qwest Internet link, it all went to hell. ResTek is fond of the term "T1", but they really just have a fractional DS3 connection, and they buy chunks 1.54 mbits at a time.

Picture 2700 students trying to cram data through 4 mbits of pipe. Yeah. That was the beginning of the year, and after many frustrating e-mails and calls to ResTek they added another "T1", or just upped the cap on the Qwest link. Ping times were still 1200+ 24/7 (no gaming for you!), and thoroughput was usually less than a 28.8 modem. More angry calls until the end of winter quarter.

End of winter quarter, and the pipe is cranked to 7 mbits. Ping times go down to 600-800, with decent pings late late at night. There's a twist at this point, though. ResTek was running an HTTP proxy server that leeched off the seperate academic link... 10 mbits of virgin pipe just asking to be sucked up by Napster transfers and porn. Up until that point the proxy had been sucking 3 mbits 24/7 off the academic pipe, and the academic technology dept (my employer, as a matter of fact) finally shut that little scheme down.

This coming year they added two more halls and the pipe is now 9 mbits. The number of people on the network will be close to 3600, and I feel the utmost pity for those poor souls. I will be living in a lake house sitting on a fat DSL connection cackling like a madman.

All in all it was a nightmare dealing with their ignorance and denial of the problem. They remained convinced that if they stopped the top 15 bandwidth users everything would be fine. That's the last time I try to explain to a manager how you can't cram almost 3000 people down 7 mbits. One of their staff members answered my complaint with "move off campus and get a cable modem", which I did at the end of the year. :)

Now that the story is done, here's some tips to reduce headaches:

• Paper documentation is a good thing. Keep the wording simple, and remember that kids bring Macs, too.
• If you're distributing information to students prior to them moving in (we have an info fair here a month before school), tell them to bring their system disks.
• Educate them on file sharing programs. A lot of bandwidth was wasted on out-going Napster/Gnutella/etc connections. Some schmuck in Kansas downloading the latest boy band release does not deserve your bandwidth.
• Keep an eye on bandwidth usage. Talk with people who seem to be abusing the system. All good things in moderation.
• Keep your staff geeky and smart. Customer service and knowledge can co-exist. Pull in those CS majors and have a ball.
• Run a lean ship. Users don't care if your staff have shiny t-shirts, they want reliability and performance. The number of dorm students with computers is approaching 90% these days... plan accordingly as far as bandwidth.

That's my essay, hope it helps people reduce headaches for poor college kids... I don't want my suffering to be in vain. ;)

-rt-

'Supercomputer on a CD' software is supposed to make it so easy to put a Beowulf cluster together

I've wanted to build a cluster for a long time. I was given that chance at school & work. School(U of C) allowed me to do it as a term project that is still ongoing. Work allowed me to use a pile of spare machines that were waiting for new users.

So, early one Saturday morning, I sit down with the O'Reilley book "Building Linux Clusters" and the CD that came with it. I followed the instructions in the book, and was frustrated beyond belief. The CD contained all the Beowulf software that was required. The downside was that the software had all been thrown over top of Red Hat 6.2. Being the second time I had ever installed Red Hat, I wasn't sure what the magic sequence was to get everything to work.

I first had problems with unsupported video cards... I tried 3 different cards. Each time, I needed to re-install Red Hat. Why wouldn't it let me install all the drivers for all the cards?

DHCP? Why? You only need to set the IPs once. Don't force me to do this... oh wait, I don't know Red Hat's weird config script structure... sigh.

The book mentioned nothing about re-compiling the kernel. But, in order to add support for the network cards, this is what I needed to do. Oh wait, where are the kernel sources?

This is when I got sick of this "wonderful" Beowulf CD.

I went to Slackware 7.1.

Installed it on the master no problem. Enabled frame buffer support for the video card so that it would work on ANY video card. Enabled native support for the network cards I was using.

Next step, I went to THE beowulf site, did a search for PVM and PVMPOV. I downloaded all the source code I needed.

Now, without the help of the book, I was at a bit of a loss. Luckily, there was this site that explained EVERY STEP in about a page and a half. The how-to was written by Christopher Johnson and I must say, he did an excellent job. I found only one thing that was lacking, you may also need to set PVM_DPATH=/home/pvm3/lib/pvmd in your profile.

Now the purpose behind all of this was to get PVMPOV running, well, with a little searching, I was able to find everything I needed here.

Conclusions:
Use a Linux distro you are used to.
Get a book if you want to know the theory.
Always remember that some PVM Books are free.

I hope this will help someone out there.
Beware TPB

I am having a hard time deciding which is cooler, flywheels or thermophotovoltaic generators. I guess I will just have to hope for a tpv/flywheel electric hybrid car to be made. That would seriously kick ass.

If you view it as a practical issue, then an historical perspective may help.

Hunter/gatherers don't structure time as we do. They don't divide time into periods of work and rest. In fact, they don't make the distinctions that we do between work/play/rest/leisure. They just hang out on the veldt and do stuff. Some is interesting, some is boring; some takes muscles; some doesn't; but it's all just stuff. The only structure on their time is the days and the seasons, and those are immutable, so why worry about it?

Furthermore, hunter/gatherers tend to be nomadic (because the land won't support intensive use). Nomads can't accumulate more than they can carry. So there isn't really any point in working harder, or smarter: you can't take it with you, even in this life.

Anthropological evidence is that hunter/gathers only spend 4 to 6 hours per day doing things that we call work. The balance of their time is spent in sleep, socializing, creative, recreational and ritual activites.

All that changes with the invention of agriculture. Farmers are out there in the fields every day, working now for a harvest that is months away. The more land you farm, the more food you grow, so incremental time spent in the fields pays off later.

Agriculture supports more intensive use of the land, so people can stop wandering and start accumulating stuff, like surplus food, or tools, or housing. Specially ambitious and intense people start accumulating armies and castles.

So everyone is out there working hard, and accumulating stuff, and you can do it 16x7 if you like, and eventually you have to stop and ask: How much is enough? How hard do we work?

And the answer that many societies came up with, going 8000 years back to the invention of agriculture, is that we rest 1 day in N, where N is typically in the range of 4 to 10. Our value of 7 traces back to the Persians.

Religion is central to the organization of pre-industrial societies, so the calandar typically became a religous matter in those societies, with attendant ritual, ceremony, and claims of divine authority.

In our society, business has largely eclipsed religion as the institution that organizes time. People work to the clock; critical services run 24x7; factories run 2nd and 3rd shift; retail runs all weekend. And the people at the top--programmers, lawyers, consultants--can work as many hours as they like.

So we're back to the question that the early farmers faced: how hard do we work? How much is enough? And we have to have an answer. People who work all the time burn out, and the currency of the phrase burn out shows just how real and prevelant this problem is for us.

You can find your answer in different places. Some people manage the problem informally: they know their limits, and take time off when they need it. Some people are more comfortable with rules. You can make up your own rules, or you can adopt someone else's rules and follow them.

The ancient Hebrews had rules, and wrote them down; you can follow them if you like. Keep in mind that their rules were written long, long ago, in a wheat field far, far away. Trying to apply them literally in our society probably isn't useful. Claims of divine authority notwithstanding, their rules were written by people to serve people; the only reason for you to follow them is that they also serve you.

There is a quite good patch for kernel support at
http://www.davin.ottawa.on.ca/pppoe/.
the creator Jamal Hadi Salim is actively working on it (last update March 30)
He has made a proposal on netdev (archive) about it, and Michal Ostrowski who wrote another implementation in kernel space has shared the discussion. Read the long thread in the archive.
Jamal writes somewhere in the readmes they'll plan to merge at pppoed 0.5 and it seems they're actively pushing for getting it into the kernel.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to find some information lately, but the fact that the pppoed is being updated gives me hope.

Suse has incorporated Jamals pppoed in their 6.3 kernel and Suse's Andi Kleen had his hands on that code (modularization).

The final goal seems to be to create a generic pppox (x=ethernet/atm/whatnot) device in kernel space and to incorporate pppoed (the userspace part, doing the discovery) in pppd.

I have to say that pppoed on linux is far superior to every implentation on other os's I have seen (winpoet and friends suck ass). There is one driver for win2000 made by a volunteer which seems very good, but only linux already has the pppoe-server.
And they have a fix for the mtu-problem on the clients when connecting a network to the internet with pppoed.

While electric cars that can do wheelstands may be cool, they probably aren't too pratical. Check out the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University. They have some really cool alternative fuel vehicles, everything from solar to electric to hybrids. The best engine they have developed so far is what they call the Midnight Sun. Check out the webpage for more details, but the gist of it is this: The engine is composed of very efficient burners which burn methane (I think). The trick is that the car doesn't get it's power from the heat, rather from the light energy. Highly efficient "solar cells" are located very close to the flame, and those charge banks of batteries. A very cool setup indeed. Not to mention the fact that this thing can ALSO peel out for a full block :0)

I like Raul. Its very clean, works well in a variety of color depths, and isn't too Linux specific. However it has problems. As someone else mentioned, its similar to a few other logo's. (its probably worthwhile to note that its similar in spirit to the Jini logo, though not in execution)

Jeanette is a high quality logo which would scale well and grabs the eye. I do wonder about the association with a bug though, if we are to believe that a logo should be designed to the fit the frame of mind of the masses then choosing an insect, regardless of the true intent, might not be such a hot idea.

Villate probably won't scale well enough, and might not look real good in lower bit depths. Drop shadows look good on web pages, but translate lousy to other media. (Oh the irony)

Guatamnlad is too linux specific for my tastes. It would however probably scale well and look fine in b&w or 8bit color. Still, I find it unexciting to look at. Redhat has a cool logo, Suse has a cool logo, Debian can do better than this.

Captain Blue Eye must die. I've found this logo disturbing from day 1. Sure it meets the logo criteria for scalability, color, etc. But its just not engaging enough.

So while I really like Raul and I think it would make a fine logo I think we should be concerned about its similarity to other common place logos. A theme I think that Debian would do good to explore is the theme of the Debian wax seal. There was one submission in the Gimp logo contest with this theme, and while it didn't translate well, (bad jpeg compression artifacts really detracted from its beauty I think) it was a really good idea. A stylized wax seal could be just as eye catching as Raul, but avoid the similarity issues. It could easily be transmogrified from a simple 2 tone line drawing to a full-on photorealisitc image, all while retaining clarity and re-enforcing the Debian "brand". All we need now is for someone to go draw it. ;-)

I've taken one or two aborted attempts at this idea myself, but I found that I just wasn't deft enough with the Gimp to do it justice. I'm hoping that someone else gives it a try.