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Debian Developer Center Of Mass
Edward Betts writes: "Debian One is over, we are at LSM, and it is raining, what do we do? Try and decide the location of the next Debian conference of course, and we all know that the best place for a Debian conference is Debian's centre of mass." What an ideal location for a conference -- perhaps they can devise a mission to retrive the errant U.S. hydrogen bomb (more information too).
Copenhagen/malmö seems to be a good location due to the immense "barrage" of developers in the european region. And hey, we dont see much of those conferences around here..
"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do NOT wave in a Vacuum " --Arthur C Clarke
A hydrogen bomb would be a valuble weapon in the OSS vs. Microsoft conflict, or the Linux vs. *BSD conflict (which is mostly imaginary IMO), or whatever. I hope the Debian team uses it wisely.
Seriously though...
Those maps really drive home how much of a world wide effort Debian is. The power of images I reckon...
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Gobble a dick!
Since Americans weigh more than everyone else except maybe some Pacific Islanders (of which very few are Debian developers), this study should have taken that into account, especially in light of the significant number of Scandinavians and Finns in the European contingent.
I suspect that if this were taken into account, the conference would best be held a couple hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland.
It'd be better to tailor this according to standard airline flight paths. I bet you get a much different location.
All the technology in the world won't hide your lack of vision, talent, or understanding.
Did anybody else notice how far up north this
"center of mass" is? I mean, for a supposedly
"world-wide" effort, the result sure is biased.
There is a pervasive belief that somehow the
Internet is a "global" phenomenon, that it
somehow brings the world closer together, erases
national and ethnic boundaries. That belief is
simply ridiculous. I mean, look at that map!
If anything, that is a powerful testament to
the deep rift between the North and the South
hemispheres. Brazil, India and China have an
infinitesimal contribution (with populations in
the billions!) while the UK is deemed important
enough to have its own map. This should be a
wake-up call to anybody arrogant and chauvinistic
enough to claim that the Internet is "global",
or that it somehow creates a "global village";
the Internet is nothing but another tool to
fuel American (and European to a small degree)
cultural imperialism. This means that we can
expect in the future that as the rift between
North and South gets bigger, the tensions will
mount until we can expect a staggering conflict.
The Third World War will be between the
underpopulated, but staggeringly rich North and
the billions upon billions of the unwashed masses
of the South. (This is not my idea, BTW.)
--
Fr. Engels.
If you could get any kind of a fix on travel time rather than distance, this could be useful.
Cost would be even better.
Besides, the real center of mass is somewhere way underground.
Now only if we could calculate traffic connections, airplane costs, how much people are willing to pay and how long it will take them. That'd be real cool.
phew!, I hope this saves the debian community the hassle to swim around in freezing cold water during conference....
Center of mass should account for the mass of the developers, should it not? That would really put more "weight" on the Americans :)
It seems to me that the right metric would really be a distance measure. Do the minimization problem that finds the point on the globe that minimizes the total distance travelled by all persons. This (at least in Euclidean space) is not the same as the average location.
If debian is developed by volunteers around the world, wouldnt the centre of mass be somewhere deep inside the white hot core of the earth?
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
I think the conference should just be held in New York.
Yes, this post was half-humorous and half serious. Seeing as how I live in New York, it would just make it a hell of a lot easier for me to attend, say if the conference were held in, oh, say, midtown. It's not a personal bias, it's clarity of thought. I swear.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
The method depends rather crucially on the choice of map of the world, which is, I am afraid a neccesity that comes about by the topology of the surface of a sphere.
A physically meaningful calculation (i.e. independent of the choice of acoordinate system) would be in 3d, and would result in a CM somewhere below earths surface..
Not that I don't think that wouldn't be great place to meet.
Looks like the Rocky Mountain range folks are asleep at the switch. No activity there. Cuba is dead, dang that Fidel! But what are the folks at McMurdo doing? Eating Klondike bars?
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Thanks
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Me pican las bolas, man!
Thanks
Jaco
The center of mass naturally gravitates to where the best beer is. This is almost certainly somewhere in Europe, but more research is needed to find the exact point. Perhaps a federal research grant is in order...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Um, sorry....
There isn't going to be a Third World War. And the Internet is the reason why. When the masses can--at trivial expense--discover what they choose from wherever they choose to find it, the power of governments (including those spouting the rhetoric of Lenin and Engels) is demonstrably weakened. The Internet really does bring "power to the people."
Power to the people. Right on!
But the deficiencies of Lenin and Engels are sort of off-topic, so let's rein in our political diatribes just a bit and look at a slightly different point: you're making a whopping great logical mistake. Just because 90% of the Debian developers live north of the equator doesn't prove that the "billions upon billions of...unwashed masses" don't have access to the Internet. Note that the concentrations of Debian developers are also heavily distributed toward parts of the world where most educated people speak English (with the notable exception of India). You're also assuming that Debian developers are evenly distributed across the Internet--but there's nothing to prove that's true.
Analogy: what results would we conclude by doing this same pseudo-analysis of the FetchMail developers? I'd bet we'd discover that they're disproportionately close to Chester County, Pennsylvania, and that lots of them own guns. Why? Because ESR lives in Chester County, Pa., and is something of a gun nut. Developer communities tend to be social communities--so if you're a pistol-packin' programmer, you're likely to be among friends on the FetchMail project. That does not mean that Internet programmers in general, Mail subsystem programmers in particular, or even American programmers are disproportionately armed. It's a self-selected cluster, and you can't draw valid conclusions from the traits of self-selected clusters.
Lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are a lot more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West. Just for grins, the official US Government document for how a nuclear weapons loss is to be handled may be read here.
Hi!
I'm a GIS developer, so I'm just as happy to geocode data points and map them as anybody. Party on, you geo-coding dudes! But the "center" you have defined assumes that you're traveling "as the crow flies"--and (pardon the old joke) that's only useful if you're a crow. If you're really serious about coming up with a logically-derived meeting location, central to as many people as possible, I'd suggest a slightly different method.
I'd bet that this wouldn't take that long to figure out. You've probably only got 20-25 airports to check, and using any of the travel sites you can shop for fares in very little time. You're not going to come up with a single solution: but you're going to narrow your list down rapidly to just a few choices--you can then consider other factors (how expensive hotel, food, and rental car expenses will be; costs for conference organizers to bring keynote speakers [since the conference pays for those], etc.; whether suitable space for the conference is available on your dates) and make your choice.
And, oh, yeah--where does everybody want to junket to next year? Even if Shannon, Ireland is the ideal location, you can't have the conference there every year....
--
Free Mac Mini
1. No. An AK-47 is versatile and rugged enough so
that it can be made by practically any country.
2. There have been at least 2 wars in Chechnya
in the second half of the 20th century.
3. The leftover weaponry from the Soviet empire
is long gone. Most of the weapons used were
manufactured in the last 10 years. (Weapons
manufacturing is always profitable.)
--
Fr. Engels.
Here we have yet another boring anti-western rambler who ignores obvious conclusions so he can push his annoying agenda (or whatever). The reason that that point was chosen is simply that Greenland is the only solid land at that longitude. Sorry, I guess you'll have to look somewhere else to bitch about capitalism, imperialism, or whatever else bugs you.
Other readers already pointed it out: this result is biased. ;-)
First of all, the map is eurocentric, and influences the generated result. Each possible central point will generate a different result.
Taking Greenwich as a central point, you'll end up much more towards the equator, somewhere in the Atlantic.
Debian forgot to paint a big red smear on Finland
Is it because it is not a third world nation with a mushrooming population like India? Is it because most of its population dosen't live in abject poverty like Africa?
Oh, no, it's because a linux distribution was developed in china so you had to omit the country to "prove" your point.
Since when has the development of a linux distribution been a mark of cultural autonomy anyhow? Last I checked, there were no Finnish Linux distributions.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''Where are the North American and European centers, anyway? I can only guess from looking at the map that the North American center is somewhere in northeastern South Dakota or southwestern Minnesota, and can't guess at the European one at all.
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
quoi?
If you had a look at the method, they took the centre of mass in three dimensions, which will give a point well beneath the earth's surface, and then "Project the point onto the surface".
If they were to meet at the actual centre of mass, I imagine it would be rather hot.
The only case where this is ill-defined is if the centre of mass happens to be at the earth's centre. If there centre of mass is very near the earth's centre, then small variations in the developer distribution will result in large variations of the projection.
Note that this method does not obviously guarantee the shortest "as the crow files" distance to the selected point, because curvature of travel paths is not taken into account.
It is however independant of the coordinate system used.
... so why renormalize to the surface of the sphere? You could give "IP tunnelling" a whole new meaning!
Taking the average may seem to make sense but, Instead of taking an average the best thing to really do in this situation is to minimize the sum of all the distances that the developers have to travel, even better may be to minimize the sum of all the distances squared, that way those farther away from a spot get weighted more. This is a much harder calculation, but it makes more sense than taking an average and then projecting it to the surface.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Which is far away from just about everybody...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
What a stupid answer....
Sure it can be made but in reality 90% of it is made either by Russia or China.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
Uhh, it's more a confirmation of how access to PCs and the Internet is distributed among geographical locations. But we're making strides here, I'm glad to see that access to Slashdot is now also available from trailer parks.
So three half-lives have passed since the bomb was lost, and only one-eighth of the original tritium remains. That nuke has only one-eighth its original yield, assuming it's even in one piece.
Alas, neither article gives the yield of the bomb.
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Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delenda est Windoze
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Debian developers should all move to an island. One that has nice weather and lots of bandwidth. Then they wont have to go anywhere to meet. The plus side is that Debian will get really good really fast. I'm all for it!
Here on Debian island...
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The above is not worth reading.
Did they really include the weight of each individual Debian developer in the calculations? :)
It seems that their point of average falls in the general area of St. Lawrence, or maybe St. John's, Newfoundland (can't really see from all those green rays)....which is an island, with decent connectivity, but for the weather....I dunno....:)
It would make more sense to optimize things by locating the next conference at a location that minimizes the average cost of travel for each developer. I guess that problem is too tough?
There's twice as much habitable landmass in the northern hemisphere as the southern. Wait a few tens of thousands of millenia, and you can have your happy carefree hemispherically evenly distributed landmasses.
somebody bent my whookey.
Actually, you are right, it is a very cool idea to be able to choose your kernel (Linux or Hurd for example), in addition to things like your desktop (KDE or GNOME for example). All the while, applications can be easily recompiled for the specific configuration of Debian. This would require some kind of "ports" type system though.
Center of Mass? Worcester area?
Really nice. Maybe when Debian becomes big enough to charter a cruise boat it becomes doable to actually meet there.
;-))
But If they are trying to achieve that for everybody it should be equally easy to go to the meeting, the distance measure should be weighted by the cost of travel divided by the travel budget of each of the developers... And where will the cruise boat stop to pickup people?
That should give them a project for a couple more rainy days
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
...because the true center of gravity is below the ground quite a ways...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?