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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
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.
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.
phew!, I hope this saves the debian community the hassle to swim around in freezing cold water during conference....
Reason I include the UK centre of mass is because I am British.
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
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.''Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
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.
Since I live in Omaha, NE, I'd be there in a heartbeat. I'm still waiting for some sort of computer conference to go on in this area. The KC linux expo had potential, but they screwed up endorsing it, and nobody went.
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?
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.
...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?