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Oregon Government Supporting Open Source
amountlad writes "In a pair of articles released today on N4N.org, Oregon continues to lead the way in government open source adoption in the USA. The Oregon State University's Open Source Lab will host a Government Open Source Conference in October. The GOSCON has strong support from within the state government. The State's Department of Administrative Services released a white paper detailing their use of Asterisk for audio conferencing for more than 500 conferences a week. The set-up includes a web-based interface for judges to manage recording the hearings. In doing so the State joins Metro, a Portland area regional government which uses Asterisk along side its Beowulf Cluster."
...whether proximity to the state of Washington has anything to do with it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Please dont mod this up. It is a common troll post and can be found with a quick Google.
It is also totally incrorrect
Please do not feed the trolls
One of the great things about open source is that it offers a way for business and non-business organizations and individuals to leverage the power of existing equipment for very little additional expense (to wit, additional peripherals or upgrades necessary to run the software) rather than investing the money into a solution they're just going to have to throw away shortly down the road.
With the increasing price of oil, I can't help wondering what the face of computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average computer uses as much as seventeen swimming pools worth of coal to run on any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed, you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that, between the advances in open source and the levelling off of true innovation in hardware design, I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one compelling reason not to.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Oregon! Yeah!
Next up: Iowa! Yes!
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I like the sound of this 'Jeff Dixon'
He reminds me of an old friend...Richard Cranium.
How do I sign up?
Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em
I walk down the street stay on my course
Dat biatch look bout as sexy as an open source
Not talkin bout linux her legs are an open source
Stick it in and now I'm balls deep
Too busy trolling got no time to sleep
People say pr0n cuz dey scared of the beep
Got such high karma it'll make ya'll suckas weap
New CD slashdot Pimp hitting stores soon
I happen to know that Microsoft has a rather large contract with the State Govt. Offices most if not all of my state's Office computers. A few years back I used to work for a Tech company that had a contract to service the computers for the state. They were all running WIN 2K and 98. If one state starts to move to Open Source soon more should follow. Decreasing MSFT's domination in the maket. Nice thing though, both systems should still need to be services on occasion so there's always going to be tech support work. :)
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
I started (or attempted to start) using Linux a few years back when I started university, just out of plain curiosity. My buddy and I downloaded the ISO images of Red Hat Linux 8.0, and from that point forward, it all went to shit.
I figured it would be no problem, I used Sun's Solaris quite a bit so I understood the shell at least. Install went well, even though I was confused why I needed seven million partitions which I had to allocate manually and to have a root password since it was a single user machine. After my install, I restarted my machine, saw a bunch of ugly crap being spewed to the screen, and before you knew it, X Windows loaded up and I was in Linux. "Ooh, this looks neat, just like Windows. Let's see if I can surf the web!"
This is the point where I discovered the 'magic' of Linux. It couldn't find a driver for a simple ethernet card. So I got onto another computer running Windows, and found some type of driver for it. All right, I'll just burn it to a cd, pop it onto the Linux machine, and we're good to go. I started looking around for the CD ROM icon...where was it? Apparently I had to mount it manually, luckily I know UNIX. Then it asks me for root password. Okay, so I enter it. Then I can see the CD ROM, great. Oh look, the driver is in the form of source code, I have to compile it. So I tried to compile it with the configure script that came along. Oh wait, I need some !@#$ing stupid C library. All right, so I download that as well in the form of a RPM, which luckily worked, and then I was able to compile the driver.
Okay now what? According to the instructions, I had to recompile the kernel making the driver a part of it. 'Recompile the kernel?' I thought, 'What kind of sick operating system makes you recompile its kernel...' Apparently I didn't know what kind of twisted people designed Linux. Oh wait, it wants the stupid root password again...good God. So after about 5 hours, I had Internet...given that I knew how to use a UNIX machine. Four days later I tried installing something else, it asked me for the same stupid C library but version 1.2.3.4.5 instead of the version I had...God forbid...1.2.3.4.4 (oh what a fool I was for not updating every 10 minutes!) Within an hour, my drive was formatted (twice out of spite) and running Windows XP.
A few months back I was inspired again to run Linux. If you read the tech news, there's no doubt about it, it's taking over the server market. A Linux sys admin will make 20 grand more than a Windows sys admin (Makes you wonder if 20 grand is worth eventual suicide), so I felt I should pick it up. Of course now I was more prepared, I've read books, admin guides, worked as a student UNIX operator, 3 years under my belt as a computer science student, two internships, and had studied the Linux kernel in depth.
I decided I would try a whole bunch of distributions, I tried Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 2, SuSe 9.1, Debian, and Mandrake 10. All special in there own little way...like retarded children. As soon as SuSe loaded up, I was like..."nice nice, very sleek...", then a hissing came out my left speaker that wouldn't go away. Nice autodetection for the sound driver. Bye bye SuSe. All right, let's try Red Hat 9...oh look Red Hat won't give any more automatic updates because now that it has a little bit of money...!@#$ open source, let's become the next Microsoft! Oh Debian and Mandrake, just plain ugly and slow.
What about Fedora Core, Red Hat's latest method of getting code for free rather than having to pay programmers in India $0.85 an hour to do it. Why pay someone when you can have some idiot from GNU or some grad student do it for free, then sell it for 400 bucks a pop. It was surprising though that that experimental piece of crap worked better than all the other distributions, even though its autoupdate some how corrupted my kernel and I had to overwrite it.
But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software engineer, good software is hard to m
Unfortunately, not all government agencies in Oregon are following along. I work for the Oregon Judicial Department, and there's not a drop of open source in use that I know of. It's pretty much all Microsoft, Lotus, and Corel.
What's even worse is that there's a lot of alternatives in use between counties. For audio recordings in the court, most counties use either FTR or CourtSmart. My court uses Office products, even though the "official" standard is the Corel suite. It makes it difficult at times when working with other counties.
I think it'd be great if we went with Linux and Open Office, but that'll never happen.
Uh, I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude there. Care to post some supporting evidence to that silly statement?
Most IP attorneys I talk with have no clue about open-source software, let alone non-attorney government employees (unless they really need continuing legal education credits and stumble upon it). I'm glad that the OS community is begining to reach out to this group and not expecting them to shell out $800/day like the OSBC conferences.
Due to the trolls above- but if you're having problems viewing the Coral'd links above, try going directly to http://goscon.org/
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The average computer uses as much as seventeen swimming pools worth of coal to run on any given day.
No, it doesn't. Not even close. Please, for the love of God, don't pull "facts" out of your [thin air].
For those of you who aren't complete idiots, a computer uses about 300 Watts. 300 Watts in 24 hours is 7.2 kiloWatt-hours. That's a little less than 17 swimming pools worth of coal in energy.
*burying face in hands*
It turns out that some proxy servers are challenged by the Coralized links in the story. For the direct scoop on GOSCON, go to GOSCON's Website
"Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable."
Replace your lawyer--he can't read. The GPL does not require you to license things under the GPL simply because they were compiled with gcc.
If you don't believe me, read it yourself.
The average computer uses as much as seventeen swimming pools worth of coal to run on any given day.
I'd like to see the math behind that point please. Show all your work, and include just how much tonage a swimming pool is. I don't know what the conversion ration of tons of coal to kilowatts is- so include that as well. You might also want to compare it to the hydropower and wind power we enjoy out here on the left coast.
I do know that the computer I use most of the time can run on it's 900mah battery for up to 2 hours straight without a recharge while playing full motion video.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Looking at the list, I was thinking, education is first step. Not many managers know about linux (even if they knew, they may be sacred of using some unknown OS). These kind of seminars should help them. Instead of charging money for these, why not linux vendors(like RedHat, Novell and others) offer these things for free.
.... with little meat.... they keep on "planning" all the while buying MSFT.
good times in that orygun
Oregon ... home to Linus Torvalds and the OSDL
I
I don't know where the hell that statistic is from either. My AMD64 3500+, Geforce 4 ti4200, and 2 sticks of PC3200 RAM uses about 200 watts of power. I recommend trying this thing called the kill-a-watt from thinkgeek, it really is nice for finding out how much power stuff uses. I am not going into anymore of a promo-mode besides that today though :)
Anyway, a hair dryer uses when it is on FYI 1359 watts, a toaster 800 watts, and even a gas dryer uses 500 watts! So don't bitch about desktop computers.
The average computer uses as much as seventeen swimming pools worth of coal to run on any given day.
l
t ml
1 ton of coal produces 2,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity
1 pound of coal produces 1.25 kilowatt-hours
From:
http://www.teachcoal.org/lessonplans/how_much.htm
It looks like an hour of active computer use should use no more than 200 watt-hours in an hour.
From:
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.h
200 X 24 = 4800 = 4.8kwh/day = Under 4 lbs. of coal.
I think the grandparent post got the words "day" and "year" mixed up. Easy mistake. Half the time I get carded, I tell the bartender I'm 22 days old.
I've seen this troll before. It's a prefab.
Yeah, i told that troller the same thing last time he posted but obviously he didnt listen.
Maybe grandparent is assuming very, very small swimming pools.
.81 lb coal/kWh
Amount of coal needed to generate one kWh:
10,500 BTU/kWh / 13,000 BTU/lb. coal =
Assuming 1/3 kW to run your computer, that's 8 kWh/day, or 6.48 pounds of coal. The VAX 6000 in my garage would consume about 120 pounds per day - about 2.3 cubic feet.
Seeing as how Oregon is so close to the hydroelectic power nearby, perhaps the grandparent post is confusing oil with water? :)
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
Why do people post such retarded comments about how bad Linux is and how joe six pack can't use it? Joe six pack can't even use Windows...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
and that may still be too much.
Oh well, what the hell...
Their system of measurment suggests so too...
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
So now we have a new SlashMeasurement of energy - a swimming pool worth of coal. How many of those will it take to illuminate a Library of Congress worth of data?
...if we had a Beowulf Cluster of states doing this!
-Valiss
Especially all loaded up on Southern Comfort.
Since I'm bored and this is more fun that work, here's some more info:
.81 lbs per kWh, you get 1.4 megawatt hours of electricity. That's enough to run IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer (216 kW) for 272 days.
24' x 12' x 4.6' pool = 1295 cubic feet
17 pools = 22015 cubic feet
Density of broken coal = 52 lbs/cubic foot
So that's 1144780 lbs of coal in 17 (small) swimming pools. At the aforementioned
Again, this is assuming smallish swimming pools. If we're talking Olympic sized swiming pools, figure 50 times that.
Hey, didn't they steal the GOSCON idea from those Ruby guys who helf FOSCON a few weeks back... oh, wait...
How quickly we forget, Oregon schools tried to go open source and got the smackdown by Microsoft's lobbyists. No, this state government is NOT in the lead on the use of open source.
Not that I agree with Mister Seventeen Swimming Pools of Coal, but, er...does your hair dryer or toaster boast 60+ days of uptime?
As cost to run a Government go up, and people refuse to pay more taxes, alternate cheaper ways will hbave to happen.
My advice, on your time, think about what Open sourse products could replace the ones you have. Then set up a test enviroment in your home.
Once you confirm, to the best you can, that it does work write a paper then sit on it. The very next time someone in managment complains abouit cost, tell them:
"I can write you up a document on products that do they same work, but for less money."
Then tune the document to fit that scenerio.
Then email it to that person. If you can, schedule a meeting to discuss the work this wil be doing, and invite his boss, and other managers.
Then do a 3-8 minute overview, do not tell them it is free. The reason for that is they know NO software is free. This is true, you have the associated costs for installation, training, maintainance.
Address those costs. The costs that the agency is spending on current items is a matter of public record so you will know what price point you will need to break.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They can handle this with a short shot commuter flight. I know those Red-Eye flights to Brazil and Asia had to be playing hob with their systems.
OMGZ! That's equal to a Library of Congress of natural gas! It's almost 2 Volkswagens of Uranium! Won't someone THINK OF THE CHILDREN???????????????
SAILING MISHAP
Portland General Electric owns two natural gas-fired power plants, one of which can run on oil if gas prices go too high, one coal-fired plant (low-sulphur coal for those of you who are wondering about how much it pollutes), and several hydroelectric dams. The nuclear plant has been shut down due to a variety of reasons, many of which are less than obvious to the casual protester -er- observer.
I seem to remember that you can figure about 1.5 kW of generation per ton of coal, though I don't know how many tons make up a swimming pool.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
I hate replying to my own posts, but I can't be right on the generation estimate, because it would be in kWh, not kW, and 1.5 kWh seems ridiculously low for an entire ton of coal. More research is required.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Finally! I was beginning to worry that our proximity to Mordor^H^H^H^H^H^H Redmond was going to completely screw over any chances of Open Source spreading around here. I mean, I knew about OSU's heavy support and involvement in OSS, but that's completely different from getting the government to back it. Actually, one of the local school districts has a policy banning the use of Linux in any way at school. Not well enforced, thank God, but it has been enforced in the past.
Maybe this will also lead to loosening up on other Microsoft bindings, too. Nearly all colleges in the state, for example, do only Microsoft certification. Apparently, there is only one college that does non-MS certification. Let's hope that changes soon!
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
http:www.lsb.orgLinux Standard Base
is an standard, supported by all major linux distros, which ensures that even proprietary software can be developed using it's components as a framework. When it comes down to compiling with GCC it is just bullshit and FUD that this imposes any license restrictions. As you can surely see onhttp://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGP LToolsForNF
gnu.org
the copyright on the editors and tools does not cover the code you write. Therefore it is possible to compile even proprietary applications with GCC.That would be more like 7 lbs of coal a day for 24 hour operation of a 200W computer.
:)
That's assuming 8,500 BTU/lb of coal and system 30% efficiency from the coal pile at the power plant to the plug in your wall.
You either have very small swimming pool or real inefficient computer.
If you were to put the electical power from burning 17 swimming pools of coal a day into an electrical load in your house, it's a safe guess that your house would burst into flames in a matter of seconds.
Hmm, Swimming Pools of Coal.
I am not familiar with this type of measurement.
Perhaps you could do me a favor and convert to say, Libraries of Congress.
That would make things a lot clearer for me.
Thanks!
You are right! Look here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/2/13/8422/16656
Word-for-word.
I re-posted the CD we created for the Oregon House and Senate as a reminder of why Government use of Open Source Software is so important:
http://cooper.stevenson.name/open_source_cd/
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question481.htm
A computer really uses less than 300W, even if the power supply says 300W. I now have the luxury of metered PDUs at one place I work and my estimates are about 90-100W --but these are HP DL360s, with dual 3.8GHz Xeon processors and 2x 15k RPM SCSI disks. You can imagine that a regular desktop is drawing a fair amount less. No CRTs on the PDUs, of course, so I can't say what those draw.
Wil
wiki
If we're talking Olympic sized swiming pools
We can't, remember? Perhaps you're talking "international sporting event taking place two years after 2010 between the summer and fall" sized pools.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Instead of Blackboard?
In case you blathering folk didn't know, Oregon State University is home to one of the largest open source initiatives anywhere. Just go to http://osuosl.org/ . They host mirrors for lots of linux distributions (gentoo ebuild source, open source projects, and other stuff). It was only a matter of time that the government clued in on how it could save money by studying the guys at OSUOSL.
No. I shut my computer down when I'm not using it. If you care so much about energy conservation, maybe you should too.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Indeed, I'd be surprised if a computer used more than a fist sized lump of coal worth of energy in a day. Coal burns long and hot. When I was a kid, we heated a small house with a few small shovels full of coal per day. Modern CPUs run hot, sure, but not THAT hot.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Are we talking one of those lame above ground pools or one of the nice below ground pools with waterfalls and stuff all over.
I agree with the sense of what you said. However, I think it is not useful to use the terms "liberal" and "conservative". They no longer have significant meaning because those who want government corruption have been pretending that they have a legitimate political view, and calling that view "conservative".
Check out the government debt to see who is conserving the quality of government. The Bush administration is borrowing more money than any entity has borrowed in the history of the world.
Is dishonesty and violence "conservative"?
Is breaking the law "conservative"? Bush and Cheney are the most arrested U.S. president and vice-president in history. George W. Bush was arrested once for the crime of DUI and Dick Cheney twice:
George W. Bush DUI, 1st record of arrest
George W. Bush DUI, 2nd record of arrest
George W. Bush was arrested 2 other times in his life, also, for stunts that were not something a sober person would find interesting.
Dick Cheney DUI, record of 1st arrest
Dick Cheney DUI, record of 2nd arrest
--
If your government chooses killing as policy, expect others to choose the same.
Maybe you mean the Riverdale School District in Portland, Oregon? Very impressive project, great guys.
--
Bush lied, many died.
Out of pure boredom and a little curiosity, it seems that with complete combustion or fission, you get approximately 8KWh of heat out of 1kg of coal.
There seem to be about four different kinds of coal (Anthracite Solid and Broken, Bituminous Solid and Broken), and the previous link doesn't specify a type of coal, I'll go with the average of the cleaner burning two Anthracite coals (+-1300kg/m3).
The GPP doesn't state what kind of swimming pools we're talking about, but a single olympic swimming pool is (50*25*3*1300) 4875000 kg of coal, which is (4875000*8) 39000000 KWh. Assuming the coal doesn't burn completely, but only say 90% to it's potential, that's (39000000/365) 106849 years worth of continuous computing pleasure.
Assuming the GPP was talking about a backyard swimming pool, it seems they are about 70m3 on average, or 249 years worth of computing pleasure.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
we're using at a couple campuses in the Cal State System, San Francisco and Humboldt. Solid, stable, easy to install runs on a range of systems from shared hosts to dedicated clusters, pretty easy to use, more features than BBBlackboard, SSL ready and LDAP built in (they actually charge extra for SSL 'support' in Blackboard Basic!).
Great user community too, helpful, inventive, worldwide.
And it has more cowbell than any of it's competitors.
Isn't the beaver a noble and beautiful animal?
On the other hand, we do have some leaders in new market innovations (hint: look at the first entry under "Alternatives").
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to
something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".
If the parent post is not fake, then I will really consider moving to some different planet.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat.
Actually virtually all of the electricity used by a computer is given off as heat. That's true of most other electronic devices as well and it doesn't have anything to do with "Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication".
...along side its Beowulf Cluster.
Boy, imagine a Beowulf cluster of...those Beowulf...er...oh, damn.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Oregon, isn't that some kind of biscuit you have in the states?
That's a little less than 17 swimming pools worth of coal in energy.
Olympic or paddling?
Just over 1kg of coal, depending on what type. And that assumes that you're running the power supply at its limit rather than the nominal 30W that most computers use. So about 100g of coal.
GWB and co. are not Conservative; they are 'neo-cons'. True Conservatives such as John McCain are as marginalized by the neo-cons as the liberals are.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Somehow I don't think Tillamook should be too worried...
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
82% of all statistics are made up on the spot, in an attempt to prove one's point.
300 Watts = 3 100 Watt light bulbs = 5 60 Watt light bulbs.
I saved more enegery going to more efficient light bulbs then I did going to a less power hungry pc.
Yes, but we know nothing sucks like a VAX.
His name was Robert Paulsen.