They found the same results in historical data of various labs. That of course does not rule out such a mundane reason, it makes it less likely.
I agree that there are certainly seasonal variations in labs, even if you try to keep it as constant as possible. But for starters the air in the lab has to be refreshed all the time, and this air comes from the outside. I can imagine the composition changes between summer and winter (plants don't grow in winter).
The 33-day cycle another replier mentioned is interesting of course, as it correlates with a solar cycle and no normal human cycles.
A multi-year cycle correlating to solar spots could be interesting.
A more workable model would be like the telephone: you pay a fixed amount for the connection, plus variable amounts for usage.
This I think is reasonable, as the cable to one's home costs a certain amount per month for maintenance and so, no matter how much data is transferred over it. Data is cheap; rates should reflect this.
I thing customers will revolt though used as they are to unlimited plans.
There are restrictions to e.g. making photographs of people and publishing them without permission if that person is the subject of the photograph. There are restrictions on the requirements of producing ID documents. And so there are many more. Walking around a public street doesn't mean there is no such thing as privacy any more.
There is more to privacy than staying at home with the curtains drawn.
Auto-trains in Europe are rare, and the only ones that I am aware of run in the vacation season. Just a few of them. I don't know of any regular services where you can take your car on the train. But those vacation trains are very popular.
Impressive market share for a high-speed that's only doing 240 km/hr tops (and average half that). Indeed they should start building dedicated tracks - use existing track only to reach the stations.
NY to LA... almost 4000 km. High speed train, average maybe 250 km/hr (top speed 350 km/hr for a modern high-speed but include stops), 16 hours.
Leave 18:00 from NY, arrive next morning 10:00 in LA. Not too bad. Train may even cost a bit extra as no hotel needed on the other side. I don't know the exact situation in the US but would expect the train stations to be pretty much down town.
Otoh your flight takes about 6 hours for that trip. Add at least an hour for check-in and security check. 6 hours is too short for overnight and sleeping on a plane doesn't really work. Trains have beds at least. So you would lose a lot of your day. Say your plane leaves at 16:00, so you have to be at the airport at 15:00, arrive at destination 22:00, and then you need a hotel there.
I can see for many people the plane still wins, but it's not that clip and clear! I can even imagine a non-stop train between these two cities (will have enough traffic), then speed up to an average of 320 km/h and do it in just over 12 hours. Then your airliners will really start to feel the heat.
Not only Sweden; there is the EuroNight and CityNightLine network as well. Not the fastest connections (they do detours to serve more cities) but it's overnight so just sleep a little longer.
China also has lots of sleeper trains, and they are popular.
Now China is developing a lot of high speed rail, this will include 8-12 hour journeys (e.g. Hong Kong to Shanghai or Beijing) - now those trips are 20-24 hours. It would be great if that is on high speed. Imagine on Monday evening you can have dinner with your family, then off to the station, Tuesday all day meetings in Beijing, after dinner you take the overnight train back to HK, and Wednesday morning day back in office. Now try that by plane!
For those 8-12 hour journeys overnight trains rule. A plane can not compete to that, even if the train is more expensive as you really start to save time and don't have to pay for hotels.
Where I live the ISP provides the router, basically leaving me with a network port to plug my network in.
At home I have to log in using PPPoE (I have managed to connect two computers at the same time, giving me with two external IP addresses!), a chore to set up on each connecting device, but now I'm using my own WiFi router which is the only device connecting to my IP's gear. They may affect me when switching to IPv6 but will certainly announce years in advance - as most everyone needs to upgrade their home gear, and they have only that many support staff to go around.
That is probably also what holds ISPs back. Everyone at home is now on IPv4, no-one cares (of course - it's low-level infrastructure, an end user shouldn't have to care in the first place), so to switch the ISP network to v6 the ISP would have to either provide routers that are IPv4 compatible on the home side, or embark on a multi-year campaign to have people switch to v6. That's going to be a bigger campaign than the switch to digital TV has been in the USA (I followed that a bit through/. stories) as there are many more people affected, and understanding of the tech involved is definitely less.
And regarding Windows: does the most popular version, WinXP, support IPv6 out of the box? I doubt it - it's 10 years old and MS is not known as early adopter. This would make matters even worse. Not just the router, everything needs replacement. That your printer supports it out of the box great, but not many people at home will connect the printer over the network, most will simply use USB.
So unless there is a real need (and currently there simply isn't) it's just not going to happen.
This is why I think in developing countries IPv6 will come fist/. Historically the US has given themselves an extra big slice of the IPv4 address pie - there is a lot of space for expansion. Especially if those US based companies with A-level address blocks start to give back some of their unused space. There is no real urgency.
Developing countries however have much less IPv4 space, and will be forced to switch earlier. They also don't have much legacy infrastructure, it all has to be built from scratch, so why not start with the latest tech? It is like telephone: large parts of Africa have mobile networks, but no landlines. Mobile is way cheaper to roll out (not so many cables to dig in), so the fixed line phone tech is simply skipped. In the West landlines are sometimes still cheaper only because all those cables are there already, and the investments have been paid for already.
Afaik all modern Linux distros are fully up to the task of IPv6. TFS mentions even Windows can do it.
At this moment I am connecting my computers to the Internet via a wifi router/firewall - not likely this is going to change. Router is old, may not do IPv6 yet. My ISP also doesn't. But I guess the time will come that ISPs start to switch.
Will it really make a difference for me as end-user? Is my browsing going faster? Will I get less spam in my mailbox? Will it be easier to find the information I am looking for on the net? Probably none of the above.
At the moment I know I'm on IPv4 but on a daily basis I don't care as it just works. I don't know my IP address, it's not important to me what it is really. My home and office networks are internally IPv4, wouldn't make a difference if it's IPv6 except that addresses get harder to enter in BIND but that's one-off only. I suppose my uplink there also uses IPv4, not v6. I always approach my web site and mail server by entering an URL, not entering an IP address. Again what would I care? Let DNS take care of that part.
Don't get me wrong I understand it's time to move on: we run out of address space, soon there are more devices/networks connected to the Internet infrastructure than that there are unique addresses to find them. But from an end user perspective... I say let the ISPs take care of that. It's their job. Get me the connection, make sure your hardware works, preferably understands both IPv6 and IPv4 (backwards compatibility; and mostly it's not broken in the first place), and use on your network whatever works best.
There is always the talk of IPv6 will give any ISP subscriber a complete range of addresses instead of just one, so you can connect every computer, printer, whatnot directly to the Internet. I don't understand why an end user would want to connect their printer directly to the Internet. Their second computer maybe if they have one (makes torrenting easier) but then you lose the benefit of a hardware firewall in between. Simply because of security for my home network I prefer a single point of entry, not a dozen. Much easier to keep an eye on. So one external IP address is simply enough for most of us.
So while IPv6 is important for developers and ISPs, for the end user it's not. I totally agree with this Steve Cassidi that it's simply not something to worry about. He says not yet, I'd argue not ever, unless you're developing network gear/software or work for an ISP or so.
Don't worry, this is a Hong Kong cat-III movie. Which roughly means: female nudity fully OK, male nudity except full frontal, suggestion of sexual intercourse OK but nothing explicit there. Anything beyond that is simply illegal here.
Furthermore this is a remake of an erotic cult classic "sex and zen", and at least two of the lead actresses (actors don't really count of course) are from the JAV industry. It's hard to find Hong Kong actresses who willingly bare it all.
That's why I said "caused by" and not "causing".... this comment was just a test on how well you and the rest of/. can read. It was obviously meant as joke but got a troll mod. Nuff said.
Point in case: Apple's OS-X 10.3.9 hasn't received updates in years, and afaik is not supported any more by Apple. They want you to pay and install another OS instead. My iBook still works fine though.
Previously I heard the centre of Europe being in the neighbourhood of Prague. Iceland is pretty far up North. But then there are also places like Spitsbergen and Greenland - count those in and the centre of Europe shifts further up north, some claimed more towards Vilnius even.
Let's see. South of Malta is at 35 deg N, top of Spitsbergen is somewhere near 80 deg N, average 57.5 deg N, then I'm somewhere in Latvia even. Vilnius is just under 55 deg N.
Counting the Nordkapp (North Cape) as northernmost point - it's the northernmost point of the European mainland - at 71 deg N so that will certainly not bring it down as far south as Austria.
Not taking latitudes now, just looking at longitudes. And somehow I have the feeling that Austria is not even close to the centre of Europe. Or maybe they use a different calculation to get the centre to them.
Though it's not much better than my latest experiences with Mandriva, an RPM based distro. I have had quite a share of problems with RPM and dependencies... but this seems to have been solved quite well by now.
That said: running Debian as server, and I love it. Super stable, it just works, nothing to worry about there.
Running Ubuntu 10.4LTS as desktop now. Not happy. The user interface is great, but the system is unstable. I experience crashes, software weirdness (network that doesn't start on boot! Had to manually fix that using initrd!), etc - just not fun. Strongly considering moving back to Mandriva. Partly because I miss their management tools.
Of course. They work. They do the job. They do everything the user wants, and more. Unless a computer physically breaks down there is no reason to replace it.
Sorry won't work - and sorry I can't be bothered to search for that silly form.
The school 1 scenario won't work as all student's and teacher's laptops and smartphones stop connecting to the wifi, making them realise it's not on, and probably start complaining about it.
In school 3, at least set all your networks to "hidden" otherwise they will discover the network immediately. And sue for lying. Which they could do anyway.
Anyone knows (has it ever been asked?) how many parents have switched off or removed their WiFi routers because of this? And asked their neigbours to do the same?
I doubt any would do so.
I doubt many would think about that in the first place.
It makes me think of the "wait until we actually switch it on!" remark by some telecoms exec about a newly built GSM mast that caused lots of illnesses nearby.
Interesting. And after seeing those results it's of course time to jump to some conclusions.
I heard before that women are more likely than men to have same sex sexual contact; this confirms that clearly.
And it confirms one other "myth": it is easier for a woman to get laid. More of them had sex then men. More women report having had opposite sex sexual contact than men.
Secondly it appears that men report almost double the number of partners, which of course is impossible without a lot of same-sex contact which is more the realm of women.
The number of sex partners in the mobile phone survey reported by women also tends to be higher than for men; but with 14% also having same-sex contact that's getting more reasonable as the reported differences are less great. And as 97% also has had opposite sex sexual contact it means there really are lots of bisexual women around.
And most of all the big difference between the reports indicates that likely both surveys are highly off the mark. Both report very different numbers, and in the government report the difference between numbers of partners reported by men and women is I think too great to explain by same sex contact. Unless those having same sex contact do it with way more partners than average.
Typical problem of universities (I've also studied at a university myself): they teach how/why stuff works from a highly theoretical pov, not how it is used in practice. This gives a great basis for deeper understanding but most practical things are not learned in university but in real life.
The biggest difference interestingly is on the female side: 6.1 for android to 12.3 for iPhone. Males report 6.0 for Android to 10.0 for iPhone. And the number of people reporting having had same-sex partners is around 5% only.
Slashdot Mirror
They found the same results in historical data of various labs. That of course does not rule out such a mundane reason, it makes it less likely.
I agree that there are certainly seasonal variations in labs, even if you try to keep it as constant as possible. But for starters the air in the lab has to be refreshed all the time, and this air comes from the outside. I can imagine the composition changes between summer and winter (plants don't grow in winter).
The 33-day cycle another replier mentioned is interesting of course, as it correlates with a solar cycle and no normal human cycles.
A multi-year cycle correlating to solar spots could be interesting.
Effects correlating to known solar flares too.
A more workable model would be like the telephone: you pay a fixed amount for the connection, plus variable amounts for usage.
This I think is reasonable, as the cable to one's home costs a certain amount per month for maintenance and so, no matter how much data is transferred over it. Data is cheap; rates should reflect this.
I thing customers will revolt though used as they are to unlimited plans.
Even in public there is such a thing as privacy.
There are restrictions to e.g. making photographs of people and publishing them without permission if that person is the subject of the photograph. There are restrictions on the requirements of producing ID documents. And so there are many more. Walking around a public street doesn't mean there is no such thing as privacy any more.
There is more to privacy than staying at home with the curtains drawn.
That I may not be important in your eyes doesn't mean I don't have a right to privacy.
OK right, I forgot to take time zones into account. And anyway I would need to consult a map to see which way is eastbound and which way is westbound.
Auto-trains in Europe are rare, and the only ones that I am aware of run in the vacation season. Just a few of them. I don't know of any regular services where you can take your car on the train. But those vacation trains are very popular.
Impressive market share for a high-speed that's only doing 240 km/hr tops (and average half that). Indeed they should start building dedicated tracks - use existing track only to reach the stations.
NY to LA... almost 4000 km. High speed train, average maybe 250 km/hr (top speed 350 km/hr for a modern high-speed but include stops), 16 hours.
Leave 18:00 from NY, arrive next morning 10:00 in LA. Not too bad. Train may even cost a bit extra as no hotel needed on the other side. I don't know the exact situation in the US but would expect the train stations to be pretty much down town.
Otoh your flight takes about 6 hours for that trip. Add at least an hour for check-in and security check. 6 hours is too short for overnight and sleeping on a plane doesn't really work. Trains have beds at least. So you would lose a lot of your day. Say your plane leaves at 16:00, so you have to be at the airport at 15:00, arrive at destination 22:00, and then you need a hotel there.
I can see for many people the plane still wins, but it's not that clip and clear! I can even imagine a non-stop train between these two cities (will have enough traffic), then speed up to an average of 320 km/h and do it in just over 12 hours. Then your airliners will really start to feel the heat.
Not only Sweden; there is the EuroNight and CityNightLine network as well. Not the fastest connections (they do detours to serve more cities) but it's overnight so just sleep a little longer.
China also has lots of sleeper trains, and they are popular.
Now China is developing a lot of high speed rail, this will include 8-12 hour journeys (e.g. Hong Kong to Shanghai or Beijing) - now those trips are 20-24 hours. It would be great if that is on high speed. Imagine on Monday evening you can have dinner with your family, then off to the station, Tuesday all day meetings in Beijing, after dinner you take the overnight train back to HK, and Wednesday morning day back in office. Now try that by plane!
For those 8-12 hour journeys overnight trains rule. A plane can not compete to that, even if the train is more expensive as you really start to save time and don't have to pay for hotels.
Where I live the ISP provides the router, basically leaving me with a network port to plug my network in.
At home I have to log in using PPPoE (I have managed to connect two computers at the same time, giving me with two external IP addresses!), a chore to set up on each connecting device, but now I'm using my own WiFi router which is the only device connecting to my IP's gear. They may affect me when switching to IPv6 but will certainly announce years in advance - as most everyone needs to upgrade their home gear, and they have only that many support staff to go around.
That is probably also what holds ISPs back. Everyone at home is now on IPv4, no-one cares (of course - it's low-level infrastructure, an end user shouldn't have to care in the first place), so to switch the ISP network to v6 the ISP would have to either provide routers that are IPv4 compatible on the home side, or embark on a multi-year campaign to have people switch to v6. That's going to be a bigger campaign than the switch to digital TV has been in the USA (I followed that a bit through /. stories) as there are many more people affected, and understanding of the tech involved is definitely less.
And regarding Windows: does the most popular version, WinXP, support IPv6 out of the box? I doubt it - it's 10 years old and MS is not known as early adopter. This would make matters even worse. Not just the router, everything needs replacement. That your printer supports it out of the box great, but not many people at home will connect the printer over the network, most will simply use USB.
So unless there is a real need (and currently there simply isn't) it's just not going to happen.
This is why I think in developing countries IPv6 will come fist/. Historically the US has given themselves an extra big slice of the IPv4 address pie - there is a lot of space for expansion. Especially if those US based companies with A-level address blocks start to give back some of their unused space. There is no real urgency.
Developing countries however have much less IPv4 space, and will be forced to switch earlier. They also don't have much legacy infrastructure, it all has to be built from scratch, so why not start with the latest tech? It is like telephone: large parts of Africa have mobile networks, but no landlines. Mobile is way cheaper to roll out (not so many cables to dig in), so the fixed line phone tech is simply skipped. In the West landlines are sometimes still cheaper only because all those cables are there already, and the investments have been paid for already.
Is there really anything to worry about?
Afaik all modern Linux distros are fully up to the task of IPv6. TFS mentions even Windows can do it.
At this moment I am connecting my computers to the Internet via a wifi router/firewall - not likely this is going to change. Router is old, may not do IPv6 yet. My ISP also doesn't. But I guess the time will come that ISPs start to switch.
Will it really make a difference for me as end-user? Is my browsing going faster? Will I get less spam in my mailbox? Will it be easier to find the information I am looking for on the net? Probably none of the above.
At the moment I know I'm on IPv4 but on a daily basis I don't care as it just works. I don't know my IP address, it's not important to me what it is really. My home and office networks are internally IPv4, wouldn't make a difference if it's IPv6 except that addresses get harder to enter in BIND but that's one-off only. I suppose my uplink there also uses IPv4, not v6. I always approach my web site and mail server by entering an URL, not entering an IP address. Again what would I care? Let DNS take care of that part.
Don't get me wrong I understand it's time to move on: we run out of address space, soon there are more devices/networks connected to the Internet infrastructure than that there are unique addresses to find them. But from an end user perspective... I say let the ISPs take care of that. It's their job. Get me the connection, make sure your hardware works, preferably understands both IPv6 and IPv4 (backwards compatibility; and mostly it's not broken in the first place), and use on your network whatever works best.
There is always the talk of IPv6 will give any ISP subscriber a complete range of addresses instead of just one, so you can connect every computer, printer, whatnot directly to the Internet. I don't understand why an end user would want to connect their printer directly to the Internet. Their second computer maybe if they have one (makes torrenting easier) but then you lose the benefit of a hardware firewall in between. Simply because of security for my home network I prefer a single point of entry, not a dozen. Much easier to keep an eye on. So one external IP address is simply enough for most of us.
So while IPv6 is important for developers and ISPs, for the end user it's not. I totally agree with this Steve Cassidi that it's simply not something to worry about. He says not yet, I'd argue not ever, unless you're developing network gear/software or work for an ISP or so.
Don't worry, this is a Hong Kong cat-III movie. Which roughly means: female nudity fully OK, male nudity except full frontal, suggestion of sexual intercourse OK but nothing explicit there. Anything beyond that is simply illegal here.
Furthermore this is a remake of an erotic cult classic "sex and zen", and at least two of the lead actresses (actors don't really count of course) are from the JAV industry. It's hard to find Hong Kong actresses who willingly bare it all.
That's why I said "caused by" and not "causing".... this comment was just a test on how well you and the rest of /. can read. It was obviously meant as joke but got a troll mod. Nuff said.
What you saying? This is not caused by global warming?
Don't worry, WinXP won't spontaneously stop working.
Point in case: Apple's OS-X 10.3.9 hasn't received updates in years, and afaik is not supported any more by Apple. They want you to pay and install another OS instead. My iBook still works fine though.
Previously I heard the centre of Europe being in the neighbourhood of Prague. Iceland is pretty far up North. But then there are also places like Spitsbergen and Greenland - count those in and the centre of Europe shifts further up north, some claimed more towards Vilnius even.
Let's see. South of Malta is at 35 deg N, top of Spitsbergen is somewhere near 80 deg N, average 57.5 deg N, then I'm somewhere in Latvia even. Vilnius is just under 55 deg N.
Counting the Nordkapp (North Cape) as northernmost point - it's the northernmost point of the European mainland - at 71 deg N so that will certainly not bring it down as far south as Austria.
Not taking latitudes now, just looking at longitudes. And somehow I have the feeling that Austria is not even close to the centre of Europe. Or maybe they use a different calculation to get the centre to them.
Apt works great, true.
Though it's not much better than my latest experiences with Mandriva, an RPM based distro. I have had quite a share of problems with RPM and dependencies... but this seems to have been solved quite well by now.
That said: running Debian as server, and I love it. Super stable, it just works, nothing to worry about there.
Running Ubuntu 10.4LTS as desktop now. Not happy. The user interface is great, but the system is unstable. I experience crashes, software weirdness (network that doesn't start on boot! Had to manually fix that using initrd!), etc - just not fun. Strongly considering moving back to Mandriva. Partly because I miss their management tools.
What? Apple's Safari also uses it! You're not going to suggest Microsoft to copy something from Apple do you? They would never do so!
Oh, wait...
Of course. They work. They do the job. They do everything the user wants, and more. Unless a computer physically breaks down there is no reason to replace it.
Sorry won't work - and sorry I can't be bothered to search for that silly form.
The school 1 scenario won't work as all student's and teacher's laptops and smartphones stop connecting to the wifi, making them realise it's not on, and probably start complaining about it.
In school 3, at least set all your networks to "hidden" otherwise they will discover the network immediately. And sue for lying. Which they could do anyway.
I totally agree.
Anyone knows (has it ever been asked?) how many parents have switched off or removed their WiFi routers because of this? And asked their neigbours to do the same?
I doubt any would do so.
I doubt many would think about that in the first place.
It makes me think of the "wait until we actually switch it on!" remark by some telecoms exec about a newly built GSM mast that caused lots of illnesses nearby.
Interesting. And after seeing those results it's of course time to jump to some conclusions.
I heard before that women are more likely than men to have same sex sexual contact; this confirms that clearly.
And it confirms one other "myth": it is easier for a woman to get laid. More of them had sex then men. More women report having had opposite sex sexual contact than men.
Secondly it appears that men report almost double the number of partners, which of course is impossible without a lot of same-sex contact which is more the realm of women.
The number of sex partners in the mobile phone survey reported by women also tends to be higher than for men; but with 14% also having same-sex contact that's getting more reasonable as the reported differences are less great. And as 97% also has had opposite sex sexual contact it means there really are lots of bisexual women around.
And most of all the big difference between the reports indicates that likely both surveys are highly off the mark. Both report very different numbers, and in the government report the difference between numbers of partners reported by men and women is I think too great to explain by same sex contact. Unless those having same sex contact do it with way more partners than average.
Typical problem of universities (I've also studied at a university myself): they teach how/why stuff works from a highly theoretical pov, not how it is used in practice. This gives a great basis for deeper understanding but most practical things are not learned in university but in real life.
The biggest difference interestingly is on the female side: 6.1 for android to 12.3 for iPhone. Males report 6.0 for Android to 10.0 for iPhone. And the number of people reporting having had same-sex partners is around 5% only.