Not a clue, but I can tell you about my hometown in Michigan, which is also 50-100K people. Yes, there are buses that run in the city. Maybe once an hour, so not as good as the situation in Finland. But, there is not really public transport linking that city to anything else. There is a city of 500K 80 km away, there are several small communities of 20K about 30km away. Otherwise no large city for ~300km. And no real way to get to any of them on PT.
So, if you can afford it, you have a car. If you have a car, why walk to a bus stop, wait for a bus, walk from that stop to where you want to go (assuming you don't need to transfer)? Then repeat on the way home. Instead, you hop in your car, go where you need to, and come home. You can either take 2 hours to make your trip (assuming you know the schedule) or 30 minutes. The bus system is barely adequate, so it only gets used by those with no other option.
I'm not saying this is "right," just that that's the way it is.
I think this issue of not having interconnects between cities is very important in the US, because it requires nearly everyone to have a car anyhow. And part of the reason we aren't interconnected is that there are large areas of the country with low population densities. As I pointed out, if you look at the Northeast, which is the part of the US most like Europe from a population density standpoint, the transportation system *is* more like Europe's. Still not as good, but improved.
Oslo is a fairly large place, both in area and the number of people living there
A lot larger than Charlston, WV I bet. How many people need to do what your friend does on a daily basis? How many roundtrip trains would that support, even if everyone did it?
There are lots of reasons public transportation sucks in the U.S., and cultural reasons are just one of them. But, if you look at the densely populated East Coast, things are better from that standpoint. But, part of the problem is that since there are large gaps in what the transportation system offers, everyone needs a car to fill those in.* Since everyone has a car, they tend to use it because its more convenient. Then no demand for more transportation options, big gaps remain.
Even when we do live in places with good transport (Denver area for me) we still need a car for those middle length trips, so you have to make a point of using the local transport since it is still often less convenient.
Re:What would they rather have?
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
I don't know what you are (rudely) trying to say. I mentioned that there is uranium mixed in with the coal. That's where radon comes from too, decay of uranium. The issue was carbon-14 in coal.
If you're trying to suggest that carbon-14 is created in coal by activation of nitrogen, there might be some of that. If you google on "carbon 14 coal" you'll find a discussion that claims C-14/C-12 ratios of (occasionally) up to 10^-13. (Atmopheric carbon is 10^-12). Many times its below 10^-15. Another possible explanation is bacteria living in coal presumably fixating atmospheric carbon.
In any case, the CO2 coming out of a smokestack should have 10-1000 or more less radioactivity than the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Re:What would they rather have?
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
really don't care about the radioactive carbon-14 they're dumping up the stack
There is radiation from these stacks, but it can't be carbon-14. The half-life of carbon-14 is 6000 years and the coal has been underground for millions. Any carbon-14 in the original source will have turned to nitrogen a long time ago. The radioactivity comes, as I understand it, from trace amounts of uranium and maybe thorium.
Well, in particle physics, the typical use is that data isn't stored on these systems longer than it takes to analyse it (and since data is constantly being accumulated, you don't worry about small losses).
But, there are people looking into parallel, redundant filesystems and the like so that you can keep more on disk. For instance 1000x60GB=60TB is a sizable amount of free space on these clusters, but the output datarate from these experiments is a petabyte/year or so.
First, as another poster pointed out, these detectors produce a LOT of data. I'm on an experiment slated to take data at about the same time as the LHC experiments, with similar rate requirements.
We plan to use a 2500 node cluster (of year 2007 CPUs) to filter our data in real time. The input rate into this cluster will be about 10 GB/s, output rate about 200 MB/s.
But, each interaction is analyzed (usually) by just one computer. There are so many interactions, though, that you need massive clusters, but not much communication between nodes of the cluster.
That's just for the data filter. You need even larger amounts of computing to analyze what comes out in that 200 MB/s and to simulate what happens in the experiment. Much larger amounts.
Our experiment will ultimately require clusters this size at the laboratory and at something like a dozen other institutions.
What nearly everyone seems to forget (including the NPR report last night) is that hydrogen is not an energy source any more than the wall socket your computer is plugged into is.
Hydrogen has to be produced. Currently, most of it comes from fossil fuels in a process that releases CO2. Some if it comes from electrolosis, which requires energy which comes from sources like burning fossil fuels.
The only thing hydrogen would do in our current situation would be to move pollution from your car to a power plant.
Lastly, for those who have pointed out the gap we seem to have left between hobbyist and enterprise, we are looking into that as well. We are always looking to fill in the gaps in our offering.
Well, I hope you figure it out soon. Frankly Redhat looks pretty silly next to support policies from, say Microsoft, who will only cease security updates for Windows 98 at the end of this year (and don't charge any subscription fee). That's over 5 years of support on a consumer OS.*
If you come up with something reasonable, I can almost guarantee my research group's collection of workstations will remain running Redhat for the forseeable future. My home machines may switch from Mandrake to Redhat too, at least the firewall will.
BTW, my definition of "reasonable" is a guaranteed 3 year lifetime (maybe more) with a subscription fee for updates of no more than $60/year. We won't have any need to call or e-mail you, so we won't want to pay for that.
Heck, we might ever spring for a copy of AS at work if we can get a reasonable deal on the workstations. Oh yeah, discounts for bulk license packs would be nice too. (Quantities of 5/10/25/50/100 maybe).
From reading the comments here, our situation is far from unique. But if you don't fix the gap, we'll migrate, maybe to Debian. If we do that, I doubt we'd ever come back.
* Yeah, yeah, Redhat supplies much more than just an OS, its all the apps too. I know, but even a support policy that covered the OS and the 50 most common apps would be an improvement.
So when on January 3, 2004 an exploit is discovered in Apache, will this be your course of action?:
Wait a week
Search rpmfind.net for apache RPMs
Research which of them include a fix for the exploit
Download one built by someone you don't know if you can trust
Try to install it
Solve any dependencies (maybe you need a new OpenSSL?)
Hope it installs config files in the same places, doesn't overwrite your config
Hope it works
Wait for the next vulnerability to happen, wonder if your unknown RPM is vulnerable
If so, good luck.
The problem is that for complex applications, RPMs between various distributions aren't that compatible. Some distros are better than others, I would imagine, but I've run into situations where trying to upgrade an application to a version from a newer distro eventually wanted to upgrade just about the whole OS to solve the dependency issues.
So, I've seen various opinions on this, including one from Redhat.
Why do I need a license for each machine running RH. Doesn't their software allow me to install one copy of Advanced (workstation/server/whatever) to any number of machines? Ok, so I can't contact their network from each machine to get updates and I get zero support, but what if I don't care? I've never needed support, and I'm used to updating RPMs by hand. So, why can't I just continue on like this?
Except now the end of life is just one year. Do you want to move to RH 10 on April 30, 2004? Then do it again every year after that. Redhat is targetting groups like you (and me). How to handle this has become a more complex issue recently.
Also, solid state, however big and bulky, isn't susceptible to the radiation that many mega-tiny chips are...
Actually, the current microchips are inherently rad-hard (radiation resistance). This wasn't the case in the past.
It's something about the size of the features being small and also shallow, so that not much charge is deposited as a charged particle passes through. 0.25 and 0.18 microns are apparently especially good. However, as feature size continues to go down, things will get worse again.
It's not completely clear to me what exact problem you are trying to solve, but if you are looking for a way to communicate with a variety of data aquistion and control boards, comedi may be part of your solution. It's developed, as I understand it, by LBL (Lawrence Berkley Lab, a.k.a. the US government). They have a list of about 100 boards they support.
I've found it somewhat difficult to use since building their modules is really suggested on a generic rather than stock Redhat kernel (and building with what are claimed to be the RH sources and config files didn't work for me).
I really enjoyed the first Thomas Covenant trilogy, but put down the second one half-way into the first book
That might have been a mistake. The "problem," as I see it, with the 2nd series is that in the first he developed this marvelous world that is so beautiful, naive, whatever (if you read the books you know what I mean). In contrast, Covenant stands out as not being worth its attention, but he is.
The second series shows that beautiful world destroyed and essentially Covenant is bright spot (which isn't saying much) in the whole business. Very depressing first book. However, in the 2nd and 3rd books, new characters are brought in that make you realize that this world is still worth fighting for.
Who wants to spend the time reading 7, or however many there are now, 1000+ page books
You said it. My feeling is that the WOT books are the literary equivalent of Zeno's Paradox. Each book gets you half-way to the end from where you are, so you will never finish. Actually, with Jordan it is more like 1/4 of the way to the end.
Maybe when he actually finishes the series I'll read it, but I just can't keep straight for 5 or 6 years (I started when there were 3 or 4 books) all the characters and sub-plots and I refuse to keep re-reading to keep it fresh.
Ok, first I'd suggest you broaden your horizons and read something completely different.
But if you insist on reading a hacker book, read "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It's about the design of a Data General mini-computer to compete with the VAX (so its about the deep, dark past). Yes, it's dated, but a very good yarn and it won the Pulitzer Prize. No, really, it did, and it's definitely a "hacker book."
Novell owns the copyright to the Unix source code and Novell is now supporting Free/Open Source software and developing for Linux, why doesn't Novell release Unix under an Open license. There must be good things in that source, even if it is a little old, that F/OSS developers could learn from.
Anyone know how much revenue they derive from licensing the source code?
Exactly. We don't require that if you put a return address on an envelope, that you send it by leaving it in your mailbox at your house.
I have one e-mail address I use, but travel all over and send e-mail from home. Until recently, I had no access to an authenticated mail server so I HAD to send using postfix on my home machine/laptop/etc. This is very useful to me, less so since AOL started blocking this behavior. Plus, as I understand it, it isn't so useful to spammers since sending all the mail from their own machine still incurs the wrath of their ISP.
As others have pointed out, though, this doesn't seem to be what RMX is used for. But, will I have to register with my ISP to be "allowed" to send mail? Fat chance I can find anyone who knows enough to do it, let alone a policy that will register me.
Do you think it's possible there is an ulterior motive of totally screwing up commerce in the United States behind this proposal?
Seriously, though, short of going to the Euro 1,2,5,10,... system we need a smaller 50 cent piece that actually gets used. And, of course, having sales tax already in the items and then priced to the nearest 5 cents would help. I spent 4 or 5 days in Paris before I ever needed or received a 1 or 2 cent euro coin.
Do you think they considered "Astronaut?" Doubtful. They also don't have "President of the United states" which has lost 4? people to "accidents" in less than 220 man-years of work.
That'd be 10 times higher than commercial fisherman. For astronauts, we've lost 17 in in about 50 years. One every three years (and that's just on the vehicles, doesn't include test pilot crashes). So if you assume that 150/100000 rate for fishermen is per year, I figure we'd have to have 220 astronauts in the program to reach the same level of fatality. Anything less than that, and being an astronaut would be more dangerous than a fisherman. Closer to 700 when comparing to coal miners.
I don't know the size of our program, but I'd put 220 as already too high. Conclusion: This study didn't consider jobs with just a few people working them.
BTW, if the 150/100000 is over a career, being an astronaut is even more dangerous, relatively speaking.
Re:Astronauts were pioneers, not statistics.
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Those 14 people volunteered, and not a one of them would want his or her memory reflected by the cancellation of something they spent their entire lives to achieve.
So for that reason we should continue to spend billions of dollars and risk more lives?
Keep the shuttles flying as long as there are volunteers to crew them, and make every effort to bring them home.
As opposed to look at whether what we are doing up there makes sense in the first place?
Ok, these people are heros, brave, and all that. Yes we should remember them as such and not as statistics. But to say that because these people are brave and willing to take the risks, we as a society have no responsibility to look at and change the situation is ludicrous.
I think its been pretty well established that the science done by the manned space program and on the ISS is not worth anywhere near what we spend on it. So we have to ask ourselves what the prestige of the manned space program is worth, both in dollars and in human lives. Is satisfying our yearning for the last frontier worth the cost we are paying? Should we do it now, or develop a cheaper, safer way to do it 15 years from now? Maybe the answer is that it is worth it and we shouldn't wait. But let's at least be honest about the questions we have to ask and ask them rather than forging ahead blindly because it's the only thing we know how to do.
Exactly. I have a homebrew machine running my linux firewall/NAT, web server. In 2+ years it has had exactly one freeze not attributable to a power outage. I rebooted it. I don't care what happened; it's not worth my time to try to figure out.
On the other hand, when I was managing physics reconstruction software, that software, when I started, would crash once every couple of days. Those were repeatable so you track them down and fix them. When that process was done, we could run for months on 60+ machines without an application crash.
It all depends on how easy it is to track down the problem and what the costs of not doing it are.
Slashdot Mirror
The remnants from the Big Bang are only hydrogen, helium, and maybe a little lithium (I'm not sure about that).
So, if you can afford it, you have a car. If you have a car, why walk to a bus stop, wait for a bus, walk from that stop to where you want to go (assuming you don't need to transfer)? Then repeat on the way home. Instead, you hop in your car, go where you need to, and come home. You can either take 2 hours to make your trip (assuming you know the schedule) or 30 minutes. The bus system is barely adequate, so it only gets used by those with no other option.
I'm not saying this is "right," just that that's the way it is.
I think this issue of not having interconnects between cities is very important in the US, because it requires nearly everyone to have a car anyhow. And part of the reason we aren't interconnected is that there are large areas of the country with low population densities. As I pointed out, if you look at the Northeast, which is the part of the US most like Europe from a population density standpoint, the transportation system *is* more like Europe's. Still not as good, but improved.
A lot larger than Charlston, WV I bet. How many people need to do what your friend does on a daily basis? How many roundtrip trains would that support, even if everyone did it?
There are lots of reasons public transportation sucks in the U.S., and cultural reasons are just one of them. But, if you look at the densely populated East Coast, things are better from that standpoint. But, part of the problem is that since there are large gaps in what the transportation system offers, everyone needs a car to fill those in.* Since everyone has a car, they tend to use it because its more convenient. Then no demand for more transportation options, big gaps remain.
Even when we do live in places with good transport (Denver area for me) we still need a car for those middle length trips, so you have to make a point of using the local transport since it is still often less convenient.
If you're trying to suggest that carbon-14 is created in coal by activation of nitrogen, there might be some of that. If you google on "carbon 14 coal" you'll find a discussion that claims C-14/C-12 ratios of (occasionally) up to 10^-13. (Atmopheric carbon is 10^-12). Many times its below 10^-15. Another possible explanation is bacteria living in coal presumably fixating atmospheric carbon.
In any case, the CO2 coming out of a smokestack should have 10-1000 or more less radioactivity than the CO2 in the atmosphere.
There is radiation from these stacks, but it can't be carbon-14. The half-life of carbon-14 is 6000 years and the coal has been underground for millions. Any carbon-14 in the original source will have turned to nitrogen a long time ago. The radioactivity comes, as I understand it, from trace amounts of uranium and maybe thorium.
But, there are people looking into parallel, redundant filesystems and the like so that you can keep more on disk. For instance 1000x60GB=60TB is a sizable amount of free space on these clusters, but the output datarate from these experiments is a petabyte/year or so.
I'm sure they are firewalled/NATed off, so why would they need (or even want) to upgrade that often?
First, as another poster pointed out, these detectors produce a LOT of data. I'm on an experiment slated to take data at about the same time as the LHC experiments, with similar rate requirements.
We plan to use a 2500 node cluster (of year 2007 CPUs) to filter our data in real time. The input rate into this cluster will be about 10 GB/s, output rate about 200 MB/s.
But, each interaction is analyzed (usually) by just one computer. There are so many interactions, though, that you need massive clusters, but not much communication between nodes of the cluster.
That's just for the data filter. You need even larger amounts of computing to analyze what comes out in that 200 MB/s and to simulate what happens in the experiment. Much larger amounts.
Our experiment will ultimately require clusters this size at the laboratory and at something like a dozen other institutions.
Hydrogen has to be produced. Currently, most of it comes from fossil fuels in a process that releases CO2. Some if it comes from electrolosis, which requires energy which comes from sources like burning fossil fuels.
The only thing hydrogen would do in our current situation would be to move pollution from your car to a power plant.
Well, I hope you figure it out soon. Frankly Redhat looks pretty silly next to support policies from, say Microsoft, who will only cease security updates for Windows 98 at the end of this year (and don't charge any subscription fee). That's over 5 years of support on a consumer OS.*
If you come up with something reasonable, I can almost guarantee my research group's collection of workstations will remain running Redhat for the forseeable future. My home machines may switch from Mandrake to Redhat too, at least the firewall will.
BTW, my definition of "reasonable" is a guaranteed 3 year lifetime (maybe more) with a subscription fee for updates of no more than $60/year. We won't have any need to call or e-mail you, so we won't want to pay for that.
Heck, we might ever spring for a copy of AS at work if we can get a reasonable deal on the workstations. Oh yeah, discounts for bulk license packs would be nice too. (Quantities of 5/10/25/50/100 maybe).
From reading the comments here, our situation is far from unique. But if you don't fix the gap, we'll migrate, maybe to Debian. If we do that, I doubt we'd ever come back.
* Yeah, yeah, Redhat supplies much more than just an OS, its all the apps too. I know, but even a support policy that covered the OS and the 50 most common apps would be an improvement.
If so, good luck.
The problem is that for complex applications, RPMs between various distributions aren't that compatible. Some distros are better than others, I would imagine, but I've run into situations where trying to upgrade an application to a version from a newer distro eventually wanted to upgrade just about the whole OS to solve the dependency issues.
This reminds me of the congressman who wanted to get rid of the National Weather Service because "I get my weather forecast from the TV."
Redhat will not produce RPMs for 7.3 or earlier after then end of this year. They won't produce RPMs for Redhat 9 after April, 2004.
So, I've seen various opinions on this, including one from Redhat. Why do I need a license for each machine running RH. Doesn't their software allow me to install one copy of Advanced (workstation/server/whatever) to any number of machines? Ok, so I can't contact their network from each machine to get updates and I get zero support, but what if I don't care? I've never needed support, and I'm used to updating RPMs by hand. So, why can't I just continue on like this?
Except now the end of life is just one year. Do you want to move to RH 10 on April 30, 2004? Then do it again every year after that. Redhat is targetting groups like you (and me). How to handle this has become a more complex issue recently.
Actually, the current microchips are inherently rad-hard (radiation resistance). This wasn't the case in the past. It's something about the size of the features being small and also shallow, so that not much charge is deposited as a charged particle passes through. 0.25 and 0.18 microns are apparently especially good. However, as feature size continues to go down, things will get worse again.
You might find this link interesting too.
I've found it somewhat difficult to use since building their modules is really suggested on a generic rather than stock Redhat kernel (and building with what are claimed to be the RH sources and config files didn't work for me).
That might have been a mistake. The "problem," as I see it, with the 2nd series is that in the first he developed this marvelous world that is so beautiful, naive, whatever (if you read the books you know what I mean). In contrast, Covenant stands out as not being worth its attention, but he is.
The second series shows that beautiful world destroyed and essentially Covenant is bright spot (which isn't saying much) in the whole business. Very depressing first book. However, in the 2nd and 3rd books, new characters are brought in that make you realize that this world is still worth fighting for.
You said it. My feeling is that the WOT books are the literary equivalent of Zeno's Paradox. Each book gets you half-way to the end from where you are, so you will never finish. Actually, with Jordan it is more like 1/4 of the way to the end.
Maybe when he actually finishes the series I'll read it, but I just can't keep straight for 5 or 6 years (I started when there were 3 or 4 books) all the characters and sub-plots and I refuse to keep re-reading to keep it fresh.
But if you insist on reading a hacker book, read "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It's about the design of a Data General mini-computer to compete with the VAX (so its about the deep, dark past). Yes, it's dated, but a very good yarn and it won the Pulitzer Prize. No, really, it did, and it's definitely a "hacker book."
Anyone know how much revenue they derive from licensing the source code?
I have one e-mail address I use, but travel all over and send e-mail from home. Until recently, I had no access to an authenticated mail server so I HAD to send using postfix on my home machine/laptop/etc. This is very useful to me, less so since AOL started blocking this behavior. Plus, as I understand it, it isn't so useful to spammers since sending all the mail from their own machine still incurs the wrath of their ISP.
As others have pointed out, though, this doesn't seem to be what RMX is used for. But, will I have to register with my ISP to be "allowed" to send mail? Fat chance I can find anyone who knows enough to do it, let alone a policy that will register me.
Seriously, though, short of going to the Euro 1,2,5,10,... system we need a smaller 50 cent piece that actually gets used. And, of course, having sales tax already in the items and then priced to the nearest 5 cents would help. I spent 4 or 5 days in Paris before I ever needed or received a 1 or 2 cent euro coin.
That'd be 10 times higher than commercial fisherman. For astronauts, we've lost 17 in in about 50 years. One every three years (and that's just on the vehicles, doesn't include test pilot crashes). So if you assume that 150/100000 rate for fishermen is per year, I figure we'd have to have 220 astronauts in the program to reach the same level of fatality. Anything less than that, and being an astronaut would be more dangerous than a fisherman. Closer to 700 when comparing to coal miners.
I don't know the size of our program, but I'd put 220 as already too high. Conclusion: This study didn't consider jobs with just a few people working them.
BTW, if the 150/100000 is over a career, being an astronaut is even more dangerous, relatively speaking.
So for that reason we should continue to spend billions of dollars and risk more lives?
Keep the shuttles flying as long as there are volunteers to crew them, and make every effort to bring them home.
As opposed to look at whether what we are doing up there makes sense in the first place?
Ok, these people are heros, brave, and all that. Yes we should remember them as such and not as statistics. But to say that because these people are brave and willing to take the risks, we as a society have no responsibility to look at and change the situation is ludicrous.
I think its been pretty well established that the science done by the manned space program and on the ISS is not worth anywhere near what we spend on it. So we have to ask ourselves what the prestige of the manned space program is worth, both in dollars and in human lives. Is satisfying our yearning for the last frontier worth the cost we are paying? Should we do it now, or develop a cheaper, safer way to do it 15 years from now? Maybe the answer is that it is worth it and we shouldn't wait. But let's at least be honest about the questions we have to ask and ask them rather than forging ahead blindly because it's the only thing we know how to do.
On the other hand, when I was managing physics reconstruction software, that software, when I started, would crash once every couple of days. Those were repeatable so you track them down and fix them. When that process was done, we could run for months on 60+ machines without an application crash.
It all depends on how easy it is to track down the problem and what the costs of not doing it are.