Earth's magnetic field deflects most of the nasty particles eventhough it is weak because it is huge. To do the same on a smaller scale would require a much stronger field. Probably too strong to create with the available power a spacecraft might have. You only have to shield what you really need to protect (the occupants) and that could be done (as is done on the space station) by having a small, well-shielded room to duck into when the need arises. There are new multi-layered shielding materials that are better than lead kg for kg.
The problem of radiation does not go away once you get to the surface of Mars because, unlike Earth, has little, if any, magnetic field. Those nasty, high-energy solar particles just cascade through the thin atmosphere right down to the surface. You are going to have to bury yourself under the soil for protection.
First off you have to remember that Buzz is now in the spaceflight hardware business. While the Earth Moon L1 LaGrange point does offer intersting possibilites for being a gateway to the solar system, this really just sounds like another International Space Station. I worry about under utilization, a wandering mission objective, and massive operational costs. Not that a lunar surface base will be cheap. The big difference in my mind is the availability of raw materials on the surface. You won't have to launch as much mass from Earth. This would especially true if there really is water in the polar craters. Nevertheless, having a bunch of lunar soil to pile up for shielding would be a tremendous advantage. You also do not have to maintain the orbit of the moon (unlike an EM-L1 gateway). The other big advantage of the lunar base over EM-L1 is that once there you actually have things to do and places to explore. Just imagine having some large otpical, IR, and radio telescopes on the darkside of the moon - away from all of the earth-bound noise/light pollution. The possibilities are vast. Maybe we should go to the moon first and then build one of those carbon nanotube elevators from the surface to EM-L1 later.
Glad others share the same thoughts on this. Without DVI I'd hardly say it is targeted for HDTV. Lose the other connectors and stick a few DVI in's and out's on the back to provide me with a DVI switching capability. It would be a lot cheaper than the Sony STRDA9000ES. Then I'd be interested.
I prefer this site to plan my aurora watching activities. I was out in my Poquoson, VA yard last night from 7:30 to 8:30 watching some nice red and green auroral glows move about the sky. It would make for an ideal Halloween setting!
I agree with previous posters about the skewed results occuring as a natural result of the time period selected. That is why I have always been fond of "The Ascent of Man" (book and TV series) from the mid-to-late 1970's, as I recall. While I never read that book by Jacob Bronowski, I was captivated by his TV series and developed a respect for the achievements of our ancestors. I've always loved science, but I learned of the deep connection it has with art from the serires. I wish some network would re-run that series so I and my kid could experience it again.
Re:Digital Rebel vs 10D for Astrophotography
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I was seriously considering the 10D for astrophotography in part because of the ability to have the mirror lock up 2 second prior to exposure when using the timer. So I wonder whether that feature is one of the things that the dumbed down 300D/digital rebel has lost?
While certainly true, Kodak is dropping film and going to all digital (that is if the shareholders let them). Not sure this is a wise move at this point, but it is certainly inevitable.
I agree that it is not totally a money problem, but the machine gun nest would be a problem for the sargent if he had to work with a fixed budget and needed to either buy the bullets/grenades to take out the next or buy fuel for the M1A1 he is going to need down the road at the bridge he has to take. He does not have these worries. Nor does he have two other units competing to take out the same nest in order to see who gets the next promotion to leutenant. Sufficient funding is required.
That said, the people have to be talented and motivated. They need a certain degree of security and comfort to be able to focus on the task at hand. And, they need to have the guts and authority to make the decision without the worry of a spanish inquisition from above. They also have to have significant input from the beginnning of the project/effort. The last thing you want is someone who doesn't care doing something critical with insufficient authority and resoruces to accomplish the job - especially if lives are at stake. "CYA" This last statement is a generality and probably has no bearing on the investigation. "/CYA"
Moving control down the ladder only works if they had the input from the start. Otherwise, your just creating the ability to blame someone under you later if something goes wrong. "I told him what to do, gave him the resources, and the authority. He wasn't up to the task!" Yeah, too bad it was an impossible task with twice the time and money and he would have told you so if asked at the start.
The small fry is not afraid of 200 suits, just two or three in the level or two of management above them. There are many levels of management in NASA and it is likely that someone somewhere in that chain of management (I was going to call it command, but frequently the managers high up have insufficient command/knowledge of the topic they manage) will not want to pass bad news along. They'll either decide to report nothing or spin it into something less distasteful. Generally there are two concerns: Somebody goofed or We need more time/money to do it right. The latter is not acceptable since NASA has a fixed budget and congress is already unhappy about the growing cost over-runs in some programs. It all really boils down to too much to do with too little resources. Just look at the way things worked under the moon program or the way it works under the dark side of DOD where money was/is frequently no object. Nowadays, everybody underbids to get the contract and then tries to do what they can with the money (not necessarily what was promised). Yes, checks and balances would help a little a few years down the road once the short-comings are caught and exposed, but by then any last shred of confidence in NASA by the public will have evaporated.
Bottom line here is that you get what you pay for. Congress and the voters have to decide what they want to do given realistic costs. The costs are frequently adjusted by managers trying to get the program to boost their self esteem or pay-grade with little regard as to what will happen to the likelhood of success. The underlings are all too eager to try and make do for similar motivations. Now toss in contracting functions out to the lowest bidder and you're really asking for trouble.
Time is a measure of the "distance" between two instants.
Instants occur only when you make the point of noticing them.
Memory/history is an ordered seies of instants.
If you are too busy, caught up in the flow of things, to notice time and form an instant that you can remember, then time really passes quickly. In physics, we usually deal with a series of states of a system sampled at set instants and use the "laws of Physics" to explain what happened in between. What we do not normally do, or may not have achieved yet, is to grasp the continuum of the evolution of the state of the system - like being caught up in the asymptotes and infinite series presented in the Achillies vs tortise paradox only to miss the fact that Achillies blew by the tortise. As others have eluded to, there isn't enough time to notice all the instants posed by the paradox and its infinite series arguments.
It will be interesting to see where this new perspective takes us.
Well imagine this interfaced to a website where you can browse the available material and "print" tracks to the audio queue. Rather than just playing the audio locally, it adds it to the webacast audio stream you are listening to (a queue for each stream). You can easily monitor the queue/streams from the same website - all without needing to mess with a database. It would also be easy to have a background "DJ" script loading the queue periodically with randomly selected tracks with a low priority. That way a real user can easily jump ahead in the queue with thier request. Plus you can see who requested what. Personally, I'd rather muck around with a mysql db, but some others may find this useful and it does seem like a lot of functionality ready to use.
Get a grip folks! Look at the picture. This is artwork, probably from a press kit. If selected, the real thing will probably be the usual stark white with minimal decoration. Things we send to other planets have to be meticulously cleaned, sterilized actually, so we do not contaminate the planet. White is easy to inspect.
From my work developing some of the science instrumentation for this, I recall the flight speed to be in the vicinity of 250Km/Hr.
Well just the thought of two screens drains the battery on my laptop. The power consumption of the displays will make the following options popular: 12 pack of lithium ion batteries Handy 12 pack leatherette carrying case Queen size lithium-ion box-spring/battery for reading ebooks in bed.
When ultra low power screen hit the mainstream and battery life is 10+ hours, maybe then dual screen laptops/notebooks will make sense.
Remember the episode from the original Star Trek series ('Amok Time' I think) where the cast gets stranded in the past of a planet's history. The time portal operated in the Library by Mr Atoz was called the Atavochron (literally 'Throw back in Time').
I had the opportunity to see a Segway in use at, of all places, the Toledo Zoo. Aside from looking really cool in action, this thing is supposed to of interest to companies as a productivity enhancing tool. The guy I saw moved along smartly with a package in a basket on the Segway. As I continued to watch, he pulled up at his destination, dismounted and then stood there watching the Segway to make sure it didn't roll/drive away on its own. I would have dismissed this, but he made such a deliberate effort to assure himself that it would stay put. He spent perhaps 15 seconds doing so. I have to conclude that his experience on the Segway taught him to be certain it stays put. If he has to do this every time he dismounts then there is more productivity to be gained. Maybe a little voice recognition system should be added to these things. "Segway, sit! Stay! Good Segway!"
Hmmm, You must be using something other than fortran to read those files. While I hate Fortran, I use it when required - just another tool to get the job done. If you have the fortran source code, you can avoid the 'extra integer' problem by using the proper parameters in the OPEN statement on most compilers. I believe that is a hold over from the old days when people used 9-track tapes. Sad thing is that people still use tapes exept they're now 8mm, DAT, QIC,....
I do not think we are talking math libraries, but rather the extensive set of legacy code that exists in the sciences. I am certain that a lot of this is due to the way some of the sciences are taught at the graduate level and the fact that it is easy to build on the work of others if you do not have to recreate/test/validate algorithms that work but are just not implemented in your favorite language. Programs like 3-D GCMs take many years (decades) to develop and you can't just port them over to a new language without a serious investment in time. Usually that is the time of some student. They won't be there forever and are better off learning something new or making improvments to the project. As a result, things never get ported, students learn fortran, and jobs still exist for those with the right skills.
Here at NASA we still use fortran (F90) for our processing of satellite remote sensing data. For brute strength and optimized speed it is hard to beat. F90 makes the code easier to work with. I like to use the AbSoft F90 compiler on my linux cluster. There are only a few differences from the DEC (HP - Compaq - whatever) fortran for thier Unix and Digital Fortran for Windoze. Using some good F90 rules adherance tools to keep you from including propriatary extensions smooths the process of assuring portable code.
If you need to develop number crunching code that has a limited lifetime (disposable code) you might consider RSI's Interactive Data Language. This IDL is wonderful for developing code fast and is very powerful with its built-in graphics. It is also vector/matrix oriented and few loops are really necessary once you get used to the language. Bad part about IDL is the cost unless you can qualify for the student version ($75 last time I checked). Best part is that is comes with an extensive library of high level functions. Check it out at http://www.rsinc.com/.
The brief answer is that they do not need to. However, there are things that we can do. Foremost would be to write open source apps for the M$ OSes. If you want Apache to run on Windows it can be done.
The second half of your series of questions is a bit more relevent. I would pay retail pricing to have M$ Office (sans Outlook) on Linux. I would also pay for third party apps like Quicken. They all could profit by selling apps to the linux market. The real rub for M$ here is, IMHO, that the Office Suite is what keeps the masses comming back to the M$ OSes. We could digress off topic here and talk about the user unfriendly aspects of Linux, but....
They, M$, are not worried in the near term. The Open source community has a lot of wasted effort and redundant/competing activity to overcome before M$ will sit up and take notice. Pick any Open Source application, utility, or function written for linux and search Freshmeat/SourceForge for similar software and you'll find several if not dozens of similar competing 'products'. Most if not all of these will be flawed or disfunctional in different ways. My point? M$ won't be worried until we get organized, develop competing standards, and stay focussed on putting them out of business.
Orbital uses their own L-1011 to launch the Pegasus these days. The B-52 was used during their X-Plane phase before they knew it would work and could make them money.
He hit the nail right on the head. I've been trying to move completely over to linux from windows for the past year, but have had to resort to using win4lin and office and adobe products in order to interact well with my coworkers and the rest of the world. I gave up last week and got a notebook computer running WinME. I'll keep the linux box around for apache and some data processing code that just has to run and be available online (no substitude for linux stability). I'll be following a similar path on 2 of my 6 computers at home that run linux.
Such a shame that the effort and talent of the open source community are locked in duels (Gnome vs KDE, python vs Perl, and myriad others)rather than being unified for a common purpose/product.
I thought there would be someone working on this. I agree that the extant docs are not exactly what is needed to write SW for LocoNet and Digitrax would like folks to develop SW on a non-disclosure basis. So, I toyed initially with the DOS TSR's that are out there to see if I could reverse engineer or disassemble them to gain some insight. Got far enough to know that putting together something that mimicked a control throttle should be pretty straightforward. I'd like to get in contact with the group developing the linux software since I have the required hardware, run linux, and can program (GUI's are my favorite). Ideally, it would be nice to have a daemon running to manage the traffic and monitor/buffer messages and provide an interface for SW others might develop. Something akin to what the German group has been working on. I dabbled with running their websight through babelfish, since my German is not what it used to be, and did not see anything which led me to believe that they had a working loconet daemon. If there is a working monitor out there then getting the commanding going should not be too difficult. I'm willing to contribute to an open source effort for linux.
I've been wanting to get my train layout under computer monitoring, if not control, for some time now. My dream is to have a web interface to the system using PHP to acccess the LocoNet and therefore the DCC in the locomotives, turnouts,...
and also have a MySQL DB to hold all of the individual loco's DCC custom variables. Add in a few web cams and I could run the system from work! While I could do all of this under Winders I really want the stability of linux to avoid a chain reaction - system crash -> train wreck.
Slashdot Mirror
Earth's magnetic field deflects most of the nasty particles eventhough it is weak because it is huge. To do the same on a smaller scale would require a much stronger field. Probably too strong to create with the available power a spacecraft might have. You only have to shield what you really need to protect (the occupants) and that could be done (as is done on the space station) by having a small, well-shielded room to duck into when the need arises. There are new multi-layered shielding materials that are better than lead kg for kg.
The problem of radiation does not go away once you get to the surface of Mars because, unlike Earth, has little, if any, magnetic field. Those nasty, high-energy solar particles just cascade through the thin atmosphere right down to the surface. You are going to have to bury yourself under the soil for protection.
First off you have to remember that Buzz is now in the spaceflight hardware business. While the Earth Moon L1 LaGrange point does offer intersting possibilites for being a gateway to the solar system, this really just sounds like another International Space Station. I worry about under utilization, a wandering mission objective, and massive operational costs. Not that a lunar surface base will be cheap. The big difference in my mind is the availability of raw materials on the surface. You won't have to launch as much mass from Earth. This would especially true if there really is water in the polar craters. Nevertheless, having a bunch of lunar soil to pile up for shielding would be a tremendous advantage. You also do not have to maintain the orbit of the moon (unlike an EM-L1 gateway). The other big advantage of the lunar base over EM-L1 is that once there you actually have things to do and places to explore. Just imagine having some large otpical, IR, and radio telescopes on the darkside of the moon - away from all of the earth-bound noise/light pollution. The possibilities are vast. Maybe we should go to the moon first and then build one of those carbon nanotube elevators from the surface to EM-L1 later.
Glad others share the same thoughts on this. Without DVI I'd hardly say it is targeted for HDTV. Lose the other connectors and stick a few DVI in's and out's on the back to provide me with a DVI switching capability. It would be a lot cheaper than the Sony STRDA9000ES. Then I'd be interested.
I prefer this site to plan my aurora watching activities. I was out in my Poquoson, VA yard last night from 7:30 to 8:30 watching some nice red and green auroral glows move about the sky. It would make for an ideal Halloween setting!
I agree with previous posters about the skewed results occuring as a natural result of the time period selected. That is why I have always been fond of "The Ascent of Man" (book and TV series) from the mid-to-late 1970's, as I recall. While I never read that book by Jacob Bronowski, I was captivated by his TV series and developed a respect for the achievements of our ancestors. I've always loved science, but I learned of the deep connection it has with art from the serires. I wish some network would re-run that series so I and my kid could experience it again.
I was seriously considering the 10D for astrophotography in part because of the ability to have the mirror lock up 2 second prior to exposure when using the timer. So I wonder whether that feature is one of the things that the dumbed down 300D/digital rebel has lost?
While certainly true, Kodak is dropping film and going to all digital (that is if the shareholders let them). Not sure this is a wise move at this point, but it is certainly inevitable.
I agree that it is not totally a money problem, but the machine gun nest would be a problem for the sargent if he had to work with a fixed budget and needed to either buy the bullets/grenades to take out the next or buy fuel for the M1A1 he is going to need down the road at the bridge he has to take. He does not have these worries. Nor does he have two other units competing to take out the same nest in order to see who gets the next promotion to leutenant. Sufficient funding is required.
That said, the people have to be talented and motivated. They need a certain degree of security and comfort to be able to focus on the task at hand. And, they need to have the guts and authority to make the decision without the worry of a spanish inquisition from above. They also have to have significant input from the beginnning of the project/effort. The last thing you want is someone who doesn't care doing something critical with insufficient authority and resoruces to accomplish the job - especially if lives are at stake. "CYA" This last statement is a generality and probably has no bearing on the investigation. "/CYA"
Moving control down the ladder only works if they had the input from the start. Otherwise, your just creating the ability to blame someone under you later if something goes wrong. "I told him what to do, gave him the resources, and the authority. He wasn't up to the task!" Yeah, too bad it was an impossible task with twice the time and money and he would have told you so if asked at the start.
First a disclaimer: I work for NASA.
The small fry is not afraid of 200 suits, just two or three in the level or two of management above them. There are many levels of management in NASA and it is likely that someone somewhere in that chain of management (I was going to call it command, but frequently the managers high up have insufficient command/knowledge of the topic they manage) will not want to pass bad news along. They'll either decide to report nothing or spin it into something less distasteful. Generally there are two concerns: Somebody goofed or We need more time/money to do it right. The latter is not acceptable since NASA has a fixed budget and congress is already unhappy about the growing cost over-runs in some programs. It all really boils down to too much to do with too little resources. Just look at the way things worked under the moon program or the way it works under the dark side of DOD where money was/is frequently no object. Nowadays, everybody underbids to get the contract and then tries to do what they can with the money (not necessarily what was promised). Yes, checks and balances would help a little a few years down the road once the short-comings are caught and exposed, but by then any last shred of confidence in NASA by the public will have evaporated.
Bottom line here is that you get what you pay for.
Congress and the voters have to decide what they want to do given realistic costs. The costs are frequently adjusted by managers trying to get the program to boost their self esteem or pay-grade with little regard as to what will happen to the likelhood of success. The underlings are all too eager to try and make do for similar motivations. Now toss in contracting functions out to the lowest bidder and you're really asking for trouble.
Sorry if this borders on being a rant for some.
Three concepts may help explain this:
Time is a measure of the "distance" between two instants.
Instants occur only when you make the point of noticing them.
Memory/history is an ordered seies of instants.
If you are too busy, caught up in the flow of things, to notice time and form an instant that you can remember, then time really passes quickly. In physics, we usually deal with a series of states of a system sampled at set instants and use the "laws of Physics" to explain what happened in between. What we do not normally do, or may not have achieved yet, is to grasp the continuum of the evolution of the state of the system - like being caught up in the asymptotes and infinite series presented in the Achillies vs tortise paradox only to miss the fact that Achillies blew by the tortise. As others have eluded to, there isn't enough time to notice all the instants posed by the paradox and its infinite series arguments.
It will be interesting to see where this new perspective takes us.
Well imagine this interfaced to a website where you can browse the available material and "print" tracks to the audio queue. Rather than just playing the audio locally, it adds it to the webacast audio stream you are listening to (a queue for each stream). You can easily monitor the queue/streams from the same website - all without needing to mess with a database. It would also be easy to have a background "DJ" script loading the queue periodically with randomly selected tracks with a low priority. That way a real user can easily jump ahead in the queue with thier request. Plus you can see who requested what. Personally, I'd rather muck around with a mysql db, but some others may find this useful and it does seem like a lot of functionality ready to use.
Get a grip folks! Look at the picture. This is artwork, probably from a press kit. If selected, the real thing will probably be the usual stark white with minimal decoration. Things we send to other planets have to be meticulously cleaned, sterilized actually, so we do not contaminate the planet. White is easy to inspect.
From my work developing some of the science instrumentation for this, I recall the flight speed to be in the vicinity of 250Km/Hr.
Well just the thought of two screens drains the battery on my laptop. The power consumption of the displays will make the following options popular:
12 pack of lithium ion batteries
Handy 12 pack leatherette carrying case
Queen size lithium-ion box-spring/battery for reading ebooks in bed.
When ultra low power screen hit the mainstream and battery life is 10+ hours, maybe then dual screen laptops/notebooks will make sense.
Remember the episode from the original Star Trek series ('Amok Time' I think) where the cast gets stranded in the past of a planet's history. The time portal operated in the Library by Mr Atoz was called the Atavochron (literally 'Throw back in Time').
Enjoy!
I had the opportunity to see a Segway in use at, of all places, the Toledo Zoo. Aside from looking really cool in action, this thing is supposed to of interest to companies as a productivity enhancing tool. The guy I saw moved along smartly with a package in a basket on the Segway. As I continued to watch, he pulled up at his destination, dismounted and then stood there watching the Segway to make sure it didn't roll/drive away on its own. I would have dismissed this, but he made such a deliberate effort to assure himself that it would stay put. He spent perhaps 15 seconds doing so. I have to conclude that his experience on the Segway taught him to be certain it stays put. If he has to do this every time he dismounts then there is more productivity to be gained. Maybe a little voice recognition system should be added to these things. "Segway, sit! Stay! Good Segway!"
Hmmm, You must be using something other than fortran to read those files. While I hate Fortran, I use it when required - just another tool to get the job done. If you have the fortran source code, you can avoid the 'extra integer' problem by using the proper parameters in the OPEN statement on most compilers. I believe that is a hold over from the old days when people used 9-track tapes. Sad thing is that people still use tapes exept they're now 8mm, DAT, QIC, ... .
Enjoy! Z
I do not think we are talking math libraries, but rather the extensive set of legacy code that exists in the sciences. I am certain that a lot of this is due to the way some of the sciences are taught at the graduate level and the fact that it is easy to build on the work of others if you do not have to recreate/test/validate algorithms that work but are just not implemented in your favorite language. Programs like 3-D GCMs take many years (decades) to develop and you can't just port them over to a new language without a serious investment in time. Usually that is the time of some student. They won't be there forever and are better off learning something new or making improvments to the project. As a result, things never get ported, students learn fortran, and jobs still exist for those with the right skills.
Enjoy! Z
Here at NASA we still use fortran (F90) for our processing of satellite remote sensing data. For brute strength and optimized speed it is hard to beat. F90 makes the code easier to work with. I like to use the AbSoft F90 compiler on my linux cluster. There are only a few differences from the DEC (HP - Compaq - whatever) fortran for thier Unix and Digital Fortran for Windoze. Using some good F90 rules adherance tools to keep you from including propriatary extensions smooths the process of assuring portable code.
.
If you need to develop number crunching code that has a limited lifetime (disposable code) you might consider RSI's Interactive Data Language. This IDL is wonderful for developing code fast and is very powerful with its built-in graphics. It is also vector/matrix oriented and few loops are really necessary once you get used to the language. Bad part about IDL is the cost unless you can qualify for the student version ($75 last time I checked). Best part is that is comes with an extensive library of high level functions.
Check it out at http://www.rsinc.com/
Enjoy! Z
The brief answer is that they do not need to. However, there are things that we can do. Foremost would be to write open source apps for the M$ OSes. If you want Apache to run on Windows it can be done.
....
The second half of your series of questions is a bit more relevent. I would pay retail pricing to have M$ Office (sans Outlook) on Linux. I would also pay for third party apps like Quicken. They all could profit by selling apps to the linux market. The real rub for M$ here is, IMHO, that the Office Suite is what keeps the masses comming back to the M$ OSes. We could digress off topic here and talk about the user unfriendly aspects of Linux, but
They, M$, are not worried in the near term. The Open source community has a lot of wasted effort and redundant/competing activity to overcome before M$ will sit up and take notice. Pick any Open Source application, utility, or function written for linux and search Freshmeat/SourceForge for similar software and you'll find several if not dozens of similar competing 'products'. Most if not all of these will be flawed or disfunctional in different ways. My point? M$ won't be worried until we get organized, develop competing standards, and stay focussed on putting them out of business.
Good Luck, Z
Orbital uses their own L-1011 to launch the Pegasus these days. The B-52 was used during their X-Plane phase before they knew it would work and could make them money.
He hit the nail right on the head. I've been trying to move completely over to linux from windows for the past year, but have had to resort to using win4lin and office and adobe products in order to interact well with my coworkers and the rest of the world. I gave up last week and got a notebook computer running WinME. I'll keep the linux box around for apache and some data processing code that just has to run and be available online (no substitude for linux stability). I'll be following a similar path on 2 of my 6 computers at home that run linux. Such a shame that the effort and talent of the open source community are locked in duels (Gnome vs KDE, python vs Perl, and myriad others)rather than being unified for a common purpose/product.
I thought there would be someone working on this. I agree that the extant docs are not exactly what is needed to write SW for LocoNet and Digitrax would like folks to develop SW on a non-disclosure basis. So, I toyed initially with the DOS TSR's that are out there to see if I could reverse engineer or disassemble them to gain some insight. Got far enough to know that putting together something that mimicked a control throttle should be pretty straightforward. I'd like to get in contact with the group developing the linux software since I have the required hardware, run linux, and can program (GUI's are my favorite). Ideally, it would be nice to have a daemon running to manage the traffic and monitor/buffer messages and provide an interface for SW others might develop. Something akin to what the German group has been working on. I dabbled with running their websight through babelfish, since my German is not what it used to be, and did not see anything which led me to believe that they had a working loconet daemon. If there is a working monitor out there then getting the commanding going should not be too difficult. I'm willing to contribute to an open source effort for linux.
I've been wanting to get my train layout under computer monitoring, if not control, for some time now. My dream is to have a web interface to the system using PHP to acccess the LocoNet and therefore the DCC in the locomotives, turnouts,... and also have a MySQL DB to hold all of the individual loco's DCC custom variables. Add in a few web cams and I could run the system from work! While I could do all of this under Winders I really want the stability of linux to avoid a chain reaction - system crash -> train wreck.