I bought SUSE 9.1 thinking that it might act as a good replacement for RedHat when it went the Fedora way (I was a manager of a ~300 desktop Linux cluster so I was looking for something 'production' ready that fitted with an academic budget). So I will admit that part of my problem was just learning the differences between the RedHat way and the SUSE way. However, that aside, I found one serious and extremely annoying bug.
First I thought to really test the system so I installed it with XFS formatted LVM partitions (these were all options given by YaST). The installer looked great and it seemed to work like a treat....until it came to the reboot where I got a "Kernel Panic: no root device". To cut a long story short I tracked it down to the boot image disk not having 'libc' installed in the correct directory so that 'insmod' could not run to insert the required modules.
At this point I was not impressed since this is a fairly major bug to have escaped notice making me wonder how rigourous their testing was but, hey, I'm a generous guy, the installer looked really cool and the install options were somewhat on the bleeding edge. So I fixed my ramdisk image and emailed their support address with a description of the exact problem......time went by with no response. So I emailed them again....and again....and again....still no response, in fact I'm still waiting for any acknowledgement of the email let alone a fix! (and no, my email does work - I did test that!)
To add further irritation the machine crashed after a few months of uptime...and when it came backup something had magically re-broken the ram disk. I tried to track this down through crontab and the rc scripts but no luck (possibly partly due to my unfamiliarity with the SUSE setup). Now I just have a cron entry that copies the fixed image back every hour....not a really sensible or reliable solution!
When Fedora Core 2 comes out this week I'm dumping SUSE. It's the only time I've ever paid for a Linux distribution and, while my experience was still way better than I've had with Windows and by no means horrific, for a Linux distribution I would rank it as my worst experience yet by far. To contrast that I've found Fedora far more like the "old" RedHat in terms of support, stability and longevity....not quite what the original RedHat press releases implied.
As other people have pointed out this is simply Young's double slit experiment. While the "Many Worlds" interpretation could explain this phenomenom it cannot (to my knowledge) explain other QM phenomena which seem to require faster-than-light communication or at least "pre-knowledge" of what is going to happen.
Consider an unstable nucleus which decays into two gamma ray photons emitted in opposite directions, each with opposite polarizations. Now place two polaroid filters on either side of the nucleus each at 90 degrees to the other an equal distance from the source. Now the first photon has a 50% chance of passing the filter but what is interesting is that the other photon ALWAYS does the opposite to what the first photon does.
To more clearly illustrate this think of trying to reproduce it with two separate computers. You can write any program you like to simulate this system and set any initial conditions and propagation laws that you like the only rules are that after an initial set up the two computers cannot communicate and you can't fix the random number generator's seeds (used to determine if the photon passes the filter)! Without communication between the computers it is impossible for them to always produce opposite pass/absorb results.
Modern physics forbids communication faster than the speed of light yet these photons are each moving in opposite directions at that speed. So how can we resolve this? Certainly some sort of "pre-knowledge" would work here - just as it would for the double slit experiment described. However I do not see how "Many Worlds" would help here. Thus, although to my knowledge, we have no clue how to explain such "pre-knowledge", it does seem that some mechanism like it might be what we are missing from QM and not a Many World's approach. The one thing I think all physicists can agree on though is that we are clearly missing SOMETHING!
If they are in the UK then you can mention the Data Protection Act which will apply to them. I bleieve that under this act you can insist they remove all computer records about you. Demonstrating some knowledge of our laws should at least remove the smug tone from their voice!
To all the posts claiming that it is too expensive to send faxes from the UK, think again. For $2.95 a month here in Canada I get 6 cents (Canadian)/minute to the UK whereas for an extra $2.95/month I can only get 7 cents/minute to somewhere else in Canada so it would actually be cheaper to fax Canada from the UK than from within Canada!
One nice feature of it will be being able to go to trip.com and find out where you actually are. Of course this is only uselful on planes which don't have the in seat displays where you can select the inflight map anytime you want to.
Why is the US 110V 60Hz instead of 220V 50Hz? Because of Thomas Edison and his bizarre attempts to foist a DC system on the country.
So, to get back on topic perhaps this is what will happen with OS's....the US will end up with a different one to the rest of the world because of Bill Gates and his bizarre attempts to foist a Windows Operating systems on the country? Of course by then it will be known as the USOS, though the 'U' may be redundant.
I said based on almost no facts, you haven't said anything here which challenges that. The big bang is a theory, that makes any facts determined based on when it happened a theory also. Your basing the starting point on pure theory. There are no facts in anything you've just said. And you certainly can't presume to impose proofs which rely on another contradictory theory on his theory.
Actually the Big Bang theory is based on lots of facts, for example the cosmic microwave background. Saying that because it is a theory means that its not true is an illogical argument. All physical laws are "theory" - we just tend to believe that the "theories" with experimental data to back them up (like the Big Bang). However they remain theories since we cannot test them under all possible circumstances. The Big Bang is by far the best theory that we have to explain all the data so far. Could there be a better one - possibly - but that is not guarenteed and so until and unless someone comes up with it the Big Bang is what we believe.
For a second let's pretend to give you the big bang. Now, you say we determine this from knowing when all matter we can presently observe was at a single point based on the rate of theoretical expansion that may or may not be happening. No matter how far we've looked, and been able to look, we've found more universe. So wouldn't it be fairly reasonable to believe it might just be a tad arrogant to believe that how far we can presently see is as far as can be seen?
No because we actually believe that we have seen the "edge" of the Universe - it's the cosmic mictowave background. To my knowledge there is no other theory out there which can explain this and the prediction and subsequent observation of fluctuations (which using Big Bang models give dark matter consistent with galactic rotation speeds) adds lots of weight to the Big Bang's believability.
Further, nobody has proposed creating mass from nothing here, someone has however proposed that mass from another location is moved to this location. That in itself violates none of the fundemental laws of physics that I'm aware of.
It does when you are talking about the universe. Where is this other location? By definition it has to be outside the Universe and, currently, that is a physical impossibility.
Odd, I was under the impression that about the only thing in physics we could be absolutely sure of was that mass was at one point created. After all it had to come from somewhere right?
I'm using energy and mass interchangeably here. You can convert one into the other but that's all. There is no know way to create new energy/mass.
Actually even with that interpretation the result is still not 70%. WMAP shows that 4% of the Universe is baryonic matter and 23% non-baryonic matter. Thus ~83% of the matter should be dark matter, not ~70%. So with either interpretation the BBC result is still wrong.
We can't even claim with a straight face we have more than almost zero fact based imaginings we are even aware of the size of the Universe.
Actually the amazing this is that we CAN claim to be aware of the size of the universe! Since everything is accelerating away from us as the Universe apparently expands we can extrapolate this expansion back in time until all the matter in the observable Universe was at a point i.e. the Big Bang. Since we now have a time when the Universe began we now have a maximum size limit for the Universe ~ speed of light x age.
And the last thing we can do is claim that there isn't mass being introduced somewhere.
Well that is not quite true. We can observe a tremendous amount of the Universe and we see no evidence for mass being created since creating mass from nothing would violate probably the most fundamental law of physics, namely conservation of energy. This conservation law is caused by invariance of all the physical laws (that we know of) under spatial translations. So in order to create matter/energy you would need to introduce a new physical law that does not hold the same for all spatial coordinates.
So while we cannot categorically rule out mass being created somewhere in the Universe it requires lots of new physics for which there is absoulely no evidence. Thus it is far more likely, given our current understanding, that mass is NOT being created and added to the Universe.
Just in case you got as far as the BBC article they got the dark matter percentage way off. It's actually about 23% that is dark matter. The 70% number is for dark energy which is a completely different beast which nobody yet really understands (at least to my knowledge) since it is actually gravitationally repulsive and is what is thought to be causing the Universe's expansion to accelerate.
The numbers come from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) which measured fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave background (afterglow of the Big Bang). There's a good review of their results in hep-ph/0308251 accessible from the LANL preprint server though it might be a bit technical for most.
What if the entire damn universe consists of matter and energy trapped within an unimaginably large black hole?
Then is a pretty damn strange black hole since all the evidence so far indicates that the Universe's expansion is accelerating not slowing down and Black Holes should not rapidly expand without lots of mass being added to them, which, as far as we know is not happening to the Universe.
Ever seen the film "The Hollow Man" where they turn Kevin Bacon invisible? Essentially they prevent his body from interacting with photons, i.e. light, so that he turns invisible and nobody can see him.
It's exactly the same principle with WIMPs. If they hardly ever interact you will never see any effect of them being there.
Of course being invisible raises the point of how can he actually see anything since his retinas can no longer interact with any photons thus making him blind....so in terms of physics the film is more like a road runner cartoon with fancy CGI but you get the idea.
I disagree, that's a problem with democracy not the system for implementing it. It's a sentiment that was probably best expressed by Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government....except for all the rest."
Sigh... here we go again....
Est. Population (2004) of Canada: 32,000,000
Est. Population (2004) of US: 294,500,000
Area of Canada (in km^2): 9,970,610
Area of US (in km^2): 9,363,520
Canda Population Density per sq km (1997): 3
US Population Density per sq km (1997): 29
Got it?
No - the UK has almost exactly the same system as Canada (where do you think they got it from?) and likewise has seen no problems with it over the last century or so. However the UK has about twice the population density of the US (~60 million people in less than 10% of the area) and it still works (well, it did elect Blair but that can't really be blamed on the system:-)
So no excuses - you could fix it with a system that works if you wanted to!
Quick history lesson but WWII was actually 60 years ago, plus, as you'll find if you visit the site of the D-day landings near Arramanche, the US contribution, although significant and welcome, was incredibly inept. Not only that but it was paid for - where do you think the gold in Fort knox came from? Of course the fact that Churchill out maneouverd you and took us off the gold standard made it far less valuable but there you are. As for the benefit of the doubt sure but what doubt is there?
You are not talking about a bunch of scared British ladies for God's sake but people who were serving as mercenaries to a medieval regime
SO PROSECUTE THEM! That is what the rule of law is all about. If you don't trust your legal system to get to the truth of the matter then it's your responsibility to fix it you cannot afford to just bypass it otherwise you will end up being no better than the tinpot dictatorships which are causing all the trouble in the first place. The fact that in this case there were no charges laid at all simply underlines the fact that there was no case to answer for....plus if they really were mercenaries then they should have been treated as POWs.
what is so bad about a fingerprint? It's not like a bank account number, where bad things can happen to you if it's abused.
From my point of view it is two-fold. First taking fingerprints is something you do to criminals thus taking my fingerprint makes me feel as if I'm being treated as a criminal, also since US citizens aren't fingerprinted not only does that reinforce the criminal aspect but it completely undermines the security aspect.
The second reason is that supposing it comes up randomly as a partial match in a criminal investigation? Being innocent I'd eventually be cleared (I hope!) but as several British citizens recently released from Guantanamo bay prove, the US government has detained non-citizens merely on suspicion of wrong doing for extended periods of time.
Well if this is the way you treat guests remind me never to visit your house!
However you are correct - it's your country and you get to set the entry conditions I don't have a problem with that. I even imagine in the short term there will be little effect since some of us are involved in projects there and the trouble caused by never going greatly outweighs the scummy treatment. However in the longer term I imagine that a lot of people, myself included, will think again before getting involved in projects requiring travel to the US.
So as I said it's your choice...but those choices will have repercussions.
Since you already live here, it's kind of assumed that your good unless you cause a problem where upon you are fingerprinted. The same can't be assumed said about forgien nationals whom we have no backgroun on whatsoever.
Wow I wasn't aware that being born in the US somehow made you good. In fact given the level of violent crime there one might be excused for thinking the reverse.
Given your reaction I take it that you would find having your fingerprint taken unacceptable since it would be treating you like a criminal. My point is simply that that is exactly how us foreigners will feel. Are you really implying that everyone who crosses an international border is likely to be a criminal, or more likely than the general populace?
It's your country so you get to decide how you treat your guests. However if you treat your closest allies this way don't expect to have any for much longer.
So you won't have a problem if they started compulsory fingerprinting all of you US citizens...just so they could improve security of course, nothing wrong with that is there? I mean it won't affect 99.5% of all of you living there.
Afterall if a freakin fingerprint is all you have to worry about to live in your country, you're still doing pretty damn good, right?
INS official: Before we can let you enter the US we'll need to take your fingerprint.
Pissed-off Tourist (raising middle finger*): Certainly will this one do?
...of course the tourist spends next several years rotting in a US jail as an obvious terrorist...
* since you are now doing it to Brits we would of course raise our middle and index finger in the time honoured fashion giving him the option of two fingers to choose from - we try to be helpful that way
I imagine that, if true, this will have a significant impact on the US hosting scientific conferences. I mean, lets face it, given a choice between visiting the US and getting treated like a criminal or going somewhere else to present your results what are you going to do?
Actually it's the fingerprinting that I really object to. I would have far less complaint about a retina scan.
The reason being you can bet that every criminal fingerprint search in the US will go through that database so what are the chances of a false match? Yes, everyone's fingerprints are unique but supposing its only a partial print they are trying to match. Should I have to deal with the hassle of proving to the police that I had absolutely nothing to do with a crime simply because I entered the country?
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First I thought to really test the system so I installed it with XFS formatted LVM partitions (these were all options given by YaST). The installer looked great and it seemed to work like a treat....until it came to the reboot where I got a "Kernel Panic: no root device". To cut a long story short I tracked it down to the boot image disk not having 'libc' installed in the correct directory so that 'insmod' could not run to insert the required modules.
At this point I was not impressed since this is a fairly major bug to have escaped notice making me wonder how rigourous their testing was but, hey, I'm a generous guy, the installer looked really cool and the install options were somewhat on the bleeding edge. So I fixed my ramdisk image and emailed their support address with a description of the exact problem......time went by with no response. So I emailed them again....and again....and again....still no response, in fact I'm still waiting for any acknowledgement of the email let alone a fix! (and no, my email does work - I did test that!)
To add further irritation the machine crashed after a few months of uptime...and when it came backup something had magically re-broken the ram disk. I tried to track this down through crontab and the rc scripts but no luck (possibly partly due to my unfamiliarity with the SUSE setup). Now I just have a cron entry that copies the fixed image back every hour....not a really sensible or reliable solution!
When Fedora Core 2 comes out this week I'm dumping SUSE. It's the only time I've ever paid for a Linux distribution and, while my experience was still way better than I've had with Windows and by no means horrific, for a Linux distribution I would rank it as my worst experience yet by far. To contrast that I've found Fedora far more like the "old" RedHat in terms of support, stability and longevity....not quite what the original RedHat press releases implied.
...and yet they appear to work in Britain where we get snow and plough the roads too...
I don't know if it will make the US's lakes and rivers safer but I bet they'll be less skinny dipping.
Consider an unstable nucleus which decays into two gamma ray photons emitted in opposite directions, each with opposite polarizations. Now place two polaroid filters on either side of the nucleus each at 90 degrees to the other an equal distance from the source. Now the first photon has a 50% chance of passing the filter but what is interesting is that the other photon ALWAYS does the opposite to what the first photon does.
To more clearly illustrate this think of trying to reproduce it with two separate computers. You can write any program you like to simulate this system and set any initial conditions and propagation laws that you like the only rules are that after an initial set up the two computers cannot communicate and you can't fix the random number generator's seeds (used to determine if the photon passes the filter)! Without communication between the computers it is impossible for them to always produce opposite pass/absorb results.
Modern physics forbids communication faster than the speed of light yet these photons are each moving in opposite directions at that speed. So how can we resolve this? Certainly some sort of "pre-knowledge" would work here - just as it would for the double slit experiment described. However I do not see how "Many Worlds" would help here. Thus, although to my knowledge, we have no clue how to explain such "pre-knowledge", it does seem that some mechanism like it might be what we are missing from QM and not a Many World's approach. The one thing I think all physicists can agree on though is that we are clearly missing SOMETHING!
To all the posts claiming that it is too expensive to send faxes from the UK, think again. For $2.95 a month here in Canada I get 6 cents (Canadian)/minute to the UK whereas for an extra $2.95/month I can only get 7 cents/minute to somewhere else in Canada so it would actually be cheaper to fax Canada from the UK than from within Canada!
Well since I imagine they are planning on using them to broadcast content digitally (via IP) quite a lot actually.
One nice feature of it will be being able to go to trip.com and find out where you actually are. Of course this is only uselful on planes which don't have the in seat displays where you can select the inflight map anytime you want to.
So, to get back on topic perhaps this is what will happen with OS's....the US will end up with a different one to the rest of the world because of Bill Gates and his bizarre attempts to foist a Windows Operating systems on the country? Of course by then it will be known as the USOS, though the 'U' may be redundant.
Actually the Big Bang theory is based on lots of facts, for example the cosmic microwave background. Saying that because it is a theory means that its not true is an illogical argument. All physical laws are "theory" - we just tend to believe that the "theories" with experimental data to back them up (like the Big Bang). However they remain theories since we cannot test them under all possible circumstances. The Big Bang is by far the best theory that we have to explain all the data so far. Could there be a better one - possibly - but that is not guarenteed and so until and unless someone comes up with it the Big Bang is what we believe.
For a second let's pretend to give you the big bang. Now, you say we determine this from knowing when all matter we can presently observe was at a single point based on the rate of theoretical expansion that may or may not be happening. No matter how far we've looked, and been able to look, we've found more universe. So wouldn't it be fairly reasonable to believe it might just be a tad arrogant to believe that how far we can presently see is as far as can be seen?
No because we actually believe that we have seen the "edge" of the Universe - it's the cosmic mictowave background. To my knowledge there is no other theory out there which can explain this and the prediction and subsequent observation of fluctuations (which using Big Bang models give dark matter consistent with galactic rotation speeds) adds lots of weight to the Big Bang's believability.
Further, nobody has proposed creating mass from nothing here, someone has however proposed that mass from another location is moved to this location. That in itself violates none of the fundemental laws of physics that I'm aware of.
It does when you are talking about the universe. Where is this other location? By definition it has to be outside the Universe and, currently, that is a physical impossibility.
Odd, I was under the impression that about the only thing in physics we could be absolutely sure of was that mass was at one point created. After all it had to come from somewhere right?
I'm using energy and mass interchangeably here. You can convert one into the other but that's all. There is no know way to create new energy/mass.
Actually even with that interpretation the result is still not 70%. WMAP shows that 4% of the Universe is baryonic matter and 23% non-baryonic matter. Thus ~83% of the matter should be dark matter, not ~70%. So with either interpretation the BBC result is still wrong.
Actually the amazing this is that we CAN claim to be aware of the size of the universe! Since everything is accelerating away from us as the Universe apparently expands we can extrapolate this expansion back in time until all the matter in the observable Universe was at a point i.e. the Big Bang. Since we now have a time when the Universe began we now have a maximum size limit for the Universe ~ speed of light x age.
And the last thing we can do is claim that there isn't mass being introduced somewhere.
Well that is not quite true. We can observe a tremendous amount of the Universe and we see no evidence for mass being created since creating mass from nothing would violate probably the most fundamental law of physics, namely conservation of energy. This conservation law is caused by invariance of all the physical laws (that we know of) under spatial translations. So in order to create matter/energy you would need to introduce a new physical law that does not hold the same for all spatial coordinates.
So while we cannot categorically rule out mass being created somewhere in the Universe it requires lots of new physics for which there is absoulely no evidence. Thus it is far more likely, given our current understanding, that mass is NOT being created and added to the Universe.
The numbers come from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) which measured fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave background (afterglow of the Big Bang). There's a good review of their results in hep-ph/0308251 accessible from the LANL preprint server though it might be a bit technical for most.
Then is a pretty damn strange black hole since all the evidence so far indicates that the Universe's expansion is accelerating not slowing down and Black Holes should not rapidly expand without lots of mass being added to them, which, as far as we know is not happening to the Universe.
Ever seen the film "The Hollow Man" where they turn Kevin Bacon invisible? Essentially they prevent his body from interacting with photons, i.e. light, so that he turns invisible and nobody can see him.
It's exactly the same principle with WIMPs. If they hardly ever interact you will never see any effect of them being there.
Of course being invisible raises the point of how can he actually see anything since his retinas can no longer interact with any photons thus making him blind....so in terms of physics the film is more like a road runner cartoon with fancy CGI but you get the idea.
I disagree, that's a problem with democracy not the system for implementing it. It's a sentiment that was probably best expressed by Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government....except for all the rest."
No - the UK has almost exactly the same system as Canada (where do you think they got it from?) and likewise has seen no problems with it over the last century or so. However the UK has about twice the population density of the US (~60 million people in less than 10% of the area) and it still works (well, it did elect Blair but that can't really be blamed on the system :-)
So no excuses - you could fix it with a system that works if you wanted to!
That would be difficult considering that we had a queen on the throne from 1837-1901 which cover most of it.
You are not talking about a bunch of scared British ladies for God's sake but people who were serving as mercenaries to a medieval regime
SO PROSECUTE THEM! That is what the rule of law is all about. If you don't trust your legal system to get to the truth of the matter then it's your responsibility to fix it you cannot afford to just bypass it otherwise you will end up being no better than the tinpot dictatorships which are causing all the trouble in the first place. The fact that in this case there were no charges laid at all simply underlines the fact that there was no case to answer for....plus if they really were mercenaries then they should have been treated as POWs.
From my point of view it is two-fold. First taking fingerprints is something you do to criminals thus taking my fingerprint makes me feel as if I'm being treated as a criminal, also since US citizens aren't fingerprinted not only does that reinforce the criminal aspect but it completely undermines the security aspect.
The second reason is that supposing it comes up randomly as a partial match in a criminal investigation? Being innocent I'd eventually be cleared (I hope!) but as several British citizens recently released from Guantanamo bay prove, the US government has detained non-citizens merely on suspicion of wrong doing for extended periods of time.
Well if this is the way you treat guests remind me never to visit your house!
However you are correct - it's your country and you get to set the entry conditions I don't have a problem with that. I even imagine in the short term there will be little effect since some of us are involved in projects there and the trouble caused by never going greatly outweighs the scummy treatment. However in the longer term I imagine that a lot of people, myself included, will think again before getting involved in projects requiring travel to the US.
So as I said it's your choice...but those choices will have repercussions.
Wow I wasn't aware that being born in the US somehow made you good. In fact given the level of violent crime there one might be excused for thinking the reverse.
Given your reaction I take it that you would find having your fingerprint taken unacceptable since it would be treating you like a criminal. My point is simply that that is exactly how us foreigners will feel. Are you really implying that everyone who crosses an international border is likely to be a criminal, or more likely than the general populace?
It's your country so you get to decide how you treat your guests. However if you treat your closest allies this way don't expect to have any for much longer.
Afterall if a freakin fingerprint is all you have to worry about to live in your country, you're still doing pretty damn good, right?
Pissed-off Tourist (raising middle finger*): Certainly will this one do?
* since you are now doing it to Brits we would of course raise our middle and index finger in the time honoured fashion giving him the option of two fingers to choose from - we try to be helpful that way
I imagine that, if true, this will have a significant impact on the US hosting scientific conferences. I mean, lets face it, given a choice between visiting the US and getting treated like a criminal or going somewhere else to present your results what are you going to do?
The reason being you can bet that every criminal fingerprint search in the US will go through that database so what are the chances of a false match? Yes, everyone's fingerprints are unique but supposing its only a partial print they are trying to match. Should I have to deal with the hassle of proving to the police that I had absolutely nothing to do with a crime simply because I entered the country?