If users of cell phones are less likely to get cancer, this means that the microwaves HAVE an effect. If this effect exists, then it MUST be investigated.
Clearly, the potential effect is not related with heat disipation, 1W is small compared with the energy gains due to solar radiation impinging in the head in summer.
The potentially dangerous effect is related with the interaction of the microwaves with the complex biochemistry in the brain. And this is not known yet.
We have plenty of examples of possible hazards to public health that were underestimated and then they become a problem.
Serious, independent research must be carried out. It must be payed by public institutions, not by manufactures of cell phones or wireless devices. The results must be published in serious, peer-reviewed journals.
Galileo discovered only four but this (among other reasons) was enough for Roman Church to prosecute him. The existence of objects moving arround Jupiter was a serious problem for the official geocentric model of the universe, and therefore, a challenge to the authority of the Church. Only recently, the Pope apologized for that.
I wonder what would they think of the existence of 58 Jovian satellites, just to mention one of the wonders that science has discovered.. Can we reach conclusions from the past history and apply them to the present ?
A friend said exactly that when I gave him a copy. Just try it and you will see:
1-The impressive automatic configuration 2-The quantity and quality of software included 3-The capability to read Linux and MS filesystems, including ext3 and reiserfs
In my home machine I just insert the CD and in a few minutes I have a Debian system running. It configures correctly all the hardware, the network card, Internet access, CD writer, sound card, VIDEO card, etc.
Last month I bought a new video card. I just let Knoppix generate the Xfree configuration files for it, rebooted Debian Woody and it is working fine. It is also an excellent tool to test new or second hand machines before buying.
However, to be honest, I have to say that Knoppix hangs my new Toshiba 1900-303 laptop. This seems to be strage but it may happen.
I wonder if they will use or suport the "Linex" Linux distribution, based on Debian and developed in Extremadura with funding by the Comunidad Autonoma government.
Spain has a sort of federal government structure. Andalucia is next to Extremadura, and both "Comunidades Autonomas" (equivalent to state governments) have a parlament with majority of the same party, that is the oposition to Mr.Aznar, the Spanish president.
How long will it take for the rest of Spanish public institutions to support open source software ? Or will they follow the path of Catalunya government, this is, cooperate with Microsoft ?
According to "Ethnologue..", we are 6.5 millions. But to my opinion, this is a simplification. 6.5 millions is the total population of the territories where the language is spoken (that are in more than three different states). Of them, I would say that about one half (3 M) know how to speak and write the language. Less use it daily.
But the main problem is not the number of speakers. The problem is that 99% of them also speak and use daily another "large" language. The cinema, newspapers, etc are mainly in the "large" language. Thus, the "small" language is being more and more diluted into the "large" language. If in a group of persons speaking the "small" language comes a speaker of the "large" language, the conversation switches to the "large" language.
For serious business, you are forced to use the "large" language. The relevance and importance of our language is constantly questioned. Speakers of the "large" language are surprised when they know that we actually speak the "small" language with our children.
All this situation is of course related with wars lost many years ago... because people do not abandon the language of their parents unless they are forced to do so.
My own mother language is in serious risk in the mid term. Most of you are native English speakers, so I think that you can not imagine what does this situation mean for us. It is good that there are "large" languages like English that are used arround the world, but the "small" languages are as rich and respectable as English or Spanish or Chinese, and it is important to protect and preserve them as they are part of the cultural heritage of humanity.
I don't want to say the name of my language because I would like to speak in the name of all the speakers of "small" languages. Every word of my son, who is 16 months now, makes me feel very proud. I hope that the sons of my son will one day learn and be proud of our language (and also learn English to be able to read slashdot !)
According to my personal experience with 2.2, if you do a lot of small memory allocations and bring the machine very close to the limit (including swap space), the system will eventually stop working, perhaps not crashing, but not responding to rsh/telnet.
I remember that I even wrote a small C code to reproduce the problem. In summary: Alloc M bytes of RAM. If they are available, ask for M more. If not, ask for M/2, M/4... Repeat that until even 1 byte is not available. Store all the pointers and, between mallocs, access to all the memory correctly allocated before.
The problem disapeared with 2.4. This holds at least for the old versions of 2.2 we used, I don't know if it has been fixed.
It seems that it is fashionable to question the scientific method. But, to my opinion, science is the human activity with less corruption.
This is because:
1-It is done mainly by persons that are intelligent and in general could be earing more money working in a less interesting thing, and do science mainly because they love it.
2-Because of the revision mechanisms, that even if imperfect, are (like democracy) the less bad system.
Every person has the right to criticise, but please, be fair and before criticise science, compare it with politics, marketing, professional sports, art, religion. In all these activities, one or both of my arguments do not hold.
To me, this kind of questions actually test if the person who is answering has the same cultural background as the person who wrote the question.
A certain context has to be assumed to find out the "correct" answer. The same holds for the tests that ask you to complete a sequence of numbers. There are infinite sequences of numbers with the first terms equal !
Complete: 1,2,3,4,5, ?
Why 6 has to be the "correct" answer ? I don't think that there is a good reason, the ordered sequence of the natural numbers is not better than the sequence 1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5,..
But dont try that ! If your answer is not 6, you will never get a job, because that must mean that you are either totally stupid or from a different planet.
In my country (Europe) the situation is similar to your description. (well, here we don't have bears). I don't see at all the need for having a gun.
The argument in USA seems to be "if everybody has a gun and I don't, I'm weaker". However, the same sentence would still be true if instead of gun you say for instance "combat weapon" or even "nuclear weapon". If the level of weapons in circulation is higher, the risk of being killed is higher.
To me, it seems clear that the only solution is increase the control.
I live in Europe. Here, al least in my country, it is very strange to own a gun. Some people have rifles for hunting but I guess that they are less than 1%. The average person in the street has never seriously considered buying a gun. The average opinion here is totally against having guns.
Yes, there is crime. But usually no guns are involved. It is extremely difficult to obtain them, even for delinquents. As an example: recently a gang of thieves has been operating arround my city. They enter silently in houses during the night, steal some valuables and disapear. If the owners awake, they just live. No shoots are involved. Probably they do not even have a knife. Against that, people buy alarms, better doors, and pay insurances.
However, the father of a friend of mine had a gun. When my friend was 15, one day he took his father's gun and killed himself, with no clear reason.
I don't pretend this true story to be statistically relevant. Right, maybe he could have killed himself jumping out of the window.
I'm just explaining how we see the question from Europe. I'm surprised to see that in USA it seems to be the average opinion that guns are more positive than negative.
I find your comment interesting. The IF discussion is appropiated in this context (I publish papers in third-tier journals too, and I'm happy about that too !).
Science, with all its problems, limitations and ocasionally even corruption, is the best method that we have to advance.
Everybody can do an experiment and write a paper about that. Maybe even publish it. However, Galileo was almost killed for doing some experiments and writing a book.
As about 95% of the computers in the world use the same OS, it is very easy to generate false error messages such as in this banners.
The same happens in natural ecosystems: the more homogeneous is a population, the higher the risk of oportunist infections and parasites.
The best solution to this problem, instead of fighting each oportunist separately, is to create an environment where computational diversity could develop.
To begin, in your own interest, never ever again buy a computer with an OS so easy to attack.
I've just dowloaded aa, bb and recompiled Mplayer for aa suport. You can play everything in text mode.
It's really cool, I agree. And, you'll agree, almost totally useless too.
However, the point of open source is that there is no need to be practical, it can be done only for fun.
You can call me stupid too.. + Linux?
on
TMDC5
·
· Score: 1
Call me stupid too but this is the 1st time I see all these things.
I want to learn more but all these "demos" seem to run only on MS computers and I only have Linux machines. Is this a coincidence ?/* Before somebody asks, my first computer was a 6502-based machine (far more primitive than the C64) that had to be programmed in assembler. A floppy disk was a dream to me. */
>About system reliablity... Checkpoints may be a good idea. Actually, what we do is to save (to local disks) all the data needed by the code to go on with the calculation. We do this "by hand", it is implemented in the codes. If there is a way to do it automatically (using a kernel functionality ?), please let me know it. However: -What if HD fails? -A RAM failure (to my experience) does not allways cause the system to instantaneously crash but to generate wrong results. This is can only be detected after a while.
>About network - why not to use 1000 Mbit? We also need low latency. As far as I know, low latency, reliable, 1Gbit/s hardware is still quite expensive: at least doubles the cost per node. This means reduce the number of nodes to 1/2. Please let me know if you have better information than me.
>And I would expect that RTT Please let me know what does it mean
>why not use network boot? We are working on that too, its almost ready.
>I've no experiences with any type of clusters;-) You are wellcome to visit us at any time.. Precisely this week we must change the position of 20 nodes and install a fan in each:-)
This was a joke (you are still wellcomed !) but expresses quite well the kind of problems we have. Operations that are trivial on 1-4 nodes become a problem for 70.
Slashdot Mirror
If users of cell phones are less likely to get cancer, this means that the microwaves HAVE an effect. If this effect exists, then it MUST be investigated.
Clearly, the potential effect is not related with heat disipation, 1W is small compared with the energy gains due to solar radiation impinging in the head in summer.
The potentially dangerous effect is related with the interaction of the microwaves with the complex biochemistry in the brain. And this is not known yet.
We have plenty of examples of possible hazards to public health that were underestimated and then they become a problem.
Serious, independent research must be carried out. It must be payed by public institutions, not by manufactures of cell phones or wireless devices. The results must be published in serious, peer-reviewed journals.
Yes, I'm afraid. Who really knows the long term effect of microwaves ?
In my opinion, unless there is a very good reason, network traffic is better kept inside wires.
If somebody has good information on this topic, please post it.
Galileo discovered only four but this (among other reasons) was enough for Roman Church to prosecute him. The existence of objects moving arround Jupiter was a serious problem for the official geocentric model of the universe, and therefore, a challenge to the authority of the Church. Only recently, the Pope apologized for that.
I wonder what would they think of the existence of 58 Jovian satellites, just to mention one of the wonders that science has discovered.. Can we reach conclusions from the past history and apply them to the present ?
A friend said exactly that when I gave him a copy. Just try it and you will see:
1-The impressive automatic configuration
2-The quantity and quality of software included
3-The capability to read Linux and MS filesystems, including ext3 and reiserfs
In my home machine I just insert the CD and in a few minutes I have a Debian system running. It configures correctly all the hardware, the network card, Internet access, CD writer, sound card, VIDEO card, etc.
Last month I bought a new video card. I just let Knoppix generate the Xfree configuration files for it, rebooted Debian Woody and it is working fine. It is also an excellent tool to test new or second hand machines before buying.
However, to be honest, I have to say that Knoppix hangs my new Toshiba 1900-303 laptop. This seems to be strage but it may happen.
Try with Timo's rescue cd. It is based on Debian. and you can configure it to include the packages that you need. I recomend it.
http://rescuecd.sourceforge.net/
I wonder if they will use or suport the "Linex" Linux distribution, based on Debian and developed in Extremadura with funding by the Comunidad Autonoma government.
Spain has a sort of federal government structure. Andalucia is next to Extremadura, and both "Comunidades Autonomas" (equivalent to state governments) have a parlament with majority of the same party, that is the oposition to Mr.Aznar, the Spanish president.
How long will it take for the rest of Spanish public institutions to support open source software ? Or will they follow the path of Catalunya government, this is, cooperate with Microsoft ?
:)
First, thanks for the links.
... because people do not abandon the language of their parents unless they are forced to do so.
According to "Ethnologue..", we are 6.5 millions. But to my opinion, this is a simplification. 6.5 millions is the total population of the territories where the language is spoken (that are in more than three different states). Of them, I would say that about one half (3 M) know how to speak and write the language. Less use it daily.
But the main problem is not the number of speakers. The problem is that 99% of them also speak and use daily another "large" language. The cinema, newspapers, etc are mainly in the "large" language. Thus, the "small" language is being more and more diluted into the "large" language. If in a group of persons speaking the "small" language comes a speaker of the "large" language, the conversation switches to the "large" language.
For serious business, you are forced to use the "large" language. The relevance and importance of our language is constantly questioned. Speakers of the "large" language are surprised when they know that we actually speak the "small" language with our children.
All this situation is of course related with wars lost many years ago
My own mother language is in serious risk in the mid term. Most of you are native English speakers, so I think that you can not imagine what does this situation mean for us. It is good that there are "large" languages like English that are used arround the world, but the "small" languages are as rich and respectable as English or Spanish or Chinese, and it is important to protect and preserve them as they are part of the cultural heritage of humanity.
I don't want to say the name of my language because I would like to speak in the name of all the speakers of "small" languages. Every word of my son, who is 16 months now, makes me feel very proud. I hope that the sons of my son will one day learn and be proud of our language (and also learn English to be able to read slashdot !)
I agree, Corel Draw is excellent.
According to my personal experience with 2.2, if you do a lot of small memory allocations and bring the machine very close to the limit (including swap space), the system will eventually stop working, perhaps not crashing, but not responding to rsh/telnet.
... Repeat that until even 1 byte is not available. Store all the pointers and, between mallocs, access to all the memory correctly allocated before.
I remember that I even wrote a small C code to reproduce the problem. In summary: Alloc M bytes of RAM. If they are available, ask for M more. If not, ask for M/2, M/4
The problem disapeared with 2.4. This holds at least for the old versions of 2.2 we used, I don't know if it has been fixed.
I agree with you.
It seems that it is fashionable to question the scientific method. But, to my opinion, science is the human activity with less corruption.
This is because:
1-It is done mainly by persons that are intelligent and in general could be earing more money working in a less interesting thing, and do science mainly because they love it.
2-Because of the revision mechanisms, that even if imperfect, are (like democracy) the less bad system.
Every person has the right to criticise, but please, be fair and before criticise science, compare it with politics, marketing, professional sports, art, religion. In all these activities, one or both of my arguments do not hold.
To me, this kind of questions actually test if the person who is answering has the same cultural background as the person who wrote the question.
A certain context has to be assumed to find out the "correct" answer. The same holds for the tests that ask you to complete a sequence of numbers. There are infinite sequences of numbers with the first terms equal !
Complete: 1,2,3,4,5, ?
Why 6 has to be the "correct" answer ? I don't think that there is a good reason, the ordered sequence of the natural numbers is not better than the sequence 1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5,..
But dont try that ! If your answer is not 6, you will never get a job, because that must mean that you are either totally stupid or from a different planet.
No, not at all.
>1) It reduces crime, so with guns you are safer.
We don't think that guns reduce crime. The opinion here is exactly the oposite.
>2) In extremis, having citizens with guns allows them to overthrow the government.
Are you serious here ? If so, the army that in principle would support the government, has even more and bigger guns.
See my comment for more about (what I think is) the average opinion in Europe.
Good argument indeed !
Take a look to other comments about the situation in Canada and Europe.
In my country (Europe) the situation is similar to your description. (well, here we don't have bears). I don't see at all the need for having a gun.
The argument in USA seems to be "if everybody has a gun and I don't, I'm weaker". However, the same sentence would still be true if instead of gun you say for instance "combat weapon" or even "nuclear weapon". If the level of weapons in circulation is higher, the risk of being killed is higher.
To me, it seems clear that the only solution is increase the control.
I live in Europe. Here, al least in my country, it is very strange to own a gun. Some people have rifles for hunting but I guess that they are less than 1%. The average person in the street has never seriously considered buying a gun. The average opinion here is totally against having guns.
Yes, there is crime. But usually no guns are involved. It is extremely difficult to obtain them, even for delinquents. As an example: recently a gang of thieves has been operating arround my city. They enter silently in houses during the night, steal some valuables and disapear. If the owners awake, they just live. No shoots are involved. Probably they do not even have a knife. Against that, people buy alarms, better doors, and pay insurances.
However, the father of a friend of mine had a gun. When my friend was 15, one day he took his father's gun and killed himself, with no clear reason.
I don't pretend this true story to be statistically relevant. Right, maybe he could have killed himself jumping out of the window.
I'm just explaining how we see the question from Europe. I'm surprised to see that in USA it seems to be the average opinion that guns are more positive than negative.
I find your comment interesting. The IF discussion is appropiated in this context (I publish papers in third-tier journals too, and I'm happy about that too !).
Science, with all its problems, limitations and ocasionally even corruption, is the best method that we have to advance.
Everybody can do an experiment and write a paper about that. Maybe even publish it. However, Galileo was almost killed for doing some experiments and writing a book.
I agree with you, well maybe I would not call it
*the* real problem, but I had many of the problems that you describe.
As about 95% of the computers in the world use the same OS, it is very easy to generate false error messages such as in this banners.
The same happens in natural ecosystems: the more homogeneous is a population, the higher the risk of oportunist infections and parasites.
The best solution to this problem, instead of fighting each oportunist separately, is to create an environment where computational diversity could develop.
To begin, in your own interest, never ever again buy a computer with an OS so easy to attack.
I've just dowloaded aa, bb and recompiled Mplayer for aa suport. You can play everything in text mode.
It's really cool, I agree. And, you'll agree, almost totally useless too.
However, the point of open source is that there is no need to be practical, it can be done only for fun.
Call me stupid too but this is the 1st time I see all these things.
/* Before somebody asks, my first computer was a 6502-based machine (far more primitive than the C64) that had to be programmed in assembler. A floppy disk was a dream to me. */
I want to learn more but all these "demos" seem to run only on MS computers and I only have Linux machines. Is this a coincidence ?
Ok, it seems they have a new idea that allows to design systems that react better in unexpected situations.
By the way, this would be great for PCs, at BIOS and OS levels...
But, is there any public information about how these so-called "immobots" are actually programmed ?
It is certainly an impressive system that seems far beyond clusters. Do you have any idea about the price ? And availability outside USA ?
>About system reliablity ...
;-) :-)
Checkpoints may be a good idea. Actually, what we do is to save (to local disks) all the data needed by the code to go on with the calculation. We do this "by hand", it is implemented in the codes. If there is a way to do it automatically (using a kernel functionality ?), please let me know it.
However:
-What if HD fails?
-A RAM failure (to my experience) does not allways cause the system to instantaneously crash but to generate wrong results. This is can only be detected after a while.
>About network - why not to use 1000 Mbit?
We also need low latency. As far as I know, low latency, reliable, 1Gbit/s hardware is still quite expensive: at least doubles the cost per node. This means reduce the number of nodes to 1/2.
Please let me know if you have better information than me.
>And I would expect that RTT
Please let me know what does it mean
>why not use network boot?
We are working on that too, its almost ready.
>I've no experiences with any type of clusters
You are wellcome to visit us at any time.. Precisely this week we must change the position of 20 nodes and install a fan in each
This was a joke (you are still wellcomed !) but expresses quite well the kind of problems we have. Operations that are trivial on 1-4 nodes become a problem for 70.