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Debian

Debian Developer Center Of Mass 75

Posted by Hemos from the the-best-place-for-a-conference dept.
Edward Betts writes: "Debian One is over, we are at LSM, and it is raining, what do we do? Try and decide the location of the next Debian conference of course, and we all know that the best place for a Debian conference is Debian's centre of mass." What an ideal location for a conference -- perhaps they can devise a mission to retrive the errant U.S. hydrogen bomb (more information too).
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Debian Developer Centre of Mass More

Debian Developer Centre of Mass

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  • Copenhagen/malmö seems to be a good location due to the immense "barrage" of developers in the european region. And hey, we dont see much of those conferences around here..
  • A hydrogen bomb would be a valuble weapon in the OSS vs. Microsoft conflict, or the Linux vs. *BSD conflict (which is mostly imaginary IMO), or whatever. I hope the Debian team uses it wisely.

    Seriously though...

    Those maps really drive home how much of a world wide effort Debian is. The power of images I reckon...

  • Assumes developers all weigh the same. (Score:5)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @03:55AM (#102401)
    Since Americans weigh more than everyone else except maybe some Pacific Islanders (of which very few are Debian developers), this study should have taken that into account, especially in light of the significant number of Scandinavians and Finns in the European contingent.

    I suspect that if this were taken into account, the conference would best be held a couple hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland.

  • Re:Assumes developers all weigh the same. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Finns are scandinavians.
  • It'd be better to tailor this according to standard airline flight paths. I bet you get a much different location.
  • like in Umea or Kiruna Sweden ???
  • Did anybody else notice how far up north this
    "center of mass" is? I mean, for a supposedly
    "world-wide" effort, the result sure is biased.
    There is a pervasive belief that somehow the
    Internet is a "global" phenomenon, that it
    somehow brings the world closer together, erases
    national and ethnic boundaries. That belief is
    simply ridiculous. I mean, look at that map!
    If anything, that is a powerful testament to
    the deep rift between the North and the South
    hemispheres. Brazil, India and China have an
    infinitesimal contribution (with populations in
    the billions!) while the UK is deemed important
    enough to have its own map. This should be a
    wake-up call to anybody arrogant and chauvinistic
    enough to claim that the Internet is "global",
    or that it somehow creates a "global village";
    the Internet is nothing but another tool to
    fuel American (and European to a small degree)
    cultural imperialism. This means that we can
    expect in the future that as the rift between
    North and South gets bigger, the tensions will
    mount until we can expect a staggering conflict.
    The Third World War will be between the
    underpopulated, but staggeringly rich North and
    the billions upon billions of the unwashed masses
    of the South. (This is not my idea, BTW.)


    --

  • Better measure by travel time (Score:4)

    by streepje ( 87249 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @04:01AM (#102406)
    If you could get any kind of a fix on travel time rather than distance, this could be useful.

    Cost would be even better.

    Besides, the real center of mass is somewhere way underground.
  • Now only if we could calculate traffic connections, airplane costs, how much people are willing to pay and how long it will take them. That'd be real cool.
  • actually they are derived from the viking colonisation and inuits...

  • not welldefined (a mathematical note) (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07, 2001 @04:04AM (#102409)
    There is a problem when calculating center of mass on a sphere. It's not really welldefined. Imagine e.g. that all the developers where distributed evenly all over earth. Then everyone could claim to be at the center. Another problem is that center of mass is based on vectorspace properties such as identifying points and vectors. This is not possible on general manifolds (including spheres) The result from making averages over coordinates depends on the coordinate system and is therefore not welldefined in a physical sense.

    phew!, I hope this saves the debian community the hassle to swim around in freezing cold water during conference....

  • Right metric? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Center of mass should account for the mass of the developers, should it not? That would really put more "weight" on the Americans :)
    It seems to me that the right metric would really be a distance measure. Do the minimization problem that finds the point on the globe that minimizes the total distance travelled by all persons. This (at least in Euclidean space) is not the same as the average location.
  • i still think that we should have it in the copenhagen malmö area. and by the way why use a metric system its flawed.. not to mention illogical..
  • Except, seeing as how Debian plans on developing Debian GNU/BSD and Debian GNU/Win32 ... they wouldn't really want to play both sides now would they?
  • Reason I include the UK centre of mass is because I am British.
  • If debian is developed by volunteers around the world, wouldnt the centre of mass be somewhere deep inside the white hot core of the earth?
  • The research project I am currently engaged in involves finding 'averages' on spaces that aren't even manifolds. It's very easy to do on spaces that are uniquely geodesic, and I'd imagine you could get a plausible measure on spheres as well. All you need to do is to be able to measure distances between points -- and a sphere is certainly a metric space.

    Just find the point (or points) which minimize the sum of the squares of distances to other points. Because the sphere isn't uniquely geodesic, you might get more than one point (if you had two points, one at the north, one at the south pole, then the points of minimum squared distance would be all the equator).
  • <sarcasm>As everyone knows, New York City is the center of the world. Therefore, it should also be the center of mass of the world (assuming the world and all people are spherical and everything is distributed evenly, mass-density is a constant, etc.). How could this guy claim differently?</sarcasm>

    I think the conference should just be held in New York.

    Yes, this post was half-humorous and half serious. Seeing as how I live in New York, it would just make it a hell of a lot easier for me to attend, say if the conference were held in, oh, say, midtown. It's not a personal bias, it's clarity of thought. I swear.

    ---

  • can't do that on the surface of a sphere (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The method depends rather crucially on the choice of map of the world, which is, I am afraid a neccesity that comes about by the topology of the surface of a sphere.

    A physically meaningful calculation (i.e. independent of the choice of acoordinate system) would be in 3d, and would result in a CM somewhere below earths surface..

    Not that I don't think that wouldn't be great place to meet.
  • I doubt that very much. Since you can't have a truly useful BSD without an assload of GNU tools, Open, Net, and FreeBSD become GNU/BSD as soon as the poor user realises that he can't live without bash filename completion and colorized ls. As for GNU/Win32, that exists too: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/ [redhat.com]. It even has gcc and XFree86.
  • Read the comments in the code.
  • Strangely enough, weapons is the one thing that
    isn't lacking at all in third-world countries.
    I mean, even in the most backwater African
    countries you will find an AK-47 in every village.
    Western powers are content to sell weapons
    even if they know that the weapons will be used
    directly against them! For example, during
    the wars in Chechnya, both sides used the exact
    same weaponry.
    --
  • I swear, it's times like this that I wonder: How can anyone be satisfied with a RH GNU/Linux (or non-Debian) distro? =) Look at the cool sh_t that gives rise out of these guys.

    Looks like the Rocky Mountain range folks are asleep at the switch. No activity there. Cuba is dead, dang that Fidel! But what are the folks at McMurdo doing? Eating Klondike bars?

    --
    Me pican las bolas, man!
    Thanks

  • The center of mass naturally gravitates to where the best beer is. This is almost certainly somewhere in Europe, but more research is needed to find the exact point. Perhaps a federal research grant is in order...

  • Um, No. (Score:4)

    by John Murdoch ( 102085 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @05:08AM (#102423) Homepage Journal

    Um, sorry....

    There isn't going to be a Third World War. And the Internet is the reason why. When the masses can--at trivial expense--discover what they choose from wherever they choose to find it, the power of governments (including those spouting the rhetoric of Lenin and Engels) is demonstrably weakened. The Internet really does bring "power to the people."

    Power to the people. Right on!

    But the deficiencies of Lenin and Engels are sort of off-topic, so let's rein in our political diatribes just a bit and look at a slightly different point: you're making a whopping great logical mistake. Just because 90% of the Debian developers live north of the equator doesn't prove that the "billions upon billions of...unwashed masses" don't have access to the Internet. Note that the concentrations of Debian developers are also heavily distributed toward parts of the world where most educated people speak English (with the notable exception of India). You're also assuming that Debian developers are evenly distributed across the Internet--but there's nothing to prove that's true.

    Analogy: what results would we conclude by doing this same pseudo-analysis of the FetchMail developers? I'd bet we'd discover that they're disproportionately close to Chester County, Pennsylvania, and that lots of them own guns. Why? Because ESR lives in Chester County, Pa., and is something of a gun nut. Developer communities tend to be social communities--so if you're a pistol-packin' programmer, you're likely to be among friends on the FetchMail project. That does not mean that Internet programmers in general, Mail subsystem programmers in particular, or even American programmers are disproportionately armed. It's a self-selected cluster, and you can't draw valid conclusions from the traits of self-selected clusters.

  • Lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are a lot more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. [cdi.org] There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. [clui.org] If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West. [atomicarchive.com] Just for grins, the official US Government document for how a nuclear weapons loss is to be handled may be read here. [about.com]

  • Hi!

    I'm a GIS developer, so I'm just as happy to geocode data points and map them as anybody. Party on, you geo-coding dudes! But the "center" you have defined assumes that you're traveling "as the crow flies"--and (pardon the old joke) that's only useful if you're a crow. If you're really serious about coming up with a logically-derived meeting location, central to as many people as possible, I'd suggest a slightly different method.

    • First, identify major international airports in the areas where you have Debian developers.
    • Map those points, and then identify (for each Debian developer) the two or three closest airports. (For developers in the more remote regions of the world you might need to just deal with the one choice they have.)
    • Then identify a dozen or so centrally-located international airports. Don't immediately pick Heathrow, DeGaulle, and JFK! In particular, consider Shannon (Ireland) and Anchorage (Alaska)--both see a lot of air traffic from very long distance flights, and have an amazing number of connections to/from practically anywhere.
    • Then identify median airfares from airports to these potential central locations. I suspect that you'll find that airfares in Europe are higher than fares in the U.S., and fares south of the equator are higher than fares to the north. This should "tilt" the scales toward a European location.

    I'd bet that this wouldn't take that long to figure out. You've probably only got 20-25 airports to check, and using any of the travel sites you can shop for fares in very little time. You're not going to come up with a single solution: but you're going to narrow your list down rapidly to just a few choices--you can then consider other factors (how expensive hotel, food, and rental car expenses will be; costs for conference organizers to bring keynote speakers [since the conference pays for those], etc.; whether suitable space for the conference is available on your dates) and make your choice.

    And, oh, yeah--where does everybody want to junket to next year? Even if Shannon, Ireland is the ideal location, you can't have the conference there every year....

  • Go to Iceland... It's warmer, generally nicer, they got those great hot springs and geothermal pools, and next to zero polution...


    --

  • Yes. You're right, you need a lot of factors in deciding how much to weight each particular (developer,location) line in the graph.

    Things like:
    * Mass of the developer
    * Cost of travel to airport
    * ease of locating power supply adapters
    * networking connectivity available at function HQ and also in nearby cheapo hotels
    * Time taken to travel to airport
    * Amount of time wasted hanging around waiting for connecting flights
    * Whether said developer thinks yankee Budweiser is watered down, yankeeland sucks and Scotland is wonderful, etc etc.

    Could be quite complicated - looks like an integration over the surface of the planet is called for, or something pretty perverse.
    ~Tim
    --
    .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
  • 1. No. An AK-47 is versatile and rugged enough so
    that it can be made by practically any country.

    2. There have been at least 2 wars in Chechnya
    in the second half of the 20th century.

    3. The leftover weaponry from the Soviet empire
    is long gone. Most of the weapons used were
    manufactured in the last 10 years. (Weapons
    manufacturing is always profitable.)

    --
  • Here we have yet another boring anti-western rambler who ignores obvious conclusions so he can push his annoying agenda (or whatever). The reason that that point was chosen is simply that Greenland is the only solid land at that longitude. Sorry, I guess you'll have to look somewhere else to bitch about capitalism, imperialism, or whatever else bugs you.
  • Other readers already pointed it out: this result is biased.
    First of all, the map is eurocentric, and influences the generated result. Each possible central point will generate a different result.
    Taking Greenwich as a central point, you'll end up much more towards the equator, somewhere in the Atlantic.
    Debian forgot to paint a big red smear on Finland ;-)

  • Is it because it is not a third world nation with a mushrooming population like India? Is it because most of its population dosen't live in abject poverty like Africa?

    Oh, no, it's because a linux distribution was [redflag-linux.com] developed in china so you had to omit the country to "prove" your point.

    Since when has the development of a linux distribution been a mark of cultural autonomy anyhow? Last I checked, there were no Finnish Linux distributions.

  • Where are the North American and European centers, anyway? I can only guess from looking at the map that the North American center is somewhere in northeastern South Dakota or southwestern Minnesota, and can't guess at the European one at all.
    --
  • You seem to have missed Best Linux [bestlinux.net] when you were searching for Finnish Linux distributions.

  • It doesn't depend on the choice of map, as indicated in the article. The easiest way to explain is by quoting the code mentioned in the "article:"

    # Find the mean location of Debian developers
    x_av = x/NR; y_av = y/NR; z_av = z/NR;

    # Project the point onto the surface
    long_av = atan2(x_av, -y_av);
    lat_av = atan2(z_av, sqrt(x_av*x_av + y_av*y_av));

    # Convert back to degrees and print
    printf "%+8.2f %+8.2f \"Average\"\n",
    lat_av / 3.14159 * 180, long_av / 3.14159 * 180;

    In other words, what they are doing is what you suggest. They're calculating the 3D centre of mass (in XYZ coordinates) and then projecting that point onto the surface of the sphere.

    Now, as some other comment [slashdot.org] pointed out, this isn't technically valid. But they are doing what you suggested.

  • Sorry about that, I changed the colours, should make it easier to read.
  • You have to remember how few people are in many parts of the Rocky Mountain area compared to the rest of the world. It's just hours and hours of desert.

    There's a few spots around the Great Salt Lake though.
  • If you had a look at the method, they took the centre of mass in three dimensions, which will give a point well beneath the earth's surface, and then "Project the point onto the surface".

    If they were to meet at the actual centre of mass, I imagine it would be rather hot.

    The only case where this is ill-defined is if the centre of mass happens to be at the earth's centre. If there centre of mass is very near the earth's centre, then small variations in the developer distribution will result in large variations of the projection.

    Note that this method does not obviously guarantee the shortest "as the crow files" distance to the selected point, because curvature of travel paths is not taken into account.

    It is however independant of the coordinate system used.
  • Surely the centre of mass of the Debian developers would be somewhere in the middle of the earth. It is round after all...
  • ... so why renormalize to the surface of the sphere? You could give "IP tunnelling" a whole new meaning!
  • Taking the average may seem to make sense but, Instead of taking an average the best thing to really do in this situation is to minimize the sum of all the distances that the developers have to travel, even better may be to minimize the sum of all the distances squared, that way those farther away from a spot get weighted more. This is a much harder calculation, but it makes more sense than taking an average and then projecting it to the surface.
  • Dear Fr. Engels -

    Get stuffed. Look at the map and you may notice that most of the land-mass is north of the equator. Ergo, barring any other information, one would expect that most humans live north of the equator, and since saltwater (unlike form Indy 500 driver Salt Walther) is evil to electronics, few programmers are floating in the oceans. Also, vast areas of land south of the equator is very hostile to human life, like the Australian outback, much of the African continent that is in the south, and the government of Argentina.

    Really, if one is going to troll, one should at least get one's facts straight and not use an obviously false name like "Fr. Engels".

    Yours sincerely,
    Walt Zingmatilda (Mrs.)

    P.S. - What idiot made the troller's post a "5 - informative"???? If the moderators are this pathetic, they should give up moderation and do something that is more suited to their intelligence, like voting in Miami-Dade or watching the Eurovision Song Contest.

  • Which is far away from just about everybody...
  • I assume the question was what is the lat/long of the center -- it appears to be roughly Mt Rushmore... :)

  • And you blame us for inability of these people to keep up with he rest of the world ?
  • > Besides, the real center of mass is somewhere way underground.

    Yes, indeed - but it is not unreasonable to extend this point along a line from the centre of the Earth until it intersects with the surface.

    However, in general terms this cannot be adopted as the main chooser of locations for Debian meets - remember the theoretical voting deadlock issue contained within the Debian constitution? This method has a theoretical deadlock too... a distribution such the the centre of mass is the centre of the Earth, which is expensive to get to however you travel. There would be no simple logical resolution of this....

    :-)
  • Heh, considering how they whored themselves during the last war, one should not worry much about these "Viking descendants" ...
  • What a stupid answer....
    Sure it can be made but in reality 90% of it is made either by Russia or China.
  • Uhh, it's more a confirmation of how access to PCs and the Internet is distributed among geographical locations. But we're making strides here, I'm glad to see that access to Slashdot is now also available from trailer parks.
  • You have a fine point, but there is a problem. The theory works in that there seems to be nice concentrations in both London and Germany. But if you go to the middle you find yourself in Holland. The beer in Holland is "tolerable at best" (the pot is much better though).

    You might have to settle for a slight deviation and go down to Belgium.

  • Yes, that's what I had in mind, but having the color different does help for the European one...
    --
  • Looking at it with the color highlighted, it looks like it's to the southeast a little bit of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. (There's an entry there in the database.) This would put it in far northwest Iowa.


    Anyone wanna schedule a meeting for Sioux Falls? It's actually not hard to get to...
    --

  • That nuke in Greenland was lost in 1968, 33 years ago. The yield of a hydrogen bomb is mainly determined by the hydrogen -- the fissile material contributes only a small percentage. The half-life of tritium is about 11 years.

    So three half-lives have passed since the bomb was lost, and only one-eighth of the original tritium remains. That nuke has only one-eighth its original yield, assuming it's even in one piece.

    Alas, neither article gives the yield of the bomb.
    --
    Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
    Delenda est Windoze

  • Debian developers should all move to an island. One that has nice weather and lots of bandwidth. Then they wont have to go anywhere to meet. The plus side is that Debian will get really good really fast. I'm all for it!

    Here on Debian island...
    --
    _|_
  • OK. Then show me a Linux distribution developed in Africa or India.

    How about Brazil? Linux Brazil [trix.net] is a southern hemisphere distro, and reportedly growing in popularity by leaps and bounds. Note that there are few Portugese-speaking developers on the Debian team--maybe because that's because they're working on a Portugese distro!

    You might also look at this SlashDot article [slashdot.org], declaring that Linux will be proclaimed the "official OS" of the People's Republic of China. For more third-world Linux you can view sites from Indonesia [infolinux.web.id], Malaysia [linux.com.my], and Zaire [linuxafrica.co.za]. And, while I'm at it, you might view this article from SlashDot [slashdot.org] describing the Mexican Federal District's adoption of Linux. Mexico City, of course, is not south of the Equator--but most people still lump Mexico into the Third World.

  • and you can get really cheap airfares [www.icelandair] there, too. Iceland rocks. I took a weekend trip there from Boston last winter and had a blast. It has everything I need:

    - unbelievably attractive women
    - fast internet access
    - clean environment
    - a really wild clubbing scene
    - lots of outdoor activities
    - very modern capital (Reykjavik) with everyting a city dweller could need
    - friendly, intelligent citizens
    - great food, especially when it comes to fish
    - did i mention beautiful women?


    --
  • Did they really include the weight of each individual Debian developer in the calculations? :)

  • Since I live in Omaha, NE, I'd be there in a heartbeat. I'm still waiting for some sort of computer conference to go on in this area. The KC linux expo had potential, but they screwed up endorsing it, and nobody went.
  • It seems that their point of average falls in the general area of St. Lawrence, or maybe St. John's, Newfoundland (can't really see from all those green rays)....which is an island, with decent connectivity, but for the weather....I dunno....:)
  • It would make more sense to optimize things by locating the next conference at a location that minimizes the average cost of travel for each developer. I guess that problem is too tough?
  • Remember that the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, so the problem of having each developer being equally spaced might be such an unlikely occurrence that we don't need to write code to handle that special case. Instead we could just put a note in the manual that in the event that the Earth becomes a perfect sphere and all developers are equally spaced, the program will segfault. The workaround would be to take a step to the right, and then restart the program.

  • There's twice as much habitable landmass in the northern hemisphere as the southern. Wait a few tens of thousands of millenia, and you can have your happy carefree hemispherically evenly distributed landmasses.

  • Actually, you are right, it is a very cool idea to be able to choose your kernel (Linux or Hurd for example), in addition to things like your desktop (KDE or GNOME for example). All the while, applications can be easily recompiled for the specific configuration of Debian. This would require some kind of "ports" type system though.
  • Center of Mass? Worcester area?
  • Besides, the real center of mass is somewhere way underground. Actually it makes perfect sense of you define your continuum as the surface of the earth.
  • .za is South Africa, not Zaire.
    --
    // mlc, user 16290
  • As a former British colony, there's actually a lot more english spoken among the educated classes than you'd expect in India. That's why there's so many software developers from there, because they can compete in the english speaking world.

    The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
  • Really nice. Maybe when Debian becomes big enough to charter a cruise boat it becomes doable to actually meet there.

    But If they are trying to achieve that for everybody it should be equally easy to go to the meeting, the distance measure should be weighted by the cost of travel divided by the travel budget of each of the developers... And where will the cruise boat stop to pickup people?

    That should give them a project for a couple more rainy days ;-))
  • I certainly know how it was projected, and that this center of mass was must be somewhere between the US and Europe. There's obviously no central point. (hey, even I made it through geography without falling asleep)
    In fact, I made no point at all. Just an observation: the choice of the projection of the Earth influences the way people perceive these results. Japan sits in a proverbial corner.
  • You have to remember how few people are in many parts of the Rocky Mountain area compared to the rest of the world. It's just hours and hours of desert.
    :0) We need to get some of those brown bears Debian developer status.

    --
    Me pican las bolas, man!
    Thanks
  • Reminds me of something funny that happened one time when I was in the US. I was in a bar which had a micro-brewery. A guy walked in and asked the bar keeper "what have you got that's like Budweiser ?". I turned round to him and suggested a pint of water.

    For some odd reason, he didn't get the joke...

    (The bar keeper did though !)

  • ...because the true center of gravity is below the ground quite a ways...
  • Technically we're not, but whatever...

    --

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