Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Diebold, Cluster, Radiation
Copies files in under 17 minutes, I bet. Eug writes "The latest supercomputer list (Oct. 26) has Apple/VT's G5 Power Mac cluster at 9555 Gflops/s, which puts it into third place overall. This list is hosted here. This new score is interesting for a number of reasons, besides placing them in third place:
- It is now ahead of the 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 cluster, which is composed of 1936 CPUs and which achieves 8633 Gflops/s.
- On a per CPU basis, the G5 2.0 is also ahead of the Itanium 2. The G5 2.0 scores 4.52 Gflops/s per CPU, while the Itanium 2 1.5 scores 4.46 Gflops/s per CPU.
- If one extrapolates from the score of NetworX's Xeon 2.4 cluster (2304 CPUs at 7623 Tflops/s), a G5 2.0 would be as fast as a Xeon 3.28 GHz.
- Efficiency of the G5 clusters is now at 57%, which is considerably higher than the IBM POWER4 clusters in the top twenty. (The G5 is a derivative of the POWER4.)
- Virginia Tech's cluster is now in shouting distance of 10 Teraflops/s, and there are still a few weeks left to optimize the system. (They've gained over 2 Teraflops/s in the last 2 weeks.
- They have utilized only 2112 CPUs (1056 dual Power Macs), despite having supposedly purchased 2200."
eGovOS 3 cancelled due to EC funding withdrawal jaruz writes "Due to the unexpected withdrawal of EC funding for the eGovOS conference from the University of Maastricht's MERIT's FLOSSPOLS EC contract, the conference is now cancelled."
I prefer conspiracy theories, myself. MyNameIsFred writes "Slashdot recently discussed White House Website Limits Iraq-Related Crawling. It turns out The Dead Parrot Society got an explanation for their behavior. They used the unprecedented approach of asking someone at the White House. White House spokesman Jimmy Orr stated the blocking of search engines is not an attempt to ensure future revisions will remain undetected. Rather, he explained, they "have an Iraq section [of the website] with a different template than the main site." Thus, for example, a press release on a meeting between President Bush and Special Envoy Bremer is available in the Iraq template (blocked from being indexed by search engines) or the normal White House template (available for indexing by search engines). The attempt, Mr. Orr said, was that when people search, they should not get multiple copies of the same information. It was also reported that the White House recently asked the The Internet Archive to do a thorough scan of everything on its website."
My dad can beat up your burst of solar radiation. Earth survives solar storm. kurth writes "A major solar flare unleashed Tuesday punished Earth's protective magnetic field early Wednesday, but the planet and its high-tech communication systems appear to have weathered the worst of the storm."
eggfellow writes "here's an article in the WashPost about the geomagnetic storm that pounded Earth (with little disruption) [Tuesday]. What I want to know is why the predicted pounding-time was 12 hours later than actual. Can't these scientist do their math?"
Sounds like a nice feature. News.OSDir.com is reporting that Mandrake is re-releasing it's 9.2 ISOs and CDs after the unfortunate LG CD drive incident earlier this week. "The problem was that the kernel would send a FLUSH_CACHE command to the LG CD-ROM drive which would make the drive inoperable by overwriting its firmware....A new kernel (2.4.22-21mdk) has been released that fixes this problem in the kernel, although the CD-ROM devices are still not up to specification. New CDs and ISOs will be available shortly to correct these problems; they will come with the new kernel."
Maybe they should stick with safes and such. The work of the Swarthmore rebels is paying dividends, (they now have 17 mirrors of the Diebold memos set up). Meanwhile Scoop is reporting how one of the memos deals with an incident in which a single memory card from a precinct of just 600 voters managed to subtract 16022 votes from Al Gore in Florida, nearly lead to his concession of presidency. You can read more about this in Bev Harris's "Black Bov Voting" Chapter11 (PDF) also available here & here."
More on the Diebold front: cananian writes "Two students at MIT (I'm one of them) received cease-and-desist letters from Diebold today for mirroring Diebold's incriminating internal memos, which reveal (among other things) -16,000 votes being credited to Gore in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, how the vote could have been rigged by changing the audit logs or creating a manager card, etc. Students at Amherst also received cease-and-desist letters today. Diebold claims we are infringing its copyrights, but there is good precedent for the legality of the publication. The EFF has in is support: "Wendy Seltzer, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation [...] encouraged them to defy the Diebold cease-and-desist letters.""
... because making text cross-platform is Unamerican. David H. Rothman writes "Convert Lit, the program that lets you crack Microsoft Reader to make backups as part of Fair Use, has moved to a Polish host to escape the tyrannies of the new EU-style DMCAism in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the wake of a new Copyright Office ruling on the DMCA, lawyer Robin Gross at IP Justice warns not to think that the DMCA peril has passed."
But how do you really feel?
In reaction to our ealier review of Eclipse in Action, wobbet writes "I've started using Eclipse at work and consistently feel that there is more sophistication and power hiding underneath the obvious and wanted a book that would help me find and fine tune the goodies under the covers. I read a previous review of this book on Slashdot that prompted my purchase. If that review had not been as positive I probably would not have been so disappointed and moved to post my own review.
When I read a technical book I ask myself how well it stays on topic, how thoroughly it addresses the topic and whether it meets my expectations. In this instance I find that the book stays on topic about half of the time and that it is thorough about half of the time. Unfortunately that half of the time I really didn't care about and thereofre my expectations were unmet. To be honest - after reading the book and then re-reading the back cover I should have not even purchased the book because the objectives set forth on the back cover would have warned me that this book was not what I was looking for.
I found the first half of the book to be simply horrible. A supposed introduction to actually using Eclipse this section concentrates more on the "Agile" toolset that all competent, well-informed Java developers that care about the quality of their code, products and development process should already be using. Well, that's what all the books say anyway.
If I wanted a book on Agile tools for Java developers I would purchase Java Tools For Extreme Programming . Is it a great book? No, but it is honest about what it is - a survey of tools. Despite what Mr. Chappell says about Eclipse In Action, I did not find the authors' "...TDD evangelism, skillfully disguised as Eclipse usage instruction. ." Instead I found the first half of the book to be TDD Evangelism thinly disguised as poor Eclipse usage instructions. I did not learn a single thing about USING Eclipse that I hadn't already figured out from randomly selecting menu items over the past two months.
The second half of the book seemed to be a decent introduction to the development of Eclipse plug-ins. If I cared I probably would have found it interesting in its discussion of the API, the perspectives, views and even editors. Those of you that do care may find the second half of the book to be worth skipping the first half of the book."
Matt Groening says he was only joking about Fox News suing the Simpsons.
So it was a story that was completely made up by one person, and all the lefty blogs were up in arms over it.
Where are the slashdotters complaining that Fox News was thin-skinned, censoring or plain evil now? Hopefully you would think they'd be man enough to apologize and admit they were wrong.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
This is most definitely not a Mandrake-only issue. I managed to torch a crappy LG drive on a non-Mandrake system using the same (or similar) BitKeeper pull that they used in their kernel. It's too bad it made it into the final release, though.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
The question that most Mandrake to-be users are asking: Will the new 9.2 ISOs that are being released include the other 300MB of updates so far, or just the new kernel RPMS? Anyone know?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Check it! That's socialism for you... The government knows best!
I believe the code was part of detection routine to see if the drives supported writing (packet based writing specifically).
If the drive doesn't it should either say so or return an error state (unsure what the spec is) but it should dump it's firmware.
It sounds like LG was either lazy and reused what they thought were unused ATAPI commands for flash upgrades, or released buggy code.
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
$9.99 at one store, and $5.49 at the other... is it really that much of a pain to just go get a different one? That's actually up to standards? I bought one of these 2 weeks back for $9.99. Now they're back up to $19.99. They paid the 10$ diffence in store, no mail in. The 5.49 was someplace else, dun remember where. Cash card for, 30$ I think... to cover the price difference.
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*
I fried my external LG-CDROM connected to my G5 (running Debian, also happened with Yellow Dog)
Screenshot of My G5 desktop!
Regarding knots, mips, flops, and a lot of other things: yes, you are correct. Technically, these units already include the "per (unit of time)". However, it is an easy rule to forget, due to the fact that the units in question break standard usage rules in the first place. While two wrongs don't make a right (but three lefts do), two wrongs seem reduce the shame of the second wrong.
In the case of knots, the same unit (knot) is used for distance and speed. You tell me how that isn't screwball to begin with. Even though knots is a valid measure of distance, the convention is to use "knots" instead of "knots per hour" since it is also used for speed. So those who make the mistake either don't know this irregularity of usage, or have a conflict between the regular use of units (follow "distance" with "per (unit of time)" to turn it into speed) and the convention for usage of the word "knot".
Mips and flops -- they are plural. Removing the "s" technically leaves you with "millions of instructions per" but we're more accustomed to situations where removing the "s" makes the plural into a singular. So it is easy to forget, since the trailing "s" doesn't mean what it usually means in English usage.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
to be fair Eclise in action is not a book targeted at developers who want to extend and get into the power under the hood..even says that in the intro an d forward..
To be fair to the reviewr he shoudl have read the intro andofreward online bnefore orderign and choosen the book:
The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse published by Addison wesley and the Authores are the wizards from OTI where Eclipse happen to come from..
I am very happywith this book as it meets my needs to poke under the hood and extend Eclipse..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Just to be pedantic:
300 = 0000 0001 0010 1100.
-16084 = 1100 0001 0010 1100.
So that is TWO bits flipped. But in either case, the actual number was 16,022, not 16084.
-16022 = 1100 0001 0110 1010
362 = 0000 0001 0110 1010
So this can still work out as a reason if Gore had 362 going in, and the first TWO bits flipped accidently.
On the other hand, they looked at the card, and it wasn't corrupt. They fixed the problem simply by re-uploading it.
The logs indicate there were TWO uploads (Before the fix). The first contained the valid numbers. The SECOND subtracted the 16K votes. They have no idea where this mysterious second card is, or how it got uploaded. The bitflipping thing is what it was dismissed as when it happened: A corrupt card that they caught and fixed. But the memos show that it was not.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I didn't lose any drives to it or anything, but after install, the updates listed are like 200MB, which is a ridiculous amount of patching, IMO.
/var partition as noexec and my /tmp partition as nosuid, so it's possible that this could have bugged the installers. (I'm not sure whether I adjusted that before or after I patched.) I might be unfairly blaming Mandrake when I'm not running a stock system. So, consider this a warning: there's at LEAST a problem with noexec /var or nosuid /tmp, so don't do that. (or remount before running patches.)
Further, those patches misfired badly on both of the machines I installed it on, completely hosing the menus and the icons in the KDE taskbar. I was able to recover the menus by just running menudrake, but I had to add a specific new button to the taskbar to run it, since there was no way to run a shell off the start menu anymore. There's no way a normal desktop user is going to know how to do this; I'm an old hand and I still had to think for a minute to figure out how to fix it. And I had to fix all my buttons by hand, which sucked.
Now, to be fair, it may be my fault. I mount my
Not only are the Democrats quiet about this lately, but big-name organizations such as the ACLU are actually promoting electronic voting. People need to stop sending the ACLU checks and start sending them copies of the Diebold memos. Every ACLU member should be ashamed, IMO.
The shock wave from yesterdays X17 flare struck the earth at 0625 UTC 29 Oct 2003, or a little after midnight Mountain time. All I could see from Socorro, NM was a slight red glow to the northeast for about 30 minutes. I am at 32 deg. N, 107 deg. W. I would expect better displays were seen in the northern states, such as from Wyoming to Washington. Still, it is *very* unusual to see auroral displays this far south, and the dull red glow is typically what we see.
This was considered to be the second strongest shock wave to hit the earth in recorded times. However, the magnetic field remained north pointing (+Bz), minimizing the activity of the auroral display and geomagnetic storm.
That is not to say we did not get a geomagnetic storm. While most of us were sleeping, the Earth experienced a very strong SEVERE geomagnetic storm. K=9 (on the K 1-9 scale) and the estimated A-index reached 400.
We are still being bombarded with particles from this event and auroral activity is persisting over Asia right now. It is unlikely this will persist to produce auroras for North America by the time night falls for us tonight.
Science agencies are still trying to figure out the strength of the shock wave. All of the proton and particle sensors on the ACE, LASCO and SOHO satellites were blown into full saturation and some failed. Whether or not this is a permanent failure of these sensors remains to be seen. It is hoped the sensor elements were just highly charged by the arriving wave front of electrons. As soon as the charge bleeds off, hopefully the sensors can be restored to normal.
NOAA received some skepticism regarding their estimate of how fast this shock wave was traveling, predicting the 0600-0700 UTC arrival time based on their speed estimate of 2200 km/sec., or about 5 million MPH. We know that when a shock wave leaves the sun, it will experience some slowing as it travels through the interplanetary space. But there is just no data to estimate how much slowing such a fast shock wave will experience. From what we experienced, it seems NOAA had it "right on." Kudos to SEC/NOAA.
Driving into work this morning, the local radio news was STILL predicting the arrival of the CME, I guess still based on the original press releases that predicted it's arrival for later today.
HOW IS THE SHOCKWAVE MEASURED? We have gobs of earth-based and space-based instruments for observing the sun at various wavelengths. Observing the CME and escaping shock wave is the most difficult.
As the shock wave leaves the sun's surface at the footprint of a solar flare, it can not be seen because the brightness of the sun, at optical and radio frequencies, is brighter than the escaping plasma. As it gets away from the sun, it can finally be seen. The images you have seen from the SOHO satellite showing the expanding full halo CME, for example, shows this escaping shock wave. While it makes for pretty pictures, there are very few good measurements that can be made from these images. While the speed can be closely estimated, the particle density remains unknown, for example.
These halo CME images are NOT the shock wave itself. What these images show are the escaping particles that get caught up in the magnetic field lines of the flare. Strong magnetic field lines leave the sun at the site of the flare and return near it. When the shock wave leaves the sun, some of the particles get caught in these magnetic field lines, flowing along them to "paint" the outline of the magnetic fields. This is neat, but the shock wave itself is long gone. That's what the halo is all about ... the
toroidal
pattern of the magnetic field lines of the flare event.
As the shock wave leaves the sun's surface, it "punches" through the magnetic field lines of both the sun's magnetic field and the magnetic field of
I have NEVER heard knots used as a measure of distance, always as speed. One knot is one nautical mile per hour. If you can sho wme some reference, I woudl appreciate it.
My dictionary says that knot is indeed a measure of distance, except not in nautical usage. I have never heard the non-nautical usage as distance, not even by landlubbers, who quite commonly says knots per hour.
Infuriate left and right
Nothing bizarre about it. Pretty straight forward and simple: the white house site is editting past webpages without posting updated dates. A robot.txt file was created to prevent mass archiving of these documents, so the editting wouldn't be as obvious.
.
However, I can't imagine an AC, who can't even figure out how to login, to be able to comprehend that . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
You know, there's a name for this: RAS Syndrome. (RAS == Redundant Acronym Syndrome) They're technically a form of pleonasms.
Accelerating objects experience a force against the direction of the acceleration vector. I can imagine transverse structural members in an assembly (read: "rocket ship") having limits to how fast lateral (from their reference frame) force changes can be accomodated. Thus, they'd have "jerk" limits.
Um, actually they do not. You are correct that your hypothetical rocket could be torn apart, but it doesn't have anything to do with a force "against the direction of acceleration." There is no such force. I think you got confused because you are thinking in terms of the non-inertial reference frame of the rocket.
A slinky with a string tied to one end can serve as a model for your hypothetical rocket. Jerk the string hard enough and you can break the slinky, but there is no force pulling any part of the slinky in the other direction.
What is really going on is that you have an object which is not perfectly rigid so it temporarily stores some of the energy you have provided with your jerk. It takes a while for the momentum (speed * mass) to "flow" from one end of the slinky to the other. If the energy density from storing this "flow" is too large, well, then you have breakage.
Keep in mind that momentum is conserved, just like energy. Of course, some of the energy you applied with your string can become heat energy rather than kinetic energy, but the momentum has nowhere else to go.
Now, if this reminds you a bit of basic electronics, you are on the right track: in both case you have some conserved "stuff" (charge in one case, momentum in the other) and a "potential" (voltage on one case, force in the other) which can move your "stuff" around, subject to certain rules.
It is no coincidence that the same equations which work for electronics work for this mechanical stuff.
Give yourself extra-credit if you can reason out which circuit element is analgous to the slinky. is it a resistor, capacitor, or inductor?
You get an "A" if you can explain how a see-saw is equivilant to an electrical transformer.
A+ if you can describe how the see-saw/transformer are two coupled transducers, and describe the flowing "stuff" and "potential" in each case, and which domains the transducers operate in.
Hey, it's for nerds, right?
Oh, IANAL.