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."
In a small Volusia County precinct, there were -16000 votes for Gore where he would have only gotten about 300 until the error was corrected. Maybe that was just a random bit flop in the first position in a 16-bit number storage system, 300+16384=-16084 for signed ints.
Considering how charged the 2004 elections are likely to be (not to mention the extent to which foreigners will be watching to see if Bush is around another 4 years) I hope the Diebold memos will gain some national exposure. Otherwise if this matter is swept aside and ends up causing major discrepancies during the election we could be looking at some pretty serious consequences. I wouldn't even put civil war out of the picture....
Where the Music Matters
You MUST be new here if you think this "apology" concept of yours might happen. In fact, since so few /.ers probably know that term, here is the dictionary definition of that word.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Yes. It is because LG are non-ATAPI compliant for some drives and use the (rare) FLUSH_CACHE command to update firmware. Purely a LG problem but embarassing for LG not to spot it.
-- Alchohol is a hard drug. Cannabis is a soft drug.
Wouldn't an open-source voting system software be a great OSS contribution to nations? If it was flexible enough it could be used say both in Great Britain and the USA with only loading a different locale file...
Anyone know about anything like this already being developed open source?
Shh.
If you read the article, it's not that clear that the entire thing was Matt Groening making a joke.
Fox News, however, denies reports that they ever threatened to sue. "We were all scratching our heads and thought it was hysterical," [Fox News] spokesman Rob Zimmerman told us yesterday. "It's not the first time we've been spoofed, you know."
Maybe not, but Groening told Gross during the interview that ". . . Now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news."
Nonetheless "The Simpsons" (the show, not the characters) issued an apology yesterday: "Matt was being satirical and certainly there was never any issue between the show and Fox News. We regret any confusion."
Matt G. never quite came out and said he made the whole story up. it sounds like fox told him to say there was no issue since they decided not to sue.
Fox: We won't sue, but you gotta come out and say there was never any dispute between us.
MG: Oh, fine, whatever.
So Matt says "I was being satirical." Whatever that means. I don't take it to mean that fox news never got pissed/threatened to sue over that episode of the simpsons.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
From the site:
/.'ers are too dense to figure that out . . . (or, at least the editors think so).
"Yes, he DID say "major combat operations" in his speech. The problem, though, is that on the official websites, the headlines regarding the speech all spoke of "Combat operations" as having ended - NOT "major combat operation." That was how the government was presenting the transcripts of the speech and other articles referring to it - at least up until someone questioned Bush about his having said that "combat operations" had ended, and then, suddenly, someone decided they needed to go back through and add the word "Major" to all of the articles. In at least some cases, the articles were copies of press releases that had been sent out after the speech - and when they were sent out, they went out with the "combat operations" headline. Now, however, they want to make it LOOK like they sent out the press releases with a headline reading "major combat operation," which isn't the case at all."
I guess speeches have to be cautious, but webpages can say exactly what you want to say 'cause later you can easily change things and make everyone THINK that is what was posted that way all along.
Anyway, I conclude that is the REAL reason for the robot.txt file, but
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
What happens when Poland joins the EU in 6 months?
to send the FLUSH_CACHE command.
regardless, this command should be perfectly safe to send, and LG is being irresposible in the implementation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wait for the first Windows worm that pushes this command on to the IDE bus. You don't need a CDROM drive to propagate. Destroying hardware in this case would do nothing to slow down the spread of such a malicious worm.
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.
There are a few things about this remark that are at very least unrealistic. Not everyone uses agile methodology. Agile developers are hardly the only people who are "competent, well-informed Java developers that care about the quality of their code, products and development process." The first half of the book does not focus on agile methodology. The use of the word "horrible" is frivolous and without merit.If you read and work through the first six chapters, you will
- Quickly and easily set up eclipse on your favorite platforms
- In a couple days be competent enough to move your day to day work to eclipse with few or no hassles
- Set up CVS on windows or linux
- Point all of your eclipse installations to the CVS repositories you created, and use CVS as your repository via eclipse menu commands
- Integrate ant, log4j, and junit with eclipse
Before eclipse, I was a Textpad/Cygwin Command Line developer, having abandonded JBuilder over a year ago. Eclipse is easy, versatile, and doesn't get in your way. Eclipse in Action is your fastest and easiest ticket to getting up to speed with it. My coworkers just dropped $1700 a pop for their JBuilder upgrades. I spent less than $100 on Eclipse in Action and Eclipse Modeling Framework .Um, dude, that was the joke. ATM Machine == Automated Teller Machine Machine. PIN Number == Personal Identification Number Number.
I know that the whole 'reading' thing must be hard for you, but please, try it next time...
Let's make it simple then. "LG drives are defective". Pretty simple.
My new MB includes two network interfaces. Getting the brand-new chipsets working on my Linux workstation would require either patching my current kernel, running the newest unstable branch, or trying to figure out why the suplied proprietary kernel wouldn't work (btw - I dual booted too until I erased Windows to make space). I didn't want to take the time so I blew $9 US on a NIC that works fine and will be reused later on once I migrate to a kernel that suports it.
These people buy pre-built machines. If they want it running Linux, they'll likely buy one with it pre-built and pre-installed.
Apparently you don't have the right ticket. Here's a hint: "people" don't organize their lives around any OS - Windows included.
Not to stick up for DMCA, but didn't it say they were fleeing the EU? When the US is wrong it's wrong, but why doesn't anyone ever regonize when the EU or Oz or any other nation makes a gaff? We even gripe more about the US than China.
.NZ site pretty much dedicated to bashed US conservatives? Does that mean US politicians are now more interesting than the Royals? (Common on, you know which Royals I mean.)
In a barely related comment, did anyone notice that one of the sites about the Diebold mess was a
Because his link points to FreeBSD, so obviously he's trolling against Mandrake and Linux in general.... or something like that, who knows?
Obviously? Obviously? Just because he outs himself as BSD fan, this makes im trolling as soon as he speaks about another OS?
Forget about the FreeBSD link for a moment and you will realize that he asked a valid question that a majority of Mandrake users (and "wanna-be"s) are wondering about. And if you don't have to believe me on this: simply read the Mandrake-specific forums or mailing lists, where this question is all over the place.
Keep an eye on which arguments are silently dropped in replies. Not always, but often times it's very telling.
You get an "A" if you can explain how a see-saw is equivilant to an electrical transformer
Here's an attempt:
Consider a see-saw with one side twice as long as the other, measured from the fulcrum. The load on the short end of the see-saw is twice as massive as the load on the long end, and the see-saw balances. Motion of either load causes the other to move, such that the lighter mass moves twice as far as the heavy one.
The analogy, I believe, is that the mass of the loads would be the electric pressure, or voltage. The distance moved would be the amount of electric current, or amperage. The long side of the see-saw has half as many transformer windings as the other side, and thus a large current of small voltage on that side induces a smaller current of a larger voltage on the other side.
Or maybe that analogy sucks, and it would make more sense intuitively if you used mass=current, height=voltage? Then the long side would be the more-windings side.
But the basic idea is right, yes?
I am not familiar, though, with "coupled transducers" and domains... can you explain?
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
No, take a look at the source code (this is Linux we're talking about here; source is easy to get :)--look for the callers of pkt_flush_cache() in drivers/block/pktcdvd.c and you'll see that FLUSH CACHE is issued to flush all pending writes when the CD device is closed. Unfortunately, it's being called even if the drive doesn't support writing.
I'm curious why people think it was used to detect whether a drive supported writing or not; I've seen that same speculation from a few other people. Perhaps leonbrooks's highly-scored post is the source of this misinformation? (And I still don't see why he continues to think that something needs to be done to enable packet writing on a read-only CD-ROM drive... Oh well, I guess for him, Mandrake can do no wrong).
Hardware is expensive for those of us not living in alice's-wonderland-with-7%-GDP-growth-in-one-semes ter.
And how is this relevant? If you have a drive affected by this, return it, and LG will replace it or give you a refund, since this is a hardware defect which they are responsible for. Many users have already.
You either put up with that and write safe software for sub-par nonstandard tienda-de-descuentos hardware,
And how do you know which standards-compliant methods will damage bad hardware? You have to test it. Why wasn't this bug (in a failry popular kernel patch) discovered before? Because it wasn't tested by a large enough group of people before, so it was difficult to isolate the problem. Now that we know what the problem is, it is easy to spot other occurences of the bug (Gentoo's America's Army CDs for instance).
or you create clear specifications of what kind of system you must have for Linux to even work.
There are specifications for the hardware, and LG is the only manufacturer not following them, which is why they are the only ones affected by this patch.
(By the way, am I the only one annoyed by the fact that even the modern-est Linux distros only support 10% of the ethernet cards supported by Win95?)
Are you talking about ancient plug-n-play network cards? Linux does support them, but they're such a mission to set up if you don't have the DOS utilities they shipped with to set the IRQ and base address (since you have to guess).
Maybe you would like to tell me why Windows 2003 doesn't support the PCI network cards I have in my linux box (which work fine with windows95->Windows 2000)?