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."
/\ Appropriate name no doubt
Well, I guess we shouldn't have been surprised. Given the ethics that run through big companies these days, trying to cover their ass after doing something stupid / malicious is a pretty obvious thing to do.
Shit, Ken Lay is still free, and not one of you angry Americans have tried to shoot his ass after he pissed away your retirement and the money for your children's education. Quite frankly, I'm dissapointed, I was kind of hoping for at least one mentally unstable dude with a rifle to go off.
On a side note, I think it is really interesting how quiet this has been. You'd expect the dems to be raising hell in the house and the news media about this, but it just isn't happening. I've seen a bit of news on this, but more on folks proclaiming how bad other countries are in terms of election fraud.
Accident? Malicious intent? Lets just say that Brazil created a better system, and they have death squads roaming the streets.
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The BBC has some nice pics from amateurs: (in plain text to reassure those sceptics):
3 /s ci_nat_polar_light_display/html/1.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/0
-- Alchohol is a hard drug. Cannabis is a soft drug.
Well, it was the first time I ever saw the Aurora Borealis over Dublin city, I can tell you that! Pretty bloody amazing if you ask me...
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I'm a physics dummy. What use do these 'jerk' units have in the field?
No, we still think Faux News is slanted, biased, spinning out of control, disgustingly sensationalist, and generally full of lies.
Start Running Better Polls
This is NOT a Mandrake only issue.
Over a month ago, installations of Gentoo and America's Army both caused the exact same problem; as far as I know, no exact cause was found (I'll research Bugzilla to see if it was closed).
I'll bet dollars against a stale doughnut that this is the root cause.
Well, I'm more of a computer nerd than a physics junky (though I can handle the Special and General theories of Relativity fairly well), but let me try to contemplate a possible use.
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.
Perhaps some mechanical engineering types might have a better answer. All I know is that the third derivative of motion w.r.t. time is called "jerk".
You could've hired me.
I can entirely believe that Groening would say, with a completely straight face: "Fox fought against it and said that they would sue the show. ... And we called their bluff because we didn't think that Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself." I could imagine him saying that in such a fasion that people not looking for the satire would take it seriously.
You can see this in the Simpsons and Futurama too - there are a lot of visual gags that are just there, with nothing calling attention to them. If you were stupid enough to assume the animation was "real" you might miss that they're actually a joke. I can completely believe that Matt Groening was relating a story about being yelled at for mocking Fox News, and that people thought he was serious.
What I imagine really happened is that some humorless executive somewhere flagged the ticker as potentially "harmful" or something and created a big stink, and that Groening's story is based on that. Afterwards, there may or may not have been a policy against faking tickers, to satisfy this executive who is certain that it's confusing people. But who knows, I'm just guessing. But it seems that is most likely what happened.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
George W. Bush and Hu Jintao both came to Australia a few weeks ago, and both offered a free trade agreement. The Chineese one was a simple "We'll buy your stuff if you sell it to us" agreement, the American one however was "We'll buy your stuff, if you change your laws to the way we want them". This includes DMCA like laws and increased copyright time.
China was made famous by their invasion of Tibet and their treatment of Taiwan (although to be fair, Taiwan did split from China to begin with). Yet most of the time China treats other countries sovereignty and their right to make up their own laws with far more respect than Uncle Sam.
I am asuming that you are from America so this might come as a shock to you, but apart from South Korea and small pockets of teenagers in eastern Canada, almost everyone outside the US hates the US. This is why you have heard so much bitching over the interent, because 5.9 Billion people are pissed off.
The US goes around invading countries and then refusing to pay for their restoration to even pre-war standards (let alone pre-embargo), instead trying to dump the bill on the UN. The US goes around changing people's laws with threat of ecconomic or military action. The US uses the CIA to play around with people's religeons by using fake Imams to preach Islam that suits the US foreign policy. The US frequently gets involved in other people's civil wars such as Vietnam. The US arms such nutcases as Saddam Husain and Osama Bin Laden in attempts to settle petty disputes with countries such as Iran and Russia.
In a barely related comment, did anyone notice that one of the sites about the Diebold mess was a .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.)
Queen Elizabeth although the head of the British armed forces including the British Nuclear arsonal has very little power. Therefore the only thing interesting about her is to be able to laugh at her and her family when her granson smokes pot or her son commits adultary or her late daughter in law's butler publishes embarassing and possibly false information. The american conservatives do the same amount of things that are stupid, its just when they do, people die. Learning about republican stupidity when you are outside the US is all part of the movement towards reality TV, because when you hear that George W does something stupid, you get up the next morning and find your city bombed.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
The XBench CPU Test score went from 148.72 to 193.29. There was a slight decline in the "Floating Point Basic" category, but performance in "AltiVec Basic" and "vecLib FFT" improved by over 50% and "Floating Point Library" performance also improved by over 20%.
The XBench Thread Test score went from 185.93 to 209.27, with most of that accounted for by an 18% gain in the "Computation" subtest. The XBench Memory Test score went from 293.70 to 312.41, gaining primarily in the System (vs. Stream) memory subtests, particularly "Allocate" which went up almost 40%. (On my iBook G3-600, Panther improved "Allocate" scores 304%!)
So if my machine - roughly equivalent to a single node of VT's cluster (theirs have more RAM; mine has more disk) - can get a 30% boost on the CPU test, a 12%+ boost on the thread test, and a 6% boost on the memory test, it looks like the planned upgrade to Panther mentioned in a previous article might help it get past the 10-TeraFLOP mark.
(Hypothetically speaking, if VT's code for LINPACK made extensive use of the AltiVec and vecLib bits included in the OS, going to Panther could boost things up into the 12-14 TeraFLOP range. However, I believe they're probably using custom-written libraries built with optimizing compilers, so I don't think the difference will be that profound.)
Am I totally off base being suspecious of this?
p ?txtName=Diebold
Diebold gives $200,965 to the Republicans...
http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/softcomp1.as
Personally I think this should automatically disqualify them for making any sort of voting systems, but I guess I don't really understand the system that well.