Slashback: Diebold, Cluster, Radiation

Slashback tonight brings you word on the less-spectacular-than-advertised solar storm earlier in the week, Mandrake's response (a good one) to the problems their new release had with LG brand CD drives, more Diebold madness, and more, including a lengthy rebuttal to Slashdot's review of Eclipse in Action. Read on for the details, and check your costume in the mirror before leaving the house.

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:

1. It is now ahead of the 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 cluster, which is composed of 1936 CPUs and which achieves 8633 Gflops/s.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.)
5. 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.
6. 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."

Comments

Sweet acceleration!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It won't be stuck at third long; if the cluster speed is increasing by 9555 Gflops every second, then in a few seconds it should be in first!

Yes, hearing the phrase "knots per hour" turns me into an ass too.

Re:Sweet acceleration!

[renehollan]

Yes, hearing the phrase "knots per hour" turns me into an ass too.

So, hearing "knots per hour squared" turns you into a jerk? (For the physics impaired: jerk is the third derivative of motion with respect to time, so units of velocity per time squared are units of jerk.)

Knots per hour sounds like a perfectly good unit of acceleration to me (and probably appropriate for vessels like supertankers).

Re:Sweet acceleration!

[Peter Cooper]

I'm a physics dummy. What use do these 'jerk' units have in the field?

Re:Sweet acceleration!

[renehollan]

hat use do these 'jerk' units have in the field?

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".

Re:Sweet acceleration!

[arodland]

My calculus textbook told me "Jerk is what spills your soda." It's true on so many levels. :)

Re:Sweet acceleration!

[paxil]

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.

Re:Sweet acceleration!

[jerde]

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

Multiple copies?

[wrinkledshirt]

The attempt, Mr. Orr said, was that when people search, they should not get multiple copies of the same information.

Or, more likely, not get multiple answers to the same questions.

Like, for instance, "Why did the U.S. attack Iraq?"

I was trying to write a paper for school

[painfall]

But then the sun shot this big solar flare and my computer was like BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!

The sun ate my paper.

It was like, a bummer.

Re:I was trying to write a paper for school

[SheldonYoung]

I wanted to shoot a solar flare into the Sun after it started going BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP after I cat(1)'d my paper to the console. All those CTRL-Gs in the file made the machine completely unresponsive and beep incesently. After 15 minutes I just couldn't take it any more.

Annoyed as hell and not wanting to take down the machine the hard way I did what every network admin fears a user will do; I found a screw driver. With pleasure and resourcefulness I opened the case and cut the wires to the speaker. That'll fix it I though! Except it didn't.

I learned something that day. Sun machines beep using a buzzer in the keyboard.

Fox News Didn't Consider Suing the Simpsons

[Pave Low]

Here's a follow up on this non-story.

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.

Re:Fox News Didn't Consider Suing the Simpsons

[MBCook]

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.

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.

Re:Fox News Didn't Consider Suing the Simpsons

[Soong]

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.

No, we still think Faux News is slanted, biased, spinning out of control, disgustingly sensationalist, and generally full of lies.

Re:Fox News Didn't Consider Suing the Simpsons

[kaltkalt]

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.

Re:Fox News Didn't Consider Suing the Simpsons

[_xeno_]

Actually, Matt Groening has a very "straight" approach to telling jokes. If you listen to the audio commentary, you can hear him telling jokes in a very "normal" manor. He'll say absolutely rediculous things with a completely straight face, and if it weren't insane and on an audio commentary, you might not realize he was joking.

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.

Re:Fox News Didn't Consider Suing the Simpsons

[1010011010]

So, it's like CNN, but not as bad as local news.

Re:Fox News Didn't Consider Suing the Simpsons

[Cornelius Chesterfie]

"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?"

Nice try. Too bad for you I RTFA you linked. NOWHERE does Groening go back on his words. The closest thing to that is the Fox News suit denying it (ya, no shit).

So lemme get this straight:
Step 1: Be a rightwing jerk.
Step 2: Read a Slashdot story that exposes THE main pillar of the rightwing media as the morons that they are.
Step 3: Get annoyed.
Step 4: Link to article that doesn't invalidate the step 2 story in any way, with a hint of triumph in your tone.
Step 5: ???
Step 6: You win the argument. Hooray!

Performance acceleration, indeed

[momerath2003]

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)

Teraflops per second eh? A teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second, so a teraflop per second would be an increase of calculation speed (of 1 teraflop) for each second that goes by.

Incredible! I want one of those trillion floating point operations per second squared machines in my computer!

Oh, and if I want to go on, I could say that if "they've gained over 2 Teraflops/s in the last 2 weeks," then their acceleration is increasing at a linear rate, so their floating point performance is increasing exponentially!

(Sorry, I don't like ATM machines and PR relations and PIN numbers; I couldn't help but post) ;-)

Re:Performance acceleration, indeed

[Ancil]

..their acceleration is increasing at a linear rate, so their floating point performance is increasing exponentially!

Sorry to be pedantic, but that would make their performance increase at a quadratic rate. To increase at an exponential rate, the rate of that increase would also have to be exponential, not linear. d/dt exp(t) = exp(t), remember?

Re:Performance acceleration, indeed

[SlightOverdose]

I have an ATM Machine that uses Dynamic DLL's. It's currently running at about 350 degrees kelvin and uses 500 watts per second at a processing power of half a Teraflop per second. It's currently sitting in my boat travelling at 5 knots per second displacing around 1000 cubic litres. I once ran into a peir and experienced a deceleration of 200 jerks per second squared.

*ducks*

Re:LG stuff

[bconway]

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.

liebold [ly]?

[loraksus]

/\ 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.

Re:liebold [ly]?

[realdpk]

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.

New 9.2 ISOs

[bconway]

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?

Re:New 9.2 ISOs

[catenos]

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.

California court rejects touchscreen voting law

[dada21]

Check it! That's socialism for you... The government knows best!

Re:California court rejects touchscreen voting law

[Unordained]

Uhm, I probably shouldn't encourage you by replying, but would you mind taking a second to think about this?

Socialism is about having the government redistribute money from taxes to a bit of everyone for services they could theoretically provide to themselves. (Yes, you could, I suppose, get your own militia and do without the military, but that's less likely than paying for your own healthcare.)

Any government, by its very nature, is going to make decisions like the one you're unhappy with. That's why we have voting -- so we can make it clear that a lot of us aren't happy, but don't get our way. Really -- look at our last presidential elections. Half of us were happy with the result, half unhappy. That's not great. Is it the fault of socialism? No.

If you don't like decisions like this one, you probably shouldn't like any form of government at all. Anarchy is interesting, and you probably wouldn't even care about voting machines. Anarchy, however, is likely to lead to small groups of people forming their own governments, eventually leading back to bigger governments, for the sake of security, simplicity, and ... well, their parents did it too, right? Can a lack of government enforce the no-government rule? Better get those torches ready, you're gonna need 'em.

As a reminder, there is no government. There are people, serving other people, elected to best represent (as they can) the wishes of the majority. A court said 'no' to a lawsuit presented by one member of the population -- that means that, most likely, the rest of the population disagreed with him. Darn. That's not socialism, that's a process that occurs even in anarchism: people can beat you up if they disagree with you, and there's nothing you can do about it. ...

Now that I look at your other posts, I see you sometimes are against most any form of government. Good. Now be consistent about it -- don't blame socialism, or anything else, when it's just the fault of the basic governmental process.

-16000 Votes

[powera]

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.

Re:-16000 Votes

[canajin56]

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.

2004 Elections

[aSiTiC]

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....

Re:2004 Elections

[feronti]

I don't know... I'd put civil war out of the picture myself... Americans are too lazy to liberate themselves anymore.

Re:Awesome pix of the radiation flares

[SiliconBateman]

The BBC has some nice pics from amateurs: (in plain text to reassure those sceptics):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/03 /s ci_nat_polar_light_display/html/1.stm

Re:LG stuff

[SiliconBateman]

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.

Re:LG stuff

[Akai]

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.

When 52X-CD-RW's are only...

[Ceadda]

$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.

Re:Awesome pix of the radiation flares

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Now, those are what I call some HOT AMATEUR PICTURES! ;)

only 2112 CPUs!

[azlondon]

Damn Rush fans get everywhere.

Less spectacular than advertised?

[DGolden]

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...

Diebold

[headkase]

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?

Its not just Mandrake

[1337 Apple Zealot]

I fried my external LG-CDROM connected to my G5 (running Debian, also happened with Yellow Dog)

Oh goodie...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the rest of the world gets to watch you guys liberate yourselves!

Re: Units of Jerk

[Alien54]

What use do these 'jerk' units have in the field?

They measure how hard someone is jerking your chain.

Eclipse in Action

[linuxislandsucks]

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..

Mandrake 9.2 has been a real PITA for me...

[Malor]

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.

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 /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.)

But he did say major combat...

[MyNameIsFred]

See for example, CNN article dated May 1, 2003. A major point at the time of Bush's carrier speech was that "major combat" was over.

In the speech, Bush will declare that major combat is over in Iraq, but stop short of a formal declaration of victory, according to White House aides.

There are many valid criticisms of the Bush administration, for example, the administration's poor post-war planning. However, there is no need to invent things, in particular, claim he didn't use the caveat "end of major combat" Or are you suggesting that the Bush administration changed the CNN website also?

and?

[/dev/trash]

has moved to a Polish host to escape the tyrannies of the new EU-style DMCAism has moved to a Polish host to escape the tyrannies of the new EU-style DMCAism

What happens when Poland joins the EU in 6 months?

Any version that dares

[geekoid]

to send the FLUSH_CACHE command.

regardless, this command should be perfectly safe to send, and LG is being irresposible in the implementation.

Solar shockwave arrival time

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's some info about the solar flare arrival times being passed around in amateur radio circles. It explains the difficulty of estimating the time of arrival.

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

Re:LG stuff

[_Sprocket_]

Does _any_ version of Windows cause this?

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.

Eclipse in Action

[Un pobre guey]

I read the review, bought the book, and very happily and quickly put eclipse to use. It is now my Java IDE, although I find I still prefer TextPad for lengthy editing sessions.

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 .

Re:Oh well

[jfern]

Does that mean that he only gets to steal one Presidential election? The US deserves to have only one stolen Presidential election every 124 years.

Re:LG stuff

[_Sprocket_]

You either put up with that and write safe software for sub-par nonstandard tienda-de-descuentos hardware, or you create clear specifications of what kind of system you must have for Linux to even work.

Or when you put out a piece of hardware and claim its a Widget that meets a certain spec - it should meet that spec. If you can't trust a manufactorer to do so, its a good bet that one should avoid them.

I'm all for making use of cheap hardware when needed. Heck - sometimes that's part of the fun. Part of the challenge of doing so is finding out what cheap hardware delivers and what is one step away from a scam. Thank the Internet for providing a medium where like-minded people can share notes.

(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?)

Welcome to the wonders of commodity hardware. Just because you get a component in-hand, doesn't mean you get the drivers you need. That goes for Windows as well as Linux. Pissed off that you didn't get your driver? Do your homework next time or bitch at the manufactorer.

For me - I tend to grab inexpensive (outright cheap) NICs based on Realtek's chipsets. Work fine. In fact, I just built a box with a RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ based NIC.

There were industry-wide Multimedia PC specs for a while - MPC1, MPC2, MPC3.

...

That way, anyone could go to their local tienda-de-descuentos el-cheapo xing-ling computer assembler and ask for a Linux Computer, level two.

Where are these standards now? What you're talking about is a pre-built box running Linux. I agree - for most people, that's the only way they'll be able to get in to Linux. Heck... its the only way they get in to Windows. You likely have a better chance to get a box built to run Linux from your local whitbox screwdriver shop than your favorite local consumer electronics outfit pushing big-name kit.

That said, just imagine what Slashdot'd be saying if this problem happened with a M$ release.

Sure. You'll get some trolling and FUD going with Linux zealots ingoring the issue for a chance to bash Microsoft. Just like you've got Windows zealots doing now.

Re:LG stuff

[_Sprocket_]

And I'm not gonna bother deciphering meant-for-engineers technical docs to see if my CD-ROM drive has some quirky use for some dandy non-mandatory ATAPI instruction. If random distros of Linux (and it's not just Mandrake, read up the comments) are frying random popular cd-rom drives, I'm just not gonna bother.

Let's make it simple then. "LG drives are defective". Pretty simple.

I got my NIC for free when I joined my broadband provider, and I'm just not gonna bother searching hardware stores to see if they have some Linux-compatible NIC. It either runs on what I have, or I ignore it.

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.

And most users are even less interested in Linux than I have. I happen to have a particular taste for computers and programming and geek culture. Most economists - high-level professionals who've gone through heavy scientific and mathematical training - care even less.

These people buy pre-built machines. If they want it running Linux, they'll likely buy one with it pre-built and pre-installed.

Cluetrain arriving: people just don't organize their lives around Linux.

Apparently you don't have the right ticket. Here's a hint: "people" don't organize their lives around any OS - Windows included.

Distance?

[A nonymous Coward]

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.

Unamerican??? What?

[DeVilla]

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.

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.)

You got that backwards

[A nonymous Coward]

Someone brought suit to stop the touchscreen voting law, and the appeals court threw out the suit. The court did NOT reject the touchscreen voting law.

A federal appeals court has struck down a lawsuit filed by a California Libertarian that sought to ban electronic voting machines on the grounds that they are susceptible to fraud and software bugs.

This is why we gripe about the US

[donscarletti]

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.

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.

Jerk AND it gets better...

[arete]

Distance, and it's derivates: velocity, acceleration, jerk. To use a car example, a distance is how far you are, velocity is how fast you're going (changing distance). Acceleration is how fast you're changing velocity, and Jerk is how fast you're changing acceleration. So, for instance, while acceleration is roughly correlated to how far down you have the gas pedal, jerk would be correlated to HOW FAST you jam the pedal down.

To follow another poster - it IS how fast someone jerks your chain, assuming they start out holding your chain and then move to break, they'll have a significant jerk.

It gets better. The next ones are (wait for it): snap, crackle, and pop. I kid you not. Seems I learned something getting a BS in Mechanical Engineering.

Panther alone might boost the VT cluster.

[dbirchall]

I have a Power Mac G5 2x2.0GHz here, and this evening I compared XBench numbers on it under Jaguar (10.2.8 G5, build 6S90) and Panther (10.3 build 7B85). The overall score in XBench went from around 180 to around 210, a 16-17% increase in benchmark performance, but some of the subtests showed more significant changes.

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.)

Re:LG stuff

[Dahan]

I believe the code was part of detection routine to see if the drives supported writing (packet based writing specifically).

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).

Has no one noticed this? -16000 +$200,965

[jriskin]

Am I totally off base being suspecious of this?

Diebold gives $200,965 to the Republicans...

http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/softcomp1.asp ?txtName=Diebold

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.

There are specs - LG doesn't follow them

[buchanmilne]

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)?