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).

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.

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.

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.

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:-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.