That's my point. 50,000 Iraqis died as a direct result of sanctions each year, according to HRC and Amnesty International estimates. 50,000, each year. For 12 years. Over half a million Iraqis dead. That's where all the "X00,000 Iraqi children dead for oil" posters came from in the 90s.
INCLUDING all of the people killed by the US action on your precious iraqbodycount.net, there has actually been a NET PRESERVATION of Iraqi lives, WHEN COMPARED WITH the lives lost each year under sanctions.
"57 percent of [Iraqis] said life was better now than under Saddam, against 19 percent who said it was worse and 23 percent who said it was about the same."
Or the 600,000 Iraqis who, according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Campaign, perished as a direct result of sanctions during the 12 years sanctions were in place? The Iraqis who have actually had their lives spared as a result of the net preservation of Iraqi life that has occurred (as opposed to sanctions - INCLUDING all of the Iraqis the US killed during the invasion), just from the infrastructure improvements the US forces have made in electricity, water, sanitation, medicine, food distribution, etc., in rural areas that represent HALF of Iraq's population?
You do realize that, fundamentally, no matter how "ironic" you think it is, that non-US citizens do not and should not have any say whatsoever in the outcome of US elections? And that, therefore, US political campaign sites have no actual reason to serve anyone other than voters?
Um...this is a POLITICAL CAMPAIGN SITE. The people not voting next week should have NO IMPACT here. The official policies of the United States, whoever is in office, are not disseminated by political campaign sites, but by myriad other means.
On 21 October, the George W Bush website began using the services of a company called Akamai to ensure that the pages, videos and other content on its site reaches visitors.
Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision was taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.
He said the site may see no reason to distribute content to people who will not be voting next week.
Managing traffic could also be a good way to ensure that the site stays working in the closing days of the election campaign.
And:
However, simply blocking non-US visitors also means that Americans overseas are barred too.
Ok, yeah, that's the ONE thing that might be pertinent, and might be arguable.
Otherwise, there's always this, and this, and this, and, um, the whole rest of the internet and every other available source of information in print, television, radio, and so on, on Earth.
This is a political campaign site with political campaign propaganda. And since there are still an extremely wide variety of ways to get at its content and information from outside the US, it's obviously not some kind of "international censorship". (C'mon, slashdot! I know you can come up with some crazy shit!) Even the Netcraft guy realizes that. It's not like the New York Times, or critical news information, is suddenly blocked. Hell, within the last week, they had to start using Akamai! That alone should prove to a normal person that there are clearly traffic concerns at play. They have little to no obligation to serve anyone outside of the US, with the statistically negligible exception of US citizens outside the US.
Ok, slashdot, let's see who can come up with the best off-the-wall looney conspiracy theories to twist this around as a malicious, underhanded tactic, and some kind of "proof" that Bush is evil incarnate! While you're at it, explain to me how it's right for the Guardian to encourage its UK readers, i.e., not US citizens, to start a letter writing and email campaign to Ohioans encouraging them to vote for John Kerry, or, better yet, calling for the assassination of the sitting US president! (Even as a "joke".)
In a regular column in The Guardian newspaper's Saturday TV listings magazine, Charlie Brooker described Bush in scathing terms, and concluded: "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr., where are you now that we need you?"
I don't know how much Dell's Tungsten cluster cost but those guys went online last year and got ranked #4 (just behind this Mac cluster) and they're #5 or something now. These bozos have spent a year fscking around with upgrades and from the theoretical #3 (as they were taken out since the cluster couldn't enter production) will have dropped to #7 or more in the next ranking....
Tungsten cost $12 million. Just for the hardware.
System X cost a total of $6 million, and it's still faster.
Not to mention that Virginia Tech was able to pull of a publicity coup and become #3 in the world, #2 in the US, and #1 academic for a paltry $5.2M. And they were "taken out" of the list voluntarily, because they dismantled the entire thing to replace it with Xserve G5s. With the renewed US focus on supercomputing, no one will likely EVER be able to hit #3 on this list for something anywhere close to $5.2M again.
Confusingly, you seem to have forgotten that since VT dropped on the list, since VT is still much faster than Tungsten, that means Tungsten also dropped. Tungsten is currently #16. For $12 million. VT's 2.5 Tflops faster - a respectable standalone clusters' worth faster - for half the price. Plus VT got all the huge publicity and news articles, and attracted millions of dollars in funding and grants for their new supercomputer center. Not to mention bringing a whole new OS, platform, interconnect, and processor onto the scene, which will benefit everyone (competition and choice is good, right?).
Nice try at trolling, but next time don't be so obvious and pathetic about it, especially when Tungsten looks like it clearly is the raw end of the deal, when you have to spend over twice as much money to get a cluster that performs significantly worse, and has worse power requirements.
On one hand, we had analysts and pundits of all types saying Apple will fail if it *didn't* include photo/video functionality in a handheld, and now we've got a luminary here predicting it will fail because it *did*.
Well, I think I'll trust Apple's judgment on this one, considering it seems to know what it's doing, thank you.
- The Complete U2, a digital box set of every song ever recorded by U2, plus some crazy and rare recordings, available in November for $149 via the iTunes Music Store, with a $50 certificate towards it with the iPod U2 Edition
Other cool things: in addition to its dock, the iPod Photo can also even output video via its own headphone jack with a special 1/8" AV cable, and the 220x176 65536-color screen also displays album art while playing, as well as color games, etc! (Don't have much/any album art? Get it!)
While Steve Jobs talked at length during the presentation about why Apple isn't doing video on a portable device itself for reasons of battery life, device/screen size, weight, etc, now that this device has video output capabilities, I think it's a clear sign of the direction; that is, future devices - or future firmware - being able to output video content to an external monitor/projector. Imagine this: your iPod dock, already at your entertainment center. The iTunes Movie Store (or, your own iMovie content). H.264/MPEG AVC (Microsoft WMV9/VC-1 has hit some snags in its bid for standardization). Download a movie, sync to your iPod. Drop the iPod in its video dock at your TV (or ANY device that has video inputs). Done. And a LOT cleaner and easier than having a whole separate computer that needs to be maintained as a part of your entertainment center. Add 802.11g with things like AirPort Express to the mix, and who knows what might come...
Yes, it was up for a while, but mostly for testing and tuning.
The one critical problem with the initial cluster was that the Power Mac G5 didn't have ECC memory, meaning that any long calculation would really have to be run twice - or at least until the result was the same - to essentially insure a soft error did not go unnoticed (and no, VT's special "error detecting" software didn't account for this).
The Xserve G5, however, does have ECC memory, making the current cluster just as capable as anything else in the top 10.
I'm not denigrating the original cluster, however: VT played by the rules, and made it to #3 in the world, #2 in the US, and #1 academic for a mere US$5.2M. They also broke the burgeoning Dell/Linux hegemony for cheap clusters, proving that you could use Apple, PowerPC, Mac OS X, and Infiniband to make clusters just as cheap, if not cheaper (note how much better the Apple clusters perform per processor than the closest Dell P4 Xeon 3.06GHz Linux cluster several spots below...additionally, check out this fantastic cost comparison of many of the top machines). Not to mention bringing a new 64-bit player to the HPC table. And one would hope that competition, even in supercomputing, is a good thing.
Rich guys that buy Ferraris and never drive them don't get untold amounts of recognition, publicity, free advertising, news articles, and the capability to catapult themselves to the forefront of the supercomputing community overnight for a paltry sum of money, thus attracting millions of dollars of additional funding and grants to build clusters that WILL be doing real work, such as the one we're talking about now, and the several additional clusters they plan to build in the future, not to mention the benefit of proving that a new architecture, interconnect, and OS will perform well as a supercomputer, allowing more choice, competition, and innovation to enter the scene, which ultimately results in more and better choices for everyone.
There have been some new entries, including IBM's BlueGene/L, at 36Tflops, finally displacing Japan's Earth Simulator, and a couple other new entries in the top 5.
No matter what anyone says, Virginia Tech pulled an absolute coup when they appeared on the list at the end of 2003: no one will likely EVER be able to be #3 on the Top 500 list for a mere US$5.2M...even if the original cluster didn't perform much, or any, "real" work, the publicity and recognition that came of it was absolutely more than worth it.
Also interesting is that there is also a non-Apple PowerPC 970 entry in the top 10, using IBM's JS20 blades...
Diebold of course will always assert that their system has been verified. By who? If they are so certain and without worry, why then is it a big deal to open it up for all to see?
Can't you make the same argument about Microsoft and Windows? You can certainly make arguments that Windows is critical to business in the United States; not as critical as something as fundamental as voting, but the only thing that will cause code to be opened is a mandate requiring it to be so; otherwise, "if they are so certain and without worry, why then is it a big deal to open it up for all to see" is just as weak an argument as "if you have nothing to hide, then why not submit to a search?"
Also, making an electronic voting system isn't as simple as everyone here on slashdot thinks it is. It's not just counting. I mean of course, yes, at the core, it's simply counting votes. But there are nuances and complexities that make this a gargantuan task, and to make something like this *reliable* is even more daunting. (And it seems they're not succeeding there, either, if the failures are any indication.)
It's just that your post seemed to imply or insinuate that Diebold was purposely obfuscating code for possibly nefarious reasons. Diebold is a company of 13,000 people. Heck, they could also "make" their ATMs skim cash if they wanted to. And ATMs are a critical part of our lives, too. You could probably look at some of the code and declare "it doesn't need to be that complex". Maybe, maybe not. Says who? You?
I do agree that the code should be opened, but no company should be forced to open its code. Conversely, what should happen is that such systems should REQUIRE open code, such that any companies who want to compete for the project would have to follow such guidelines. Remember, too, that part of the chastising that the system has gotten even with paper systems is the ridiculous amount of complexity and diversity of systems: one, unified, similar, simple system in every jurisdiction should be what's required. For this reason, it's often easiest, and sometimes even the best, to go with a single contractor.
But the code itself can, and should, still be subject to a rigorous level of scrutiny.
Ah yes, indeed. When you said "Senate", I had "Congress" on the brain. But I do agree: split leadership forces compromise, and that's generally what leads to the best solutions to problems.
Hopefully, in 2004 we can either bring in a Democratic president, and/or give the Democrats control of the Senate. The overall impact of getting away from the one-party-controls-all system we have at the moment will be a move back toward the center, where all the good compromising gets done. As it is now, we have one party pushing the country clear over to their side, with no meaningful compromise going on. No matter what party is in control, that sort of thing is bad for the country.
Then I think what you meant to say is "Hopefully, in 2004 we can either bring in a Democratic president, or give the Democrats control of the Senate."
Perhaps opening the source to these critical systems and having it overseen by an independent election agency would be an idea worth considering...
And even then, there's nothing stopping Diebold, which has a lot of experience with hardened public computer terminals, from making the interface and infrastructure equipment that runs the code. Yes, they then lose the "lock in" that the proprietary software buys them, but if their other systems and hardware are that good, it won't be a problem. Heck, that kind of openness in the context of the election system code could even be a PR win for Diebold, as the problems become more and more public.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my point. 50,000 Iraqis died as a direct result of sanctions each year, according to HRC and Amnesty International estimates. 50,000, each year. For 12 years. Over half a million Iraqis dead. That's where all the "X00,000 Iraqi children dead for oil" posters came from in the 90s.
INCLUDING all of the people killed by the US action on your precious iraqbodycount.net, there has actually been a NET PRESERVATION of Iraqi lives, WHEN COMPARED WITH the lives lost each year under sanctions.
But don't let that interrupt your bashing.
...but I don't particularly like Bush, and didn't say that I did.
"57 percent of [Iraqis] said life was better now than under Saddam, against 19 percent who said it was worse and 23 percent who said it was about the same."
Source, Oxford Research International National Survey of Iraq
Or the 600,000 Iraqis who, according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Campaign, perished as a direct result of sanctions during the 12 years sanctions were in place? The Iraqis who have actually had their lives spared as a result of the net preservation of Iraqi life that has occurred (as opposed to sanctions - INCLUDING all of the Iraqis the US killed during the invasion), just from the infrastructure improvements the US forces have made in electricity, water, sanitation, medicine, food distribution, etc., in rural areas that represent HALF of Iraq's population?
Those Iraqis?
Just checking.
You do realize you have to *pay* Akamai *a lot* for their services?
Good job; I knew you wouldn't let me down!
You do realize that, fundamentally, no matter how "ironic" you think it is, that non-US citizens do not and should not have any say whatsoever in the outcome of US elections? And that, therefore, US political campaign sites have no actual reason to serve anyone other than voters?
Um...this is a POLITICAL CAMPAIGN SITE. The people not voting next week should have NO IMPACT here. The official policies of the United States, whoever is in office, are not disseminated by political campaign sites, but by myriad other means.
From the article:
On 21 October, the George W Bush website began using the services of a company called Akamai to ensure that the pages, videos and other content on its site reaches visitors.
Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision was taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.
He said the site may see no reason to distribute content to people who will not be voting next week.
Managing traffic could also be a good way to ensure that the site stays working in the closing days of the election campaign.
And:
However, simply blocking non-US visitors also means that Americans overseas are barred too.
Ok, yeah, that's the ONE thing that might be pertinent, and might be arguable.
Otherwise, there's always this, and this, and this, and, um, the whole rest of the internet and every other available source of information in print, television, radio, and so on, on Earth.
This is a political campaign site with political campaign propaganda. And since there are still an extremely wide variety of ways to get at its content and information from outside the US, it's obviously not some kind of "international censorship". (C'mon, slashdot! I know you can come up with some crazy shit!) Even the Netcraft guy realizes that. It's not like the New York Times, or critical news information, is suddenly blocked. Hell, within the last week, they had to start using Akamai! That alone should prove to a normal person that there are clearly traffic concerns at play. They have little to no obligation to serve anyone outside of the US, with the statistically negligible exception of US citizens outside the US.
Ok, slashdot, let's see who can come up with the best off-the-wall looney conspiracy theories to twist this around as a malicious, underhanded tactic, and some kind of "proof" that Bush is evil incarnate! While you're at it, explain to me how it's right for the Guardian to encourage its UK readers, i.e., not US citizens, to start a letter writing and email campaign to Ohioans encouraging them to vote for John Kerry, or, better yet, calling for the assassination of the sitting US president! (Even as a "joke".)
In a regular column in The Guardian newspaper's Saturday TV listings magazine, Charlie Brooker described Bush in scathing terms, and concluded: "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr., where are you now that we need you?"
3... 2... 1...
Go!
I don't know how much Dell's Tungsten cluster cost but those guys went online last year and got ranked #4 (just behind this Mac cluster) and they're #5 or something now. These bozos have spent a year fscking around with upgrades and from the theoretical #3 (as they were taken out since the cluster couldn't enter production) will have dropped to #7 or more in the next ranking....
Tungsten cost $12 million. Just for the hardware.
System X cost a total of $6 million, and it's still faster.
Not to mention that Virginia Tech was able to pull of a publicity coup and become #3 in the world, #2 in the US, and #1 academic for a paltry $5.2M. And they were "taken out" of the list voluntarily, because they dismantled the entire thing to replace it with Xserve G5s. With the renewed US focus on supercomputing, no one will likely EVER be able to hit #3 on this list for something anywhere close to $5.2M again.
Here's the current list:
http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/performance.pdf
Here's just the current top 20, as of 10/26/04:
http://das.doit.wisc.edu/misc/top500.jpg
Confusingly, you seem to have forgotten that since VT dropped on the list, since VT is still much faster than Tungsten, that means Tungsten also dropped. Tungsten is currently #16. For $12 million. VT's 2.5 Tflops faster - a respectable standalone clusters' worth faster - for half the price. Plus VT got all the huge publicity and news articles, and attracted millions of dollars in funding and grants for their new supercomputer center. Not to mention bringing a whole new OS, platform, interconnect, and processor onto the scene, which will benefit everyone (competition and choice is good, right?).
Also, here's a really great cost/performance comparison of all the top clusters.
Nice try at trolling, but next time don't be so obvious and pathetic about it, especially when Tungsten looks like it clearly is the raw end of the deal, when you have to spend over twice as much money to get a cluster that performs significantly worse, and has worse power requirements.
Prof. Jack Dongarra of UTK is the keeper of the official list in the interim between the twice-yearly Top 500 lists:
http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/performance.pdf See page 54.
And here's the current top 20 as of 10/26/04...
Yes, they said it would be available exclusively on iTunes Music Store, in November.
Ahh, if only one of the new iPods and this XM device were one and the same. :-)
I'm not talking about video playback on the iPod. I'm talking about what I said in the last paragraph of this post, which is why I said to look there.
Are you having trouble reading? I didn't say it played movies (yet). I said THINK movies. And I also said look at the last paragraph of this post.
...about the original iPod, and iPod mini.
And they're runaway successes, to put it mildly.
On one hand, we had analysts and pundits of all types saying Apple will fail if it *didn't* include photo/video functionality in a handheld, and now we've got a luminary here predicting it will fail because it *did*.
Well, I think I'll trust Apple's judgment on this one, considering it seems to know what it's doing, thank you.
...here.
And funnily enough it does.
Does anyone else think that this a bit overkill. 60Gb is a LOT when you are just talking about music and pictures.
Think movies.
See the last paragraph here.
In addition to the iPod Photo, which comes in 40GB and new 60GB flavors for $499 and $599 respectively, there's also:
- iPod U2 Special Edition ($349)
- The Complete U2, a digital box set of every song ever recorded by U2, plus some crazy and rare recordings, available in November for $149 via the iTunes Music Store, with a $50 certificate towards it with the iPod U2 Edition
- iTunes 4.7
- QuickTime 6.5.2
- iPod Updater 3.0.4 (2004-10-20)
- iPod-focused Apple Store: iPod Store
- EU iTunes Music Store added to 9 more European nations, with over 700,000 songs
- iTunes Music Store is coming to Canada in November
- Press releases
Other cool things: in addition to its dock, the iPod Photo can also even output video via its own headphone jack with a special 1/8" AV cable, and the 220x176 65536-color screen also displays album art while playing, as well as color games, etc! (Don't have much/any album art? Get it!)
While Steve Jobs talked at length during the presentation about why Apple isn't doing video on a portable device itself for reasons of battery life, device/screen size, weight, etc, now that this device has video output capabilities, I think it's a clear sign of the direction; that is, future devices - or future firmware - being able to output video content to an external monitor/projector. Imagine this: your iPod dock, already at your entertainment center. The iTunes Movie Store (or, your own iMovie content). H.264/MPEG AVC (Microsoft WMV9/VC-1 has hit some snags in its bid for standardization). Download a movie, sync to your iPod. Drop the iPod in its video dock at your TV (or ANY device that has video inputs). Done. And a LOT cleaner and easier than having a whole separate computer that needs to be maintained as a part of your entertainment center. Add 802.11g with things like AirPort Express to the mix, and who knows what might come...
Yes, it was up for a while, but mostly for testing and tuning.
The one critical problem with the initial cluster was that the Power Mac G5 didn't have ECC memory, meaning that any long calculation would really have to be run twice - or at least until the result was the same - to essentially insure a soft error did not go unnoticed (and no, VT's special "error detecting" software didn't account for this).
The Xserve G5, however, does have ECC memory, making the current cluster just as capable as anything else in the top 10.
I'm not denigrating the original cluster, however: VT played by the rules, and made it to #3 in the world, #2 in the US, and #1 academic for a mere US$5.2M. They also broke the burgeoning Dell/Linux hegemony for cheap clusters, proving that you could use Apple, PowerPC, Mac OS X, and Infiniband to make clusters just as cheap, if not cheaper (note how much better the Apple clusters perform per processor than the closest Dell P4 Xeon 3.06GHz Linux cluster several spots below...additionally, check out this fantastic cost comparison of many of the top machines). Not to mention bringing a new 64-bit player to the HPC table. And one would hope that competition, even in supercomputing, is a good thing.
Rich guys that buy Ferraris and never drive them don't get untold amounts of recognition, publicity, free advertising, news articles, and the capability to catapult themselves to the forefront of the supercomputing community overnight for a paltry sum of money, thus attracting millions of dollars of additional funding and grants to build clusters that WILL be doing real work, such as the one we're talking about now, and the several additional clusters they plan to build in the future, not to mention the benefit of proving that a new architecture, interconnect, and OS will perform well as a supercomputer, allowing more choice, competition, and innovation to enter the scene, which ultimately results in more and better choices for everyone.
Does that answer your question?
Prof. Jack Dongarra of UTK is the keeper of the official list in the interim between the twice yearly Top 500 lists:
http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/performance.pdf (see page 54)
There have been some new entries, including IBM's BlueGene/L, at 36Tflops, finally displacing Japan's Earth Simulator, and a couple other new entries in the top 5.
Here's just the top 16 as of 10/25/04:
http://das.doit.wisc.edu/misc/top500.jpg
No matter what anyone says, Virginia Tech pulled an absolute coup when they appeared on the list at the end of 2003: no one will likely EVER be able to be #3 on the Top 500 list for a mere US$5.2M...even if the original cluster didn't perform much, or any, "real" work, the publicity and recognition that came of it was absolutely more than worth it.
Also interesting is that there is also a non-Apple PowerPC 970 entry in the top 10, using IBM's JS20 blades...
Diebold of course will always assert that their system has been verified. By who? If they are so certain and without worry, why then is it a big deal to open it up for all to see?
Can't you make the same argument about Microsoft and Windows? You can certainly make arguments that Windows is critical to business in the United States; not as critical as something as fundamental as voting, but the only thing that will cause code to be opened is a mandate requiring it to be so; otherwise, "if they are so certain and without worry, why then is it a big deal to open it up for all to see" is just as weak an argument as "if you have nothing to hide, then why not submit to a search?"
Also, making an electronic voting system isn't as simple as everyone here on slashdot thinks it is. It's not just counting. I mean of course, yes, at the core, it's simply counting votes. But there are nuances and complexities that make this a gargantuan task, and to make something like this *reliable* is even more daunting. (And it seems they're not succeeding there, either, if the failures are any indication.)
It's just that your post seemed to imply or insinuate that Diebold was purposely obfuscating code for possibly nefarious reasons. Diebold is a company of 13,000 people. Heck, they could also "make" their ATMs skim cash if they wanted to. And ATMs are a critical part of our lives, too. You could probably look at some of the code and declare "it doesn't need to be that complex". Maybe, maybe not. Says who? You?
I do agree that the code should be opened, but no company should be forced to open its code. Conversely, what should happen is that such systems should REQUIRE open code, such that any companies who want to compete for the project would have to follow such guidelines. Remember, too, that part of the chastising that the system has gotten even with paper systems is the ridiculous amount of complexity and diversity of systems: one, unified, similar, simple system in every jurisdiction should be what's required. For this reason, it's often easiest, and sometimes even the best, to go with a single contractor.
But the code itself can, and should, still be subject to a rigorous level of scrutiny.
Ah yes, indeed. When you said "Senate", I had "Congress" on the brain. But I do agree: split leadership forces compromise, and that's generally what leads to the best solutions to problems.
Hopefully, in 2004 we can either bring in a Democratic president, and/or give the Democrats control of the Senate. The overall impact of getting away from the one-party-controls-all system we have at the moment will be a move back toward the center, where all the good compromising gets done. As it is now, we have one party pushing the country clear over to their side, with no meaningful compromise going on. No matter what party is in control, that sort of thing is bad for the country.
Then I think what you meant to say is "Hopefully, in 2004 we can either bring in a Democratic president, or give the Democrats control of the Senate."
Right?
Perhaps opening the source to these critical systems and having it overseen by an independent election agency would be an idea worth considering...
And even then, there's nothing stopping Diebold, which has a lot of experience with hardened public computer terminals, from making the interface and infrastructure equipment that runs the code. Yes, they then lose the "lock in" that the proprietary software buys them, but if their other systems and hardware are that good, it won't be a problem. Heck, that kind of openness in the context of the election system code could even be a PR win for Diebold, as the problems become more and more public.