LinuxParanoid's Journal: Stories rejected in January 2003

If you have a story submission that has been neglected in January 2003, then reply to this post.

I'm not sure how/whether comments on stories in my journal can be moderated or not; I'm hoping so. Here goes nothing.

Update: 01/21 5:18 GMT: It works! The first story has been moderated up! Thanks to the kind moderator for noticing this area, whoever you are. Now we just have to get more submissions (+ moderations). I'm advertising in my tagline; feel free to join in.

    --LP

The EMP Cruise Missile has arrived

[LinuxParanoid]

[Testing this concept with the rejected story from Mulletproof mentioned in my first journal entry. [slashdot.org] --LP]

Didn't think much of those EMP Artillery shells [slashdot.org]? According to Time Magazine [time.com], The US military has developed the High Powered Microwave cruise missile, capable of generating 2 billion watts of power broadcast over an area off 1000 feet, perfect for those late night electronic barbeques.

Altix 3000: Suddenly SGI is Interesting Again

[Twirlip of the Mists]

On January 7, while most everybody was watching the Macworld keynote address, SGI [sgi.com] announced their highly anticipated (by some, anyway) Linux [sgi.com] supercomputer system. Called the Altix 3000 [sgi.com] series, the system is basically a modified Origin 3000 [sgi.com] with Itanium 2 processors and black, yellow, and silver skins. (Yes, the Altix rack system looks a lot like a 6-foot-tall penguin.)

First, the hardware: if you know anything about SGI's Origin family, you know this stuff already. The system uses Itanium 2 processors running at 900 MHz or 1 GHz in place of the MIPS R14000 processors in the Origin 3000 family. The system is available in two configurations [sgi.com]: the Altix 3300, a deskside system with up to 4, 8, or 12 processors, and the Altix 3700, a rack system scalable from 4 to 64 processors in increments of 4. Each system comes with 10 PCI-X slots on 5 busses, and the 3700 can be equipped with PCI-X expansion modules.

Now the software: the system can run stock, unmodified Red Hat Linux for IA-64, but SGI will also bundle with each system their own ProPack extensions to Red Hat's OS. SGI's ProPack includes XFS and some other features (as yet unspecified) for the new servers. Also of note is the fact that SGI is implying in their marketing materials that CXFS server is now available for Linux, and that DMF and TMF have also been ported to Linux. Still waiting on independent confirmation of these facts.

Before today, the biggest commercially available Linux computer was a 32-processor beast from IBM. SGI plans to scale the Altix to 512 processors later this year-- which they can already do with their virtually identical Origin 3000 series, so doing with Altix shouldn't be hard-- and 2,048 processors in 2004.

When they're available-- which may be days or even weeks from now-- manuals will be available on techpubs.sgi.com [sgi.com], and high-res photos will be available in SGI's Image Library [sgi.com]. SGI's press releases (3 in all) can be found here [sgi.com], and media coverage can be found on Google News [google.com].

(Note: the eds eventually published a story [slashdot.org] about this, but it was much less info-laden than mine. Waa, waa. I'm really only posting it here because I'm a whiny bastard [slashdot.org].)

How can I recover my submitted stories?

[Anonynmous Cow]

I have two particular stories I submitted that were rejected that I think are particularly good. I'd really like to drop them in here for a second chance...

I can see them listed as rejected but I don't seem to be able to dive down into them to copy them to here... any ideas?

moo

Re:How can I recover my submitted stories?

[LinuxParanoid]

You're pretty much screwed. You have to save them when submitting them, or remember the key links in your story and reconstruct.

--LP

Open source used in fight for real human rights

[LinuxParanoid]

[A story rejected 10 months ago then that I think remains interesting 'news' to those who haven't seen it. --LP]

In "How Coder Cornered Milosevic" [wired.com], Wired tells how Patrick Ball, a sociologist, statistician and coder, used Linux, Apache, MySQL and Python, to store and analyze data gathered about the killings and refugee situations in Kosovo for use in war crimes trial against Slobovan Milosevic.

His main findings seem to be that statistically A) the refugee crisis and the killings were not random but occurred at the same time suggesting a systematic cause, and B) that the changes in death rates and refugee rates does not correlate with NATO or Kosovo Liberation Army activity, but with Serbian activity.

The Milosevic war crimes trial (BBC timeline here [bbc.co.uk], video and other files here [bard.edu]) began in February 2002, finished with the Kosovo portion of the trial in September 2002, and has since begun the Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina phase, according to the official International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia website. [un.org] A paper published by Patrick Ball six months after his trial testimony can be found in the American Statistical Association's Chance magazine, Fall 2002 [duke.edu].

--LP

Less Than Total Information Awareness

[NFW]

Slashdot rejected, K5 approved. [kuro5hin.org]