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Dell's New Precision 7000 Workstations
Dell’s New Precision 7000 Workstations: Dual Xeon, Triple RTX, 3 TB DDR4, 16 TB NVMe
Launching in May, the new Precision 7820 and Precision 7920 machines will be based on one or two Intel Xeon Scalable ‘Cascade Lake-SP’ CPUs thus offering up to 56 physical cores supporting AVX512_VNNI instructions advantageous for workloads that use neural networks, which is why Dell emphasizes AI (and VR) in its announcement. On the graphics and GPGPU side of things, the new Precision 7900-series machines will feature up to three NVIDIA Quadro RTX graphics cards (no word on GV100-based GPUs, but it is highly likely that they will be offered as an option too).
The most hardcore Precision 7920 configurations will be able to carry up to 3 TB of DDR4 DRAM, up to 16 TB of PCI/NVMe solid-state storage (i.e., several M.2 and/or U.2. drives, depending on the configuration), and up to 120/96 TB of storage space enabled by ten 3.5-inch hard drives (i.e., Dell has certified 12 TB HDDs with the new system). Obviously, the workstations will support all kinds of connectivity along with 5.25-inch FlexBays (enabling ODD(s) and/or additional I/O modules for special purposes).
Lu Guang, winner of World Press Photo awards, vanishes in Ch
Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2018-12-02 19:18:14 from the prepare to be drained of all individuality and spirit dept.
RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:
Last year he said in an interview
"The reality in China is you never know if you’re going to get into trouble because there are no written rules”
This year, Lu Guang has disappeared from China's remote Xinjiang province.
Lu's work is
known for capturing images of China's environmental damage and the lives of the country's dispossessed
The article infers that Lu has likely disappeared into the same 'reeducation' camps in that province that a million Uighurs have disappeared into.
Did You Know the Greatest Two-Year Global Cooling Event Just
Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2018-11-25 19:45:52 from the It's not the crime, it's the coverup dept.
RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:
RealClear reports : https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/04/24/did_you_know_the_greatest_two-year_global_cooling_event_just_took_place_103243.html [realclearmarkets.com]
Would it surprise you to learn the greatest global two-year cooling event of the last century just occurred? From February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available) global average temperatures dropped 0.56°C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47°C—also during the global warming era.
While this is interesting, it is a normal statistical variance without significant meaning on its own. What makes it significant is the lack of mention by the same sites reporting similar up spikes. Downs need to be reported along with ups. Failure to do so feeds into climate change denialism.
The public and media case for global warming, unlike the scientific case, depends heavily on short-term observation of actual temperatures. Biased reporting suggests warming is much steadier than it is. If the global temperature really showed half a century of uninterrupted warming—with only warming records, no cooling records—then people with nuanced views of plausible future temperatures could be dismissed as deniers. Annual atmospheric CO2 levels have gone up in pretty much a straight line since 1960, if temperatures did the same thing, the link to CO2 would be direct and obvious. In fact, it is real but complex, and those complexities are important for analyzing policy choices.
Then there is the danger of backlash. Suppose the next five months are similar to the same five months in 2017 and 2016. At some point the news will leak out that all global warming since 1980 has been wiped out in two and a half years, and that record-setting cooling events went unreported—in fact the headlines while they were occurring referenced warming from other times. Some people could go from uncritical acceptance of steadily rising temperatures to uncritical refusal to accept any warming at all.
libya.hmm
A US citizen wants to overthrow a US-backed government in Libya. Here's why
At the heart of this is Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, now leading the current move by forces from the east of the country towards the capital Tripoli. Haftar is, to be polite, the ultimate pragmatist. He supported Moammar Gadhafi in his 1969 coup, then found himself in Langley, Virginia in the 90s where he gained US citizenship, before returning to overthrow Gadhafi in the 2011 conflict. Since then, he has been one of many strongmen claiming pre-eminence in the nation's descent into disarray, based in the city of Benghazi and exerting most of his control in eastern Libya.
US pulls troops from Libya amid a surge in violence
The United States military pulled a contingent of its troops from Libya on Sunday amid a surge in violence in the capital city of Tripoli, America's top commander for Africa said.
"The security realities on the ground in Libya are growing increasingly complex and unpredictable," Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, head of US Africa Command, said Sunday in a statement. "Even with an adjustment of the force, we will continue to remain agile in support of existing US strategy."
The American forces, who provide military support for diplomatic missions, counterterrorism activities and improving regional security, have been relocated temporarily in response to "increased unrest."
The root of all evil. No, really, I'm serious.
This is close. Very close. But it's only one specific case of a more generalized problem. I've referred to this before in a few posts as a sort of "moral priority-inversion bug," a very deep and insidious one that corrupts what you may think of as a person's moral elevator algorithms.
And what is it? Very simply, it's this: treating objects as agents and agents as objects. Or, elevating objects to or even over the status of other people, and objectifying other human beings.
The reason I call this insidious is that very often one is not aware that one is doing it, and the fact that ideologies and beliefs are part of this class of "objects" is why, as well as where, the majority of instances of this bug occur.
On this site, the most common manifestation I see of this particular bug is when someone asserts that their summum bonum is something nebulous like "freedom" or "liberty" or some such. This is one of the most difficult glitches to debug, because a) being for these things is always seen as a good thing, b) implying that one is against them is a powerful argument from emotion, c) much evil may be rationalized if one tells oneself that it is being done in the name of freedom and/or liberty, and d) at least in my observation, the kind of people prone to this bug in the first place are the type that are selfishly-oriented to begin with and not much for actual (as opposed to fake, self-serving) self-reflection.
What does this bug look like in practice? When you see someone who's so driven by a single ideal, let's say "freedom" here, that s/he starts making assumptions that are actually self-destructive of that ideal with a perfectly straight face, you have a good indicator that the bug is triggering. For example, "all taxation is theft" or "show me my signature on the social contract" in a discussion about the social safety net is a pretty good tell that the person you're talking to is glitching. When challenged on this, doubling down on the position and retreating to pedantic interpretations of one's value system in the face of observable reality is usually the next step. An inability, or an unwillingness, to separate de facto from de jure, in other words.
Specifically, when you point out to this sort of person that a starving, homeless, sick, frightened human is not a free human and you get back a blanket, emotional denial without so much as a "screw you, MUH PURITY!" you've run smack into it. One of the prime pathologies of people prone to this bug is, again, elevating ideologies over people. This is where that famous saying about "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to steal their bread" comes into play.
So how do you debug this? I have no idea. Short of pointing out that this is a dark antipattern that exists and making people aware of it, there doesn't seem to be much else that can be done. Like the proverbial lightbulb in the old joke, the bulb has to want to change, and as a consequence mostly of d) and partly of c), people may not be incentivized to do the debugging. You can't change someone's mind for them; true repentance, "metanoia" in the Koine, comes from the will within.
I hope that by pointing this out, I can get people to be on the lookout for this pernicious tendency, not only in others, but in themselves as well. Just pointing out that it's there to someone when they're displaying it may (or may not be, depends on the person) the first step toward preventing it from triggering.
Now this is some funny shit!
The person that damn near single-handedly lost the democrats' majority in the US House of Representatives (and senate!) during the 2010 elections (for pushing Romneycare) is going to get an award for, among other things (pushing Romneycare), restoring the democrats' majority in the US House of Representatives during the 2018 elections
Profile in courage?! So insane!
InfoWarsStore Hacked
Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2018-11-16 20:54:45 from the I did tell you they were out to get me dept.
RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:
Silicon Angle Reports: https://siliconangle.com/2018/11/14/alex-jones-blames-industrial-political-sabotage-following-hack-infowars-store/ [siliconangle.com]
Per the researcher who uncovered it, the InfoWarsStore was subjected to a Magecart infection based hack, similar to the one that affected Newegg and several other companies a while back. The hack, which exposed details of customers making purchases, was in place for ~24 hours and affected ~1600 customers.
All affected customers have been notified per Alex Jones, however after this perfectly reasonable and appropriate statement the train kept right on rolling:
“This criminal hack is an act of industrial and political sabotage,” Jones said in a statement. “The corporate press is claiming that a Magento plugin to the shopping cart was the point of entry, but that is not true. Infowarsstore.com has never installed that plugin. We use some of the top internet security companies in the nation and they have reported to us that this is a zero-day hack probably carried out by leftist stay-behind networks hiding inside US intelligence agencies.”
So there you have it. It was the deep state.
Twit for Twat
Rejected submission by RandomFactor at 2018-11-04 23:05:57 from the Doubling down on dumb dept.
RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:
Twitter suspended Michael Knowles (a political commentator) three days prior to the election.
The reason was a rehash of one of the oldest election jokes there is, telling the other party to 'remember to vote November 7th!', this was a joke that was already made multiple times by commentators on the other side of the political divide.
There was the usual and predictable uproar from the usual suspects (#freeknowles)
Normally Twitter's playbook in this sort of situation is to ignore or blackhole discussion of it. In very rare cases with lots of visibility it is possible to even get the inappropriate suspension rescinded.
This time Twitter took a new approach, instead doubling down and suspending various prior posters of the same well worn joke, so now both sides of the aisle have been slapped down for a rehash of an antebellum joke.
So where does this leave us? Should we be
- happy they suspended someone whose claim to fame is writing a book without any words?
- angry they belatedly suspended multiple people on the the other side to appear unbiased?
- disgusted that they do this to anyone at all?
- when is GAB coming back?
More info: https://www.dailywire.com/news/37958/freeknowles-twitter-suspends-daily-wires-michael-emily-zanotti?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=051717-news&utm_campaign=dwtwitter [dailywire.com]
(Rejected and pending submissions are not listed.)
When perusing submissions from other people (ok, yes, a little bored.) I noticed that statement at the bottom of their listings.
Applying my extensive powers of deduction, I conclude that there is a chance that my rejected wit, brilliance, and occasional misses or mistakes are being lost for the ages just like BottomQuark circa 2004. (For some fun naval gazing, check the articles on the front page and compare them to articles 15 years later here.)
This is tragedy!
Combining this with the fact that I don't really have anything of note to say in journal entries (hence the stunning lack thereof up until now), henceforth I will post my submissions rejected by cold-hearted editors as 'journal entries' for your commentary and bemusement as appropriate.
Note that it is possible that some of these were rejected for valid reasons. Also they won't be editored into any form of presentability.
Orange Corn
More nutritious, better tasting, non-GMO ‘orange corn’ launches in US markets
But where is my goddamn 50 lb sack of Golden Rice?
