Slashback: Benchmarks, Sobig, Blob

Slashback is back, with more this time around on NASA's G5 benchmarks, an in-depth look at the Sobig.E virus, an update on the Internet Book List (growing rapidly), the fate of both the Microsoft-purchased Virtual PC and one very unlucky sperm whale, and more. Read on for the details.

A good excuse to file purchase orders, too. Eug writes "Writing in this Ars thread, Craig Hunter of NASA gives details about his much-quoted dual-G5 Power Mac benchmarks listed here. This should answer some of the questions posed around the net about the methodology and potentially the validity of his benchmarks."

The lines between viruses and spam is thin enough already. Joe Stewart writes "There have been a lot of news stories lately about how Sobig and spam are tied together. I actually revealed this in a paper two months ago. Now with the widespread Sobig.e, it seems to have become a topic again. However, the major antivirus companies have once again left out the whole story - most of them currently rate Sobig.e as 'low damage.' This is because they haven't fully understood how the real payload of Sobig.e is delivered. I've written a followup paper describing the entire mechanism that Sobig.e uses to facilitate spam, identity theft and bank fraud. Sobig has evolved, and it is much harder to stop than before."

Is this the beginning of a long goodbye? [e-mail] writes "Microsoft has updated their Mactopia Web Site to include a section on Virtual PC. It's taken them since February 2003 to do this. On the site, they mention, 'In August 2003, Virtual PC for Mac will be available through standard Microsoft channels of distribution.' So it looks like they aren't killing it after all."

Simplicity itself is a nice ideal. webword writes "Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark is now available online. As you might recall, Joe was interviewed on Slashdot back in December. Good stuff if you care about accessibility."

Not yet billions and billions served, but getting there. nzilla writes "The Internet Book List, which announced its creation earlier this year on /. has now reached 10,000+ entries and is still going strong. The Internet Book List (IBList) strives to be the IMDb of books. IBList is maintained exclusively by volunteers around the world."

Girlfriends drive strange endeavors. ceejayoz writes "This interesting article on MSNBC.com details the Degree Confluence Project - a project to gather a photographic record of the points on Earth where latitude and longitude lines meet. The article has links to some of the more interesting points. The project's website also has an interesting map showing all the completed confluence points."

We mentioned this project quite some time ago, and it's progressed quite a bit since then.

Uh, sir, you have some blubber on your collar there. Scoria writes "Chilean scientists have determined that a 12-meter mass of flesh discovered recently on a Pacific beach is actually a sperm whale, not an obscure 'giant octopus' as many researchers speculated. Scientists performing research at the Museum of Natural History in Santiago were the first to develop this conclusion after observing the presence of dermal glands unique to the species."

Code that pays tribute to the money in television. mondainx writes "Following(?) in the footsteps of Linksys, Tivo has made their source available for versions 2.0 through 4.0. Get the GPL source here. Sweet!"

IBlist & IMDb

[aeinome]

IMDb really shouldn't be called the Internet Movie Database anymore. They cover TV shows as well. Does this mean the IBList will go beyond books (novels, short stories, etc.) in into "literary works"? (comic books, poems, plays) Just a thought.

Where is everyone?

[blate]

What I found odd about the confluence points was that almost none of them where in populated areas. It just seems a little strange.

I guess it just goes to show that no matter how overpopulated the world seems, there is still a lot of wide-open space out there.

Re:VPC

[WatertonMan]

Actually Microsoft plans on bundling VPC with Office as a kind of "high end" version.

One can't help but wonder if it will use some of VPC's functions to help port software.

Doesn't MS-Word actually already run in a semi-interpreted Java-like language they developed back in the early 90's? I seem to recall something like that. Of course I think that Mac Zealot's complaints about MS-Word are vastly overstated. Especially when one compares to to the horrible status of AppleWorks which is a half-hearted carbon port and which still has lots of Sys9 elements to it. Yeah I'd like more OSX interface features like the font choser in Word. But its still vastly superior to any other choices on OSX.

sobig and danger ratings

[jeffy124]

AV firms are probably giving that virus a low rating because it lacks damage to the actual computer, meaning it doesnt delete/corrupt data. I think AV companies need to add a "Societal Threat:" field to viruses. In which case sobig is "highly dangerous."

IBList Automation

[heli0]

It seems that for each book they have: Title, Year, Author, Synopsis, Language, ISBN# and Genre. It seems there are already sites out there *cough*Amazon*cough* where a bot could scour this information for millions of titles.

Bad Compilers for Apple G5

[Nom du Keyboard]

Craig Hunter of NASA gives details about his much-quoted dual-G5 Power Mac benchmarks listed here.

When you read his latest comments he notes that several Fortran compilers gave faulty results, some depending on optimizations selected. THIS IS SCARY, to say the least. Even years ago I knew of C code that broke for no known reason when optimizations were selected.

What does it take to start a /. article about faulty compilers. This ought to be a big deal.

The IBlist is kind of poor

[chadamir]

I have a few beefs with the book list that I will air here as I do not see a means to on their site. - No button to submit corrections(I saw tons of mistakes) - Peoples real names were listed as pseduonyms rather than having their fake names as nom de plume and then a separate section for real names. - Books were listed by the year of their most recent printing rather than their original publishing. - The above could have easily been acknowledged but they dont even have a section for this - I saw things miscatogorized as novels that were just individual poems. It's a good endeavor but I don't see how it beats going to amazon and just typing in the authors name.

Re:Where is everyone?

[John Hasler]

> I guess it just goes to show that no matter how
> overpopulated the world seems, there is still a
> lot of wide-open space out there.

You have an urbanite's notion of "wide-open space".

VPC

[madsenj37]

Microsoft will not kill off VPC for many reasons. 1. It can sell a licensed copy of Windows with every product. They are a software company, so this is good for them. 2. They can limit VPC to use only windows products. This pushes their software over the competitors. 3. They can discontinue products for the mac and make people use VPC for compatability until they are willing to switch over to their platform. Either way, its Microsoft software they are using. 4.They have a way for people/companies to run older Microsoft OSes inside the new ones ... such as running NT inside of Server 2003.

Re:sobig and danger ratings

[ewhac]

It may not damage the computer itself, but it will seriously damage the reputation of the computer's owner, who will be falsely branded a spammer and get cut off the net. This should be of serious concern to computer owners and, as such, the virus should be rated as highly dangerous.

Schwab

Re:Well of course ...

[groomed]

If Symantec is anything like any of the companies I've worked for, they are way too busy just attending the regular day-to-day business to invent and distribute new viruses. It's absurd to think that they could be this efficient, releasing new viruses into the wild every couple of months that work this well. Much easier, and probably just as effective, to just throw around some inflated numbers, like claiming billions upon billions in damages and what not.

Re:That's about as fair as it gets re: G5 speed.

[groomed]

AMD had a great product with the Athlon a few years ago, but they never managed to shake off the low-cost hobbyist image and never really competed with Intel for the markets where Intel has traditionally been the strongest, i.e. business & industry.

AMDs 64 bit offering is an attempt to finally challenge Intel's dominance in those markets, but its very late, and apart from (again) the hobbyists and perhaps a few scientists who are low on funds, nobody is planning to support it (Microsoft? Yeah, right. Look what happened to Microsoft's support for PPC and Alpha).

You should see it the other way around. Intel has been stomping the entire CPU industry for the past quarter century.

Re:Where is everyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, but what percentage of that land is both:
* productive (i.e. useful farmland, natural resource deposits, etc)
AND
* undeveloped

Just because you see a lot of corn fields all over the central united states doesn't mean "gee we could build a manhattan-denisity city accross all that and have a trillion people there" They have nothing to eat.

Even if you live in a studio apartment in some city somewhere there's still many acres of the earth's surface needed to provide you with the resources you consume from the planet.

CNN (actually Reuters) actually had a decent article about this [cnn.com] the other day.

Re:about your cost comparison ($.02 warning)

[virtual_mps]

The dual Xeon 2.4Ghz you speak of, what are its other features? Firewire? USB2? Serial ATA? What video card? Apple sells a package, so you can't really compare it to that server setup.

Sure you can. The problem with "packages" is that the package is only good if it contains exactly the set of features that you need. It might well be that a machine used for computations doesn't need firewire, usb2, serial ata, or a video card. It probably does need networking (and both the apple and many xeons include gigabit, but you'd need to buy an add-in card for either if you wanted quad or fiber gigabit).

Internet Book List ownership

[unger]

hmmm, i'm a bit hesitant to contribute my time and energy to this database without a stronger guarantee of public ownership.

from the Internet Book List site:

Policy and ownership
IBList is not a commercial venture, nor a real legal entity in any sense. All the data on IBList has been entered by its users. We the creators of IBList, while giving it our best effort, do not guarantee the accuracy nor the quality of the information within the website. We do reserve the right to correct any errors we find within and remove or change any material we find abusive or otherwise unsuitable. We do not claim any ownership over the user-submitted data.

didn't the IMdb start out as a public database? then there was the CDDB fiasco. freedb says everything is GPL'd. i didn't think you could GPL data, can you?

i'd also like to know i'll be able to download the database file prior to contributing.