Slashback: Benchmarks, Sobig, Blob 285
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? inertia@yahoo.com 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!"
Well of course ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course they do, they didn't make this one. It's almost obsurd to think that there isn't some tie between anti-virus and virus creators. It may seem a little far fetched, but what better way to keep yourself in business than to make new business. Just like the mob ... some places would call this extortion, here we call it "Virus Protection"... guess if you call it something more than "Protection" it makes it okay.
The motive behind this virus was simple, spam blocking has actually gotten to be a threat to spammers, so what better way than relaying spam through innocent windows boxes on the internet. Though who knows maybe there's an unmarked envelope of cash sitting waiting for them. Or hell, maybe symantec didn't think they weren't making enough money and decided to take a little something from the spam industry to get a bonus for new sales.
Just because you pretend to not to see things in the world doesn't mean this world isn't the most evil cruel place immagineable.
What about Virtual PC for Windows? (Score:5, Interesting)
If they kill it, or more likely, make it so I can't run non-MS OS's, I will be severely bummed.
OTOH, if they kill it, I will be tempted to pay the big bucks and go with VMWare and host it using Linux.
And then deal with the fact that I don't get to play as many games. Sigh.
Wow.. it took MS as long as they said it would! (Score:5, Interesting)
From the Connectix Aquisition FAQ: [connectix.com]
Imagine that. Microsoft said it would take six months and it took *looking at my calendar* six months! So what was there to complain about?
Reading comprehension, gang. It's a good thing! Just think, if JWZ had that ability, he wouldn't have had that nasty little toothbrush problem [jwz.org]!!
about your cost comparison ($.02 warning) (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
They compared it to a Dell Xeon workstation which I agree with; it had the other peripherals and graphics power that someone doing rendering or other apps may need. For server uses and clustering, it would probably make sense for research orgs and renderfarm owners to wait for XServes, which will hopefully cost less than the desktop G5s.
Re:That's about as fair as it gets re: G5 speed. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to be a fanboy. But you're implying that AMD hasn't been real competition?
Seems like for roughly 3 of the last 4 years AMD was stomping Intel on a regular basis. Now they are in a lull between product lines and people completely write them off....
Re:That's about as fair as it gets re: G5 speed. (Score:3, Interesting)
In Vector FP math the G5 is going to mop the floor with just about anything you throw at it. If you were going to use the G5 for scientific number crunching it is entirely likely you'd do your best to vectorize as much of your code as possible. For such applications the G5 enjoys a 10x performance and thus price advantage over the Xeon based workstation you priced. For some people the G5 as a number crunching workhorse is going to be a real winner, for others the Xeon is going to keep the place running. Regardless of who uses it the G5 is pretty damn impressive.
Re:VPC (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I shouldn't moan about a rejected story but... (Score:2, Interesting)
P.S. Yeah, Yeah, I know sequels in trilogies such as BTTF were six months apart. But those movies each had separate scripts. They weren't originally one script and then split down the middle.
P.P.S. I'm really excited to see these movies >:D Even moreso than Revolutions.
Re:Bad Compilers for Apple G5 (Score:3, Interesting)
It was a SCADA system running on DEC MIPS-based superminis and Sun workstations some years ago. I no longer have access to that source code. Performance was a problem and some tests I ran showed that full optimization could improve one of them by 2X and the other by 4X, but when the whole system was compiled with optimization it simply didn't run. Like many software projects, there was no time at the moment to track down the failing modules and later it was possible that some selective optimization was performed after I left the project, but compilers that can't compile have always concerned me because some problems are not easy to verify results on. If you knew the results, you wouldn't have to be running the program to get them.
The author of the G5 test, whom I don't know how to contact, hasn't named the compilers, though I wish he would.
I've had no luck in my past attempts to submit an article to /., however someone else with better results might ask the question of faulty compilers. I'd expect it to get a lot of results.
Re:IBlist & IMDb (Score:3, Interesting)
That to me shows that book does indeed denote the form in which some sort of information is published, and not the nature of the information. Thus, comic books, poems, and plays that are all published in bound dead-tree format qualify, though internet books probably won't.
Re:Nasa G5 Benchmarks (Score:2, Interesting)
Basically, these numbers tell me that for the test run, P4's are roughly equal to a G5. Of course, it's the P4 at 2.66GHz that's equal to the 2GHz G5, but that can kinda be expected, because Intel seems to focus on processor speed (which is what sells the processors), instead of preformance/speed. And if you consider the cost, then the P4 wins hands-down.
I'm sure you can argue that for some things, the G5 is much faster than the P4, but you'd have to show me the tests that indicated that (as well as how you got them). Statistics can say anything you want them to.
Re:VPC (Score:2, Interesting)
Doesn't MS-Word actually already run in a semi-interpreted Java-like language they developed back in the early 90's?
If I recall correctly, the whole MS Office suite of apps (or at least the Word/Excel/Powerpoint portion thereof) do fork off from a set of shared code that was the evil incarnation known as Word 5 (or was it 6?) et al. You know, the version most Mac users still refer to in horror as "Office for Windows for Mac". From what I understand, the codebases for the respective platforms are now pretty much completely seperate, although I would guess that some of that bastard code still lurks...probably what makes it so damn slow and crash all of the time.
Of course, I'm probably just being bitter because no matter how many times I reinstall Office X, I still get freakin' "shared library [insert obscure alpha-numeric code of choice] can not be found" errors upon launching Excel.
Re:Where is everyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see, California covers 163707 square miles.
census.gov reports that the world population clock for 7/1/03 is 6302486693
6302486693 / 163707 = 38498.57 people per square mile (of california).
1 mile = 5280 feet
1 square mile = 27878400 square feet.
27878400 / 38498.57 = 724.14 square feet per person.
Although that doesn't give much space for growing food.
The United States covers 3618770 square miles...
That puts us at 1741.6 people per square mile, or give each person a measly 16007 square feet. Anyone think that they could be entirely self-sustaining inside of a box 400 feet by 400 feet? Including food production and sewer? That isn't much larger than the average city block.
Now, this is assuming that the entire world is stuffed into the area of the united states, and all of the area, including Alaska is used, so much of that area is not very habitable.
Saying that everyone can FIT into a place is much different from saying that we have too large a population for the natural resources to sustain. And the sustainability all depends on how we use those resources....do we buy computers that use 9 square meters of raw materials per ounce of silicon wafer (if I remember right), or do we use products that can be produced with minimal environmental impact?