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? 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!"

Comments

Poor Sperm Whales

[Mshift2x]

First they get hosed when scientist were handing out animal names....now this!

Re:Poor Sperm Whales

[Xeger]

Actually, I've heard it was sailors who first gave the sperm whale its interesting name.

The sperm whale has a huge reservoir of liquid in its head, with an oily sheen and a translucent, pale white color. The liquid solidifies under pressure (when the whale dives); current scientific thinking has it that the change in the liquid's density helps the whale adjust its buoyancy.

When early whaling crews first killed one of the beasties and slit it open, they encountered the oily stuff in its head but didn't know what it was....being sex-starved sailors, they jumped to conclusions, called the substance spermaceti, and named the whale after his unique feature: gallons and gallons of sperm in its head!

Re:Poor Sperm Whales

[bad_fx]

Hey, at least they didn't blow it up.

Re:Poor Sperm Whales

[Anonymous Coward]

In which case, shouldn't it be called semen... uhhh, ok, I guess why given these men were seamen after all....

Re:Poor Sperm Whales

[marko123]

The Japanese call them Bukake Whales.

Re:Poor Sperm Whales

[Xeger]

Actually, I'm sure it was natural philosophers who coined the actual term "spermaceti"; the sailors called it jizz or cum or whatever one called the male ejaculate, circa 1600.

From Thomas Beale's "The Natural History of the Sperm Whale," 1840:

"What spermaceti is," (says Sir Thomas Brown, in his work published in 1686, third book, chap. xxv. p.139,) "men might justly doubt, since the learned Hofmannus, in his work of thirty years, saith plainly nescio quid sit, and therefore need not wonder at the variety of opinions, while some conceived it to be flos maries, and many a 'bituminous substance floating upon the sea.' That it was not the spawn of the whale, according to vulger conceit or nominal appellation, philosophers have always doubted, not easily conceiving the seminal humour of animals should be inflammable, or of a floating nature.

So you see, even before sperm were known to people, spermaceti (though probably not known by that name) was considered to be somehow involved with the reproduction of the whale, in much the same way that human semen was known to be involved with the reproduction of humans even though its exact nature was unknown.

Re:Poor Sperm Whales

[ComaVN]

With sperm not being discovered until 1676,

I find this highly doubtful. Surely they must have noticed the stuff before that.

And in other news...

[Zeddicus_Z]

...a shattered bowl of petunias was found close by the splattered sperm whale. Police are treating the death of the petunias as suspicious.

Re:And in other news...

[JWSmythe]

"Oh no, not again."

{crash}

Re:And in other news...

[JoeShmoe950]

And all the white mice die

Re:And in other news...

[Jon Abbott]

I don't get it. What is this a reference to?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book series, by Douglas Adams, of course! Do please purchase or borrow copies and read them, won't you? Alternatively you can listen to the BBC radio show version that came out before the books did. When you find yourself sufficiently mesmerised, be sure to visit the BBC's online shrine to the series, the man behind the series, and generally all things pan-galactic in nature.

VPC

[darkov]

'... Virtual PC for Mac will be available through standard Microsoft channels of distribution.' So it looks like they aren't killing it after all.

No, they're just going to mediocre it to death.

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.

Re:VPC

[Mainframes ROCK!]

I agree, they can't pull too many tricks with this as a RealPC is returning. RealPC was as good as Virtual PC up until about release 3 or so of Virtual PC, with a little more work it could be again. This is probably why Microsoft is giving them grief; on the FWB home page they say "FWB has pushed back the release date of its Beta Version of PowerWindows (formerly SoftWindows) later this summer due to issues relating to Microsoft."

Re:VPC

[the argonaut]

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.

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.

Re:IBlist & IMDb

[lommer]

I fail to see why comic books, poems, and plays do not qualify as books. From m-w.com, "book: a set of written, printed, or blank sheets bound together into a volume".

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.

Zealots! All of you!

[Valar]

Hm. I wonder how long until some /. arm-chair technologist declares NASA a facist-Mac-worshipping-zealot organization. Maybe he/she will top it off by saying, "Well, if they really do use macs, I have trouble believing they could have possibly landed on the moon."

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: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".

Re:Where is everyone?

[Eevee]

In Mary Pride's book The Way Home, she calculated that you could give every person in the world 2,000 square feet (which is larger than most homes) and everyone would fit into the state of Texas.

Yeah, but you'd really, really have to hate everyone in the world to put them all in Texas.

Re:Where is everyone?

[deranged unix nut]

If I calculated it right, given 724 square feet each, the current world's population could fit in California.

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?

Re:Where is everyone?

[sniggly]

It does explain why neo looked so stunned after waking up from the pill and seeing all these thousands of humans in their pods. "wow, efficient!!!!"

Well of course ...

[SuperDuG]

However, the major antivirus companies have once again left out the whole story - most of them currently rate Sobig.e as 'low damage.'

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.

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.

What about Virtual PC for Windows?

[corebreech]

Virtual PC for Windows is indispensible. I do so many great things with it...

• running Linux and BSD
  
• testing code on different Windows versions
  
• having Virtual PC create an entire network of machines on my desktop so I can do network development
  
• sandboxing weird code I might get over the Internet
  
• justifying having lots and lots of RAM
  
• etc.
  

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.

Re:What about Virtual PC for Windows?

[Mainframes ROCK!]

I disagree. For the past while I have been doing tech support using VMWare running Windows 2000 on a Windows 2000 host. On the guest images I run a VPN client, Office, remote control software (Timbuktu or NetMeeting); works very nicely. The important thing is to have a fast host (of course) and lots of RAM on the host; I have 768MB on the host and usually 192-256MB defined for the guest. With this I can run the 2 guests I need at very good speeds. The thing you want to avoid is dual paging, that is, having both the guest and host doing VM paging, that really kills performance.

Wow.. it took MS as long as they said it would!

[jbuilder]

"Microsoft has updated their Mactopia Web Site to include a section on Virtual PC. It's taken them since February 2003 to do this.

From the Connectix Aquisition FAQ:

Q: What is the duration of the transition period after this transaction?
A: The transition period is approximately six months from today (February 20, 2003).

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!!

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

[SlashChick]

Craig does seem to be about as fair as he can be regarding the G5 benchmarks he posted. If you read the whole thread, you will see that he used several different methodologies (compiler options and various compilers, mostly) to optimize both the P4 and G5 code.

Here are Craig's final numbers, as posted on Ars's website:

dual G4-1GHz Xserve (single CPU only): 105
dual G4-1GHz Xserve (both CPUs): 207
dual G4-1.25GHz PowerMac (single CPU only): 129
dual G4-1.25GHz PowerMac (both CPUs): 256
dual G5-2GHz PowerMac (single CPU only): 254
dual G5-2GHz PowerMac (both CPUs): 498
single P4 2GHz: 192
single P4 2.66GHz: 255
single P4 3.2GHz (extrapolated): 307

These numbers seem entirely reasonable to me. A single G5/2GHz G5 is approximately equivalent to a single P4/2.66GHz. This rings true to me -- Intel has never been known to squeeze every last bit of performance out of every chip, instead opting to continually push for higher and higher raw MHz. Thus, on a purely MHz/performance basis, Apple wins (as has been the case for years.)

However, in the dual-processor arena, things get muddier. Intel should have dual 3.4GHz Xeons by the time Apple's G5s are shipping. In raw performance, based on these numbers, the Xeon will have an edge over the G5. Plus, it will be priced lower... I priced a dual Xeon 2.4GHz with 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive for a company that is buying a game server from us, and even with a 1U form factor (which is more expensive than a standard desktop case), the price came to $1705... a bit more than half the cost of the dual G5/2.0GHz. There is no question that the dual Xeon will outperform the G5 both in terms of raw performance and cost. The P4, however, doesn't have much edge over the G5 except for the cost.

For most of us, who are probably sitting on machines around 1-2GHz, almost all of the machines above, including the P4/2.66 and a single G5, will be a healthy upgrade. Despite Apple's high price point, I for one am happy to see them get back into the game... and I'm happy to see Intel have some real competition. A big thanks to Craig for doing the benchmarks... I'm sure this is just the first of many arguments about which machine is better!

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

[captain_craptacular]

and I'm happy to see Intel have some real competition

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.

[Rura Penthe]

Yes, in scalar FP. If you vectorize this same app then the G5 trounces everything by nearly 10x. Of course only scientific applications (and very few of those at that) can really be vectorized in that fashion. :) But if you're doing vector fluid dynamics calculations you can't beat any machine with Altivec!

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

[Graymalkin]

Craig also said in his paper that the 20% performance advantage the 3.2GHz P4 enjoyed over the G5 could be made up for with G5 specific optimizations made to the Jet3D code. The code tested was basically the G4 savvy version. It is interesting that even using wholly unoptimized code the G5 trounced the G4 and held up pretty well to the P4. Depending on the application I would bet the G5 could keep up with a 3.2GHz P4 in scalar FP math.

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

[Graymalkin]

I've seen some links like that before regarding 64-bit integer math with AltiVec so I went delving and found that awesome page. The factorX example runs PDQ on my 867MHz G4. There's also the vecLib.framework which you may or may not know about. It's got several methods for multiprescision integer math using AltiVec.

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."

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

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.

Re:Whales

[The Bungi]

Probably signed up for Earthlink, logged into Slashdot and clicked on a goatse link. Heart attack and the rest is blubber.

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.

Re:Bad Compilers for Apple G5

[Nom du Keyboard]

What's the C code that broke for no known reason? Let's get the ball rolling

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:Whales

[RollingThunder]

They die, they bloat from rotting, they float for a while (the skin is really tough) until they finally rupture. The fatty chunks that washed up are all that's left by that point.

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:The IBlist is kind of poor

[Sabalon]

IMDB started off as a database on three computers with an e-mail interface. It's got better.

Hopefully this will.

Actually, the hobbit was listed as 1937. I would think if they were gonna make an IMDB kinda thing, they would have added some more of the cool stuff from the start.

about your cost comparison ($.02 warning)

[pimpinmonk]

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: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).

ISBN.nu

[autopr0n]

What about isbn.nu? That site's been around for years and does much the same thing as this booklist site.

hmmmm

[Vilim]

Hmmm, I recal Douglas Adams saying something about a sperm whale in the middle of nowhere "As they approached the ridge of higher ground they became aware that it seemed to be circular - a crater about a hundred and fifty yards wide. Round the outside of the crater the sloping ground was spattered with black and red lumps. They stopped and looked at a piece. It was wet. It was rubbery. With horror they suddenly realized that it was fresh whalemeat. At the top of the crater's lip they met Zaphod. "Look," he said, pointing into the crater. In the centre lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn't lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot. The silence was only disturbed by the slight involuntary spasms of Trillian's throat. "I suppose there's no point in trying to bury it?" murmured Arthur, and then wished he hadn't. Now, the most logical explanation of this, is that in another dimension Earth was actually Magrathea (sp?) and this sperm whale was dropped out of the sky from the Heart of Gold. It then went through time and dimensions to wind up on earth. See, explains it perfectly :p

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.

How about that....

[Anonymous Coward]

Chilean scientists have determined that a 12-meter mass
of flesh discovered recently on a Pacific beach is actually CmdrTaco.

See
What
I
Mean?

available for a nominal fee

[comnenos]

On the tivo site, to get a copy of the source code by mail, it gives a mailing address (no phone) and says: "You will be charged a nominal fee for reproduction, shipping and handling costs, as allowed by the GPL." Anybody wonder what that nominal fee is? How would that work, you mail them asking for it, they mail you back, say what it costs, then you mail them? And who decides what a nominal fee is, even? Why not just say code available for $5 or whatever? I realize that the GPL may not say you have to tell people what the "nominal fee" is, but wouldn't that just make everyone's life easier?

And how would you enforce that part of the GPL in court? This haziness isn't the fault of Tivo, but rather of the FSF. Maybe as far as the company is concerned it takes several hours of labor at $50 an hour to get you that c.d. of code, so would have to pay $300?

Anyhoo, I think that everyone will just download the code off the website as it's there for free.

The IBList

[winkydink]

The Internet Book List, which announced its creation earlier this year on /. has now reached 10,000+ entries and is still going strong.

The only problem is that 9,500 of the books are about unicorns or elves.

Re:The IBList

[madpierre]

Of the remaining. 499 are about Unicorns and Elves. 1 is the index.

That's nothing.

[s20451]

How do you think Uranus feels?

(waits for a goatse link)

Re:I shouldn't moan about a rejected story but...

[mcp33p4n75]

Yeah, I was kind of shocked to hear this story also. But, don't be so naive. The reason it was split up wasn't because of projected ticket losses. Miramax split it up because they can make more than twice as much money this way. If I have to go twice to the theater to see one movie, that's twice as much money. But look just how much hype the Matrix sequels are getting. Some part of that is because they're split up. After you see Reloaded you just have to see Revolutions. With all that hype about what's going to happen, you don't mind paying twice as much. Plus, more people than would normally see the movie will get drawn into the hype and have to see it also. I thought the marketing by the Matrix people was ingenius, but I sure hope it doesn't turn into a fad.

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:Nasa G5 Benchmarks

[jdhutchins]

Well, you have to think about the data for a second. It's basically saying that 2 G5 @ 2GHz are about the same as two P4's, 2.66GHz. That's not much of a biggie. The parts that you have bolded show that you didn't think about it. You're saying that 2 processors kick the butt of one processor. That's not suprising, that's what should have happened.

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.

TiVo a leader, not a follower

[Burdell]

Both my original Series1 TiVo and my newer Series2 have a section in the manual with the GNU GPL and the URL for their kernel and GNU utilities source. They've been legal from the beginning, unlike Linksys.

TiVo has been a leader in releasing the required source and a little more; they also provide the compiler toolchain used to build the kernel (which is not required, but a nice touch, since it allows users to easily build additional binaries with the same toolchain).

Re:Nasa G5 Benchmarks

[htmlboy]

dual G5-2GHz PowerMac (both CPUs): 498 single P4 2GHz: 192 single P4 2.66GHz: 255 single P4 3.2GHz (extrapolated): 307
Not only did the score of the G5 with both CPUs make me say "Holy shit" out loud in front of my comp (seriously!), but it also kicks the piss out of the P4! So, Apple does have one of the fastest machines around!

so two 2.0 GHz cpus are faster than a single 3.2 GHz cpu? i fail to see why this is surprising.

Hey!

[chriso11]

You forgot to include:
A reading from the holy book, as written by the prophet Adams, you insenstive clod!

Re:Wonder no longer!

[JWSmythe]

I make a run for the old Russian probe, sacrifice all my fellow explorers in the process, blow up an insane dog robot, climb into a rock sample container with no air and a one-way ticket, get saved by a hot chick that's been sitting in the safety of her spaceship for a week, and bone her for the whole trip back to Earth.

just like last time...

And they said, "what are the odds of *THAT* happening twice?"

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.

Wrong on Tivo

[The Wicked Priest]

As a couple of posters have pointed out, Tivo has always (or for a long time, anyway) released code under the GPL. I'd just like to add that Tivo is actually getting more restrictive about what you can do with their boxen. The Series 2 Tivos are more difficult to hack than Series 1's, and they're making them even moreso with each software revision.

Although they give you the source code for the kernel, that doesn't mean that you can change it -- not and still expect your Tivo to work, anyway. The boot PROM (think "BIOS") in the Series 2 checks that the kernel it's booting is signed with Tivo's key. Then, a program in the initrd checks everything on the root partition to see that it's not modified, either. With the initial software that came out with the Series 2, it was possible to get around this by setting BASH_ENV as a kernel option in the drive's boot page, but they "fixed" that in the next revision.

Now, to hack a Series 2, you have to either stick to old software, play two-card monte with the kernel, or reprogram the PROM -- which requires desoldering it from the motherboard, since it can't be done in software from the Tivo.

I've done the kmonte thing, and it works well -- in that context, the kernel source is actually useful, since you can boot anything you like as the second kernel. But you still have to devote a couple partitions to the old software (after first getting a copy of it) that allows the BASH_ENV hack. Doubtless this will not work once there's a Tivo Series 3. :-(

Oh, and it probably goes without saying, but Tivo's GPL'ed software doesn't include the main applications -- the bits that actually handle TV.