> I have an "early slashdot worm story alert system" built in to my DSL connection. I found out about this around midnight last night, when my DSL connection proceeded to crawl to a slow, and even google was returning results with considerable lag. Anyone else so lucky to have a system such as mine?
[Sorry, I already posted this in another thread.] I'm still on dialup, so lags are the norm for me. But my Inbox still gives the new e-mail worms away before the security announcements go out. I was tempted to submit a story about this Wednesday night!
> If Linux was the mainstream OS, we would be in the possition MS is today.. all worms would hit Linux. Linux isnt the cure for worms, OpenSource programs contains as much securityholes as MS products. It might be eayer to fix and all, but Linux has the same problem as MS when it comes to that users should actualy _update_ there machines.
AFAICT this is another human "click that attachment!" engineering worm. The issue really isn't Linux and Windows, it's applications and users.
We'll have this kind of stuff on Linux the day similar e-mail "click that attachment!" clients become popular on Linux and the userbase degenerates to a similar level of clubieness.
For the same reason, Microsoft's much publicized month of security bug fixing didn't, and could not, make this go away. It's all about application design and user cluefulness.
> Translation: this worm only compromises and damages Microsoft systems, and only propagates on Microsoft systems; its effect on the rest of us is basically the shrapnel (as always).
Yes, I knew there was a new virus on the loose a full day before I saw it on any news site, because of the sudden influx of e-messages with 110K attachments in my inbox.
> > Apparently they never got so far as Chapter 1 in Hennesy & Patterson, where you learn the mantra of "make the common case fast".
> Apparently YOU never got so far as Chapter 1 of the Mac OS X system architecture guide
Of course not. While it's reasonable to suppose that a chip designer is familiar with the contents of Hennessey and Patterson, there's no reason to suppose that a Linux dweeb would have read any of the OSX documentation.
> where it says "we use single-precision floating point arithmetic for everything."
> When you draw something to the screen in OS X, whether it's through Quartz 2D or a higher-level API, you specify pixel locations as floats. That's right, your window is 200.0 pixels by 300.0 pixels. And you can use fractional values, too. A pixel at 200.5 gets antialiased between 200 and 201.
> Mac OS X is a VERY floating-point intensive operating system. The only ints in the system foundation APIs are bools and enums. Everything else is floats, floats, floats.
That's very interesting, and it surely indicates that OSX is more fp-intensive than other platforms. But I'm not sure it means that fp operations are the common case. Surely a typical application will do more than make calls to that API? Surely all the counters, indices, and addresses that do so much of the grunt work in any program are still processed by the integer ALU?
And lots of integer operations don't even show up explicitly in a program's source code. You can't even print a string without iteratively incrementing an index. And a simple expression like A[i] hides two integer calculations required for accessing the value, regardless of the data type of the array. So unless the G5 has a special ALU in the data path for performing these rudimentary operations, almost any program is going to be soaked in integer calculations at the machine-code level which would have to be handled by the same ALU tested by the integer benchmark.
[Of course, that's not an argument that integer operations are the common case. I don't know how you could tell without instrumenting your code to count integer and fp operations.]
Also, notice that even if we suppose that fp operations are in fact the common case, that would tell us something very interesting about these benchmarks: it would say that the purported 20% fp speedup vis-a-vis Intel is no longer an interesting comparison for programs that use the OSX API; the interesting comparison would be whether OSX can do these things faster in fp than an Intel OS can do the same things with integers. The relative performances on the SPEC benchmarks are no longer useful for the analysis.
Don't get me wrong; I think the x86 architecture is a kludgey piece of crap. I'd certainly rather have a G5, if all else were equal. But KPoC or not, we should still think critically about the claims of benchmarketers and fans.
> By the way... aren't you the Black Parrot who about a year ago got stone-cold-busted for making false claims about Microsoft? Something about your company being put out of business by Microsoft or something? Claims that later turned out to be false?
Heh, I remember that thread. Some lamer was arguing incessantly that Microsoft had never crushed any of the competition, and since he couldn't actually win that argument he decided instead to crow when I didn't give him some meatspace biographical information he wanted, as if he had actually scored a point in the debate.
But I'm curious why you say 'busted'. Ignoring the slim, slim possibility that some overzealous idiot mistook a wisecrack for a statement of fact, wouldn't 'busting' someone require some actual knowledge of the fact? I.e. in this case knowing the complete employment history of the person or persons posting as Black Parrot, and going down that list to ensure that none of those companies had ever been crushed by Microsoft?
> Well.. you can have my 8-bit commodore 64 for free.. so the bang for the buck is infinite..
Good point (as well as funny). It calls attention to the fact that for any serious evaluation on the basis of bang/buck there is likely to be a lower bound on the amount of bang required and an upper bound on the amount of bucks you can spend, so that certain regions on a bang/buck graph are going to be "shaded out" and excluded from purchase considerations.
Also, the boundaries of those exclusion regions are likely to be fuzzy. Although the mathematical model for the value of money is linear, our subjective valuation of it surely isn't, so that if you have two systems with the same bang/buck ratio they may not have the same appeal to the purchaser.
> A G5 is faster than the fastest Intel box with Linux. Read the benchmark whitepaper. It describes the testing methodology in precise detail. In a side-by-side, controlled test, the single-processor G5 was 10% slower on integer performance but 20% faster on floating point performance than the Pentium 4 with Linux.
Apparently they never got so far as Chapter 1 in Hennesy & Patterson, where you learn the mantra of "make the common case fast".
> I am a straight guy with a girlfriend and a life and I like to play girl characters. Why? I mainly play games that involve blowing things up, and I think girls with guns are sexy.
> How many people will be shorting SCO stock tomorrow morning?
Holding on to SCOX may not be a vote of confidence in SCO's business plan; it may be a vote of no confidence in the US legal system.
And there are plenty of folk out there who can afford to throw away a few thousand dollars on SCOX now on the extremely slim chance that it will be worth 10x a year or two from now.
> At this point, I think it would take me and my loved ones being flogged with bundles of stinging nettles that have been dipped in hot sauce and rolled in salt, while listening to Celine Dion sing that Titanic song accompanied by an orchestra of bagpipes.
Aye, matey, that would really spoil the bagpipe music.
> They are not the only western soldiers in Congo, the Belgians are sending troops too (heck, another country the US loves to hate right now), but those are mainly restricted to medical teams and transport due to historical sensitivities in the former colony.
As I understand it there are other nations' peacekeeping troops there, but everyone other than the French is giving way to stay out of any fights. The French are ordering the combatants out of towns and threatening force if they don't comply.
> No. Look at the map. Or did they plan to invade Sweden, too? It was about iron ore.
They wanted to seize the ice-free port Narvik and use it to stage overland aid to Finland via Sweden. Norway demurred, so the British decided to do it by force. They counted on the Norwegians to show token resistance and then go along with it.
And of course, it was about ore. Britain wanted to 'secure' Narvik for the same reason Germany did.
> Invading neutal contries to help other neutral contries defend against invaders?
> I know you didn't draw any conclusions from Finland being allied with Germany, but before anyone else does, I would like to point out two things:
> 1) Russia sought to invade Finland > 2) No one else would help
Actually, Britain tried to. In fact they were going to invade Norway to open a port where they could put troops into Finland from the north. They actually lanched the troopships for the invasion, but bad weather made them turn back and the Germans occupied Norway just a few days later. IIRC both invasion forces were actually at sea simultaneously.
> I know it's the in thing now to bag on "those French cowards" but...
Also "in" to ignore the fact that French troops are the only Western soldiers trying to stop the horror in the Congo right now.
Three million people have died in the Congo over the past four years, but the members of the "Coalition of the Willing" who were so eager to 'rescue' the people of Iraq are falling all over themselves to see who can ignore what's happening in Africa the best.
> I am plesently suprised that my anti-spam encoded email address still has not been spammed. [...] It wouldnt take much to find and decode most of the simple spam-protected email addresses. [...] But pretty soon I suspect we will get much cleverer email collecting tools and the problem is going to get to the scale of the virus/anti-virus stage.
Then we'll start putting "nospam" in our real addresses!
Slashdot Mirror
> I have an "early slashdot worm story alert system" built in to my DSL connection. I found out about this around midnight last night, when my DSL connection proceeded to crawl to a slow, and even google was returning results with considerable lag. Anyone else so lucky to have a system such as mine?
[Sorry, I already posted this in another thread.] I'm still on dialup, so lags are the norm for me. But my Inbox still gives the new e-mail worms away before the security announcements go out. I was tempted to submit a story about this Wednesday night!
> If Linux was the mainstream OS, we would be in the possition MS is today.. all worms would hit Linux. Linux isnt the cure for worms, OpenSource programs contains as much securityholes as MS products. It might be eayer to fix and all, but Linux has the same problem as MS when it comes to that users should actualy _update_ there machines.
AFAICT this is another human "click that attachment!" engineering worm. The issue really isn't Linux and Windows, it's applications and users.
We'll have this kind of stuff on Linux the day similar e-mail "click that attachment!" clients become popular on Linux and the userbase degenerates to a similar level of clubieness.
For the same reason, Microsoft's much publicized month of security bug fixing didn't, and could not, make this go away. It's all about application design and user cluefulness.
> Translation: this worm only compromises and damages Microsoft systems, and only propagates on Microsoft systems; its effect on the rest of us is basically the shrapnel (as always).
Yes, I knew there was a new virus on the loose a full day before I saw it on any news site, because of the sudden influx of e-messages with 110K attachments in my inbox.
> Astronauts have again found ice on mars which scientists speculate could be evidence of life, just as they have on previous missions.
And I didn't even know that NASA was up for a funding vote this week.
> Oh...kay. Call me strange, I've never really considered a "big pocket of trapped hydrogen gas on Mars" much of a turn-on, but to each his own.
At least it isn't methane!
> > The open-source development community is an international treasure and should be protected as such
> Exactly! And what do you do with international treasure?
If you're a pirate, you try to get your hands on it.
> > Apparently they never got so far as Chapter 1 in Hennesy & Patterson, where you learn the mantra of "make the common case fast".
> Apparently YOU never got so far as Chapter 1 of the Mac OS X system architecture guide
Of course not. While it's reasonable to suppose that a chip designer is familiar with the contents of Hennessey and Patterson, there's no reason to suppose that a Linux dweeb would have read any of the OSX documentation.
> where it says "we use single-precision floating point arithmetic for everything."
> When you draw something to the screen in OS X, whether it's through Quartz 2D or a higher-level API, you specify pixel locations as floats. That's right, your window is 200.0 pixels by 300.0 pixels. And you can use fractional values, too. A pixel at 200.5 gets antialiased between 200 and 201.
> Mac OS X is a VERY floating-point intensive operating system. The only ints in the system foundation APIs are bools and enums. Everything else is floats, floats, floats.
That's very interesting, and it surely indicates that OSX is more fp-intensive than other platforms. But I'm not sure it means that fp operations are the common case. Surely a typical application will do more than make calls to that API? Surely all the counters, indices, and addresses that do so much of the grunt work in any program are still processed by the integer ALU?
And lots of integer operations don't even show up explicitly in a program's source code. You can't even print a string without iteratively incrementing an index. And a simple expression like A[i] hides two integer calculations required for accessing the value, regardless of the data type of the array. So unless the G5 has a special ALU in the data path for performing these rudimentary operations, almost any program is going to be soaked in integer calculations at the machine-code level which would have to be handled by the same ALU tested by the integer benchmark.
[Of course, that's not an argument that integer operations are the common case. I don't know how you could tell without instrumenting your code to count integer and fp operations.]
Also, notice that even if we suppose that fp operations are in fact the common case, that would tell us something very interesting about these benchmarks: it would say that the purported 20% fp speedup vis-a-vis Intel is no longer an interesting comparison for programs that use the OSX API; the interesting comparison would be whether OSX can do these things faster in fp than an Intel OS can do the same things with integers. The relative performances on the SPEC benchmarks are no longer useful for the analysis.
Don't get me wrong; I think the x86 architecture is a kludgey piece of crap. I'd certainly rather have a G5, if all else were equal. But KPoC or not, we should still think critically about the claims of benchmarketers and fans.
> By the way... aren't you the Black Parrot who about a year ago got stone-cold-busted for making false claims about Microsoft? Something about your company being put out of business by Microsoft or something? Claims that later turned out to be false?
Heh, I remember that thread. Some lamer was arguing incessantly that Microsoft had never crushed any of the competition, and since he couldn't actually win that argument he decided instead to crow when I didn't give him some meatspace biographical information he wanted, as if he had actually scored a point in the debate.
But I'm curious why you say 'busted'. Ignoring the slim, slim possibility that some overzealous idiot mistook a wisecrack for a statement of fact, wouldn't 'busting' someone require some actual knowledge of the fact? I.e. in this case knowing the complete employment history of the person or persons posting as Black Parrot, and going down that list to ensure that none of those companies had ever been crushed by Microsoft?
> Just asking,
> > > He MAY have valid points but his credibility is zero.
> > That claim really doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.
> Actually, it does. MAY have valid points But his credibility is zero. Mutually exclusive ideas. Neither relies on the other.
Not IMO. If for example 10% of someone's posts are worth considering and 90% aren't, I'd say they had a 10% credibility rating.
> Well.. you can have my 8-bit commodore 64 for free.. so the bang for the buck is infinite..
Good point (as well as funny). It calls attention to the fact that for any serious evaluation on the basis of bang/buck there is likely to be a lower bound on the amount of bang required and an upper bound on the amount of bucks you can spend, so that certain regions on a bang/buck graph are going to be "shaded out" and excluded from purchase considerations.
Also, the boundaries of those exclusion regions are likely to be fuzzy. Although the mathematical model for the value of money is linear, our subjective valuation of it surely isn't, so that if you have two systems with the same bang/buck ratio they may not have the same appeal to the purchaser.
> A G5 is faster than the fastest Intel box with Linux. Read the benchmark whitepaper. It describes the testing methodology in precise detail. In a side-by-side, controlled test, the single-processor G5 was 10% slower on integer performance but 20% faster on floating point performance than the Pentium 4 with Linux.
Apparently they never got so far as Chapter 1 in Hennesy & Patterson, where you learn the mantra of "make the common case fast".
> Yes, it's "slam Apple time" here on Slashdot. Submit your anti-Apple articles and we'll post them.
No problem; the daily SCO story will be up in a little while and then everyone will forget about Apple until tomorrow!
> He MAY have valid points but his credibility is zero.
That claim really doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.
If his points "MAY" be valid, then is credibility is not zero.
> They're giving us a desktop UNIX running on 64-bit hardware, what else can you ask for? sheesh
Who wants 64-bit for 64-bit's sake? I want fast, cheap computation. I'd be happy with an 8-bit computer if it gave sufficient bang for the buck.
> I am a straight guy with a girlfriend and a life and I like to play girl characters. Why? I mainly play games that involve blowing things up, and I think girls with guns are sexy.
Yes, but what about men in drag with guns?
> You mean SCO jumped into the GPL pool without their crack team of lawyers reading it first? Say it aint so.
Of course, "they" jumped in when they were still a software company instead of a lawsuit company. There has been a change of managment since then.
> How many people will be shorting SCO stock tomorrow morning?
Holding on to SCOX may not be a vote of confidence in SCO's business plan; it may be a vote of no confidence in the US legal system.
And there are plenty of folk out there who can afford to throw away a few thousand dollars on SCOX now on the extremely slim chance that it will be worth 10x a year or two from now.
> At this point, I think it would take me and my loved ones being flogged with bundles of stinging nettles that have been dipped in hot sauce and rolled in salt, while listening to Celine Dion sing that Titanic song accompanied by an orchestra of bagpipes.
Aye, matey, that would really spoil the bagpipe music.
> They are not the only western soldiers in Congo, the Belgians are sending troops too (heck, another country the US loves to hate right now), but those are mainly restricted to medical teams and transport due to historical sensitivities in the former colony.
As I understand it there are other nations' peacekeeping troops there, but everyone other than the French is giving way to stay out of any fights. The French are ordering the combatants out of towns and threatening force if they don't comply.
> No way Britain would have stepped on Stalin's toes.
This was early 1940, after Stalin had stabbed Poland in the back but before Stalin was at war with Germany.
> No. Look at the map. Or did they plan to invade Sweden, too? It was about iron ore.
They wanted to seize the ice-free port Narvik and use it to stage overland aid to Finland via Sweden. Norway demurred, so the British decided to do it by force. They counted on the Norwegians to show token resistance and then go along with it.
And of course, it was about ore. Britain wanted to 'secure' Narvik for the same reason Germany did.
> Invading neutal contries to help other neutral contries defend against invaders?
So the game of nations is played.
> I know you didn't draw any conclusions from Finland being allied with Germany, but before anyone else does, I would like to point out two things:
> 1) Russia sought to invade Finland
> 2) No one else would help
Actually, Britain tried to. In fact they were going to invade Norway to open a port where they could put troops into Finland from the north. They actually lanched the troopships for the invasion, but bad weather made them turn back and the Germans occupied Norway just a few days later. IIRC both invasion forces were actually at sea simultaneously.
> I know it's the in thing now to bag on "those French cowards" but...
Also "in" to ignore the fact that French troops are the only Western soldiers trying to stop the horror in the Congo right now.
Three million people have died in the Congo over the past four years, but the members of the "Coalition of the Willing" who were so eager to 'rescue' the people of Iraq are falling all over themselves to see who can ignore what's happening in Africa the best.
> Linus is a Finn.
I thought he was part of Finland's largish Swedish ethnic community.
> I am plesently suprised that my anti-spam encoded email address still has not been spammed. [...] It wouldnt take much to find and decode most of the simple spam-protected email addresses. [...] But pretty soon I suspect we will get much cleverer email collecting tools and the problem is going to get to the scale of the virus/anti-virus stage.
Then we'll start putting "nospam" in our real addresses!