Wired: “Bootleg CDs and cassettes have always been easy to buy in Russia’s markets. But now that confidential information is appearing on some of them, the police are cracking down. Never mind that it’s not against the law.”

An anonymous reader writes: “Netscape 6.1 is here to stay, hopefully! Download links and release notes on MozillaQuest Magazine. (mozillaquest.com). From MozillaQuest: “AOL-Time-Warner´s Netscape division placed its Netscape 6.1 (NS 6.1) browser-suite upgrade on its FTP servers today — for the second time this week.”

Wired: “U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson has been a thorn in Microsoft’s side for months. Now the software company wants the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out previous rulings and give it a new trial.”

IDG: “South Korea reported its first Code Red computer virus outbreak
Tuesday as servers at a cluster of government offices were hit, sparking a shutdown of some
systems to prevent it from spreading further.

The computer worm froze a computer network linking government offices in Taejon city, about
84 miles south of Seoul, the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs said.”

Globe And Mail: “San Francisco-based Brightmail Inc., an e-mail
protection company, says its Internet-monitoring
network has seen the number of spam “attacks” jump
about 400 per cent to between 12,000 and 13,000 daily
today from about 3,000 or 4,000 a year ago. This rise in
spam is only the beginning, e-mail experts warn.”

GreasyDaemon: “Recently my new iBook arrived with a copy of MacOS X and I immediately dug in to find out what it could do for me. As a
member of the BSD faithful I want to have access to the fundamental tools that I find with the other major BSD platforms,
like a web and database server, compilers and network utilities. I also want a command-line interface since I feel I can
achieve greater control over a system in that way.”

Zoe Knipe writes: “Further research conducted by Idaya (www.idaya.co.uk), sponsors of the freeVSD project (www.freevsd.org), has revealed that the global top 1000 ISPs broadly welcome large IT companies embracing Linux, and feel that this trend would constitute a boost for the GPL market.
However, a fifth of respondents also felt that the rapid adoption of Linux-based services from the major IT solution vendors would squeeze opportunities for smaller players and freelance developers, an outcome which would contradict the spirit in which Linux was created. Opinion in the ISP community was evenly split as to whether Linux could ever become the desktop operating system of choice.
“This latest research from Idaya/FreeVSD was concluded in June 2001, and surveyed opinion amongst the global top 1000 Internet Service Providers – precisely the companies that have made the greatest investment in GPL technology and applications. Respondents were a mixture of business managers, technical heads and service managers.

Principal findings from this latest research project are:-

· 83% of respondents believe that the porting of key enterprise applications to Linux (Lotus Notes, Oracle, SQL etc) would constitute a boost for the GPL market. 13% believed it would pose a threat. The main reason for regarding such porting as a threat was firmly focused on the fact that the code would no longer be free at the point of usage under the GPL principle.

· 42% of respondents felt that the adoption of Linux by major IT solutions vendors (IBM, HP, Compaq, etc) would actively help improve opportunities for smaller players and freelance developers. In contrast, 21% felt that it would actually squeeze opportunities for smaller companies and freelancers. 37% felt that it would have little effect either way. .

· 50% of respondents felt that at some point Linux could become the desktop operating system of choice. However, a comparable 48% felt that this was unlikely to happen. This even split of opinion reflects the findings of a freeVSD/Idaya survey earlier this year which found 70% of respondents wanting greater convergence between freeBSD and Linux distributions in order to combine strengths and develop a standard set of tools for modern Unix platforms. .

Austin Delaney, founder of the freeVSD project comments, ?There is no question about the inexorable progress of the Linux platform and applications developed for it. The rapid adoption of freeVSD for secure virtual server web hosting and remote management is just one example of the trend we are all experiencing. Frankly, I think that the Linux support from the major IT solutions vendors has to be a good thing. Our previous research has shown that the main obstacle to Linux penetration in the large company back-office is the inertia of fear amongst corporate IT directors, especially with reference to support levels for mission-critical applications. The adoption of Linux by the big players must do much to allay those concerns. Surely, then, with the code being open source, the possibilities for small and freelance developers providing specialist applications and utilities must grow with the expanding market.

For further information please contact:
Zoë Knipe
Lindsell Marketing
Tel: +44 (0)207 434 2090
Fax:+44 (0)207 437 4130
E-Mail:zoe@lindsellmarketing.com
“

An anonymous reader writes: “In response to the escalating attacks on Open Source Software from proprietary software vendors, Lineo has announced a new tool which is intended to assist developers in identifying the licenses within system software components. The tool is said to identify up to 40 different software
licenses including GPL, LGPL, BSD, Artistic, and many others. The tool, along with a new Lineo “anti-FUD” initiative, is announced in an open letter from Lineo VP Tim Bird to the Embedded Linux and Open Source community.”

Jorrit Tyberghein writes: “Crystal Space: The Open Source 3D Engine (crystal.linuxgames.com) now accepts monetary donations via Tux Games (www.tuxgames.com, see the ‘Project Donations’ section there). This money is going to be used for various things related to the advancement of Crystal Space:

• Hardware and software for CS team members in order to better work on CS. Some examples are: 3D cards, sound cards, commercial compilers, debugging tools (Insure, …), …
• Promotion of CS in general. For example, ads in game magazines, CS presence in expos and shows, …
• Help with production of the CD-ROM for Crystal Space (for when the 1.0 release is ready).

– By Jeff Field –
With new CPUs come new motherboards, and the Intel Pentium III Tualatin 1.13/1.2 release has prompted new Pentium III motherboards, breathing a bit of life into an otherwise stagnant market. Soyo is one of the first manufacturers to create a motherboard to support the new Pentium IIIs with its SY-TISU board.The board and expansion
The SY-TISU is not much of a departure from Soyo’s three other I815 ATX boards. It does not have on-board video, like the 7ISA/7ISA+ did, but otherwise, they are similar boards. Where the board differs is in the support of the new Tualatin-cored Pentium III 1.13 and 1.2 GHz CPUs. These CPUs differ from the previous Pentium IIIs because they use a new .13 micron core. This causes the CPUs themselves to have new voltage requirements, and more importantly, they require a new, lower voltage for the CPU bus signaling.

What does this mean to you? First, it means that if you had dreams of putting a 1.2GHz Pentium III on your current I815 board, you can forget it, because only these new boards can provide the correct bus voltage (1.25v versus the 1.50v of the previous Pentium IIIs). The lowering of the voltage and the smaller process also decrease the amount of heat produced by the CPU.

For expansion, the board comes with a fairly standard configuration — six PCI slots, one AGP, three DIMM slots that accept up to 512MB total of PC133 SDRAM, due to a limitation of the i815 (and, indeed, all Intel SDRAM chipsets), and two ATA/100 ports for up to four IDE devices. For external expansion, the board has onboard sound, two serial ports, one parallel ports, and two on-board USB ports.

Layout and design
The layout of the TISU is clean and well thought out. There is nothing obstructing the PCI slots, there is a decent amount of clearance around the CPU, and nothing seems to be in a spot where it would get in the way.

Documentation and configuration
The documentation of the SY-TISU is the same as that on all recent Soyo boards — light. The manual is 20 pages. It tells you how to physically install the CPU and how to configure the board. The documentation is well written but suffers from a lack of depth, serving as more than a reference than a comprehensive guide. An experienced builder will have no trouble, but the inexperienced will have to look for information at various Web sites dedicated to building PCs.

Configuration is one feature where the TISU shines. Taking a page from Soyo’s newly released AMD board, the Dragon, the TISU has a front-side bus speed that is adjustable in 1MHz increments from 133MHz to 250MHz. Also, it is capable of changing voltages in 0.025v increments, crucial to overclocking. These surprising features could make the TISU an appealing board for the overclockers out there.

Performance
A note, a Pentium III Coppermine CPU was used in testing of this board, because a Tualatin core CPU was unavailable.
System Specifications
Pentium III Coppermine 933MHz
256 Megs PC133 SDRAM from Crucial.com
Western Digital 7200 RPM 10.2 Gig Hard Drive
3Com 3C905TX-C 10/100 NIC (PCI)
300 Watt AMD-Approved ATX Power Supply
Abit Siluro GeForce 2 MX400 64MB AGP

Mandrake 8.0 with Kernel 2.4.3

Kernel compiles
To test both the board’s stability and speed, I ran three sets of Linux kernel compiles on this board. One is a normal, “uniprocessor” make, or make -j1, which is the default. This uses one process, and does not always maximize system usage. I then did make -j2, which spawns a second process. The last test I run is with make -j3, spawning two extra processes. I do this for several reasons — to find the “sweet spot” for the board/CPU, as well as to stress the system as much as possible when trying to rate its stability. Also, the kernel is extremely useful as a measure of integer performance.

Kernel 2.4.6 Compile Times (Minutes:Seconds)
Board	-j1	-j2	-j3
Soyo SY-TISU	6:08	6:09	5:59

The performance here is right on par with what you should expect out of a Pentium III 933 — right around six minutes. Provided there is not a problem with the motherboard, this time should be expected in such a CPU-intensive task.

POVRay Benchmarks
POVRay is a multi-platform raytracing program. It is a floating point-intensive task and serves well to help measure the floating point performance of a CPU. For more information on this benchmark, head to the official POVBENCH homepage. The command to run for this benchmark, once you obtain POVRay, you run povray -i skyvase.pov +v1 +ft -x +mb25 +a0.300 +j1.000 +r3 -q9 -w640 -H480 -S1 -E480 -k0.000 -mv2.0 +b1000 from the command prompt. Results are in seconds.

POVRay
Board	Result
Soyo SY-TISU	30

The Pentium III is not as good at POVray as an equivalent Athlon, but it certainly is not slow.

Quake 3 Arena Timedemos (Frames Per Second)
Board	640×480	800×600	1024×768	1200×1024	1600×1200
Soyo SY-TISU	132.4	121.8	85.4	52.8	36.8

Quake 3 scores show the same thing we keep finding — that the GeForce2MX is not CPU limited, but rather memory and clock speed limited. So, we see performance comparable to higher clocked processors with the GeForce2MX, simply because the GeForce2MX cannot do any better.

bonnie++ results
Bonnie++ is a hard drive benchmark that tests the writing and reading
from both a single large file (such as that of a database) and many small files (like a proxy, or mail program). It is
useful for simulating performance under such applications.

Bonnie++ results
Sequential Output
Controller	Per-Character	Block	Rewrite
Soyo SY-TISU	10037 K/sec, 99% CPU	26571 K/sec, 32% CPU	8922 K/sec, 7% CPU
Sequential Input			Random
Controller	Per-Character	Block	Random
Soyo SY-TISU	8732 K/sec, 77% CPU	22278 K/sec, 9% CPU	157.6 Seeks/sec, 0% CPU
Sequential Create
Controller	Create	Read	Delete
Soyo SY-TISU	12593 /sec, 99% CPU	none	13872/sec, 100% CPU
Random Create
Controller	Create	Read	Delete
Soyo SY-TISU	12054 /sec, 100% CPU	none	11474/sec, 100% CPU

Here we see the drive controller on the SY-TISU performs quite well — certainly on par with other IDE controllers I have tested, functioning fully with DMA under Linux with no trouble.

HDParm
HDparm tests the maximum data transfer rate of a hard drive in using two methods, uncached (but buffered still by the hard drive’s on-board buffer) and cached (buffered by the drive and cached via the operating system cache). While the uncached test should not vary between controllers that support the drive’s ATA-version (such at ATA-66, which is what this drive uses), the cached test varies between boards because it is essentially a test of the CPU, cache and RAM on a system. This is what makes it interesting in this case — it can help showcase the memory performance of the board.

hdparm -t (Uncached) Results
Soyo SY-TISU	23.53 MB/sec
hdparm -T (Cached) Results
Soyo SY-TISU	139.13 MB/sec

The first test is as expected — the same as almost every other result I have gotten with this drive, because it depends physically on the drive. The second benchmark, however, shows the maximum transfer rate of the CPU-RAM-cache combination, which we find to be almost one hundred megabytes less than comparable Athlon boards, due to the increased memory bandwidth of the Athlon.

Conclusion
The SY-TISU is just what you would expect from what is now the third generation of board based on, basically, the same chipset. It’s a stable board with a good amount of features for a range of users. The board fully supports all Socket370 processors, does so with stability and ease of use, and even throws overclocking into the mix. For the user looking for a stable platform on which to run a Celeron, Pentium III or Pentium III Tualatin, you would be hard pressed to find a more well-rounded board. The Soyo SY-TISU is available from SpecialtyTech for $106.