The Register: “An Australian MP has become the centre of a hacking scandal following
accusations that computers in his office were used to hack into the PCs of rival
politicians in the New South Wales Parliament.”

The latest version of the 2.4.7 Linux kernel has been released by Alan Cox. Read on for the links and changelog.

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/

                 Intermediate diffs are available from
                        http://www.bzimage.org


2.4.7-ac8
o       Kill accidental bit of S/390 merge I meant      (Bill Nottingham)
        to skip (hotplug should be working again now)
o       Fix host_info_lock namespace on ieee1394        (Keith Owens)
o       Fix duplicate rio serial init                   (Keith Owens)
o       Fix dead init_zoran_cards symbol                (Keith Owens)
o       Don't define EXPORT_SYMTAB in cmpci             (Keith Owens)
o       Don't define EXPORT_SYMTABL in sisfb            (Keith Owens)
o       Fix warnings in ess_solo1                       (me)
o       Fix deadlock in moxa mxser driver               (Christophe Barbé)
o       First of many needed devfs race fixes           (Al Viro)
o       Windows 2000 vfat name mapping fix              (Wolfram Pienkoss)
o       Clean up ubd, CONFIG_IOMEM->CONFIG_MAPPER       (Jeff Dike)
o       Fix a UML crash, make uml devices pluggable     (Jeff Dike)
o       Use page cache in hostfs, fix UML stat64 bits   (Jeff Dike)
o       Complete UML ppc support merge                  (Chris Emerson)
o       Complete UML Configure.help                     (Bill Stearns)
o       Add rep nop so the poor old Pentium IV doesnt
        go thermal slowdown every long mdelay           (Arjan van de Ven)
o       Fix various invalid Config script items         (Christoph Hellwig)
o       SYS5fs BSD style symlink support (SCO etc)      (Christoph Hellwig)
o       Fix PnPBIOS reporting on io v mem               (Andrey Panin)
o       Fix atyfb compilation problems with vaio bits   (Keith Owens)
o       Make HP support in AMI Megaraid run time        (Michael Johnson)
o       Fix an ext3 buffer credit accounting bug        (Andrew Morton)
o       Add hardware volume control support to ALi      (Matt Wu)
o       Clean up the above a little for non ALi, fix    (me)
        rmmod crash
o       Adaptec scsi update (6.2.1)                     (Justin Gibbs)
        | + gcc 3.0 fixes
o       Handle broken PIV SMP tables                    (Maciej Rozycki)
o       Switch to static inline on ARM subtree          (Russell King)
o       SHMfs updates, race fix                         (Christoph Rohland)

– By Jeff Field –

Although they may come from different manufacturers, there’s one thing the Pentium 4 1.8, the Athlon 1.4, the Duron 950 and the Pentium III 1.13/1.2 all have in common — a high price premium for being top-of-the-line CPUs. This pricing isn’t just limited to CPUs, either, it happens with all sorts of hardware, including hard drives and monitors. Is having the top-of-the-line worth the premium price?
If you look on Pricewatch for the Athlon 1.4GHz and 1.33GHz CPUs, you’ll see something interesting – an Athlon 1.33 will cost you, roughly, $133 with shipping. On the other hand, the top-of-the-line Athlon 1.4 will cost you somewhere around $166 with shipping. That’s a 25% increase in cost from the 1.33 to the 1.4 model. A 1.33GHz CPU is 1330MHz, and a 1.4GHz is 1400MHz, and if you do the math, the 1.4GHz has only a 70 MHz, or 5%, increase in clock speed. This is why price-to-performance ratios are so important when purchasing a CPU: to find out what kind of bang you’ll get for your bucks. You wouldn’t pay 28% more for an extra egg in a dozen, why should you pay the equivalent when buying a CPU?

It isn’t just Athlons, either: Almost every CPU you can find on Pricewatch is sold this way. The Duron 950 costs 40% more than the 900, the Pentium 4 1.8GHz costs 78% more than the 1.7GHz model, and the Pentium III 1.13 costs 75% more than the Pentium III 1GHz. And I don’t want to leave the impression that the price differences are just for CPUs either — a 100GB hard drive will cost 45% more than a 80 gig, but only give you 25% more room. A 22-inch monitor with 20-inch viewable costs $685, while a 21-inch with a 19.9-inch viewable screen costs $415. In that case, you are paying a company 65% more money, for 0.5% more screen. Somehow, that doesn’t seem “cost effective” to me. To illustrate my point, I am going to take the aforementioned Athlon 1.33GHz for a spin, comparing it to the 1.4GHz.

Performance comparison
System specifications
Gigabyte 7DXR Motherboard
256 Megs DDR PC2100 SDRAM from Crucial.com

Western Digital 7200 RPM 10.2 Gig Hard Drive

3Com 3C905TX-C 10/100 NIC (PCI)

400 Watt ATX 2.03 Power Supply
Gigabyte GeForce 3 64MB AGP

Mandrake 8.0 with Kernel 2.4.3

For performance comparison purposes, similarly configured systems are used, where only the memory type (PC133), the processor type and the motherboard are different.

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. In order to compile the kernel, I untarred kernel 2.4.6, ran “make config” and used the default values. (In other words, I held down the “Enter” key.)

Kernel 2.4.6 Compile Times (Minutes:Seconds)
Board	-j1	-j2	-j3
Athlon 1.4 – DDR	4:29	4:20	4:21
Athlon 1.33 – DDR	4:32	4:28	4:27

In this case, your $33 buys you six entire seconds in a kernel compile. Thats $5.50 a second.

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. Once you’ve obtained POVray, run this command to perform the benchmark povray -i skyvase.pov +v1 +ft -x +mb25 +a0.300 +j1.000 +r3 -q9 -w640 -H480 -S1 -E480 -k0.000 -mv2.0 +b1000 from your command prompt. Results are in seconds.

POVRay (Seconds)
Board	Result
Athlon 1.4 – DDR	15 seconds
Athlon 1.33 – DDR	16 seconds

In this case, you’re actually paying $33 a second, because POVRay gets a whopping one second increase in performance.

Quake 3 Arena Timedemos (Frames Per Second)
Board	640×480	800×600	1024×768	1200×1024	1600×1200
Default Quality
Athlon 1.4 – DDR	183.6	182.6	172.8	126.1	90.7
Athlon 1.33 – DDR	180.6	178.7	169.2	123.7	90.3

Here, we find a gain of three frames a second, and at the very high end only 0.4 frames a second. It is even worse on slower boards than a GeForce3 — on those boards resolutions above 800×600 are barely affected by CPU speed.

Conclusion
What’s the moral of the story here? If there is one, it is to shop smart. That 1.33GHz Athlon will perform nearly as well as the 1.4, and it will leave some extra money in your pocket, perhaps for another good upgrade. When buying components, always factor in what you need, as well as how much you’re willing to pay, and do not let yourself get caught up in that silly game where you must have the highest speed grade, even if it means exorbitant premiums. Do your research, find out what advantages higher models really have over lower models — or you may end up paying more for a sound card that’s only benefit is some additional Windows software, or a CPU that costs a hundred dollars more but doesn’t really offer superior performance.

From a post at Linux Weekly News: “A new Zope hotfix has been issued which addresses an important security
issue that affects Zope version 2.3.3, all Zope 2.4.0 alpha and beta
releases, as well as the final release of Zope 2.4.0.

We *highly* recommend that any Zope site running Zope 2.3.3, Zope
2.4.0 final or any alpha or beta version of 2.4.0 have this hotfix
product installed to mitigate the issue.”

Doug Loss writes “This is the latest in our regular, fortnightly reports on the use of Linux in education.” Get more information on Tux Typing, find your way to the new education mailing list at FSF Europe, and some great ideas on how to present Linux to a non-technical audience.

Hot topics amoung the 3.2MB of posts delivered through the linux-kernel mailing list include an announcement for Linux Kernel Metrics, a discussion on graphical representations of kernel sources, and, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Linux, news of a picnic/BBQ in the San Francisco Bay Area. Posted at kt.zork.net.

The major news in this edition: “up, 0.9.0 was released. And there was much rejoicing (and waving of little flags).” Get the latest news about this Open Source word processing application, at AbiSource.

Network World Fusion: “The protocol widely used to set up VPN tunnels
is potentially insecure and work on extending its
use should be halted, according to The Internet
Engineering Task Force.

Administrative groups within the IETF have put
a temporary moratorium on extensions to
Internet Key Exchange (IKE) without saying how
long that moratorium should last.”

ZDNet: “If modern wireless mythology is to be believed, it won’t be long before
everything in the business world will be linked to the Internet and
remotely controlled via cellular phone. People will walk down the street
to a chorus of beeps and rings as coupons and ads from nearby shops
arrive at their wireless inboxes. Mobile workers will be able to get the
latest report from the office, even if they’re cooling their heels in the
back of a cab. No wireless device will have a keypad, because they’ll all
be controlled by voice commands.

It’s time to come back to reality.”

From MozillaQuest: “AOL-Time-Warner’s Netscape division placed its Netscape 6.1 (NS 6.1) browser-suite
upgrade for the Linux, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows platforms on its FTP servers today.
Netscape 6.1 could be the make-or-brake, do-or-die, and last gasp Netscape browser
offering.” Update: It appears that Netscape is restricting access to FTP directories with 6.1; you may or not be able to download at this time.