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Recommended reading: How To Become A Hacker by ESR. I think it will give you a more holistic approach to your learning process and has a nice section that covers the need to "Learn how to program".

Yes, who would have though that programming (aka hacking) is done by highly creative people.

Oh wait, this has been covered before: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

It's bad enough when the suits think programmers are not creative; worse when I read it on slashdot :/

A rootkit is a tool that helps worm authors to slip past malware detection tools. The rootkit is 'wrapped around' the virus, and hides its payload from detection engines. After the rootkit has penetrated a system's defences, the worm can start doing its work.

Wrong. A "rootkit" is a series of hacks to the underlying operating system, which make a running process harder to detect. In other words, a rootkit will keep your process from turning up in the Windows Task Manager, or a Linux "ps".

Definition from the Jargon File.

"Quick, hit the estop!"

Most places call that the "Big Red Button", although the Jargon file appears to prefer the term "Big Red Switch".

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/cokebottle.html

Majority does care.
If i'd say you're asshole you would be a bit harder to listen for the rest of my words.
For most people emotions are more weightful than logic.

You, personally, would not notice, if i call Your asshole? That's because Your emotion, willing to find the truth is overcoming emotion, unplesance to hear my rude words. But i do not think that would be the same for majority.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html #keepcool
Read this section and the next one. Does it suit You? fine! but not the majority, believe me.

PS: BTW scientists are usually not that fone refined rationale minds.
Many new ideas in hostory met quite wild reaction, when some basics of mainstream were questioned by new ideas. Axioms is what we choose to believe, yes? Since we rarely have time to rejustify axioms, they became a kind of religion to us. Feeling oneself as a part of a big, great Science makes it easy to ignore attacks to yourself, but you might take very personal any attack to the well-knowns of that Science.

This is a UN event targeting US unilateral Internet policy. Bolton is the US ambassador to the UN. Much as you'd like to pretend that Bolton isn't in charge of US international diplomacy, because he's such a loser, and was recess appointed in a typical Bush system game that subverts Congress and the American people, we're stuck with him. So play your Republican compartmentalization games, where you walk on eggshells not to "activate the frames" of any of the obvious disasters your boys have created in American policy. When I see the US in an Internet crisis in the UN, I'll point out that the guy responsible for fixing that is worse than useless.

And since you're so obsessed with staying within the boundaries you have carefully proscribed for your own airless "debate", I'll quote the "Troll" definition to which I helpfully linked, but which you obviously couldn't bother to click, or to understand: "To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself". Your argument, weak as it is, still might be invoked to back up a mod of "Offtopic", though it surely isn't (see sentence #1 of this post). So it's perfectly obvious that you're really saying "I will say or defend anything that keeps Bush's gang of malevolent incompetents out of scrutiny while they do their damage".

Now, I've flamed you with an attack on your Bushit smokescreen post. Which you surely expected. If I hadn't replied to your post with this one, I'd get to mod you "Flamebait" or "Troll". Instead, because I've got more courage of my convictions than a zombie army of TrollMods, I've spelled it out to you in a post.

Moderation 0
    50% Troll
    50% Insightful

Listen, you rightwing TrollMods, that post praising Bolton for nonexistent diplomatic skills as we enter a diplomatic crisis is not a "Troll", it's "sarcasm". Sure, you hate the UN, you worship Bush. But who knew you hated the Internet as much as you hate America?

Film at 11. USENET cliche by 1989. EU resolution in 2006... 2017? 2038?

On topic, I think many games already express a specific style, even if it often is more subtle. This is unavoidable as long as different people take notice of different things; different people express themselves differently. This is unavoidable as no man is objective in perception.
Conways law is satisfied.

A quick comparison between the releases of gamehouses should show this. It's often striking how varied models of humans can be. Faces especially.

And also read this, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html . It's Eric Raymond's fairly famous rant on the poor design of open source interfaces, with suggested rules on how to avoid or fix some of the issues.

simply go to http://www.paypal.com./

The DNS mess isn't as bad as it could be though:

• With all the trouble people have gotten into with it, it's probably a good thing that DNS lacks an equivalent of '..' references.
• At least the UK gave up their old convention of big-endian domain names. There's no convincing them to drive on the right though.

• History
• Examples, examples etc. e.g. dual licensing
• Stories; lots of interesting stuff to tell.
• Obligatory: the cathedral & the bazaar; http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar /
  
• Guidelines for communicating with RMS & de Raadt..

Part I is to provide info on the licensing of software and FOSS licensing. Include:

• The ideas and the differences between, meaning of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, contract, click-wrap/shrinkwrap license, etc -- And how these effect software. Concepts that are important to fully appreciate the difference between closed source and Free Software.
• The Open Source definition link
• Show the traditional model examples of interoperability problems such as proprietary file formats, Patents, the enforcement mechanism, End-User License Agreements.. pick a prominent example, show common restrictions vendors place on their development tools, i.e. look at the licensing of a particular computer video game, development tool, OS, etc by a major publisher. (No reverse engineering, no right to tinker, etc)
• Perhaps contrast with the Open Source model in an example as a way to illustrate the advantage.
• Show off some of the major Open Source programs in action -- a web browser would be a start, but provide some example that the Open Source model has been successful and delivered "cool", respectable products.
• Cover Free Software, the Free Software Foundation's philosophy link; other philosophies
• The distinction made between Free Software, Open Source, Freeware, Careware, etc...
• Free documentation... Wikis.. transparent file formats, etc.
• The meaning of copyleft
• How to place software under an Open Source license, when you can, choose? Compatibility with the GPL (and between other licenses)
• Popular types of Open Source licenses to pick from (GPL, LGPL, BSD License, MIT Style, Artistic, are probably the most important); what is unique about each of the popular licenses; when they can be interchanged.
• The development advantages.. including forking and its advantages and disadvantages (consider X.org).. good reading material may be the The Cathedral and the Bazaar: link.

Part II would be software development in an open source environment; basically how to get and setup a free software Operating System like Linux, FreeBSD, etc, to program in C/C++/Perl using GCC, or a compiler set like Python or Ruby on their windows machine. An understanding of what some of the most popular tools are used for (not necessarily the skills to use a tool, just what they are used to do):

• Subversion / CVS
• Gimp
• Vim, TeX, Indent, Text editors
• Make, Patch, Diff, Gdb, GCC, G++, Autoconf
• Apache, PHP, Python, Perl
• GNU/Linux; Redhat; Debian; *BSD; ...
• OpenOffice, The Mozilla browser
• XFree86, Qt/GTK, KDE/Gnome

Part III OSS Projects

• Organize: Version control, version number management, Todo lists, Milestone charts, ideas like 'release early, release often..' What's a beta? What are nightly tarballs.. nightly builds Etc.
• Develop: Tools used to edit and test sources. How to get a copy of a source tree... how to compile a source tree...
• Popular coding styles, brace styles; tab stops, etc.. GNU Coding standards, GNITs
• Debug: GDB, Bug trackers..
• Feedback/Discussion and its importance: Forums, Mailing lists, Newsgroups

Students should have a project that deals with Open Source Software.. for the purpose of expanding practical experience -- and to write a report on Open Source, their experimentation, and what was learned, including some quoted forum posts, and patches/source snippets, related to their activities. The quality and understanding of Open Source conveyed in the report is what matters.

Perhaps to either start their own Open Source proje

Also, SourceForge

Basic tools. Source code management, build systems.

Leadership techniques about getting people to work with you when you aren't paying them and can't fire them.

Are you by chance friends with ESR?

---I have been reading alot about the future of LINUX and mainly the BS about windows vrs. linux. I have been trying to find a OS besides Windows to run and learn.

There's 2 camps of software that will run on X86 systems. Those being MS Windows (VMS derived) and Unix derived systems. The three divisions of Unix on X86 are traditional unixes (BSD and like, SunOS, and others), Linux and GPL'ed bretheren, and BeOS. Considering BeOS is dead, and propeirty unixes are not desktop suitable, that leaves you with Linux (which the most work at this time is done with) and MS Windows as competitors.

Both represent the two types of architechure development (Cathedral and bazaar opposites, and difficulties of each therof).

---It seems that the best thing about linux is the ideas of open source, reality states this is about all there is, IDEAS, It doesn't matter what OS, and I have checked a number of them, can be just downloaded and run.

The last thing you should do with a Free version of Linux is buy it. Some of the best are not for sale, in the traditional sence of going to a software store or buying a book. Gentoo and Debian are two such. Im sure you copuld find them to buy, but the traditional way of the user getting them is to download them.

Still, Open Source lets you see others implementations of ideas, and how you can guide yourself in the very implementations of ideas. Much more powerful than the Microsoft camp allows with a "default install".

---The wireless cards need drivers to work, fine it you know how to do It, and other things seem to keep poping up.

The problems with WiFi drivers is the companies will not release specs on how to drive the cards. We do not ask them to write drivers. We ask that the specs on how to talk to the card be opened. Think of this for a moment... Do you like using your older hardware? Would you still like to use it 5 years from now? If you dont know how the card communicates, it is worthless if you upgrade to a newer machine that has no driver for that hardware.

My hardware that works with open specs for my drivers will work for years and years. I am not tethered to one specific company.

---I have re-installed XP nine (9) times in the last six (6) months of trying to use LINUX.

Hard drives are cheap these days. Even if you have constraints, you could buy a 70$ USB2 enclosure for a 40 GB harddrive. If XP works, dont keep making it unwork.

---I don't know what to really do it seems so I bought a number of books, POINT & CLICK the last one, with CD's and there is still things that just make no sense whatever.

In order to work with Linux effectively, you must understand what you do. Every little action builds upon itself. The very idea of Linux is sort of like Legos, where every part is interchangable, but you do NEED that part. The parts on the top represent the GUI, below that nice pretty pictures lay a powerful command line to do many things at once. You can rip off each layer as it suits your needs. But, as you probably have learnt, the blocks are the same, but sometimes the blocks are TYCO instead of Lego, so they sometimes dont fit too well. That represents the difference between distributions.

---I always return to Window because I load it, it works. I have checked the linux forams of a number of distro's,

The forums wont help you understand why. Go skim parts of Eric Raymonds, Art of Unix programming. I guess I could force-feed you, but if you have no will to learn, and use free-r software, then go use Windows. If it works for you, there is no shame for using it.

---but it doesn't make alot of sense when you really don't understand the questions to ask, even the questions to look for.

Well, what kind of questions do you have? As an aside, please use better grammar and utilize paragraphs. Many a time, "bad ritings will be kritized in teh softwarez" and will be shrugged off with usually a deriding comment. Errors do ha

just go read this

Printing setup has been a simple point and click affair for some years now.

You can add them to the theory of quantum bogodynamics.

Naw, blargh ain't any good... but is it any surprise that quick ping times make us happy? To answer: no, no it's not. (see definition #5).

Naw, blargh ain't any good... but is it any surprise that quick ping times make us happy? To answer: no, no it's not. (see definition #5).

Obviously you have not worked with production computer arrays and software where 'deductive and rational' does not necessarily apply.

Finding bugs in software and hardware can be likened to Scientific investigation - where the researcher controls the number and quantity of inputs so as to focus the results on meaningful data - which may or may not lead to a meaningful conclusion, leading the investigator to devine the meaning from incomplete data.

Creating and integrating multiple systems on a large network is also not clear cut, and many times unknowable interactions between various pieces of equipment on a hetrogenous network break calculations.

At a lower level the hardware itself can be used to postulate new techniques and validate the science surrounding semiconductors and other emerging technology involving the interactions of various materials and its application to computer technology.

So I think it is safe to say that, outside of some simple applications, computer science is indeed a science.

Just another instance of the Wheel of Reincarnation.

Though this one is dumber than most.

I haven't redefined anything. You might want to try reading the Jargon File.

The entry for hacker says, in part:

6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.

7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.

And for hack it includes:

2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.

  4. vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an immediate sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In a general (time-extended) sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO." More generally, "I hack foo" is roughly equivalent to "foo is my major interest (or project)". "I hack solid-state physics."

As I said, you might want to learn what the word means before you chime in.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/suit.html

Generally, "suit" is what geeks call people who have to wear one as part of their job. Most suits are not geeks. Most geeks are not suits. Therefore, geeks and suits rarely see eye-to-eye. Nevertheless, they frequently are forced by circumstances beyond their control to co-operate in order to achieve some otherwise-unobtainable goal, like keeping a company in business.

Nevertheless, it's not an automatic putdown. In this context, we may speak of "suitware" for "suits" to delimit the applications as being for office use, as opposed to something that's good for writing program code in. Some undercurrent of dislike may also be prevalent when you hear of a geek speak of "suitware" because...well...they're incredibly boring applications to design. Databases especially.

Yes, by limiting the freedom of people to use free software for purposes Stallman doesn't like.

Absolutely wrong. Stallman doesn't like Communism, but his license doesn't say the Chinese can't use emacs to draw up the death-sentence for some dissident.

The *sole* purpose of the GPL is to promote the FSF's Four Freedoms. Nothing more, nothing less.

It's an irony, but inescapable fact, that to promote freedom, one must actually limit freedom. It sounds illogical, but it's not a matter of logic, it's a matter of reality. For example, if you don't have laws that limit someone's ability to kill someone else, you have less overall freedom because the threat of being killed can be used to force people to do what you want.

Similarly, the GPL limits certain freedoms (more specifically, it outlines certain responsibilities, and limits your ability to add further licensing restrictions to a piece of software) in order to promote more freedom overall. Of course, just as in the real world, it's possible to go overboard and limit freedom in such a way that is not rational. I'm sure you can think of some laws right now that do that. The GPL, on the other hand, does not do that. The GPL is simple, is predicated on four basic freedoms, and is fully consistent with those four freedoms.

Plus, let's not forget what happens when you make free software too difficult for commercial entities to use ... that's bad for the free software world, because if it happens too often, people will standardize on something else and free software will become marginalized.

RMS's goal is not for all software to free. His goal is for free software to exist. He has stated many times that you are perfectly free to use non-free software all you want. ESR is the one who's more concerned with promoting a system he sees as superior for practical reasons (read The Cathedral and the Bazaar), and while he's a libertarian, he really isn't primarily focused on promoting freedom, he sees that as a nice side-effect.

So, stating that the new GPL may make some companies not use the GPL is not a counter argument because it doesn't have "companies use GPL software" as its primary goal. If you want that, the BSD license is more in line with that goal. You (and everyone else) is free to chose whatever license they wish for their own fully-owned code.

IANAL

THE PROBLEM WITH BLOGGING IS THE SELF DELUSION THAT YOU BELIEVE YOU MATTER OR THAT PEOPLE GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU SAY.

Like many Slashdotters, I have a "blog" myself. I write it for an audience of one. If someone expresses an interest in something I've written, as they do from time to time, it's interesting and, to a limited extent, I'll engage in the odd argument, but for the most part, the blog exists for me to let off steam. As a location I can rant about politics, computers, cellphone companies, Slashdotters, open source and free software, and other stuff, without actually boring the pants off the people around me or offending them. Sometimes I'll ask a question in the hope it'll be answered, but for the most part, I honestly don't care. The only real interactive nature of it is that after a while, if and when people do look occasionally enough to think it worthwhile looking regularly, you end up with a little community of people who are interested in each other's stuff. Kind of like a group of people who hang out at a pub. That's really the only reason it ends up going online.

And I don't think most bloggers care either. Do you think the 14 year old who explains in great depth how Snuggles shat all over her mother's best rug today and how yesterday Mike (urgh!) broke up with her AGAIN really considers this more than a version of her diary with the potential for the odd bit of feedback?

As far as calling a blog a website and other stuff. Why? Amazon's "just a website" too, as is "Cingular.com" and "Yahoo". A blog is a relatively specific form of website, it's an online journal (and not a "home page" as at least one person argued. This (NSFW! NSFH either, come to think of it...) is a home page, and this is a blog.) It may be a stupid sounding name, but it's nonetheless describes a particular type of website rather than "all websites". Would I prefer a term like "journal"? Probably, that'd probably be more reasonable, and some people - and for the most part I myself do - use that term instead. But you're not suggesting "journal", you're suggesting "website", which I'll start calling blogs the day I drive to building in my vehicle every period of day, driving back to other building in my vehicle while stopping by another building to get products on the way back every some other period of day.

My advice: lose the snobbery. And if you feel posting your unsolicited feelings and news on the web should be beneath anyone, you might want to reconsider your policy of involving yourself in Slashdot discussions. You're missing the point, in a way far sillier than any teenager who writes about their cat is.

from http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/dogfood.htm l :

dogfood: n.

        [Microsoft, Netscape] Interim software used internally for testing. "To eat one's own dogfood" (from which the slang noun derives) means to use the software one is developing, as part of one's everyday development environment (the phrase is used outside Microsoft and Netscape). The practice is normal in the Linux community and elsewhere, but the term 'dogfood' is seldom used as open-source betas tend to be quite tasty and nourishing. The idea is that developers who are using their own software will quickly learn what's missing or broken. Dogfood is typically not even of beta quality.

Look at what they did with hurricane katrina, went WAY out of their way to keep private help and citizens out,walmart trucks with water told to go back, citizen convoys with rescue boats, ordered to go back, civilian communication lines CUT by agents of the feds, on and on, until it had dissolved into chaos, THEN they decide to show up to 'restore order". THIS IS A CLUE. That isn't an "intelligence failure" like that additional 9-11 bigfat lie, it was done on purpose.

See Amiga Persecution Complex. It's not really their fault, you see.

Well, I've read the constitution, and it is amazing that it's held this long. And I didn't say it was at the rate of tyranny yet--but it does seem to be coming dangerously close with things like the PATRIOT act(which needs to be taken to court, to prevent such a thing from going any further--let's just hope that Bush doesn't take over the courts too). Censorship seems to be winning out in America--just look at any /. story about violent video games or porn. The CDA(which was overturned, thank $DEITY) contained a provision to ban debates on abortion.(see http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/CDA.html) I wouldn't be surprised if the Republican government tried that again--now that Republicans in specific, and pro-censorship politicians in general, control all three branches of government(making a judicial overturn much harder), freedom-lovers need to be twice as vigilant as before. Yes, there are many, many governments much worse, but acting like the US is immune to becoming like that is helping the US become like that. I know it's cliché, but "The only thing needed for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing."

I was going to say something about second system effect here, but it doesn't really apply to Microsoft. I can't think of any first system of theirs that meets the "relatively small, elegant, and successful" criteria... not more than one out of three, anyway.

... PEBKAC!

Actually, it would probably be a good thing if the hypothetical disk-erasing worm would come along -- it would probably prompt a lot of dumb users to make backups, take some basic security precautions, and maybe consider switching from MS-ware to more secure OSS.

I know he's an arrogant prick, but esr points out exactly why that wouldn't be a good thing here.

My comprehensive defense.
If I had a nickel for every time I've told vi "Alt F X", or told notepad "Colon X", (or wordpad Alt F X Y "fuck you") I'd be posting to forbes.com instead of slashdot.org.

Mr Marshall strings together a series of misconceptions and misinformation that looks like the arguments of any generic IT manager who has heard of open source but doesn't really know all that much about it. He makes absolutely no attempt to back up his claims with any form of evidence or example. A good portion of the article can be debunked by inspection, the rest goes up in flames when held against The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Homesteading the Noosphere and The Magic Cauldron, (which I'm sure most Slashdotters have read) all of which were written after years of experience and study of hacker culture, rather than just a glance at the surface of "the most influential and talked about phenomenon to hit the computer industry since the invention of the microprocessor."

In short this is nothing more than an opinion piece, definitely not news.

Mr Marshall strings together a series of misconceptions and misinformation that looks like the arguments of any generic IT manager who has heard of open source but doesn't really know all that much about it. He makes absolutely no attempt to back up his claims with any form of evidence or example. A good portion of the article can be debunked by inspection, the rest goes up in flames when held against The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Homesteading the Noosphere and The Magic Cauldron, (which I'm sure most Slashdotters have read) all of which were written after years of experience and study of hacker culture, rather than just a glance at the surface of "the most influential and talked about phenomenon to hit the computer industry since the invention of the microprocessor."

In short this is nothing more than an opinion piece, definitely not news.

Mr Marshall strings together a series of misconceptions and misinformation that looks like the arguments of any generic IT manager who has heard of open source but doesn't really know all that much about it. He makes absolutely no attempt to back up his claims with any form of evidence or example. A good portion of the article can be debunked by inspection, the rest goes up in flames when held against The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Homesteading the Noosphere and The Magic Cauldron, (which I'm sure most Slashdotters have read) all of which were written after years of experience and study of hacker culture, rather than just a glance at the surface of "the most influential and talked about phenomenon to hit the computer industry since the invention of the microprocessor."

In short this is nothing more than an opinion piece, definitely not news.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Homesteading the Noosphere

The links to the references to Eric Raymond's work, and it is true, he covers what this article addresses.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Homesteading the Noosphere

The links to the references to Eric Raymond's work, and it is true, he covers what this article addresses.

And you can tell by reading the first two paragraphs where the author presents a complete parody of the attitudes of OSS as if it had anything more than a faint resemblence to the truth.

And I don't think OSS software developers are captivated by the idea of a free lunch. I think there is even greater awareness among such of money issues, payment for services rendered, and the value of a professional's time.

Also, deconstructing the three main sections...

This section of the WA statutes, and this section of the MN statutes (the two states I've researched) explicity limit 'work for hire' IP ownership transfer to work done during work hours, and/or using the employer's equipment or resources. So, the IP ownership issue is significantly less fuzzy than the article's author makes it out to be.

As for conceptual integrity, ESR has written an excellent essay entitled "Homesteading the Noosphere which talks about project maintainers and how projects move from maintainer to maintainer, thereby maintaining conceptual integrity. It's my experience, having working in several different software shops, that OSS typically has greater conceptual integrity because the maintainers feel a significantly greater sense of ownership over the software. There is no manager or marketing person with the power to tell them what must, or must not go into the software. It's their personal decision.

As for professionalism, I see no greater boost for overall code quality than for it to be seen by potentially hundreds of other programmers who have every incentive to pick it apart and find problems with it. Sure there are 100s of low quality text editors on Freshmeat, but that isn't actually very important. It quickly becomes known which ones are worth anything.

Lastly, the 'innovation' bugaboo. To anybody who's actually familiar with Open Source projects, the existence of innovative ideas is clear. Small things like Virtual Folders in evolution to big things like Bittorrent. There are valuable new ideas to be found by the hundreds in OSS. And many projects get started because someone has an interesting new idea. They have a lot of incentive to see that idea through.

Innovation isn't churning out stuff that's so brand new everybody has to learn something completely different in order to use it. It's finding some idea that creates a valuable change and integrating it with all the other stuff that already exists. Linux is a spinoff of Unix not because the process is only capable of creating copycat software. It's a spinoff because Unix was something everyone knew, and it was good enough to not bother tossing it all out.

Brand new application categories are few and far between, and OSS has had its fair share of those. Apache was the first webserver around. And Wiki's are another category that has its genesis in OSS.

So, in short, the article is complete bunk by some guy with a preconcieved notion of how things are who can't be bothered to actually look around and figure out whether or not he's right./p.

When I first read TFA, I thought of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. However I don't think that releasing early and often alone will lead to higher quality software. It would seem that MS is playing the numbers game to keep up with the number of releases you'd see in an open source project.

In the open source community frequent releases are due to rapid user feedback. In the MS world, it seems, releases happen because features that the competition has are better or because an exploit needs fixing. I suppose one could see it as a way of MS responding to user feed back but it's neither direct nor rapid.

This shift to release often for MS seems a bit unsettling given the amount of time typically needed for software to be QAed in the cathedral model. Can Microsoft release often and keep up with QAing releases in spite of an increasing number of customers questioning the corporation's ability to QA it's products?

``Isn't this expected when you start broadcasting macrovision codes which are themselves manufactured errors in the data stream?''

Actually, no. I think you can get about any desired reliability by just making the signal sufficiently strong and sufficiently spread out. The fact that this didn't work out in this case shows that the implementation is either bad or BAD. In the first case, it can be fixed by TiVo. In the second case, it's likely that the users are screwed, because the big corps probably don't care that you can't copy even the shows that don't have the flag set.

Hi Charlie,
1. First of all, grab Knoppix, burn it to a CD, and spend a few days (or a few weeks, whatever you feel comfortable with) playing with it. The base CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, so you can't harm anything. This is a completely safe, non-intimidating way for you to initially get your feet wet.

2. While you're exploring Knoppix, there are a few things to read which will really help you. This will give you a very good introduction to Linux, in terms of a little history of the system, how to begin using it, and how some basic things work. Here is another in-depth document about using Linux, leading on from the previous one.

3. Once you've gone through those two, (take as much time as you need) this, written by the same man as the introduction, will introduce you to the Bash shell, the textual command interpreter where as a sysadmin in particular you'll likely be spending a lot of your time. This will ease you into scripting in what I think will be a very non-intimidating way. You will be able to try out all of these exercises with the Knoppix CD, and again, because the CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, you needn't worry about destroying your existing system's contents while you learn. This is another book on Bash scripting which to a degree follows on from that one, and will go into somewhat greater depth. Both of these should lead to you feeling very comfortable writing shell scripts and moving around to a degree on the system.

4. Here is where we get to some meat. This document goes into compiling and installing generic Linux/UNIX software, and offers some basic applications and examples. Once you've gone through this, coupled with the material above, you should now have sufficient understanding to be able to compile and install at least a basic application yourself.

5. The Pocket Linux Guide will take you step by step through the process of learning to make a small, bootable Linux system on two floppy disks. Although compiling a basic custom kernel is part of this process, the Guide contains a link to another document which explains very clearly how to do this, and given the background you will have received from the previous documents, this should not be difficult.

6. Once you have completed the Pocket Linux Guide, you will then be ready to proceed to this site, which is the homepage of the Linux From Scratch Project. Here you will be able to read an HTML-formatted book which will give you the necessary information to successfully build an entire base Linux system of your own, and a more pure boot CD than Knoppix to initially build it upon. The Linux From Scratch Project also has a sequel book, Beyond Linux From Scratch, which describes how to install, among other things, a full graphical user interface with the X Windows system.

7. After you have completed all of this, although it is not crucial, I thoroughly recommend reading this book during idle moments. (It's still a good mealtime accompaniment for me) It will give you a detailed knowledge of the history and philosophy behind the UNIX operating system in general, which I am sure you will find enormously useful.

(Slashdot flamers, start your engines. I'm aware I'm likely to get a ton of abuse from corporate droids in particular about how I'm not telling him to find hand-holding tech support/this isn't practical advice, blah blah blah. For anyone considering res

And don't go running to the linux community for help when you do run into problems. They can be remarkably unhelpful beyond laughing at you for not already knowing the answers or repeating 'RTFM'.

That's unfair and untrue.

The community WILL tell you to RTFM if you have NOT even bothered to consult google or basic FAQ's AT ALL, but if you have a real question that ISN'T totally obvious to anyone that has spent 5 minutes of research, you will find that the responses are rather good and helpful.

See: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

... trolls like yours, where you use the pretense of defending the conversation to subvert it instead. Well done.

My post was two sentences. You're trying to start a completely worthless flamefest.

I don't feel the need to show everyone how smart I am or abuse others to feel superior

If "improving future conversations" is that important to you, why not do something useful and submit a spell-checking patch to slashcode? Oh, I know -- because that would require more work than being a pompous self-righteous ass.

Oh, I see you made me a "foe". How mature. That really showed me! I guess that will teach me to abase myself before the next jackass who points out a trivial spelling error in one of my posts.

I'm done feeding you, Troll. You can crawl back under your bridge now.

... trolls like yours, where you use the pretense of defending the conversation to subvert it instead. Well done.

My post was two sentences. You're trying to start a completely worthless flamefest.

I don't feel the need to show everyone how smart I am or abuse others to feel superior

If "improving future conversations" is that important to you, why not do something useful and submit a spell-checking patch to slashcode? Oh, I know -- because that would require more work than being a pompous self-righteous ass.

Oh, I see you made me a "foe". How mature. That really showed me! I guess that will teach me to abase myself before the next jackass who points out a trivial spelling error in one of my posts.

I'm done feeding you, Troll. You can crawl back under your bridge now.

Is that not the functional specification for Windows Update? ( Ha ha, only serious.)

For that matter, is that not the functional spec for every automatically self-updating piece of software?

Your machine is as trustworthy as those you permit to administer it. To the extent that you install auto-updating software, your machine is only as trustworthy as the authors of that software.

I'm highly confident that when my cron job asks apt-get to phone home, the maintainers of $MY_PET_DISTRO won't take advantage of the opportunity to place anything nasty on my machine.

I'm somewhat confident that Microsoft isn't going to auto-disable even pirated Windows installations, nor to install a RIAA/MPAA sniffing trojan as part of its updates - at least, not without providing a few weeks of warning.

I had so little confidence (as a matter of personal opinion) that the auto-updating and installation of DRM/software subscription services from www.steampowered.com, that I never purchased Valve's Half-Life 2. (If you trust Valve, hey, go for it -- but Steam is, IMO, fundamentally no different than having companies like EA and Adobe decide to outsource the management of "licencing component services" to organizations like Macrovision and the BSA. Would you like to get your "security components" from DRM providers?

And finally, I'd have no confidence whatsoever in any machine that was required, as part of the Homeland Cybersecurity Act of 2012, to download security updates from updatefarm.cybersec2012.gov.

On that scale, I'd place the original "cracker group" (perhaps affiliated with the Russian mafia) installing its own rootkits as somewhere between "less trustworthy than Steam, but more trustworthy than bsa.org".

But there's fundamentally no difference between any of these options.