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This lack of integrity goes to the heart of Be's corporate culture, and is in particular exemplified by the attitudes and practices of Be's CEO, Jean Louis Gassee.

Read about the experience of one of Be's formerly most-loyal and most enthusiastic business partners in:

• The Valley is a Harsh Mistress

I have no doubt that BeIA has tremendous technical advantages. See what this once-ardent BeOS developer is doing to harden the competition for Be Inc. at The Linux Quality Database and Freeing the Developer from OS Vendor Shackles.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

1. Competition is often a Good Thing. Look at the KDE/Gnome split.
2. One of them is free software, the other isn't (or, at least, wasn't). Note that this was originally a cause of the KDE/Gnome split.
3. They might do the same thing in different ways. Consider:
   • ease of use for novices vs. speed of use for experts
   • looking or working more like like this, that or the other existing client
   • eye candy vs. uncluttered
   • more features vs. more speed and less disk space
4. And if they were both GPLd, they could borrow code from one another anyway-- theoretically, at least.

(I was told this text was hard to understand if you don't know that sound is nothing more than waves, and that waves can be 'drawn' in digital by stacking together a bunch of numbers representing the amplitude of the wave at exact timed moments. All musical effects are math on those 'strings' of numbers))

I was thinking of starting a musical project after my current gig is over.

It would be cool if we could create a musical tool (maybe a replacement to proprietary VST, but completly VST compatible...) that was completely free and ultra powerful.

Python is a language I've come upon recently and it seems to be very apt for massively paralleled computational tasks such as Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and VST effects (and musical effects in general).

All that would have to be coded is an agent app that does work on incoming packets and outputs to another specific agent(eventually the signal data would return, completely processed, to the output computer)

Live shows using the software could consist of one controller computer that changes parameters for each effect according to musician's input(knobs and/or instruments plugged into the computer). That computer's agent would grab the input and send constructed commands to the processing cluster. The processing cluster would run all the math, then output the resulting signal to the output computer, (which is running an agent whose 'job'(or 'effect') is to play the signal) resulting in crackling beats and such)

python Anybody want this to exist?

UNIX was a revolutionary piece of software in the 1970s. According to this chronology by Ronda Hauben, the UNIX kernel was born in 1969, over thirty years ago. V7 UNIX, which was many people's first exposure to UNIX, was released ten years later, in 1979.

I don't mean to denigrate the accomplishments of Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan and the others who contributed to UNIX. The longevity of UNIX is a tribute to their genius.

If we pick 1979 as the baseline, what has been accomplished in the past twenty-plus years? The Mac and its GUI based OS debuted in 1984. TCP/IP became a standard part of nearly every operating system. Everything got cheaper and faster. And...

Computer hardware advanced from the 8 MHz 16-bit 8086 and 1200 bps modems to 1+ GHz 64-bit microprocessors with complex and sophisticated architectures, gigabytes of memory and gigabit LAN connections.

What happened to the progress in operating systems? We have the software equivalent of a Ford Model T powered by an advanced gas turbine engine that produces thousands of horsepower.

I think the author misunderstands what Linux and the open source movement is all about. I can't articulate it as well as Eric Raymond can, but I can approximate...

Microsoft won't be stealing from Linux by embracing it, no more than IBM, Oracle or even RedHat is. The point of the Open Source movement and the motivation of the Linux community isn't to beat Microsoft, it's to make good software. People may bash Microsoft because they abuse monopoly power, and because they do some pretty ruthless stuff (which, apparently, the author seems to laud them for); but the main reason people use Linux is because it's just better. Technically better, better security, better stability, better support, better foundation and it's part of a better community. Linux represents what's best in technology and what's best in society. Imagine an operating system put together by individuals from around the world; each working in collaboration without profit incentive or military incentive, but just because they wanted to make computers work better. So if Microsoft pitches in; or even if they just absorb other people's work, we'll all be the better for it because it will bring about total Linux domination which really means no domination at all. We can use the programs we like, we can drop the ones we don't; because WE'LL have the power to decide. That's what Linux represents: choice.

Marcel Gagne has written a nice series of intro articles on this topic for The Linux Journal. You can find the articles, called Tweaking Tux at LJ under the System Administration section in the archives section, or listed on his personal page of his company's website.

Marcel Gagne has written a nice series of intro articles on this topic for The Linux Journal. You can find the articles, called Tweaking Tux at LJ under the System Administration section in the archives section, or listed on his personal page of his company's website.

Linux.com has weekly newbie articles. Also Linux Journal occassionaly has some worthy newbie articles. Of course, nothing beats handing out RedHat cds and making 'em install linux at home.

I, for one, have sent mail a few time to the /. team suggesting an interview with M. Wall. This man is incredible in interview : look at http://www2.linuxjourna l.c om/lj-issues/issue61/3394.html for a good example.

They're flippin' expensive, though. Just under $500, last I checked.

There's a review of their 2100 model at Linux Journal.

But really, really cool. Wouldn't mind having one myself, to play around with

Bo

GNOME was started with the express purpose of replacing (killing) KDE, not very admirable goals to begin with. This has been backed up time and time again with the Stallman's attacks against KDE. How can we expect them to work with the entire Linux community's interests at heart when they have been motivated by these petty feuds in the past?

No, Larry Wall is "Weird Al" Yankovic without the hair.

If you live in a metropolitan area, chances are good that Open Source or Free Software "luminaries" will be in your area from time to time.

Having a good web page that is listed on GLUE is a good first step; it lets them find you.

If a conference of any sort is going to be in your area, check the guest list, and email any that appear interesting.

Don't be afraid to ask your members if they know anyone; the Orlando LUG got Ian Kluft to come speak that way, and unfortunately we had to turn down Chris DiBona but he contacted us because of a VA staffer in the LUG.

Don't be afraid to email anyone; the worst they can do is delete it unread, and you haven't wasted much time in that case.

That being said, don't be a cheap bastard, either; if your LUG can afford to pay for speakers, do so. Otherwise they might have to start charging for software to make a buck.

Oh; and watch for businesses in your area that may be in the Linux arena, they aften have contacts you don't, and will probably have interesting speakers on staff.

-

But the bottom line is to go to the site, look around, and start asking people.

Look at one of last years Linux Journal issues (or was it Linux Magazine?). They had a list of the top 100 most influential open source people. You may want to contact a few of them. Some may even be in your neck of the woods. Western PA should have a fair supply of open source developers and beowolf people.

Maybe you should have a look at: Jabber.org and Jabber.com. There was also a nice feature on Jabber in August's (or was it September's?) issue of Linux Journal. Jabber has the potential to integrate all of the above and more.

Then it's good enough for me. Does the perl commnity have any plans to get a ringing endorsement from such a public opensource figure? I mean, besides Larry Wall, of course. We geeks may make these decisions on their technical merit, but it really helps the suits if a celebrity pitches it to them.

The hacker boycott of SDMI organized by suspicious members of the programming community has turned out to be irrelevant.

Wow. I didn't know Don Marti, technical editor of Linux Journal was a "suspicious member" of the programming community.

Apparently, if you don't want to do everything the RIAA and other corporate cartels want you to do, you're "suspicious".

Cute implication.

On the other hand, I also don't think the SDMI crew wanted everything to get cracked either:)

Karma (aka the Golden Rule, etc.) is real, and it is biting the RIAA in the ass, my friends...

And shame on Janelle Brown, the author of the piece, and/or her editors, for putting that defamatory line in the article. Not going along with a cartel's wishes does not make one "suspicious" except in the eyes of the cartel and its allies. Are you an ally of the cartel, Miss Brown/Salon?

-------------

Linux Helps Bring Titanic to Life

- |Daryll

Well Linux doesn't have anything to do with getting effects, cheaper probably, but it's up to the artists and technicians involved. Actually a lot of companies are looking and using Linux at the moment, like Digital Domain (renderin g on Titanic for example), Rhythm and Hues (their work on getting 16 bit Gimp and application porting) and Hammerhead (they even have Linux software to give away). This last SIGGRAPH you copuld here a lot of people from the industry talking about it.

Anyone who talks about Google "selling out" is, frankly, an idiot. To run their search engine, Google needs hundreds, perhaps thousands of servers (you don't think a desktop PC running off a DSL line indexes 1 billion pages and serves the searching needs of 6.6 million distinct people I hope?) using tons of bandwidth and space at a pricey colocation facility.

Linux Journal has an interview with Sergey Brin this month.
(Table of contents here. The interview isn't online, though.)

Google has 5000 computers now. About 80% are performing searches, 10% are for R&D, and 10% are crawling & indexing.

Anyone who talks about Google "selling out" is, frankly, an idiot. To run their search engine, Google needs hundreds, perhaps thousands of servers (you don't think a desktop PC running off a DSL line indexes 1 billion pages and serves the searching needs of 6.6 million distinct people I hope?) using tons of bandwidth and space at a pricey colocation facility.

Linux Journal has an interview with Sergey Brin this month.
(Table of contents here. The interview isn't online, though.)

Google has 5000 computers now. About 80% are performing searches, 10% are for R&D, and 10% are crawling & indexing.

I've seen Linux used in the Army to do things that were just not possible with M$ products, cost being a BIG factor. With all the cutbacks with the military budget, it's just not possible for units to spend several thousand dollars on software. Or the several thousand dollars on licenses. When people (i.e. officers) are shown how flexible linux is (not to mention free), it's not uncommon to hear them make suggestions to problems by saying, "Well, can't you just download something off of the internet?"

Oh gosh. There was a review of various Linux flavors I was just reading last week... Ah, here it is... a bit dated, but something to start from.

Link

HTH

Vote Naked 2000

yeah it is actually on the cover
the article is on page 86

anyway i could just be jumping to conclusions because they watch may very well be a different watch but i wanted to complain and make a fool out of myself so i could be a "karma whore"

here is the online article

:)

Linux Journal had an article about GNU/Linux on a wristwatch with videoconferencing last month, here is a link to the appropriate month with a picture of the watch on the cover even!
http://www2.linuxjournal. com/lj-issues/issue75/index.html

---

take a look at this link for an article at linux journal about a GNU/Linux based videophone on a watch :)

IBM is two years behind on this one, playing catchup to the Open/Free Source community again.

--

Linux already does run on a watch. Check it out. (actually, the OS is running out of site and the display is on the watch)
--

Let's see... I'll just scrawl 'CmdrTaco@usps.com' on this here envelope, tack a stamp in the upper right hand corner, and it'll be there in 3-7 days.

WOOPS.... "returned to sender: address [nnohF8o*@usps.com' unknown"

At least they've got one thing in their favor.

FYI, Linux PCC guru Stew Benedict has a great article in this month's Linux Journal, "Yellow Dog Linux on the iMac." He gives a good overview of the process, the benefits and drawbacks to YDL, etc.

FWIW, I use Yellowdog (I have for over a year), and I absolutely love it. There's nuthin' prettier than Helix Gnome on an iMac. :)

-Waldo
-------------------

FYI, Linux PCC guru Stew Benedict has a great article in this month's Linux Journal, "Yellow Dog Linux on the iMac." He gives a good overview of the process, the benefits and drawbacks to YDL, etc.

FWIW, I use Yellowdog (I have for over a year), and I absolutely love it. There's nuthin' prettier than Helix Gnome on an iMac. :)

-Waldo
-------------------

Someone posted a link to a 1994 Pat Volkerding interview done by Linux Journal in which, among other things, he talks about how Slackware came into existence.

--

Someone posted a link to a 1994 Pat Volkerding interview done by Linux Journal in which, among other things, he talks about how Slackware came into existence.

--

Some references I found:

"Slackware is based on the older SoftLanding System Linux"

"SuSE started in the Linux business by distributing the SoftLanding Systems version of Linux"

I also found this reference to an old Linux Journal article... written by Ian A. Murdock... saying basically SLS was so bad, that he had to do better... and started Debian.

Don't know about current, but this link in LJ shows that as of the date of the article, NT creates a thread in 0.9ms, while Linux takes 1.0ms to create a process. However, this table shows the effect of some changes to the scheduling - under light load conditions (small run queues), Linux switches processes (much more secure & protected) faster than NT switches threads. Read the main article. The changes happened in the 2.0.x series, so hopefully it got even better during 2.2, never mind 2.4.

Don't know about current, but this link in LJ shows that as of the date of the article, NT creates a thread in 0.9ms, while Linux takes 1.0ms to create a process. However, this table shows the effect of some changes to the scheduling - under light load conditions (small run queues), Linux switches processes (much more secure & protected) faster than NT switches threads. Read the main article. The changes happened in the 2.0.x series, so hopefully it got even better during 2.2, never mind 2.4.

Don't know about current, but this link in LJ shows that as of the date of the article, NT creates a thread in 0.9ms, while Linux takes 1.0ms to create a process. However, this table shows the effect of some changes to the scheduling - under light load conditions (small run queues), Linux switches processes (much more secure & protected) faster than NT switches threads. Read the main article. The changes happened in the 2.0.x series, so hopefully it got even better during 2.2, never mind 2.4.

Eric Raymond's typically well-argued Why Python? piece in the May 2000 Linux Journal has this to say about Perl Syntax: Larger project size seemed to magnify some of Perl's annoyances into serious, continuing problems. The syntax that had seemed merely eccentric at a hundred lines began to seem like a nigh-impenetrable hedge of thorns at a thousand. ``More than one way to do it'' lent flavor and expressiveness at a small scale, but made it significantly harder to maintain consistent style across a wider code base. And many of the features that were later patched into Perl to address the complexity-control needs of bigger programs (objects, lexical scoping, ``use strict'', etc.) had a fragile, jerry-rigged feel about them. He makes a strong case for (more or less) abandoning Perl for Python, specially for new programmers. Since the world needs a lot more programmers than there are now, the learning-curve argument is probably the strongest one against Perl (only in a Perl vs. Python context though). Specially when it comes from Eric Raymond!

there are about a kajillion different ways to do the same thing

Nothing wrong with that as such (or perhaps I should say "per se"...)

and I've never much cared for the way variables are declared and used in Perl (scalars?). Too much use of symbols, not enough grammar.

Amen!

This is a plug for Icon. You can do everything you can in Perl in Icon - with sane and human-readable syntax. Things are slightly different there; see the article from the Linux Journal.

To download this object-oriented, very high level language with garbage collection, X11 support, POSIX stuff (networking, file/directory manipulation etc.) go to the Unicon web page. It is available for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD etc.) and Windows-NT. It is, of course, free.

-s

Thanks to the June Linux Journal, here's a link to the PoPToP home page. PoPToP is a free server implementation of the PPTP that works with MSCHAPv2. Not sure about compression.

This is a logo and licensing agreement developed by the Linux Journal... it looks like it was designed to address these issues, particularly by licensing the logo for a $1.00US/year fee and retaining control over how it's used. More information can be found here.

You'll want to use a "real" RDBMS. I'm not trying to flame here, but MySQL is inadequate for storing your customers' data because it doesn't support transactions. If one of your scripts accidentally breaks (due to bad user data), you do not want to bill them or store their order accidentally. Likewise, you want to update "stock/availablility information" atomically. There are probably some parts of your site that you could use MySQL for (i.e. authentication), but since you will need transactions for a critical part of your product anyway, you may as well go with Sybase, Oracle, PostgreSQL or SOLID. The MySQL developers have made it pretty clear that even if they implement something "called" transactions, it will fail the ACID test. (see the links from http://openacs.org for more objective info.) In any case, don't run the db server on the same machine as the WWW server -- remember the example set by CDUniverse.com, who lost many credit card numbers to a cracker.

If you have any db/php beginners on your team, you might want to show them this article I wrote for the Linux Journal -- it features a (cursory) overview of some of the topics you'll need to teach them.

Best of luck! ~wog

Hey!

I may be missing something here, but what good encryption system would need 20GB of random data? What is that, like half your hard disk space? if you want to do a sort of XOR job, then encrypting the random data, you'd need that much, but 20GB? that's a lot of hard disk space.

I'd go for something different if I were you. I like the look of TCFS but I'm fairly new to Linux so I don't think I'll be using it just yet. Here's an ectract from the security HOWTO:

"6.10. CFS - Cryptographic File System and TCFS - Transparent Cryptographic File System

CFS is a way of encrypting entire directory trees and allowing users to store encrypted files on them. It uses an NFS server running on the local machine. RPMS are available at http://www.zedz.net/redhat/, and more information on how it all works is at ftp://ftp.research.att.com/dist/mab/.

TCFS improves on CFS by adding more integration with the file system, so that it's transparent to users that the file system that is encrypted. More information at: http://edu-gw.dia.unisa.it/tcfs/.

It also need not be used on entire filesystems. It works on directory trees as well."

You could try either of them. As I may have said, I like the look of TCFS. The website in the qoute may have been removed, if so, I know it's availiable at http://tcfs.dia.unisa.it/.

The Linux Journal has a good article that you could also look at.

Just my $0.02

Michael Tandy

By far, my favorite feature is the popup Intellisense, when you're working with an object or struct and type "." or "->" you get a window with the details of the object at that level.

Visual Slickedit has this and many more features and is availble for almost all UNIXes. Trial versions are available.

Slickedit is expensive ($299), and closed source, and most of its (and other editors) features can be reproduced in vi and emacs, but I like it. Especially the feature you mention.

Incidentally the latest issue of Linux Journal has a review of Visual Slickedit.

By far, my favorite feature is the popup Intellisense, when you're working with an object or struct and type "." or "->" you get a window with the details of the object at that level.

Visual Slickedit has this and many more features and is availble for almost all UNIXes. Trial versions are available.

Slickedit is expensive ($299), and closed source, and most of its (and other editors) features can be reproduced in vi and emacs, but I like it. Especially the feature you mention.

Incidentally the latest issue of Linux Journal has a review of Visual Slickedit.

As well as the Expo, Suse were also running a conference in the Olympia conference centre on the first day. This was a poorly advertised and poorly focused event - there were no titles given for the talks beforehand, and no real indication as to whether this was meant to be an introduction to Linux for those new to the phenomenum, or whether it was a development conference. In the end it was closer to the former, but with a good number of hardedned linuxers and even developers there....

Where this becomes relevant to the subject line (wow - relevant - thats an oddity), is the Maddog gave the closing talk - his chosen subject (chosen in the previous 24 hours) was "Why under 21s should not be excluded from these events".

Maddog spoke well, eloquently and amusingly on why he thought that the expo organisers were cutting themselves off from their own future by excluding people who may well already be making a significant contribution to linux development. Much of the background he gave is actually covered in the article in June 2000 Linux Journal.

As a postscript I would strongly advise people politely taking this issue up with IT Events and other conference organisers - it worked when we took up the issue of Debian and other non-profits attending the show.

• Crossplatform - runs on Windows and *nix (Im not sure about Max or Bez et al)
• It has been tested and interoperates with more H323 stacks than you knew existed - Radware, Cisco...
• Free Software - which is the point of this article, right?

• Very complex ... just take a look at the codebase
• Control data is transmitted in binary form - most widely used protocols are based on ASCII (FTP, HTTP, SMTP)
• It uses a port assignment process which is virtually impossible to use through a NAT firewall.

I had a similar problem a few years ago and wrote some scripts to do failover clustering.
I published it in the Linux Journal last year:
http://ww w.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/lj-issues/iss ue64/3247.html
source/scripts:
ftp://ftp.ssc.com/pub /lj/listings/issue64/3247clusterd.tar.gz
It would solve your problem with layer-2 and layer-3 failover but, without modification, would require two identical servers.
Yes, it will decide which switch/router is actually still live for the next hop routing aswell - it can determine which switch has failed if any by pinging a list of 'supposed to be reachable' addresses.
It is a bit dated and I haven't really kept the code upto date but the principles are there and it is has been used for a long time with no major problems.

Philip J Lewis
Network Consultant
Dome Computer Consultants Ltd
UK
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