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To quote from an article in linuxjournal

"Despite the fact that it is opposed by 23 U.S. attorneys general, by every consumer-rights organization that has ever examined the issue, and by hosts of legal scholars, two U.S. states (Virginia and Maryland) have already adopted the measure. (In a noted U.S. pattern called "The Race to the Bottom", you can expect other states - hoping to cash in on lobbyists' bucks and the tax revenues they'll get by attracting software firms to their states - to adopt UCITA in short order.) "

Definitely a scary trend. If I was living in the US I would seriously consider leaving.

Note, I use PostgreSQL on my server and I have no problems with it (except for weird blown buffer errors during inserts with the perl lib), but InterBase sounded like a pretty solid system from the article.

By the way, I ran across that article while looking for comparison reviews on OSS Linux EJB containers. Anyone know where I can find such a thing? Please email me, I had no luck.

The High availability cluster is something else entirely. These clusters are not built for speed, but rather reliability and distributed load bearing. It usually means a group of machines that behave to the user as if they are one. Kind of like a certain major website that we're on. You generally have one or two traffic servers whose job is to send requests to the computer that meets certain criteria. Perhaps you want load balancing web servers. The traffic computers would send some requests to one server, some other requests to the other server, and so on based on some predetermined criteria. It can also be used to make sure no requests go to a dead machine. There is some real good information on this out there, but the most easily digestible is probably at TurboLinux and their High Availability Cluster solution and RedHat with their Piranha solutions.

I know that was oversimplified, but I hope that it helps.

"I've always thought that Visual Basic is a good product."

Was it

• Bill Gates ?
• Linux Torvalds ?
• Zaphod Beeblebrox ?
• Hemos ?

Answer : Linux Torvalds. Source : Linux Journal.
http://www2.linuxjourn al.com/articles/conversations/006.html

Personally, I prefer Perl, but there ya go ...
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my

You seem bitter, my friend ... Maybe you are shocked by the extra punctuation in variable name, or maybe you can't stand the ambiguity of the langage. Anyway, don't take our word for it and listen to the master. You should be enlightned.

Here's a little story for "legitimate" companies that wish to send advertising. This story is about SSC, which is one of the most reputable companies on the Internet. I would recommend them to anyone, despite this story.

SSC publishes Linux Journal , one of the oldest (if not the oldest) and easily one of the highest signal-over-noise Linux mags available. I had a fairly long subscription to LJ (which, again, I would recommend despite this incident). One day I got e-mail telling me it was time to renew. Well, this e-mail didn't appear to come from SSC. It gave a different site as the place for credit card orders, had non-SSC "From" and "Reply-To" lines, and a non-SSC origin IP. So, uncomfortable about how my e-mail address was getting picked up, I decided to wait until I could call SSC and find out if the e-mail was from their agent or just some random magazine house trying to scam a commission. After I got a paper renewal notice later, I still hadn't gotten around to calling, so I kept putting my renewal off.

That was probably a year or 2 ago. I still haven't gotten around to calling. That's my rotten procrastination habit again, I'm sure. But, my point to legitimate companies is this: This whole time I've been procrastinating, SSC has been without my (probably 5-year) subscription. And that's a company I actually like, sending me a notice I actually wanted. You can probably imagine what I think of companies who send me e-mail when I've never even contacted them.

The moral of this true fable is thus: Go out of your way to demonstrate that you're a previous business contact. Identify who you are and why you have the e-mail address, so that the recipient isn't worried about their personal information getting out. Net folks are far more concerned with whether their privacy than whether they buy something. I'll bet SSC probably knew this, but their agent didn't get it.

(That said, I'll probably go call them and subscribe to Linux Journal again sometime soon. Now I get to wonder about Boardwatch , who is owned by a different company, and wants to charge me more for renewal ($72) than normal people pay for a first subscription. Ah well.)

I've been to several NASA sites recently, and I can tell you that on the ground most of the machines are SGIs, presumably running IRIX.

As for the shuttle itself, the onboard computers are mostly 386s. If I remember correctly, ESR mentioned in one of his essays that NASA runs trimmed-down Linux on the integrated computers.

The computers that are used for scientific research are different for each mission. If you read Linux Journal, you're familiar with the Metro-X adds which boast that Metro-X X servers are used on the space shuttle. Therefore we can be reasonably sure that either Linux or *BSD runs on these computers at least part of the time.

Also, it should be noted that shuttle crew members are allowed to bring their own laptops onboard for personal use, presumably running whatever they please.

An excerpt:
"In order to test the vehicle extensively under different traffic conditions, road environments and weather, a 2000km journey was undertaken June 1 through June 6, 1998. During this test, ARGO drove autonomously along the Italian highway network, passing through flat areas and hilly regions including viaducts and tunnels. The Italian road network is particularly suited for such an extensive test since it is characterized by quickly varying road scenarios, changing weather conditions and generally a fair amount of traffic. The tour took place on highways and freeways, but the system also proved to work on sufficiently structured rural roads with no intersections."

This is a fairly interesting, linux based, driving platform where the technology is integrated into the car (well integrated the best it could be for the expense taken) instead of acting on the car.

I wish I'd known about all this stuff before I bought my DVD player, or I would've bought a better one. Especially since I'm a total otaku and would like to watch Japanese movies (many of which won't be released here). Stupid region codes.

Of course, I really wish I'd known about the DeCSS controversy and DVD boycott before buying my DVD player. I could've saved about $300. I obviously don't need a DVD player if I won't be buying DVDs.

For a closer look at how we got into this mess, check out this december article on Linux Journal, it details how it all started in 1952 in a congressional commission chaired by a patent attorney named Giles S. Rich, that changed the wording of the Patent Act to cover 'Processes'.

Mr. Rich subsequently embarked on a long term plan to expand the scope of wat is patentable. These efforts culminated in the 'State Street Bank & Trust vs. Signature Financial Group' decision of 1996, over which Giles S. Rich, now a judge in his nineties, presided. This decision created the current situation where a computer mediated business process is patentable.

There were a few other steps along the way, but Judge Rich was definitely instrumental to the chain of events, and as a patent attorney, was hardly a disinterested party. Unfortunately, He's now safely dead, so we can't call him up and ask: 'What were you thinking?'.
--

It can't be revenues ($3 million in '99) or profits ($9.4 million loss in '99).

Caldera Systems' products would appear to be proprietary Linux ports of Noorda's, I mean, Novell's successful and fast-growing Netware line plus Red Hat-based OpenLinux distro. The Lizard installer (co-developed with TrollTech) seems to have been finally open-sourced last September under TrollTech's QPL but the only reference to COAS licensing seemed to imply that the source will only be released after the administration tools are developed , whatever that means.

Offering only approximately 5% of the stock to the public is a time-tested method of increasing demand by artificially restricting supply. Ray Noorda (holding 73% after IPO) will be laughing all the way to the bank even if the IPO tanks. Even Sun, SCO, Citrix etc. got their pre-IPO shares at $6 a few months ago while TrollTech got theirs via equity swap. However the common man only "wins" if the company is really going to be worth over $1 billion in the not too distant future. Also be warned that daytraders and marketmakers (both well-known market manipulators) may quickly boost the price quite high after opening but they're also able to dump their "holdings" in a split second when the price starts heading south.

Are people even aware that this Caldera Systems, Inc. isn't the same as Caldera, Inc.? Since they took over www.caldera.com from their mother company any references to the latter have been hard to find. At least they're still proudly carrying a link to the Caldera vs. Microsoft (SETTLED!) page, even though the dough went to the old Caldera, Inc. instead. I hope that the DOJ's case will finally produce Microsoft a guilty verdict instead because it would be too painful to see Gates (unrelated tip: try searching Chairman Gates' site for "Linux") proclaiming again how Microsoft has never, ever done anything remotely naughty, how the operating system and Office suite markets are, as always, extremely competitive and how they only settled to be able to better continue innovating for their customers...

Anyways, it will be interesting to see what impact the nouveau rich Caldera Systems, Inc. will have on Red Hat's market valuation and strategies; both of these primarily server and service-oriented companies are going to be accountable for their shareholders' financial well-being. With Caldera Systems, Inc. IPO already priced above Corel's market valuation perhaps Red Hat should reconsider strengthening their position by buying out Corel (currently valued at only 10% of RHAT market cap), selling Corel's investments in other companies for cash and then creating a number of subsidiaries with their own lucrative IPO's of the Corel product lines as e.g. the WordPerfect Office Corp., the Corel Draw and Publishing Corp., the Red Corel Linux OS for desktop etc. Say what you will but competition between these Linux-based companies is going to get started.

He actually answered this http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue2/2750 .html. Basically he says that he started installing SLS on some computers for a professor, and ended up fixing bugs in the SLS setup. The ball started rolling, and eventually he had slackware

That's nice, but not what I was really trying to ask about (perhaps I was too delicate). The SLS/Slackware story, as I remember it, involved attempts to "close" an open source license on the SLS install scripts, accusations that somebody was trying to prevent SLS from making money...a bunch of more sensitive issues that were presented way too emotionally at the time to allow any kind of rational analysis or learning to take place. Also, I think the current interest in the story is that SLS was, in many ways, the first Linux company on earth and it went out of that line of business. Slackware was not the sole cause of this by any means, but it is a fact that doesn't seem to be very widely known right now.

He actually answered this http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue2/2750 .html . Basically he says that he started installing SLS on some computers for a professor, and ended up fixing bugs in the SLS setup. The ball started rolling, and eventually he had slackware
treke

Actually he DID just make changes to SLS to start...eventually it evolved into what is now slackware. Originally it was just SLS with modifications...then the installation scripts were re-done ( they WERE from SLS ).

Have a look at this interview with Patrick from 1994 in Linux Journal
Click here for the article

There are probably many "established" professionals in your area who would be more than happy to come in and give a presentation on Open Source in general, or Linux in particular. Check for a local Linux users group, or even a local branch of a related user group (like Perl Mongers, for exaqple). Even if the presentation is just for the teachers, it would probably be well received. If you are in the Boston area, contact the FSF. See the Linux User Group HOWTO for more info.

Actually linux is much faster than solaris with certain thread libraries. For all you trolls who actually wanna *learn* (is that possible? an educated troll..hmm..) about thread libraries and see the benchmarks have a look at this :
http://www2.linuxjournal.c om/lj-issues/issue70/3184.html

Surely you're just testing if we're awake. Elsewise-- who do you think stamps all those bar-codes on our mail? Bloody elves???

Anyway, the USPS uses Linux, according to Linux Journal issue 52:

"The United States Postal Service deployed over 900 Linux-based systems throughout the United States in 1997 to automatically recognize the destination addresses on mail pieces. Each system consists of five dual Pentium Pro 200MHz (PP200) computers and one single PP200, all running Linux.

"One of the five Linux boxes has a monitor, keyboard, mouse, CD-ROM and floppy--the other four are headless. Each has 128MB RAM and a 2.5GB hard drive. The mail pieces are scanned at 212dpi at a rate of 12 per second. The binary image is sent to one of the Linux boxes via a custom cable and receiver board. The board packs the bits and uses DMA (direct memory access) to transfer the data over the PCI bus. The receiving computer runs a process that compresses the images and routes them via Ethernet to one of 10 identical processes, two for each CPU, that do the hand-print recognition and machine-print recognition. Those algorithms recognize the text from the image in less than a second and return the ASCII results to a database on a separate computer that looks up the zip code. The slave computers are connected on a subnet with the master which has a second Ethernet card connected to the rest of the computers associated with the scanner. The local network is 10Mbps Ethernet and handles the compressed binary images sent to the slaves and the ASCII results received from the slaves. "

There is a tutorial on how to use LaTeX over at linuxjournal today.

Let's see: it's complete, if you find a bug Knuth will pay you, it does the world's most beautiful equations (I'm a math student), does indexing, has device independent output, and is free as in thought. The only "problem" is that importing Word documents is sketchy. Plus you get the awesome "look and feel" of your favorite text editor.

What you need to do is find a Linux User Group to join. Here's a helpful page. Don't worry if there's not one within driving distance, they almost all have mailing lists. Just pick one. Or pick two or three, ask a few questions, and see which list is the most helpful.

I'll take this as an opportunity to plug our local LUG, GOLUM. You're welcome to join our list, or if you're in the Memphis area, come to the meetings. Plus we have the coolest mascot of any LUG.

--

It will probably ship in the third quarter of this year - or maybe the fourth (that's from the newsgroups)

The command line C++/Object Pascal compiler is working now.

It will use Qt as a toolkit (not my choice, but at least it's not Motif!) (That's from an interview at www.linuxjournal.com here with Dale Fuller - Borland CEO - done just after the merger)

It seems likely that the compilers will be a free download (and maybe even open source) - and perhaps even a free "Entry Level" version of Kylix will be available.

They aren't sure about the licencing for the VCL yet.

Btw, the Interbase open source project is still going along nicely. A new company has been set up to run it. See here for more news.

The Department of Defense has already made a large commitment to using an Open Source groupware package called CVW, that was developed as an internal research project by MITRE. There's an article in the latest Linux Journal about it.

[ There are shareware products that have better groupware features than those of Microsoft products, he said, drawing applause from the audience. ]

Ok then, give some shareware developer out there an early christmas present and buy his software. If not, then basically...shutup. Or was he hoping to get some beanie points by bashing Microsoft?

The Department of Defense has already made a large commitment to using an Open Source groupware package called CVW, that was developed as an internal research project by MITRE. There's an article in the latest Linux Journal about it. My guess is that Undersecretary Hultin was referring to CVW, and confused shareware with open source.

OSS trivia item: Eric Raymond was instrumental in helping convince MITRE (and their legal department) to release CVW as Open Source Software.

Legacy systems have already shown corporations predilection to maintaining old protocols and hardware over upgrading to more efficient and (sometimes) more restrictive hardware and operator interfaces. As long as the current (relatively) non-restrictive internet is 'cost effective' our current (and imho rightfull) liberties online will continue to exist. The moment the people with the money to 'up-grade' the hardware and software that is the internet decide it is in thier best interest (or more importantly figure out how) to do so; they will.

In the interest of backwards compatibility the internet will probably always continue to support the protocols it is currently using (ie TC/IP).

Individual private Wide Area Networks (WANs) have the greater possibility for rapid highbandwidth gains and censorship possibilities. A system owner should be able to dictate what data is allowed on thier own system.

The MPAA Dilemma is more the way I see restrictions associated with the internet to go(badly). They are makeing it hard on the net as a whole by unjustly persecuting (not prosecuting) someone for breaking a strangle hold on media (that limits its use to non-opensource OSes {which many of us use even tho we find them to be inferior; thus illustrating my take on backwards compatibility}) that does not directly affect copyrights.

sig? never touch 'em.

i wonder what computer companies he and his buddies own. nope. probably own part of some telecom co. 8.3million in tax losses == 83,000 new internet subscribers * $50/month. there it is right there! more welfare for the rich, wrapped up as a benefit to the middle class. what a crock!

if a politician really wants to help computer users, how's about working on the abolition of software patents.

and yeah i am a part of the bougeuoise (sp? again) masses in this country. i just work for myself, or is it just the illusion of being self-employed? either way, don't start flaming up calling me no hypocrite. i ain't falling for the man's feeble attempt at the ole' jedi mind trick. =) not this time, anyway.

In the Crackers and Crackdowns article from Linux Journal , Jason Kroll <hyena@ssc.com> writes:

The GILC ... has condemned the action as a violation both of the Human Rights Accords of the United Nations and the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

The US Constitution? Aren't Jon and Per Johansen Norwegian citizens? And wasn't the "action" carried out by Norway's Econcomic Crime Departement (ECD)? How is the US Constitution relevant here?

Is Mr. Kroll's claim that the MPAA was somehow directly influencing Norway's ECD to suppress the Johansens' free speach, and that since the MPAA is an American organization, somehow the US Constitution has bearing on the ECD's actions? That doesn't make much sense. So what if the MPAA pressured the ECD? That might be an issue for Norwegian law, but I just don't see the US Constitutional tie-in.

Mr. Kroll goes on to write:

Almost ironically, Jon's reverse-engineering rights are specifically protected by the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which itself is probably unconstitutional).

Again, why would Jon's rights to do anything be protected by an American law? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be completely irrelevant as regards a Norwegian citizen acting on Norwegian soil.

Am I just missing something here?

Don't get me wrong. I don't endorse the action taken against the Johansens. But I do want to understand the basis for Mr. Kroll's claims. If his claims have merit, then I have misunderstood something important and I wish to be corrected. If his claims are without merit, then they are alarmist misdirections that do nothing to help foster rational discussion and debate.

In the Crackers and Crackdowns article from Linux Journal , Jason Kroll <hyena@ssc.com> writes:

The GILC ... has condemned the action as a violation both of the Human Rights Accords of the United Nations and the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

The US Constitution? Aren't Jon and Per Johansen Norwegian citizens? And wasn't the "action" carried out by Norway's Econcomic Crime Departement (ECD)? How is the US Constitution relevant here?

Is Mr. Kroll's claim that the MPAA was somehow directly influencing Norway's ECD to suppress the Johansens' free speach, and that since the MPAA is an American organization, somehow the US Constitution has bearing on the ECD's actions? That doesn't make much sense. So what if the MPAA pressured the ECD? That might be an issue for Norwegian law, but I just don't see the US Constitutional tie-in.

Mr. Kroll goes on to write:

Almost ironically, Jon's reverse-engineering rights are specifically protected by the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which itself is probably unconstitutional).

Again, why would Jon's rights to do anything be protected by an American law? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be completely irrelevant as regards a Norwegian citizen acting on Norwegian soil.

Am I just missing something here?

Don't get me wrong. I don't endorse the action taken against the Johansens. But I do want to understand the basis for Mr. Kroll's claims. If his claims have merit, then I have misunderstood something important and I wish to be corrected. If his claims are without merit, then they are alarmist misdirections that do nothing to help foster rational discussion and debate.

At some point the Linux game industry will reach the volume needed to justify a magazine targetted at Linux gamers (or serious inclusion in the Windows gaming mags), at which point you'll be able to get the demos on CD's that come with many magazines or are handed out at computer stores...

Actually, that's sort of what Maximum Linux seems to be. Granted, there's only one issue to judge it by (and that one has a TurboLinux eval CD bundled with it), but its headline article is "Linux Got Game!". A lot out of date now (Myth2 was the current Loki game at that point), but closer to the "mainstream" PC (gaming) mags than either Linux Journal or Linux Magazine.

It grated a little on me, but I can imagine them having cover CDs with various demos in forthcoming issues. In fact, I'd welcome it. I have a 33.6 =/

(Actually, people with fat pipes and CD burners can make demo and patch CDs for their friends ;-) )

It disturbs me a little to see Slashdot again biased towards GNOME. There are two articles in Linux Journal, one about KDE2, another about GNOME. GNOME got a story on Slashdot, KDE did not.
Read here

Here's a Linux Journal article about the post office and optical character recognition.

It seems like Mann has done pretty much research in WearComp, If some want to know more just visit his homepage, or Unv. Toronto.

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention...it seems that Linux Journal is planning to do a story about the response of the Linux community to the plight of these penguins...and they've also sent a donation of their own. I look forward to seeing that story come out!

recently spotted this in LinuxJournal and was rofl.

Chuck

Good reasons to buy VA Linux:

• VA Linux are an established brand name in selling Linux-ready machines, in their own words "The Leader in Linux Servers and Workstations".
• They are effectively number one in selling a niche product.
• They have excellent products (They won Best New Hardware in the Linux Journal Editor's Choice Awards).

• Vapourware product. Only a beta available.
• Not original - based on RedHat 6.0 for Intel
• The functionality of their product LinuxLite which runs Linux off a Windows hard drive, is already within most Linux distributions just by using UMSDOS.

J.

Linux doesn't have the right tools and support yet.

This isn't quite true. Check out the Linux Journal story here about using Linux in the graphic arts industry.

While Linux isn't a comprehensive solution in this area yet, it isn't that far off either.

It was mostly Linux on Alpha workstations, which were doing the rendering. But the interactive work was probably allmost all SGI gear. Anyway here is the link to the article referencing their renderfarm setup Titanic and Linux.

I agree that VB is trashed a bit overmuch and so does Linus, judging by this quote from recent interview:

"Don't get me wrong, I like Visual Basic, really, and I think it is one of the best successes Microsoft has had. That was because it was a really good medium for customization, it was a great medium to the front ends for the real work. I think that is the future."

Compared to working with MFC, VB is a real pleasure. It can produce huge, slow, klunky applications, but it does so quickly -- which often counts for a lot in a internal business tool environment.

Also, I rather work against an API, whether it is GTK+ or Qt, or even, yes, here it comes, the horror, I know, the WIN32 API, than trying to write my own library to talk to the hardware. How many actually write directly with Xlib?

And Open Source might be flexible enough to satisfy specialized demands of the niches, but will it attract enough developers to actually do it?

Big companies, or even small ones, can afford to give their developers the training to understand the issues in the niche. The cost of the training and development will be offset by the sale of the product and the subsequent support. Open Source, and we are really thinking of Free Software here, where the developers are left to themselves, won't have that support. Sure a company could put their developers on a training program, and then develop it, but if they then put the software in the FREE category, they would have to compete with other service companies that didn't spend the money on developer training and development.

Who do you think will be able to sell the services cheapest?

The niche marked is the marked I think, the properiatery, closed source will do much better than the open source.

I remember seeing ads like this in LJ two or three years ago, slamming XFree86 just as this one does. That, along with their CDE product being a complete and total POS (yes, I know how you people feel about CDE; the decision to standardize on it for the whole center wasn't mine), such that X apps (not just things that used the CDE libraries - anything that used X) you built on machines that had it installed would not run on machines that didn't have it installed due to extra libraries being linked in, was the reason I successfully made the case for dumping X Inside. The only reason we ever used their X server product in the first place was because XFree86 was lagging behind at the time (a situation that has improved greatly since - thanks to all the XFree86 programmers.) Once we had working XFree86 servers, I saw no need to throw any more money at X Inside.

I haven't seen this ad anywhere, but I'm not surprised it's running. I am surprised that the marauding Slashdot forces haven't noticed it before...

• Complex mathematical solutions or optimizations in which conventional methods fail or are problematic. GA helps here because conventional methods tend to concentrate their energies on local features whereas a good GA will continue to act globally even when it's found a fairly optimum solution.
• Nonmathematical problems which lack analytical solutions.but where the construction of input parameters (the chromosome encoding) and a fitness function (how well does a candidate solve the problem) can be constructed. This family of solutions could be just about anything. Game playing comes to mind as a candidate here. How about a game of global thermonuclear war?
• GA's have shown themselves to be very useful in assisting other techniques. For instance, the training of a neural network can be accelerated with GA's. Often a GA is biased with knowledge of the solution domain that strict, blind Darwinistic evolution could not have. This is why GA's are often used to accelerate other techniques--even other GAs.

As multiprocessing becomes cheaper (thanks in part to Linux), GA's should find more uses. It is very, very easy to parallelize a GA. (You don't need Beowulf to do it.) See September's Linux Journal for a case of a GA designed only to solve a particular mathematical problem concerning White Dwarf stars. No Beowulf here, just a customized, 33-node Genetic Algorithm machine. Cost? A mere $22,000. Not too shabby.

it's not the burn all GIFs day that we need to come with, it's rather the Burn all Lawyers days just like with witches or Jeanne d'Arc ;-))) more seriously, it seems that we're really seing the beggining of a new era where creativity and free developement doesn't mean anything ! but are we really ready to fight against "industry bullies and parasites" as described in the Linux Journal's article : The Coming Software Patent Crisis: Can Linux Survive? (very nice reading)

I haven't seen any quotes from an excellent article on the Linux Journal website but this is worth reading.

Alright this is going to sound really bitchy and arrogant, but ...The graphic design business standardized on Adobe (and Quark) long 'ways back (8 yrs). Seriously, Wordperfect and Lotus Notes have more lingering marketshare against bloody MS Office than Corel Draw or say Macromedia Freehand have against Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

I am unaware of any Quark-grade document formatter Corel might make --in case that was the drift of your question. Office Document formatting applications like WordPerfect are not the same kind of animal. Wordperfect or Word is like having a typewriter that remembers certain kinds of settings, using Quark is like assembling the components of your page by shooting them superimposed on one another -- any way you like-- in a photostat booth (the way prepress used to be done before the advent of digital compositing). Totally different applications for totally different purposes!.

The Corel lineup of products is not really competitive. By that I mean no personal judgment, I mean you can go a long time without hearing the name Corel. A Linux version of Corel products like Photopaint and Draw will be attractive to the same people who use Corel products now in businesses where the secretary does the annual report with clip-art, and to engineers with light report generating needs, and to Linux enthusiasts, but it will pass unremarked (literally) in the general graphic design business. Not because it's Linux, but because it's not Adobe (or Macromedia) and thus pretty much useless.

8 years is a long time for things to stay one way, I'd welcome a change. For one thing I'd like not to be tied to Apple computer for my equipment needs. But of all changes possible in the industry, Corel upsetting or even nudging Adobe just isn't in the cards. If anything Adobe is consolidating its position in print as never before now that they have a viable replacement for Quark. I just want them to spread some of that monopoly goodness my way in the form of an across the board Linux port. i can live without it, I just think it would be healthy for all the companies I care about. Meantime, here's an Linux Journal story about Linux in the prepress biz (server side) that'll make your chest swell with pride. Oughta be a feature story here on Slashdot.

Sorry, I didn't mean to cause a ruckus.

I would have quoted my orginal source for this earlier, but I was at work and had already used up my four hours of slacking off.

Larry Wall: "If you've ever been spammed (and who hasn't?), your e-mail address was almost certainly gleaned from the Net using a Perl script. The spam itself was likely sent via a Perl script. One could say that Perl is the language of choice for Net abuse. And one could almost be proud of it."

From a previous /. link to Linux Journal

I wasn't trying to blame Perl for all the Spam in the world, but when I read that this site relied on Perl, the quote from Wall came to mind.

(And Bill Gates IS responsible for all Windows virii. He and Janet Reno write them in the basement of the loveshack on his back lawn, emailing the binaries to unsuspecting script kiddies around the world.) I'll take my medicine now.

Posted by Kilbert:

In the June 1999 issue of Linux Journal they had an article(page 82) about the Totalisator Administration Board(TAB) of Queensland using Linux for their betting booths. Now wouldn't censorship put all of these guys and gals' hard work to nothing? I'm sure the representitaves in Austrailia like to indulge in a little betting after the daily round of votes...but I could be wrong.

later,
Kilbert

Granting that you may have your own reasons for being anonymous, for all we know, you're some 12-year-old trying to pick an argument. This article may or may not be true, but we certainly aren't going to tell what is the case from your unsubstantiated assertions. (And calling someone delusional when they challenge said unsubstantiated assertions isn't helping build your credibility.)

Unless you have something substantive to add, I don't see why anybody should pay further attention to what you say.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/issue52/2 985.html

Hmm .. guess it was all a sham. Better tell your boss about this faker, postal boy.

There are enough other magazines out there putting free demos of games and the like with their paper product, why doesn't a magazine like Linux Journal do the same?

I buy CMJ New Music every month just for the included mix CD; I'd do the same for something like Linux Journal.

Thoughts?

There is a neat project going on named Linux Router Project. It was described in Linux journal I think March issue. The cool thing is that the kernel can fit on a 1.44M floppy. Definitely NT can't do that.