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A fast compiler might be something like Intel's own compiler: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4885

Can most hobbyists afford its 400 USD price tag?

• This is not Java vs C++. This is Sun's JDK 1.4.2 vs GCC 3.3.1 on a P4 mobile processor.
• GCC is not a fast compiler, it's a portable compiler that happens to be fairly fast. A fast compiler might be something like Intel's own compiler: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4885
• Having proven that method calls take almost twice as long under G++: http://kano.net/javabench/graph - the author then several of the tests recursively ( http://kano.net/javabench/src/cpp/fibo.cpp ). When this benchmark came out, various people on /. managed to get around 1,000 times better perfomance (under G++) by switching to a fixed memory usage non-recursive implementation.

Regardless of the negligible performance hit compared to native code, major software houses, as well as a lot of open-source developers, prefer native code for major projects even though interpreted languages are easier to port cross-platform, often have a shorter development time, and are just as powerful as languages that generate native code.

Particular to Windows programmers, the announcement of MS-Windows Vista's system requirements means that future Windows boxes will laugh at the memory/processor requirements of current interpreted/JIT compiled languages (e.g. .NET, Java , Python, and others).

Document Version Control in OOo Writer
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8911

DocBook Filters - Read and write docbook xml using OpenOffice.org
http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/

IBM *never* supported Linux on their Thinkpad laptop line

"ThinkPad Series A and Series T are available with OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4. The ThinkPad T22 is the first Linux computer ever to ship a licensed software DVD player, the InterVideo LinDVD." I'm guessing this also means that there were laptops to have linux preloaded on them before the a and t series.

IBM and Linux

Funny. Linux Journal and a whole host of other publications think that it is.

I doubt I'll ever see anything but a monolithic kernel on my desktops.

Too bad you are denying yourself the pleasure of using Mac OS X...

Yes, Mac OS X's kernel is a microkernel, and yes, most of it is Mach based, and NO, it is not BSD based (while most of the userland is essentially a copy of BSD 4.2, with some later FreeBSD "contributions', very little of kernel has any *BSD in it).

Factual overview: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/architecture/ind ex.html

Fanboy overview: Obsolete Microkernel Dooms Mac OS X to Lag Linux in Performance

That's funny. The company is too smart to buy a new copy of M$ Office and you don't think they will take a free version instead? You need to look at GM, Lowes, IBM and every other fortune 500 company is doing.

One advantage of LaTex is that it separates information from presentation.

\begin{itemize}
  \item Apples
  \item Oranges
  \item Grapes
\end{itemize}

Many of the Ph.D papers have to be reformated for the proper widths, line height, etc.

That's funny. The company is too smart to buy a new copy of M$ Office and you don't think they will take a free version instead? You need to look at GM, Lowes, IBM and every other fortune 500 company is doing.

some of the ARTS machines run lynx.

See e.g. article about a university system. Also Cyrus supports load balancing and failover via murder, although backends (the actual file stores) still remain single points of failure.

And one of the FreeBSD founders emphatically (his word was "hallelujah") agrees with you . He made his case and asked them to hire him.

Maybe a little more research is in order here...

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8312

From that article:

In November 2003, Robert Moskowitz, a senior technical director at ICSA Labs (part of TruSecure) released "Weakness in Passphrase Choice in WPA Interface". In this paper, Moskowitz described a straightforward formula that would reveal the passphrase by performing a dictionary attack against WPA-PSK networks. This weakness is based on the fact that the pairwise master key (PMK) is derived from the combination of the passphrase, SSID, length of the SSID and nonces. The concatenated string of this information is hashed 4,096 times to generate a 256-bit value and combine with nonce values. The information required to create and verify the session key is broadcast with normal traffic and is readily obtainable; the challenge then becomes the reconstruction of the original values. Moskowitz explains that the pairwise transient key (PTK) is a keyed-HMAC function based on the PMK; by capturing the four-way authentication handshake, the attacker has the data required to subject the passphrase to a dictionary attack. According to Moskowitz, "a key generated from a passphrase of less than about 20 characters is unlikely to deter attacks."

Reread that last sentence...

Robert's article can be found here:

http://wifinetnews.com/archives/002452.html

To quote Robert from the above article:

"The PTK is used in the 4-Way handshake to produce a hash of the frames. There is a long history of offline dictionary attacks against hashes. Any of these programs can be altered to use the information in the 4-Way Handshake as input to perform the offline attack. Just about any 8-character string a user may select will be in the dictionary. As the standard states, passphrases longer than 20 characters are needed to start deterring attacks. This is considerably longer than most people will be willing to use.

This offline attack should be easier to execute than the WEP attacks."

End quote. Reread THAT last sentence...

Current optimized attacks on WEP (assuming it's one of the more modern implementations that addresses the key scheduling problem and weak IVs) require something on the order of hundreds of thousands of packets with well distributed IVs. That's several megabytes of data. Then the WEP key can be recovered. There there is also "chop-chop" which is an active (and noisy) attack against WEP performed by generating controlled packet errors. All WEP is also vulnerable to the XOR known-codebook attack, but you have to accumulate over 2Gig of known data (one long packet for each unique IV) to recover the "code book" (the cypher stream). Yes, all of that is doable. I've done it. I'm well aware of the effort you have to go to in order to accomplish this. It all takes a LOT of data. Enough data, and it can be relatively quick to compute. One test I ran, I had over 500,000 "interesting" packets (unique IV) and Aircrack still couldn't break it after 3 hours of run time on a 2.4 GHz processor. Yes, it would eventually break it (but I ran out of time in my talk and I had only started the cracking run 2 hours before my talk began) and once it's broke, it's broke (but so is WPA-PSK). Obviously, if you have an older, or lame, implementation, the attacks against WEP work much much faster.

OTOH... WPA-PSK, you only need the first four packets of the session setup. Because you can cause the access point to "disassociate", you can force the nodes to reauthenticate and get your 4 packets at any time. Then you can brute force the PSK at your leasure. The longer and more complicated the passphrase is, the harder it will be to brute force. But, as Robert and other noted cryptographers had documented, it takes a LONG passphrase. 8 characters or less can be exhaustively broken in mere seconds. I've seen recommendations for passphrases that vary any

The whole point of the TPM is that you don't get the keys. Otherwise, you could just as well use software encryption.

Didn't he just say in the very post you responded to how there was an article in Linux Journal about using your own keys?

Do you seriously believe that you are going to get the keys?

The real question is, why dont you?

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6633

To be cynical about it, Intel makes great heaping piles of money from Linux servers. Why would they want to put an end to that again? I missed that part where Intel would suddenly go bokers and dispose of huge piles of cash just to become a Tool of the Man (tm).

Nah, Jeff Waugh got it right:

Ubuntu actually is "an ancient African word for I am sick of compiling Gentoo".

LJ had a good article on this a few months back.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/8368/print

To answer half your question (the how), just buy the latest issue of Linux Journal http://www.linuxjournal.com/. The latest issue's theme is podcasting.

Dynamic linkage. The FSF's interpretation of the GPL says I may not link a non-GPL program to a GPL library. You can't do it with static linkage, because that's clearly distributing the software, but both dynamic and runtime linkage should be acceptable. Except that the FSF says the GPL won't let you.

You aren't distributing the software with dynamic linkage. And you're not creating a derivative work either, not in the way copyright law defines it. The FSF offers up some excuse about the two separate works running in the same process space create a derivative work, but they're just making it up. But the process space "threshold" isn't in copyright law, so they might just as well say "because we said so".

For more information on this exception, from a real lawyer, see http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366. Don't respond to my post, respond to Larry Rosen's article.

If performance and memory usage are among your biggest concerns, maybe Wyrd would be a better fit. It's built on top of Remind, a Unix console calendar with powerful scripting capabilities.

Disclaimer: Yes, I wrote Wyrd, and am therefore thoroughly convinced of it's awesomeness. But in all seriousness, it's extremely fast and runs in under 2MB. Textmode applications have their advantages.

Hi our little Space Station project. Maybe your project isn't mission critical, but mine is at least pretty high on the list.
:-)
Bart

And you base this opinion on... what? How you think the world works, or how the world actually works? Because I can tell you that a judge who awards him his remaining fees would be likely to also award him court costs. At a minimum.

It's nice to think that it's all about a balance sheet of who owes who what, but the law doesn't work that way. If it did, stuff like this wouldn't be possible.

Have a look at this story (also here). It's the tale of how one school's sysadmin converted the computer lab to Linux (Mandrake), KDE, and a host of open-source education and productivity applications.

This project seems to be going well, and was covered in Linux Journal and on Slashdot.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6349

I have family that lives up that way and they get some help for there linix stuff from this guy.

Replies :

1- Actually there is a free accelerated driver for all the ATI cards out there. There is an excellent non-free driver for all the NVidia, and that solves 99% of your problems.

2- Actually, I'm typing this on OS/X right now and I find it really shitty compared to linux. Sure, as long as you stay within the neat boundaries of what OS/X does well, then everything is hunky-dory. However soon enough one encounters some kind of mysterious limit, and all of the sudden it's either the 25$ shareware (at best), command-line galore or no solution at all. You could hit this sort of thing by plugging in a random USB webcam for example, a TV tuner or even an external firewire DVD writer. On linux I've always been able to solve my problems eventually, with less and less effort as the distributions improved.

The fact is my Linux box is currently more capable than my Apple notebook even though the latter is supposed to be able to run a larger variety of software.

3- Access-like GUI database now available in OOo 2.0 (check it out) ; video editor : kino, cinelerra ; DTP : Scribus (Macworld described it recently as better than Pages) ; OCR : Kooka, gocr ; DVD authoring : try this.

Best thing about all of these softwares : they run on windows too. You can try them in your favourite default environment and see if they match your needs.

In my opinion eventually F/OSS will at at least match commercial offerings in most instances like it does with firefox right now. Office is next and I'm sure Microsoft is at least slightly worried. We'll have a population inversion. Most bog-standard software will be free (like O/S, browsers, office suites and utilities). There will be commercial software available for niche markets. Hardware and software makers will try to DRM everything but it won't work. There is enough commercial interest in Linux right now that one of these outfit will bring forth a huge lawsuit and force things to remain open.

There is a legal thoery (similar to the original EULA theory) that goes as follows:

When you run and install a program, you make copies in RAM and on the hard disk. This requires a license from the copyright holder. A license grant from the seller can reasonably be implied from the purchase, as selling unusable copies doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

In the United States, USC Title 17, Chapter 1, 117 makes specific exceptions for copies needed to run or install a program (this really hurts the case for the need for EULAs); however, the exemption only applies to "the owner of a copy of a computer program".

Now, companies make the case that it is not, in fact, a sale, but rather simply a license. This is the same argument that was used in Adobe vs. Softman, and was rejected.

So, through the wonders of copyright law, it is in fact the purchase of the software that grants you the right to use it (or, more specifically, prevents copyright law from taking away your right to do with your own posessions as you see fit).

Considering all the praise we read about Subversion, and its compelling features list, we switched a medium size project (80000 loc) from CVS to SVN. All in all we are not impressed with Subversion, and are not going to use it for new projects (for the forseeable future).

The bad things:

svn import: oops, there is a some experiment data in the directory, or an AAP subdirectory. Shit, the repository has grown by another 100 MB. No way to get it out again, unless you convert the whole BDB database to text, find your accidental additions, cut it out, rebuild the database, do svnadmin recover, fix all the permissions.

Really wrong error messages.

svn add *
svn rm *.log (oops added some test runs)
svn commit

Big errors:

Having moved our repository to another server, we have had situations where a subdirectory was pointing to the new server, and its parent to the old server. When we did an svn update in the subdirectory, the updates would not happen and no error whatsover was given. Worse, to prevent this kind of problems, we had renamed the repos directory on the server, so that there was no way some dangling old links could accidentally access it.

Adding files to a repository from multiple places around the lab has gotten us often into troubles

The Berkeley DB format keeps changing. You can't just copy one to a server with a slightly different svn version. Worse: it will not tell you that there is a version difference, it will just try, and come up with the most irrelevant error messages.

All in all, we find SVN not ready for prime time. Its promises are great, but at least CVS is just working reliably.

This code is going into the Space Station (Declic), version control is a must for us.

I read a long article about this not too long ago - http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8673

I thought he made a good point of why having a "stupid" internet has been good for everyone. Many of the services we have now may never have developed had big business gotten complete control of the net. And think about all those little extra charges you pay on your phone bill. I don't watch TV, but I think it's similar with cable. Now imagine the the dozens of things you'll be charged for just to browse for a few hours. There is a lot of demand for internet services. They aren't going to charge lightly.

That's not saying that Linus hasn't been the main driving force all these years, but he's in no way the only one. Now, the jury's still out as to whether GPLv3 is a good thing - I haven't made up my own mind yet either - but I'll bet large chunks of the Linux kernel could be relicensed immediately if the will was there.

found it:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/comment/reply/8673

good background reading for the implications of letting the internet be defined as packets and pipes rather than a global (market) place. Good reading for any slashdotter actually.

Battle of the Ajax Mail Packages
By James Turner on Thu, 2006-01-26

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8722

Yeah, I'm sure Linus just hates the GPL.

Linus: Even with 20/20 hindsight, I consider the linux copyright to be one of the very best design decisions I ever did ...

I'm so glad that you can enjoy the benefits of Linux without regard for the license that makes it possible without any cognitive dissonance.

I don't know about this one, but the next Falcon payload will.

Apparently it does, or at least they do.

For people in the US, that's not necessarily the case.

This may interest you:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8722

Another article on this topic:

Linux Journal: Seven Criteria for Evaluating Open-Source Content Management Systems

Having used python for about 3 years now, I'm yet to find something that I can't easily do in it, that I can in other languages. Except for speed/numbercrunching issues. And then I use ocaml (for new code) or C (for existing code). Even if I liked perl syntax and hated python's whitespace-significance (I don't and I don't), I imagine I'd have migrated to ruby by now.

Actually, the really cool feature of Python, one that I use all the time now, is "list comprehensions" -- an idea stolen from Haskell, and as far as I know, no other language has it. You can't do anything with it that you couldn't with map() and filter() but it's a much more elegant way of writing things -- just the way mathematicians would with sets.

They are synonymous. To "use" software means many specific things, but they are all instances of utilization. Both execution and dynamic linking are forms of utilizing the software. But the FSF says the GPL regulates the second usage, even though the latter does not copy, distribute or modify the licensed software.

Whether or not the latter form of use/utilization constitutes derivation is still under debate. The FSF says it does, but other people say it doesn't. Copyright law itself is quite silent on the matter.

Well, ESR seems to agree with the reviewer here:

"These problems combined to make large volumes of Perl code seem unreasonably difficult to read and grasp as a whole after only a few days' absence. Also, I found I was spending more and more time wrestling with artifacts of the language rather than my application problems. And, most damning of all, the resulting code was ugly--this matters. Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code."

Taken from http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 where ESR also gives his reasons for switching mostly to python as a replacement for perl.

Brian

Think about it, tv used to be free, now virtually evenyone has cable/satellite subscriptions.

We originally moved to cable TV to get away from commercials, but now we get to pay for those too although we still have more channel choices than broadcast.

Taping shows on your vcr is still free, however now everyone and their dog runs Tivo, sending a monthly check to them for the priviledge.

That can be fixed with a large hard drive. Look into MythTV.

llegal drugs are at least a big of a problem as copyright violation in the world today. In fact many of the artists promoted by Hollywood and the American recording industry include many positive drug related references in their scripts and lyrics. So the question is : Would you endorse forced illicit drug testing for all artists, actors and executives involved in content production?

Over 11,000 people die in America each year at the hands of gun violence. The USA has the highest murder rate in the developed world. So the question is : Would you endorse taking away the legal capability of all Americans to bare arms?

In the USA there are over 12,000 speeding-related traffic deaths per year. The technological capability exists to install a "governor" in every new automobile which would deny the driver the ability to exceed the speed limit. So the question is : Would you endorse restricting access to roads and highways to only vehicles that have such a speed restriction system installed?

( If the questioned person says yes to any of the above then pass the quote along to the Hollywood/recording/NRA/automobile media, bloggers and lobby groups etc)

Spam advertising and spyware has become a major problem for computer users. The DRM capability that Intel is offering to content providers would also be available to those wanting to abuse those same user restrictions. Intel is effectively offering the ability to hide malicious content or deny access to content needed to gather evidence for the basis of a complaint. So the question becomes: Why are you offering up this ability to content providers when it denies the owners of the computer the ability to protect themselves?

Whether it is a war on drugs, gun, or road crime restrictive and technological solutions that lock the end users out of the ability to make personal decisions perform actions are effectively a fundamental violation of a person's civil rights, even if taking that action could violate the law of the land.

Even though illicit drug consumption is against the law, wholesale drug testing would be seen as a violation of a persons right to privacy. In fact most American courts would not accept evidence gathered though such an action.

Even though gun related crime is a major problem, taking away the right for any citizens to bare arms would leave them at risk from criminals who would ignore the law as a matter of course.

Even though speeding is a major problem, there are cases it is needed for safety. Overtaking vehicles may require the driver to exceed the speed limit to safely avoid oncoming traffic. Also there are rare cases, such as transporting someone requiring urgent medical treatment, where the even the courts have found that exceeding the speed limit was preferable to the affected person's demise.

While making a copy of copyrighted content may seem trivial in comparison to the examples in the above three paragraphs, remember that Intel along with Adobe and Microsoft is talking of offering this same DRM technology for business, legal and even governmental documents. The ability to blow the whistle on suspect dealings, and pass copies along to the press and even authorities, may be severely restricted in the future.

So the final question to everybody has become: Why should the consumers and citizens have to put up with DRM restrictions on their general purpose computers that they own?

llegal drugs are at least a big of a problem as copyright violation in the world today. In fact many of the artists promoted by Hollywood and the American recording industry include many positive drug related references in their scripts and lyrics. So the question is : Would you endorse forced illicit drug testing for all artists, actors and executives involved in content production?

Over 11,000 people die in America each year at the hands of gun violence. The USA has the highest murder rate in the developed world. So the question is : Would you endorse taking away the legal capability of all Americans to bare arms?

In the USA there are over 12,000 speeding-related traffic deaths per year. The technological capability exists to install a "governor" in every new automobile which would deny the driver the ability to exceed the speed limit. So the question is : Would you endorse restricting access to roads and highways to only vehicles that have such a speed restriction system installed?

( If the questioned person says yes to any of the above then pass the quote along to the Hollywood/recording/NRA/automobile media, bloggers and lobby groups etc)

Spam advertising and spyware has become a major problem for computer users. The DRM capability that Intel is offering to content providers would also be available to those wanting to abuse those same user restrictions. Intel is effectively offering the ability to hide malicious content or deny access to content needed to gather evidence for the basis of a complaint. So the question becomes: Why are you offering up this ability to content providers when it denies the owners of the computer the ability to protect themselves?

Whether it is a war on drugs, gun, or road crime restrictive and technological solutions that lock the end users out of the ability to make personal decisions perform actions are effectively a fundamental violation of a person's civil rights, even if taking that action could violate the law of the land.

Even though illicit drug consumption is against the law, wholesale drug testing would be seen as a violation of a persons right to privacy. In fact most American courts would not accept evidence gathered though such an action.

Even though gun related crime is a major problem, taking away the right for any citizens to bare arms would leave them at risk from criminals who would ignore the law as a matter of course.

Even though speeding is a major problem, there are cases it is needed for safety. Overtaking vehicles may require the driver to exceed the speed limit to safely avoid oncoming traffic. Also there are rare cases, such as transporting someone requiring urgent medical treatment, where the even the courts have found that exceeding the speed limit was preferable to the affected person's demise.

While making a copy of copyrighted content may seem trivial in comparison to the examples in the above three paragraphs, remember that Intel along with Adobe and Microsoft is talking of offering this same DRM technology for business, legal and even governmental documents. The ability to blow the whistle on suspect dealings, and pass copies along to the press and even authorities, may be severely restricted in the future.

So the final question to everybody has become: Why should the consumers and citizens have to put up with DRM restrictions on their general purpose computers that they own?

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6011 Here, Industrial Light and Magic editing Yoda (Star Wars? You have heard of it?) in a *gasp* Gnome desktop, using all those (*AAAAGGGHHHHH**) MULTIPLE WINDOWS - God! The HORROR! - that everybody complains about in Gimp. Fuck all you bastards, you're just Adobe and Microsoft stockholders who hate the Open Source community for it's SUCCESS! And we're not even excluding you, we're inviting your unworthy asses in!

Okay, call me a karma whore, but I was going to ask if anyone has ever actually done this. I did a Google search and found out it is possible:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7040

Whether it's worth your time is another question.

It's interesting to see xxxBSD user/developer comparing "just written" software for BSD with ancient versions of Linux counterparts and (surprisingly) finding xxxBSD version to be better. My point being: dm-crypt.

If you are interested in Linux 2.6 encrypted partition, use dm-crypt together with cryptsetup tool. It's much safer than AES loop and:[...]

Choosing a compression utility is a delicate trade-off between CPU time and compression achieved. Get a perfect match for your available processing time and bandwidth.

Use top-performing but little-known lossless data compression tools to increase your storage and bandwidth by up to 400%

... benchmarked 87 combinations of tools and levels

PS, Comparison_of_file_archivers externals links

rzip has an outstanding combination of speed and compression ratio. See this review.

A while ago, linux journal had a great comparison of a lot of programs, with a lot of options, comparing speed and resulting size. If you want to know something about compression on unix, go and look. Everything! It even convinced me to buy the magazine! (Yep, I start to sound like an ad). Anyway, check this link

rzip wasn't reviewed but it uses hashing to quickly look for previously seen data. I think it's great. A tutorial with it and other linux compression tools is here. The tutorial also has graphs that make it easy to see the trade offs between speed and compression ratio, as well as advice on which compressors increase effective bandwidth the most for your CPU and network speed.