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O'Reily and Pragmatic Bookshelf and Baen all publish in major formats (pdf, epub, mobi, etc), all DRM-free.

The problem is when you can only get books from one location you are screwed.

Also, the fact that Amazon can retroactively wipe books off the Kindle means even after the sale, they can Take It Back, like if you buy a book from a brick and mortar and they follow you out to your car, throw you up against the side, rifle through your bag, take your book and then drop some coin on the ground (your "refund").

In real life, they'd get shot. Online, they get more money.

SoftRAM/SoftRAM95 was non-diluted snakeoil.

RAM Doubler for the Mac was a real and non-snakeoil product. That was mostly due to the "classic" Mac OS doing a horrible job of managing memory, so the potential for improvement was huge.

There were similar products available for win3.x and Win9x, some of which at least tried to do what they advertised. The performance benefit of using them (at least the RAM-compression) was pretty much non-existent though.

Linux / OS X / WinNT already has quite decent virtual memory management so the potential performance benefit is limited.

I've been on the lookout for a mobile data card in the UK ever since using a Verizon EVDO card in the US; it saved our arses at ETech when the network went down on the last day, and we had to demo our web service.

Up until now all the pricing for mobile data's been around 70 quid/month for 200MB, which is far enough from flat rate to make me worried about using it repeatedly. However, this is 20 quid for 2 gig, and that's fantastic. 20 quid is more than worthwhile insurance if I have to give even one demo a month - the fact that I can setup and get going with no futzing with local networks is a major boon.

When I bought it they said I could use it for anything. I may pop over the road at lunchtime and give the T-Mobsters a grilling about these restrictions. Mind you, I really can't see how they'll enforce this; so many people have their IM client set to start automatically on boot and sign-on on network connection that it's going to be a major pain, and T-Mob deserve all the problems they get if they think they can enforce it.

One thing I do love about the Oreilly titles is their choices in cover art. The cover of "Time Management Tips for Sysadmins" is a wolverine. Very appropriate choice. ;)

Interestingly, although admittedly a small point, the book seems to be the first O'Reilly animal book to be colored in. I really like the new look, and I hope it continues.

If you ask me it looks like a Tarsier, you know the O'reilly Animal.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41091000/jpg /_41091444_borneanfront203.jpg
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_covers/hi-res/ 1565924266.jpg

If indeed it is a new animal we should name it O'reilly Logo Animal

Well, if you're browsing books at BN, don't pick up this one!

ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_covers/hi-res/ 0596100329.jpg

I guess I can understand this move from a business perspective, but it sure seems awful tacky, doesn't it? I mean, it's not like they started out with Windows XP Starter Edition, then spent a great deal of money adding on to it to create the Home/Professional editions, thus justifying the extra expense. They merely took a perfectly good Home/Professional/Whatever edition and spent a good deal of money crippling it.

This is just another example of the "what the market will bear" principle. If MS was selling this stuff for what it's worth, they wouldn't have the untold hundreds of billions that they do. Oh well, enough ranting.

You might recall how people could turn their NT Workstation in to NT Server with some registry tweaks. I wonder if the same will happen in this case, or if it is even possible?

Are you kidding? The spirit of sacred Bear has been corrupted. They'd never work in tech.

Sorry for following up to myself but this is an even better link

There's nothing that even comes close to having a hardcore hacker as a good friend. Information is quickest gained through other people's personal experience.

I've done it all. I've read a whole series of O'Reilly books (don't even bother with any other publisher) on various Linux and Network related subjects--I've read at least 25 of them cover-to-cover in the last 4 years. I have a whole bookshelf lined with them.

Then I subscribed to O'Reilly's Safari online program, and will never again be without it. I'll never have to buy another tech book again. If you can tolerate reading books online, getting a subscription is an ABSOLUTE must. And if you buy (or would like to buy) an average of more then two or three books a year, this will save you loads of cash. You can read up to about 60 books a year for $10/mo.

However, when you need to come up to speed as quick as possible, by far and away the best resource is a friend who knows it all. Install Linux on all your computers, and play with every piece of software you may be even slightly interested. Read all the books, read all the man pages. Write a few scripts in Bash, Perl, Sed, Awk, and anything else you hear about. And when you get stuck (and believe me, you will), call up that friend or drop by his desk. You'll be an expert faster than you can immagine.

It's the little things, you know, that make you an expert. Anybody can copy files to another computer, but if you can come up with something like

tar cf - dir{1,2} | (ssh host2 'cd destdir; tar xpf -')

It is a threat: ugly and dangerous.

Most Linux distros will work just fine with any TTF library - like the ones you would normally find in you C:\WINNT\Fonts

ls -d *.TTF | sed "s/\(.*\)\.TTF$/mv '&' '\1.ttf'/" | sh

A "Nutshell" or "Definitive Guide" book isn't a learning resource; it's a reference.

If you can't be bothered to find out what a book is for before you buy it, that's your problem. O'Reilly have full details of all their books on their website, with sample chapters. Just check it out before you buy it; if you don't know enough about the subject to make use of the book, go elsewhere.

Java in a Nutshell is what it says - an encapsulation; not "Everything You Might Ever Want to Know About Java in 28 Days!!!". That's why it has that title, and is part of that series.

The Definitive Guides won't teach you the basics; that's why they aren't called "The Definitive Tutorial". They are the best reference books on their subjects, and the best to consult when you're most of the way there.

I believe some people do produce books with "For Dummies" in the title, but as you know enough to read O'Reilly books, they really should be beneath you ;-) But please don't expect a book to do something other than what it says it will. I use O'Reilly's books every day, but I go elsewhere when I'm beginning.

And to get back on topic: I have well-worn copies of the first and current editions of this book, and it is the book to look stuff up in. But it won't get you through the start of the learning curve. That's what the web is for.

Having read this book I can tell you that it is NOT really for beginners. You may want to try Essential System Administration , which is also by O'Reilly .

Other Linux security book authors, on the other hand, clearly are in it for more than just books. Brian Hatch of hacking linux exposed writes a free hacking newsletter every week (archives)
as well as Security Focus stuff. Michael Bauer of
Building Secure Servers with Linux writes articles for O'Reilly and is the security editor for Linux Journal.

Especially in the area of Linux, I expect to have experts. I've read RWLS 1, and was very dissapointed in the amount of fear mongering vs useful security info.

... ora's "learning the vi editor"? it has almost 40 pages on vim, and is (as usual with ora) a very good book.

... ora's "learning the vi editor"? it has almost 40 pages on vim, and is (as usual with ora) a very good book.

No, I'm not an O'Reilly employee, I'm just a big fan . O'Reilly has the best technical manuals I have ever seen from one place. But Safari is even better, it's a collection of 100's of good O'Reilly books, put into online format.

Of course something like this isn't free, but its not expensive either. About 10 bucks a month gets you the ability to "subscribe" to about 5 books for 30 days and read them online, or print them! (yes, the terms allow for printing). At the end of the 30 days you can trade in your books and subscribe to new ones. There are other levels of subscription also. It's been one of the best programming resources I've used in a long time. Not just articles and tutorials like you normally find, but real, published, books online, chapters of information. You can even bookmark pages, and add notes to them.

• http://people.hp.se/stnor [nice checklist of NT/Win2K security items, PDF linked off this page]
• http://www.ora.com/catalog/securwinserv
• http://safari.oreilly.com/main.asp?bookname=securw inserv [same book, available to read online]

...are short. Say, around 250-270 pages.

Not huge 500+ page tomes that try to cover everything.

Not books with 3+ page code segments (and certainly not with code that doesn't compile).

Skinny, easily totable books. A good example is Effective C++--256 pages (plus or minus a few for endpapers and colophon).

Books that can be read quickly, with comprehensive indices to find what you want, and bibliographies to other short books with details.

Why?
Because these are the shortcomings I perceive in the major market. (O'Reilly's books being among the biggest offenders, the pocket reference books aside.) A large book is harder to have open on your desk, harder to move back and forth in your laptop bag, and (more importantly) tends to suffer from lack of editing -- authors will repeat themselves and say the same things over and over again. (They also tend to repeat themselves.) Anyone who's done book-writing knows that it's much easier and better to edit down too much content than to try to generate filler.

There is a drawback to this, though. Imagine how much more Addison Wesley would have had to have charged for The Bible had it come in six, easily digestible segments. And I do make exceptions for things that are meant to be references.

Need further proof? Look no farther than O'Reilly books. There best selling book "Unix in a Nutshell" is about real Unix, of which Unixware is perhaps the purest example. For better or worse, O'Reilly cancelled publication of its BSD nutshell book sometime ago.

Yes, *BSD is part of the Unix family tree, but it is the Cousin Eddy branch of the Unix world. Certainly not what historians would call "pure".

Check out It is free for non-commercial use. If nothing else, it will add some historical perspective to your repetoire, and introduce you to the rock-solid root branch of the Unix family tree.

In fact, the rise of Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) as the dominant Web server on NT shows much the same pattern as the rise of IE as the dominant browser: Microsoft got pole position by exercising its unique leverage as an operating system vendor.
Originally IIS, Web server software that runs only on the NT operating system, was bundled "free" with a version of NT called NT Server. Web server vendors such as Netscape and O'Reilly responded by pointing out in our advertising and PR that if customers ran our third-party Web server software on NT Workstation (a less expensive version of NT, which came without the IIS Web server software), they would end up with a more powerful server than Microsoft's IIS running on NT Server -- and it would cost less too.
Much as it had done by bundling the browser with Windows 98, Microsoft was bundling an application -- the IIS Web server -- as part of an operating system, (NT Server). But in this case, the company offered another version of the same operating system without the bundle, (NT Workstation). It seemed natural to competitors to offer our products on top of the version of the operating system that came without IIS.
It did not, however, please Microsoft that we did so. In June 1996 Microsoft responded by changing the license to NT Workstation to prohibit its use as a server platform. (At first, the company went further, and actually crippled the version of TCP/IP provided in NT Workstation, but the outcry from users forced it to backtrack.)
Microsoft argued, quite rightly, that it had the right to create two different versions of NT, with different price points, and different functionality. But the company went a step further, and used its operating system license (and more specifically the license to the parts of the operating system that implemented TCP/IP, an industry standard protocol) to prohibit the use of third-party applications that duplicated the functionality of Microsoft's more expensive platform.
Microsoft's public rationale for the policy -- that it was protecting its customers because NT Workstation was not suitable for use as a server operating system -- was proven false by my colleague, former O'Reilly editor Andrew Schulman (working with Mark Russinovich). Shulman and Russinovich demonstrated that it was possible to convert NT Workstation to NT Server by changing only a few registry entries. NT Workstation contained all of the same program code as NT Server; the code was simply disabled, and some additional applications bundled.

In fact, the rise of Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) as the dominant Web server on NT shows much the same pattern as the rise of IE as the dominant browser: Microsoft got pole position by exercising its unique leverage as an operating system vendor.
Originally IIS, Web server software that runs only on the NT operating system, was bundled "free" with a version of NT called NT Server. Web server vendors such as Netscape and O'Reilly responded by pointing out in our advertising and PR that if customers ran our third-party Web server software on NT Workstation (a less expensive version of NT, which came without the IIS Web server software), they would end up with a more powerful server than Microsoft's IIS running on NT Server -- and it would cost less too.
Much as it had done by bundling the browser with Windows 98, Microsoft was bundling an application -- the IIS Web server -- as part of an operating system, (NT Server). But in this case, the company offered another version of the same operating system without the bundle, (NT Workstation). It seemed natural to competitors to offer our products on top of the version of the operating system that came without IIS.
It did not, however, please Microsoft that we did so. In June 1996 Microsoft responded by changing the license to NT Workstation to prohibit its use as a server platform. (At first, the company went further, and actually crippled the version of TCP/IP provided in NT Workstation, but the outcry from users forced it to backtrack.)
Microsoft argued, quite rightly, that it had the right to create two different versions of NT, with different price points, and different functionality. But the company went a step further, and used its operating system license (and more specifically the license to the parts of the operating system that implemented TCP/IP, an industry standard protocol) to prohibit the use of third-party applications that duplicated the functionality of Microsoft's more expensive platform.
Microsoft's public rationale for the policy -- that it was protecting its customers because NT Workstation was not suitable for use as a server operating system -- was proven false by my colleague, former O'Reilly editor Andrew Schulman (working with Mark Russinovich). Shulman and Russinovich demonstrated that it was possible to convert NT Workstation to NT Server by changing only a few registry entries. NT Workstation contained all of the same program code as NT Server; the code was simply disabled, and some additional applications bundled.

These categories are especially apt for solaris books. First are the ones that are rushed to press, full of screen shots and man pages (Sams, Que, etc). Of these books in my library, I've found them most useful for holding up monitors. However, they can't be completely disreguarded. Sometimes it's nice to read a large man page on paper (csh, cvs, etc). Thus, IMHO, these two inch thick volumes should look *great* to the eye and be easy to read and STAY OPEN sitting on a desk. Alas, most of these books don't fit their niche. Their main assest is that they are cheap and first to market. I've also noticed that these books age quicker than milk left out on blacktop on a hot summers day. At least these books are made by using the product. There was a great thread about "Solaris 8: The Complete Reference" in comp.unix.solaris recently that shows both sides (and expresses what a waste of time and money the book was for me).

The second type of books are the ones produced by or in association with the producer of the software. Think M$ press, Oracle Press and the God-aweful Janice Winsor books on Solaris. These seem to be produced by asking people about the product and then writing down their answers. Thus, you never seem to get the best answer to questions, but you get the correct answer for the Sun, or Cisco or Oracle point of view. This is vitial for the lame certification tests out there. The correct answer isn't the right answer, it's the Cisco right answer. Thus, the best books from this group are the test prep books. These books (which can be even bigger than the first category) are also useful for reference material that you may need once a month or so. I use these books as book-ends for the books I actually read and use.

Third, as you may have guessed, are the *good* books that you actually read, use and learn from. I am always impressed with the readabilty and content of O'Reilly books. There have been so few bad books from them. It also seems their books age quite well. An impressive feat for their market. Text books also end up in their category. Most texts are bad and overpriced. However, with time, the diamonds start to show from adison-wesley (tcp/ip books) and prentice-hall (unix systems administrator's handbook - THE must read for solaris and all unix).

The point of this rant is to look for the third type of books that you may *like* to read and that will age well. Try going to a college book store and look around; they have great book ideas there. Of course, you would NEVER buy anything there (try a local used bookstore or allbookstores.com). I am currently reading those type two books, and I can say that "Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture" seems to be a good book so far. It's certianly better than most of "reference" books out there.

> Given the reasonable success of these systems I wonder when people are going to start exploiting this sort of system comercially.

there are number of companies that are going to offer for pay project. you should check out following sites:

popular power: Research on influenza vaccination. has windows and gnu/linux clients. mac, solaris and *bsd clients about to be released soon. it has tim oreilly of o'reilly as board member.

parabon: Research on cancer treatment (chemotherapy). clients exist only for windows but they are going to release gnu/linux client soon. they are giving out 100$ on daily basis to random providers.

Dcypher/Processtree they have some kind of physics project. problem is that its easily to cheat on this project. they are also giving out 100$ to random users.


now to my conclusion. all of these projects are paying to little to warrant me donating my cpu time to them. many of them demands that you have 24/7 access to inet. this is something that is unnacaptable to large number of users in europe because we dont have flat rate, so i'll keep donating my cpu cycles to ogr project on dist.net

Oracle programming guru Steven Feuestein uses a lot of ethical & non-ethical examples in his books and classes - check out this article where he explains himself.

If you're using a simple network setup, or are learning the network side of system administration, this is a great book. It's the only network admin I've ever needed to use for Linux.

Just a note on O'Reilly, if you don't have a user group in your area, set one up. The user group gets free books, discounts on conventions and conferences, and lots of pre-release input and useful information. There's a link on their website, but you have to dig.

O'Reilly and Associates

It was most popular in the classic Progidy interface, as it allowed them to create graphics despite the old slow modems. Of course, it is easier to create cartoons with vector graphics than it is to create detailed images -- but that's an implementation issue.

There is no need to grow more food than what is already grown. The world produces enough to feed everybody well with current technologies.

Also, the countries where malnutrition is the most prevalent have food surpluses.

technology won't allow people contribute money to the cause,

Money doesn't solve problems.

technology won't fly the food across an ocean,

Why would you want a people to depend on food flown in by strangers across an ocean? You want people to produce their own food crops.

technology won't improve distribution channels in a country

Repeat: you want countries to grow their own subsistence crops. A big cause of hunger worldwide is having a privileged few control the land, who grow cash crops in order to export to the 1st world. You can do a lot of things in your immediate environment to counteract this. For example, eat what is produced locally. Diminish or eliminate your consumption of beef-- the amount of grain and water used to produce one pound of meat is huge. Even better, become a vegetarian. Together we can make the international meat industry collapse, and free up huge amounts of grain for the starving.

And, check out this article.

The camel was chosen as the cover animal by O'Reilly (www.ora.com) for the first 'Programming Perl' book.
--

Has every body seen this article where Time O'Reilly dismantles Patent Office Director Q. Todd Dickinson?

Here's an exchange that really says it all:

Tim: Are you a lawyer by training?

Dickinson: Yes, I am.

Tim: How would you feel if a lawyer was able to patent an argument?

Dickinson: If it was new and non-obvious, I wouldn't have a problem with it at all.

Tim: And the ability to basically extract a royalty from other lawyers for using that same legal argument?

Dickinson: As I say, if it's new, and if it met the statutory standards for patentability (and that's the key question here), and it was incorporated into software in some form, that wouldn't be a problem.

Tim: No, not in software. Just in actual, in court.

Dickinson: Well, I don't want to deal in hypotheticals. The courts haven't dealt with that question.

Now, even when this guy was completely snookered by Tim he couldn't bring himself to concede the point. It was at this moment that every shred of confidence I have in the PTO evaporated completely. It went on...

Tim: Well, how about a basketball player invents a new move. Should that be patentable?

Dickinson: Moves aren't patentable subject matter.

It continues in this vein. Eventually the moderator steps in to rescue him from embarrassing himself further. Read the entire article.

In my opinion, this man is the problem.
--

I don't want to knock the book at all, but have no compunctions about lambasting this review ;-)

My [non-techie] wife found it amusing, which is unusual for geek humour. I liked it, but since I check User Friendly almost daily, I didn't see anything I hadn't seen before.

Correction: there is a new joke in the book, and it is the book. This is an O'Reilly "In a Nutshell" book, right down to the Colophon: "The animal on the cover is a Dust Puppy". I can't help but think that if IDG weren't such assholes about their trademarks, this could just as well have been "Evil Geniuses for Dummies".

Thanks to the reviewer for pointing out the missing text in the Windows refund storyline. I didn't get it, and didn't think to check the website to see if the print version was accurate.

Isn't it Mike who is haunted by the giant cola can? The reviewer says it's AJ, but I'm pretty sure it's not.

--
At the time of writing, this is a first post.

yep. i second this fully. for all those of us plotting to destroy UNIX, this book is a must read. really.

The main problem with GPL'ed software in general is the question "how can I make a living writing free software." Companies like Red Hat, Caldera, and the rest of the Linux start-ups answer this question by providing technical support for a fee. However, not all programs lend themselves to this economic model. While it may be appropriate for complex software like operating systems and server programs, it is not nearly as feasable for desktop applications -- particuarly if they are very intuitive and user-friendly. A program that's easy to use won't need much in terms of tech support.

Besides providing support services, historically the only other significant way open-source programmers have been able to support themselves directly is to write & sell books. (ESR and Larry Wall spring to mind as examples of this model of compensation).

As a programmer, I'd hate to think that after putting hundreds or thousands of hours of my time into writing an open-source program, the only way I could make any money would be thru banner ads and selling tee shirts and stuffed toys. If I wanted to sell souvineers for a living, I wouln't have busted my ass getting an engineering degree. When you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into somthing, you deserve to be rewarded for your effort. If ego gratification is enough of a reward for you, that's fine; but remember that even the most altrustic programmer still needs to provide for himself and his family.

The problem with the free documentation licence is , like the GPL, it has a "viral" nature. Let's suppose I write program foo and release it under the GPL, then release a basic user's manual under the FDL. Because of the viral nature of the FDL, I could not then go write a book (foo In A Nutshell) that expands on the FDL'ed documentation. Strictly interpreted, even quoting a single line of FDL'ed text could render the entire new document FDL'ed. Even paraphrasing the original text might not be enough to get it out from under the FDL, given the translation clause.

Look at the Declaration of Independence : because it's in the public domain, anyone can publish a copy of the DoI without restriction. However, if I take the DoI and intersperse it with a line-by-line analysis of what it means, this derivitive work is fully copyrightable. However, if I did the same thing with a FDL'ed document, I would have to give up all rights to the new work, regardless of if I wanted to or not. I should have the freedom to decide how to assign my intellectual property rights.

Tim O'Reilly has done some great things for the open-source community, has made a good bit of money doing it, and has helped many open-source programmers, and has given a lot back to the community. But even a publisher as open-minded at O'Riley & Assc. would have to think twice about publishing a book that could be copied & resold by anyone.

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

O'Reilly has made this particular newbie's life better, especially for programs I really use, . So far I've got Running Linux, Linux in a Nutshell, Learning the vi Editor, and Learning Python. All have been mind expanding.

I hope O'Reilly continues to task their famously talented editors to organize and make readable open source books like Learning Debian so cheapskates like you can download the text if you like. I'm buying it myself once Potato becomes the new stable version. I have zero problem shelling out for the convenience of the pre-printed work, and heck, those animal pictures on the covers are so cute! Well, except for the stupid looking bronco buster on the front of Learning Debian.

I learned Java with the JDK 1.1, and found two books pretty helpful. I already had been programming in other languages including C/C++ for a while, and these books helped to learn the language. Neither would be a good choice if you also needed to learn how to program at the same time.

• "Java 1.1 Certification Study Guide" by Roberts and Heller, published by Sybex.
• "Java in a Nutshell" by Flanagan, published by O'Reilly.

The certification guide has an updated version for 1.2 that I haven't read. I was also warned by people who had taken the exam that the book by Boone, "Java 1.1 Certification Exam Guide for Programmers and Developers" is one to stay away from. Apparently it is just filled with errors. (There may be an updated version that is better, but I have no intentions of buying it, so I don't know.)

I know what you mean by being overwhelmed when you go to the bookstore. There are a lot of Java books available, and most are pure garbage. For the more specific Java topics the ORA books are pretty good, but I think that the Addison Wesley books are just a bit better.

Well. It's sorta on-topic. And it DID need a reference in it...

/(o\ I'm not a medievalist - I just play one on weekends!

Well I only use RTFM with people that have an understanding problem. If you feel like not understanding the documentation please give up on Linux, because you are probably too dumb to use it. Linux documentation and HOWTOs are very concise in contrast with Winzode help files (click here, click there, is the power cord connected?). There are books. O'Reilly has very good UNIX/Linux/programming books. No, they won't sell you a hologram or an interactive movie called "Installing Linux for Dummies".

My wife and I successfully shopped from Amazon.com, Spiegel, Sundance, and O'Reilly. We had no particular problems and everything came in a few days.

I disagree. While for the vast majority of people, there is no technical reason why sendmail should be preferred over other MTAs, there are cases where more obscure things need to be done and sendmail is simply the only functional choice.

I can do things with sendmail rewrite rules that are simply impossible (or at least *extremely* difficult) in other MTAs. This is why postfix is only 99% sendmail-compatible, since that last 1% is a killer.


Of course, sendmail *is* the best documented MTA in the world (it actually has two books written on the subject, Sendmail: Theory and Practice by Avolio and Vixie, and the definitive reference sendmail (now in it's second edition) by Bryan Costales with Eric Allman.

Then there's the increased available online documentation, both the FAQ, and my own Sendmail Performance Tuning for Large Systems paper that I wrote and presented at SANE'98.

While perhaps not strictly a technical reason, available documentation (or the lack thereof) is a very strong motivating factor as to why many people choose to select particular products, SMTP MTAs included.

And on the top of my list is the Simpson's Music CD, the new one is out now, check it out at amazon.com. This link may expire, so just do a search for "Simpsons" in the "Popular Music" sectoin. They've got 4 albums now, if you include the oldest (and really bad) The Simpsons Sing the Blues.

What else.....CDs full of MP3s are good.....or if you know that your geek has a CD Burner, blank CDs are always useful. You can get them for around a buck a piece at your local best buy.

Also, just check out linux.ora.com. If theres a book there that I don't have, I'd be happy to receive it.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Team up with the guys from PALM and/or HANDSPRING.
For them, the availability to download books into their devices
has cash value since it can attract new customers.
They'll eventually place some pointer to PG into
their hand-held manuals or their web sites.

Try to get some authors to sponsor PG by providing
etext stuff (or even books?) donated to PG.

Speak to Tim O'Reilly. ;)

The /. crew provides a column "My Favorite
Literature Download of the Month" which can
bring new insights to geeks who usually read more
Perl than literature pearls (training the other
half of your brain cannot be wrong and
might even improve your programming skills :)


--

THE GOOD

• LinuxCare's little bootable Linux recovery CD kicks ass. No bigger than a business card, it fits in the 3" diameter groove in CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive trays and has the potential to save your butt when lilo eats itself. They also had some Linux stickers that now adorn the case of my 386... (Yes, it runs Linux.)
• IBM had a presence. Although certainly not the largest or flashiest booth in the show, Quake 3 on a rather large plasma display attracted lots of attention. Dual PII-400 Intellistation + Voodoo 3 3000 + large plasma display. Mmmmmm. Thanks to the guys there for letting me get some game time on that mammoth thang...
• O'Reilly also had a presence, and their trade show pricing kicks much booty. Picked up a few books for 20% off list and got a shirt to boot...
• Mad props to VA Linux Systems for not only having a cool booth and giving away lots of stuff but for supplying the machines used for public Internet access. Their Debian boxed set is pretty cool and sports Learning Debian GNU/Linux from O'Reilly. (Yes, I was one of the people who stood around in line for ten or fifteen minutes to win this...)
• Thanks to the Sun and Rave Systems folks for all the free stuff. Learn to play Quake 2 without cheating before next year's show... :-) (Now where's my complimentary Sparc 5?)

THE BAD

• None of the shirts I got fit. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. I'm 6-foot-3-inches tall and weigh 295 pounds. Show me the big-assed shirts!
• The IBM guys told me that the Showcase had a T-1 connection to the 'Net. I couldn't verify -- the packet loss and latency was horrible on the connection. I'm hoping this is only because lots of geeks were pounding on the connection like a pack of wild monkeys...
• Food choices were few, and lines were long. Within the Galleria, your choices were Subway, some cafe whose name I don't remember, Ruby Tuesday's, and Chick-Fil-A. If you were bold, you could go to the movie theater downstairs and buy a big tub of popcorn. The group I was with walked across the street to another mall and ate at Arby's. Yum... I think.

THE UGLY

• Where the hell were the Slackware people? I wanted Slackware apparel... Hmmph.
• Linux merchandise places came out of the woodworks to hock their goods. Yay capitalism...
• Don't eat at Shoney's. Our group waited over an hour for food before giving up and leaving.

THE REST

• The andover.net/freshmeat.net/slashdot.org booth was smack dab next to the linux.com booth. Taken together, it looked like one big congregation of slackers with laptops. All things considered, however, I wouldn't have minded flopping down on the couch for a rest after walking around for a few hours...
• I will seek revenge against the guy in the Debian shirt who shot me in the arm with a Nerf dart... muahahahaha
• The Debian folks had a Sun Ultra 5 running XaoS, Netscape, and some Tetris clone in separate windows. Just for kicks, I maximized the XaoS window. Can we say slideshow?
• I had nothing interesting enough to trade with the lady at the VA Linux booth, so I didn't get one of those nifty enlightenment shirts. Dammit.
• NetBSD was there. Go figure.

Overall, it was a pretty cool show, but I wish I didn't have the 2-1/2 hour drive. It was put on very professionally and appeared to be very well organized. I was only slightly disappointed that the show wasn't any bigger... The nifty canvas bag attendees got and the included CD made up for that, though.

THE GOOD

• LinuxCare's little bootable Linux recovery CD kicks ass. No bigger than a business card, it fits in the 3" diameter groove in CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive trays and has the potential to save your butt when lilo eats itself. They also had some Linux stickers that now adorn the case of my 386... (Yes, it runs Linux.)
• IBM had a presence. Although certainly not the largest or flashiest booth in the show, Quake 3 on a rather large plasma display attracted lots of attention. Dual PII-400 Intellistation + Voodoo 3 3000 + large plasma display. Mmmmmm. Thanks to the guys there for letting me get some game time on that mammoth thang...
• O'Reilly also had a presence, and their trade show pricing kicks much booty. Picked up a few books for 20% off list and got a shirt to boot...
• Mad props to VA Linux Systems for not only having a cool booth and giving away lots of stuff but for supplying the machines used for public Internet access. Their Debian boxed set is pretty cool and sports Learning Debian GNU/Linux from O'Reilly. (Yes, I was one of the people who stood around in line for ten or fifteen minutes to win this...)
• Thanks to the Sun and Rave Systems folks for all the free stuff. Learn to play Quake 2 without cheating before next year's show... :-) (Now where's my complimentary Sparc 5?)

THE BAD

• None of the shirts I got fit. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. I'm 6-foot-3-inches tall and weigh 295 pounds. Show me the big-assed shirts!
• The IBM guys told me that the Showcase had a T-1 connection to the 'Net. I couldn't verify -- the packet loss and latency was horrible on the connection. I'm hoping this is only because lots of geeks were pounding on the connection like a pack of wild monkeys...
• Food choices were few, and lines were long. Within the Galleria, your choices were Subway, some cafe whose name I don't remember, Ruby Tuesday's, and Chick-Fil-A. If you were bold, you could go to the movie theater downstairs and buy a big tub of popcorn. The group I was with walked across the street to another mall and ate at Arby's. Yum... I think.

THE UGLY

• Where the hell were the Slackware people? I wanted Slackware apparel... Hmmph.
• Linux merchandise places came out of the woodworks to hock their goods. Yay capitalism...
• Don't eat at Shoney's. Our group waited over an hour for food before giving up and leaving.

THE REST

• The andover.net/freshmeat.net/slashdot.org booth was smack dab next to the linux.com booth. Taken together, it looked like one big congregation of slackers with laptops. All things considered, however, I wouldn't have minded flopping down on the couch for a rest after walking around for a few hours...
• I will seek revenge against the guy in the Debian shirt who shot me in the arm with a Nerf dart... muahahahaha
• The Debian folks had a Sun Ultra 5 running XaoS, Netscape, and some Tetris clone in separate windows. Just for kicks, I maximized the XaoS window. Can we say slideshow?
• I had nothing interesting enough to trade with the lady at the VA Linux booth, so I didn't get one of those nifty enlightenment shirts. Dammit.
• NetBSD was there. Go figure.

Overall, it was a pretty cool show, but I wish I didn't have the 2-1/2 hour drive. It was put on very professionally and appeared to be very well organized. I was only slightly disappointed that the show wasn't any bigger... The nifty canvas bag attendees got and the included CD made up for that, though.

--AC

Intelligent writers have been talking about this for years. One I particularly like is Steve Talbott, who publishes the NETFUTURE newsletter. He was also the article of a very well regarded book on the subject called "The Future Does Not Compute". I disagree with much of what he says (particularly his New Age nature worshiping), but it's always a good read. Especially important are the writings on computers in education.

The following essays he's written should give you a feel for the flavor of NETFUTURE:

Why Timesaving Devices Don't Save Time

and

The Principle of Technological Deceit

> I do not believe the GPL has anything at all to
> do with the rise of Linux. It has everything to
> do with Linus being at the right place,
> at the right time, with the right OS.

It was in the right place at the right time -- in the Tannenbaum / Torvalds debate you cite, note that both Tannenbaum and Torvalds say that they would have used GNU (and not reinvent UNIX on their own) if the HURD had just been done. Linux did come along at just the right time -- after GNU had the aspects of a full-featured UNIX, but before it had a kernel. (Note that MINIX was not a full-featured UNIX, it had a C-like compiler, and a dinky shell, but not much else. It also had a license that restricted free and open kernel development, IIRC.)

But the GPL (in comparison to the BSD license, not pseudo-free licenses) did have an effect on the success of Linux, in that developers can tend to get fanatical about stuff. Both the BSD license and the GPL are licenses easy to deify ("the GPL preserves freedom forever!" vs. "with the BSD license you are truly free!"), and thus easy to rally around.

Ever notice how vi and Emacs are the two most popular editors among UNIX folks? Talk about extremes! Emacs and vi survived because they staked out a clear vision of how to do things, and stuck with it. Neither editor was lacking in competition. Linux and BSD were the same way.

Hackish OO features are a strange brickbat to throw at Perl, because Perl5's OO-features were strongly influenced by Python's

When it came time for the object design, he rejected much of the C++ model. That's probably just as well, since C++ has so many oddities not found in any other language with object support. Python's model seemed sufficiently clean and appealing that, as with so many other tools and languages where Larry "cherry-picked" the coolest property from eclectic sources, he took most of the object stuff from Python.

For example, the object's self reference (the "this" pointer) coming in as the initial argument in a method call rather than as a formally defined variable comes right from Python.

Of course, we weren't really content to stop there. One difference from Python is that the class itself can serve as something of a meta-object. This has some rather nifty ramifications to this. If you're filling out a check-list of features, you'll find that Perl OO programming supports classes and objects, single and multiple inheritance, instance methods and class methods, access to overridden methods (a virtual SUPER class), constructors and destructors, operator overloading, proxy methods via autoloading, delegation, a rooted hierarchy for all objects (class UNIVERSAL), and two different levels of garbage collection.

Before you diss it too much, you should know what Perl OO is actually about. If you're looking for more information or examples on Perl OO, here are some suggestions:

• The perltootc manpage, for managing class (and sometimes instance data) in Perl.
• The perltoot manpage, a tutorial for OO in Perl
• The perlobj manpage, a rather dry but essential page.
• The overload manpage, to see how operator overloading works with Perl objects.

• The Perl Cookbook (yes, my name is on the cover) has a chapter on objects. You can download the source through the Examples link there (either normal gzip or else Wintel zip format).
• A new book (that yes, I tech-edited, but no, which I don't get royalties on) is coming out by Damian Conway, called simply enough Object Oriented Perl. Damian is our Melville. :-) We've accepted three of this prolific fellow's papers in the refereed track at the next Perl Conference. One of them is even a technical paper that's written completely in a certain kind of poetry.

I don't mean to pretend that Perl's OO doesn't have its host of issues. The biggest one is that unless you're careful in your design, one class needs to get unnaturally chummy with its parent class to avoid accidentally overriding or interfering with not just functional members (methods) but also data members (attributes).

But as Larry has said: `Concentrate on Perl's strengths, not its weaknesses.'

No, you use the more modern chomp() which removes EOL's from lines as defined by the $/ variable.

I imagine that $/ defaults to CRLF on Windoze.

Not everyone agrees what a line in a text file is, because one person's textual character set is another's binary gibberish. Even when all parties involved are using ASCII instead of EBCDIC, Rad50, or Unicode, discrepancies arise. There is no such thing as a newline character. It is purely virtual, a figment of the operating system, standard libraries, device drivers, and Perl.

Under Unix or Plan9, a "\n" represents the physical sequence "\cJ", a linefeed. However, on a terminal that's not in raw mode, an key generates an incoming "\cM" (a carriage return), which turns into "\cJ", while an outgoing "\cJ" magically turns into "\cM\cJ". This strangeness doesn't happen with normal files, just terminal devices, and is handled strictly by the device driver.

On a Mac, a "\n" is usually represented by "\cM"; just to make life interesting, a "\r" represents a "\cJ". You will note that this is exactly the opposite of the way that Unix, Plan9, VMS, CP/M, or nearly anyone else does it. This means that Mac programmers writing files for other systems, or talking over a network, have to be careful. If you just send out "\n", you'll deliver a "\cM" and no "\cJ" will ever be seen. Most network services prefer to receive and send "\cM\cJ" as a line terminator, but most are also content to receive merely a "\cJ". The old adage ``be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send'' is still true today.

Under VMS, DOS, or derivatives thereof, a "\n" represents "\cJ", in a similar fashion to Unix and Plan9. From the perspective of a tty, Unix and DOS behave identically: a user who hits ENTER generates a "\cM", but this arrives at the program as a "\n", which is "\cJ". And a "\n" (that's a "\cJ", remember) sent to a terminal shows up as a "\cM\cJ".

But these strange conversions happen to Windows files as well. A ``text file'' in DOS actually contains two characters at the end of every line, "\cM\cJ". And the last block in the file has a "\cZ" in it to indicate where the text stops. When you write a line like "bad news\n" on those systems, the file ends up containing "bad news\cM\cJ", just as if it were a terminal.

When you read a line on such systems, it's even stranger. The file itself contains "bad news\cM\cJ", a ten-byte string. When you read it in, your program gets nothing but "bad news\n", where that "\n" is the virtual newline character, that is, a linefeed ("\cJ"). That means to get rid of it, a single chop or chomp will do it. But your poor program has been tricked into thinking it's only read nine bytes from the file. If you were to read ten such lines, you would appear to have read 90 just bytes into the file, but in fact would be at position 100. That's why the tell function must always be used to figure out where you are. You can't infer your position just by counting what you've read.

This legacy of the old CP/M file system, in which their equivalent of an inode stored only block counts and not file sizes, has been a source of frustration and despair to programmers for decades now. And there's no end in sight. Because DOS is compatible with CP/M file formats, Windows with DOS, and NT with Windows, the transgressions of the fathers have truly been visited unto the children of the fourth generation.

Some of this may be confusing. Here's a handy reference to the ASCII CR and LF characters. You can print it out and stick it in your wallet.

LF == \012 == \x0A == \cJ == ASCII 10
CR == \015 == \x0D == \cM == ASCII 13

| Unix | DOS | Mac |
---------------------------
\n | LF | LF | CR |
\r | CR | CR | LF |
\n * | LF | CRLF | CR |
\r * | CR | CR | LF |
---------------------------
* text-mode STDIO

The Unix column assumes that you are not accessing a serial line (like a tty) in canonical mode. If you are, then CR on input becomes "\n", and "\n" on output becomes CRLF.

These are just the most common definitions of \n and \r in Perl. There may well be others.

--tom