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Oh, if I only had Mod points. RT is great. Once you get used to it, it's not too difficult to customize, and can be extended with the user-contributed modules (e.g. LDAP/Active Directory integration). There's even an O'Reilly book that outlines customization for different requirements/environments.

This is similar to the Tivo situation in that it is ADDING a feature to the printer. I think that Tivo hackers would very much like th ability to add features to the Tivo software, like an improved search function, different skins, commercial skip, or other features. The ability to turn a Tivo into a general purpose PC or a router is hardly what people want, as in most cases it would be a waste of money.

An interesting possible reason for 365's outage debacle was posted by someone on an O'Reilly Radar blog (emphasis added by me):

ajblardone [07.24.07 06:22 PM] I was there when the power went out. The generators kicked in right away. Some colos were fine others weren't. Mine went black for a while after the outage. 365 main had been working on electrical upgrades all week and this outage might have been bad timing for them... At 4pm 365 main sent out a notice saying the building was 100% operational and still running on the generators until PG&E confirms that utility power is stable.

As bad form as it is to reply to myself... 10 seconds of research leads me to this. Chalk me up as a GPL3 detractor. The license has no business dictating terms based on the usage of the product.. Either hardware lock is allowed or not.

We're talking about two different things. You're assuming that average people, when faced with two options, will pick the difficult one with no benefit to themselves, magically listening to an inconvenient person telling them that the easy option is "amoral". I'm more concerned with how Stallman will get people to actually listen to him. At this rate, he's bound to have as much success as the anti-whalers.

If your goal with life is improving society rather than achieving personal success, this works perfectly fine. It's just about the same choice that Stallman made and it's the same choice that thousands of free software programmers make when they use their spare time making software that the whole society benefits from.

Besides, Stallman has on numerous occasions mentioned ways to make a living while making free software, and many of the aforementioned free software programmers use these. Making private software (software that will never be released to the public, intended for use in only one place), doing support, making donationware or doing something other than programming all make you a living, whilst avoiding making proprietary software.

Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald wrote an excellent chapter on this topic for O'Reilly's Beautiful Code book (just out). See Chapter 32, "Code in Motion". The code from their chapter is online here: http://www.perforce.com/beautifulcode/

So this post is perfectly timed. It's a collection of essays by leading software engineers about code they find especially beautiful.

Andy Oram, the editor, thought it would be poor form to make a post himself, but heck, I thought: this is very relevant. The table of contents for the book can be found at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046/toc.h tml

It includes essays by Brian Kernighan, Jon Bentley, Tim Bray, Yukohiro Matsumoto, Simon Peyton-Jones, and many others. The code is intended not only to be beautiful but also instructive and in many cases re-usable.

We're hoping to build an ongoing site around the book so additional examples would be very welcome.

You shouldn't speak for everybody, and use terms like "we" and "our side". In particular, your notions that copyright isn't needed because code could just be decompiled is totally against what RMS believes in. The original motivation behind GPL was sparked by a printer driver that RMS had a binary for, but no source.

Quote from For Want of a Printer:

"Programmers were free to open the files up if they wanted to, but unless they were an expert in deciphering an endless stream of ones and zeroes, the resulting text was pure gibberish. Although Stallman knew plenty about computers, he was not an expert in translating binary files."

If copyright didn't exist, then for RMS's world some other GPL-like law would be needed to compel authors to provide source. Note that I don't personally agree with RMS's views, but I logically understand them, and they are fundamentally different from what you think. Be able to hack the source is the fundamental idea behind GPL.

The main motivation behind the GPL was that a user should be able to modify their software. If GPL software is embedded in hardware in a non-modifiable form then that violates the fundamental principle upon which the GPL was built.

So yes, something doesn't jive, and that's the Tivoization of GPL software.

Whole lot of funny comments modded to +5, need more signal to noise I guess.

Heres what I do when I get in:
- Change backup tapes
- Do other things that have to be done (move tapes to off-site safe, make sure AC drip pan isn't full, etc)
- Check Nagios to make sure nothing is totaly f'ed up
- Tea

What I should do:
- Review my to do list and try and create some kind of schedule.

Good reading if your feeling a bit disorganized:Time Management for System Administrators

That sort of sounds like generally accepted software engineering best practices. But that's just in general, and it's not really how Linux works. Linux would suffer if they tried to suddenly and arbitrarily impose such practices that conflict with current practices.

Anyway there is at least one book about Linux device drivers: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxdrive3

The GPL is all about ensuring user's retain control over their machines.

Apparently you don't know the famous incident between Richard Stallman and a printer, that allegedly gave birth to the Free Software Movement.

Read about it here.

Kevin,
Looking back at the review now I can see my abundance of deviations. I apologize for the interjections, and hope that you can look past that and still get some information from the review.

This helps me improve my writing of reviews - so I appreciate the feedback.

I haven't checked out the Head First book yet - but it does look like it would be a good starting point. I am at the point that with most of the CSS books I have read I start to see all of the overlapping. I like books that can bring something fresh and different to the table. This is why I liked this book - it examined real world scenarios and layout options.

CSS books come in many different flavors. Some are CSS specifications broken down. Some are just explanatory of the different selectors. Some, like this book, give real world examples. And still others such as Transcending CSS, challenge you to move forward in your designs.

Again, thanks for the critique.

Steve Talbott is no stranger to technology; he wrote the first edition of O'Reilly's Managing Projects with make . He's a very well-informed technologist who's grown cautious of the "benefits" of technology through many years of exposure to them.

His concerns are well-founded; I just don't happen to share them all.

For the first edition of a book, Embedded Linux Primer is rather complete, with the only exception being chapter 8, Device Driver Basics, which is...well, rather basic. I started the chapter expecting to finish with a detailed understanding of how the Linux kernel processes driver requests and a look into some common drivers. This is not the case; for a second edition of this text I would suggest beefing up this chapter to provide more of an insight into kernel-driver interaction.

Embedded or not, Linux uses the same driver structure. Most often, the same drivers as well. That's the main advantage of "embedded" Linux - it's no different than any other Linux. Just smaller. Try running a Windows XP program on Windows CE to see what I mean.

If you want to chase driver development, read Linux Device Drivers, by O'Reilly. It's IMHO the definitive book, and works just the same for embedded Linux. A single chapter in an embedded how-to book could hardly be expected to capture everything you'd need.

Any Knoppix distro, or remaster of Knoppix, like mine, (see screenshots, below) can be used to work with an XP install that is having problems. You don't need a linux distro on a USB stick to do that, the CD will work, and will run on computers that don't have the USB boot option in the bios.
Look through a copy of Knoppix Hacks, by Kyle Rankin for all that Knoppix can do for Windows. Most bookstores have a copy you can look at for free. The book in the link has Knoppix based on Version 3.4, which will boot on almost any computer. I did remaster that, and have much improved it over the past two years of development. For instance, for a boot: prompt, I have bright yellow on a black background, Knoppix has pale grey on a black background. (that's the logo16 file) Hard to see, especially if you have to enter a long series of commands and Knoppix cheatcodes.

I have fixed a Dell Inspiron 1505 with it, repartitioning the hard drive, and assisting with an XP reinstall by obtaining necessary Dell drivers. Be advised, that the Dell restoration CD does not contain all of the drivers for a particular PC, and you may have to get nearly 60% of them from Dell via download. the Knoppix CD can do that for you until you get XP restored to the point where it can get it's own drivers.
One item to remember with Knoppix, it can see inside all partitions on the PC, whereas XP may not in all cases. You need to know what is on the PC, and in what partition. Important on Dell PC's where Media Direct is installed on the machine in a partition, and also the all-important Restoration Partition (caps mine) that you will need to sucessfully use the Dell restoration CD.

Now for a shameless plug: (kindly bear with me)
Since I placed all of the Debian font packages (that are compatible) in my Knoppix Remaster, the web pages look better on Rapidweather Remaster of Knoppix Linux using Firefox 2.0.0.4 (yes, I can run that) than on XP. Or Vista, for that matter. For most users, it's how the web pages look that matters. Later versions of Knoppix have cut the fonts down too much for me, same is true for Damn Small Linux. So, their desktops, browsers don't look as good as they need to be.

-Rapidweather

Actually, Unix. Not DOS. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/sfearthq uakes_o.html

Oh Cripes, throw me a technology idea that no one else has thought of first.

Exactly. Everyone should go read The Myths Of Innovation (O'Reilly) before making comments about innovation.

RMS has never been opposed to people making money writing software, what he's opposed to is people making non-GPL'd software.

If you are interested, look into Cygnus Solutions and how they made a business out of developing, maintaining and providing support for GCC. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ti emans.html

I think you should read some Stallman. He clearly calls copyright and all the other intellectual property ideas "unethical" and "anti-social". YOU might like copyright, but the FSF clearly doesn't.

Thanks for the links. IMHO, only the last one is coherent. To abuse on old joke around here, in Soviet Russia, frameworks call you.

What Spolsky (and everyone here) is complaining about isn't really about frameworks versus libraries but more about heavy weight versus light weight. Frameworks can get heavy because they tend to combine lots of functionality in a way that introduces a lot of dependencies, thus increasing coupling (which, in software engineering, is a bad thing). That's where the feeling of having to deal with a lot of stuff that you don't care about comes in. A lightweight framework tends to chunk all this complex functionality into a set of relevant services then uses Dependency Injection as the plumbing to connect the services together. A really great book on this topic is Better, Faster, Lighter Java.

http://www.linux-tutorial.info/index.php/

Dry

O'Reilly Books

"Understanding the Linux Kernel" == A thousand pages about just the kernel.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/understandlk/#top

Do-It-Yourself Documentation? Research Into the Effectiveness of Mailing List\s (August 19, 2006)

Rethinking Community Documentation (July 6, 2006)

Splitting Books Open: Trends in Traditional and Online Technical Documentation (September 23, 2004)

BOOKS:
Essential System Administration By Æleen Frisch
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esa3/index.html

Unix Power Tools By Shelley Powers, Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly, Mike
Loukides
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/upt3/index.html

Running Linux By Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Matt Welsh
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/runlinux5/index.htm l

The UNIX Systems Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder,
Scott Seebass, Trent R. Hein, et al.
http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-System-Administration-H andbook-3rd/dp/0130206016/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/104 -2587738-8696715?ie=UTF8&qid=1176522696&sr=1-1

The Practice of System and Network Administration by Thomas A.
Limoncelli, Christine Hogan
http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Admi nistration/dp/0201702711/ref=pd_sim_b_4/104-258773 8-8696715?ie=UTF8&qid=1176522696&sr=1-1

Martin F. Krafft: The Debian System: Concepts and Techniques
http://debiansystem.info/

Benjamin Mako Hill, Jono Bacon, Corey Burger, Jonathan Jesse, Ivan
Krstic: The Official Ubuntu Book
http://www.amazon.com/Official-Ubuntu-Book-Benjami n-Mako/dp/0132435942

BOOKS:
Essential System Administration By Æleen Frisch
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esa3/index.html

Unix Power Tools By Shelley Powers, Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly, Mike
Loukides
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/upt3/index.html

Running Linux By Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Matt Welsh
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/runlinux5/index.htm l

The UNIX Systems Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder,
Scott Seebass, Trent R. Hein, et al.
http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-System-Administration-H andbook-3rd/dp/0130206016/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/104 -2587738-8696715?ie=UTF8&qid=1176522696&sr=1-1

The Practice of System and Network Administration by Thomas A.
Limoncelli, Christine Hogan
http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Admi nistration/dp/0201702711/ref=pd_sim_b_4/104-258773 8-8696715?ie=UTF8&qid=1176522696&sr=1-1

Martin F. Krafft: The Debian System: Concepts and Techniques
http://debiansystem.info/

Benjamin Mako Hill, Jono Bacon, Corey Burger, Jonathan Jesse, Ivan
Krstic: The Official Ubuntu Book
http://www.amazon.com/Official-Ubuntu-Book-Benjami n-Mako/dp/0132435942

BOOKS:
Essential System Administration By Æleen Frisch
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esa3/index.html

Unix Power Tools By Shelley Powers, Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly, Mike
Loukides
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/upt3/index.html

Running Linux By Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Matt Welsh
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/runlinux5/index.htm l

The UNIX Systems Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder,
Scott Seebass, Trent R. Hein, et al.
http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-System-Administration-H andbook-3rd/dp/0130206016/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/104 -2587738-8696715?ie=UTF8&qid=1176522696&sr=1-1

The Practice of System and Network Administration by Thomas A.
Limoncelli, Christine Hogan
http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Admi nistration/dp/0201702711/ref=pd_sim_b_4/104-258773 8-8696715?ie=UTF8&qid=1176522696&sr=1-1

Martin F. Krafft: The Debian System: Concepts and Techniques
http://debiansystem.info/

Benjamin Mako Hill, Jono Bacon, Corey Burger, Jonathan Jesse, Ivan
Krstic: The Official Ubuntu Book
http://www.amazon.com/Official-Ubuntu-Book-Benjami n-Mako/dp/0132435942

O'Reilly publishes any number of books that will suit your needs, covering everything from the basics on down to the most esoteric.

...try O'Reilly's Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing, which you can find (gratis) at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/osfreesoft/book/

Andrew M. St. Laurent does an IMO excellent job of explaining the predominant licenses, how they differ, why they differ, which phrases of the license are the important ones and which ones are just fuzzy, and other considerations, including how you should select a license (don't forget that just because your work is "self-started", you don't have free license choice, depending on if and what you link against).

I recommend that, and I recommend all of the above comments saying to stick to one of the big licenses.

Or another Larry or Sergey? What about another Tim? Or maybe another, another Larry? No? Never? Never ever Never? Please throw your sub-marxist historicist ramblings out of the window and get back into the real world. There will always be a place for some bastard/s with brains and balls to turn over the big boys no matter the industry, no matter the time.

I guess this is enough to disregard the fact that it was GNU/Linux - *not BSD* - that was the first truely free Unix like OS.

Apparently Bill Joy started putting BSD together in early 1977. The FSF didn't exist until October 1985. From what I've read, the UNIX sources were distributed completely without restriction even earlier than 1977, since due to the antitrust case against them, AT&T weren't allowed to begin selling an operating system. The only charge that was being put on the source was the price of the mag tape, and I also don't know of any license restrictions either. Given the degree of university collaboration that existed early on, I can only assume that there weren't any. AT&T only became restrictive with the source themselves when they were released from the ban on selling it.

AFAIK, the main reason why UNIX wasn't used much outside of universities very early on was because of it originally being written for the PDP-8 and 11, which were very different architectures to the 80386. The first port that I know of to the 80386 that took place that I know of was the one done by the Jolitzes, which ended up becoming (more or less, anywayz) what we now know as FreeBSD.

It sounds like you've got the version of history that Stallman wants people to have; i.e., the one that makes him look like the sole father of the entire practice of releasing source code in general. From what I've been able to figure out anywayz, the truth is a bit different. UNIX was developed very collaboratively from its' inception, and as you yourself probably know, without source, that can't really happen. ;-)

Probably enough to disregard the fact that the "evil" FSF was already making available a shitload of software when Bill Gates was still dabbling in GWBASIC

The ANSI standard for Minimal BASIC is dated 1978, the same year Microsoft was founded. According to Wikipedia, the FSF was founded in October 1985...Looks like you're off by a couple of years. According to that, BASIC existed *before* the FSF. Also...I don't know what your own definition of "free" is, but Stallman himself was selling copies of Emacs during the 80s.

Rewriting history must be a nice hobby.

Reading history is a great hobby, sure...it allows me to know when it's been rewritten by someone else. ;)

You might dislike it, you might have another, but *ours* has been there well before BSD did *anything*.

Unfortunately that simply is not true...it's what you've been told. Don't take my word for it though...Go and do some research of your own. Some links that might help:-

Some accounts of early UNIX history from the UNIX Heritage Society. There's some early source code there as well.
20 Years of Berkeley UNIX.
Some info about where Stallman originally got at least some of his ideas.
The Art of UNIX Programming, which has a fair amount of historical info as well.
A rather non-canon biographical portrait of Stallman.
Another second opinion on Stallman, more or less in general.

Maybe if you take the time to go through this material, you might start to realise what my beef is. I don't like bullies, and I don't like frauds...Stallman is both, which from reading the above, you will learn. I strongly urge anyone else here who views me as merely a baseless troll to go to the above links and read that material as well. If I am a troll, the point of it is very simple:- This Emperor has no clothes.

This is indeed nothing new. Geocoding photos has been around for years - even in the same form that this person has used: Article on using Google Maps + geocoded photos (check out the date). There have even been cameras which contain built-in GPS to automatically geotag your pictures as you take them on the market.

You might want to check that.

To quote Jeff Licquia:

"And it is a shame that they're being so taken in, given how said debate-framing is unjustly suppressing the emergent style of misogynistic, sexual-tinged death-threat art. What a pity."

"..they are taking the lead in moving away from Windows unlike many of their American counterparts."

Well, unlike north America, south America is going to lead (not Europe - where i live): "In January the Venezuelan open source law goes into effect, mandating a two year transition to open source in all public agencies." http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/12/venezuel a_open_source.html

We, here in Europe, are only debating and like sort of agreeing to that open-source software is good. But in Venezuela they are signing into law. Which we will probably never do.

"The semantic web is doomed to fail because language is far more highly personalized than anyone wants to believe. "

That's why one uses Folksonomy in conjunction with Ontologies.

When all else fails, use O'Reilly.

I recommend Deitel's C# book. It is a very comprehensive book and has everything you can need.

I will also recommend the In a Nutshell book. I am a big fan of those books as they cut all the crap and take you directly to the meat (I loved specially the SQL IAN book).

And for all the people saying "dont buy a book", STFU. If you do can not answer the question of the poster just do not post anything. His question is not "Should I buy a book?" but "Which book to buy". If there is something I have learned is that reading a book is *never* a bad idea. Or what, if someone asks you in the street how to get to X you answer "No, dont go to X, go to Y, X sucks" ?.

sheesh!

For technical IT books I recommend Safari. It has saved me a lot of money since now I can read all new IT technical books online and I don't have to buy dead trees anymore. It has also saved me a lot of space on my library, and the search feature allows me to find quickly what I need. For learning a new language, Safari is surpassed only by open-source, and if you combine the two you can learn C# as fast as you count 1, 2, 3.

'I think if we can teach the computer to listen to the story that players are telling,' Wright said, a game could detect patterns of what the player wants, and adjust music, lighting, and other immersive elements to reflect the story that a player wants to play.

Ten minutes later, Jack Thompson goes before a court, "Look what happens when I play this game determined to get my rocks off over baby mutilation! It was certified T for Teen but a learning AI and my talent for deviency means it's now hardcore porn. These game makers need to be sued!"

We're already seeing lawsuits and potential new laws over the fact that games are so complex the ESRB can't possibly see everything (though the potential new laws would require that anyway). Add in an AI that modifies the game to suit you and you're in for a whole world of hurt when it modifies in ways no one ever expected.

Spore will be an interesting one. It'll be one thing when horny teenagers figure out how to create a creature that looks like a naked woman but and edge case in the procedural animation system causes to move by pelvic thrusting it's way around the world. Now imagine what it'll be like when Spore's other great feature - sharing content between players - gets pulled in and eight year old little Johnny sees it and his mother decides to go to the media with the apparent porn her child was exposed to.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of emergent behaviors, advanced AI, true neural networks, adaptive gameplay and automatic content sharing. I just sadly see those same great features giving ammunition to those who'd love to hurt the industry for their own political gain.

Interestingly, if you pick up the O'Reilly book on Game AI, they discuss the notion that game developers are already shying away from what's possible for fear of what it might decide to do once they're no longer watching. We're already at the point where it's no longer about what we know how to do but what our lawyers will let us do.

Try this one:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hfobjects/
Fairly simple, fun to read and far more useful than it appears at first sight.

I had a chance to skim through the MySQL cookbook a week or so ago and will more than probably pick one up, though I think I need another shelf for my web development/linux books. :-)

I'd recommend trying their online library, which most certainly contains this book as well as about 10000 others on a wide variety of subjects, ATM. I used Safari last month and it was really amazing!! I plan on renewing my subscription when I have more reading time...

PatPending,

Thanks for collecting the errata. Could you post it to the errata page? That way, it will go through "the system" (we'll forward it to Paul, he's say yea or nay, and the changes will make their way into a future reprint).

This charming example of Perl programming appeared in the first two editions of Schwartz's book "Learning Perl", published by O'Reilly. It serves as an introduction to Mr. Schwartz as well. I kinda wished they'd left it as an appendix to the book, which is now in its fourth edition.

FYI Tim would be gnat's boss Tim O'Reilly. Who runs a little publisher that has some influence in the technology world.

Perplexed as to why Amazon would launch two separate Question and Answer services, NowNow and AskVille I did some googling and thought I'd share what I came up with.

Firstly, it turns out that someone has already asked this on AskVille and the answers are fairly to the point. Also O'Reilly Radar has a post about the two services.

The gist of it is: AskVille is like Yahoo! Answers and NowNow is like 82ASK. NowNow is specifically set up for mobile users who need to find answers quickly. Questions are farmed out to Mechanical Turk where people are paid real cash money to answer questions.

However, Amazon have completely dropped the ball with NowNow:

1. The interface is mobile email! It's specifically for mobile phones and yet they've used email instead of the obvious choice of SMS.
2. Because they've chosen email instead of SMS they've also made the billing procedure more complicated. While the service is beta it is free, but I presume that in order to use it when it goes live you will have to set up some sort of Amazon account. So you have to know in advance that you might one day need to use the service, unlike with 82ASK.
3. Mechanical Turk is notoriously badly paid, and absolutely anyone can join it. So the researchers aren't vetted or trained like 82ASK's texperts are, and they're nowhere near as well paid as texperts, so they can't guarantee the same quality of answers as 82ASK.

AskVille has some interesting twists on Yahoo! Answers. Like an online game answers earn virtual money, and there is more community vetting and rating of answers and answerers then there is on Yahoo! Answers.

If they'd been really innovative they would have merged the best bits of each into on single product with both mobile and web access. If they'd done that there would be reason for 82ASK to be worried. But as it is I think they've blown it.

You could adopt the practice of doing a lock_keys on the hashref at the end of the object/creation initialization stage, and then if anyone accidentally tries to create a new hash field later, it will throw an error. A simple, effective trick, and I wish it were better publicized...

Hey, that's Perl Hack #87!

Have you tried Learning Perl on Win32 Systems? Windows users wouldn't benefit from the Minimal Perl approach, because they don't have the background it builds on. This book starts at the beginning.