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That's who and why and I can understand that.

Her reaction is generally "just plan better". I argue that the industry has been struggling with this issue for decades. I don't think we're all morons to have built so much infrastructure and come so far, but we still can't solve the simple parts like accurately identifying how long it will take us to accomplish our goal.

Hmmm, I'm still not sure what you want to explain but I'll take a swing anyway. I can think of social, technical and legal complexities to software development. I've talked to my wife about all three. You might be thinking of something completely different.

Talking to my wife is not all that hard, even though she has no interest in programming. Her first and only practice was some kind of basic in grade school. She was an interior designer for a Steelcase for eight years and understands all three classes of difficulties.

Others have done a great job explaining complexities in terms of free software. Voices from the Open Source Revolution has a lot of clear thinking from software masters. Vixie's article about software engineering is particularly germain. You can also get a lot of good thought from the Free Software Foundation's philosophy pages. The Cathedral and the Bazaar deals with the issue explicitly. Indeed, there's an embarrassment of riches matched only by the wealth of text editors in the free software world.

So, how do you get from there to dinner table conversation with the wife who's never written a line of code? It's the same way you try to simplify everything and the largeness of the subject actually helps.

You start with what a program is and everything flows from there. My wife, like most people, understands modularity. "You eat an elephant one bite at a time," is one of her favorite sayings. She also has a basic idea that a program is something that takes information and does something with it. It does not take too much to explain that programs expect specific organization of their inputs to be able to deal with it and that smaller, simpler programs are easier to work with that big complex ones, and the wife then understands modular programming. It's a division of labor kind of thing that runs right into group development and organizational and social complexity. How do you know what the customer really needs? How do you make decisions about meeting those needs and turn those into a blueprint that you can follow? The free software world has solved those problems by letting the customer make the software themselves, and those customers have been organizing themselves very well. At that point, you zoom back into the perspective of a developer getting their hands on some huge project. If you can imagine that the free software developer knows what they want to accomplish, you are then faced with another embarrassment of riches: so many great tools, each of which can take years to explore. Did I say "free software developer"? Yes I did, because I did not want to wade into the swamp of NDA's, cross licensing, binary blobs and other horror stories of legal complexity. That can come later. By now, your wife's head will have popped but you will have explained software development complexity.

Like most things, none of the parts is particularly difficult, there's just a lot of parts.

From the pdf of _Chapter 11_

select a.ename,
              (select count(*)
                  from emp b
                where b.ename <= a.ename) as rn
    from emp a

I would layout that like

SELECT a.ename,
              (SELECT COUNT(*)
                  FROM emp AS b
                WHERE b.ename <= a.ename) AS rn
    FROM emp AS a

or like

select a.ename,
              (select count(*)
                  from emp as b
                where b.ename <= a.ename) as rn
    from emp as a

And for those of us not in an area where technical English texts are not available in a timely manner, there is the Safari Books Online from O'reilly. I don't know if they still have the referal program, but if they do, please use me.

I had a look at the sample chapter, which looks mildly interesting, but the examples are a litte contrived in my opinion.

I only know SQLServer in depth. Most of the techniques he shows rely on features introduced in SQLServer 2005.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sqlckbk/chapter/ind ex.html

Agreed. The php online manual is one of the best features of the language. I also like how it's presented; simple and esaily searchable.

I went and picked up O'Reilly's Safari Service, and while it is perfectly sufficient for slogging through an entire book, it's pretty inadequate the day-to-day function reference stuff, mainly due to its clunky interface. Fine, you need to split the pages up, but if I have to load a new page more than once a chapter, I'm going to be pissed. I'm not pleasure reading here, I want an answer and I want it now.

Chapter 11: Searching
40 pages, 500k PDF

"Why split fundemental os functions, such as memory management, into user
processes? As all good *nix gurus know, the means to success is to
divide and conquer, with the goal being to *simplify* the problem into
managable, well defined components. If splitting basic parts of the
operating system into user space processes complicates the function by
introducing additional mechanisms (message passing, complicated signals),
have we met the objective of simplifying the design and implementation?"

He had said the same thing in the last flame-war, which means exactly the same thing which Linus is saying now.

The main point is that the simplest design is the best design.

A microkernel is not the simplest possible design, a monolithic kernel with proper modularisation is simpler.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ap pa.html

Airgo's "True MIMO" is a pre-standard interpretation of the future 802.11blah (TGnSync vs. WWiSE) and will most likely not be compatible with the final 802.11n.

The MIMO concept itself offers to double the throughput at the expense of increasing bandwidth from 20 to 40MHz as well as spreading multipath garbage on the spectrum. If you've had fun with congestion on 802.11b/g channels, this 802.11n will really make your day.

Ok, so it might have marginally better spectral efficiency per Mbps but really, what we want to see is true beamforming dynamic-arrays that will properly 'point' the RF where it's supposed to go in real-time.

Meanwhile one of these 'gaming' laptops will just screwup the spectrum and slowdown existing b/g channels.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ap pa.html

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/vi6/

Seconded. This was how I learned VI, and I found it invaluable. From there you can use the VIM help files to pick up on the improvements over vanilla VI.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/vi6/

I think time not only proved Tannanbaum wrong, but gave him a huge ass-whooping, and made him go into the kitchen and make him a pot-pie! Whatever "theoretical" basis may be true - the practical reality has told us otherwise. Below is a 1992 email debate between Torvalds and Tannanbaum. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ap pa.html

Blurry Hash

Blurry hash was developed by Blue Security to safeguard the content of the Registry from being jeopardized by malicious hackers. It is an evolution of traditional hashing methods that ensures that even brute force attacks are futile.

Traditional hashing solutions use one-way encryption methods that transform clear-text data into a pseudo-random bit sequence. For example, hashing each Do Not Intrude Registry entry transforms the e-mail address into a 128-bit string.

The idea behind Blue Security's blurry hash is simple. The process starts by using a standard hash function to calculate the 128-bit hash values of the e-mail addresses in the Registry. The output is then trimmed to a shorter sequence (e.g., 30-bits). A large number of random 30-bit values are then added to the list to create the Do Not Intrude Registry.

Blurry Hash mitigates the privacy risks associated with publishing the Registry;

        * Using addresses removed from the spammer's original mailing list.

            When a spammer notices that an e-mail address has been deleted from his list, he has no way of knowing if it was filtered because it was a legitimate user's e-mail address, a honeypot address or a random entry in the hashed Registry.
        * Dictionary Attacks

            A spammer may also attempt to uncover the registry's content using dictionary attacks. These attempts are worthless due to the random information in the Registry that ensures that some percentage of e-mail addresses enumerated by the spammer will match hashed registry entries, even though they are not actually listed in the Registry. Hence, a spammer will not be able to tell whether the matches are valid e-mails addresses.

then they laugh at you...

then they fight you...

then you win :D

One thing is safe to know: At least the spammers are now PAYING ATTENTION to us. A year ago they didn't even know we exist. Then they tried to give bad publicity to Blue Security in anti-spam websites (they said bluefrog was a botnet).

Later, SendSafe included an option to use bluefrog's list to NOT send spam to those addresses.

Finally, they're targeting us directly. You know what that means B-)

Also, I doubt the database's been compromised. I'm sure they only diffed the original and the filtered e-mail list. This means that only a small percentage of e-mail targets has been truly released.

They probably don't even associate the big blue "e" with Microsoft

I just clicked the blue e and I got a window whose title bar is "MSN.com - Microsoft Internet Explorer". How is it possible not to associate the blue e with Microsoft?

Can they recover in time for 2010?

http://spamkings.oreilly.com/archives/2006/02/aste risk_on_popup_moguls_gold.html

For Knoppix, I used Knoppix Hacks by Kyle Rankin. Just had to remaster it, however, see my screenshots, link in signature. Knoppix always needs remastering.
Since he fills up the CD, only those able to chroot need try. Mine runs 495 MB now, still can toss out some items.

        I cannot live without books.
        Thomas Jefferson
        3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)

Dood, you're on crack.

You seriously need to read the following link:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ki rkmck.html

There you will learn that BSD did NOT come from SYS V, but from an earlier version of AT&T Unix. Also, with Linux you might have a bigger sandbox, but what good is it when it's full of shit and kids that are constantly pissing in it? Also, what good is it to have 100 different sandboxes especially when it contains the same shitty, pissed on sand. ;)

As far as security goes, we both know that software is written by humans that are prone to error. Errors happen, but I'd take fewer errors over a multitude of errors anyday. With OpenBSD at least you know there are fewer errors and at least they try to reduce the amount of errors.

OpenBSD is well engineered. The system feels solid and stable. The security and networking tools are available. The documentation is pretty decent as well. It's a pretty good tool whether you have a webserver, edge router, firewall, or even workstation.

You want to know how Unix-like it is? Well maybe you should read the following link so that you know the history of BSD. It should answer your question quite well.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ki rkmck.html

Weeks after his first auction went live, Blizzard, Vivendi, and the ESA began sending repeated takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), asking eBay to yank the auctions because of copyright and trademark infringement concerns.

In effect, if the video game industry's actions are upheld, "then selling a how-to book about Microsoft Word would infringe Microsoft's copyright, especially if the book contained one or more screenshots of Word's user interface," said Paul Levy...

Obviously. However, if the price were less than the hard copy (by let's say 50%) would the sales of that particular book (in pdf form) increase to raise revenue beyond what it would have been at full price? That would require some research and faith by a book distributor. Consider this, I get probably 90% of my questions related to software development by going to google and various programming websites right now. I have shelves of computer books (most of which are read throughout) but I almost never use them as a reference.

I like this idea O'Reilly Safari But at $220~380 a year it's equivilent to what I actually pay for books so there is no net gain for me. And only 5 Chapters per month can be downloaded. So close but not quite.

I don't know much about operating systems at all, but I do know that the Windows NT line of kernels are hybrid kernels, which are more modular than monolithic kernels like Linux. In fact, Linus famously argued for a monolithic kernel.

What is Postgresql missing that Oracle has?

It's great for you that you like your Clie, but I don't own one and am not about to run out and spend, what, over $200, or heck, even $100 to be able to purchase a book.

With all the fancy changes, is VB still the great beginner's language it once was? Would you recommend it to a beginner over C#?"

"Is kicking puppies still a great way of attracting women, or do you recommend kittens these days?"

VB was never a great beginner's language. It's wrong all over. The only thing that got it a reputation for being a "great beginner's language" was that you could draw the GUI in later versions * before you actually learnt how to write code, so you could get visually pleasing results immediately, whereas the competition at the time meant you actually had to learn how to use a GUI API (and consequently, how to write code) first.

You want a good beginners language, look at Python. It's been used successfully in teaching environments for a while now. It enforces good practices like indentation and prohibits easy sources of bugs, like if foo = bar: O'Reilly have an article about Python for teaching programming that you might be interested in.

* Yeah, the first versions of Visual Basic ran on DOS and didn't have the GUI builders that later versions did. I'm not quite sure what qualified them as basic of the "visual" variety, it's not like you had to type your code in with your eyes shut in other basics.

It's kinda scarey how the terrorists want to steal copies of ROME too.

--Jimmy
"Kinda makes you think, donut."

The lumber industry, paper mills, and O'Reilly publishing are all it together! Create a new programming language and Presto! More revenue for all!

That explains the book on slash...

There's a good summary on Zend: http://www.zend.com/php5/andi-book-excerpt.php

Basically, PHP 5 adds proper object support (think Java-style) including iterators for objects, and new extensions add good XML support, SOAP, SQLite, better MySQL support (prepared statements, OO interface, etc.)

I'd recommend reading Adam Trachtenberg's book Upgrading to PHP 5 if you're familiar with PHP 4.

...is Linux Server Hacks. Just to "turbo mode ssh logins" hack (#67) is worth the price alone.

Oh, and, book plug!

and a proper index of the book you can get a preview on the O'Reilly microsite for the book here

Found this via the spam kings blog, absolutely hilarious:
http://spamkings.oreilly.com/archives/2006/01/unde r_attack_spammer_begs_for_1.html

Honestly, I still believe that vigilante tactics combined with laws such as ours in TN (making spam a civil action) are the only realistic way to go.

And that Democrats in general can logically be blamed for spamming by Republican Attorneys General.

You're wrong. He did write the original versions of gcc and gdb, and Emacs among many other things. The original Emacs was ground breaking, not trivial as you allege. Whatever else you may think of him, RMS's code contributions are huge.

His biography is pretty good. See also his Wikipedia entry.

Scroll about two-thirds of the way through this page.

Michael Posner has developed a "game-like" interactive training scheme that has been shown to increase some measurements of working memory and increase nonverbal IQ scores. Other researchers (Cogmed) have followed suit, even going so far as to manufacture video games for kids with ADHD.

And it's no surprise the military is interested in video games (ever play "america's army?) given that other research has shown that habitual video game players have a shorter attentional blink (basically it's the "recovery" time you need to process multiple stimuli) and have a greater capacity for subitizing. See the excellent Mind Hacks chapter on video games, or this short article for more.

What's really amazing is that games may even be a universal phenomenon among more intelligent species - Stan Kuczaj and Lauren Highfill recently observed dolphins playing over 317 distinct versions of various games, including easier versions for the younger dolphins. Whether they have underwater consoles remains to be seen...

Certain manufactures have much better interpolation than others, but they are all getting pretty good in recent years, especially the big names (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony). My G6 has RAW mode and I have done a fair bit of testing Jpg vs RAW (from multiple converters).

You will see essentially no differnce between Canon RAW vs Canon jpg. You need to use a 3rd party converter to extract a tiny bit more detail. Canon does a bit of noise smoothing in both the jpgs and the RAW converter. Get a 3rd party converter and you can convert without the noise smoothing to get a tiny bit more detail but a bit more noise. From my printing test this is only slightly visible in a 13x19 print to the most picky of people and not visible at all in 8x10.

As for 35mm, you are looking at the extreme fringe use, there is a small advantage in detial capture for B&W, That is about it. As far as shooting ISO 3200, see here: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2004/10/06/canon20 d.html

The 20d has extremely low noise ISO3200 that blows away any color film/transparency. In black an white mode its noise profile is an easy match for any B&W film/transparency. I think digital is more adaptable, being able to do ISO 100-3200 with lower noise, in color or in B&W and all at the flip of a button.

Some people don't realize how much more noise there is in film than in digital, look at this 11MP 1ds vs Provia 100. Notice the noise on the Provia.

So yes if going for ultimate resolution in B&W you can still do better with film. Otherwise the digital SLR is superior.

> Perl? Fuck. He wants a stable app with good code. Sheesh.

Just because you can't read or write Perl proficiently doesn't mean that's a problem with Perl. If you're going to do a big perl project, check out Perl Best Practices first. It'll help you set a consistent, reliable, and maintainable coding style.

Personally, I've coded a big perl app this way, and it still makes perfect sense to me (and the other hackers) 6 months later. (As opposed to a Java program that I could no longer understand after a 36-hour coding session. :) Thank you oh-so-much for CVS.)

And when was the last time you actually wrote a construct like that?

The point is, it's easy to screw your self over in any language. If you're a bad programmer, you're going to be bad in any language. If you're a good programmer, you'll manage with any language. The fact that there's lots of bad perl scripts out there just means that there are lot of bad perl programmers -- not that perl itself is bad.

Anyway, if you are going to do a big project in Perl, definitely read Perl Best Practices.

I have to agree with you, but obviously, I'm biased.

as to why? ... the madness of crouds

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/01/digging_ the_madness_of_crowds_1.html

When dealing with Java's lack of pointers, I found I needed to learn more about JNI. Addison Wesley's Java Native Interace contains some of the more useful info I found regarding the classloader mechanism, which is about all you should need to supplement the java.lang.reflect API docs.

--MarkusQ

I think this page explains quite well why the gpl exists
and is a nice history lesson to explain where this all started.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/debian/chapter/book /ch01_02.html
"Two Bell Labs software engineers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie, worked on Multics until Bell Labsbwithdrew from the project in 1969. One of their favorite pastimes during the project had been playing a multi-user game called Space Travel. Now, without access to a Multics computer, they found themselves unable to indulge their fantasies of flying around the galaxy. Resolved to remedy this, they decided to port the Space Travel game to run on an otherwise unused PDP-7 computer. Eventually, they implemented a rudimentary operating system they named Unics, as a pun on Multics. Somehow, the spelling of the name became Unix.

As word of their work spread and interest grew, Ritchie and Thompson made copies of Unix freely available to programmers around the world. These programmers revised and improved Unix, sending word of their changes back to Ritchie and Thompson, who incorporated the best such changes in their version of Unix. Eventually, several Unix variants arose.

What Ritchie and Thompson had begun in a distinctly non-commercial fashion ended up spawning several legal squabbles. When AT&T grasped the commercial potential of Unix, it claimed Unix as its intellectual property and began charging a hefty license fee to those who wanted to use its Unix. Soon, others who had implemented Unix-like operating systems were distributing licenses only for a fee. Understandably, those who had contributed improvements to Unix considered it unfair for AT&T and others to appropriate the fruits of their labors. This concern for profit was unlike the democratic, share-and-share-alike spirit of the early days of Unix."

So two geeks wanted to play games and created C and unix so they could. More geeks contributed to unix then corperations hijacked it...

makes you think thou if GPL had been in place would SCO be battling it out in court trying to prove ownership and copyrights in Linux for things supposedly taken from unix which was taken from the free software world in the first place.

when you can look back and see how unix was taken from the people who developed it. It suddenly becomes clear why the GPL is important and needed.

I mean as programmers we learn from our peers and then what hoard our little knowledge pile and claim it as our own...

click on the link and read ...

I suggest:

• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python, introductory, available both in electronic form (for free) and printed;
• Thinking in Python, advanced, available only in electronic form (for free);
• Python Cookbook, Second Edition, advanced, available only in printed form, but it's a really good book.

Good reading.

I am a Java programmer by profession but I wanted to give Python a shot because it seemed like fun.

As a programmer experienced with OO programming and some other types of "scripting" languages, all I needed to read was Learning Python from O'Reilly. Great book, great language.

On a shameless side note, if you're a Scrabble fan, come check out my online, multiplayer Scrabble program written in Python. PyScrabble

I've had good experiences with O'Reilly in general, and with "Learning *", "Programming *", and "* Cookbook", where * has been Python, Perl, PHP. However, have a look at http://python.oreilly.com/ and download the free chapters and source code before you buy. For an intermediate level programmer you can probably do without the "Learning Python" book. Good Luck.

Python Cookbook, Edition 2 also covers version 2.4. And it is also a very useful book, even for those who know Python quite well...you can always learn a few new tricks.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pythoncook2/

Not only is this a good book, it is also one of only few that cover Python 2.4. The author Magnus Lie Hetland has a free python tutorial ("minimal crash course) (Instant python) on his homepage. He was also involved (as author, editor etc.) in several other book projects:

• Practical Python (Author) [Beginning Python is based on this one]
• Python Cookbook (Coauthor)
• Python in a nutshell (Editor)
• Foundations of Python network programming (Editor)

So we can assume he has a clue what he is writing about.

His homepage uses PHP, btw.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Not only is this a good book, it is also one of only few that cover Python 2.4. The author Magnus Lie Hetland has a free python tutorial ("minimal crash course) (Instant python) on his homepage. He was also involved (as author, editor etc.) in several other book projects:

• Practical Python (Author) [Beginning Python is based on this one]
• Python Cookbook (Coauthor)
• Python in a nutshell (Editor)
• Foundations of Python network programming (Editor)

So we can assume he has a clue what he is writing about.

His homepage uses PHP, btw.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

No WYSIWYG printing architecture

And it's not true that Unix had the components before Windows

When they were designing Motif/CDE, they went to Microsoft for advice on how to do it.

You can read Chapter One for free and decide for yourself. That is, if you're not afraid of learning some new words.