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Snort and pf work well together. If you're interested in Free/OpenBSD security, check out Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security. Highly recommended.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Well, BSD has been along for a long time, since the late 1970s. In fact, here is the Berkeley copyright notice for FreeBSD:

Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994

The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

Compare that history to Windows (first released in 1985, although to be fair, Windows development and the release of DOS was in 1981), and to GNU/Linux (GNU project started in 1984, Linux started in 1991). Now, BSD has been freely available for just about the same time as Linux, though. Read your history before you start flaming.

Secondly, the BSDs have a nice level of integration between the kernel and the userland, since the developers work on both parts. For example, the BSD developers work on the kernel, the userland, the C library, the manual pages, etc. The only parts that aren't developed by the BSDs are the C compiler (from GNU) and a handful of other GNU utilities. This is different from Linux, in which the kernel is developed by Linus and contributors, while the userland is developed mainly by the GNU project.

Finally, the BSDs have proven themselves over the last 25+ years that they are very stable and capable operating systems, with a lot of merit. BSD was the first operating system to implement TCP/IP. BSD was a major commercial player back in the days of 4.3BSD and the VAX, and it does behind the scenes work in many of the non-BSD operating systems that people use (e.g., the core of Mac OS X and many Windows networking tools). BSD was one of the first pieces of software that went from closed-source to open-source (but not without a fight from AT&T, which explains why Linux, and not BSD, seems to be more popular).

BSD is a very nice operating system, and developers like working on it because it is well engineered and is proven. Read some BSD history and try a BSD before you start flaming.

Is that a llama in one of the Krita screenshots?

And have you noticed that programmers seem to be curiously obsessed with certain animals? You know, llamas, badgers (because they run Linux, of course), wombats, grues, dragons (the compiler book). Did O'Reilly start the fad with their books on computers and technology, or are they simply followers?

Looks like this is on safari so added it to my bookshelf.
http://safari.oreilly.com/
If you have not used this safari service yet its got an excellent selection of books, reading about 3 a week.

also this site I saw on the daily dave mailing list seems a good resource for disassemble of malware. http://www.openrce.org/

Hehe, good one :)

I believe that not grokking MVC detracts from the value of your review, particularly with respect to your opinion of the architecture of Rails. Without understanding MVC, you can have no understanding of the design decisions they made, and as such, no qualified understanding of the architecture itself.

Ruby on Rails is astounding. Using it is like watching a kung-fu movie, where a dozen bad-ass frameworks prepare to beat up the little newcomer only to be handed their asses in a variety of imaginative ways. I've got David Heinemeier Hanson giving a session, tutorial, and keynote. That's how much I love "convention over configuration" and the other philosophies behind Rails. Rails shows us a very interesting future for web applications, and is a great example of innovation from within the open source community.

Oh, shit, I wish I knew. I hated the way that you seemed to have to be a firefox hacker to know how to do this shit. But you don't -- there are lots of examples to learn from now.

Plus, I learned with help from da intarweb:

• XUL Reference
• DOM Ref
• XmlHttpRequest

And an out-of-date but still informative book (got cheap!).

Some Firefox extensions like venkman (JS Debugger) and one called "Extension Developer" which has a real-time graphical XUL eval thingy that's worth its weight in gold.

Toss in reading about how to create closures in JS (imperative for developing useful OO libraries). And about two serious weeks of sweat equity to get started.

I, for one, think the little pop-up balloons on the system tray and start menu have all of the appeal of a celebrity trial.
Configured a limited account, logged in, and the annoying bubble says "There are unused icons on your desktop, would you like my to clean that up for you?" and I'm thinking, please, anything to shut this OS up, so I play along, and it throws an error about being unable to create a folder somewhere.
Presumably, this is a vaguely positive thing, inasmuch as the security features may have worked, I think.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/winxphks2/ is really a requirement to make sense of the situation.

I'm partial to the classics from O'Reilly...

You can buy them on Amazon, O'Reilly (in fact, I'm on the front page right now!), WalMart, etc.

Of course, the fastest place to get them from is the Prag Prog site itself. ;)

You can buy them on Amazon, O'Reilly (in fact, I'm on the front page right now!), WalMart, etc.

Of course, the fastest place to get them from is the Prag Prog site itself. ;)

Err, BSD wasn't able to free up their code because for a long time, most of BSD was AT&T code that couldn't be freed up. The FSF might have had some influence in getting the original Berkeley Unix developers to open their TCP/IP code (since it wasn't AT&T code at all), here is a quote from Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T Owned to Freely Redistributable:

With the increasing cost of the AT&T source licenses, vendors that wanted to build standalone TCP/IP-based networking products for the PC market using the BSD code found the per-binary costs prohibitive. So, they requested that Berkeley break out the networking code and utilities and provide them under licensing terms that did not require an AT&T source license. The TCP/IP networking code clearly did not exist in 32/V and thus had been developed entirely by Berkeley and its contributors. The BSD originated networking code and supporting utilities were released in June 1989 as Networking Release 1, the first freely-redistributable code from Berkeley.

The licensing terms were liberal. A licensee could release the code modified or unmodified in source or binary form with no accounting or royalties to Berkeley. The only requirements were that the copyright notices in the source file be left intact and that products that incorporated the code indicate in their documentation that the product contained code from the University of California and its contributors. Although Berkeley charged a $1,000 fee to get a tape, anyone was free to get a copy from anyone who already had received it. Indeed, several large sites put it up for anonymous ftp shortly after it was released. Given that it was so easily available, the CSRG was pleased that several hundred organizations purchased copies, since their fees helped fund further development.

The idea of releasing the rest of the BSD-only utilities and rewriting all of the AT&T-owned source code (such as the C library, little utilities like cat, sed and grep, and the kernel) came from Keith Bostic, who managed to get a group of developers to work on all of this code. After 18 months, they were left with six "contaminated" kernel source files. All of the unencumbered files were released as the Net/2 Release. (Unfortunately, AT&T and Berkeley got into a fight about those supposedly unencumbered files, which led to the infamous USL vs. BSDI/UCB lawsuit and almost halted development of 386BSD, the first free BSD)

So, it wasn't really the FSF's idea for BSD to release its source code, or to rewrite all of the old AT&T utilities and release them. However, the FSF does deserve credit for getting the free BSDs to switch their license from the orignial BSD license (with the advertisement clause) to something more or less like the MIT/X11 license.

PHP's ease of use and flexibility do make for a dangerous combination. There's no arguing that.

I'm not so sure that the answer lies in the interpreter, although I'm open to the idea. In the meantime, the PHP Security Consortium is an effort to help educate the community about secure programming practices (among other things).

I also try to do my part (in addition to my work with the PHPSC) by providing free articles, giving various talks (including the PHP Security Briefing), and writing Essential PHP Security. Education might not be the only answer, but I think it helps.

So, you're right that there is a bit of a problem, but some of us are trying to help.

I believe Monad uses the .Net framework and .Net's regex's classes are a superset of Perl 5's regex functionality.

Here are two pieces of evidence that Google does *not* disapprove of Google Maps hacks:

1. A post to the official Google blog: http://google-code-featured.blogspot.com/2005/04/m apscraigslist-mashup.html

"While we have no official API for Maps yet, work like this really is amazing and deserves recognition."

2. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/google_m aps_hac.html

"They responded that they had every intention to not shut them down as long as their licenses permit it, and one of the engineers insinuated that they might be working on a Google Maps API or a similar way to build on top of Maps (he actually said, "to make them not hacks," by which I think he meant not unauthorized)."

Disclaimer: I'm the guy that did chicagocrime.org, so I'm biased in favor of openness.

C++ IS a lot daunting at this point in your programming career. If you're just doing websites and database work then start with JavaScript and move to Perl or Python from there. Learning Perl is a good primer on a good first "real" language.

For digital electronics, O'Reilly's Designing Embedded Hardware is brilliant. I have the first edition, and it takes you through digital circuits with practical examples of putting together AVRs and other small chips with memory and peripherals. It doesn't cover FPGAs or VHDL though.

For an introductory title Designing Embedded Hardware is pretty good. It doesn't go into specifics, just introduces terminology and explains the things you need to know.

LDAP System Administration
By Gerald Carter
First Edition March 2003
ISBN: 1-56592-491-6

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ldapsa/toc.html

I don't know how it compares to books24x7.com, butI'm pretty happy with my subscription to O'Reilly's Safari online library. Most stuff that I need to know is on the web, but a couple times a month I really need a good book on the topic, and O'Reilly usually has what I need.

Q: Who uses weak passwords (apart from other vandals trying to pull off the same stunt)?

Richard Stallman. (grep the page for 'passwords')

I don't think the evidence on RDF mailing list supports that opinion. Look at the literature in the bookstores about semantic web. If anything, it is full of confusion and the specification is poorly written compared to the HTML and XML specification.

Triplet does not equal (Subject verb object). What the RDF spec describes is closer to Natural Language parsing concepts. There are many similarities between what the RDF describes as RDF Model graph and dependency grammar techniques http://w3.msi.vxu.se/~nivre/research/sdg.html.

The fact is RDF is really just triplet. Not surprising that it can be represented in N3 (where 3 stands for triplet). Take a look at this example taken from wikipedia :

http://en.wikipedia.org/Tony_Benn> http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> "Tony Benn" . http://en.wikipedia.org/Tony_Benn> http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/publisher> "Wikipedia" .

<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax -ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<rdf :Description rdf:about="http://en.wikipedia.org/Tony_Benn">
<dc:title>Tony Benn</dc:title>
<dc:publisher>Wikipedia</dc:publisher>
</rdf:Desc ription>
</rdf:RDF>

So take another look at RDF, you'll be surprised.

RTF Server Load Balancing by Tony Bourke. After reading that book you will at least know what you need to look for. Also, you can outsource your load balancing if that is optimal for your needs using something like the Akamai's servers (Microsoft.com uses Akamai, Netcraft confirms).

I think Apple provides excellent documentation and tutorial at http://developer.apple.com/. I've always been a fan of the O'Reilly books, and they provide lots of free articles at their MacDevCenter. That should be enough to get you started.

You shouldn't have to think of new ways of doing tables, it should have already been done before. There really should be "patterns" for data modelling.

One of the best design books I have is;
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/oracledes/index.htm l

It does weigh towards Oracle, but trust me you can apply the ideas anywhere.

Also, look into design tools such as ERWin or Oracle Designer and their cheaper OpenSource equivlents. It will help show potential problems and keep you consistant.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

What a question.. like a cell phone engineer asking for books on physics.. didn't they teach you this in school?

But since you are curious: you need to start with relational theory. I recommend Date's new book on O'Reilly:

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

Read and understand the relational model, and DO NOT think about how current SQL databases work. Think abstractly.

Design your databases with this model in mind, then translate it into your favorite SQL product. Find a way to implement the general integrity constraints of relational model with, e.g., SQL triggers. Once you master data *integrity*, your database will hum along smoothly.

If you don't start shaking your head and thinking "WOW SQL really sucks, it's nothing like the relational model which is so general and powerful" .. read the book again. You'll come around. The more people who are demanding better products, the more likely a vendor will deliver them.

Oreilly radar has an excellent interview notes on the Bill Gates interview with Walt Mossberg, who asks Bill some Not so softball questions, from tablets not doing well to Media Center, to yahoo and google comparisons. Its quite good.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/notes_fr om_bill.html

near the bottom:

WM - What's the difference between what you're doing and what google is doing?

We've been doing this a long time. The pictometry deal is an
exclusive. But there will be a lot of competition.

WM - so you're going to look up and see a Microsoft plane, a
google plane, a yahoo plane!

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/google_m aps_hac.html

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

I've used Spotlight to help me organize my GROWING documents folder. Each and every document I've created since owning my first Macintosh SE in 1989 is in there. It's a mess. I started pulling the low-hanging fruit out first: Invoices and Taxes. Spotlight has been a GREAT help.

Once O'Reily comes out with Spotlight:The Definitive Guide, Spotlight:The Missing Manual, or Spotlight in a Nutshell I will make more effective use of it.

--Mike

Shouldn't the "then" in the title be replaced with "than?"

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

mvps.org has a lot of the registry hacks needed to make security policy changes. So does windows registry guide, labmice, elder geek, and technet.

Good books to get are the XP Registry Guide and xp hacks. But the easiest thing to do is to run a copy of XP Pro.

XP Pro needs a paired down version of Windows 2003 Server "Security Configuration Wizard (SCW)"

still intersting and in some kind very funny the tanenbaum vs. torvalds debates about microkernel vs. monolithic architecture

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

There is a debate. It has not been completely accepted that micro-kernels are the way to go.

Google: stallman passwords MIT

Search down through chapter seven here on the word password, to get a very colorful view of Stallman's strong aversion to passwords, and the hackers' fight against passwords at MIT.

This link, BTW, is to THE definitive book on Richard Stallman. If you have interest in the man read the whole thing. Buy a copy, even. It's really important stuff.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Linux is not the begining of anything. Linux is a kernel that works with the GNU OS. It's just one component. Actually the real history of GNU is far, far away from what this guy is telling. It started as a revolution, it didn't recieve economic support, and rms was unemployed.

Please read this: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
and specially this: http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/

Someone should've hit the progenitors of this little "contest" upside the head with the Garfinkle book before they decided to go ahead with it.

If said book had impacted the morans' cranium, they would've realized that such contests are useless for determining a system's hardness. Or they'd be dead. End results are about the same. So, let us review the possible results:

1. The box is hacked. Oh man, it is pwned! Guess the system wasn't so strong after all.
2. (more likely) The system isn't hacked.

Does the latter scenario PROOF that the system is hacker-proof? Is it? Nope, sorry, it isn't.

To prove that a system is unhackable, I have to demonstrate that in every case the security will not fail. If you have a random testing plan (i.e., a "contest"), then you'll never be sure you touched all the scenarios or even the most likely ones.

To prove that a system is hackable, I just have to find one situation where it can be hacked. Finito; sayonara; have a nice day.

The latter is relatively easy to do. The former is very hard (and sometimes impossible) to accomplish. It is much easier to hold a "contest," declare yourself the winner ("UNBREAKABLE, BABY! w00t!") and then go sell a bunch of units to the PHBs.

Sample chapters are available from this book's webpage on O'Reilly's website -- you can even read about my hacking on the sega dreamcast VMU in chapter 52 or from my (outdated) website.

Sample chapters are available from this book's webpage on O'Reilly's website -- you can even read about my hacking on the sega dreamcast VMU in chapter 52 or from my (outdated) website.

Although descriptions of his own unwillingness to speak out carry a tinge of nostalgic regret, Stallman says he was ultimately turned off by the tone and direction of the anti-war movement. Like other members of the Science Honors Program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at Columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.3 Ultimately, Stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving the rest of youth culture. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, girls in Stallman's age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. To a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, escapist slogans like "make love not war" had a taunting quality. Not only was it a reminder that Stallman, the short-haired outsider who hated rock 'n' roll, detested drugs, and didn't participate in campus demonstrations, wasn't getting it politically; he wasn't "getting it" sexually either.

"I didn't like the counter culture much," Stallman admits. "I didn't like the music. I didn't like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I especially didn't like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn't like the prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I didn't like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered. There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to support the North Vietnamese. They couldn't imagine a more complicated position, I guess."

Such comments alleviate feelings of timidity. They also underline a trait that would become the key to Stallman's own political maturation. For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. In the process of doing so, Stallman had found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam, Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice. Rather than widen the breach between himself and his peers, however, Stallman elected to keep the analysis to himself.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

The only way to get a BSOD on XP is to have some really broken drivers.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Everyone got hung up on the stupid optimization jokes instead of "Graphical install, isn't that Knoppix? http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/2479 http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=39998

Have you forgotten Wil Wheaton's Just a Geek ?

As long as O'Reilly doesn't start doing that shit ...

For the User Friendly plug-of-the-day: Try reading Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell. The Steve Jobs version isn't too far behind. :P