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it ended up top of all the search engines for the site's name.

Multimed,

This is because your domain is one of the biggest weights in google rankings for a given search term. If you search for 'cat hats' a site like 'www.catshats.com' will be near the top even though it doesn't even mention cat hats within the entire site. However, a site that contains all kinds of descriptions and references to cat hats will rank higher. In the world of Search Engine Optimization, Flash is a black hole, like the grandparent poster claims. Sure, a search for your domain name will return your site, but try a search for any of the text presented in your flash-delivered content. Your site won't be anywhere in the results.

For further insight on this topic, I recommend the O'Reilly book, Google Hacks.

I wonder how hackable these units will be and if DirecTV will look the other way like TiVo has. Somehow I doubt it.

I blogged something about this today here. Seems that prosecutors had plenty of dirt to prove Jessica's involvement, including an incriminating to-do list with her name all over it. Jon Praed presented a copy of these documents at the 2005 MIT Spam Conference, video of which is linked from my blog. Praed explained that, due to a legal technicality that's beyond me, the evidence was not admissible.

by googling you fucking retard. This is the hack you're looking for..

The new Make magazine has a heavily-photographed and pretty intelligible partslist / walkthrough of building the actual device, as well. http://make.oreilly.com/

The original vi wasn't by Sun. It was written by Bill Joy at Berkeley. The command-line version of the editor, ex, was in the very first "Berkeley Software Distribution". The first vi for display terminals was in 2BSD. (source: Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix, Marshall Kirk McKusick's chapter in the O'Reilly Open Sources book).

The vi that FreeBSD uses these days is nvi, a "bug-for-bug compatible" rewrite of the original, which was produced for 4.4BSD (presumably the original vi/ex was "encumbered", derived in some way from Bell Labs Seventh Edition Unix sources?).

The original vi wasn't by Sun. It was written by Bill Joy at Berkeley. The command-line version of the editor, ex, was in the very first "Berkeley Software Distribution". The first vi for display terminals was in 2BSD. (source: Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix, Marshall Kirk McKusick's chapter in the O'Reilly Open Sources book).

The vi that FreeBSD uses these days is nvi, a "bug-for-bug compatible" rewrite of the original, which was produced for 4.4BSD (presumably the original vi/ex was "encumbered", derived in some way from Bell Labs Seventh Edition Unix sources?).

You're a little hasty calling OS X lame on the desktop and server. Browse here and here and here. OS X covers a much wider range of uses than any other *nix out there. On the desktop it can run most of the X11 sw out there + the big name sw from Adobe, MS, Macromedia, etc. On the server, you can tweak it just like any other OSS *nix since you have a CLI and free access to the source. OTOH, the GUI is an option for those lacking your elite hacking skills who would have used MS Server but heard this was better...

There's a REASON why you don't see many girl geeks...

Can you identify it for us then? It is quite obvious that a set of cultural conditions exists, which allows genders to excel in certain areas, but to say that gender roles are "natural" is a bit too bold.

While every society features some kind of labour division based on gender, the specifics are very hard to explain by "natural" causes. Take prostitution. In our age it is almost exclusively a female occupation. If we are hasty, we may conclude that females are naturally good at whoring out. But a quick look at the Greeko-Roman society -- that's only 2000 years ago -- can convince us in the contrary: male prostitution was so prominent, that a colloquial for "young man" was "prick". The ideal of beauty, likewise, was a male body, and female bodies were just found useful.

I promise you my girlfriend just wouldn't ever enjoy spending 6 hours recompiling and securing a *nix system.

It almost sounds like you are saying, between the lines, that you would not ever want your girlfriend to be geeky in this way. Which is not to much to ask in an egalitarian relationship. After all, if people start living together, and happen to meet each other's expectations, then who is to say that their gender roles are improper?

Again, however, your particular example does not qualify as a proof that females are naturally indisposed to the IT labour, although it may support a notion that a traditional IT-inept female finds herself to be well-adjusted for the modern social life.

I am going to such lengths describing this distinction, because in the course of my rather modest IT career I have met plenty of highly competent females, who were able to do their jobs without any noticeable detriment to their social lives. In particular, one of my favourite books on the basics of *nix administration is written by a female.

Apart from that, he makes it seem as though they're "inferior" for not having read "complex texts".

I bet this asshole has never read "The Bat Book".

Why don't more professors require the O'Reilly books? For most topics, I know we have to purchase some $100 textbook for class, but when we get on the job we end up just buying the O'Reilly reference book. Why not require your students to purchase the O'Reilly book and then just teach selected topics from it? That way they already have the very best reference book to take to work with them. Look at this for instance: Javascript, the Definitive Guide. Now they'll never need another Javascript book. They'll thank you when they get into the workplace.

Knoppix: learn it, live it, love it.

The benefit is clear: Solaris would have slowed its death spiral from its great height. Why else do you think they Open Sourced it in the first place? They just miscalculated, manouvered badly, and picked the wrong license. Jeers instead of cheers. Not a good marketing move, and certainly not something to garner the same community fervor as only the GPL-oriented can expend. They would have had a majority of defenders instead of detractors. Not something to take lightly in this slippery market. Public noise can make the difference between being independent, and being a subsidiary.

It may even have split the Linux community into adopters of Solaris in addition to Linux. It would have given Sun breathing space in the market, as even IBM would find it hard to argue the point of using Linux to their customers when another robust and battle-tested GPL OS was out there. But, even more importantly, it could have given Linux a real competitive fight, giving both a chance to evolve and surpass each other. The community could've benefited greatly.

Linus understands Sun very well when he says that:

"...from Sun's perspective, the CDDL had to be incompatible with the GPL. Sun "wants to keep a moat against the barbarians at the gate," he wrote in an e-mail interview. Torvalds said he does not expect developers clamoring to start playing with that source code.

"Nobody wants to play with a crippled version [of Solaris]. I, obviously, do believe that they'll have a hard time getting much of a community built up," Torvalds wrote. "I think there are parallels with the Java 'we'll control the process' model. I personally think that their problem is that they want to control the end result too much, and because of that they won't get any of the real advantages of open source." "

And...

"He contrasted Sun's CDDL with the wide-open nature of the GPL. "One of the beauties of the GPL," he said, is that "you have to totally give up control over the project (because everybody literally has the same rights to the whole project), but exactly because nobody can control it, it makes everybody feel like true owners.""

He's right, and Sun will have to learn it the hard way.

So what you end up as you almost always do is a religious argument based on hypothetical scenarios that have no substance in reality. Fine but don't image that it makes anyone with any sense or perspective think that Sun is out to damage GPL. It isn't and in fact all the evidence is that Sun is out to support GPL where it is sensible.

Any GPL developer would be in danger of contaminating his projects if he were to work on Open Solaris AND Linux due to Sun's questionable patent stance. Yes, witholding patents makes sense if you intend to hurt the users of what you consider a competing community. Why else withold from some and give to others? They've performed an action that doesn't require explanation.

Sun was doing Open Source or something rather like it when the perceived wisdom was that this was a very stupid move commercially.

Let's see, Unix source code was floating around and being shared by various universities and companies. Everyone was sharing their improvements. Now that was enlightenment. Sun relicenses what other people had worked on, decides to close their source and suddenly they were enlightened? Please, it's because of companies like Sun that GNU was started in the first place.

From the FAQ:

When will it be out?
The premier issue of Make should ship to subscribers and single-issue purchasers in mid-February and hit bookstores and newsstands at the end of February.

It will also be available in coming months through most of the same online and brick-and-mortar retailers that carry O'Reilly's other publications, plus select newsstand outlets. We'll be posting more about that as it becomes available at those places. But the subscribers will be getting it sooner.

What's different is the increasingly strenuous tone calling for people to reign in the number of licenses. In many ways, this basically demonstrates that OSS/FS has matured. Lots of people have created new licenses, essentially experimenting with different approaches. The marketplace of ideas has selected a few "winning" ideas, and it's getting increasingly hard for even a good new license idea to overcome the many problems of incompatibility with what already exists. Commercial development and use of OSS/FS is now widespread; a consolidation of common licensing approaches appears inevitable as the whole approach becomes common.

There's at least one simple test: make sure your license is GPL-compatible. You can do this by using the GPL, using a different license that is known to be GPL-compatible (in particular the LGPL, MIT/X, or BSD-new (modified BSD) licenses), or by dual-licensing the program (and ensuring that one of the licenses is the GPL). See my essay for info on why GPL compatibility is so important.

In many ways, this license winnowing is happening anyway. My paper More than a Gigabuck found that only a few licenses were used by nearly all the code; at the time it was (in order) GPL, MIT, LGPL, MPL, and BSD (counting by lines of code). You can look at Freshmeat's statistics, which counts the licenses per project. Today, 2005-02-16, the OSS/FS licenses in order of popularity were (from most popular) the GNU General Public License (GPL) (67.99%) GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) (5.89%), BSD License (original) (3.54%), BSD License (revised) (1.92%), Artistic License (1.80%), MIT/X Consortium License (1.26%), Apache License (0.72%), Mozilla Public License (MPL) (0.57%), Perl License (0.39%), and Apache License 2.0 (0.26%). I see a short list here, and notice that even in this list of the most popular licenses, the dropoff between the most-popular licenses and the next most popular licenses are really steep. Every project whose license is incompatible with all of these has a serious liability, and in fact, being only compatible with the lower-popularity licenses is a real problem. Few think Sun's CDDL code is going to go anywhere, solely because it's an odd license incompatible with the millions of lines of code already out there.

I wish he'd used proper terminology - I think he meant "proprietary" not "commercial". Last I checked, Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Sun, and many other distributors of OSS/FS programs (including those using the GPL) were commercial companies.

Obligatory book website and sample chapter links.

Obligatory book website and sample chapter links.

I never buy the O'Reilly book if another publisher has a decent title on the same subject. But it's often the case that O'Reilly has the only title on a particular subject, or the only one by an author who really knows the subject. So they kind of have a guaranteed audience. Which, as you say, tends to make them arrogant.

What makes this particular frustrating is that somebody at O'Reilly sat down and wrote one of the best writer's guides I've ever seen. If only they'd make their writers actually read it!

Right. Do any of them appear in the Errata for the book?

Sure

You're welcome. Thanks for the flowers! :^)

I think Arnold Robbins' latest O'Reilly covers the differences between awk, nawk, mawk, oawk, and gawk - I know the author of mawk wrote the introduction.

I've heard that mawk is pretty good, but I don't think it has the network socket interface or the fixed-field processing feature of GNU awk yet. I could be wrong.

As for the ugly string concatenation syntax, I agree with you - but for a different reason! I dislike the way languages like shell and perl want to translate variables within quotes, I prefer explicit concatenation (i.e. I will use print 'total is ' . $total . "\n"; in perl rather than print "total is $total\n";) even though it's longer to type. Awk's use of the space - a so-called "invisible" character - for string concatenation is even more annoying, and it's the reason for the mostly when people say awk has "mostly elegant syntax".

It seemed like a good idea at the time. --Brian Kernighan

the only real reason he's doing this is the money

These two things aren't incompatible.

The only reason my super-market provides groceries is to make money, and the result is a valid service.

The only reason the movie theater down the road plays movies is to make money, and the result is a valid service.

Just because this blogger is motivated by money does not mean that the service he provides is a scam. He's aggregating information, and will likely eventually - after he's been covering the topic long enough - provide knowledgeable commentary on it. I wouldn't be suprised if, in a few years, he's doing original research on the issue, iterviewing people, and digging up articles in libraries.

What he's doing is indistinguishable from someone starting up a new magazine because they see a demographic that would read it and an advertising base that would purchase ads (see, for example Make). The end result is that all three parties are better off: the readers get something that they choose to read, the advertisers get eyeballs, and the guy who puts it all together gets a slice.

What you're seeing is actually history in the making - the decoupling of demand-driven journalism from media companies.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

-- Adam Smith

Here's a simpler (and cheaper if you already have a video camera) way to create a PVR for Mac.

Link

The problem isn't language designers its us developers, we don't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop, we want to use what we used before. In other words we are luddites.

I strongly disagree. Not all of us are a bunch lazy idiots as you imply. If I didn't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop I wouldn't have finished reading a second Perl 6 book yesterday, now would I? I have already spent man-months learning the language that is not even fully designed yet, so I would appreciate if you kindly exclude me--and most of Slashdotters--from your hasty generalization, for even though I would tend to agree with you that most of people in general are incompetent idiots, I believe that Slashdot community is a rare exception to this sad rule, or otherwise we wouldn't be so enthusiastically discussing the possibility of designing a Heraclitean programming language with its roots in the philosophy of ancient Greece--which nota bene would be an interesting addition to postmodern languages we already have. But even though I disagree with your premiss, I fully agree with your conclusion that Java and C# are rubbish, that of course is undeniable. But this conclusion by itself is quite useless unless we answer the question why they are the way they are. Why does the competence of your proverbial marketing department is nearly without exception reversely proportional to the technical advantages of the technology in question? When we answer this question, a lot of other answers will become clear.

Somewhere in IBM's headquarters there is a camel. A straw has just been placed on its back.

As long as they have the correct permissions from O'Reilly for use of said camel it's all OK :-)

If you look on Éric Lévénez Computer Languages History page you'll see that there is a link to O'Reilly. "O'REILLY has published a color version of The History of Programming Languages."

I thought we had posted this a while back?
O'Reilly had even made a spiffy poster with it?

http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/language poster_0504.html

FreeSBIE, based on Free BSD and bundled with Xfce, is intriguing, but I couldn't get it to talk to the wireless network, or to print. It also crashed my system twice. But I'd be willing to check it out again sometime.

That whole article is just one big trollish flamebait. The author doesn't know FreeBSD is not Linux and he cannot even get the name right, it's a miracle he didn't write Linux as Li nux. He also failed to notice that Fluxbox is also available and not just XFce, but maybe he thought Fluxbox is a version of Tetris. Well, since he didn't explain what exactly happened, here is a more detailed account of what went on:

*FreeSBIE booting up*
James LaRue: "Oh, check out the penguin, I like the new costume, hehe!"
James LaRue: "*scratching head* Uhh, Fluxbox... Tetris? Nah, not for me... What the hell... *presses 1 (console tcsh shell)*"

# ifconfig wlan0 wificlient broadcast 192.168.1.255
ifconfig: interface wlan0 does not exist

About the author: James LaRue is a public library administrator..

Are you sure? I think I know him from somewhere... Well, if he really is a public library administrator it seems his library is missing a book or two.

The book is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs and is available as PDF.

If you take a look at O'Reilley's History of Programming Languages chart you'll see that Objective-C was just one of many parents to Java.

Java was not inspired by any one language, but rather the desire to see some of the nicer features of a variety of languages brought together.

It must have been a good idea because Microsoft liked it so much, they changed the capitalization of the libraries and ported it wholesale (well, parts - slowly they are getting close to where Java was a few years ago) and now they are basing the future of Windows on it.

According to this book you can already do that, albeit in slightly different form. Try this:

a.blue, span.blue, div#back {color: blue;}

It's on page 3.

how exactly does O'Reilly releasing 2 books on firefox equal a "end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages"?

Probably because the OP recognises Tim Oreilly uncanny abilty to predict (or influence) technology trends which is verging on presciense.

Which could be done by hold the first button on the link, and waiting for the pop up menu.

Is the O'Reilly book AI for Game Developers. It has lots of practical examples and ideas with code snippets that build from something a beginner can understand.

Is it easy to program for these days?

Linus hates microkernels.

This website explains about the three related patents in mp3. The website mentioned that the patents relate to encoding and not decoding (playback.)

MP3 The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly)

History of MP3. Qouted from this website: "In 1998, Winamp became a free MP3 music player boosting the success of MP3. No licensing fees are required to use an MP3 player."

Real is bullshitting about mp3 playback fees!

Check out the Essential CVS book from O'Reilly: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cvs/. It's concise and told me almost all I needed to know to manage my company's first CVS server for the last two years.

Bonsai is the best tool I've seen for digging through CVS's not-so-friendly history output. It's web-based, and provides a nice interface for creating pointed queries to see who did what and when. The setup is a little bit arcane, but once you've got it going, it's very handy to have in your toolbox.

O'Reilly's History of Programming Languages poster, silly.

Some phones have IDEs provided by the manufaturer. Check out the Nokia Developer Forum and Blackberry's SDK (though you have some limited functionality with Blackberries unless you get your app signed, from what I've read.

With the free SDK, JDK, J2ME, J2ME In a Nutshell & Learning Wireless Java I was able to whip up a simple app for my phone in no time at all.

Some phones have IDEs provided by the manufaturer. Check out the Nokia Developer Forum and Blackberry's SDK (though you have some limited functionality with Blackberries unless you get your app signed, from what I've read.

With the free SDK, JDK, J2ME, J2ME In a Nutshell & Learning Wireless Java I was able to whip up a simple app for my phone in no time at all.

Then buy the O'Reilly book Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks. It has instructions on how to make an Internet Ready Toaster

Yummy.. take a byte of that.

Then buy the O'Reilly book Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks. It has instructions on how to make an Internet Ready Toaster

Yummy.. take a byte of that.

I wrote a chapter in the fictional book Stealing the Network - How to Own a Continent about a college student who steals social security numbers from his college. This is the second public story about universities losing tons of social security numbers because they continue to use them as student IDs since that book was released about 7 months ago. Universities should have stopped doing this so long ago...

Anyway, read my chapter! The whole book was really good. Ryan Russell and Kevin Mitnick edited it and it features amazingly cooler authors than me, like Nmap's Fyodor, Dan Kaminsky, FX and a number of other amazing people. Read the reviews at Amazon if you don't believe me.

Anyway, read my chapter! The whole book was really good. Ryan Russell and Kevin Mitnick edited it and it features amazingly cooler authors than me, like Nmap's Fyodor, Dan Kaminsky, FX and a number of other amazing people. Read the reviews at Amazon if you don't believe me.

Actually you can remove the CD.
As an exmaple: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/knoppixhks/chapter/ hack05.pdf

Isn't this a standard Google hack as listed in O'Reilly's book.
I've had loads of fun with this one. Turning supposedly security cameras in on themselves etc.
We even have such a camera watching things at work.
"It's secure", said our IT manager (my boss - did someone mention Dilbert?).
Once home, it took me all of 10 mins to spy on my colleagues.
Has anyone seen the Kevin Rose footage on WarSpying - increasing the range of a receiver and driving around a neighborhood to spy on the X10 network cams?

The situation with the fast binary Nvidia drivers and the slow open source ati drivers is exactly like the situation that got RMS started.

RMS could either use the slow(20min print job) printer he had with open source drivers or use the fast (2min print jobs) printer with binary only drivers.[1] The problem with the fast printer was the there was a critical problem that he needed fixing that he could not do with out the source.

[1] http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html

It wasn't that he didn't have drivers for the laser printer to use with his word processing program. He had access to binary drivers for the printer but the printer experienced paper jams.

The solution he(?) used before with another printer was to have the printer send a msg back to all users who had print jobs that there was a paper jam. He couldn't do this with the new laser printer cause he didnt have the source to modify, so he had to 'borrow' the source from another university that did have access to the source.

(source for above info from http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html )