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For me, O'Reilley's Linux in a Nutshell allowed me to charge in with both guns drawn back in 2000. (Read: I'd hosed my Windows installation, and the Compaq restore CD wasn't working.)

They have books on both Linux and BSD here. And, so long as you have a machine to read them from, check out their Safari service. I loved it. (but had to cancel to pay for tuition last Fall. I'm still planning on going back.)

Huh. I was on campus when I found the link, and clicking on it brought me to the article. Now that I'm at home on my DSL connection, clicking on it brings me to a registration required page... Perhaps UCLA has a subscription to Nature Publishing Group, allowing me to view articles from on campus, verifying that I'm on campus by my IP address (they have one with O'Reilly, allowing me to peruse all of the O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf, which has come in handy more than once).

Oh well... Leave me your e-mail addy and I'll see what I can do.

- sm

> I like how they said that it will run along side
> IPv4 for 20 years to get rid of the bugs

Those bugs being the bugs in IPv4. One would hope
to be rid of IPv4 sooner than that, but some

coffee makers might last that long, especially
the (ahem) homebrew models.

I worked as the web admin to my student association when I was in college, and a job opening came up to redesign the programmers site, bringing online a bunch of new tools for students of that department. This was basically a summer job, and they had interviews where myself and four other students made it through the selection process to the final interview. The college is very Microsoft-centric, and therefore I should have known better than to pitch PHP & MySQL to them, but I could not pitch anything else because I am a firm believer in the quality of PHP.

I didn't get the job because, as I found out later, they wanted ASP.

Did they ever get screwed. The guy who they hired was a Korean exchange student, who I happen to think was a great choice for the job, but the problems started cropping up with the ASP code. It was buggy as hell. The system took all summer to code out the object oriented code, and it was never opened because it was never quite good enough.

In my opinion, this was not the fault of the guy they hired at all, it's just that ASP takes a lot more time to get together than PHP. You can "know what you're doing" all you want, but when your boss wants you to make changes to core behaviours, there is nothing faster or more efficient than PHP for handling anything web related. It's just easier to whip together any site with any behaviour and get it working and stable.

Now if they had hired me, they would have had a great PHP & MySQL system likely ready in about four weeks for what they were looking for. They paid this other guy at an hourly wage for the summer and the whole school year and they didn't get their site. What they got were a lot of modules and classes that could do different things, but they all were bug-ridden.

Now I think that because PHP is open source, it's much easier to find ready-made source code on the net, without having to pay anything. You obviously have to be selective, yet there are more freely available sources for ideas, as well.

I would recommend to anyone who wants to get ahead with PHP to read O'reilly's PHP Cookbook.

However, many people in college should make good use of their interlibrary loans or local collections. I discovered too late the amazing selection of books in my university's library system. I read 8 books over the course of four months because it was as simple as logging on to the library's site, requesting the book, and picking it up the next day at the branch campus. Shipping was free, and I could keep the book for a month before having to return it.

Perhaps there should be a system like this for libraries.

I read, maybe, a novel every other year or so, though the other text I go through doesn't seem to met the criteria for arts.

Hey! We can't all be libral art majors!

Free As Freedom, the biography of Richard Stallman

This is one area where the OSS camp has yet to catch up - and I don't mean providing access to a Bugzilla database with 100,000+ known issues, mostly minor.

Paul Vixie wrote an article in which he point4ed out that It's best to pick "friendly" users are likely to find a lot of defects and that many linux users are so friendly as to be able to suggest fixes.

Unfunded open-source software enjoys the best system-level testing in the industry, unless we include NASA's testing on space-bound robots in our comparison. The reason is simply that users tend to be much friendlier when they aren't being charged any money, and power users (often developers themselves) are much more helpful when they can read, and fix, the source code to something they're running.
The essence of field testing is its lack of rigor. What software engineering is looking for from its field testers is patterns of use which are inherently unpredictable at the time the system is being designed and built--in other words, real world experiences of real users. Unfunded open-source projects are simply unbeatable in this area.
An additional advantage enjoyed by open-source projects is the "peer review" of dozens or hundreds of other programmers looking for bugs by reading the source code rather than just by executing packaged executables. Some of the readers will be looking for security flaws and some of those found will not be reported (other than among other crackers), but this danger does not take away from the overall advantage of having uncounted strangers reading the source code. These strangers can really keep an Open Source developer on his or her toes in a way that no manager or mentor ever could.

He is entirely right & there is PLENTY of stable F/OSS that is also perfectly predictable. Just stay out of the development releases & take your FUD someplace else.

I would challenge the notion that there is a distinct category of books that are self-published. To some extent the categories of publisher and self-publisher are anachronistic.

I've made the argument that there is no such thing as self-publishing in more detail elsewhere, but to summarize:

• Many independent publishers publish the work of a small number of writers.

• Many writers establish "publishing companies" to distribute their own work.

• And at this point, technologies like Lulu.com make publishing accessible to anyone and everyone.

The real difference, insomuch as there is a difference, is in the branding. O'Reilly, for example, has a brand that information seekers trust. So an O'Reilly book by an author you've never heard of is probably more appealing than a Lulu.com book by an author you've never heard of. But what if an author develops his own brand?

Along those lines, last week I found myself in the middle of a back-and-forth with a prominent tech journalist. His position was in essence that most of what is written is crap and that the editorial control exercised by publishers is essential. Fair enough. Most of what's written is crap, (although that doesn't seem to stop people from buying it when it's put out by major publishers).

But the dilemma you allude to, as I see it, is comparable to the dilemma presented by the emergence of the World Wide Web itself. "If anyone can put up anything on the Web," railed skeptics, "the whole thing is going to be useless. If you can't find the worthwhile information in the mountains of rotten information, what good will it be?"

Venerable institutions like the New York Times (justifiably) shuddered that individual sites--Matt Drudge's, for example--could compete with their own as sources for information. And yet, it has come to be. The Internet provides the means by which authors can develop their own brands. Matt Basham (the CISCO prof), for example, is in the process of developing his.

If that doesn't work, try resetting the iPod as described on page 46 and then try ejecting it.

I hope this is a joke or a provocation...
But if not, i suggest you read some of his work;
You can begin with the reference The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
or if you're too lazy his short chapters in O'Reilly's 'Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution'.

I hope this is a joke or a provocation...
But if not, i suggest you read some of his work;
You can begin with the reference The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
or if you're too lazy his short chapters in O'Reilly's 'Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution'.

If you haven't checked it out already, Linux Server Hacks also has some fun things you can do with SSH tunnelling, backups over SSH, and X over SSH.

Hrm, well. Putting aside my suspicions about
a college that teaches you acronyms rather than
fundamental theories ;), as someone working in
the industry since about '98, my advice is *be
vendor neutral*. Sure, learn cisco. But try to
get your hands on other vendor's kit too. You
never know what you'll run into out in the wild.
The more hats you can wear, the more likely a
potential employer is to need one or more of your
hat array. So get a bunch of cheap x86 hardware
and toy with every linux distro you can get your
hands on, all the *BSDs, and solaris x86. Learn
bash, learn perl, learn C, learn enough HTML to
make a decent-looking technical document. Use
sites like bookpool and safari to
read technical books until your brain explodes and
then read some more. Always be reading, always be
learning, and never stop growing. At my day
job, I could in any single day touch anything
from graphic design to middleware development
to server administration to hardware configs
to router management. This is a field where
the flexible get ahead and those that focus on
alphabet soup end up kissing a bank manager's
ass until they retire at 70.

Oh, and buy a kevlar vest. It's a rough world out
here.

Certs are OK I guess if you're way entry level,
but a degree from any sort of college will probably
trump them, and significant, relevant
experience will trump almost anything.

I know Lisp is not the ideal language - its ugly, illegible, and slower than compiled languages

Just in case you don't know, Lisp is a compiled language and not slow, especially when compiled with appropriate type declarations. Only the very most early dialects (forty or so years ago) were interpreted-only. Some interpreted implementations exist now, but that's a choice of the implementor, not a requirement of the language.

I disagree with your remarks about ugly and illegible, too, but that's personal taste, I guess. My views on all this are copiously documented in my Slashdot interview, Part I and Part II.

However, what really disappointed me in this chart was its unscientific and subjective decision about what to include and how to present things.

Some of the arrows stop mysteriously so far leftward (as if to hint "this language is no longer used). That's apparently a subjective assessment on their part offered with no foundation, and irresponsibly inappropriate in a document intended to fairly describe history. Common Lisp's arrow stops short for reasons I don't understand since it continues in commmercial use today.

I didn't check the table thoroughtly, but the absence of mention of the fact that Scheme influences Common Lisp seems odd since it's a well-advertised truth.

The omissions of ISLISP, an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 13816:1997) is also surprising and shows poor researching. The absence of Interlisp, Portable Standard Lisp (PSL), Eulisp, Gnu Emacs-Lisp (in spite of huge distribution world-wide as customization substrate for Emacs), and Xlisp (hugely distributed as part of Autocad) as important dialects is similarly sad.

O'Reilly sells books and has for a long time requested outright that no Lisp authors approach them. I and others have long noted that it has an apparent chip on its shoulder about Lisp, and little surprise they couldn't help exposing that bias in their chart. They want you to think the books they sell define the market. But that's just not so, especially when they voluntarily close their eyes to what's going on around them.

People should look skeptically at a company that wants a reputation as a "documentation" company yet so easily falls victim to its own commercial decision to close its eyes to this language family's achievements (such as an international standard).

A quick glance at other parts of the table leave out many other important languages and dialects, with no explanation of their rationale. Just for example: Teco, which strongly influenced Emacs-Lisp. I don't see HyperTalk there, either, even though I thought it influential. And there were many dialects of BASIC and LISP that are too small to mention, yet variations on the Unix shell language like bash are apparently worth mention. I guess that more reflects O'Reilly's sales than an attempt to explain history.

As a consequence, I have to regard this chart of theirs as commercial eye candy and not a properly scholarly work. I think it's a shame that Slashdot has chosen to give it all this free press. I'm sure that's just what they were hoping. And I'm sure they just don't care about their errors, omissions, and biases. I imagine they just want to sell books, and that all this free press will do just that.

Me, I buy my books from other sources. And I recommend you do, too.

• $5.95 Digital Media Collection (PDF)
• 
  $5.95 Java vs .NET Security (PDF)
  $5.95 PHP Security Collection (PDF)
  $5.95 Web Services Collection (PDF)
  $7.95 Smileys
  $8.95 Oracle PL/SQL Built-ins Pocket Reference
  

Why do they have to make it hard to order a copy of the poster? What if I don't want two extra o'reilly books, and just want the poster? Penny Arcade does this with some of their stuff... the only way to get some of their posters is to fly across the US to visit their conference of choice. Why do they do this?

I always like to joke that this book should have been called: RTFM: Raid - The Fucking Manual

I'll tell you why in one acronym: TADW. This is a little old but it's a good start. People don't like Dave Winer. That part is entirely explicable. He's an asshole.

The ones which are also available on the website are: Why Nerds are Unpopular, Hackers and PAinters, What You Can't Say, The Other Road Ahead, The Hundred YEar Language, BEating the Averages, Revenge of the Nerds and Design and Research.

The ones which seem to be missing from the website (i.e, the ones for which youwould have to buy the book!) include Good Bad Attitude, How to Make Wealth, Mind the Gap, A Plan for Spam, Taste for Makers, Programming LAnguages Explained, The Dream Language.

There are also some on the website which are not in the book.

I had the table of contents from the book and the list of essays from the website reproduced here, but the lameness filter (designed to ensure lameness, I guess) kept saying that the characters per line was 36.

Try this.

I spent a few minutes recently looking through O'Reilly's Digital Photography Hacks... it has sections on white balance, etc.

BTW, if you have a camera that can shoot RAW format, you can do white balance totally in software, without having to worry about it at all while shooting.

Oh, but there is, Sir. Mastering no less, in a new-ish (2nd Edition, July 2002) edition. It is good, it is just. :)

Actually, I don't think Ken Brown is completely wrong on this point, though it hardly matters, since he is wrong about so much else.

Richard Stallman has long pushed for the term "GNU/Linux", as discussed in his biography:

>But JIT is STILL interpreting in the same sense perl code is interpreted (even if there are utils to compile perl as well), the code is compiled on the fly as it's loaded and then executed. AFAIK JIT compiling is really just an efficient method of interpreting.

No, this is incorrect.

Perl 5 initially parses the source code into an in-memory parse tree that is not processor-native machine language, nor is it bytecodes. It's a pre-parsed tree structure of tokens from the source code. The Perl 5 interpreter then executes this parsed tree.

The Java compiler bytecode compiles Java source code into Java bytecodes and typically writes them to disk in .class files, for later execution when you run that Java program. These bytecodes are not just chunks of text from the source code; they are also not processor-native. They are instructions for an imaginary CPU (the Java "virtual machine"). Compare this to Perl, in which you usually compile from source each and every time you run the program.

It is possible to compile from Perl source to Perl bytecodes for later execution too, but I haven't seen anybody actually bother with this. Even if you did, what Perl does is to re-constitute the parse tree from the bytecodes, and then it interprets that.

The classic Java interpreter then treats these pre-compiled Java bytecodes as the program, emulating the imaginary CPU in software by calling functions that are part of the interpreter to handle each of the bytecodes.

According to O'Reilly's Programming Perl, Chapter 18:
"Pass 4: Code Generation
This pass is optional; it isn't used in the normal scheme of things."
and
"Please be aware that the code generators are all extremely experimental utilities that shouldn't be expected to work in a production environment. In fact, they shouldn't even be expected to work in a nonproduction environment except maybe once in a blue moon."

Yes, it's possible to generate native code from Perl source, but they way you do it is to first generate C source code, and then run that through a C compiler. In general use, though, Perl is parsed into a tree of in-memory tokens, and those are then interpreted.

This is not at all the same as what a JIT compiler does. The JIT compiler in Java encounters a chunk of bytecodes (which were previously compiled from Java source code), transforms them into a chunk of processor-native instructions, and then runs them. It doesn't run the bytecodes; if they say to add X and Y and store them in Z, a JIT compiler creates code that would do that, and then the VM runs that native code. The main drawback with a JIT compiler is that compiling from bytecode to native code adds a bit of a lag. Multiply this across a big application, and the lag is pretty serious. The benefit is that if you call that chunk of code 100,000 times during a program, the first iteration is delayed while the code is JIT compiled, but then the 100,000 iterations of that code are done by native code, so overall it's faster.

The HotSpot compiler (once experimental, now a standard part of the Java VM) has a few performance tweaks, including a sort of hedged approach to interpretation vs. JIT compilation. Basically it interprets the code the first few times and keeps track of how many times the code is called. After that, it JIT compiles it. The idea here is to make sure that it's worth the overhead of JIT compiling.

By the way, .NET uses JIT compilation too, and it works similarly: you compile to files full of MSIL bytecodes, and treat that as your compiled program. When you go to run it, the .NET JIT compiler turns those MSIL bytecodes into native instructions which are run.

One big reason why compiling to native code and caching that is not done is that it breaks the Java (and .NET) security model. The verifiers that check your code for adherence to the secur

You're not constrained to a specific editor. You could use anything the system had on it. Emacs, vi, pico, some Notepad-like tool that was in the desktop (forget if it was gnome or kde), whatever. No special IDEs - just the regular gcc, g++, or IBM's Java SDK were provided and also used on the judging side (IBM was a contest sponsor).

The only real problem regarding editors was for emacs users, especially those used to their own config setup. But - those are the breaks of participating in such a contest. Though it really shouldn't matter much since more people use vi than emacs 2 to 1 anyway. (proof - fourth paragraph)

Try O'Reilly's "Running Linux." I bought the second edition (used) about a year ago and sat down to read it from the front (something I never do with technical books). I got distracted with life about Chapter 4, but can say for sure that it explains things using clear language without "talking down" to the reader. Now that my house is almost completely Windows free (only my wife's laptop left), I'll be upgrading my Running Linux to 4th edition soon.

I'm not much of a programmer, I did a some scripting in VBA, but tackling a real programming language was really hard. Then someone recommended Head First Java, which is written by a programmer and someone who is a learning specialist. It's really great, and seems to teach the basics well: http://www.oreilly.com/headfirst/

Um, no, actually. It started off as a joke at the time, but since then Parrot has actually turned into a a real project which will run Perl 6 and, eventually, Python and other interpreted languages. (The Perl folks are in much more of a hurry to ditch their spaghetti Perl 5 VM, so that's priority #1. :-P) But there's some strong rumblings in the Python community about the Python port in progress, there are quite a few references to JVM bytecode translation and a Scheme port, and I've seen unsubstantiated rumors of Ruby and PHP ports. True, the core Python community isn't planning a switch yet, but if someday down the road the standard Parrot distribution comes with a Python frontend, people might start flocking to it for the one-stop convenience.

However, to hopefully help you out of this mess, here is some light reading that you might find useful:

1) Read Don't Make Me Think (not on safari yet) by Steve Krug. It's the best web usability book out there and will take you all of two hours to go through. His usability testing alone would have found your problem earlier.

2) Read Eric Meyer on CSS(no safari) to find out how to make your site look better. If you can find/afford a designer, use them, but learn how to abstract your design from your code and your life will be much easier. (If you like it, there is More Eric Meyer on CSS (safari) as well.

3) If you're trying to do public sites, I've found Submit Now (safari)by Andrew Chak to be an excellent read. It's common sense, but its good to be reminded.

I hope this helps, and good luck salvaging the gig.

However, to hopefully help you out of this mess, here is some light reading that you might find useful:

1) Read Don't Make Me Think (not on safari yet) by Steve Krug. It's the best web usability book out there and will take you all of two hours to go through. His usability testing alone would have found your problem earlier.

2) Read Eric Meyer on CSS(no safari) to find out how to make your site look better. If you can find/afford a designer, use them, but learn how to abstract your design from your code and your life will be much easier. (If you like it, there is More Eric Meyer on CSS (safari) as well.

3) If you're trying to do public sites, I've found Submit Now (safari)by Andrew Chak to be an excellent read. It's common sense, but its good to be reminded.

I hope this helps, and good luck salvaging the gig.

The google cache link is below

Google cache

PDF Critique

OReilly book page with sample chapter.

Yeah.. and since Hejlsberg, the former Chief Engineer at Borland, is Microsoft's Chief C# Language Architect , About.com even speculates about a Conspiracy Theory: MS's .Net IS Borland's Product

Get "Linux In A Nutshell". Every Linux admin should have a copy of this wonderful book around. It is a great refernce book that has helped me numerous times when I forget soemthing or wanted to view more info on a certain command but didn't want to wade through the man pages. There is also sections on bash, rpm, and other things you may find useful. For the most part with regards to security just keep all software installed up2date and don't run unneeded services. And don't forget to check the logs and document every change you make to the system and you should be fine.

The alpaca (Lama pacos) is featured on the front of the rather new (2003) O'Reilly book, Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules .

I think the Linux is obsolete flamewar is good reading for anyone trying to understand the history behind all of this. It certainly is funny to see Tanenbaum making predictions like "5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5". Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but it does make one wonder what the history of free operating systems would look like had Linux been controlled/produced by someone with Tanenbaum's outlook rather than Linus's.

Treating the micro v. monolithic debate as a solved problem ("microkernels win!") is as idiotic as suggesting that object orientation is the ideal solution to all programming problems.

Tell that to Tanenbaum:

From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: LINUX is obsolete
Date: 29 Jan 92 12:12:50 GMT

". . . While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won . . ."

Cited from here

Read all about IP take over and distributing server load as sample chapter of O'Reilly's Linux Server Hacks.
Don't know if it works for your setup.
My favorite quote:
If you serve a particularly popular site, you will eventually find the wall at which your server simply can't serve any more requests. In the web server world, this is called the Slashdot effect, and it isn't a pretty site (er, sight)

Read all about IP take over and distributing server load as sample chapter of O'Reilly's Linux Server Hacks.
Don't know if it works for your setup.
My favorite quote:
If you serve a particularly popular site, you will eventually find the wall at which your server simply can't serve any more requests. In the web server world, this is called the Slashdot effect, and it isn't a pretty site (er, sight)

I've been told that all programs can be traced back to a copy & paste of Hello, World. In this limited case, I actually believe what I've been told. The first open/free code was that very same Hello, World example in the first coding manual, wherever it is now, and there are likely a handfull of possible "ultimate parents" of every application that's out there.

Really, though, when's the last time you started a piece of code to be used in production from a completely blank text file? I've even got a VIm macro that shoves in...

public class fileName
{
} .. whenever I try to edit a Java file that doesn't exists. My ADO.NET code was likely originally stolen from the MSDN help files (will likely only work if you've got the .NET SDK installed). My Java networking code likely started somewhere in Mr. Harold's Java IO book from O'Reilly. My Swing code came, in large part I imagine, from The Java Tutorial.

Are any of these sources the "father" of my crappy shareware app, much less my "professional code"? Of course not. Nor would they want to be!

jpkunst, I know you were in a hurry to get a story submitted to and accepted by slashdot. I can imagine the scene now; Palms moist, you rush to type a compelling, FUD-spreading (same thing, around these parts) story which will be sure to get your story accepted! And in your mad rush, you don't even bother to read the patent application. If you're going to link something, you should really read it in its entirety to find out if it contradicts your story.

If you want to complain about Apple patenting translucent windows, perhaps you should examine U.S. Pat. No. 5,949,432, entitled "Method and Apparatus for Providing Translucent Images on a Computer Display", which is referred in Patent application 20040090467 (your link.) This patent was granted September 7, 1999 (filed April 11, 1997.) That appears to be a patent on software transparency by blending layers done by the CPU, which is to say it does not compete with hardware transparency.

True laziness is a virtue. Your brand, however, leaves something to be desired.

In the UK there are subscription services for institutions to sign up to. My University (Sunderland) curently has Safari on trial. There's only a handful of books available under the trial but it's a nice selection with some O'Reilly, Sams Teach Yourself, and some authorised books from Macromedia and Microsoft.

There's also Heron from the excellent people at Ingenta who put all the journals online.

It's nice to see my fees put to some good use rather than fancy lighting and LED information boards.

It's only free if you use the "Freedom" definition of "Free".

Meanwhile it's just gotten a lot cheaper to be on a legacy Red Hat platform.

Product End-of-Life came to Red Hat 7.2 but then there is still life. Do you believe in life after End-of-Life? Miracles can happen.

I haven't read this CSS book, but I've read a few, and the best ones always seem to have the same author. I can't imagine how one could be more clear and complete than Eric Meyer's Definitive Guide. He's also published a useful reference to CSS 2.0.

Ok, there is currently a great deal of information over the net for TeX, LaTeX, and derivatives. Knuth is the authoritative guide, useful for the mechanics of typesetting and the internals of the whole system. LaTeX is an augmented set of macros useful in preparing articles, books, reports, even letters.

And since O'Reilly is THE source of educational material in computing, they DO have a book about TeX but it is out of print. It explains how TeX distributions such as TeXLive, the official distribution by TeX User's Group work, and how to put the constituent parts such as BiBTeX (the bibliographic management software).

So much for history. As far as the resources part is concerned, Google is your eternal friend.

I don't think Tux was built for that. He's small and fragile. That cowboy would crush him.

Yeah, but who outside of O'Reilly actually associates Linux with a horse rather than a penguin?

Suggesting that people should support this malpractice by working with the system, is like saying that a law which allows the police to lock up people based on merely a hint of suspicious activity is good, and instead of complaining about it, people should gather evidence that proves that wrongly locked up people are innocent, so they can be set free again by the authorities. It's just the world turned upside-down.

In that case, I would hope people did both things, it's not an exclusive either/or proposition. The system definitely needs to change, but we can do something about it now while we petition for an overall change. Many patents may not be obvious, but many of the patent claims that are lamented about on /. have prior art. Your expression was fine but I think of it more as bailing a boat with a leak. You still need to bail while the leak is repaired - without doing either one the boat still sinks. At least the EFF is doing something about it. I'm getting to like them more and more everyday.

Ok. This is starting to become a pet peeve of mine... when you put a link into a Slashdot comment post, can you take the time to make it clickable?

How do I do that you ask? Like this:
<a href=http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba2/book/to c.html>Samba Online</a>

Which winds up as this:
Samba Online

Note that Slashdot will automatically add the [oreilly.com] (So that you can't fool people into looking at that goatse guy for the millionth time).

Sure it's a little extra typing but think how much time you'll be saving others. Also it's more likely to get you that (+1)Informative.

And yes, I'm sure that if I used a REAL browser it would automatically convert it... no need to berate me (on that point at least).

"Maybe this will prompt former EFF Board Member Tim O'Reilly to share that killer piece of 1-click prior art that's sitting on his bookshelf!"

After reading the page this links to, I'm really wondering if there is any such prior art. Maybe my tin foil hat is on a bit too tight, but perhaps it's really a killer piece of 1-click bluff he's holding onto? He could be waiting for Bezos to make the next move in the patent poker game.