Slashdot Mirror

Yeah, I have the 3rd edt. (oct 2002, 1st edt. came march 1993, 2nd edt. in aug 1997) right here.

Unix Power Tools. 1113 pages of goodness, although many things are way too advanced for this delicate flower. But "power grows on you", as the authors say..

(what open-source anything ever is truly complete, tested, and waranteed).
After six months of futzing with Freevo I finally gave up and got TiVO for $4.95 with a new satellite installation from Value Electronics, which came with free installation, oddly enough done by Vladimir of Sputnik TV.

The DirecTiVO pretty much works like it's supposed to, but it's utterly non-hackable, and contrary to your implication that it's completed and tested, I find that about twice a month it goes into a bad skip / synch mode and stops responding to menus for minutes at a time, fails to record large sections of TV, and eventually I have to pull the plug (and re-apply the one hack that works).

So while I'd love to have an open-source solution that works (and maybe this Knoppix+MythTV is it), I'd also love to have a commercial solution that works. Neither is perfect though.

A sample chapter from the book, Email is available in PDF format from O'Reilly.

O'Reilly has a book about Linux annoyances as well. However, they named it Linux Server Hacks

I check all these daily:

MacInTouch
MacNN
MacMinute
MacFixIt
Mac OS X Hints
MacSurfer

Great software update resources:

VersionTracker
MacUpdate
OS X freshmeat

Other great sites:

O'Reilly Mac DevCenter
O'Reilly Mac OS X Page
Apple Mac OS X downloads
Apple Third Party Products Guide

Developer sites:

Mac OS X Developer Home Page
Mac OS X Developer Documentation
Darwin
OpenDarwin
fink

abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123ab c123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc1 23abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123 abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123ab c123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc1

Standard disclaimer: I have nothing to do with o'reilly, but I do like using their online book thingy.

You might want to take a look at Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync posted by Mike Rubel. I think this is mentioned in the book Linux Server Hacks by O'Reilly (hack #42), although I don't have the book so I'm not sure.

Basically it uses rsync and cp to create a backup, but only changed files are actually copied; unchanged files are simply linked to. This saves a lot of disk space, and allows you to keep many backups on the system at one time, assuming most of your files don't change.

You might want to take a look at Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync posted by Mike Rubel. I think this is mentioned in the book Linux Server Hacks by O'Reilly (hack #42), although I don't have the book so I'm not sure.

Basically it uses rsync and cp to create a backup, but only changed files are actually copied; unchanged files are simply linked to. This saves a lot of disk space, and allows you to keep many backups on the system at one time, assuming most of your files don't change.

From the two days that we I get at so far, the calendar looks pretty useful. For those who haven't bothered to RTFA, the first two days cover validating user input without referring to a copy of Mastering Regular Expressions. I can see myself using something from this calendar in the new year, if I survive the family xmas lunch with my sanity intact.

the lack of standards in IM protocols, as well as the preception that the distracting nature of IM precludes it from being a more useful communications medium

It's too bad that the Jabber project has been largely dismissed as a chat-thingy, when it could solve real problems in a workplace.

Say you're spellchecking a document at work, and your wordprocessor doesn't recognize a deparment name. Your word processor could use Jabber to check other word processors in your organization if they know of the word in question.

I recently read Peer-to-Peer - Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. An excellent book, containing, among other things, a chapter on Jabber.

Sure they are. Look up dsniff.

If you did, you'd find that reports of vulnerability are greatly exagerated.

This is good place to point someone who think that Hack and Hacking are something bad. Hacking books from O'Reilly

<karmawhore type="shameless">

</karmawhore>

Until the the Net1 release, the Berkeley code was intermingled with Bell Labs code, considered a derived work, and needed the purchase of an AT&T license. Your "BSD yesterday" corresponds to about BSD 4.4-lite, from 1994.

See Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable for details.

In a way OzPixel's post got it wrong too. People in the academic environment got the freedoms of liberal distribution, but people outside of the university environment who were interested in learning about or using these technologies were out of luck. Linux expanded to a wider audience than BSD was capable of reaching.

Californians, who like many others had little choice but to pay Microsoft's high prices for its monopolistic proprietary software, now have a unique opportunity to help the Free Software Movement

RMS's stance on non-free software is tiresome, borderline-communist, and impractical. I agree with others that his motives are not great software, but software li[b|v]re.

But OH-my-goodness...the contributions he's made! Take a couple of hours and read Richard's biography Free as in Freedom. It's a must-read, and as always Richard has ensured it will be a free one as well. You may love him or hate him, but more than that the man has earned the respect he deserves.

Support the FSF.

Wasn't that case settled because of the fact that AT&T had copied a bunch of BSD code, and the realization had been made that both had screwed up and the easiest course of action was to say "From this day forth..." both were legal? that's always been my understanding of that settlement.

The exact terms of the settlement remain secret, but Marshall Kirk McKusick wrote this nice history summary.

If SCO really has any way to re-start the proceedings on this, I somehow feel Berkeley lawyers will have none of it...

http://safari.oreilly.com/?XmlId=0-596-00213-0

http://slashdot.org/books/01/01/07/0414242.shtml

Secondly, if the GNU/Linux operating system were to use a different kernel, then it would be the GNU/XXXXX operating system.

You mean like those non-Linux versions of Debian, like Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/NetBSD, Debian GNU/FreeBSD, Debian GNU/Win32 and the upcoming Debian GNU/ELKS (based on the ELKS kernel for 8086 and 80286 et al), right? What is your point again?

The best explaination of this whole naming farce I've read so far is Chapter 10 of Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams. It's available online. Instead of pretending to be unbiased, it actually shows every biased point of view, from different angles, showing that basically all of the people involved have their own agendas and egos.

Linux vs. GNU/Linux OS naming schism is not a simple issue and should not be treated as such. It represents the Open Source fork of the Free Software movement and is equally complicated as the infamous Lucid Emacs vs. GNU Emacs schism. Your Score:5, Insightful comment (yes, I am jealous) is an extreme oversimplification of a very complicated and interesting issue.

Secondly, if the GNU/Linux operating system were to use a different kernel, then it would be the GNU/XXXXX operating system.

You mean like those non-Linux versions of Debian, like Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/NetBSD, Debian GNU/FreeBSD, Debian GNU/Win32 and the upcoming Debian GNU/ELKS (based on the ELKS kernel for 8086 and 80286 et al), right? What is your point again?

The best explaination of this whole naming farce I've read so far is Chapter 10 of Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams. It's available online. Instead of pretending to be unbiased, it actually shows every biased point of view, from different angles, showing that basically all of the people involved have their own agendas and egos.

Linux vs. GNU/Linux OS naming schism is not a simple issue and should not be treated as such. It represents the Open Source fork of the Free Software movement and is equally complicated as the infamous Lucid Emacs vs. GNU Emacs schism. Your Score:5, Insightful comment (yes, I am jealous) is an extreme oversimplification of a very complicated and interesting issue.

SCO said Wednesday that it has filed subpoenas with the U.S. District Court in Utah, targeting six different individuals or organizations. Those include Novell; Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation

Wow, and I didn't think SCO could get any weirder. How can they possibly hope to benefit their case by subpoening Linus and RMS? Linus will just wanna see the code without signing their NDA, and Richard will probably gaze at them and cause them the stare crying.

I don't know. Maybe they'll get them in a room, tie them to a chair with their eyes propped open like in A Clockwork Orange and force them to read their code without signing their NDA. Then any future development of Free/Open Source Software will fall under SCO's control because they were influenced by SCO's source. Things couldn't get any weirder.

What to learn in Windows:
Left click to do things. Left quick twice to do important things. Right click to get a menu of things to do wherever the cursor is. X closes. _ makes it smaller. If you lost it, you can get it back by clicking in the task bar. My Computer has a list of places to store information. It's organized in folders. To install something, just put the disk in, or click twice on the program. To install hardware, put in the CD and follow the instructions

What to learn in Linux:
Eh, I'd never make it through the lameness filter. Start here and don't stop. Ever.

But in Windows there is basically a switch can install, can't install.

It's evident from this comment that you know very little about modern Windows security. When you get a chance, you should read up on Active Directory, particularly Group Policies.

Your comments would be much more persuasive if you did a little more research before posting them.

See, the thing is, in the long run logos work because people LIKE them, not because someone comes up with them and then says, "This is what our logo is going to be." The BSD beastie is cute. Tux is cute. The perl camel almost has a cute expression that's at least a little bit interesting. Even the GNU has a smug expression that you can at least appreciate even if you aren't a Stallman fan. But this? A tic-tac-toe board with 5 dots? Wow, blow me away, I mean, shit that speaks to me on such a--<snoooooore>

see http://drbd.cubit.at/ DRBD is described as RAID1 over a network.

"Drbd takes over the data, writes it to the local disk and sends it to the other host. On the other host, it takes it to the disk there."

Rsync with a cron script would work too. I think there is a recipe in the linux hacks books to do something like what you are looking for: #292.

In related news, the 2.48 version of apache was also released. Was this a slashdot moment, as well? Did I miss a memo? I'm assuming I have. I recently read the O'Reilly book on this topic and two things seemed clear. 1) That the authors of the book really preferred the 1.3.x series of httpd to the 2.x series and that 2) BSD is the way to be for Apache (though Linux is an "okay" substitute.) Which really surprised me because threading in Linux is better than BSD.

So my questions are: If they are updating the 2.x series why are they *also* updating the 1.3.x series? Isn't the idea that 2.x will supplant/replace the earlier series? What do you get out of using the older version that you don't with the newer? Other than the ability to work with a tool that's more familiar to you becasue you've been using it for so long...Wouldn't the technological advantages of using the newer version outwiegh the inconvenience of yet another learning curve?

As a Safari subscriber, I'd say it's probably because Full Text Search of online book content is also present at O'Reilly's own Safari online tech book site. You've been able to do the same thing Amazon is now crowing about, on every book Safari has, since launch quite some time ago (year or two perhaps?)

Safari is more of a "service" (i.e. renting access to book content) than a "feature" of a retail website, which is all Amazon's "innovation" seems to be.

Basically the only real different between the two (aside from what is cited above) is that Amazon just lets you know the content is mentioned, and shows you a page or two. Safari gives you the entire book. That and that Amazon has a much wider range of books in non-tech genres

Yeah, but, to be fair, Pogue writes books about the operating system that he's reviewing. It's in his best financial interest for people to adopt the new OS. I've always found it really dubious that the Times lets him report on the Mac since he's not exactly what you'd call a neutral observer.

What's next? Harry Knowles writing reviews of Tarantino movies for Entertainment Weekly?

If the author is the same David Pogue who wrote this, I'd probably trust is opinion on a new version of Mac OS X.
Guess what! It is him!

Stallman became so irate at one point that he issued an email threatening to "wrap myself in dynamite and walk into Symbolics' offices."(66) Although Stallman would deny any memory of the email and still describes its existence as a "vicious rumor," he acknowledges that such thoughts did enter his head. "I definitely did have fantasies of killing myself and destroying their building in the process," Stallman says.

I disagree. This article's benchmarks are very arguably skewed, and his rationale for optimizations is just awful. (Solaris sucks on x86 as much as linux 2.4 vs 2.6, so let's compare x86 Solaris with 2.4 linux??) Not to mention that Redhat's packages are still compiled for i386...

On top of that, the author's writing is all over the place, and not at all consistent. The part about "your momma [being] ugly" aside, he has also written a book for O'reilly, which received some very negative reviews. Terrible read, unfortunately. I'd avoid anything he writes, period.

I was going to add that some companies, like O'Reilly Publishing, are following the Founder's Copyright and releasing works into the public domain after 14 (or 28) years at most.

However, in fact, they are not. Instead they are releasing the books with an open license. Thus, while Project Gutenberg could republish these works under the terms of the license, they would remain copyrighted and probably miss the spirit of the project.

I was going to add that some companies, like O'Reilly Publishing, are following the Founder's Copyright and releasing works into the public domain after 14 (or 28) years at most.

However, in fact, they are not. Instead they are releasing the books with an open license. Thus, while Project Gutenberg could republish these works under the terms of the license, they would remain copyrighted and probably miss the spirit of the project.

The first edition was an essential purchase for me, but I find that I refer to the HTML version on the 'Perl CD Bookshelf' much more often than the paperback. Anyone who doesn't subscribe to Safari and wants to read the electronic edition of Cookbook 2 will have to wait until January, when it'll be included in the 4th edition of the Bookshelf.

The second edition works great for Perl 5.8. but not for Perl 6 which is going to require a rewrite of ALL of the Perl books.

O'Reilly addresses the issue here

Still Perl is such a beautiful thing you should buy ALL Perl books.

The Top 500 benchmark is a reasonable test designed to test both theoretical and "real world" workloads assuming application loads that exhibit a high degree of parallelism. Realistically, such a cluster (including the G5 based one) can reasonably expect to achieve 25-60% of its theoretical performance on real world work depending on everything factored in.

Still, a few TFlops is impressive. Sites are shooting for 100TFlops sustained by 2008-2010. Work is on the horizon on a Petaflop machine.

What's amusing is the fact that nowadays a lot of folks have sitting under their desks the equivalent of a Cray 2 supercomputer that cost millions of dollars in the 1980s and could beat it soundly. The Cray 2 was the last of the serial supercomputers and had a peak throughput of 2GFlops clocked at 500Mhz (2ns). A modern Athlon or P4 can hammer that and contains equal or better memory and storage than what that Cray had access to. That was not even 20 years ago! Isn't technology grand.

Check out O'Reilly's High Performance Computing, 2nd Ed for an excellent primer on supercomputing and clusters. Great reading if you are interested in this stuff.

pretty simple really ... the article makes an assumption of P == $ (power/influence is directly proportional to money). The writers are only looking at people who are financially influential. And totally miss RMS who engineered a paradigm shift in software

(btw read *Free as in Freedom* it's freely availiable online by oreilly).

pretty simple really ... the article makes an assumption of P == $ (power/influence is directly proportional to money). The writers are only looking at people who are financially influential. And totally miss RMS who engineered a paradigm shift in software

(btw read *Free as in Freedom* it's freely availiable online by oreilly).

Reversing the order can affect searches too: motorcycle candles vs. candles motorcycle.

Did you know about 'phonebook:'? I didn't, until I read this book. It's an undocumented Google feature. Try it: "google for phonebook:hillary clinton ny"

The company I work for writes bespoke code to control industrial X-Ray systems (we also build the industrial X-Ray systems). I know that a vast amount of the software we produce is not written securely usually due to time constraints and a certain level of ignorance among our developers about how to write secure code (Book clicky Sun atricle clicky).

I applaud the exposure that this case will bring to the need for secure code in all applications, but wonder what reprocussions it will have if a precident is set that companies can sue for failures in code security. Will the computing industry become bound by legislated saftey (or security) tests that software must pass before it is issued (i.e. as in the automotive industry as everyone is so prone to compare us)?

Not a tyraid just a wondering

Normally I wouldn't respond to junk like this, but just to defend myself against the statement "you dont even deserve to touch fucking computers because you dont do one god damn useful fucking thing with them", I will.

First of all, I have contributed to a few open-source projects out there. I am one of the many people that have submitted patches that fix and add new features to X-Chat, for instance.

I have also had my code published in The Perl Journal and in this book.

What have you done?

I could reasonably be described as a 'Mac fanatic' I guess, but I won't flame you. I will point out that if your dual G5 is that slow at copying a mere 17 meg file, there must be something wrong. My new 1 GHz G4 eMac is blindingly instantaneous when copying files. Check out Mac OS X Hints or Macfixit for some tips on speeding up your machine. Or get one of the many excellent O'Reilly Mac books.

...with the concept of "presence".

Basically, if you subscribe to my presence notification (and I allow it -- Jabber gives you control over who can receive your presence information), then when I log in, my jabber server sends you and everyone else on my presence list a "jelmore@jabber.org has signed in"-type message. Presence information is handled by the jabber server, which provides some of the "centralization" you're looking for.

Programming Jabber from O'Reilly does a good job of explaining how Jabber works.

Jay

I should hope SCO did give this to a Judge.

Any Judge who knows of the court battle between BSD and Unix System Laboratories (, "Soon after the filing in state court, USL was bought from AT&T by Novell. The CEO of Novell, Ray Noorda, stated publicly that he would rather compete in the marketplace than in court. By the summer of 1993, settlement talks had started. Unfortunately, the two sides had dug in so deep that the talks proceed slowly. With some further prodding by Ray Noorda on the USL side, many of the sticking points were removed and a settlement was finally reached in January 1994. The result was that three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up Networking Release 2, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, although those files continued to be freely redistributed.", Open Sources,) will know that this chart is bullshit.!

If you follow the Linux timeline backwards, you will see that there are no SCO UNIX contributions to Linux. Of course you need to know that Linux is not based on Minux, as this post will prove: Linux is Obsolete. Anything before that is inmaterial.

Good job SCO team. It must have taken you hours to put little dots and zig-zagging lines that prove absoultly nothing. Well, I am sure your boss liked it.

"Oooh! Pretty!"

The Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate might be an interesting read here.

..at O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf!

Congrats to the Samba Team!

For example, search for "books" in a particular area code. You get a bunch of YP categories. Drill down to a particular bookstore and you get the YP listing, plus the obligatory Yahoo map. Since the bookstore didn't pay for a link to their own web site Smartpages.com doesn't provide one.

Now do the same search on Google location. You get bunch of book-related links for the area, all nicely plotted on a map. What's really interesting is that many of the links are not for the home page of the business or entity being found, but for a more popular page that references it. (The abovementioned bookstore is represented by an entry on a publisher site.) I suppose that counts as a bug, since you usually want to go straight to someone's own web site. Still, it's terribly impressive that they can so consistently associate address with the correct adressee based on free-form information.

Google does so much neat stuff, I can almost forgive them for moving into the ugliest building in Silicon Valley.

This hack has even been in print, through Rob Flickenger's Wireless Hacks . Look at the entry for Chapter 5, Hack 74.

I'll help: "Primestar Dish with Waveguide Feed"

Why can't they make a power plant that is powered by the "Pick your new technology" Unleashed books. There are more pages in them... so at least they would last longer, though we all know that they don't burn any brighter.

Matt Larson
VeriSign Naming and Directory Services

Co-author of O'reilly's DNS on Windows 2000 and DNS on Windows NT

mlarson@verisign.com

Matt Larson
VeriSign Naming and Directory Services

Co-author of O'reilly's DNS on Windows 2000 and DNS on Windows NT

mlarson@verisign.com