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Reconfigurable FPGAs would be better because they get around the problem where the message was encrypted using something other than DES.

(And as always with books from Garfinkel, a good and fun read)

..although i picked the cheapest form of delivery so it won't be here for a bit more time...

i read thru the sample chapter [here] it's all about particle physics. i was quite impressive, i enjoy the *conversational* style that most o'reilly books have.

i implemented all of the examples in java using java3d.

i hope the book meets my expectations....

I've been busy porting an old NeXT application to Cocoa and there are many, many similarities between the two platforms. In fact the most noticable difference is that all the defined constants and object name are now prefixed with "NS" instead of "NX", why Apple decided to change all the names, I have no clue.

As far as references go, I've been using both the NeXT Programmer's Manual and Learning Cocoa and most of Simson's book still applies (just change NX to NS!). The Objective-C introduction is very useful and (better then Learning Cocoa) overall is much clearer and in deapth. Even going through the Interface Bulder and Project Builder tutorials can be helpful since they almost exactly the same in OSX as they were in NExT.

Before I might have recommended both of these books for learning Cocoa but it sounds a lot like Cocoa Programming for OS X encompasses both of these earlier works.

I would recommend to anyone interested in Cocoa (great for quick and dirty GUI tools.) that they check out Cocoa Programming for OS X and just look at the online chapters for Learning Cocoa.

Actually Cat5 is the requirement. Cat5e "has improved signal carrying capabilities" over Cat5 but aren't required for GigE. 1000Base-T (802.3ab) standards have a complex signal encoding scheme that is very similar to 100Base-T2. It also uses all 4 pairs. My source (besides my own knowledge) is O'Reilly's Ethernet: The Definitive Guide". An excellent read BTW.

Running the fiber will increase the value of your house. That might make it worth doing even if you never use it.

While running conduit is a good alternative to fiber, do not use metal conduit. It hurts cable performance.

Placing a single CAT-5 cable in 1" metal conduit resulted in degradation of return loss, attenuation and near-end crosstalk (NEXT), three key indicators of cable performance. The cable in the tests was still within specification, but was worse in all cases when placed in conduit. Capacitive coupling between the conduit and the cable was believed to be responsible. (LINK)

If you run shielded twisted pair, or STP, instead of the usual unshielded twisted pair, or UTP, you need to ground it properly. See for example this link .

Consult your fire codes and follow them. You might need to install plenum cable in certain spaces. When in doubt, install plenum.

Whatever cable you run, leave lots of slack on each end. This is cheap insurnace against a cable problem.

Try to adhere to a standard when you install the cable, such as EIA/TIA-568 for Ethernet.

If you are worried about Echelon type spying, you will need to run fiber and take other precautions.

Should some of my pals all get huge antennae and blocks of ip address, domain names, mail and news servers?

It sounds like a great idea, even windows is ahead on this with XP's wireless lan features [i do believe any PC is capable of using wireless... so why is it one of their selling points? It's just software!]

Could this be pulled off by people with DSL/Cable/Sat connections? Hell, could any old 56ghey serve as an extra uplink?

My point is: Let's turn this out gnutella style. Anyone with Cable/DSL gets an antenna, plugs it in, and leaves it on. He adjusts what percentage of bandwidth he wants to share - and can turn it off whenever he wants. Could serve him because he's got a laptop. He's asleep, he's not using that bandwidth. He's at work, he can't use it there.

Maybe he's neighbor's got one too. Maybe lots of people do, and soon they are everywhere!

Too bad no one would pay for the ISP if their neighbor has his on and open.

I guess we would still need someone to pay for the T1 [or T3, redundant OC-3] and all pitch in. But would it be any cheaper or better?

I guess I'll just have to buy the book. Or wait for this crap to come out from Clear Channel.

i'd personally recommend this very strongly. its my primary source of samba information, and has help me set up a few networks to work rather seamlessly.

i hope that helps, and that you stick to linux, too. its a wonderful world to live in.

i'd personally recommend this very strongly. its my primary source of samba information, and has help me set up a few networks to work rather seamlessly.

i hope that helps, and that you stick to linux, too. its a wonderful world to live in.

i'd personally recommend this very strongly. its my primary source of samba information, and has help me set up a few networks to work rather seamlessly.

i hope that helps, and that you stick to linux, too. its a wonderful world to live in.

But really, do we all need to be THAT connected?

Yes. An end to boredom. Also, for those who have long commute times, sitting on a bus or train and being able to pull out a reasonable size PDA (or just sleep) is a way to turn 30 minutes or more of dead time driving a car to productive time, even if productive means catching up on slashdot.

My work recently got us all Nextels and I've been using the WAP feature a lot at red lights. I can buzz right into CNN and catch up on news each time I have to sit for a minute or two. It also contains e-mail (er, two-way messaging). With the predictive text input feature, I can tap out on a 10-key faster than a lot of people can type using a qwerty keyboard. I love it.

Now if I could only subscribe to O'reilly's Safari via direct implant connection to my brain, my life would be complete.

Still, that's just the term I'm aware of -- CJKV, referring to those four languages. I'm assuming that it's because those accent marks are used so heavily that it might as well be a different alphabet, albeit one that looks a lot like the Latin alphabet. Something like how the Slavic [Russian etc] alphabet is an evolutionary descendant of Greek & Latin, Greek grew out of Phoenician [? I think that was the ancestor alphabet...?], etc.

But hey, don't take my word for it, check out the obligatory O'Reilly book... :)

You're probably thinking of PERL. As nearly as I can tell, PERL is a dumbed down version of Perl (see the difference?) used for writing buggy, insecure message boards and spam gateways posing as mailer forms. It has as much in common with Perl as JavaScript does Java, circa 1995.

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

This is also a great book on web usability and navigation. I actually like it a bit more than Nielsen's books because it's, well, written O'Reilly style. Very concise and concrete whereas Nielsen will break down into pretty abstract theoretical stuff and talk about his days at Sun. Nielsen is pretty good, but I end usually end up a little peeved at how much of a throwback the guy is at times.

http://www.useit.com/

Case and point. Sometimes he breaks his own rules on his own front page, so I take his word with a grain of salt. He also seems to abhor graphics. I wish I could find the article, but there was a time when he came out and said that you should never use graphics as navigational elements. Rather, you should use "native" widgets like form buttons if you wanted to make a graphical link. Come on! Talk about code bloat. It takes significantly more code to generate a simple form than it does to link from a graphic. Code bloat affects the user experience and therefore usability.

Personally, I think studying information design á la Edward Tufte is a better approach than studying Nielsen.

I think the only problem w/ Linux is that here arent enough programs, because Linux geeks expect everything for free. If we start to show that you can sell things for linux, then more stuff will be developed, and BAM!, there you go.

This is a totally unsolicited plug:

Safari is O'Reilly's online, fully-searchable book database. It has about 350 titles available already, including some non-O'Reilly books.

They don't have a formal automated gift subscription yet, but if you go there and phone customer service you can have them help you set up an account that starts empty, is billed to you with receipts to your email address, but is owned by someone else's name and email address.

Only thing is, they bill monthly, so at some point you have to cut off the subscription manually. Hopefully by that point the giftee will be hooked :-)

I just did this earlier today, so I know it works.

I think that the open-source phenomenon will quietly, undignifiably, dissapear soon. It is a lofty and noble goal to be sure, however as a sustainable movement, I believe it will become less important over time. Why? Because the high-flying VC money and gold-rush speculation that drove those fat boomtime salaries are what really paid for open-source. The time to code the time to host it, the time to collaborate, just aint there any more during the dot-bomb hangover.

It depends on how you define the term open source. You hint at this in the paragraph that follows.

Open-source is an idea; that will remain. Linux the kernel, and any derivatives; they will remain. Unix is still with us after 30 odd years, and so too will Linux and OSS. Good. But, making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine that is designed for high proiduct turn-over, planned obsolecence, and not giving the customer what they want is the sustainable model, not selling services to free products. If you pay for the product, then you will pay for support. Get a free product, and you find out its not up to par or whatver, why pay for support, just get another free clone....

When you write in the first paragraph that open source will "quietly, undignifiably [sic], dissapear [sic]" but then write in this paragraph that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain," you are implying that the most important aspect of open source is "making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine." I'm more than a little confused as to how making money could possibly help supplant a capitalistic machine but I'm assuming that you meant something more like "supplanting the capitalistic machine based on proprietary software with one based on open source software." Well, perhaps it is an important element of what many people mean when they use the term open source as a conscious decision to avoid the term free software. In other words, I think that some people who use the term open source, e.g. Eric Raymond, invented the term specifically to describe the socio-economic concept of making money from non-proprietary software. So, what if we talk about free software, i.e. open source software without the libertarian, capitalist spin? Will free software disappear? You yourself even wrote that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain." Not only Linux but GNU, BSD, et al, will remain for quite a long time. In this sense, how is free software failing? If I want to use software that I am free to copy, modify, and share with the community, I can still do it. Was this not the original aim of the FSF and the GNU project? Larry Wall can still keep providing Perl. I can still look at all of the source code to BSD and W. Richard Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 is as free to publish all the gory details of the BSD implementation of the TCP/IP stack today as it was when he first wrote it. How are any of these things failures for free software?

Personally, I think that free software will continue to flourish in the same way that it has always flourished, e.g. as a free exchange of ideas communicated with source code in the grand tradition of a academic community. Perhaps the views of those who supported the idea, for example, of "Open Source as a Business Strategy" might have try and buttress their arguments in the light of economic realities. Of course, if some of these open source businesses might even manage to survive the current economic downturn and come out strong on the upturn. However, for those who think that one can see "Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research", the particular market woes of any .bomb have little, if any, relevance. And what could possible interfere with Larry Wall's idea of open source development as an exercise in "Diligence, Patience, and Humility"?

I think that the open-source phenomenon will quietly, undignifiably, dissapear soon. It is a lofty and noble goal to be sure, however as a sustainable movement, I believe it will become less important over time. Why? Because the high-flying VC money and gold-rush speculation that drove those fat boomtime salaries are what really paid for open-source. The time to code the time to host it, the time to collaborate, just aint there any more during the dot-bomb hangover.

It depends on how you define the term open source. You hint at this in the paragraph that follows.

Open-source is an idea; that will remain. Linux the kernel, and any derivatives; they will remain. Unix is still with us after 30 odd years, and so too will Linux and OSS. Good. But, making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine that is designed for high proiduct turn-over, planned obsolecence, and not giving the customer what they want is the sustainable model, not selling services to free products. If you pay for the product, then you will pay for support. Get a free product, and you find out its not up to par or whatver, why pay for support, just get another free clone....

When you write in the first paragraph that open source will "quietly, undignifiably [sic], dissapear [sic]" but then write in this paragraph that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain," you are implying that the most important aspect of open source is "making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine." I'm more than a little confused as to how making money could possibly help supplant a capitalistic machine but I'm assuming that you meant something more like "supplanting the capitalistic machine based on proprietary software with one based on open source software." Well, perhaps it is an important element of what many people mean when they use the term open source as a conscious decision to avoid the term free software. In other words, I think that some people who use the term open source, e.g. Eric Raymond, invented the term specifically to describe the socio-economic concept of making money from non-proprietary software. So, what if we talk about free software, i.e. open source software without the libertarian, capitalist spin? Will free software disappear? You yourself even wrote that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain." Not only Linux but GNU, BSD, et al, will remain for quite a long time. In this sense, how is free software failing? If I want to use software that I am free to copy, modify, and share with the community, I can still do it. Was this not the original aim of the FSF and the GNU project? Larry Wall can still keep providing Perl. I can still look at all of the source code to BSD and W. Richard Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 is as free to publish all the gory details of the BSD implementation of the TCP/IP stack today as it was when he first wrote it. How are any of these things failures for free software?

Personally, I think that free software will continue to flourish in the same way that it has always flourished, e.g. as a free exchange of ideas communicated with source code in the grand tradition of a academic community. Perhaps the views of those who supported the idea, for example, of "Open Source as a Business Strategy" might have try and buttress their arguments in the light of economic realities. Of course, if some of these open source businesses might even manage to survive the current economic downturn and come out strong on the upturn. However, for those who think that one can see "Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research", the particular market woes of any .bomb have little, if any, relevance. And what could possible interfere with Larry Wall's idea of open source development as an exercise in "Diligence, Patience, and Humility"?

Sleepcat Software's open source Berkeley DB has "been profitable since inception" in 1996

Using multiple licensing models L. Peter Deutsch is able to provide Ghostscript under the GPL and make enough money to retire.

Cygnus Support (now part of Red Hat), was founded in 1989 and was "profitable, increasingly profitable, every single year" before the Red Hat buyout.

It's very unconvential, O'Reilly must be happy enough with sales of books to pay Larry Wall to keep developing Perl.

Open Source works. Maybe not as well as VA Linu... erm... Systems wants it to, but it does.

That's interesting. The canonical Zwicky book takes a hard line against packet-based firewalling, for exactly the reason that this whole discussion suggests: you don't know what's going on on a port unless you do some kind of inspection of the packet.

I run a partial application-based proxy setup on my home network (mostly, I run things through nec socks5, but I have some app-specific proxies setup, and as soon as I get a box with a fast & big HD I'm going to have squid, oh yes :) and I couldn't be happier. In some ways, it's more of a hassle than NAT; but from a security standpoint...

No question. Zwicky - and AT&T - are right. Proxies are better.

The profits of doom?

Damn, buying evil geniuses in a nutshell has finally paid off!

More interesting might be slides from last month's Ruby conference as well as a nice writeup with pictures. Wish I could've been there!

If it deals with Open Source in any way, you must have your students read The Cathedral & the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond.

Of all the admin's I know none really started out to be sys admin's. It just kind of happened. Out of our shop the degree base consists of Masters degrees in Biology, Teaching, and Engineering, and several Bachelor degrees in electrical, general, and or computer science. Several pieces of advice. Universities are great to work at and are a lot of fun, but pay very little. Corp. companies pay more but are more rigid in culture and thus more main stream. I think the best piece of advice about being a sys admin comes from the O'Reilly Essential System Administration Book Sys Admins need to be thick skinned. There is a reason there is an armadillo on the front cover

Of all the admin's I know none really started out to be sys admin's. It just kind of happened. Out of our shop the degree base consists of Masters degrees in Biology, Teaching, and Engineering, and several Bachelor degrees in electrical, general, and or computer science. Several pieces of advice. Universities are great to work at and are a lot of fun, but pay very little. Corp. companies pay more but are more rigid in culture and thus more main stream. I think the best piece of advice about being a sys admin comes from the O'Reilly Essential System Administration Book Sys Admins need to be thick skinned. There is a reason there is an armadillo on the front cover

Boss: "Hey, you know that web site we've got, running on NT?"

Me: "Yes?"

Boss: "Well, the developers have built the new site on Solaris. The new boxes will be here in a month."

Me: "Yes?"

Boss: "You're going to have to learn Solaris by then."

That was over two years ago. Since then I've learned more, to the point where I can install Solaris, Linux, or FreeBSD on a new box, configure networking, install applications, setup user access, secure what's not secure, patch and upgrade as necessary, etc.

Age has nothing to do with it. I was 31 when I started with Solaris, with a background in business and marketing, plus creative writing. I've always been a gadget fiend, but never a hard-core coder or OS guru. Now I've learned some Perl and some shell scripting. The only way age is a factor is if you think you're too old to do it.

Someone suggested the wonderful world of academia; I'd at least suggest taking a course in Unix admin if you can find it. Get an old PC and install Linux or FreeBSD on it. Spend more money on O'Reilly books; I like 'Essential System Administration', and 'Learning the Unix OS' was very helpful in the early days, along with Sobell's 'A Practical Guide to Solaris'. Others will recommend Nemeth's 'Unix System Administration' and other titles.

Are you sure you want to do this? :-) The hours are long, you get paged a lot, you'll develop a caffeine addiction you never thought humanly possible. You'll find yourself longing for the good old days of cluelessness, where the computer was just a tool at your disposal.

Oh hell. Good luck with it.

Jack

I had no formal training but I had a PC at home that I had spent many hours playing with.

Later we bought a Novel server so I had to learn that.

Later still we bought a server that ran SCO Unix Openserver to run an MRP application. So I began to learn UNIX.

Finally we upgraded to Windows NT workstations. I kept lamenting to a friend how much I hated windows. He told me about this cool OS called Linux. I'd always wanted to learn UNIX as it seemed to me to be what the "Professionals" used. With some reading and alot of help from my friend I setup a dialup internet proxy for all the NT workstations.

The big step came when I bought a new PC. That's when the learning really took off form me.

Finally, sick of my part time Sysadmin job I started looking for a full time one. I found one and my learning again took off. My boss knows alot more than I. He is a great learning tool.

The final learning tool for me was setting up my own domain. It really helped me bring everything together.

Use your resources and learn for yourself:

1. Friends and enemies.
2. The Internet.
3. Oreilly books are a godsend.

Good Luck!

from the the-mouthpiece-pulls-a-mundie dept. Sarcasmo writes: "Hillary Rosen, CEO of the RIAA ?, spoke at length ( PDF of Speech) yesterday, during the 'O'Reilly Peer to Peer and Web Services conference'. From what I can surmise, the speech dealt both with her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money. "

...but I notice now, that the story seems to have been editorial modified (and without the usual "UPDATED" disclaimer.) I wonder why that was....

Peer-2-Peer pressure perhaps?

Face it, this book is bound to be around for quite a long time. Granted, it will be on 80th edition, but still, a timeless classic none the less.

And what about the possibility of using even RF patents to enforce digital rights management, which several people have raised before? (For instance, see http://www.oreilly.com/news/oram_patents_1001.html .

Well they either softened their stance or the techies are sneaking things without management knowing. Here is an article about the use of Python and Perl at Disney feature Animation:

And TSL is/was doing the same at least for some time. It would have been uncoceivable that DQI didn't use something GPL. During SIGGRAPH 2001 John P. Lewis of TSL demoed one of the apps he developed to remove the spots on a dog for 102 Dalmatians. It was running on a laptop with RedHat on it (6.2 I believe though it might have been older). It was quite amazing. They also used it on something else. Tal Lancaster also of Disney, in the RenderMan newsgroup mentioned he had used PRMan under Linux, though I think he didn't mentioned specifically being used for Dinosaur. Maybe they have changed since then.

Looking at this review and the plethora of reviews available on Amazon.com, this book appears to nothing more than a re-write of Oreilly's Information Architecture Book with a lot more fluff and buzzwords. Just look at the 5 main steps that are listed, each one is covered in the 3 year old Oreilly book.

That's a fairly clear indicator he is a reader...

all the cool tech toys that they sell at ThinkGeek

Obligitory ThinkGeek plug. Another sign.

Okay, first let me put on my Asbestos suit.

(Score:-1, Flamebait)
Okay, so this isn't *exactly* a /. thing on its own, taken with the other clues, it adds up.

I have given O'Reilly LOTS of my money

Okay, again not a /. reference on its own, but who out there on /. *doesn't* have your own Zoo?

So have I just lost all of my cool points, or what?

Hmmmm....
Here he really should have said "Karma" not "cool". I am begining to wonder...

I don't have a huge problem with Katz

Oh! Well that does it! I think this is all the proof we need that he really *isn't* a /. reader! &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp ;)

I have to disagree, check out the Help documentation in mozilla for example, it is quite good and easy to navigate. I have not used staroffice in a while, but I would imagine that the documentation is just as good. All major applications have very good, free online documentation in an HTML format and some (like samba) have o'reilly books available under some kind of open content license that are freely downloadable. I have always liked O'Reilly books, and they have documentation for almost any major free/open source application (vi, emacs, samba, apache, mysql, etc). Even though most are not free, they are worth the money.

Almost a decade ago, as part of the whole USL vs. BSDi lawsuit (see the section "The Lawsuit" in McKusick's history of BSD for details), one of the complaints was for trademark infringement for advertising their phone number as "1-800-ITS-UNIX".

> [...], check it out

Direct link to the online sample pdf of Chapter 1

... and whilst I'd not go overboard on the beautiful tpyograpyh angle, it certainly looks an interesting read.
[Note to self: get a life]

There is also this fascinating title, which I've been meaning to read, merely because the page layout and typography within is a work of art. If you're in the bookstore and see this one, check it out. It's impressive.

check out the sample chapters to get an idea of this is what you're looking for

For Unix:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/unixnut3/

For Linux:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxnut3/

check out the sample chapters to get an idea of this is what you're looking for

For Unix:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/unixnut3/

For Linux:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxnut3/

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sed2/

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

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/awkprog3/

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

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sed2/

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

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/awkprog3/

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

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sed2/

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

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/awkprog3/

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

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sed2/

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

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/awkprog3/

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

Use its pages to make up cheat-sheets with your favorite commands. I think that's about as simple as it gets with UNIX.

You will probably learn the commands more effectively by producing your own cheat sheets than by purchasing some produced by someone else. However, if that is what you are looking for, check at a university bookstore in the CS section. You can probably find that type of material there.

[All links pulled from google's first page for each letter - sick, ain't it?]

That being said, O'Reilly's Practical C++ Programming has been a long-standing favorite recommendation of mine.

hmmmm.... I seem to remember the same exact comment in the Sun SunFire 15k article.

anyway, instead of bitching about Java performance, learn about performance tuning java apps. Educate yourself, then educate others.

or continue to make dumb jokes.

Seems that O'Reilly has a new book out on Exim, by the creator of Exim, Philip Hazel.

Seems that O'Reilly has a new book out on Exim, by the creator of Exim, Philip Hazel.

Did you notice that their member list included the Apache Software Foundation and O'Reilly?

These are groups that I would trust in creating a secure, distributed, decentralized identity system.

Let's face it folks, some kind of worldwide identity system is going to happen. Instead of whining about whether Sun or Microsoft is more evil, start thinking about how something like this WOULD work; it's an amazing challenge, and I am far more comfortable with a consortium of companies developing it than a single one.

Just my $0.02

- jonathan.