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> As someone who can't use Linux (we have a WinME box sharing our cable modem connection), I have often wondered how compatable are such things as different file systems? Can a linux box read a PC floppy or HD?

if you mean windows/dos formated floppy/hd by saying PC floppy than the answer is yes, it can read PC floppy or HD. > How about one for Mac?

not sure about this one , but i think it has support for mac filesystem.

> Can a redhat box access files from a Mandrake one?

yes. only difference between different linux distributions a) location of config files b) some distros are using bsd init (slack ?)instead of sysV init like rest of the the distros c) packaging system d) amount of apps shipped with the distro.

> Can I get a linux box to access the internet through the Windows network?

i'm no expert in this area but i believe you can do that with the help of samba. try looking at samba.org for more info. there is also free samba book published by oreilly on their site. good luck

If you haven't read Steve Talbott's NetFuture columns, now is a good time to become aquainted. The premise of the column is responsible use of technology, especially when there are unknown consequences upon society, and there is a whole series of articles on ubiquitous computing. The earliest NetFuture article on ubiquitous computing is actually the best.

If you haven't read Steve Talbott's NetFuture columns, now is a good time to become aquainted. The premise of the column is responsible use of technology, especially when there are unknown consequences upon society, and there is a whole series of articles on ubiquitous computing. The earliest NetFuture article on ubiquitous computing is actually the best.

If you haven't read Steve Talbott's NetFuture columns, now is a good time to become aquainted. The premise of the column is responsible use of technology, especially when there are unknown consequences upon society, and there is a whole series of articles on ubiquitous computing. The earliest NetFuture article on ubiquitous computing is actually the best.

Let's face it, every major operating system has security flaws, either in the past or just waiting to be discovered. The benefit of Open Source is not only that it makes it easier for everyone to see its flaws, but it makes it easier for anyone to fix them.

Right now we have Craig Mundie preparing to argue the merits of commercial licenses over Open Source, and having a hole of this magnitude (read the article for details) showing up in closed-source software so close to this debate only serves to make our case look better.

There are times when a closed-source license scheme will work out better for a particular company, and there are times when an open-source one will be better (and I'm only talking in regards to the company, not the rest of society). This security hole will hopefully reduce the FUD level against Open Source software, particularly from a security point of view.

I can't wait to hear the Mundie debate next week.

--Cycon

Doug Lea (well known C++ programmer and writer; teaches at SUNY/Oswego)

Kevin Sullivan (U. of Virginia)

A couple of less positive articles from Australia.

An article at O'Reilly.

Until then, either set your HTTP client to send Referer:http://oreilly.com/news/mundie_0601. html or simply go here first (the originating page) and follow the link that reads "Post your questions to Craig Mundie here, or read what others have to say!" that's on the very bottom of the page.

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Every time there's a headline here with the words "interview" or "ask" people start frantically posting questions. I confess I've been guilty of that a couple of times myself... ;-)

(Original subject: First "This Is Not A /. Interview!" Post! Apparently that trips the lameness filter.)

Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

Something like Understanding the Linux Kernel perhaps?

I really liked the previous editions of O'Reilly's Java in a Nutshell and Java Examples in a Nutshell. My job doesn't involve Java (thank the gods! :), so I haven't had much use for them, but still they sit on my bookshelf, and my co-workers that do program in Java have either borrowed both of them repeatedly or have copies of their own. (The same author, David Flanagan, is also the author of a couple of O'Reilly's JavaScript books, but that's not what you're looking for here.)

(Ok sorry I can't resist -- my favorite lame Java bashing line: "Java has all the graceful simplicity of a systems language like C with the incredible performance of a scripting language like Python. That is to say, it's ugly as hell & slow as shit." Personally, I say if you're better off going with ugly but fast, like C, or pretty but slow, like Python. Java is the worst of all worlds, remarkable mainly for the dexterity with which Sun's marketing department has shoved this terrible language down our collective throats.)

But, like I say, I'm trying to be constructive here :). Less sarcastically, the Nutshell books are great, both as a learning tool and as a refernce later, after you're comfortable with the language. The same applies with other books in the series too.

I really liked the previous editions of O'Reilly's Java in a Nutshell and Java Examples in a Nutshell. My job doesn't involve Java (thank the gods! :), so I haven't had much use for them, but still they sit on my bookshelf, and my co-workers that do program in Java have either borrowed both of them repeatedly or have copies of their own. (The same author, David Flanagan, is also the author of a couple of O'Reilly's JavaScript books, but that's not what you're looking for here.)

(Ok sorry I can't resist -- my favorite lame Java bashing line: "Java has all the graceful simplicity of a systems language like C with the incredible performance of a scripting language like Python. That is to say, it's ugly as hell & slow as shit." Personally, I say if you're better off going with ugly but fast, like C, or pretty but slow, like Python. Java is the worst of all worlds, remarkable mainly for the dexterity with which Sun's marketing department has shoved this terrible language down our collective throats.)

But, like I say, I'm trying to be constructive here :). Less sarcastically, the Nutshell books are great, both as a learning tool and as a refernce later, after you're comfortable with the language. The same applies with other books in the series too.

the mobiles then use a 128 bit key to encrypt the channel. One of the technicians is quoted as saying that "A thousand pentium computers would need over 10 years to decrypt a 10 minute phone-call

As outlined in Cracking DES, an algorithm can take years to crack using a conventional computer. However, if you custom design a computer from the ground up (not as difficult as it might sound) to specifically attack the algorithm, the encryption can fall quite quickly, as it does with DES. *

I think that encryption should be evaluated on the strength of the algorithm, not on how many brute force attacks it would take to defeat it. (This is what is mentioned by Schneier in Applied Cryptography.)

* For those of you who doubt this, read the book.

BTW, if you're interested in some photos of the backroom equipment, go to http://www.oreilly.com/news/dsl_0501.html. Unfortunately, that article doesn't include a phote of the remote station that I mentioned.

You can read two pages of responses to the interview, too!

You can read two pages of responses to the interview, too!

You can read two pages of responses to the interview, too!

Oddly, the founder of a wildly successful free company doesn't agree. "I saw [in the GNU Manifesto] a business plan in disguise." Michael Tiemann, Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account.

Why tools and solutions companies like Cygnus (and Ars Digita, and Ada Core Technologies, and CodeSourcery) have had more success with free software than retail and support companies is an interesting question. Perhaps you should look into it instead of making wild and inflammatory claims.

Put simply, oBSD is the single most secure OS in existance

I know you're a troll, but from O'Reilly

Wall's education has included a B.A. in natural and artifical languages from Seattle Pacific University, and graduate level training in linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles.

Actually you're allowed to copy the phonebook in its entirety. In fact most phonebooks are just a complete rip off of the regular phonebooks. (If you don't believe me check for errors, they'll be similar. And check when you get the alternative phone books, it's always 2 or 3 months after the regular one.)

You cannot collect names otherwise. Think about it, where is a complete, public-domain copy of the list of number available? No where and the SBC's, QWests, and Verizons of the world have no interest in publishing such a thing. Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Company gave Feist permission and legal protection to COPY the other's phonebook, regardless of the others objections. There was simply nothing they could do. Since a phonebook cannot be copyrighted, there is nothing to prevent the direct copy, (minus the intro and conclusion material, which is copyrighted.) Read this to get more information.

But either way this is not an issue in this case, because both databases were generated independantly and not a copied, since CDDB did everything to prevent a copy of their free and open database from the start.

So?

What's the diff 'tween Chromatic and, say, Marilyn Manson? Or Marilyn Monroe, for that matter? It's just a name.

How about the guy who wrote Programming The Perl DBI , Alligator Descartes?

And how do we know that Tim Bunce is actually that guy's name? Huh? HUH? HOW ABOUT THAT?
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The best part is the idea of a presence engine. This thing knows that you are online. It can aggregate and integrate IM servers. The XML could be modified to store other arbitrary properties. It could do the same thing for letting music stream to the computer you are on (regardless of location). There is a real potential for all sorts of applications other than IM (Think GPS or the mythical badges you wear at bill gates house that lets the house change background music or art according to your tastes.)

IMO, that is what is the cool about Jabber, an XML (and therefore more easily extended) presence engine.

Think how this could be used with X10. (Frankly I'm still excited about the fact that my programable thermostat wakes me up with heat better than the alarm clock does with sound.)

Only if you are talking about experimental molecular biology. Theoretical molecular biology, or bioinformatics, is not some future development but rapidly becoming a major research area today. It is interesting that you bring up O'Reilly. Take a look at this

And, assuming NT means "New Technology" (O'Reilly Link, WinNTMag.com Link.) Then "based on NT technology" must mean "based on New Technology technology." Wow, Microsoft innovates both in software, and in the English language!!

I'm sure that if you contact Napster directly you might be able to get some help. They must have some PR people, at the very least, who could direct you. You might also want to broaden your scope to P2P technologies in general (which Napster technically isn't, but which are facing many of the same Copyright problems as Napster) in which case contacting O'Reilly or the author of That Book might not be a bad idea.

And the How-To on doing that is here.

See "man nanosleep". Specifically:

The current implementation of nanosleep is based on the normal kernel timer mechanism, which has a resolution of 1/HZ s (i.e, 10 ms on Linux/i386 and 1 ms on Linux/Alpha). Therefore, nanosleep pauses always for at least the specified time, however it can take up to 10 ms longer than specified until the process becomes runnable again. For the same reason, the value returned in case of a delivered signal in *rem is usually rounded to the next larger multiple of 1/HZ s.

As some applications require much more precise pauses (e.g., in order to control some time-critical hardware), nanosleep is also capable of short high-precision pauses. If the process is scheduled under a real-time policy like SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR, then pauses of up to 2 ms will be performed as busy waits with microsecond precision.

Also, see:

• http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxkernel/chapter /ch10.html
• http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/mini/IO-Port-P rogramming-4.html

The gamble seems to be that no matter how FREE software becomes, programmers will NEVER be able to write clear documentation. We'll always need O'Reilly to turn GeekSpeak and man pages into meaningful sentences.

Have you paid your O'Reilly Tax today?

Apparently, page 144 of Flanagan's otherwise Definitive Guide to JavaScript concerning inheritance in that language misled many to believe that multi-level inheritance would not be possible in JavaScript. As it turns out, not only is multi-level inheritance possible, but so are class methods/attributes, meta-classes and even multiple inheritance and fun stuff like instance level programming ala Self. Apparently JavaScript is a lot more capable than most people, even some of the better experts in it, give it credit for being.

It would be great if TIBET got released at the WWW10 conference, but I think registration deadlines for vendors has passed.

Oh one of noble but misguided intentions. Before dispensing of wisdom one must learn wisdom. After slaking thy thirst at the fount of freely available knowledge. Go forth and spread thy wisdom and your newly aquired conception of liberty throughout the mind of humanity.

You missed a couple of biggies:

• CTO of O'Reilly and Associates
• Author of Perl 5 Interactive Course
• Co-Author of Programming Perl, 3
• QuizMaster of the Open Source gameshow.
• Internet sports polling security expert.
• A better picture from TPC2K

You missed a couple of biggies:

• CTO of O'Reilly and Associates
• Author of Perl 5 Interactive Course
• Co-Author of Programming Perl, 3
• QuizMaster of the Open Source gameshow.
• Internet sports polling security expert.
• A better picture from TPC2K

You missed a couple of biggies:

• CTO of O'Reilly and Associates
• Author of Perl 5 Interactive Course
• Co-Author of Programming Perl, 3
• QuizMaster of the Open Source gameshow.
• Internet sports polling security expert.
• A better picture from TPC2K

• NBC
  
• U.S. Census Bureau
  
• Agilent (HP)
  

• NBC
  
• U.S. Census Bureau
  
• Agilent (HP)
  

• NBC
  
• U.S. Census Bureau
  
• Agilent (HP)
  

We have Stephen Cole Kleene to thank for both recursion theory and regular expressions. According to a blurb in Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions (pg. 60):

"The seeds of regular expressions were plated in the early 1940s by two neurophysiologists, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who developed models of how they believed the nervous system worked at the neuron level.

"Regular expressions became a reality several years later when mathematician Stephen Kleene formally described these models in an algebra he called regular sets. He devised a simple notation to express these regular sets, and called them regular expressions.

I'm still looking for reprints of Kleene's papers on regular expressions, but they seem to be hard to come by. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places.

The main reason that microkernels have not gained more acceptance in OS circles (although Windows NT is based on microkernel design)

Hmm, well let me elaborate on that comment. IIRC, both user mode and kernel mode drivers can be done in NT. Before NT4, it was all user mode drivers. After that, it became optional, presumably for efficiency's sake. Oreilly has a good sample chapter page on the NT I/O subsystem:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wininternals/chapte r/ch04.html

The log from the Minix mailing list can be found in the book
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Appendix A.
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I think it's great that Larry is taking the time to be the visionary and leader on Perl, and providing so much of himself in what goes into Perl 6.

And I think equally important is that O'Reilly are basically paying Larry to do it. As far as I know, Larry's been getting a paycheck from ORA for just doing the Perl stuff that he does, not unlike Damian Conway getting a paid year sabbatical to be Damian.

That salary for Larry has to be some of the best investment in the community and infrastructure of software development yet, and I cheer Tim & co. for doing it.
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A lot of the pocket references are less than $19.95, and most of the other O'Reilly books are only in the $30-$40 range.

Here is a link to their pricelist.

At the expense of getting into blatant self-aggrandizement, one answer to the question lies in Retiring Accidental Windows Servers with Virtual Samba

This is just the kind of thing for which safari. Is perfect. I'm talking work into paying for an account right now.

Actually, it's CVS Pocket Reference, from O'Reilly.

It seems strange that that author of the book would not know its correct title. Worse, there's no real disclosure of his connection to the book.
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Disclamer, I am a Canadian. It's the NSA's job to spy on ME because I am in a foreign country.

Due to the nature of open source, having the NSA slip a "Back Door" in is VERY VERY VERY unlikely. About the only ways I can consider this is similar to the techniques in Cracking DES and including an encryption/transmission scheme that seems secure just like DES did. (For more information, read the book.)

However, the NSA wants to keep citizens in the U.S. secure because its their job to spy on other countries. The NSA probably wants American businesses to be secure!!! Especially if foreign countrys are developing more secure solutions faster than the U.S. you better believe that the NSA is concerned!!

Anyhow, the NSA does not so much care about breaking in to a system as they do intercepting transmissions between systems. They are after information in foreign countrys, they are not out for scoring points like:

"31337 Jo3 r00t3d j00! H4R!!! 3Y3 w3rk 4 th3 NSA h4r h4r h4r!!!!"

As long as they can obtain the data that they need, and can crack/analyze it, they just don't *CARE* about owning anyone, it's not their job.

Try the current version of the BeBook (available online), or join #bedev on irc.elric.net :-)

I mean, seriously, to post about a Linux company's troubles is like to post an article about the sun coming up in the morning. Let's talk about something new.

As far as Safari goes, is it possible that I just missed the article on it? I can't believe that Slashdot wouldn't mention something this big. If you haven't seen it yet, it's O'Reilly's plan (they've already started) to put all their books online and offer different subscription plans to use them (links: "Safari itself, and about the design of Safari). There are so many things to discuss about this approach (which seems pretty innovative), from simply whether or not it will work. I'm definitely interested and almost signed up for it last night. Anybody taken the plunge yet? (The lowest plan is $9.95/month, if you don't feel like checking out the link.)

And whether you like it or not, HailStorm could change everything from the way that we know it. The fact that AOL and Sun were courting government officials for breakfast to talk about new anti-trust action two days before Microsoft even announced this should tell you how seriously they're taking it. There's a ton of different angles that it could be talked about, whether it's positive, negative, or how other organizations could work with it or duplicate it, but I guess Slashdot is waiting for an appropriately negative article about it before they mention it. ;)

Cheers,

I mean, seriously, to post about a Linux company's troubles is like to post an article about the sun coming up in the morning. Let's talk about something new.

As far as Safari goes, is it possible that I just missed the article on it? I can't believe that Slashdot wouldn't mention something this big. If you haven't seen it yet, it's O'Reilly's plan (they've already started) to put all their books online and offer different subscription plans to use them (links: "Safari itself, and about the design of Safari). There are so many things to discuss about this approach (which seems pretty innovative), from simply whether or not it will work. I'm definitely interested and almost signed up for it last night. Anybody taken the plunge yet? (The lowest plan is $9.95/month, if you don't feel like checking out the link.)

And whether you like it or not, HailStorm could change everything from the way that we know it. The fact that AOL and Sun were courting government officials for breakfast to talk about new anti-trust action two days before Microsoft even announced this should tell you how seriously they're taking it. There's a ton of different angles that it could be talked about, whether it's positive, negative, or how other organizations could work with it or duplicate it, but I guess Slashdot is waiting for an appropriately negative article about it before they mention it. ;)

Cheers,

O'Rielly Open Source Con

Linux Business Expo

Open Source Forum

Java One (yes, there are a LOT of apache people there)

CMP Event list (good list of conference/trade shows)

I am just a little curious if these Cons are just ways for the Apache group to make money while CLAIMING that they are open source. I can understand donations to fund the effort, but $1200/person is more on the scale of a "political contribution". Wait... that just must be my paranoia...

--
He had come like a thief in the night,