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There's something to be said for seeing an entire bookcase about 15' high and probably a good 30' long with nothing but O'Reilly.

FYI, O'Reilly recently had a big P2P conference in San Francisco, you can find out lots more information on P2P, especially on who all the current playing in the market are and what they are making, here.

I don't see how those books "rapidly lose relevance" any more than any other book they wrote about a specific version of software. Even Perl (version 4) books ended up in the bargain bins.

I guess O'Reilly makes money by writing about Windows. That's fine - I just wish they'd choose a different image and branding for that series of books.

I imagine you'd like the covers to have a guy standing there with his hand against his head, in the classic "L" ("Loser") position?

My favorite cover is for the Managing the Windows NT Registry book. It features a monkey. I couldn't resist appending "- The Author" underneath the picture on my copy...

I am pretty resistant to marketing; therefore there are few 'brands' that elicit any positive response from me. O'Reilly is one. Therefore, it always bothered me that O'Reilly was involved in things like a web server for Windows 95. O'Reilly is primarily Unix-centric, and this little pocket of Windows-centrism stuck out like a sore thumb.
On the same note, I'm very unhappy that O'Reilly has chosen to publish ephemeral books on Windows software, such as Excel 2000 in a Nutshell. These books rapidly lose relevance and end up in the bargain bin at the bookstore, harming the image of the O'Reilly 'animal' books as long-term sources of information. As an example of the longevity O'Reilly represents, Essential System Administration was last updated in 1995, and yet I find it reasonably current.
I guess O'Reilly makes money by writing about Windows. That's fine - I just wish they'd choose a different image and branding for that series of books.

I am pretty resistant to marketing; therefore there are few 'brands' that elicit any positive response from me. O'Reilly is one. Therefore, it always bothered me that O'Reilly was involved in things like a web server for Windows 95. O'Reilly is primarily Unix-centric, and this little pocket of Windows-centrism stuck out like a sore thumb.
On the same note, I'm very unhappy that O'Reilly has chosen to publish ephemeral books on Windows software, such as Excel 2000 in a Nutshell. These books rapidly lose relevance and end up in the bargain bin at the bookstore, harming the image of the O'Reilly 'animal' books as long-term sources of information. As an example of the longevity O'Reilly represents, Essential System Administration was last updated in 1995, and yet I find it reasonably current.
I guess O'Reilly makes money by writing about Windows. That's fine - I just wish they'd choose a different image and branding for that series of books.

O'Reilly offers The Future Does Not Compute on their Open Books site.

O'Reilly offers The Future Does Not Compute on their Open Books site.

Check out some of these titles:
- Choosing a Wheelchair
- Making Informed Medical Decisions
-Organ Transplants

Check out some of these titles:
- Choosing a Wheelchair
- Making Informed Medical Decisions
-Organ Transplants

Check out some of these titles:
- Choosing a Wheelchair
- Making Informed Medical Decisions
-Organ Transplants

Check out some of these titles:
- Choosing a Wheelchair
- Making Informed Medical Decisions
-Organ Transplants

I'm one of the authors of Using Samba, which is selling quite well, which has been translated into German, French and Polish, and which has a pocket guide coming out soon. It's available under an open content license, which says it can "be freely reproduced and distributed in any form, in any medium physical or electronic, in whole or in part..." I and my colleagues are receiving a decent income from this book despite its free availability: O'Reilly adds so much value by editing, publishing and distributing it on paper that people spend real money buying physical copies. The free, online copies are a non-threatening form of advertising for us.

... and for websites.

Allow me to quote from a widely-reprinted history of BSD:

Up through the release of 4.3BSD-Tahoe, all recipients of BSD had to first get an AT&T source license. That was because the BSD systems were never released by Berkeley in a binary-only format; the distributions always contained the complete source to every part of the system. The history of the Unix system and the BSD system in particular had shown the power of making the source available to the users. Instead of passively using the system, they actively worked to fix bugs, improve performance and functionality, and even add completely new features.

With the increasing cost of the AT&T source licenses, vendors that wanted to build standalone TCP/IP-based networking products for the PC market using the BSD code found the per-binary costs prohibitive. So, they requested that Berkeley break out the networking code and utilities and provide them under licensing terms that did not require an AT&T source license. The TCP/IP networking code clearly did not exist in 32/V and thus had been developed entirely by Berkeley and its contributors. The BSD originated networking code and supporting utilities were released in June 1989 as Networking Release 1, the first freely-redistributable code from Berkeley.

The first Berkeley distribution was in 1977. The first free distribution was eleven years later. Saying that BSD was developed as open source is just plain wrong.

I don't think that you know anything about compiler theory if you're seriously claiming that GCC is innovative.

Your statements about Timbuktu and X Window are unsupported. In particular, your statement that Timbuktu long postdates X is apparently false, since the X history links I gave earlier show that X is from the late 1980's, while Timbuktu was an early Mac product.

As for TeX, I do find one source showing a book date earlier than 1986, which is 1984 -- which, again, is after the release of the Macintosh. Apparently the actual language documentation was not released until 1986, so I don't know what an earlier "release" could have meant. I believe the 1980 date for TUG may be in error.

I have spent quite a while looking over TeX history links and they are ambiguous on the initial release date and original licensing conditions. I have found, in this thread and the previous one, that open source advocates often falsely claim that closed-source software projects originated as open source, so I am unwilling to accept an unsupported claim that TeX was developed as open source. Anyone who has actual information, as opposed to the kind of flame I'm responding to, is invited to speak up here or to write me. Thanks.

Tim

Whups. Thanks for the clue, deeznutsclan.

Moderators: He may have been inflammatory, but he was right. See table 2-1 in the O'Reilly chapter I linked to.

If the protection bit is on, then a checksum follows the header. They can do this in every frame of the file.

My original point still stands - a third-party utility can just as easily strip or reset the bits after downloading through the NewNapster client. But the bits are in the frame headers, not the ID3 tags. (Serves me right for taking the output of TinAMP seriously :)

someone mod Androsyn up! the original poster is clearly a troll and has never read Linus famous arguements with Tannenbaum.

see the archive at ORA

Well, the book that clarifies this issue best, is O'Reilly's Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Freely available here. The introduction has a good rundown on the history.

Well, the book that clarifies this issue best, is O'Reilly's Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Freely available here. The introduction has a good rundown on the history.

Well, the book that clarifies this issue best, is O'Reilly's Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Freely available here. The introduction has a good rundown on the history.

I think these companies are soon going to experience "Marimba Syndrome" - if you recall, Marimba rode the push wave of '97 until it became painfully apparent that the push emporer had no clothes, then they tried to distance themselves from it as quickly as possible and never really recovered.

Add a nice set of speakers and acheap 486 or pentium box and you've got yourself quite the jukebox.

When Linux got started, it was a cheesy hacked-up version of Minix, an already feature-complete operating system. But look at linux now!

Linux was not based on Minix source code. It was totally new code, it was created because of dissatisfaction with Minix. My favorite discussion of Minix vs. Linux is here.

Not really important, just a nit-pick I guess.

Linux SMP kernel does the right thing as far as cache synchronization, according to the text Understanding the Linux Kernel published by O'Reilly, in reference to kernel 2.2:

The section "Hardware Cache" in Chapter 2, Memory Addressing, explained that the contents of the hardware cache and the RAM maintain their consistency at the hardware level. The same approach holds in the case of a dual processor. ... But now updating becomes more time-consuming: whenever a CPU modifies its hardware cache it must check whether the same data is contained in the other hardware cache and, if so, notify the other CPU to update it with the proper value. This activity is often called cache snooping. Luckily, all this is done at the hardware level and is of no concern to the kernel.

Hope this helps

Cheers,
Andrew

This was debated by Linus Torvalds (Linux and the Monolithic Kernel) and Andrew Tannenbaum (Minix and the Microkernel) back in 1992. You can read their debate here.

---

What are the advantages of having a monolithic kernel rather than a microkernel?

In the case of Linux vs. Hurd, it's a matter of what works in practice, rather than theory. (And Torvalds said it gave Linux The Edge).

- Derwen

So don't compile everything in. This is why modules are a *very* good thing. IMHO modules give you the best of both worlds. As to why a monolithic kerenl see what Linux says on the matter here.

Mojo Nation dwells on solving the free rider problem. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't have that problem. When I'm not using my computer and my bandwidth, both of which I've already paid for, why not share them. They don't really cost me anything more. O'Reilly's OpenP2P site has the article " In Praise of Freeloaders." It clearly explains why Mojo Nation is solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

Listen, I am both Microsoft (MCSE) and Sun (SSA) certified. I have worked with Solaris, Linux and Windows for years. How can windows users that have little if any Unix knowledge, make any comment on what Taco has to say? I'm sure some of the posts were written by people with experiance on both platforms.. but.. Of the people that LOOVVEE M$ many know little or no Unix .. Most M$ users only know M$. Most Unix users know BOTH Unix and M$. Taco is entitled to his opinion (which it just so happens is accurate this time..you overly defensive Microsoft Borgs!) As far as microsoft.com being usefull, I guess that value is in the browser of the beholder. I don't personally have much use for Microsofts web site except when I need to patch my servers. Unfortunately, Microsoft often releases patches long LONG after a problem has been made known (see L0pht.com for a quote from the Microsoft folks). I admin both Unix and Windows machines, If I need a good technical reference I go to O'Reilly and buy a book on the subject.. not microsoft. Or I go to Docs.Sun.Com , Cisco or Linux.org but I don't go to Microsoft.com which is apparently a good thing because they have had DNS problems most of the day! -Celtic

Actually, if you're interested in writing Linux device drivers, I'd highly recommend O'Reilly's other Linux hacking book, Linux Device Drivers (more info here). I used this book to write a relatively simple device driver for a device about two years ago. It was incredibly helpful. I assume most of the information is still relevant with today's kernels. This book, combined with the existing drivers for other devices, provided me everything I needed to know.

I'm presenting a talk at the O'Reilly p2p conference entitled "Attack Resistant Sharing of Metadata".

It's based on an idea of Raph Levien's, somewhat similar to the Advogato trust metric. Basically, you only trust meta-data from your friends, or from people whose meta-data has been good in the past, and then to a lesser extent you trust their friends, but you dynamically adapt if someone starts distributing bad meta-data. We can't really prove that it will work, but it has some promising characteristics.

We are going to implement it on top of Mojo Nation.

Regards,

Zooko

Dornfest and Brickley are the authors of *that chapter*, see http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/peertopeer/author.h tml for a full list.

Umm, I really don't think this is right. Linux uses a scheduler that is not Round-Robin, it's fairly complicated, and uses kind of a cost accounting method (vaguely - It's been a while since I cracked my OS books chapter on Linux). The round robin is a a class you can assign processes too. Put calling Linux round-robin is just wrong. Oreilly has a page at Their site on this.

That would be wrong and Linux explains it here better than I ever could. Basically Linux is built well and is therefore portable by it's very nature. In any case read what Linus has to say it is better than any paraphrase I could give.

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

Enough said.

Sounds like he just ran their page through a script and happened to have a couple books lying around his place. Maybe slightly suspicious. But nothing for which to arrest him. They must not have any REAL criminals running around.

Now those police. They're the ones that need a spanking. Their website promotes the free distribution of music. With our law enforcement officers setting such a poor example for the citizens and children, how can we expect those same people to respect the law when it comes knocking at their door?

Sounds like he just ran their page through a script and happened to have a couple books lying around his place. Maybe slightly suspicious. But nothing for which to arrest him. They must not have any REAL criminals running around.

Now those police. They're the ones that need a spanking. Their website promotes the free distribution of music. With our law enforcement officers setting such a poor example for the citizens and children, how can we expect those same people to respect the law when it comes knocking at their door?

Sounds like he just ran their page through a script and happened to have a couple books lying around his place. Maybe slightly suspicious. But nothing for which to arrest him. They must not have any REAL criminals running around.

Now those police. They're the ones that need a spanking. Their website promotes the free distribution of music. With our law enforcement officers setting such a poor example for the citizens and children, how can we expect those same people to respect the law when it comes knocking at their door?

Sounds like he just ran their page through a script and happened to have a couple books lying around his place. Maybe slightly suspicious. But nothing for which to arrest him. They must not have any REAL criminals running around.

Now those police. They're the ones that need a spanking. Their website promotes the free distribution of music. With our law enforcement officers setting such a poor example for the citizens and children, how can we expect those same people to respect the law when it comes knocking at their door?

Of course all the copyright info is here and they are all free as in speech (no surprise there considering the people writing it) The one by Richard Stallman is very cool and serves to dispel many of the myths about that man.

is probably a useful nod in the right direction, if nothing else. It's here, and the full book is available online. I don't know about any restrictions of usage, though. You'll have to discover those yourself.

Hell, read Database Nation for a much better overview of these types of problems.

As I look up on my bookshelf, amongst no less than 30 O'Reilly books (geek bragging :) I have Using Samba. If you take a look at that link you will notice that there are two links off of it, one in HTML and the other in PDF format. This should not be a surprise to most /.ers. O'Reilly has been big on this for some time.

Still, I began reading Using Samba online, and after reading much of it I grabbed the book because it was so useful, sure, I can load it into my palm pilot, but that is a pain in the ass. I suppose I could print it out too, but I prefer dead-tree form.

The other advantage to this is of course that when I am working on a server I don't have the book with me on location, so I fire up a browser and read.

I also purchased The Unix CD Bookshelf. I already have Unix Power Tools in dead-tree format, but being able to search the HTML version is very handy. Sure, I know where to get the warez version of this CD, and maybe the purchased edition comes with Unix in a Nutshell as a bonus, but I bought the set because it was valuable to me, and I support O'Reilly. Does having books online increase readership? I certanly think so, my friend who has both of the O'Reilly CD compilations that he got from Warez Ftp has not read them, well, he claims he read Building Internet firewalls, and TCP/IP Network Administration. But then again, he also claims that he read Running Linux in one day and grokked it all (yet he can't seem to use a bash prompt very well...)The truth is, he hardly got anything out of the online versions, I do, but I mainly use the online material for reference, not for general reading.

There is no doubt in my mind that O'Reillys decision to place some of their books on the web for download (or in plain HTML on CD) has greatly increased my purchase of their books.

As I look up on my bookshelf, amongst no less than 30 O'Reilly books (geek bragging :) I have Using Samba. If you take a look at that link you will notice that there are two links off of it, one in HTML and the other in PDF format. This should not be a surprise to most /.ers. O'Reilly has been big on this for some time.

Still, I began reading Using Samba online, and after reading much of it I grabbed the book because it was so useful, sure, I can load it into my palm pilot, but that is a pain in the ass. I suppose I could print it out too, but I prefer dead-tree form.

The other advantage to this is of course that when I am working on a server I don't have the book with me on location, so I fire up a browser and read.

I also purchased The Unix CD Bookshelf. I already have Unix Power Tools in dead-tree format, but being able to search the HTML version is very handy. Sure, I know where to get the warez version of this CD, and maybe the purchased edition comes with Unix in a Nutshell as a bonus, but I bought the set because it was valuable to me, and I support O'Reilly. Does having books online increase readership? I certanly think so, my friend who has both of the O'Reilly CD compilations that he got from Warez Ftp has not read them, well, he claims he read Building Internet firewalls, and TCP/IP Network Administration. But then again, he also claims that he read Running Linux in one day and grokked it all (yet he can't seem to use a bash prompt very well...)The truth is, he hardly got anything out of the online versions, I do, but I mainly use the online material for reference, not for general reading.

There is no doubt in my mind that O'Reillys decision to place some of their books on the web for download (or in plain HTML on CD) has greatly increased my purchase of their books.

As I look up on my bookshelf, amongst no less than 30 O'Reilly books (geek bragging :) I have Using Samba. If you take a look at that link you will notice that there are two links off of it, one in HTML and the other in PDF format. This should not be a surprise to most /.ers. O'Reilly has been big on this for some time.

Still, I began reading Using Samba online, and after reading much of it I grabbed the book because it was so useful, sure, I can load it into my palm pilot, but that is a pain in the ass. I suppose I could print it out too, but I prefer dead-tree form.

The other advantage to this is of course that when I am working on a server I don't have the book with me on location, so I fire up a browser and read.

I also purchased The Unix CD Bookshelf. I already have Unix Power Tools in dead-tree format, but being able to search the HTML version is very handy. Sure, I know where to get the warez version of this CD, and maybe the purchased edition comes with Unix in a Nutshell as a bonus, but I bought the set because it was valuable to me, and I support O'Reilly. Does having books online increase readership? I certanly think so, my friend who has both of the O'Reilly CD compilations that he got from Warez Ftp has not read them, well, he claims he read Building Internet firewalls, and TCP/IP Network Administration. But then again, he also claims that he read Running Linux in one day and grokked it all (yet he can't seem to use a bash prompt very well...)The truth is, he hardly got anything out of the online versions, I do, but I mainly use the online material for reference, not for general reading.

There is no doubt in my mind that O'Reillys decision to place some of their books on the web for download (or in plain HTML on CD) has greatly increased my purchase of their books.

As I look up on my bookshelf, amongst no less than 30 O'Reilly books (geek bragging :) I have Using Samba. If you take a look at that link you will notice that there are two links off of it, one in HTML and the other in PDF format. This should not be a surprise to most /.ers. O'Reilly has been big on this for some time.

Still, I began reading Using Samba online, and after reading much of it I grabbed the book because it was so useful, sure, I can load it into my palm pilot, but that is a pain in the ass. I suppose I could print it out too, but I prefer dead-tree form.

The other advantage to this is of course that when I am working on a server I don't have the book with me on location, so I fire up a browser and read.

I also purchased The Unix CD Bookshelf. I already have Unix Power Tools in dead-tree format, but being able to search the HTML version is very handy. Sure, I know where to get the warez version of this CD, and maybe the purchased edition comes with Unix in a Nutshell as a bonus, but I bought the set because it was valuable to me, and I support O'Reilly. Does having books online increase readership? I certanly think so, my friend who has both of the O'Reilly CD compilations that he got from Warez Ftp has not read them, well, he claims he read Building Internet firewalls, and TCP/IP Network Administration. But then again, he also claims that he read Running Linux in one day and grokked it all (yet he can't seem to use a bash prompt very well...)The truth is, he hardly got anything out of the online versions, I do, but I mainly use the online material for reference, not for general reading.

There is no doubt in my mind that O'Reillys decision to place some of their books on the web for download (or in plain HTML on CD) has greatly increased my purchase of their books.

As I look up on my bookshelf, amongst no less than 30 O'Reilly books (geek bragging :) I have Using Samba. If you take a look at that link you will notice that there are two links off of it, one in HTML and the other in PDF format. This should not be a surprise to most /.ers. O'Reilly has been big on this for some time.

Still, I began reading Using Samba online, and after reading much of it I grabbed the book because it was so useful, sure, I can load it into my palm pilot, but that is a pain in the ass. I suppose I could print it out too, but I prefer dead-tree form.

The other advantage to this is of course that when I am working on a server I don't have the book with me on location, so I fire up a browser and read.

I also purchased The Unix CD Bookshelf. I already have Unix Power Tools in dead-tree format, but being able to search the HTML version is very handy. Sure, I know where to get the warez version of this CD, and maybe the purchased edition comes with Unix in a Nutshell as a bonus, but I bought the set because it was valuable to me, and I support O'Reilly. Does having books online increase readership? I certanly think so, my friend who has both of the O'Reilly CD compilations that he got from Warez Ftp has not read them, well, he claims he read Building Internet firewalls, and TCP/IP Network Administration. But then again, he also claims that he read Running Linux in one day and grokked it all (yet he can't seem to use a bash prompt very well...)The truth is, he hardly got anything out of the online versions, I do, but I mainly use the online material for reference, not for general reading.

There is no doubt in my mind that O'Reillys decision to place some of their books on the web for download (or in plain HTML on CD) has greatly increased my purchase of their books.

Some Additional Linux Distribution Suggestions

• Caldera Systems
• Turbo Linux
• SuSE
• Mandrake

• Sun/Open Office
• Applix/Applixware Office
• Oracle
• HP
• Compaq
• Dell
• GNU

• Osborne/McGraw-Hill
• O'Reilly
• Sybex

This from O'Reilly if nothing else there are enough online chapters to give you an idea if it might be something you are looking for. Also just to echo while Netware may suck GroupWise and NDS are very good things and both can run on *nix.

Netfuture has an article about Golden Rice

The best thing about it is the nice balance between:

• "here's what you need to do" in a step by step, recipie type way,
• and "here's why you need to do what you need to do" which you can use to understand what you're doing

The depth & breadth of information might be overwhelming if you don't recognize some of the material coming into the book , but you'll quickly appreciate the overview it gives you of the many things that Unix makes easy -- shell interaction with the machine, shell shortcuts & history, process management, input & output streams, pattern matching, file management, file security, resource usage, searching through files, editing files from the shell (sed, awk, etc) through editors (vi, emacs), and beyond (perl), etc. I've got two shelves full of O'Reilly books, alot of which cover the same things the Power Tools book does, but still it's the one I come back to over and over again. I bought it after having read most of the others, and I wish I'd come across it sooner, because it made everything Fall Into Place & Make Sense for me.

And though I don't think I could possibly rate it any more highly (unless it went into X-Windows &/or network stuff a bit more), it's worth adding that no, I'm not being paid to go on & on about it -- I just think it's that good... :)