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Perhaps this might be prior art:

CGI Programing on the World Wide Web

Published March 1996. I seem to recall some discussopn of both the GET and POST methods in this book. Perhaps this should have been cited in the patent application.

I think O'Reilly may be running the danger of being hypocritical. I have here a book on C algorithms ("Mastering Algorithms with C", ISBN 1-56592-453-3) put out by O'Reilly. At the opening of the book are the words: "Copyright (C) 1999 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved". If I were to take, say, the chapter on double-linked lists and use the code as a template for my own program, wouldn't I be in violation of copyright law? I mean, code is copyrightable and, infact, the GNU GPL depends on it.

So what does the license on the code say? I find the following in the example file to which you refer:

The source code on this disk can be freely used, adapted, and redistributed in source or binary form, so long as an acknowledgment appears in derived source files. The citation should list that the code comes from the book "Mastering Algorithms with C" by Kyle Loudon, published by O'Reilly & Associates. This code is under copyright and cannot be included in any other book, publication, or educational product without permission from O'Reilly & Associates. No warranty is attached; we cannot take responsibility for errors or fitness for use.

Hypocrisy? Not here.

I wonder what O'Reilly would think of that?

O'Reilly, which has a partnership with ActiveState, has a very interesting piece up about this IDE.

The O'Reilly has some details not found in the other two links, especially concerning the features and protocols supported in the IDE.

Building Linux Clusters is just what you should read.... Uncoftunately it won't be out until August.

>The Chapter Twenty Years of Berkley Unix: From
>AT&T Owned to Freely Redistribuatble by Mcusick &
>Co. does a very good job at describing the
>movement and development from the AT&T based
>Berkley Unix to the Free versions that we have
>today.

The full text of this article is available at http://www.oreilly.com /catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html

Does this book provide much more than that?

He really is a very cool guy, with a great view of the future, and an incredibly engaging thinker. I went down to see him wanting to evangelize him not just to recreate the old Mac desktop on Linux, but to think about how the web, and web-based services, was changing what user interface means in delivering applications today, and discovered that he was way ahead of me.

Andy has so much to share...lots of great experience with a previous revolutionary product, lots of great ideas about the future, and a real passion for open source. I can't wait to see what he and his team come up with. There's a really good chance that we're going to see something that's a real advance, not just playing catchup to stuff that Andy was part of designing 15 years ago.

However, Bruce Perens's chapter in the book Open Sources (you can read it online) contains a nice overview of the most common open-source licenses. That's probably the closest you'll get. Also, search /. for previous discussions on the subject (especially the Ask Slashdot section, eg this one). Who knows, you might find one or two helpful comments.

neutrino

Secrecy, intellectual property rights, and long-term, large-scale projects do not marry well with open source public announcements.

...and...

Motif is very much alive and well: it just isn't making public noise because that isn't the name of the game.

Perhaps the name of the game has changed?

Pretty funny and weird that they opensource the Motif monster after the not-that old Motif's not dead story featuring featuring that interview where that Motif guy explains how the "Motif community" is different from Open Source, being all about "Secrecy, intellectual property rights, and long-term, large-scale projects".

And now, OpenSource Motif ?! Wonder what happened to the great philosophy of the Motif community ? What do you mean, that community's been dead for ages ?? :)))

More seriously, we've been doing fine without Motif for a long time. There may be some interesting stuff in that source code but I wonder if somebody will take the time to read it and use it now that GTK and Qt are out there.

I hope you're not saying that CGI script is an invalid term. It is a script that conforms to the CGI protocol, not a script that implements the CGI protocol.

However, you're right; this question is clearly misstated. There is one clear favorite language for developing CGI scripts: Perl. You can write CGI scripts in virtually any language (that was the goal when defining the interface), but few people do. Not with CGI.

However, there are a wide variety of languages for web development, including Java (servlets and JSP), VisualBasic (ASP), PHP, ColdFusion's CFML, C/C++ (via NSAPI, Apache module), etc. Few people use these languages for CGI; each of these languages has its own respective interfaces for communicating with the server instead. (Incidentally, so does Perl: mod_perl or PerlEx.)

For more info:

• Original CGI spec
• CGI RFC Project
• O'Reilly's new Programming CGI (2nd Edition) to be published this summer (*cough* ;-)

CCVS was written by the guys at Hell's Kitchen Software which is now owned by RedHat. It's available for several OSen.

We use it at the dotcom where I work and it works pretty well. There are APIs for C, Java, Perl, PHP and Python and TCL. They guy who set ours up pretty much used their example code, grabbed the socket server code from the Perl Cookbook, added a few queries to our Oracle database and was good to go.

From what I hear, the support is pretty good as he's needed to call them a couple of times. I'm now supporting the software and I certainly haven't had any problems

Thank you. I'm currently reading the essay about so-called VHLL's, and it's interesting, so if I get the point I'll try to explain it. :)

But yes, note to moderators, take the time to read that sig of mine before you moderate. Call me "Troll, troll, TROLL" all you like in an Anonymous reply an ye must, but please back it up with some reasoning...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First off it disappoints me that these types of questions get posted here considering this was answered a little over two weeks ago with this article on Slashdot itself. Linux Clusters Explained But, hey what are you going to do?

The reason why I can see this coming up on Slashdot is because there really isn't a definitive guide out there that you can just kick back and read. \tangent\You would actually have to look. You know with a search engine or something. That's right "King Monkey" search engines exist.\/tangent\

Dun Dun DUN!!! That is until now. According to O'Reilly's site http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/clusterli nux/, they have a book in the works. And it should be out in August sometime.

But hey, don't let that stop anyone from actually searching for the information.

Okay, okay I'll stop picking on King Monkey and Cliff. We all love Slashdot anyhow.

The answers to your questions can be found here. It is a chapter written by Bruce Perens from the book "Open Sources".

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/pe rens.html

Specifically, scroll down to "Analysis of Licenses and Their Open Source Compliance". There is also a nice grid comparing the licenses.

Do we have any evidence that pushing kids to learn big concepts (reading, calculus, computer programming) helps them learn?

Computers, plus the support and training they require, are pretty expensive. Are we getting a big benefit from this big investment?

O'Reilly is coming soon (august --supposedely) with a book called Building Linux Clusters.

I think some of you are going to find it quite interesting.

Note that I am working on my PhD thesis in this field of research (specialized in MPI), and we have softwares available at : http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/savg/auto/ designed to help user work with data-types in MPI.

Please drop me a note at martial.michel@nist.gov if you desire more information on our project (we hope it will be added on the CD-Rom of the O'Reilly book).

O'Reilly is coming soon (august --supposedely) with a book called Building Linux Clusters.

I think some of you are going to find it quite interesting.

Note that I am working on my PhD thesis in this field of research (specialized in MPI), and we have softwares available at : http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/savg/auto/ designed to help user work with data-types in MPI.

Please drop me a note at martial.michel@nist.gov if you desire more information on our project (we hope it will be added on the CD-Rom of the O'Reilly book).

This sort of elitism is one of the reasons they have so few users (compared to linux), IMO

This kind of ignorance could only come from an Anonymous coward on slashdot. Time to dispel this sophistry as well. Voices from the Open Source Revolution Learn why those nasty Net/2 lawsuits crippled BSD from reaching the masses!

Spafford and Garfinkel wrote "Practical Unix and Internet Security," also a recommended read.

I gave up dB work a year or two ago. Maybe it was starting with MS Access and enjoying its compact, RAD, toy quality. Unscaleable and inapproriate for Enterprise stuff of course (and making no pretence to such garlands), but fast, small (well, the .mds were small if you compacted them) and fun.

The problem was the inevitable upgrade lead me to MS SQL Server 6.5 (I was stuck on NT at the time). SQL Server had a lot of stuff I was missing in Access - triggers, stored procedures, scaleability - but it also brought a lot of frustrations. The domain aggregate functions were poorer than those offered by Access, which was a pain as I was trying to roll my own OLAP before it all got proprietarized into a Babel of different buyouts and skill-subsets. Its big-iron feel didn't stop it having a ludicrous 255 byte limit on varchar fields. For bigger you had to futz about wastefully amalgamating BLOBs of text with READTEXT/WRITETEXT. Plus it was grotesquely high-maintenance. I didn't want to become a DBA. I just wanted to hack SQL. And wasteful. The 'devices' ('Honey, I bloated the database') were huge and couldn't be shrunk, no matter how svelte the actual data.

By the time I escaped the NT shop I was naively looking to Oracle to save me from these frustrations. Unfortunately, I'll never know the joys or horrors of that particular 'platform', because at 600 Mb for the Linux installation I just bailed out and cried 'Enough of this grotesquely bloated crap!' and pursued XML or BerkeleyDB solutions to anything remoteley persistence-flavoured thereafter. I knew that fast and small were synonyms, but the vendors were growing fat on the antonym line and there was nothing I could do about it. Even MySQL and PostgreSQL were part of the problem. They're all emacs. None of them are vi.

Recently I ran my periodic, wishful, wistful Google-grep for 'fast', 'small' and 'rdbms' and found myself, after rejecting Brian Jepson's TinySQL as ridiculously small and cute but strictly pedagogical, finally discovering The One.

Hypersonic SQL, a tiny Open Source Java database weighing in at less than 100K, supports correlated subqueries, transactions, referential integrity, indexes, stored procedures and JDBC - everything basically, but GROUP BY, cursors and triggers. I never used cursors myself. I'd rather iterate in Perl. The other two, admittedly are fondly missed, but not life-threatening. It doesn't support failover. But with such a small, developer-friendly codebase anything's possible.

Did I say 'Perl'? 'But it's a Java database', I hear you cry. How can this beast talk Perl? Well, it can't, which is why I'm working on a Perl DBI interface to it talking to a native driver over TCP/IP. If anyone wants to contribute (I wouldn't need to hack it if some brave soul wants to polish up the languishing JNI module in JPL to support embedding Java in Perl on Linux (currently it only works for Win32)), please get in touch. I'm almost certainly way out of my depth and entering a world of pain.

Oh, did I mention? It's 7 times faster than SQL Server.

Jon ends his essay with a challenge to traditional publishers, to "scrutinize itself and its culture, ... and yes, its models of distribution. That would truly be novel."

I don't think that traditional publishers are into introspection, but I can point out one "conventionally published" book that gained value from being on the web and enhanced the printed version.

Once upon a time I worked on the O'Reilly Samba book, which contained a chapter on troubleshooting. The largest part of this traditional chunk of paper was a trouble tree, derived from Andrew Tridgell's short paper on debugging Samba. A trouble tree, for those who haven't used one, is a bunch of numbered tests, with lists of outcomes. If the test succeeds, you're sent on to a particular page where the next test is described. If it fails, you're sent to a different page where there's instructions on what to do next.

I hear you saying "Aha!", don't I?

That's right, this was automagically converted into web pages and links, so you can just click to go to the right place. An example lives here.

The interactivity here is only moderate: the reader can traverse a pre-existing tree. By rights they should also be able to add annotations, hints to themselves and suggestions to the authors. And the web supports this, so it's at least possible...

However, even though the trouble tree isn't very interactive, it adds enough value that this section of the book is more convenient on the web than on paper. This is the first economic gain the user (and publisher) sees.

The next comes from making individual, bite-size sections available on the web. You can't read the book continuously, but my eyes hurt when I try to do that from a screen anyway. You can, though, go from Samba Book to Configuring Windows Clients to Setting Up Windows NT 4.0 Computers and review the steps you need, quickly and conveniently, before or during setting up a PC.

This is pure packaging: it's not interactivity at all. It's just a classical publishing truism: making it easy for the reader to find the information they need. A gain for the reader, and indirectly a gain for the publisher.

So now we can get to economics, and why my pocketbook likes having the book on-line.

O'Reilly tells me that Samba's selling well. People tell them they've referred to the book online and then bought copies. People tell me the same thing. Other people want to contribute corrections and updates, and have. This, to me, is wonderful: I'm both in a traditional market culture, hawking my book in town square for money, and in a "gift culture", contributing my time to making other people's work easier, and having them give me back their efforts to help the next person.

So I've added a little bit of human interactivity to the mix: like other folks with web pages, I follow the newsgroups and mailing lists, and when someone asks a newbie question that my work answers, I mail them a URL. And I get back replies like "Cool, I used your tip and I've bought the book".

So it fits my culture, and my publisher's actual and corporate culture. It nicely dodges questions of hierarchy, as I now don't have to ask the publisher's permission to mail sections to folks with problems. It's an adaptation of classical publishing techniques (trouble trees and packaging), and the editing and distribution models of the publisher adapt easily to the new medium.

For right now, I really couldn't ask for more.

Jon ends his essay with a challenge to traditional publishers, to "scrutinize itself and its culture, ... and yes, its models of distribution. That would truly be novel."

I don't think that traditional publishers are into introspection, but I can point out one "conventionally published" book that gained value from being on the web and enhanced the printed version.

Once upon a time I worked on the O'Reilly Samba book, which contained a chapter on troubleshooting. The largest part of this traditional chunk of paper was a trouble tree, derived from Andrew Tridgell's short paper on debugging Samba. A trouble tree, for those who haven't used one, is a bunch of numbered tests, with lists of outcomes. If the test succeeds, you're sent on to a particular page where the next test is described. If it fails, you're sent to a different page where there's instructions on what to do next.

I hear you saying "Aha!", don't I?

That's right, this was automagically converted into web pages and links, so you can just click to go to the right place. An example lives here.

The interactivity here is only moderate: the reader can traverse a pre-existing tree. By rights they should also be able to add annotations, hints to themselves and suggestions to the authors. And the web supports this, so it's at least possible...

However, even though the trouble tree isn't very interactive, it adds enough value that this section of the book is more convenient on the web than on paper. This is the first economic gain the user (and publisher) sees.

The next comes from making individual, bite-size sections available on the web. You can't read the book continuously, but my eyes hurt when I try to do that from a screen anyway. You can, though, go from Samba Book to Configuring Windows Clients to Setting Up Windows NT 4.0 Computers and review the steps you need, quickly and conveniently, before or during setting up a PC.

This is pure packaging: it's not interactivity at all. It's just a classical publishing truism: making it easy for the reader to find the information they need. A gain for the reader, and indirectly a gain for the publisher.

So now we can get to economics, and why my pocketbook likes having the book on-line.

O'Reilly tells me that Samba's selling well. People tell them they've referred to the book online and then bought copies. People tell me the same thing. Other people want to contribute corrections and updates, and have. This, to me, is wonderful: I'm both in a traditional market culture, hawking my book in town square for money, and in a "gift culture", contributing my time to making other people's work easier, and having them give me back their efforts to help the next person.

So I've added a little bit of human interactivity to the mix: like other folks with web pages, I follow the newsgroups and mailing lists, and when someone asks a newbie question that my work answers, I mail them a URL. And I get back replies like "Cool, I used your tip and I've bought the book".

So it fits my culture, and my publisher's actual and corporate culture. It nicely dodges questions of hierarchy, as I now don't have to ask the publisher's permission to mail sections to folks with problems. It's an adaptation of classical publishing techniques (trouble trees and packaging), and the editing and distribution models of the publisher adapt easily to the new medium.

For right now, I really couldn't ask for more.

My background: I'm a 2nd-year Chemistry/Physics/Web Site Design teacher and Assistant Technical Coordinator for Hamilton High School in Hamilton, Ohio. I've been using Macs for 6 years, PCs running Dos/Win3.1/Win9x/WinNT for about 7 years (on and off), VMS for about 5 years in college and Linux for the past 3 or 4 (I've only been trying to admin Linux for the past year or so). Our high school has a mix of hundreds of computers, mostly PCs running Win9x. We have two computer labs running WinNT Workstation 4.0 sp4 (a nightmare), several NT Servers (two of which I admin - NT isn't a bad print server or FirstClass server if you get all the extra crap off of it and don't run IIS; IIS resulted in all of our crashes while our main print/proxy server also served the school web site), and 3 Linux boxen (running various versions of RedHat (2) and Mandrake (1) - I'm currently too swamped to get into any other distro's, although we played with Corel for a while).

We've been running the school's web site pretty stably on RH for the past year or so, after inheriting a Pentium-90 Netware print server and replacing a couple parts here and there. I've been interested in Linux ever since I ran a couple large-volume websites in college for some rock bands (Smashing Pumpkins (unofficial) and Foo Fighters (official), among others), and I got into CGI/Perl. When I started working here, I had a Junior in my Chemistry class who was also signed up for the Web Site Deisgn class (which is an independent study course). After I found out he was a programmer, and did HTML/Javascript, I said "Do you know Perl?", which received a blank look. I then spent every day of the next two weeks after school with him and the llama books, showing him some of my old source and giving him 'assignments'. For a while, we did our CGI/Perl on MS's IIS, but it was such a nightmare that I would install Linux on any spare machine lying around and hope that it wasn't needed back soon!

Finally we got this P-90, which we upgraded, and we could start some serious CGI/Perl work. In October of this year, I got the idea that we could "computerize" our attendance, since we passed a levy and put a computer in every classroom. So, after some very very basic coding by myself, I set Doug on the project and more or less managed/coached him while we worked with SWOCA to get all of the attendance data prepared. This was a big deal - if you screw up attendance, the state will kill you and basically ruin your funding, among other things. We finally went live with the attendance script today, and we plan on releasing it under the GPL to other local districts. Of course, we're not going to port it - they'll have to set up a Linux server for it just like we did (we snuck out a Dell P3-450 that was waiting to be set up in a computer lab, formatted NT off of it and installed RH 6.1), but it will be there for their use. Maybe we're forcing Linux on them, but who cares, they should learn how to use it.

In doing all of this, several of my students have become interested in Linux. They borrow distro's, play around with a P2-266 running Mandrake 6.0 (which netscape seems to crash regularly), play around on the web server with the accounts I've given them, talk about their troubles/successes installing it at home, and generally act like geeks. They read User Friendly every day, and some of them have even started reading /. on occasion. The trick was to get them excited about it (they sometimes teach each other HTML and Perl during and after school - how cool is that?) and give them some space to play around with it.

Our future projects include upgrading/migrating the current web server to a faster machine, and starting a school-wide Samba server so that students can access their data from anywhere. I will say this, though: Microsoft (especially Office) still rules in this school and in the minds of IT professionals I've worked with in developing an IT pathway for students at our high school. Because of that, I'm going to be teaching A+/Network+ next year, and the year after that I may teach MCP. In the meantime, I expect Linux to get better and develop more support, and I really look forward to the day when we can start replacing labs with easy-to-admin Linux workstations with a slick Office clone. As more machines are rotated out of their life-cycle, more machines can be used as Linux boxen to re-introduce students to the reason they became interested in computers in the first place - they're fun, they're challenging, and when they work correctly, they can be really really cool.

-c

I'd be very interested in hearing the experiences of both authors and publishers about how well open licenses work for books. There are now at least three publishers that I am aware of who have published books that are licensed in whole or in part under an open license: O'Reilly, Coriolis, and New Riders. I am not counting the various publishers who have printed the Linux HOWTOs, Guides, manpages, etc. because those were not new material at the time they were published in printed form. For the same reason, I have also omitted the Free Software Foundation, which has been publishing printed copies of its own manuals for years.

Obviously, from the point of view of the publishers, it works well enough to stick their financial necks out to print the copies. It would be interesting to hear the pros and cons from a financial viewpoint. But what I really want to know is whether anyone has found a way to blend an open license with a print book in such a way that the open source community feedback has continued to improve the text after print publication. There are a lot of worthwhile documentation projects that are too big for a single person working part time on them. A positive answer to this question could encourage them to happen.

O'reilly already does this and their book on samba has been online for some time. It just got converted to HTML/PDF though.

O'reilly already does this and their book on samba has been online for some time. It just got converted to HTML/PDF though.

Another poster astutely identified updates and new editions as difficult areas. I think the license is not the problem here; logistics are. Samba developers and O'Reilly are still working out these logistics. That's a different story.

There was also a brief discussion of lots of related issues at the O'Reilly Web site:

http://forums.oreilly.com/~publishing

Er, he does.

I'm most familiar with the Samba book, where he and all three authors accepted Andrew Tridgell's suggestion of making it available as open source, but he's published several Linux open source books.

He does require the permission of the authors, you understand: they're the folks who own the books.

Did you look? How about Open Sources? Or Using Samba? Don't forget Learning Debian GNU/Linux. Maybe even Docbook: The Definitive Guide? (The latter is an O'Reilly book, but the downloadable version is hosted elsewhere.)

--

Did you look? How about Open Sources? Or Using Samba? Don't forget Learning Debian GNU/Linux. Maybe even Docbook: The Definitive Guide? (The latter is an O'Reilly book, but the downloadable version is hosted elsewhere.)

--

Did you look? How about Open Sources? Or Using Samba? Don't forget Learning Debian GNU/Linux. Maybe even Docbook: The Definitive Guide? (The latter is an O'Reilly book, but the downloadable version is hosted elsewhere.)

--

I agree that it's easy to set up. I thought that it would be a huge nightmare, but it actually turned out to be really easy.

However, it doesn't work like it *should*. I'm hoping that 8.10 will fix this. Apache's treatment of virtual servers is how I want Sendmail to treat them. Let's say that I have two domains: example.org and example.com. And I (waldo) want to get mail at each of those, but in separate POP accounts. And my mail server is named mail.example.com. I have to do this:

1. Let CW recognise example.org & example.com.
2. Get virtusertable to recognise waldo at both accounts and redirect them to separate accounts.
3. Create two system user accounts: example.org-waldo and example.com-waldo.
4. Give them shells of /bin/false.
5. Set up my mail program to check both accounts on mail.example.com with the two e-mail addresses, and have to outgoing reply-to set to the "real" address.

This is really ugly. I'm certain that there must be more elegant work arounds (probably involving MySQL), but I don't mind quite enough to get up to that.

What would be *way* nicer would be a setup where the domains are truly apart from one another. No redirecting accounts. mail.example.org and mail.example.com would be recognised differently by my mail server.

Now, I kind of got this working once, involving (*shudder*) linuxconf. I don't know how it worked, but there was all kinds of weird directories, like /vhome. But when I had to add a new account, wary of linuxconf, I ended up reinstalling sendmail and setting up a convoluted system like I've described above.

Hopefully, a more Apache-like system will come into being with 8.10. I can't take much more of this. :) BTW, do yourself a favour -- don't get the bat book. It'll only scare you. I mean, it's a great book, don't get me wrong, but it's just more information than you need to get a basic server up. You'll just get overwhelmed.

-Waldo

Yes. Easily. qmail with the vpopmail addon from Inter7 will make you wonder why you ever bothered to try and configure Sendmail.

You might also be interested in their qmailadmin addon which allows web-based management of domains, and sqwebmail which adds a hotmail-esque web interface for checking & sending email.

qmail is different than Sendmail, considerably so. But once you understand how it works, I think it's design is far superior to that of Sendmail. It's much more unixy, IMNSHO. There is ample evidence that qmail is considerably faster and less resource intensive than Sendmail, but what really made the difference for me was the security focus of qmail.

As I said, qmail is different from Sendmail, but there is a lot of contributed documentation available as well as commercial support. The qmail community is large, capable and very motivated. They do have one problem though, they don't have a 4-inch-thick O'Reilly book dedicated to their MTA...
...hmmm, maybe there's a reason for that!

I think you've missed Mr. Katz's point: actually publishing online and allowing citations and links really does mean relinquishing income from reprint, royalty and subsidiary rights. You're not limiting the viewer to just viewing your work: you're encouraging them to use it as part of a wider discussion, not all of which you own.

Allowing citations and links are important in order to get widespread public discussion, but destructive of one's hopes to republish your "collected works" later for additional income.

If you want to make money and have your work available on the net, grant only limited rights to the networked entity. O'Reilly did this with the Samba book, and therefor preserved my income from the dead-tree edition.

--dave

Hrmph. The "Please post your responses here" link at the bottom of the article should have been a link to this Slashdot discussion, instead of the O'Reilly forum.

The entire text of Open Sources can be found at the O'Reilly site. The excellent chapter on licenses is written by Bruce Perens. See:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/pe rens.html

He's gradually turning up the heat on Amazon. First it was a private exchange of email. Now it's an open letter and a petition. If that fails, maybe he will stop supplying Amazon. I doubt that it would hurt his business very much, as people buy O'Reilly because of their reputation and if Amazon don't stock them, they'll go elsewhere.

And please sign the petition

HH


Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.

If he decided that O'Reilly (the company) would no longer ship through Amazon, his company loses money. He is not the company, and other people have an interest in that money. Can you say shareholder lawsuit?

We like our independence at O'Reilly. Our customers like it as well, since it lets us serve them rather than the stockholders. Part of what has made O'Reilly so successful is that we don't chase quarterly earnings targets.

I posted my comment on Tim O'Reilly's An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos page and within an hour, nearly 200 new responses were posted on top of mine. If this rate keeps up, I think it will go a long way to convincing Amazon that they are headed down the wrong track. If we succeed in changing Amazon's course on these patents, it might set a precedent that will keep other companies from patenting the Internet to death. Tell everyone you know to go to this site and add their name to the list to keep up the momentum!

Patents like this are also incredibly short-sighted! The web has exploded because it was an open platform that sparked countless innovations by users. Fence in that platform, and who knows what opportunities will never come to light?

--

I've just started learning Python (I'm workin on another ORA book, Learning Python) but hope to use it for some Windows programming. The PythonWin environment is very easy to use. Look at www.python.org for more info.

HTH
>K

We can even estimate how long a system such as distributed.net would take to do it, actually doing it adds nothing whatsoever to the debate

Actually, it does. The EFF's building (and publishing the plans for) Deep Crack did more to show legislators and other non-techies the ridiculous nature of low limits on key lengths than any amount of mathematical discussion or mentions of Moore's Law ever could. Think of it as a great big clue stick.

("What? For $250K anyone can build a box that will break bank encryption in a day?" "Well, it'd cost less now, because the design is already done." "How can we fix this?" "Raise the key lengths.")

The problem with Usenet per se is that it's been co-opted. Dejanews doesn't even have "news" in their name any more, but it's still recognized as being what it is: A discussion tool. Just yesterday, I had someone at work ask "Hey, Andy, could we set up something like Dejanews." He didn't realize that there was an entire Usenet behind it, but it still had value to him.

Maybe the rule that "The Internet will route around problems" has a corrolary, where hard-to-understand technologies are routed around to the more easily understood presentations.

-Peace
Dave

actually this is the best place to start.


Why? The primary recommendation of that link is to go out and buy the book I linked.

Would you prefer a Fatbrain link instead?

Give O'Reilly credit - they have put the out-of-print edition of _Learning Perl_ online at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/cgi/

Handspring Visor (TM) + iSilo (TM) + The Perl CD Bookshelf = Perl Hacker's Reference Nirvana

I carry 6 books with me on Perl, along with the whole bundle of Perl docs that come with Perl itself, on my Handspring Visor with a memory expansion module. It's nice, fairly readable and usable, and searchable. I even read the XS tutorial while in the can. It took some ponderance and reflection, and what a better place to do it? :)

As for the search engine on the CD-- it's in Java, and I've gotten it working under Linux. IIRC, there are directions in the kit on how to get it working.

As for books in general, I'm working on getting more and more of them into my Visor, but I still tend to need a physical papery copy of it lying around. Electronic books (at least on the Visor) still haven't gotten the correct user interface details down to replace paper.

My current companion is DocBook: The Definitive Guide, so that I can be a DocBook XML expert while composing the massive body of documentation for my Open Source project. Try learning a new set of XML tags without flipping rapidly back and forth to see what's valid within what, what attributes are legal where, and what the hell is this?