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I don't need my graphics driver to necessarily be open-source. I need my graphics accelerator to function though

I don't need my printer driver to necessarily be open-source. I need my printer to function though - oh, I do need open source printer drivers for that...

Hi,

Well, you're going to need a presentation layer, which may or may not be obvious to you but HTML5 and JavaScript. You'll want to learn JavaScript but shortcut the process with jQuery and jQuery UI. And of course CSS3. So now you've got a pretty frontend, look and feel, behaviors, etc.

For the backend why not stick with Java? You know it already. If you're thinking PHP then that's fine too but stay away from the frameworks and shortcuts for PHP because they always end up becoming a burden down the road for upgrades, ongoing maintenance, and expansion.

I've had great luck with LAMP stack and with today's cloud bits and strong hosting providers, getting the infrastructure is easier than ever.

And if you're looking for books, try my JavaScript Step by Step book for JavaScript related (it includes jQuery too). O'Reilly has some good HTML5 material too.

Steve

I was also offended by the New Yorker cover, and I think Richard was too.

Nobody should be surprised that there was much that is negative about Steve. I do oppose Apple's way of business, which is high on DRM and control of the user. Were I writing the same piece, I think I could have said it better than Richard.

I think the saddest part is that Dennis Ritchie, who really invented the stuff of our modern world, died around the same time and in comparison to Steve, was unlamented.

I doubt there is a single person who knows about every aspect of IEEE 802.11.

There is. His name is Matthew S. Gast. Read this book and you'll have a solid foundation, too.

civilian instruments in space are dwindling

Are you sure about that?

What do you mean linux hasn't done the driver thing terribly well? Back in 2008 Linux had more device support than any other OS and I really don't see that changing. http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/10/how-linux-supports-more-device.html

You can write perl that looks like modem line noise, but you don't have to. Feature!

Specifically, it's a feature designed to let you write efficient one-liners. One-liner Perl is practically an entirely different language than 'application' Perl, and (IMHO) should be treated as such.

You don't have to make it hard to read or maintain, though some programmers do.

Even as a die-hard Perl programmer, I have to admit that Perl culture often encourages it. Perl Golf is an interesting intellectual exercise, but you shouldn't be playing it when writing production code. TIMTOWTDI is a powerful concept, but it gives you plenty of rope with which to hang yourself if you are undisciplined.

Adopting the mandatory use of perlcritic is a good first step towards managing Perl development. Perl Best Practices should be required reading for any modern Perl programmer.

How about this post? http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/03/computer-book-market-2011-part1.html?google_editors_picks=true

From the article:

A nice steady pattern for Java now. Growth in each of the previous three years. It is the 12th largest category overall and reached that same rank in 2011.

It seems like programmers are still buying Java books, so interest must be there.

So even you admit its the death of the whole "free as in beer" part of FOSS. And frankly it doesn't bother me, i use Windows where MSFT pays my license fee. what DOES bother me is frankly i don't believe the web should be locked down as we already saw what that got us with IE and all those damned proprietary formats like RMV and WMV. I had hope that the developers would stand their ground and refuse to support HTML V5 until a baseline codec was chosen that ALL could use without getting "pay your $699 license fee" but it looks like that is over.

I DO however find it funny as hell the "FOSSies", those that are the rampant fanbois of the FOSS world, can't even see the freight train barreling down the tracks. they had such a fucking hatred for Flash because it was buggy they are too fucking clueless to see what it is obviously gonna be replaced with has more ways to buttfuck them than SCO ever even dreamed of and you know what? Unlike SCO these patents WILL stick and royally assrape any chance of "free as in beer" remaining a viable option.

Personally I'm glad, maybe once free as in beer is thrown in the trash heap of history they will wake the fuck up and realize TINSTAAFL and maybe with all the major distros being forced to charge to pay their $699 license fees and to remove the right to redistribute (because MPEG-LA sure as fuck isn't gonna sell you a blanket license for shit) then MAYBE, just maybe, will the distros have enough funds to make a truly world class OS instead of constantly breaking shit. One can hope after all.

BTW isn't it funny that I get modded as a troll for daring to point out reality? Does ANYONE believe MPEG-LA is gonna be all warm and fuzzy to the Linux community, when it has over 2000+ patents that pretty much cover EVERY possible way to encode and decode video and has been willing to bitchslap anyone and everyone with a lawsuit if they don't pay their $699 license fees? pretty damned funny if you ask me that so many are blinded by their perception bubbles to see they just threw away the mangy old mutt that was friendly known as flash for a rabid pitbull that looks at their ass like a starving man looks at a T-Bone steak. Fucking stupid FOSSies are gonna get run over like a Mac truck and are too damned clueless to even see it coming, too fucking funny.

If you give a prospective employer your password, you're proving that you can't be trusted. Mike Loukides said it well.

Physics for Game Developers
Physics for Game Programmers
Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications, Second Edition: A Programmer's Guide [Hardcover]

Nothing that Google can't find. Programming language: C++ because the vast majority of examples are coded in it, plus it's fast and light if you don't get too stupidly abstract. Java if you want to write for Android. This particular application will work fine with very basic Euler integration: add the forces, divide by the mass, poof you have acceleration, integrate for velocity, integrate again for position, and shazam, physics.

Good God... I'm not even a Linux/UNIX geek and I knew how wrong you are.

Last friday Brent Crude Oil was trading at $126/barrel. This is near the all time high in modern history. We are already at the point where oil supply has become much less responsive to the price and price spikes are commonplace. It's a curious time for somebody to be declaring peak oil "debunked".

Oil is finite and the price of oil is getting exponentially more expensive as was predicted decades ago. Meanwhile, solar technology has been benefiting from a Moore's Law rate of advancement and the price of solar energy is plummeting exponentially. Even without cap-and-trade, the price of solar energy is projected to achieve grid parity by the end of this decade. Given prevailing trends, we can expect that people will use energy to make petrochemicals synthetically from the carbon in the air, using Green Freedom or some other such technology in the next 20 years.

Solar is the power source of the near future. If we embrace that fact now we can begin to adapt and avoid a huge amount of economic dislocation and suffering. Or we can get dragged into the future kicking and screaming and burdening the human race with massive ecological damage.

Oh please, before the App Store there was the option of self-publishing an app for an open OS, this is how most PalmOS apps

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/app-growth-palmos-vs-iphoneos.html

Because Win95 still rests on top of DOS, it relies on DOS memory: the so-called conventional memory below one megabyte. While almost all memory allocation by Windows programs comes out of extended memory above one megabyte, nonetheless every single Windows program -- even the newest Win32 program -- does still require a small amount of conventional memory, to hold a DOS data structure called the Program Segment Prefix (PSP). Every running Windows program must have a PSP. This structure is only about 300 bytes, but those bytes must come out of the memory below 1 MB, so that they can be visible to MS-DOS.

Besides undermining Microsoft's claims that DOS is gone from Win95, that each Windows program has a DOS PSP also means that Win95 can get wedged into "out-of-memory" situations, simply because all DOS memory below 1 MB has been allocated.

There's more, but that's what the links for. The simple layman's view is this - Windows was an app, and DOS was required to run that app, even on Win95+. The reason the DRDOS reference above was pertinent is because this was the reason that MS lost the suit. That you don't understand this, is probably because you bought this. The lesson you should learn from this is never take the word of a vested interest at face value. That's mistake #1 on your part, especially since finding it and referencing it took all of 2 minutes.

Now on to #2 of what you don't understand: From MS itself, Win2K (NT Kernel) is time-sliced, for all intents and purposes to 15ms. This has not really changed as far as I know even in the most recent kernel. (I was under the impression it was 16ms, since that is what shows on the clock, but perhaps there's a 1ms overhead in thread context switching, quite believable). In case you don't understand this particular topic either, what it means is that even if you yield() or sleep() a thread at the beginning of it's execution, windows won't activate another thread until the next time slice. Even more interesting is that at least for one application, the system clock calls during a time slice will always return the same exact long, indicating that the thread has certain restrictions put upon it, in windows at least. This is not the case with real OSes. (Yes, I do not hold MS or Windows in high regard, it's no secret.)

I hope I've opened your eyes just a little bit and taught you something, since you were apparently completely ignorant of these low-level pieces of information.

Douglas Crockford's JavaScript

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

Dynamic languages have different strengths and weaknesses than static languages. The best advice I can give you is: deal with it.

Best practice in a dynamic language includes automated unit tests for your code, for example. I don't use JavaScript so I can't tell you all the best practices and developer idioms for JavaScript, but I have heard that the best book is the O'Reilly reference book and that anything by Crockford is worth reading.

Note that lots of other Slashdotters are already giving you very similar advice to what I wrote.

P.S. Hmm, doing a Google search for "JavaScript best practices" found this: http://www.javascripttoolbox.com/bestpractices/

steveha

You might mention that the 4th Edition of "Programming Perl" is due out this month: Programming Perl. Lately, Tom Christiansen and brian d foy have been doing quite a bit of work investigating perl's support for Unicode. I'm interested to see this book if only to see what they say about it.

The Linux desktop went nowhere. 40K desktops in Spain, 14K in Munich and 90K by the French police are by themselves respectable numbers.

By that logic, the Apple desktop also "went nowhere", since there were no mass migrations of government departments to Apple computers. Or maybe there is another explanation? Maybe governments are very conservative in their IT procurement, and by default choose Microsoft, often without even bothering to consider other options? For obvious reasons, it is difficult to estimate the exact number of Linux desktop users, but according to Microsoft, Linux has a greater desktop share than the Mac. Here's are some interesting comments from a report from 2010: Debunking the 1% Myth

Apple tries to occupy a very different market. Linux has been pushed as the 'ideal' public service desktop for years and years and years.

FWIW I very, very much doubt Apple has less of a desktop/laptop presence than Linux. This is probably MS trying to downplay the importance of Apple in their (MS) home market.

Judging from all my acquaintances, I can tell you that: (about 10 years ago) when I started my PhD many of my colleagues used Linux at home. With the years, each and every one of them migrated to Apple. Many of the colleagues I had after my PhD, (people that work all day on Linux desktops) migrated from Linux to Apple 'at home' in recent years. The amount of people I know personally that runs Linux at home has only been shrinking.

The text you quoted talked about 'netbooks' running Linux. Suuure. How many *new* netbooks running Linux have you seen for sale in the last 2 years?

The Linux desktop went nowhere. 40K desktops in Spain, 14K in Munich and 90K by the French police are by themselves respectable numbers.

By that logic, the Apple desktop also "went nowhere", since there were no mass migrations of government departments to Apple computers. Or maybe there is another explanation? Maybe governments are very conservative in their IT procurement, and by default choose Microsoft, often without even bothering to consider other options? For obvious reasons, it is difficult to estimate the exact number of Linux desktop users, but according to Microsoft, Linux has a greater desktop share than the Mac. Here's are some interesting comments from a report from 2010: Debunking the 1% Myth

If we do the math we find that due to netbooks alone Linux captured nearly 6% of the desktop market in 2009. In order to reach a total number we need to add larger laptops and desktops both from companies like Dell, HP (their business line) as well as smaller boutique vendors.

Additional confirmation of the growth in Linux desktop market share last year came from an unlikely source: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Using a slide to visualize OS market share Ballmer had Linux desktop market share as a slightly larger slice of the pie than MacOS. Nobody considers Apple insignificant on the desktop and neither is Linux. Here is, in part, what Mr. Ballmer had to say about Linux on the desktop and the competition for Windows:

Linux, you could see on the slide, and Apple has certainly increased its share somewhat.

[...]

I think depending on how you look at it, Apple has probably increased its market share over the last year or so by a point or more. And a point of market share on a number that's about 300 million is interesting. It's an interesting amount of market share, while not necessarily being as dramatic as people would think, but we're very focused in on both Apple as a competitor, and Linux as a competitor."

Does anyone believe that Microsoft would see Linux as a serious competitor is Linux had captured just 1% of the market? That doesn't seem very likely, does it? All the figures I have quoted so far represent sales of systems preloaded with a given operating system: Windows, MacOS or Linux. They do not represent actual usage. If you go down to the local brick and mortar computer shop or big box retailer, buy a system with Windows, wipe the hard drive and install Linux that still counts as a Windows system, not a Linux system.

It's not like one could develop an OS kernel based on some documented open API.

One of the first design goals for Linux was following POSIX, even though the standard was too expensive for Linus. While standards like POSIX and TCP/IP don't directly state how an OS kernel must be written, wanting to comply with them does shape the basic form the kernel needs to take.

If you read the Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate thread, one of the recurring themes there is that even having easily available source code (as MINIX did) isn't enough. One of the necessary components to growing a software community is one or more maintainers willing to incorporate changes from contributors. And that's where these web service oriented companies fail the worst.

There are a host of good IPv6 books here, all reasonably priced.

Only language we ever needed was C. You putzes just aren't using it right. /flamebait friday!

I very much agree with this, even though it is tongue in cheek. C/C++/ObjectiveC is a good language for both low level, and high level. If one needs to, just write modules on it that one can use. Instead, we have a real proliferation of languages and scripts that confuse the hell out of me - Basic, Fortran, Pascal, Perl, Bison, Java, Javascript, .NET, C#, Python, Ruby, PHP, ASP, MVC, ASP, Ajax, Roo, Swing, Sinatra, Rails, SGML, HTML, XML, XHTML, QML, Qt, GTK, ECMAScript, Jenkins, and God knows how many more?

And Neil McAllister thinks it's not enough? Seriously, can anybody learn all the above languages?

So since I have had one of the early ebook devices (Sony prs) I have always had to look for ebook stores outside of the big 3 that are linked to the devices. Here are some of the ones where I shop:
no starch press
fictionwise
wowio - graphic novel ebooks
oreilly technical books
smashwords
Baen web scription
the ENTIRE Vorkosigan Saga

In hindsight, perhaps, this is all clear. At the time, would you have bet your house on the proposition of 386BSD remaining unscathed if the BSDi lawsuit had come to a different outcome? But wait, I have a reference.

From Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution:

Like the other groups, they started by adding the six missing files that Bill Jolitz had written for his 386/BSD release. ... At the preliminary hearing for the injunction, BSDI contended that they were simply using the sources being freely distributed by the University of California plus six additional files. They were willing to discuss the content of any of the six added files, but did not believe that they should be held responsible for the files being distributed by the University of California [which 386BSD also used, one would think]. The judge agreed with BSDI's argument and told USL that they would have to restate their complaint based solely on the six files or he would dismiss it. Recognizing that they would have a hard time making a case from just the six files, USL decided to refile the suit against both BSDI and the University of California.

Yeah, totally clear how 386BSD was free and clear of the legal fog of war. And a huge debt owed by everyone to Marshall Kirk McKusick and friends who fought this battle on our behalf while Linux thrived under the legal radar.

In my own view, Linux had a crazy-making anthill culture, which appealed to many young coders with more energy than brains. But you know, I wouldn't bet against energy in retrospect. The annual ipchains rewrite boggled my mind. Not my cup of tea. An even crazier splinter group made hay with PHP, breaking just about every rule of thoughtfulness and elegance known to God and man. And look where that got them: pretty damn far.

I would personally, however, have jumped on the BSD wagon at the time had it been able to promote a coherent vision of life after lawsuit. What would be the balance be now if BSD had gathered twice as many elitist greybeards into the fold? I have a feeling it would have continued to lag in the department of crappy consumer product device drivers, compromising a major defection path from Windows 98. Greybeards don't do popularity worth a damn.

Debian zealots notwithstanding, Linux quickly became popular enough to become a willing host for binary blobs.

This has just appeared: On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan

Two questions:

1- Who but a knuckle dragging moron would accept a software license and then try to sue the software's creator?

2- Why is this clause evil when it's software from Apple, but not a problem when it's from the Apache Foundation?

Okay, here are at least some closer links.

Starting here: http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/appb.html

1. "In 1990 the MIT Museum put together a journal documenting the hacking phenomenon." (Aka, not just 'someone on the internet but MIT producing their own journal.)
2. "The first self-described computer hackers of the 1960s MIT campus originated from a late 1950s student group called the Tech Model Railroad Club. A tight clique within the club was the Signals and Power (S&P) Committee-the group behind the railroad club's electrical circuitry system. The system was a sophisticated assortment of relays and switches similar to the kind that controlled the local campus phone system. To control it, a member of the group simply dialed in commands via a connected phone and watched the trains do his bidding. "
3. "By the end of the 1950s, the entire S&P clique had migrated en masse over to the TX-0 control room, bringing the spirit of creative play with them. The wide-open realm of computer programming would encourage yet another mutation in etymology. "To hack" no longer meant soldering unusual looking circuits, but cobbling together software programs with little regard to "official" methods or software-writing procedures."

And from there, the rest is easier.

The well-known author of O'Reilly's Learning Perl was caught testing an open source password cracking package on Intel's intranet while doing consulting work there in the '90s. Intel didn't find it interesting in the same way Schwartz did, and a nasty legal battle ensued.

IIRC one of the harvested passwords was "Pre$ident", from an ambitious Intel VP.

Your translation is totally wrong. I don't want or need to use Linux or Mac OS or any other OS apart from Windows, because Windows does everything I need it to do, has the largest availability of software, hardware, hardware support (drivers) and games. I would only suffer with Linux if I was skint, or if in my naivete I was trying to make a futile and stupid anti-capitalist point.

Let's see here... your point of you not needing anything other than Windows is valid to yourself but does not necessarily apply to everyone else at all. Given that:

1. Largest availability of software: I find it significantly easier to find and use software on Linux these days (largely because so much of it is free and still good quality, but also just a good package manager is huge on this). Commercial software varies a bit as well, though I will admit that there are some important packages that really only come to the same caliber on Windows (which I don't really understand when discussing the several that run on Linux, Mac, and Windows).
2. Largest availability of hardware and hardware support (drivers): No. Further interpretation of "availability of hardware and hardware support (drivers)" can be more complicated, but you don't do that.
3. Games: Overall, I will give you that one, though there are a lot of games available on Linux as well (just not as many big named ones).

It's not always the case with tech books. The slender lorises will never be obsolete.

The other big thing that I would love to have in a database is ability to scale the database to multiple machines, so have a logical database span multiple disks on multiple machines, have multiple postgres processes running against those multiple disk

This exists for Postgres in the form of Yale's HadoopDB project: http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/hadoopdb-an-open-source-parallel-database.html

HadoopDB is comprised of Postgres on each node (database layer), Hadoop/MapReduce as a communication layer that coordinates the multiple nodes each running Postgres, and Hive as the translation layer. The result is a shared-nothing parallel database, that business analysts can interact with using a SQL-like language. [Technical details can be found in the following paper.]

as well as for commercial forks of Postgres such as EMC's GreenPlum.

Affero GPL does not meet the conditions of the FSF's Free Software definition. In particular, it fails on Freedom 0. A few years ago, they never would have approved this, but they took an uncharacteristically pragmatic turn and decided to ignore their ethics in favor of achieving a result they desired that could not be achieved with Free Software licenses alone.

The basis of the FSF's definitions are their view that it is unethical for one to have a program but not have the ability to use it, study it, and modify it. When the program is on someone else's server, you don't have it, so the ethical issues do not arise. As Stallman once explained:

a proprietary program on a web server that somebody else is running limits his freedom perhaps, but it doesn't limit your freedom or my freedom. We don't have that program on our computers at all, and in fact the issue of free software versus proprietary [only] arises for software that we're going to have on our computers and run on our computers. We're gonna have copies and the question is, what are we allowed to do with those copies? Are we just allowed to run them or are we allowed to do the other useful things that you can do with a program? If the program is running on somebody else's computer, the issue doesn't arise. Am I allowed to copy the program that Amazon has on it's computer? Well, I can't, I don't have that program at all, so it doesn't put me in a morally compromised position

He's talking about proprietary programs there, but that doesn't make a difference. His point applies to any software running on someone else's server.

Perl has regexes. It also has a really twisted OO system -- elegant in its own way, but I don't know why you'd choose that if you have alternatives. It has ugly syntax, even when you know what you're doing. Anti-patterns are the default -- like, say, ignoring errors unless you explicitly handle them.

This criticism that used to apply 15 years ago, but is not really relevant anymore. The Perl community has gone to great lengths to address these things.

For OO, nowadays there is Moose, which is an excellent and extremely capable OO framework for Perl. Please check it out if you like.

For the anti-patterns, please note that strict mode is now the default on Perl 5.14 and I cannot think of a modern library ignoring errors by default. The error ignoring behavior is there for a bunch of built-in stuff that needs to maintain compatibility with old code, but you can, and are encouraged to, include the autodie pragma to change even that behavior.

About the syntax, it's probably a matter of personal taste, so I can't say anything about that. But I believe that personal taste doesn't have to do with whether you know what you're doing or not.

Lastly, writing Perl doesn't mean that your code has to be ugly and error-prone. May I suggest Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices, which IMHO is an excellent book with recommended coding practices.

Hope this helps!...

I'm more than a little tired of newbies who think the attacks are coming from the outside in the form of script kiddies and port scans. The attacks are coming from the INSIDE, by fully authorized users who face little if any opposition. The absolute HIGHEST RISK is the disgruntled worker who fears being outsourced and keeps a nifty supply of sensitive material on a USB drive. Ironically, the IT workers who build these "secure enterprise networks" are among the biggest security threats.

And when someone implements this at the request of the CEO/CIO because a disgruntled employee or outright spy just walked off with trade secrets on a USB thumb drive, who gets blamed? Not the CEO/CIO. Not the spy. No, it's "those mean draconian IT guys."

Have you ever heard of Gmail with a POP3 client? Sheesh.

And that Gmail account is one keylogger on an infected machine somewhere (perhaps on, say, the courtesy desktops in a hotel's "business office"), or some intelligent, slow-running dictionary attack, or idiot who can't be bothered to keep a secure password, away from being wide open.

Speaking of hotels: I never, ever, ever use those fucking "courtesy desktops." I've seen what gets onto them.

This may come as a surprise to you, but my 2 kids and 498 of their colleagues have the same number of computers as your "enterprise network of 500 desktops". They accomplish more of what they set out to do than the average corporate employee -- with a lot less BS.

I hope they aren't carrying sensitive data on those desktops. Oh, btw, your kids' credit card info (or yours if you let them buy something online), social security number, and everything else about him that someone might need to steal his/her identity is right fucking there out in the open. As is the info of your kids' 498 friends, because they don't fucking pay attention before clicking on "free puppy screensaver" and all that other shit.

I've thought that the reason for the triumph of the bourgeoisie in Europe is that in the middle ages, the aristocracy needed the products of the towns -- but the towns didn't need the aristocracy, and managed to obtain some independence of the aristocracy. This meant that, later on, when there were direct clashes, the aristocracy could never win, because they depended upon the products of the towns to control the towns.

So, I've thought that by analogy, if we want to move past capitalism, we want to develop facets of the economy which are socially owned, upon which capitalism will come to depend, but which do not depend upon capitalism. And it occurred to me that there are only a few entities in evidence that look like this, and the strongest (and the one I could most likely find a way to play a part in) was free software.

About the time I was thinking this, I was reading Free Software, Free Society and Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. The former appealed to my radical left sensibilities (and my hankering for heterodoxy), and the latter, while a good read, irritated me in that almost every essay made a point of stating that open source software was not socialist.

It occurred to me, however, that if the idea I had in mind was to work at all, it would be necessary to both maintain the independence of free software, and to encourage businesses and governments to use it; thus, some sort of compromise between the (apparent) two approaches would be necessary.

Not to mention that any user can root the iOS device, trivially. "Jailbreak" is fine if you're a home user chafing at Apple's restrictions, but rooted devices are a fucking nightmare if you're corporate security trying to make sure that things don't join the network loaded full of intrusion tools.

And I can hear the cries from dickwads, just like the last time we had this discussion, "well just make your network secure then and you won't care what's on it and I can run what I want." By that logic if we have a "secure" airport, as you said, a guy with a trenchcoat and 20 guns is no big deal because the airport is "secure", right? Wrong, because part of the security is keeping the fucker with a trenchcoat and guns outside the airport and away from the planes.

Corporate espionage is real. It happens. If you've got a contract with some Chinese company, it's already happened to you even if you don't know it yet. If you're the leader in your industry, or even second tier with some interesting patents or designs, someone is looking to get their hands on them.

Imagine if you will a company that implements this. No USB storage allowed. Users cry bloody murder. A ton of whining and groaning. Nobody thinking to ask WHY it happened - because someone in the middle level of the company, someone who had been one of those espionage artists getting paid money to steal trade secrets, carted off sensitive material in a USB stick.

From Free as in Freedom

After briefly introducing himself as a visitor from MIT, Stallman requested a copy of the laser-printer source code so that he could port it to the PDP-11. To his surprise, the professor refused to grant his request. "He told me that he had promised not to give me a copy," Stallman says.

And so Stallman could not improve the printer. Perhaps a small innovation that time, but having to constantly reinvent the wheel is certainly holding the software industry back.

Hopefully Adobe updates Square as it is still at version 10.1.

Well, they finally committed to a 64-bit release on Linux this year, so yeah, Windows ought to be up soon.

I'll paraphase the same things here that I said to Bruce and Bradley Kuhn on the post itself. I agree that any individual developer (i.e. not protected in their participation/contribution to the FOSS licensed project by an employer) needs to consider what they're about to do. But there's a corollary to Tim O'Reilly's version of freedom 0: It is up to any contributor to understand the terms under which they are contributing to a FOSS project.

I understand why some people feel that assignments and contribution licenses can be a barrier. I also know that as VP, R+D at Softway and then a PUM at Microsoft, I happily assigned code to the FSF for our gcc changes, and paid a contracting company with a committer to get the changes back upstream as a more efficient way than attempting to negotiate each change into the set across diverse gcc projects without the depth of reputation.

The Harmony core team have tried to provide a set of agreements that are very simple in what they state and the language used to state it, as well as the supporting guidance and FAQ, so developers that encounter them will hopefully have a better chance of understanding what they're signing regardless of whether they choose to involve counsel or not.

We live in a world where well run FOSS projects are transparent. Organizations that choose to abuse trust in the FOSS world generally get caught out and punished by a lack of participation. I still believe the Harmony documents are a better solution to the narrow problem they attempt to solve than the free-for-all we currently enjoy.

My participation in Harmony was very much as a foundation. Outercurve is a 501(c)(6) and not a (c)(3). Many of the companies and universities I engage with do still care about a legally "stricter" environment. Yes - it's a perception, but I need to work with it regardless. I can't just educate them all past their perceptions any more than we can educate everyone to support the idea of software freedom. If the Harmony agreements are a tool for me to improve the situation as I work with corporate counsel less familiar with the breadth and history of FOSS IP management, then I'm a supporter.

this isn't a radical concept... I've done it for years. It's called "zero inbox". If you're a Sys Admin, I highly recommend this book: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007836 It covers the idea, and it's where I picked it up.

Some of you may be interested in this presentation that was recently given at Velocity - has some good stats about the big three smartphones - http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/60/iOS%20vs_%20Android%20vs_%20Blackberry%20%E2%80%93%20Bakeoff%20Presentation.pdf

From my understanding, 5MB is the default, and if it grows the user is prompted to allow the increase. That may be just for databases though, I haven't personally tested it.

See: http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596805784/ch05_id35816678.html

There are places that sell eBooks without DRM at all (Baen is one of the ones that comes to mind and would appeal to a lot of people on /.)

O'Reilly as well. Slashdotters are familiar with them already, and if a publisher puts this backing behind their entire product offering, it sends a strong statement.

Can you recommend other articles that have a better take on it? I'm fascinated by this stuff, but I find it difficult to explain to people why this is useful, and why it's a growing field.

This is one from O'Reilly that is decent.

O'Reilly offers the book for sale in a variety of DRM-free ebook formats if you prefer to read it that way: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805531/

There is only one Camel Book

You might want to check out O'Reilly's Beautiful Code. It has the same goal as TFA.

Available online:

• Chapter 2 about Subversion's delta editor, written by Karl Fogel.
• Chapter 24 about Software Transactional Memory, written by Simon Peyton Jones.

part of it? how?

he's in fucking jail yet the administrators still can't login to the web?

SPOF? what if he was the only person QUALIFIED to run the system.. ?

http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/coverage-of-terry-childs.html

These were typeset with the FREE TeX and uses the FREE Computer Modern Roman fonts. The previous edition was typeset with FrameMaker and uses Adobe's Sabon fonts.

I had a free (as in torrent) copy of the previous version, but I couldn't read it knowing that it had been typeset with non-FREE software.