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"But now you've described a lot of Apple's value-add, and frankly why they're a 10 billion dollar company. That stuff is really, really hard. Not that linux coders aren't up to the task, but to coordinate all that would be a nightmare.

And likely, if any programmers showed such facility for herding the cats and whipping up some inter-app processes, they'd be snapped up in a VC minute by Apple or MS."

I've already covered this a long time ago (as an AC naturally). That's why OS code is done the way it is. Open standards, and open API's, plus the "one thing, does one thing well" mantra makes it easier for all the disparete pieces to fit together (1). That's why you see the heavy emphasis on modularity, like plugins, and "buses" (DCOP, CORBA, etc), as well as language bindings. Plus the new push for XML this (GConf), and XML that e.g. XUL(2), XAML, FLEX means that change (always a constant) is accomidated more easily without breaking things.

(1) Note the power of OSS is in it's distributed nature. That by necessity means that it will not be built the same way as proprietary (everyone in the same room) code.

(2) Note the development process.

while i will agree that wep is less secure, i found these comments to be very interesting. if you are up to date on firmware patches, wep might be enough for you.

if you are trying to protect missile launch codes, i might look elsewhere, but for day-to-day crap...

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered SCO community when IDC confirmed that SCO market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that SCO has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. SCO is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by Accelerating GNU/Linux Adoption in Fortune 1000 companies by filing their lawsuit against GNU/Linux distributions.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict SCO's future. The hand writing is on the wall: SCO faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for SCO because SCO is dying. Things are looking very bad for SCO. As many of us are already aware, SCO continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood; the only prop to the entire edifice is from licensees who sought to use the lawsuit to their own advantage.

All major surveys show that SCO has steadily declined in market share. SCO is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If SCO is to survive at all it will be among OS know-nothings who get licenses from SCO out of fear. SCO continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, SCO is dead.

Fact: SCO is dying

AFAICT it compresses better than JPEG, is patent-free, also compresses selected areas of the image [big PDF, see part 6] differently for better effect, and (hooraw!) believes in an Alpha channel and other "sideband" information.

• I once had high hopes for Linux. I felt sure it could make a real contribution to the success of humanity, now more and more I have my doubts. I have a real and growing fear that if the Mr. Smith's of Linux have their way, in the future they will look back and say: "Wasn't it nice that so many smart people worked to hard for free to forge their own chains."

I'm mainly interested in the SAP and mySQL connection because I simply didn't know about it until I read this. I know it is a bit offtopic, but I recently attended ASUG 2004 (America SAP User Group) and I posted news about it to my site. Perhaps you'll be interested.

JavaScript, DOM, and Page Reloads

Usability Interview with David Clark of TandemSeven

More Observations on ASUG 2004

ASUG 2004 and RFID

The way I see it the key factor for getting Linux onto the desktop as a consumer OS is that I should be able to walk into a high street electronics shop, buy a digital camera (or printer, scanner, video digitiser, graphics tablet &c) and have it just work when I plug it in to my PC. At most I should have to put a CD in the CD drive which will automatically start up the driver installation program which will require no more than clicking next a few times and deciding whether I want an icon put on my 'Start Menu', Desktop or both.

People are used to the Windows way of doing things. Whilst the Linux drivers for a lot of devices are becoming more common that level of ease of use is not currently available with any distro I've come accross.

Fortunately there is a project (Project Utopia) aimed at providing that. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of publicity about it outside the blogs of the authors and a few forum posts and geeky website articles. Last night I atteneded a Linux user group meeting in Birmingham (Eric Raymond was due to speak but got called away at the last minute so someoneelse delivered the talk), of the 70 odd people in the room only two or three had even heard of this project. Hopelyfully this will change as one of the developers will be speaking at OSCON about it this year.

Stephen

Those are great articles. Thanks.

Python as a first language

Why Python? by Eric Raymond, who wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I also like this article because I think Perl is a mess and I am glad to see someone else saying that.

"If I have seen further than other men, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"

Well, kind of like you, lifting most of your points from Lawrence Lessig's Keynote from OSCON 2002, all of which also made their way into his book The Future of Ideas.

I'm not trolling here, i just figure you might want to attribute some of these ideas.

great googley goodness http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2002/11/2 7/sms.html

Author and Editor's Note: Networking was never supposed to be hard -- but it is. At best it's an annoyance, at worst it's a show stopper. Granny May's got her new printer and after hooking it up, she just can't get it to print across the network, damnit. But an emerging standard, Zeroconf, just might help networking become what we've always wanted it to be: easy.

What company is it, prey tell?

I don't want to say exactly, since we were a SCO partner in the past and it seems like that's the best way to get sued by them, but I will say that we're one of the companies listed under the Linux section of this post, which has a copy and paste of the summaries of their case studies from their website.

I actually went and checked SCO's website to see if I could find the page of their Linux case studies there, but it seems like they've removed them all within the past month or so.

Actually, Yahoo uses PHP. I would think that Yahoo would be a much bigger test than CNN.com, seeing as how it's the #1 site on the Net.

The current localization efforts are so lame. I want my language skins. Please...

The other major time saver I use are sed and awk. I used each for a specific purpose. Sed works great for substitution, and awk I use to grab columns of data. Here's a sample of how I'd use both together. This will list the home directories of the users on a machine. It's simple, but there's a ton you can do with this technique.

who | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | sed 's@^@/home/@g'

Actually, you don't need awk, sed, sort or uniq to do that. You can use perl for everything:

who | perl '-laneprint$F[0]' | perl '-eprint sort<>' | perl '-ne$_{$_}++||print' | perl '-pe$_="/home/$_"'

Same thing, but without using awk, sed, sort or uniq at all.

Here's other stuff I have grouped by sections in my .cshrc

If you are programming in a csh-like shell and you are not reading comp.unix.shell you might want to take a look at this post by Tom Christiansen for a nice description of everything you should make sure to be especially careful with.

Amazon is at the top of list list for silly patents.

So then it is ok for the company to violate the GPL?

I can't find the source any where on their flash filled site, they have edited the code, and it sounds like they gave no credit to the original authors.

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/wlg/1124

And don't get me started on that liberal congress. If the Republicans controlled both houses, things would be different...

Troll...

Yukihiro Matsumoto (the creator of Ruby) has frequently and often stated that one of the reasons to program in Ruby is that it is fun. And I quote: "Fun is the most important thing in the world... Ruby makes programming fun."

This book could fit perfectly into that when it is done. Therefore I think I'll reserve judgement until later. Especially since Why's web site is the only geek site I've ever recommended to my non-geek friends just because it's so amusing and fun to read.

life hacks notes by cory doctorow (more at bottom)
"It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10 seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the simplest interface we can imagine."
"Power-users don't trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can't trust software unless you've written it -- and then you're just more forgiiving.
Text files are portable (except for CRLF issues) between mac and win and *nix.
Geeks will try the Brain, etc, but they want to stay in text."

The implementation you are taking about - Rotor - is also ported to support Mac & Linux

Nothing interesting about that article at all, it's a bunch of anti-Apple propagandist tripe that CNet posted despite lacking the balls to attach a byline to it. It's FUD, pure and simple.

Fact of the matter is, Dell apparently couldn't do what Virginia Tech wanted for as cheap as Apple could-- because they did have the opportunity. And while you need an army of highly-paid, professional specialists to assemble that Dell supercomputer, Virginia Tech's Mac supercomputer was assembled by student volunteers who were "paid" with free pizza.

While each project will continue to deliver software in their own way, the coordination between projects will:

• accelerate the development efforts of all projects
• avoid unwanted duplication of effort
• improve the consistency, quality, and responsiveness of ports

Here's an article on O'Reilly about running BEA WebLogic 8.1 on Mac OS X. Works nicely but you need plenty of memory -- no different from running WebLogic anywhere :) ).

Haven't tried to run Workshop yet. Good luck!

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4091

Have you seen this?

Hey! They should be offering a prize to the best low-cost, low-risk tech to save Hubble.

We'd better watch out for Masachusett as well then. Gee, a US state government forcing agencies to use Linux and exclufing MS from even bidding. Those anti-American, uh, American swine!

Today IE5 for Mac OS is a crumby browser compared to modern offerings such as Apple's Safari, Camino/Firebird, and OmniWeb but back near the turn of the millennium Internet Explorer 5 for Mac OS was praised far and wide as the best browser EVER for Macintosh systems, and arguably the best browser on any platform.

Here is a review at O'Reilly's Mac Developer Center (which has some geek-credit here) where they praise thinks including:

- Blending into the newly released OS X Aqua look
- The "page holder"
- Font controls
- CSS1/2 support
- PNG Support (which is still broken on windows)
- HTML4 support

Here's one over at macworld that decries it as the best thing since jesus as far as os x browsers are concerned. IE was very impressive, unfortunately Microsoft let it stagnate which hurt all mac users - choice is good.

Another article from 2000 that speaks to the quality of the MacIE.

Which makes one wonder about the motives of someone who would post such an inane comment actively encouraging such small minded thinking ("we don't use their license, we don't like them, so why should we cooperate!") ... unless you are someone who feels threatened by free software in general, or people who differ from your vision of free software in particular, and therefor prefer fragmentation over cooperation.

And, frankly, I can understand why some people are a little pissed of, even if I don't share their feelings. From the point of view of a developer using a BSD-style, permissive license, GPLed code is just as impossible to integrate as proprietary code is, so there already is a schism in "the community". Cooperation between GPL and BSD (or rather, copyleft and permissive) projects is effectively a one-way street.

Model it after Battlebots or the DARPA Grand Challenge. Let entrants audition their robots in the same groundside Hubble-repair simulations used by Astronauts. Give the best entrant a ride to Hubble to make real fixes.

More discussion at Send Asimo to Save Hubble and Hubble Rescue Battlebots .

Model it after Battlebots or the DARPA Grand Challenge. Let entrants audition their robots in the same groundside Hubble-repair simulations used by Astronauts. Give the best entrant a ride to Hubble to make real fixes.

More discussion at Send Asimo to Save Hubble and Hubble Rescue Battlebots .

The Knoppix Remastering howto page is here. The howto walks you through building your own customized, Knoppix-based distribution and also has a link to a page about customizing the Knoppix kernel itself. I also recommend an O'Reilly article that gives another overview of the remastering process.

I would love to see the length of pringles cans used to make the WiFi antenna to get that signal back to earth.

O'Reilly ran an article on it.

http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/4370

JPEG2000 can compress lossless bitmap images more than zip/lzw tiffs, by a factor of 2 or more. It's great for archiving, but slow to create files. Quicktime has decent support for both lossless and lossy compression. I'm running out of disk space fast, and am looking into any archiving solution I can.

Perl also doesn't support Windows directly like Python does - if you want Perl in Win32 you pretty much have to go with ActiveState whereas Python.org has a Win32 specific distribution.

FUD. Following Gary Ng's port of the source code to Win32, Gurusamy Sarathy began releasing a binary distribution of Perl, and so did ActiveState.

At some point they realized that it would be a benefit to Perl and Windows if they merged the distributions and gave Windows users a single place to go to get Perl with an installer and the most common packages installed.

This has been nothing but beneficial, as most IT managers of Windows shops feel better installing something with a company name attached to it, and an installer.

I don't think that ActiveState has ever been anything but good to the Perl community, and it's a shame that you imply that they're involved in some murky shadow plot.

Robots have gotten quite sophisticated. It has been suggested that even something like Honda's anthropomorphic concept-robot ASIMO with grasping hands with four fingers and a thumb may be something that could be made to swap Hubble's gyros and batteries.

guess it answers this question (Does Perl Have a Future?) posed by Brian d foy.

perl has some neat text processing capabilities (munging), regex, unicode and CPAN. I wonder if you can gain access to CPAN from your phone?

These are the Merit award winners. The Grand Master and Special Awards be announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

That having been said, these projects definitely deserve their awards. I only have experience with VideoLAN, and it's an awesome piece of software.

The committee allows nominations from the public any time, here, so go nominate your favourite project or Open Source person today! ;)

I was sure this got posted to slashdot, but wasn't able to find a link to it. Anyway, here's Tim O'Reilly's "Wired News Wishes for 2004": http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4117 At the end of the article, he quotes Rael Dornfest, author of Google Hacks and the mobilewhack, with that same exact plead.

I wish I did have a better analogy, but unfortunately, I don't!

Describing software in terms of physical goods leads to some convoluted thinking, though. Consider donating software licenses to a school. Is that really worth $x million?

Now consider developing software. Linus started writing a terminal emulator and, a decade later, that project ran on huge mainframes, embedded chips found in consumer machines, and everything in between. Sure, that took a lot of time and, yes, he rewrote a lot of code along the way, but the fact that software isn't physical makes it possible. (If you don't care for the terminal emulator as a starting point, replace it with "a simple Unix workalike for the best x86 technology 1990 had to offer". The example still works.)

He couldn't have turned a diorama into a multi-level museum that way. That's why I think the analogy is flawed. It seems to focus on the irreducible complexity that comes from a building being a physical entity. I don't think that applies very well to software.

Maybe I'm being too picky, though. It happens. :)

Owen Densmore covered this in his O'Reilly blog last year - he checked /usr/dict/words against DNS, to see how many words werent taken. There were only 43 4-letter words left from the .com namespace, junk like "frib", and "odso".

There were a few thousand 5- and 6- letter words left, but again, all pretty uncommon words: "upwaft.com" or "bepity.com" anyone? Most 'real' words are claimed by someone, somewhere, and the only option for making a name that uses words people know is to make one up by sticking words together, or letters and words together.

-Baz

Yeah, it is a great price for an IT conference, but travel costs, not conference price (and definitely not content) are why I would go to Vancouver over Amsterdam.

Besides, aren't conferences just a lame alternative for those of us who weren't invited to go camping

-TekZen

After a bit of thought, I've decided that if I wrote pieces for my 12th grade english class like Robert X. Cringely writes his columns, I'd receive terrible grades.

Why? His writing never supports its claims with actual evidence beyone the anecdotal. You can't base a business plan off of an afternoon daydream, just the same way you can't "bounce" a Wi-Fi signal over a mountain with a +15dBm power level (see links).

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020207. html
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1124

The point is, Cringely may have some interesting ideas, but he fails to back them up or do any sort of research to try to ascertain their feasibility in the real world, other than spouting off a few random statistics. You'd think Robert might wish to find others that support his opinions. Surely if his ideas are so wonderful, others in the know would validate them. Perhaps talking to an executive from a "failed" Wi-Fi company might have been appropriate for this article.

Cringely may think he knows everything, see his about page on his website. "On Why You Should Pay Attention to Him: When it comes to information technology, I know what I am talking about. Twenty years in and around the PC business have earned me wisdom, if not wealth." As most of us know, a thousand years in the tech industry won't earn you wisdom, and some of the wisest people are those who realize that they don't know everything.

My question is, "Why does Cringely get paid to write his columns?" Week after week of faulty analysis doesn't seem like it makes Cringely a very good columnist. PBS needs to wise up.

Should've used preview.
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2003/11/20 /knoppix.html

Funny. I was doing some research on SCO/Caldera and it's previous commitment to Open Source/Free Software. What I found was this guys making some weird announcements. This one seems very strange to me.. Please, look closely to the "unenforceability of the GNU general public license and other open source licenses" phrase. It is from 2001. .... Also, O'Reilly has a very interesting article about Caldera/SCO releasing old Unix source code under a BSD license See also the discussion in the Unix Heritage Society.

The project leader, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, will be speaking at a session entitled Building Virginia Tech's G5 Supercluster on Jan 28 at the upcoming O'Reilly Mac OS X conference.

He'll probably reveal some of the technical details, such as the version of Mac OS X used, at that session.

Also, according to a blog at O'Reilly:

Next year, all the little known details [about the cluster] will be revealed in a new book. By that time we'll know what the project means for supercomputing and for Apple.

The project leader, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, will be speaking at a session entitled Building Virginia Tech's G5 Supercluster on Jan 28 at the upcoming O'Reilly Mac OS X conference.

He'll probably reveal some of the technical details, such as the version of Mac OS X used, at that session.

Also, according to a blog at O'Reilly:

Next year, all the little known details [about the cluster] will be revealed in a new book. By that time we'll know what the project means for supercomputing and for Apple.

The project leader, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, will be speaking at a session entitled Building Virginia Tech's G5 Supercluster on Jan 28 at the upcoming O'Reilly Mac OS X conference.

He'll probably reveal some of the technical details, such as the version of Mac OS X used, at that session.

Also, according to a blog at O'Reilly:

Next year, all the little known details [about the cluster] will be revealed in a new book. By that time we'll know what the project means for supercomputing and for Apple.

I've never liked Robert Cringley's style or manner, which basic can be summed up as observing the obvious, then claiming all the credit or screaming "SCANDAL" where there really is none. But what made me really dislike him forever is his total lack of journalistic ethics a.k.a. MAKING SHIT UP.

He has a history of INVENTING stories that simply do not exist. IMHO he should meet the same fate as Jayson Blair. I do not know why PBS hasn't caught on.

A prime example is his incredible story of bouncing a Wi-Fi signal over a mountain, which can be found at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020207. html.

Most of his Wi-Fi tall tales are at least physically possible, but this one crosses the line.

See Rob Flickenger's Response.