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Tux magazine issue one has a good article on how to sync a palm with korganizer useing KPilot. it is avalable from HERE it provides a useful guide on how to set everything up to sync your data.

Oh, wait, I was thinking of SSC , not SCC, never mind.

You know, there are only so many TLD's (Three Letter Dohickies) to go around, I suppose... wait, I've just been told it is TLA, Three Letter Acronym, and that TLD is something else, but that they too are running in short supply.

Ok, everyone, obviously we must move to a Four Letter based society - anyone know any good four letter words to start things off?

One company that is right here in Seattle that publishes a Linux oriented magazing is Specialized System Consultants (SSC) that publishes Linux Journal.

SSC Website

No, Linus' real theme song -- as distributed in Red Hat et. al -- would have a much more direct dual purpose:

Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as "Linux."

Hear for yourself!

here is the funny thing, IBM is playing it close to the vest, there just letting SCO talk. Here is an Idea, they could be using the lawsit to force their customers over to linux. In reality the legal conundrum that SCO is in right now only works against IBM and they have admitted that under the GPL they cannot sue linux companies. Also they do not own any of the IP that they are claiming was infringed.(Follow the patents.) If IBM is forced to abandon AIX then they could tell all there customers to go to Linux.

Or even better this is the exchange in court.

SCO: Here is the code we claim is infringing.

(hands a stack of paper to the Judge)

Judge: IBM what say you?

IBM: Does any of the code contian a for loop?

SCO: Yes.

Judge: I fail to see the relevence?

IBM: We own a patent for that particullar coding mechanism.

(IBM hands Judge incredebly old patent that is still valid.)

Judge: So you do, Case dismissed.

-Just food for thought. I think that any damage done to linux will most likely be superficial as the OSDL will be unaffected and IBM will still have a vested intrest in linux.

"Microsoft .NET, the Ford Edsel of Information Technology"

Don Marti, Editor in Chief of Linux Journal

If they own patents (Like thousands of them) on all parts of the SYSV archetecture,

This is about trade secrets.

And I'm sure IBM would love to take those same patents and sue the heck out of every Linux vendor.

This is about trade secrets, not patents. If IBM has used them in Linux it couldn't then claim that they're it's secrets if it buys Caldera (I refuse to call them SCO, they're not SCO).

Ah, but a distinction - it seems the SCO people are willfully blurring the patent/copyright issue. Yes, they have patents on Unix. No, it doesn't extend to EVERYTHING about Unix. And I bet they don't have a patent, say, System V startup script formats.

SCO has no patents at all. None. Follow the Patents, People

Don Marti did some great research on this subject here:
http://www.ssc.com/pipermail/atc/2003-March/000034 .html

http://www.ssc.com/lj/linuxsay.html

The benefits of Open Source or Free software to its users are undeniable. If the software has a bug, or the software does not do something you want it to do, you can change it. There are many advantages, and they have been explained at length by various people. If you are going to be using software, you are definitely better off if you have access to the source code.

Trust

The fundamental difference between open source software and closed source software is the level of trust required. For a business to use closed source software, the level of trust required is enormous. It is not simply a question of whether the money spent purchasing the software is a good investment. The time invested using the software is far more significant. Almost inevitably your own business information becomes tied up in a format that is specific to the software you are using. In order to buy software from a closed source company, you have to take the following on trust:

• They have not left gaping security holes in the code.
• They will fix bugs in a timely manner.
• They will eventually add the features you want.
• They are not using your computing resources to do things which are not in your interest.
• They will not increase the price unreasonably once you depend on them.
• They will not go bust.

Business Models Having access to the source code makes good sense to the users. However the business case for the software vendor is far less convincing. In fact, the dangers of closed source from the user's perspective can be considered opportunities from the vendor's perspective.

The open source foundation proposes "4 ways to win" which is reproduced here: Four Ways To Win

Now for a higher-level, investor's point of view. There are at least four known business models for making money with open source:

1. Support Sellers (otherwise known as "Give Away the Recipe, Open A Restaurant"): In this model, you (effectively) give away the software product, but sell distribution, branding, and after-sale service. This is what (for example) Red Hat does.
2. Loss Leader: In this model, you give away open-source as a loss-leader and market positioner for closed software. This is what Netscape is doing.
3. Widget Frosting : In this model, a hardware company (for which software is a necessary adjunct but strictly a cost rather than profit center) goes open-source in order to get better drivers and interface tools cheaper. Silicon Graphics, for example, supports and ships Samba.
4. Accessorizing: Selling accessories books, compatible hardware, complete systems with open-source software pre-installed. It's easy to trivialize this (open-source T-shirts, coffee mugs, Linux penguin dolls) but at least the books and hardware underly some clear successes: O'Reilly Associates, SSC, and VA Research are among them.

In fact, the number of companies that have had success with any of these models is miniscule. This is hardly surprising, they are simply not very good business models for software companies.

Taking each in turn... Selling Support The better documented and more reliable the product is, the less support it needs. A business model where the more perfect your product, the less money you can make has got something fundamentally wrong with it. Loss Leader The very fact that this can be advanced as a viable business model for OpenSource shows desperation. What it comes down to is an admission that the best way to make money from software is by selling it. Widget Frosting This makes perfect sense if you are a hardware company, or when the software is a side issue. However, its no use at all for a business whose main product is software. Accessorizing Selling accessories is fine, but there is no pressing need to actually develop the software when one is in the accessories business.

There are of course other business models for Open Source. For instance, the one adopted by the Perl foundation and several others is begging. This is not a business model that many companies would find appealing though.

The basic problem is that for a business whose primary function is to make software, then the primary reward has to come from selling the software. We need a business model that actually works and we have one, it's called capitalism. It works like this: make something that people want and sell it to them. This model works for software too, and there is no reason why this model cannot work even when source code is available. Closed source vendors are relying on something a little closer to the business model of a heroin pusher. It starts off like capitalism, but there is the added feature that the user gets addicted and has to carry on buying the same thing even if he does not really want to. The more he uses the same vendor, the more reliant he is upon it.

The Solution Community software is software where the vendor can be paid a fair price for the software he creates, but where the buyer does not end up in a similar position to a junkie.

Community Source is software that guarantees the following:

1. The right to see what the software is doing, ie access to unobfuscated source code.
2. The right to add enhancements.
3. The right to fix bugs.
4. The right to sell his enhancements to other companies. This does not mean the right to the sell software without the original vendor receiving any money. The buyer still needs a license from the original vendor, but he does not have to rely on a single vendor for upgrades and enhancements.
5. The right to buy enhanced versions from 3rd parties.

The base NetBSD download is about 60 megs compressed. I download and install that and I've got a working base system to adapt to my needs. Plus, there's one distribution of NetBSD, I can install it on my Intel boxes, my Sparc boxes, on about any odd hardware I find, and the .dotfiles and config is virtually identical. Compare that to the 5-35 different 'distributions' of Linux available for each architecture.

This is why Linux has Debian

Actually Net and Free BSD have (are getting) Debian too.

Which highlights that this whole fucking linux vs BSD argument is misnamed. Linux is a kernel. The userland is substantially GNU, with a plethora of third-party contributions and appropriations.

So everyone start comparing kernel features and lay off userland.

Using rsync, I synchronize the main fileserver over to the backup computer on a regular basis. You can 'snapshot' days and weeks of data without using lots of hard-drive space by using the fine tutorial written by Mike Rubel.

I set-up the workstation's "My Documents" default to point to a shared drive (S:) on our fileserver. This automatically points everyone to the right place without even looking at their system. I also harp on how important it is to save files to the shared drive.

For laptop users, I setup a cygwin-minimal-rsync system. All backups are encrypted through ssh. Furthermore, the backup server is restricted to only running rsync backups.

Everytime they start their laptops, a batch file in the startup group opens. They can choose to abort (if they are not connected to the lan) or continue with a backup.

Because it uses rsync, only their changes are saved to the backup computer. This usually only takes a minute or two. Most users have other things to do while it is backing up.

The system cost $600. I have had two complete laptop failures since then with full recovery. Not only that, I can recover files accidently written over almost two months later. The investment was worth every single penny!

It should be noted that the SSC in SSC Publications could stand for " Short, Shameful Confession".

In an apparent response to criticism of its handling of a threatening letter from a Church of Scientology lawyer, the popular search engine Google has begun to make so-called "takedown" letters public. DMCA-censored pages are now two clicks and a cut-and-paste away from the regular search results.

The full text of two new letters to Google, dated April 9 and 10, already appears on the free speech site chillingeffects.org. "I think it's great that they're calling attention to the way the takedown provision can be used to compromise their search results," said Wendy Seltzer, Fellow of Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and co-founder of chillngeffects.org.

Google is still choosing to take advantage of the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows web sites to escape liability for copyright infringement if they take pages down in response to properly formed letters.

In a controversial move last month, Google pulled all pages from the anti-Scientology site xenu.net then restored the site's home page amid Internet outcry, just as Linux Journal readers were on their way to visit Google in person to ask for help finding censored pages about the alien warlord Xenu who is a key figure in Scientology's creation legend.

Only the name and telephone number of the attorney who wrote the letters have been removed from the copies on chillingeffects.org. Both of the new letters originate from the Los Angeles law firm of Moxon & Kobrin, where attorney Helena Kobrin has long been Scientology's standard-bearer against church critics on the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology and other online fora. Kobrin was not immediately available for comment

The letters are also linked to directly from Google search results. When results would have included a DMCA-censored page, the results page now includes a link to the takedown letter that resulted in the page being removed. A search this morning for site:xenu.net scientology produced the message:

"In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results."

Failing to act in response to a DMCA takedown letter is not against the law. "They can always choose not to take advantage of the safe harbor," Seltzer said. However, only by complying with the letter and taking pages out of their index can Google escape a possible copyright infringement lawsuit.

Finally, Google has expanded its DMCA page to include instructions for Counter Notification under the DMCA. A webmaster who believes that a non-infringing page is being unfairly censored can write the proper legal incantations and have the page put back into the index.

Google is then required to forward this Counter Notification to the original notifier, and then put the page back in the index "not less than 10 or more than 14" days after Google receives the Counter Notification. If your site is pulled out of Google and you're confused, chillingeffects.org has a web form that will generate a correctly formed Counter Notification.

In an apparent response to criticism of its handling of a threatening letter from a Church of Scientology lawyer, the popular search engine Google has begun to make so-called "takedown" letters public. DMCA-censored pages are now two clicks and a cut-and-paste away from the regular search results.

The full text of two new letters to Google, dated April 9 and 10, already appears on the free speech site chillingeffects.org. "I think it's great that they're calling attention to the way the takedown provision can be used to compromise their search results," said Wendy Seltzer, Fellow of Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and co-founder of chillngeffects.org.

Google is still choosing to take advantage of the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows web sites to escape liability for copyright infringement if they take pages down in response to properly formed letters.

In a controversial move last month, Google pulled all pages from the anti-Scientology site xenu.net then restored the site's home page amid Internet outcry, just as Linux Journal readers were on their way to visit Google in person to ask for help finding censored pages about the alien warlord Xenu who is a key figure in Scientology's creation legend.

Only the name and telephone number of the attorney who wrote the letters have been removed from the copies on chillingeffects.org. Both of the new letters originate from the Los Angeles law firm of Moxon & Kobrin, where attorney Helena Kobrin has long been Scientology's standard-bearer against church critics on the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology and other online fora. Kobrin was not immediately available for comment

The letters are also linked to directly from Google search results. When results would have included a DMCA-censored page, the results page now includes a link to the takedown letter that resulted in the page being removed. A search this morning for site:xenu.net scientology produced the message:

"In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results."

Failing to act in response to a DMCA takedown letter is not against the law. "They can always choose not to take advantage of the safe harbor," Seltzer said. However, only by complying with the letter and taking pages out of their index can Google escape a possible copyright infringement lawsuit.

Finally, Google has expanded its DMCA page to include instructions for Counter Notification under the DMCA. A webmaster who believes that a non-infringing page is being unfairly censored can write the proper legal incantations and have the page put back into the index.

Google is then required to forward this Counter Notification to the original notifier, and then put the page back in the index "not less than 10 or more than 14" days after Google receives the Counter Notification. If your site is pulled out of Google and you're confused, chillingeffects.org has a web form that will generate a correctly formed Counter Notification.

http://www.ssc.com/ssc/productlist.html.

A useful online tool, when paired with man pages, is the 'apropos' command. It can be used to search summaries of command functions to find the right command, then you can read the man page for that tool. For example:

# apropos search
apropos (1) - search the whatis database for strings
find (1) - search for files in a directory hierarchy
lkbib (1) - search bibliographic databases
lookbib (1) - search bibliographic databases
manpath (1) - determine user's search path for man pages
whatis (1) - search the whatis database for complete words.
zgrep (1) - search possibly compressed files for a regular expression

So, you can read these descriptions, and if one sounds like the tool you're looking for, call up the man page for that particular utility using "man".

For those missing man pages on the system, you can use my (somewhat outdated) man page web gateway at http://www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/man.

Happy Linuxing!

-Dane (last seen driving the North Bay backroads in a red 2001 Porsche Carerra with the California license plate "LINUX")

set mode = BOFH

OTOH, RTFM: man man, man apropos, man $command

The Linux Journal had a great article by Alessandro Rubini on how to build your own parallel port audio device for Linux with just a couple of chips. The article was on page 70 of LJ issue number 53, September 1998. There is a listing of the driver at available at the LJ website.

The article is a good read, explaining the rationale behind their choice of Linux, and comparing their experience to NT, Digital UNIX and other platforms. (There's even the gratuitous server-room shot, looking very much like a 90s version of the "Mother" computer room in Alien -- probably the same picture you saw.)

Different scary attack thoughts: Samhain (mirrors - linux-list, Red Rock Eater, bugtraq).

I had a similar problem a few years ago and wrote some scripts to do failover clustering.
I published it in the Linux Journal last year:
http://ww w.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/lj-issues/iss ue64/3247.html
source/scripts:
ftp://ftp.ssc.com/pub /lj/listings/issue64/3247clusterd.tar.gz
It would solve your problem with layer-2 and layer-3 failover but, without modification, would require two identical servers.
Yes, it will decide which switch/router is actually still live for the next hop routing aswell - it can determine which switch has failed if any by pinging a list of 'supposed to be reachable' addresses.
It is a bit dated and I haven't really kept the code upto date but the principles are there and it is has been used for a long time with no major problems.

Philip J Lewis
Network Consultant
Dome Computer Consultants Ltd
UK
mailto:slashdot@*REMOVEME*linuxcentre.net

Here's a little story for "legitimate" companies that wish to send advertising. This story is about SSC, which is one of the most reputable companies on the Internet. I would recommend them to anyone, despite this story.

SSC publishes Linux Journal , one of the oldest (if not the oldest) and easily one of the highest signal-over-noise Linux mags available. I had a fairly long subscription to LJ (which, again, I would recommend despite this incident). One day I got e-mail telling me it was time to renew. Well, this e-mail didn't appear to come from SSC. It gave a different site as the place for credit card orders, had non-SSC "From" and "Reply-To" lines, and a non-SSC origin IP. So, uncomfortable about how my e-mail address was getting picked up, I decided to wait until I could call SSC and find out if the e-mail was from their agent or just some random magazine house trying to scam a commission. After I got a paper renewal notice later, I still hadn't gotten around to calling, so I kept putting my renewal off.

That was probably a year or 2 ago. I still haven't gotten around to calling. That's my rotten procrastination habit again, I'm sure. But, my point to legitimate companies is this: This whole time I've been procrastinating, SSC has been without my (probably 5-year) subscription. And that's a company I actually like, sending me a notice I actually wanted. You can probably imagine what I think of companies who send me e-mail when I've never even contacted them.

The moral of this true fable is thus: Go out of your way to demonstrate that you're a previous business contact. Identify who you are and why you have the e-mail address, so that the recipient isn't worried about their personal information getting out. Net folks are far more concerned with whether their privacy than whether they buy something. I'll bet SSC probably knew this, but their agent didn't get it.

(That said, I'll probably go call them and subscribe to Linux Journal again sometime soon. Now I get to wonder about Boardwatch , who is owned by a different company, and wants to charge me more for renewal ($72) than normal people pay for a first subscription. Ah well.)

I sent e-mail to Jason Kroll asking him to clarify the issues I raised in my Slimy, yes. But unconstitutional? posting. He replied promptly, and asked that I post the following clarification:

Hello!

My slashdot password to my hyena account doesn't seem to work...

Yes, they are Norwegian citizens, and if Norway were truly independent and entirely sovereign, the MPA would not have made a successful effort to get the Norwegian police to raid the Johansen's home. However, the MPA(A) describes itself on its own web site as "a little State Department" which clearly identifies that it intends to enforce US law throughout the world. The World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization are both effective tools for doing this, they are so powerful as you know that they can sometimes override American law! The DMCA would be worthless to the US if it did not enforce it throughout the world, and I expect that if it is not ruled unconstitutional, this is exactly what will happen. So, while Jon is protected by his own nation, we need to make it clear that he is also protected by the law of the nation which instigated the whole affair. Neither US nor Norwegian law were broken, so it's not even an issue of whose law is legit. I do think, however, that Human Rights Accords such as free speech are valid at least in all UN nations, and really I consider them valid (since they are rights not restrictions) the world over, a moral imperative. "Truth never damages a cause that is just" said Gandhi, it's pretty relevant.

One minor point. I actually didn't allege the violations of the US constitution and US law in Jon's case (since obviously we all know he is Norwegian), it was the GILC, I was just quoting, though I should have been more critical on this point. Still, if his rights are protected by Norwegian law AND American law, there's not much argument for prosecution from anywhere, not even the WTO would be able to do much here.

Thanks for taking the time to contact me. You're more than welcome (in fact please do if you can) to post this email to slashdot if it helps to clarify the issue. I appreciate your questioning of this issue, it's very important both for our cause to make sure that we understand our own arguments, and on the general principle that we should question everything. Thank you again!

-- Jason

So there you have it. Since I publicly challenged Mr. Kroll's article, I would now like to publicly thank him for responding in an expedient and professional manner. As he quotes Gandhi, "Truth never damages a cause that is just," and a questioning public is a critical component of an enlightened, free society.

In the Crackers and Crackdowns article from Linux Journal , Jason Kroll <hyena@ssc.com> writes:

The GILC ... has condemned the action as a violation both of the Human Rights Accords of the United Nations and the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

The US Constitution? Aren't Jon and Per Johansen Norwegian citizens? And wasn't the "action" carried out by Norway's Econcomic Crime Departement (ECD)? How is the US Constitution relevant here?

Is Mr. Kroll's claim that the MPAA was somehow directly influencing Norway's ECD to suppress the Johansens' free speach, and that since the MPAA is an American organization, somehow the US Constitution has bearing on the ECD's actions? That doesn't make much sense. So what if the MPAA pressured the ECD? That might be an issue for Norwegian law, but I just don't see the US Constitutional tie-in.

Mr. Kroll goes on to write:

Almost ironically, Jon's reverse-engineering rights are specifically protected by the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which itself is probably unconstitutional).

Again, why would Jon's rights to do anything be protected by an American law? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be completely irrelevant as regards a Norwegian citizen acting on Norwegian soil.

Am I just missing something here?

Don't get me wrong. I don't endorse the action taken against the Johansens. But I do want to understand the basis for Mr. Kroll's claims. If his claims have merit, then I have misunderstood something important and I wish to be corrected. If his claims are without merit, then they are alarmist misdirections that do nothing to help foster rational discussion and debate.

Not really. There are better ways to do this, more securely. VPN mini-HOWTO is a good start.

Not that you really deserve an answer, but here is a link to a story outlining the use of Linux for the Titanic movie. Here is the link.
---

I've actually considered this. You could take a $400 box, maybe double that for a multiport serial board, mix in your favorite Linux distribution and a bunch of old VT's or Mac Pluses and replace the system half of us used in college with something easier to upgrade, support and manage (and it would be faster).

If you were really strapped for cash, you could build a dozen of these and plop one down in each lab/building around the campus and only worry about networking those dozen machines. If they were networked, you could really extend their lifespan using coda and another $400 box with a couple of 20 Gb drives to handle the bulk of the storage (and, of course, centralized backup).

It's a Third World dream come true, for the price of a hot passport...

This article appeared in Linux Journal last year, it's a little thin on tech, but does talk about how Digital Domain made use of Linux for rendering.