Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader shares a report: Think about the computing systems you use every day. All of them represent attempts to simulate something else. Like how Turing's original thinking machine (PDF) strived to pass as a man or woman, a computer tries to pass, in a way, as another thing. As a calculator, for example, or a ledger, or a typewriter, or a telephone, or a camera, or a storefront, or a cafe. After a while, successful simulated machines displace and overtake the machines they originally imitated. The word processor is no longer just a simulated typewriter or secretary, but a first-order tool for producing written materials of all kinds. Eventually, if they thrive, simulated machines become just machines. Today, computation overall is doing this. There's not much work and play left that computers don't handle. And so, the computer is splitting from its origins as a means of symbol manipulation for productive and creative ends, and becoming an activity in its own right. Today, people don't seek out computers in order to get things done; they do the things that let them use computers.

thevirtualcat found some inconsistencies in IE8's Acid2 results that made him wonder what's going on. Can anyone replicate these results or, better yet, explain them?
Update: 03/22 23:54 GMT by KD : Several readers pointed out this has to do with cross-site scripting prevention, as described here.

Finin writes "In February 2005, Google was sued by Lane's Gifts & Collectibles in a class-action lawsuit over click fraud. The company alleged that Google had been improperly billing for pay-per-click ads that were not viewed by legitimate potential customers. As part of a settlement earlier this year, Google agreed to have an independent expert examine their click fraud detection methods, policies, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not they were reasonable measures to protect advertisers. The report of the expert, NYU Information Systems Professor Alexander Tuzhilin (a Professor of Information Systems at NYU), is now available." Update 07/26/2006 at 12:52 GMT by SM: Fixed the link to Tuzhilin's report.

Finin writes "In February 2005, Google was sued by Lane's Gifts & Collectibles in a class-action lawsuit over click fraud. The company alleged that Google had been improperly billing for pay-per-click ads that were not viewed by legitimate potential customers. As part of a settlement earlier this year, Google agreed to have an independent expert examine their click fraud detection methods, policies, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not they were reasonable measures to protect advertisers. The report of the expert, NYU Information Systems Professor Alexander Tuzhilin (a Professor of Information Systems at NYU), is now available." Update 07/26/2006 at 12:52 GMT by SM: Fixed the link to Tuzhilin's report.

An anonymous reader asks: "Across the web, stories abound regarding censorship and persecution of those who publish content online that may be offensive or conflicting toward certain governments or ideals. It almost seems that you can't attach your name to anything without being heavily scrutinized for the opinions you express. Lately though, I've begun to see several communities that promote an atmosphere of anonymity to protect their users and facilitate open communication on tough subjects. PostSecret is one of the most popular of these sites, allowing a one-way publication medium for visitors to vent their frustrations, similar to Group Hug. However, both of these sites are one-way mediums, and do not provide for anonymous interaction of users. Is anonymous blogging and publication a brief fad, or a serious, growing trend?" "One rare example I've found that allows a truly open anonymous mode of communication (dissimilar to Slashdot's own automatic demotion of 'Anonymous Cowards'), is the Teen Angst Central, or Tangst. Operated by a group of high schoolers and hosted by Google's Blogger service, its editors publish posts made anonymously by visitors, with comments and discussion made to the site sprouting from a community bonded by anonymity. I think this concept can easily be applied to other aspects of online society, though I have yet to see many examples beyond the simple angst-driven outpouring of feelings."

Anonymous Coward writes "A research group at University of Maryland has published a blog describing the latest approach for finding and indexing Semantic Web Documents. They have published it in reaction to Peter Norvig's (director of search quality at Google) view on the Semantic Web (Semantic Web Ontologies: What Works and What Doesn't): 'A friend of mine [from UMBC] just asked can I send him all the URLs on the web that have dot-RDF, dot-OWL, and a couple other extensions on them; he couldn't find them all. I looked, and it turns out there's only around 200,000 of them. That's about 0.005% of the web. We've got a ways to go.'"

simoniker writes "Alan Moore is probably best known as the writer of some of the best graphic novels of all time - Watchmen, From Hell, and The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to name but three. But he's also written a prose novel - a sprawling, epoch-spanning paean to his home town of Northampton, England, in the form of Voice Of The Fire, a book originally released in the UK in 1996 in paperback only, and now debuting in the States via a revamped, hardcover version from Top Shelf Productions. So with twelve separate stories and twelve major characters in this 'magical history tour' (as Neil Gaiman describes it in the introduction) spanning six thousand years, how does the book measure up to the seminal comics canon Moore has established?" Read on for the rest of simoniker's review. Voice Of The Fire author Alan Moore pages 336 publisher Top Shelf Productions rating 8/10 reviewer Simoniker ISBN 1891830449 summary In a story full of lust, madness, and ecstasy, we meet twelve distinctive characters that lived in the same region of central England in the span of six thousand years.

There's no question about it - this book is formidable. It is formidable in its complexity, formidable in the connective leaps it expects you to make between stories and eras, and most of all, it can be formidable in its prose. Before I even read Voice Of The Fire, I'd heard that the first chapter of the book is enough to put many casual readers off, and that's not far wrong. The story of a cave-boy called Hob -- confused, immature, possibly mentally deficient, and alone in a world of freedom, love, and, potentially, disaster -- is written in intentionally limited language that the less sharp members of mankind might be imagined to use in 4000 BC. It's not an easy read; this segment is a struggle to decode at times, but the rewards are significant, because the emotions are powerful, and the story strong.

The novel's twelve stories are woven together, but only loosely. Sometimes consecutive stories interact with each other by way of common locations, characters, or themes, as historical figures tell their stories in the first-person, one by one, from the aforementioned Hob to an inevitable conclusion in the present day. But generally, the stories don't actually interact. Some of the most memorable tales, such as the first-person tale of a severed head on a pike circa 1607, or the treacherous dealings of a lecherous court judge from centuries past, have absolutely nothing in common except for the general geographical location. But they share exceptional writing, a self-contained message, and an odd sense of foreboding hovering over the entire proceedings, like someone or something is watching over every single sin committed.

And, let it be said, there are a surfeit of sins -- violence, and senseless murder, and lust, and witchcraft, and plenty left over. But that's how real history is -- bloody. Or, at least, that's how Moore wants us to believe history is, and there's clearly been significant research into many of the real-life historical figures whose lives are embroidered and colorized in Voice of the Fire. There's no doubt that some passages are tricky to digest, particularly those with odd language such as 'The Sun Looks Pale Upon The Wall,' the haunting 1841-set meanderings of another poor citizen who's not quite there. However, if you can wade through the occasional story featuring difficult prose, dense layout and strange language, the rewards can be significant. Plus, the gorgeous new full-page color illustrations/photos, courtesy Jose Villarrubia, add a little visceral flavor to the mix no matter how dense the prose.

Comparisons in terms of genre or content are tricky, though, among the stories that make up this book. What Moore definitely shares with the writer of the introduction to this new version, Neil Gaiman, is a sense of myth, of half-remembered deities and supernatural forces existing in the real world, as Gaiman depicts in American Gods . But Moore's supernatural forces are much more shamanic, much darker, and largely less substantial, except for a truly scary vision unearthed from a medieval burial chamber.

As for Moore's previous work, in as much as Promethea is a set of musings on his faith in the mystical, Voice Of The Fire gives those mystical feelings a more sinister edge and spreads them out over centuries. And it might be said that From Hell contains some similar ideas about the mystical significance of geography. But Voice Of The Fire draws no easy comparison even to Moore's own work -- being in a different medium, and focusing on the place he's lived all his life, it's much more personal than much of his other material, almost as if the dark places of his home town's past are being passed down to him.

Moore spent five years writing this book, and even refers to that torturous stretch in the final chapter, which is written by him in the first-person, in which he ties his experiences of Northampton's history to the stories. A daring move, to be sure, and one that Moore himself admits puts him close to the edge, as he muses:

'There are some weak points on the borderlines of fact and fabrication, crossing where the veil between what is and what is not rends easily. ... Walk through the walls into the landscape of the words, become one more first-person character within the narrative's bizarre procession... Obviously, this is a course of action not without its dangers... always the risk of a surprise ending with the ticket to St. Andrew's Mental Hospital.'

But what is Voice Of The Fire really about? Well, the thirteenth character in the novel, and almost certainly the most important, is the town of Northampton itself, looming large over every single character's experience. This is something that Moore has dealt with before -- there's a moment in the massive, monochrome, mystical From Hell where there's an odd 'flash forward' moment - contemporary office buildings intruding on the goings-on of 19th Century London. The same idea of geography subsuming history is true for Voice Of The Fire -- that the people are not a permanent fixture; the location is the only sure thing. Time layers burial ground on murder site on shiny new office development until there's such an odd mixture of old, new, and indescribable that some kind of sinister magic is created.

[There's plenty more about Moore at the comprehensive Alan Moore Fan Site, and the Alan Moore Yahoo group is both knowledgeable and friendly.]

You can purchase Voice of the Fire from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

VernonNemitz asks: "Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) have been around for decades, and they come in all colors. Here are the basic principles behind their operation, information on what's currently in production , and other practical info. Now, you would think it obvious that video displays should be made from LEDs, to take on the various competitors. Certainly this has been done on a large scale, and I am not the first to be interested in LED display technology for home viewing. The apparent goal of silicon LEDs these days seems to be tied up with optical communications between circuits, have they forgotten the possibility of making high-resolution display panels?"

"Achieving a good image will require smaller pixels, and now I have a better understanding of what has been holding it up, so would like to share what I found out. Basically, unlike a lot of electronic technology, LEDs are mostly -not- made from silicon. So, while silicon diodes are common, and large arrays of them are also made (for sensors), LEDs are not easy to incorporate into standard integrated-circuit manufacturing. Nevertheless, researchers have been pursuing and steadily making progress toward integrating silicon-based LEDs. Even whole arrays, 'suitable for large two-dimensional areas', of silicon laser LEDs have been made, as far back as three years ago."

Nils writes "Here is the web page of a research project at NASA JSC's Dexterous Robots Lab (DRL) to develop a humanoid robot for use in space. It is state-of-the-art with incredible hands, arms, torso, and stereoscopic vision for remote control. Very cool." We had a story on the Robonaut two years ago, but it looks like they've come a long way since then.

Vanth Dreadstar asks: "While MP3 is okay, I have begun researching other codecs that would be suitable for my home music use. Lossy codecs such as Ogg Vorbis, AAC, and MPC all seem to have promise, not to mention the lossless codecs such as Shorten (otherwise known as .SHN), LPAC, and FLAC. I would like to know what non-MP3 codecs people are using out there, and why."

Tim Finin writes: "Anthill is a framework being developed at University of Bologna to support the design, implementation and evaluation of P2P applications, viewing them as instances of Complex Adaptive Systems, typically found in biological and social sciences. In Anthill, desired properties such as resilience, adaptation and self-organization correspond to the "emergent behavior" of the underlying CA system. An Anthill system consists of a dynamic network of peer nodes; societies of adaptive agents (ants) travel through this network, interacting with nodes and cooperating with other agents in order to solve complex problems. The source code for Anthill v1.0 is available for downloading. MORE on this is at ebiquity.org."

Imagine Slashdot closing its Your Rights Online section because you no longer have any rights online, and find many of your other rights severely curtailed, too. Saturday a small group of people, including U.S. Representative Lynn Rivers, from Michigan's 13th Congressional District, met in the University of Maryland Baltimore County [UMBC] library to discuss ways to maintain Americans' civil liberties despite major pressure to curtail them in the name of "fighting terrorism." The government does listen, you know, if you speak to the right people in the right way. So here's a guide, a HOWTO, if you will, that will teach you how to lobby effectively for your Constitutional rights.

Let's start with one simple and rather sad truth: You are going to be less free next week than you were last week.

We are already seeing what several newspapers have called "the biggest criminal investigation in history." Sure, a lot of this investigation's energy is being focused on Islamic countries, but it is also going on in Europe and, more than anywhere else, the United States itself. Landlords who have rented to young men with Arab-sounding names are being interrogated. Topless-bar patrons are being asked about conversations they allegedly heard, boasting about upcoming mass destruction.

And then there's email and the World Wide Web. Imagine a technically unhip Senator or Member of Congress who has read about Osama bin Laden allegedly using encrypted email and secret messages hidden in online porn to communicate with his followers and allies. Put the words "Osama bin Laden" in the same sentence as "pornography" and "the Internet," and you had better get out of the way of the avalanche of anti-online privacy laws coming your way -- or get crushed by them, even if people like bin Laden can switch to other means of communication at the drop of a hat.

Worse, disagreeing with the U.S. government right now may almost be viewed as treason in some quarters. "My Country, Right or Wrong" was a popular bumper sticker among the gunrack-and-confederate-flag pickup truck crowd in the late 60s, and this attitude, if not yet the bumper sticker itself, has been making a major comeback

But Dissent We Must
The problem with the "My Country, Right or Wrong" attitude is that it allows our government to go terribly wrong in many ways that may not be made right again for a long time, if ever. As Rep. Rivers pointed out Saturday, once laws are made that are supposed to help law enforcement in some way, they are almost never repealed because Members of Congress don't want to be seen as "soft on terrorism, soft on crime, soft on drugs."

Carry this a little farther. What about treason charges? At what point does it become illegal to speak out against a planned US government action that, on its face, is being taken to fight against the Terrorist Enemy, whoever he or she may be, even though that action may have very bad, long-term consequences for ordinary American citizens who want nothing more that to live their own lives quietly without being afraid of their own government?

Rep. Rivers said half the people in her district's gut reaction to the idea of legislation allowing government to read their email without getting a warrant first was along the lines of, "So what? I don't break any laws, so I have nothing to hide."

Long-time EPIC activist Kathleen Ellis told Rep. Rivers she believed questions about privacy should not be asked in the context of email. "Ask people if they should have the right to keep a secret and almost all of them will answer 'Of course,'" she said. Ellis also mentioned that cryptography is the email equivalent of an envelope on a letter sent by postal mail. "Unencrypted email is like a postcard," she said, "open for anyone to read. Ask people if they want all mail to be as open as a postcard and they're going to say no."

From that point on, the meeting focused on tactics. The question in the room wasn't, "Are privacy and freedom of speech good?" but "What can we do to protect our privacy and freedom of speech?"

Background on the Meeting Itself
The forum in which all this discussion took place was decidedly unofficial. It was an informal meeting thrown together hastily by local Linux user and ham radio afficianado Rob Carlson. Carlson sent a meeting notice to several email lists and posted it at cluebot.com. 13 people showed up at Saturday's gathering, most of whom were Baltimore and Washington D.C. area privacy advocates and/or Linux users. I was there myself for that reason. Wired News reporter Declan McCullagh is another "local" who hangs in the same circles, which explained his presence.

Rep. Rivers was there because her husband, William Simpson, is a computer consultant involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force [IETF] who spotted Carlson's notice on one of the cryptography-oriented email lists he's on. He had driven Rivers' chief of staff, who needed to get back to Washington but was marooned in Michigan by the airlines shutdown, to D.C., and was taking his Congresswoman wife back to her district for a little rest and some scheduled meetings (Congress had adjourned until Friday, Sept. 21), and they noticed that UMBC was on their way. So there they were, not dressed in "mover and shaker" clothing but looking like anyone else taking a 1000+ mile car trip.

One doesn't usually think of a Member of Congress fitting in with a group of downdressed geeks, but this one sure did. We only knew what she did for a living because Carlson asked everyone in the little circle to identify themselves by name and job, and when it was her turn Rep. Rivers gave her name as "Lynn," then added "Rivers," and softly, sort of as an aside, mentioned that she was "in Congress." Her husband had already mentioned that they were "from Michigan," which was curious enough in itself for a meeting with a decidedly local orientation. But Linux folks are friendly, and Rep. Rivers was as welcome as anyone else even though she was from out of town -- and freely admitted she used Mac OS, not Linux, both at home and in her office.

When he organized the meeting, Carlson said, "I didn't know whether no one or 100 people would show up." 13 did. And revolutions have started with as few as 13 people, so why shouldn't a strong pro-Constitution lobbying movement? The next step is to get 13 more, and another 13, and so on. This means calling and emailing friends until there are 13X13X13X13.... people talking to their elected representatives about privacy issues in terms they can understand, that will help them change their minds.

How You Can Lobby Against Anti-Privacy Laws
Start with this line Rep. Rivers laid on us, which is not new but needs to be said over and over: "Democracy is not a spectator sport."

Those Americans who don't vote, no matter how they excuse this failure, have no right to criticize their government. And those who don't bother to tell their elected representatives what they want and don't want their government to do should not act shocked when the government passes laws they don't like. It gets sickening, going to hearing after hearing about proposed laws like UCITA, DMCA, and SSSCA and always seeing a whole bunch of industry lobbyists wearing expensive suits, but hardly ever anyone who could be classified as an "ordinary citizen."

You need to make some noise instead of letting "them" talk while you sit around and let "them" get their way. Pump up the volume. Take some of the time you spend posting on Slashdot and register to vote. Write email and snail mail letters, send faxes, and make phone calls to Congresspeople and Senators and other representatives, and tell other people (13X13X13X13.... voices, remember) to do the same. This, not just complaining, is what this whole representative government thing is all about.

Rep. Rivers says phone calls "...have a sense of personal contact to them," and this makes them the most effective grassroots lobbying tool. "Stick to one issue," she advises. "Don't come up with a laundry list."

Also send email and write letters, even though they probably won't have as much impact as calls. And don't forget the fax machine; reps who are too technically unhip to read email read faxes. The ACLU and NRA have both famously used fax as a means of rapid communication with legislators for many years.

Now comes the matter of what to say. A letter, call or email that starts with something like, "I has nevir voted for you I am not registered to vote but you got to lisen to me," will go nowhere, says Rivers, pointing out that many pro-Napster messages she got were along those lines -- and got ignored. Better, she says, is something that tells your representative you are a computer professional (or manager or student or business owner or whatever) whose business, occupation or future will be hurt by whatever legislation you are working against. In this case (this week), privacy and online crypto are under attack. Next week, who knows?

So you're not a business owner? Know any? Know anyone who depends on privacy to transact their business? How about your doctor? Doesn't he or she want to keep patient records confidential? Ditto any lawyer you know. If a lawyer is serious about maintaining client trust, he or she certainly doesn't want the government snooping on email through Carnivore or a similar system with a less aggressive name. Other businesses have client information they want to private, along with trade secrets and other information they would rather not share with competitors. These are all points to bring up rationally, in an orderly debate format, when communicating with an elected rep, and they are ones you should ask others to bring up, too.

Stay calm, in other words. Assume your representative is sane and really wants to do what's right and what most people want, based on the input he or she gets. Your trick is to become part of that input, and right now the input you need to give must be strong and focused because Congress is caught up in post-attack hysteria and, like the rest of us, is saying, "We need to do something to help those poor victims and their families and make sure nothing this awful ever happens again."

The only problem here is that what Congress does is make laws, not post on Slashdot, and a law made in the same emotional heat as a flame post on Slashdot can't be moderated down to -1 after it is passed. Once that law is on the books, if you break it you can be arrested, tried, and fined or sent to jail. You've heard the saying, "If [guns/crypto/brains] are outlawed, only outlaws will have [guns/crypto/brains]." It's true, you know.

Right now, legitimate Americans are in danger of having many of their Constitutional freedoms revoked by a government that is doing its best, possibly in a misguided way, to protect its citizens. This is not about Disney's copyrights or the freedom to play DVDs on computers running Linux. The current debate is about much more basic issues than those, issues I will not repeat here because they have been written about so extensively elsewhere.

An Aside: How Congress Works
Rep. Rivers said it this way: "The House [of Representatives] is ruled by brute force."

Since she was talking to geeks who follow such things, she used the DMCA as an example. She told us that the "unanimous" vote that got DMCA through the House was not really unanimous at all; that the bill got through a committee dominated by a powerful chairman (which is how bills generally get to the floor for a vote) and that the Speaker called for a voice vote. "Most yelled 'Aye,'" Rivers said, and some yelled 'Nay.'"

The voices yelling "Aye" were the loudest, so DMCA passed by acclamation. Brute Force. People yelling at the top of their lungs. If 50 loud voices had yelled "Nay" instead of "Aye," perhaps we wouldn't have the DMCA as law today, and the EFF wouldn't be begging for money to get it overturned in the courts.

Now think about a Member of Congress who is hearing, right now, from all the "Kill-the-Arab-bastards-and-stamp-out-Internet-porn" crowd loudly and repeatedly by phone, fax, mail and email, but isn't hearing from you. Who is shouting the loudest? Which wheel is so squeaky that it is going to get the grease? So far, it's not the voices of reason and Constitutionality. They are getting drowned out. Heck, they are hardly there at all. At least Rep. Rivers isn't hearing them, and if she isn't hearing them -- with her ear attuned to Internet privacy matters and a totally Net-hip husband at her side -- you can bet the rest of Congress don't even know those voices (yours) exist.

Don't Delay! Do It Today!
Congress reconvenes Friday, September 21. The anti-privacy bills and anti-privacy amendments to various anti-terrorist bills are being written now, not someday. This means you must act immediately. If you put off those calls and emails to friends asking them to help support their right to communicate with each other in private, and to live without fear of police breaking down their doors or seizing their computer hard drives without warrants for even a few days, it is going to be too late. We are in the grip of national hysteria. A $40 billion appropriations bill to support the war on terrorism was passed a few days ago, with bipartisan support, almost without debate.

I'm going to admit that I am as ready to kick terrorist butt as anyone else, so I can't really blame Congress for being so gung-ho that it will pass all kinds of measures that will make America a less free country for decades to come in response to the current emergency. All I'm really asking Congress to do -- and asking you to join me in asking Congress to do, and to convince 13X13X13.... others to ask your Representative and your Senator to do -- is remember that the freedoms that make this country great must not be forgotten in our rush to avenge our fallen fellow Americans and our attempts to keep ourselves safe from future terrorist attacks.

Specifically (concentrate on one issue, remember), as a Net user I am concerned about watching our online privacy and freedoms evaporate if the government makes strong cryptography illegal or tries to have it controlled by agencies like the NSA, CIA, and FBI, or starts reading all of our private email without due cause and legitimate judicial warrants.

The deadline is Friday. That's when the legislative fur will start to fly. So let's get to work now!

• How to find your representative
• How to contact your senator

tim finin writes: "WEP is the security protocol used in the widely deployed IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN's. "Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4" by Scott Fluhrer, Itsik Mantin and Adi Shamir describes new results on RC4 with a practical attack against WEP -- an extremely powerful attack which can be applied even when WEP's RC4 stream cipher uses a 2048 bit secret key (its maximal size) and 128 bit IV modifiers (as proposed in WEP2). The attacker can be a completely passive eavesdropper (i.e., he does not have to inject packets, monitor responses, or use accomplices) and thus his existence is essentially undetectable. After scanning several hundred thousand packets, the attacker can completely recover the secret key and thus decrypt all the ciphertexts. The running time of the attack grows linearly instead of exponentially with the key size, and thus it is negligible even for 2048 bit keys." The brave can jump straight to the paper in pure, clean, postscript or PDF format.

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Welcome to the 2nd edition of Slashback, upgrading your Slashdot experience with another week's worth of additions, updates, new links and new thoughts, all for the same low cost. (Read more.)

Like the end credits on a short, short film. gi_wrighty pointed out that "the winners from the 5K web page contest (announced a while back ) have now been announced." Here are the welterweight web winners.

A different kind of Apache Con From Slashdot's own jimjag: "Are you interested in the details concerning how www.apache.org was defaced, as reported right here? Here's how it was done from the definitive source. It just goes to remind all of us that sometimes the obvious things are the ones we don't see, and the ones that come back and bite us in the arse. I can imagine quite a few SysAdmins making some changes over the last 36 hours."

... because the old ones were invidious. Remember the flap over GPL code in non-GPL drivers released by NVidia? Well, happily, the company kept its promises. Kheldar_522 writes "LinuxGames.com is reporting that the new NVIDIA XFree86 4.0 drivers released tonight have had all the GPL code removed."

May the circle be unbroken. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, instead of subtracting code, Samsung is hoping to make sure some gets added. iKev contributed the news that "Last Sunday, Gmate, the creators of the [Linux-based PDA]Yopy, released a very preliminary SDK for the Yopy. You can check it out here (click on the Developer image). I haven't had a chance to try it (it's only for x86 linux)." iKev wondered whether the terms of the download violate the GPL, which is used for some parts of the SDK. Any takers?

You are near area 51. Leave. BenTheDewpendent wrote: "I was at gpspilot.com and found instructions on how to connect almost any GPS to a Pilot [including the construction of a null-modem cable if you need one - t] and I thought it could be handy for things like a nav system in a car or bike ... especially now that Clinton has ordered down selective avalability." Coupled with some decent mapping software, this might even help me get less lost, more often. Be warned, though -- this is not the only purveyor of Palm maps, and they do want to sell you some.

We han Cardly wait! For those who read paper books, this should be good news, contributed by Anonymous Coward after reading about the new Ender's Game sequel: "In a recent interview on otherview.com, OSC mentioned that he is also working on two more sequels to Ender's Game. Shadow of Death, the "final volume about Bean," and an unnamed Petra-and-Peter book. He mentions this on the third page of this article. Also interesting, OSC apparently is all in favor of e-books, though his publisher won't let him do it."

"Biting into some software and finding half a worm!" It's been a quiet couple of days for the administrators of Windows networks -- unless they have MS Outlook e-mail, in which case they don't feel Loved and it isn't Very Funny. Østergaard writes with "this piece, mainly as a reflection on the current worm mania filling the news (and mail-servers ;) around the world. I'd like to see what you people think." It's good reading, and very sobering if you're running the user agents at fault, or ones that could be, next time 'round.

ian writes "Yesterday, Matt Welsh was the guest on Public Interest, an NPR talk show: "It's Tech Tuesday. This week, Kojo and guests discuss the growing popularity of the Linux operating system and answer your questions about installation and use of this free, open source, system." You can listen to the show on RealAudio. " Alan McConnell also joined him on the program.

emag writes "ZDNet is reporting that it's likely Congress will allow state & local governments to tax e-commerce, just like buying from a storefront. "

Dandy writes "In this article Robin Miller, one of those rare non-clueless journalists, lets everyone know that it *is* possible to have a Linux computer that is perfect for the average home user who only wants something that is easy to use. Surprise, everyone! It's not really hard after all. "