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ed Man Page

http://www.unix.com/man-page/l...

See your NAME_REGEX in /etc/adduser.conf

FreeBSD uses heir(7) which is analogous to the FHS, and it's this that Debian is retaining support for. The major difference is the lack of libexec in the FHS, the omission being down to some fairly unbelievable politicking way back when.

Just for the people who don't know what the fuck securelevel is (NetBSD's flavor in this case)

Not going back to Linux, but this really is a worthwhile addition.

Furthermore, should something like this be omitted simply because Linus doesn't like it? Is his opinion the only one that counts? Among other things, securelevel is used to implement "jails" but the functionality can be completely disabled (securelevel = -1) -- so Linus can turn it off if he wants.

Is the direction in which Linux is driven simply the whim of people like Linus and Lennart who dictate "my way or the highway"? They are smart, capable, talented people, but not omniscient Gods - despite what they and some others might think.

Just for the people who don't know what the fuck securelevel is (NetBSD's flavor in this case)

Not going back to Linux, but this really is a worthwhile addition.

xargs -d '\n'

On GNU use -print0 in find and -0 in xargs (It's posixly incorrect because people whined that if someone added -print0 to find then people would expect other programs to be able to handle them. -0 is not supported in xargs because you can pipe the output through a crazy sed recipe to deal with any whitespace, and people would expect programs to be written to output null terminated strings. Seriously, it's in the manpage)

# touch /export/lun/0
# sbdadm create-lu -s 10g /export/lun/0 # file backing
# sbdadm create-lu /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s0 # raw disk backing

Start-stop-daemon makes for reasonably clean init scripts. It takes care of the details of managing the service so you only have to write a simple case statement in the script.

I use Arch, and decided to stick with ext4 for now--I don't want a filesystem that bleeding-edge, btrfs does not yet directly support swap files, and though my laptop has enough memory to fit a container ship or two (16 gibs, good god...) I'd still rather have one, both for resume and general swappy stuff if ever needed.

Personally I'd like file birth time support (and not just for btrfs) to jog my memory about the times I've made old stuff, but it seems I'd have to move to e.g. FreeBSD for that and I prefer the more-up-to-date-iness of Arch.

And in Unixland, an RPN calculator is often only as far away as a shell prompt: dc

Very handy.

If Kerrisk is the keeper of man 7, and he was supposed to cover man 7 in his book, then yes, this would be an oversight.

The ?roff language was pretty much "assembler language" for typesetting - you weren't supposed to write your documents in raw ?roff. In those days, before word processors like msword and oo, and before TeX and LaTeX, anyone who wrote docs for UNIX systems was well versed in the different macro packages, including some of man, ms, mm, me, and others.

And he has already been close to death with mystery illnesses:

http://www.unix.com/news-links-events-announcements/16764-slackware-please-keep-patrick-volkerding-your-thoughts.html

Did they ever figure out what he had?

In this case, the moral of the story is that this wouldn't have happened with Exchange or IIS, because there is no middle-man that could mess with their code.

Do you realize that Microsoft licenses code from 3rd parties?

Do you realize that Microsoft has BSD/non-GPL opensource code in their software (for example the ASN.1 code - which is why *THEIR* stuff were vulnerable too from that ASN.1 vulnerability a few years back)

Do you realize that Microsoft sells/gives you GPLed code?! So, all their talk about viral stuff is bullshit. Go look up "Windows Services for UNIX" and see that it's a free download, and also comes builtin with Server.

See also: http://www.unix.com/whats-your-mind/33991-windows-korn-shell.html

They are offering the majority of their software patents for free to people who offer to join the fight against patents...

"...who offer to join the fight against patents?" Riiiiiight. I think you're jamming words into IBM's mouth that it didn't put there.

IBM's donation is a standards-body/consortium licensing agreement. It works like this:

"We've made and patented many contributions to this niche. We will put ours into a pool with other contributors so that we can all use them in a cooperative manner, so long as certain conditions of development are satisfied. We'll also allow others to use the technologies and participate in the consortium if they abide to the same conditions..."

This is a traditional licensing arrangement. It helps ensure that the participants play according to some common rules - e.g., compulsory cross-licensing, such as "no one will warp the standard in a proprietary way, or refuse to cross-license their products on a reasonable basis..." etc.

These agreements only work because of the pooled patents. They ensure that participant who doesn't comply will be in breach of licenses, and will be on the hook for patent infringement damages (likely of a whole body of patents donated by many players!) If those patents did not exist, there would be no significant financial threat... and hence, no consortium. In fact, this is one of the strongest arguments in favor of patents for software (and any other technology.) It wards off "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics and other types of anticooperative behavior.

In general, IBM is a huge fan of patent licenses - it's one of the top patent licensors in *any* field. Only a few are donated to consortiums like this - the quid pro quo of most of its licenses is a cash payment, or a cross-license of another patent, etc. Those are traditional (and widely practiced and accepted) forms of software licenses... and if anything, they support the concept of software patents - because they can be, and often are, used in a cooperative manner.

BTW - it's hardly "a majority" of its patents... it has donated 500 patents to OSS, but it typically receives over 3,000 patents annually.

- David Stein

UNIX no flash

has some good info on OSS schedulers: http://www.unix.com/

i propose the following solution:

unix.com goes to the holders of the trademark, and current owners of it get asterisknix.com, since that's what they really mean/want.

everybody happy?

(ok, asterisknix.com doesn't really exist, but it _could_)

in other news......

Unix rips off Apples buttons

http://www.unix.com

vs

http://www.apple.com

good to see Unix geeks havent lost their ethics

From the Trademark Usage Terms it clearly states "It must not be used as a generic term."

If this site put up unix.com as a be-all *nix site, this this /might/ be in voliation of that (depening on how much the Open Group is willing to spend on lawyers).

Also it could be agrued (not by me) that domain names are case insenitive and there isn't really any way to tell the differance between UNIX.COM and unix.com, which could be taken as a voliation of the (all caps) UNIX trademark

From the Trademark Usage Terms it clearly states "It must not be used as a generic term."

If this site put up unix.com as a be-all *nix site, this this /might/ be in voliation of that (depening on how much the Open Group is willing to spend on lawyers).

Also it could be agrued (not by me) that domain names are case insenitive and there isn't really any way to tell the differance between UNIX.COM and unix.com, which could be taken as a voliation of the (all caps) UNIX trademark

From the Trademark Usage Terms it clearly states "It must not be used as a generic term."

If this site put up unix.com as a be-all *nix site, this this /might/ be in voliation of that (depening on how much the Open Group is willing to spend on lawyers).

Also it could be agrued (not by me) that domain names are case insenitive and there isn't really any way to tell the differance between UNIX.COM and unix.com, which could be taken as a voliation of the (all caps) UNIX trademark

Well, unix.com is slashdotted, so for this post I'll assume that it is not being sold by Open Group, the rightful owners of the trademark on the name "unix".

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999 amends current trademark law to encompass domain names, and has already been tested in the courts. This bill would make registration, use, or sale of the domain by anyone other than the Open Group a crime, and I'm pretty sure that eBay would halt the auction (according to their current policies)

It might be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts to this. I understand they offered a great deal of money for linux.com when it was for sale. I was recently at the Boeing/Microsoft technical lookahead and they see Sun as their primary competitor. Perhaps Unix.com is in their strategic plan. Sounds like Sun should be the primary customer for this...
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