Gee, it's just like with mp3s and DeCSS and other fair use issues... Let's make Napster and DeCSS illegal because someone might use them to pirate content.
They don't care that it takes me less time to download a Metallica mp3 than it does to rip my own CDs, or that I might want to trade songs by unsigned artists.
They don't care that I want to watch DVDs on my Linux box. And they sure as hell don't want me to be able to skip the advertisements at the beginning of the media... not that there's actually something illegal (or evan immoral) about that.
And they certainly don't care that you're not out there doing little kids -- why take chances? They want it to be illegal to even consider it.
To quote Hollywood: "We don't like what we don't understand, in fact it scares us and this monster is mysterious, at least."
Okay, I'll grant you, I live in Northern Virginia, and this is a pretty backwards conservative (by which I mean anti-free-speech) state, and in general, this decision does not bode well for us freedom loving hippies (by which I mean "anyone with an IQ larger than their shoe size").
On the other hand, I don't see this being enforced in cases where it is obviously ludicrous. Someone mentioned the case of a doctor not being able to research your sexual perv^H^H^H^Hdisorder online. If the doctor is doing legitimate research, he is not going to be prosecuted... if he's screwing around with the guise of research, then he's gonna get nailed.
Case in point: when I was in middle school, my drama teacher brought in "Terminator 2" because he felt that despite its R-rating, it was useful for teaching us 8th-graders what we needed to be taught. That's "against the rules"... nevertheless, he won a national teaching award a few years ago.
The laws may seem silly, but sometimes common sense wins out -- I think that will be true in this case. (That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop fighting them, of course...)
Oh sure, great, just what we need, an extra (but shorter) month. A real genius would have figured out how to give us more hours in the day -- without shortening the length of those hours. That way I could stay up all night reading Slashdot, get a full eight hours of sleep, and still get to work early enough that my boss doesn't call me at home at 10:00 AM.
There's no place you can hide! I can't broadcast my own radio station due to royalties and regulations... I guess this means I can't do it online anymore either. And for legitimate radio stations, well, they'll have to pay twice.
How much freedom can they take from us before it becomes too much?
There's a chapter or two written by Charles Allen about WIDL in the XML Handbook (Goldfarb, et al).
But it's a technology that is dated now -- webMethods has moved on to B2B, and anyone who is jumping up and down about screen scraping in 2000 is just a little bit behind the times.
I've been a faithful Netscape user since the days of NCSA Mosaic. I had high hopes for Gecko. And I gave up hope after AOL's aquisition of Netscape.
I have tried to use several of the official AOL Netscape 6 Betas but keep going back to Netscape 4.72. Netscape 6 is not only unstable, but littered with the AOL crap described in the article.
I can only hope that when Mozilla stabilizes, it will provide all of the benefits (yeah, I'm out on a limb here) and none of the AOL hooks of Netscape.
What would possess someone to post an image of an article, rather than reproducing the text? I mean, if it were in Japanese, I could understand... but after five minutes, the first line of text revealed plain ISO-Latin-1 characters. I wish I had your broadband connection.
... oh, wait, we live in a Republic, not a true direct Democracy.
I really don't like the electoral college, and I wish we could just elect the candidates we like, by <gasp> voting. But our system of government is a republic, meaning that we choose representatives to govern us. The electoral college is comprised, more-or-less, of the representatives that we vote for with the state-wide popular election process.
So, I'm all for changing the system... but keep in mind, that it is working just like it was designed to work...
Being a software engineer whose stomach can't handle coffee, I drink nearly a half dozen cans of regular Mountain Dew, every day. It's an interesting mix of carbonated water, corn syrup, tangerine juice, and caffeine. Oh yeah, and neon green coloring. And no, it doesn't shrink your testicles. I can't believe I'm posting this...
A few people have alluded to this, but I'm going to come right out and say it: This trailer looks like a cross between Lord of the Rings and The Phantom Menace.
We've got:
cute/innocent chick ruler (From Ep1)
Nasty council/advisor types (From Ep1)
Marlon Wayans vs. Jar Jar (From Ep1)
Way cool CG cities (From Ep1)
Way cool CG dragons (From LotR)
Kids with swords (From both)
Bad guys with stupid makeup (From Ep1)
Creepy Goblins (From LotR)
Lightning from finger tips (okay, that was EpVI...)
Extremely dramatic music (From LotR)
Interesting arial battles (From Ep1)
Kids with swords (From LotR)
"Kill them slowly... AHHHH!" vs "Wipe them out, all of them... AHHHH!" (From Ep1)
All that said, this looks really cool, and as someone mentioned, this will be good filler while we wait for Lord of the Rings. And Marlon Wayans is funny, unlike Jar Jar.
It doesn't matter how secure your provider is or whether you host your own server. The messages are only ever as secure as the recipient keeps them.
I don't care, use every security trick in the book... but if the recipient reads the mail in plain text off hotmail.com, it isn't secure.
To do secure email:
Make sure your box is secure enough for your purposes -- i.e. lock the screen when not sitting at the console. No security is ever perfect, but make it as good as required to protect your secrets.
Make sure your recipient is as smart as you -- namely, don't email your plan to nuke Boston to someone who you aren't absolutely sure understands basic security principles.
Use public key encryption like PGP or GnuPG with rediculously long keys.
Don't send the messages over plain text, anywhere. Type the message on your own box, and encrypt it there before it goes out on the wire. If your box can't do that (and there's usually only laziness to blame if this is the case), make sure you use ssh to connect to your shell account. In this case, you're only as secure as that box's administrator has made it. I would say make sure to use ssl if you're using web based email, but I simply cannot imagine a web based email system that provides what any truly paranoid hacker would trust as secure.
This creates an interesting dichotomy for me, half being "Oh my God, this is unethical and dangerous for society -- what if <insert conservative politician's name here, i.e. Bush or Gore> got his hands on this?!" And the other half being, "Wow, this is neat -- the crem de la crem of hackers, crackers, and other people I grew up worshipping doing something really impressive... how do I sign up?"
Second point:
To all the Slashdotters who say these people don't know what they're talking about, talk to Patrick Naughton, Kevin Mitnick, or the fabled Jaeger who was brought down by an astronomer with a few extra printers capturing all of the data going through the office... they'll tell you that people can and do track what's happening on the 'net.
These are a clever group of people, but they aren't doing this as outside observers -- the thing about recovering deleted data assumes that the machine has been seized. Being able to track the data means that they are inside your IT department, inside your ISP, inside your phone company. The FBI is good, but Carnivore is useless without ISP cooperation... and they get it. So too do lots of other people.
Don't think for a minute that you are smarter than the folks at Actis... maybe you are, but are you really smarter? How about the people who email you, or the people who run your ISP? Even if you don't make mistakes, there will be people who do, and then whoever is looking for you might find you.
This sounds rediculous, but there are computer stores that actually do this -- I was asked politely to leave a Gateway store because they couldn't imagine ever selling a computer without an operating system. Or maybe it was the 'L' word. Anyway, all this was before the public was allowed to know that Microsoft is a monopoly... maybe Gateway would be more receptive now.
Having worked with SAP in Walldorf and fought with SAP DB, I don't see how anyone will benefit from an open source SAP DB.
For those who don't know, SAP R/3 is their flagship product and is the leading ERP system in use today. It competes with the likes of Baan and Peoplesoft. All (or most) of the data that the R/3 system (often a cluster of machines running any number of related applications) is stored on a central database. At one point, this was Oracle or SAP DB.
I seem to recall SAP ditching their relationship with Oracle (because Oracle decided to compete with SAP), and going exclusively with SAP DB. However, SAP DB isn't notoriously standards compliant, and we had to write a bunch of specific code to deal with its idiosyncracies.
But SAP as a company has been trying to embrace Linux and the Web, so maybe this is an attempt at getting a better feel for the Open Source community with a component that could only stand to benefit from additional resources.
I don't know about anyone else, but I know I won't be looking at that source code.
It seems to me, that most of the damage that Microsoft can do, has been done (like killing Netscape). Linux (and maybe MacOS X ?!) seem to be providing a serious alternative that Microsoft will have a much more difficult time squashing.
Sure, I'd like to see MS squashed, but for me, I'm more concerned about some of the other monopolies out there, like Hollywood and the Recording Industry. The worst thing that Microsoft has done recently is threaten to sue Kernel developers over NTFS. Those other folks are trying to make it impossible to own data and to create competing products by outlawing reverse engineering.
The problem is not company uses monopoly to defeat rival company. The real problem is this: company uses monopoly to make rival ideas illegal.
Little did we think that corporate America would be responsible for creating an Orwellian society... and for years, we never suspected a thing.
Is distributing DecSS code legal? Judge Kaplan says no, the lawyer for 2600 says yes, we really won't get an answer until the Supremese hear of it.
Is creating an Everquest server clone legal? Maybe, maybe not, a lawyer can only argue for it, a judge ultimately decides.
Okay, fine. Why don't we get a Judge on staff at Slashdot. That might cost Andover a little more, but think of all the, uh... good that could be done if we bought-- er, I mean hired a Judge.
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Total Sports, Inc. (TS528-ORG) hostmaster@TOTALSPORTS.NET
Total Sports, Inc.
PO Box 671
Raleigh, NC 27602-0671
US
(919) 573-8020
Fax- (919) 573-8080
Billing Contact:
Accounts Payable (TS529-ORG) billing@TOTALSPORTS.NET
Total Sports, Inc.
PO Box 671
Raleigh, NC 27602-0671
US
(919) 573-8020
Fax- (919) 573-8143
Record last updated on 07-Mar-1999.
Record expires on 07-Mar-2001.
Record created on 07-Mar-1999.
Database last updated on 28-Aug-2000 01:24:25 EDT.
Why is totalsports.net running vitalviewer.com? totalsports.net's corporate page mentions no affiliation. The listed corporate offices for these two companies are on the same street.
I know all sorts of Linux resources, but the question was about teaching Unix in general, so I tried to stick to that.
Now for on-topic:
If you don't know what command you're looking for, use the command apropos (which is frequently just an alias to man -k) to search for a term. It will list the manual pages related to the topic and tell you what sections they are in.
For example:
bziman@ziege:~$ man -k printf
format (n) - Format a string in the style of sprintf
gl_printf (3) - write formatted output in graphic mode
printf (1) - format and print data
printf, fprintf, sprintf, snprintf, vprintf, vfprintf, vsprintf, vsnprintf (3) - formatted output conversion
printftest (6) - tests the vgagl gl_printf function
snprintf, vsnprintf (3) - formatted output conversion
The number in (parenthesis) represents the section in the manual that describes that function. printf(1) is a shell utility for formatting text. printf(3) describes the C library functions in stdio.h.
I hope this helps you and any beginners out there to make better use of the manual pages.
Check out O'Reilly & Associates UNIX Homepage for a list of UNIX books. In particular Learning the UNIX Operating System is in its 4th edition and is one of the best intro books there is. O'Reilly publishes books that cover general topics such as the one I mentioned. Also they have books that go into details on the utilities like sed and awk and shells like bash.
For programming, try Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens, and for extreme beginners, try The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.
For system administration, try the whatever Unleashed books. On Linux, much can be learned by browsing/usr/doc/HOWTO and the man pages.
Good luck!
Brian
An OS is everything I can't turn off.
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
Under linux, I can pare it down to fit on a floppy. And that still has more than just the OS. I have a floppy that boots the OS and then init spawns bash. This is the OS and two apps. Init is debatably part of the OS. Bash is an app. I can turn it off -- I don't have to spawn anything -- init could just sit there and the OS would be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
--brian
They don't care that it takes me less time to download a Metallica mp3 than it does to rip my own CDs, or that I might want to trade songs by unsigned artists.
They don't care that I want to watch DVDs on my Linux box. And they sure as hell don't want me to be able to skip the advertisements at the beginning of the media... not that there's actually something illegal (or evan immoral) about that.
And they certainly don't care that you're not out there doing little kids -- why take chances? They want it to be illegal to even consider it.
To quote Hollywood: "We don't like what we don't understand, in fact it scares us and this monster is mysterious, at least."
--brian
On the other hand, I don't see this being enforced in cases where it is obviously ludicrous. Someone mentioned the case of a doctor not being able to research your sexual perv^H^H^H^H disorder online. If the doctor is doing legitimate research, he is not going to be prosecuted... if he's screwing around with the guise of research, then he's gonna get nailed.
Case in point: when I was in middle school, my drama teacher brought in "Terminator 2" because he felt that despite its R-rating, it was useful for teaching us 8th-graders what we needed to be taught. That's "against the rules"... nevertheless, he won a national teaching award a few years ago.
The laws may seem silly, but sometimes common sense wins out -- I think that will be true in this case. (That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop fighting them, of course...)
--brian
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access
/guides/quantum/c.shtml on this server.
Apache/1.3.3 Server at www.3drage.com Port 80
--brian
Can you imagine? There's more than one of these people out there!
--brian
--brian
How much freedom can they take from us before it becomes too much?
--brian
There's a chapter or two written by Charles Allen about WIDL in the XML Handbook (Goldfarb, et al).
But it's a technology that is dated now -- webMethods has moved on to B2B, and anyone who is jumping up and down about screen scraping in 2000 is just a little bit behind the times.
--brian
I have tried to use several of the official AOL Netscape 6 Betas but keep going back to Netscape 4.72. Netscape 6 is not only unstable, but littered with the AOL crap described in the article.
I can only hope that when Mozilla stabilizes, it will provide all of the benefits (yeah, I'm out on a limb here) and none of the AOL hooks of Netscape.
Waiting patiently,
--brian
--brian
I really don't like the electoral college, and I wish we could just elect the candidates we like, by <gasp> voting. But our system of government is a republic, meaning that we choose representatives to govern us. The electoral college is comprised, more-or-less, of the representatives that we vote for with the state-wide popular election process.
So, I'm all for changing the system... but keep in mind, that it is working just like it was designed to work...
--brian
--brian
We've got:
- cute/innocent chick ruler (From Ep1)
- Nasty council/advisor types (From Ep1)
- Marlon Wayans vs. Jar Jar (From Ep1)
- Way cool CG cities (From Ep1)
- Way cool CG dragons (From LotR)
- Kids with swords (From both)
- Bad guys with stupid makeup (From Ep1)
- Creepy Goblins (From LotR)
- Lightning from finger tips (okay, that was EpVI...)
- Extremely dramatic music (From LotR)
- Interesting arial battles (From Ep1)
- Kids with swords (From LotR)
- "Kill them slowly... AHHHH!" vs "Wipe them out, all of them... AHHHH!" (From Ep1)
All that said, this looks really cool, and as someone mentioned, this will be good filler while we wait for Lord of the Rings. And Marlon Wayans is funny, unlike Jar Jar.--brian
It doesn't matter how secure your provider is or whether you host your own server. The messages are only ever as secure as the recipient keeps them.
I don't care, use every security trick in the book... but if the recipient reads the mail in plain text off hotmail.com, it isn't secure.
To do secure email:
- Make sure your box is secure enough for your purposes -- i.e. lock the screen when not sitting at the console. No security is ever perfect, but make it as good as required to protect your secrets.
- Make sure your recipient is as smart as you -- namely, don't email your plan to nuke Boston to someone who you aren't absolutely sure understands basic security principles.
- Use public key encryption like PGP or GnuPG with rediculously long keys.
- Don't send the messages over plain text, anywhere. Type the message on your own box, and encrypt it there before it goes out on the wire. If your box can't do that (and there's usually only laziness to blame if this is the case), make sure you use ssh to connect to your shell account. In this case, you're only as secure as that box's administrator has made it. I would say make sure to use ssl if you're using web based email, but I simply cannot imagine a web based email system that provides what any truly paranoid hacker would trust as secure.
- Double check step 2.
</paranoia>--brian
This creates an interesting dichotomy for me, half being "Oh my God, this is unethical and dangerous for society -- what if <insert conservative politician's name here, i.e. Bush or Gore> got his hands on this?!" And the other half being, "Wow, this is neat -- the crem de la crem of hackers, crackers, and other people I grew up worshipping doing something really impressive... how do I sign up?"
Second point:
To all the Slashdotters who say these people don't know what they're talking about, talk to Patrick Naughton, Kevin Mitnick, or the fabled Jaeger who was brought down by an astronomer with a few extra printers capturing all of the data going through the office... they'll tell you that people can and do track what's happening on the 'net.
These are a clever group of people, but they aren't doing this as outside observers -- the thing about recovering deleted data assumes that the machine has been seized. Being able to track the data means that they are inside your IT department, inside your ISP, inside your phone company. The FBI is good, but Carnivore is useless without ISP cooperation... and they get it. So too do lots of other people.
Don't think for a minute that you are smarter than the folks at Actis... maybe you are, but are you really smarter? How about the people who email you, or the people who run your ISP? Even if you don't make mistakes, there will be people who do, and then whoever is looking for you might find you.
You can never be too paranoid, only too arrogent.
--brian
--brian
For those who don't know, SAP R/3 is their flagship product and is the leading ERP system in use today. It competes with the likes of Baan and Peoplesoft. All (or most) of the data that the R/3 system (often a cluster of machines running any number of related applications) is stored on a central database. At one point, this was Oracle or SAP DB.
I seem to recall SAP ditching their relationship with Oracle (because Oracle decided to compete with SAP), and going exclusively with SAP DB. However, SAP DB isn't notoriously standards compliant, and we had to write a bunch of specific code to deal with its idiosyncracies.
But SAP as a company has been trying to embrace Linux and the Web, so maybe this is an attempt at getting a better feel for the Open Source community with a component that could only stand to benefit from additional resources.
I don't know about anyone else, but I know I won't be looking at that source code.
Cheers,
Brian
Sure, I'd like to see MS squashed, but for me, I'm more concerned about some of the other monopolies out there, like Hollywood and the Recording Industry. The worst thing that Microsoft has done recently is threaten to sue Kernel developers over NTFS. Those other folks are trying to make it impossible to own data and to create competing products by outlawing reverse engineering.
The problem is not company uses monopoly to defeat rival company. The real problem is this: company uses monopoly to make rival ideas illegal.
Little did we think that corporate America would be responsible for creating an Orwellian society... and for years, we never suspected a thing.
Okay, fine. Why don't we get a Judge on staff at Slashdot. That might cost Andover a little more, but think of all the, uh... good that could be done if we bought-- er, I mean hired a Judge.
--brian
Why is totalsports.net running vitalviewer.com? totalsports.net's corporate page mentions no affiliation. The listed corporate offices for these two companies are on the same street.
Could we be so lucky as to have this be a hoax?
-- brian
I know all sorts of Linux resources, but the question was about teaching Unix in general, so I tried to stick to that.
Now for on-topic:
If you don't know what command you're looking for, use the command apropos (which is frequently just an alias to man -k) to search for a term. It will list the manual pages related to the topic and tell you what sections they are in.
For example:
The number in (parenthesis) represents the section in the manual that describes that function. printf(1) is a shell utility for formatting text. printf(3) describes the C library functions in stdio.h.I hope this helps you and any beginners out there to make better use of the manual pages.
Brian
For programming, try Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens, and for extreme beginners, try The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.
For system administration, try the whatever Unleashed books. On Linux, much can be learned by browsing /usr/doc/HOWTO and the man pages.
Good luck!
Brian
Under linux, I can pare it down to fit on a floppy. And that still has more than just the OS. I have a floppy that boots the OS and then init spawns bash. This is the OS and two apps. Init is debatably part of the OS. Bash is an app. I can turn it off -- I don't have to spawn anything -- init could just sit there and the OS would be happy.