It's an interesting story of an interesting fiction. If I remember correctly, the Zimmerman note was not exactly of genuine sentiment. Likewise, the Lucitania was transporting munitions in violation of the arms embargo and as such was a valid target for the U-Boats, despite being harped on as a passenger ship that was unfairly targeted.
I assume that you're assuming that he's American and that you're referring to the Revolutionary War. Of course, the American Revolution really needs to be viewed more as a global, European war, of which North America was one battle front, and the French were here to stick it to Britain. They didn't really have much interest in us at the time otherwise, and in retrospect, what with Enlightenment-leaning military officers returning to France and helping instigate revolution there, the French really would have been better off staying out of it, at least from a Crown perspective. What I'm trying to get at is, they didn't altrusistically "liberate" the Colonies, they were just trying to punish the British.
Now, the U.S., at least in WWI, really had no legitimate beef with Germany & Co., and thus no reason to get into the war except out of friendship for France. Hell, after the Revolution, War of 1812, British support for the Confederacy during the American Civil War (Confederate failure at Gettysburg is responsible for them backing out, but had the South won, they likely would have committed troops. They had already given a great deal of Naval (ship production) and Commercial support to the South), tacit U.S. support for the Fenian invasion of Quebec after the the Civil War, etc, the U.S. and Britain weren't exactly chummy during WWI. It wasn't until after then that we really had a solid alliance with the UK.
Thus, I would say that the U.S. "Liberated" France, where as France, or at least the French government, was mostly interested in using as a pawn in a greater game against their enemy, sort of like Korea and Vietnam between the U.S. and Soviet Union.
and Marx got it from Mosses Hess, who taught both Marx and Engles, and who actually came up with most of the ideas and slogans that were later attributed to Marx. Of course, he didn't exist in a vacuum either.
All of this was being dumped onto shared web hosting servers, so its not exactly as if we could be in complete control, as the spam was directed at our customers, who were getting spam for being dumb. Of course, when we caught people sending out spam, I'd drop the hammer of the gods on them. I have a really low threshold for putting up with spam crap, and a really high BOFH drive.
We were relying on SpamAssassin out of cPanel's general config and I wasn't really allowed to do anything proactive or cool, beyond my secret practice of scraping IPs from RBLs, anything which hit the rate limit, or which otherwise displayed spamish behaviour and dropping it with an apf -d.
Yes, I know. But I was a junior admin an a "that's the way we've always done it" type place, where despite the fact I had been a C programmer at an accelerator facility as an intern when most of the other employees were still in middle school, I didn't know PHP and thus my 12 years of FreeBSD experience still counted me as a "n00b".
I'll be happier where I am now, though. It's a lot better for me.
I was self-appointed anti-spam czar at my last job, as I was absolutely convinced that nearly all our CPU criticals in Nagios were i/o bound, and that they were largely caused by spam. One time, I took a server (a dell 2950) down from a load of 15 to a load of 3, just by blocking one IP address I found connected to SMTP 6 times, and causing spamd to churn, according to the Exim logs. The majority of the spam that I saw would come from Brazil, Columbia and Italy. One time, we hit a flood so bad of Brazilian spam, that it maxed out SMTP connections on half our west coast shared hosting servers, and caused one of our caching nameservers to crash from all the rbl look-ups.
I've been thinking about this for a right while, and this is just the straw on it for me. No, it doesn't surprise me at all, but what surprises me is that vast numbers of people have, for quite some time now, been not only "ok" with Google having access to all their data, but also actively putting more and more of it DIRECTLY into their hands.
Say I log into Gmail. Whether I got a message from a friend or relative, or whether it was from something to which I had subscribed, I am going to be greeted with ads trying to sell me stuff based on key words in the message itself. Perhaps that's the "cost" of the "free" service, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. I run my own mail servers, I don't need to use Gmail anymore. Back in 2003-2004, that wasn't the case, and I did make heavy use of it. Now, not so much, but I have a lot of stuff archived there.
Then, there is Google Docs. Yes, by all means, lets all put all of our school papers, work documents, personal projects, etc, onto Google. Then we have no more physical control over it, and who knows what might happen to it, or why. The same argument could be used about any "cloud" service, or even hosting provider. I was as system admin at the hosting provider which contains my mail server, and even though I just moved to a different company, I still maintain root access to my machine and trust all the people who still work there, which is a slightly different situation.
I really don't use any Google services anymore, except for search. But now, apparently, even if I don't log in, then they're going to track my searches and customize results based on cookies and whatnot? Tres uncool. Of course, Now with the Yahoo-MS search deal, that's pretty much no good. AlltheWeb seems to provide reasonably good results, and doesn't push advertising at me, so I'll probably start moving towards that for search.
But, I don't need Voice, don't want Wave, am completely disinterested in Android as a platform and am so repulsed by the droiddoes.com website, which, imho, is the goatse.cx of cellphone sites, that I will not ever purchase one of those either. Google is not my friend, and I'm not their fan. I don't see the point in putting them up to hero worship any more than any other company. I'm typing this on a new MacBook Pro, but I don't give a crap about Apple, I just wanted a desktop Unix that would actually have reasonable power management. My servers run FreeBSD and Linux. I don't "hate" Microsoft, but I don't love them either, and I use their product where appropriate. However, these are things that aren't really "services" that I am capable of providing for myself. Mail, web hosting, and all that jazz, I can set up for myself. I contract a hosting provider to give me space and bandwidth, but that's about it.
I'm not paranoid, really, and I do understand the reality of the situation. However, what I don't understand is writing off risks posed by trusting far-off corporate entities such as Google, Apple, or anyone else to integrate my entire life and shove it back to me, or anyone else who cares to investigate.
I have long suspected that you and your company were, in fact, completely evil and not deserving of the hype surrounding you, nor the trust placed in you. I will now no longer be using my Gmail account, which I have had for years. The few things which are still sent there regularly, I will be changing to send to another address on my personal mail server. I will continue not responding to Voice and Wave invites. I will no longer be logging into Google for search results, nor will be accepting cookies from you, and as soon as I can find a reasonable search engine to replace you, I will not be coming back.
At least this will give me something to do this morning.
I have the Storm, and I can use the GPS with Google Maps just fine. The GPS chip doesn't work when you're on a phone call, but I think that's a function of hardware rather than Verizon.
Despite this being a thread about me hating on Google at this point, Google Maps on my phone is alright. It's free, and it dosn't advertise at me. It's not as nice as Verizon's product, but it costs $5/mo less for something I really don't use all that regularly.
Maybe I should turn in my geek card, but I'm just not really interested in most of the new stuff coming out of Google. I'm happy with my Blackberry on Verizon (they don't really lock down the BB devices, so I don't need Google Voice, or Android). I run my own mail servers, so I don't need to use Google Mail anymore.
I've taken a poke at Chrome, but I really wasn't that impressed with it. I don't have any interest at all in ChromeOS, either.
Most of my criticisms against Google could be levied at any other "cloud" type service provider, and that is lack of any real control. But the fact that it is obvious Google indexes your emails and then inserts targeted ads based on the context of personal communications is just disturbing to me.
and one of the world's largest advertising companies, masquerading as a technology company (though only as a vehicle for their advertising) isn't EVER going to start throwing up link farms or ads in response to NX queries? You, sir, have more faith than the pope.
I've always assumed that my mother was probably smarter than my father, or at least more educated. She went to Princeton, and my dad went to a public school in Florida. She studied Romance Languages, particularly French and Italian, and currently has a masters in Spanish. She used to be an investment banker with a Japanese company, and as she speaks 7 languages, was heavily involved in a lot of deals. My dad was an airline captain for many years, and he's good at maths and stuff though. On my dad's side, my grandfather was a navy pilot with a civil engineering degree, and my grandmother was a calculus teacher though. On my mother's side, my grandfather had a business degree, also from Princeton, and my grandmother was a model, and I don't think she went to college.
So, in my family its evenly matched (and perhaps actually stacked in favor of the women). However, that's just one more anecdote and not a real data point.
Much of system administration scripting is manipulating text. Nearly every log or config file is in pure text, and commands take text in and spit text out, which is why Perl is so great for system admins. The general purposeness of it helps make the program flow easier to deal with for me. If I'm throwing something together on the command line, then awk, sed, cut, etc are fine. If its something I intend to use over and over again, then Perl helps me write a more permanent solution, which, at least to me, will be easier to modify later on as well.
Perl 6 is NOT Perl 5. Perl 5 has been under active development, introducing several new features. CPAN is constantly getting new libraries and whatnot, which and its possible to throw together quick hacks and elegant solutions in Perl, depending on what you want to do.
Maybe Perl is more for a systems administration language (it started out that way) than a software development language, but that's what I need, and that's why I like it. Perl combines the features of awk, sed and shell scripting with those of other languages as well, wraps them up in a C-like syntax, but removes all the hard syntactic bits of C that make it harder for processing strings, or just generally cumbersome.
For me, Perl 5 is perfect. It's pretty much the language that I would have designed if I designed programming languages -- it i well suited to the tasks I do, the problems I tackle, and is expressive in the same way that I think about writing code. That said, I don't give a flying fuck about Perl 6 at all and really have no interest in it at all.
I mentioned in another reply already, but given your name, I'll just say again, the function is in shutdown.c in the sys source tree. Check it out, its funky.
If I were to ask people what kind of technology they use and then ask them how well they hold their liquor, without testing the second half, then I haven't really done any research at all, have I? No. This could just as easily have said "children who use technology tend to think they're way smarter than everyone else." It may turn out to be true, but that doesn't mean the research is actually valid. Just sayin'.
There is a time and a place for the easy stuff. Running FreeBSD on a laptop is a bitch, so I finally sucked it up and bought a Mac, but I still live in the terminal and do everything that way whenever possible -- but I don't have to worry about power management and wifi. But, I started out terminal-only, via telnet, to a FreeBSD 2.2.8 shell account on my dial-up ISP years ago, then with FreeBSD 3.0 and RedHat 5 at home shortly there after. Google wasn't even really around yet then, so you had to rely on less-than-great search, man pages, printed books, or help on irc and mailing lists.
I spent the last 14 months playing sysadmin for a rather large fleet of CentOS-based web servers, and now am moving into straight networking and security type stuff. I'm competent at my job and when I come home, I don't want to have to write wpa-supplicant files by hand. That shit is for suckers, but if I were installing a wireless LAN for PCs that I didn't intend to move around, then it's worth it to write the files and be done with it.
If you use a long-form BSD license (with the credit clause), then they can't take the all the credit -- they have to indicate that they borrowed your source as a starting point.
I don't do much coding, so I don't release a lot of code beyond some Perl or Shell stuff, but when I do, I prefer BSD licensing to GPL licensing. Maybe I just don't think my code is novel enough for anyone to want to hijack anyway.
That's because its really difficult to determine what's "Linux" when you're talking about Linux. What works on RHEL/CentOS won't necessarily work exactly the same on Fedora, and will probably be way different than on a Debian box.
Contrast this, however, to one of the BSDs, say FreeBSD, which I am the most familiar with. Let us take a look here: http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html. All of these documents ship with the OS, so if you don't have a network connection (for instance, you need the docs to help you set it up), then you have them there as well. The FreeBSD Handbook covers everything from installation to configuring BGP.
There is a separate Developer's Handbook (which even contains a primer on x86 asm), a Porter's Handbook, etc. The docs that ship with the OS include even The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, which is somewhat dated at this time, but still a great help in theory.
Then, of course, there are the man pages that everyone always mentions, which are awesome, but don't really help make the point I'm putting forward. Of course, the fact that FreeBSD can ship such thorough documentation is because FreeBSD is FreeBSD anywhere, where "Linux" is not. So, perhaps the problem isn't with "Linux," but with certain distributions not taking documentation seriously enough for the various common tasks and interfaces.
What I'm really getting at is, I should not have to Google around for random blogs and wikis to find out how to do a common task that I may be getting to for the first time, hope that I can find an answer, and that the source can be trusted. Any of the distributions which have any sort of commercial or foundation backing at all, really should just bite the bullet and hire on a few technical writers to actually make proper documentation, and then keep it up-to-date. Hell, even Microsoft updates their online help files, and most tasks in Windows are straight forward enough that only 4th grades and 60 year olds need to ask about it.
Relying on GUI config tools, DHCP, and other magic to keep "newbies" from needing to actually learn anything is counter-productive and isn't going to help create new professionals. "RTFM" shouldn't be a put down or a dirty word, but TFM needs to actually contain TFInformation. Is that really so much to provide?
Wow, the 2010 Fiscal Year is ONLY 8 months away when 2010 is only 4 weeks away? Yeah, better start planning for this massive and abrupt shift... (yeah, I know the difference between a fiscal and a calendar year).
Seriously, though. Good for them. I think XP was out way too long and while I never really had a problem with it that wouldn't be inherent in any type of Windows (I'm just old enough to have missed out on needing to learn much about DOS, and PowerShell pisses me off by not being tcsh), and I think people got complacent with it. The long run of XP probably had as much to do with Vista fears as early bugs did. I purchased a copy of Vista Ultimate a few months ago, and I had no problems with it at all, other than shitty command line, but I was never really an XP user at home anyway.
The story yesterday with regards to Win 7 stealing more XP market share than Vista market share, I think backs this up. The XP users who were still hanging on were doing so because of perceived issues with Vista, which may or may not have been valid, so Win 7 is more for them than for anyone currently using Vista by choice. Kicking up the Win 8 cycle should keep interest higher, and hopefully they'll be able to deliver on time (yeah, yeah...), because 2 years plus 8 months is still sort of slow compared to Apple's releases, and like a glacier compared to some of the major Linux distributions or BSDs which are on might tighter release schedules.
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It's an interesting story of an interesting fiction. If I remember correctly, the Zimmerman note was not exactly of genuine sentiment. Likewise, the Lucitania was transporting munitions in violation of the arms embargo and as such was a valid target for the U-Boats, despite being harped on as a passenger ship that was unfairly targeted.
I assume that you're assuming that he's American and that you're referring to the Revolutionary War. Of course, the American Revolution really needs to be viewed more as a global, European war, of which North America was one battle front, and the French were here to stick it to Britain. They didn't really have much interest in us at the time otherwise, and in retrospect, what with Enlightenment-leaning military officers returning to France and helping instigate revolution there, the French really would have been better off staying out of it, at least from a Crown perspective. What I'm trying to get at is, they didn't altrusistically "liberate" the Colonies, they were just trying to punish the British.
Now, the U.S., at least in WWI, really had no legitimate beef with Germany & Co., and thus no reason to get into the war except out of friendship for France. Hell, after the Revolution, War of 1812, British support for the Confederacy during the American Civil War (Confederate failure at Gettysburg is responsible for them backing out, but had the South won, they likely would have committed troops. They had already given a great deal of Naval (ship production) and Commercial support to the South), tacit U.S. support for the Fenian invasion of Quebec after the the Civil War, etc, the U.S. and Britain weren't exactly chummy during WWI. It wasn't until after then that we really had a solid alliance with the UK.
Thus, I would say that the U.S. "Liberated" France, where as France, or at least the French government, was mostly interested in using as a pawn in a greater game against their enemy, sort of like Korea and Vietnam between the U.S. and Soviet Union.
and Marx got it from Mosses Hess, who taught both Marx and Engles, and who actually came up with most of the ideas and slogans that were later attributed to Marx. Of course, he didn't exist in a vacuum either.
I've had like 30 points in the last few weeks... it can grow tiresome, though the dry spell before that was an equal burden.
All of this was being dumped onto shared web hosting servers, so its not exactly as if we could be in complete control, as the spam was directed at our customers, who were getting spam for being dumb. Of course, when we caught people sending out spam, I'd drop the hammer of the gods on them. I have a really low threshold for putting up with spam crap, and a really high BOFH drive.
We were relying on SpamAssassin out of cPanel's general config and I wasn't really allowed to do anything proactive or cool, beyond my secret practice of scraping IPs from RBLs, anything which hit the rate limit, or which otherwise displayed spamish behaviour and dropping it with an apf -d.
Yes, I know. But I was a junior admin an a "that's the way we've always done it" type place, where despite the fact I had been a C programmer at an accelerator facility as an intern when most of the other employees were still in middle school, I didn't know PHP and thus my 12 years of FreeBSD experience still counted me as a "n00b".
I'll be happier where I am now, though. It's a lot better for me.
I was self-appointed anti-spam czar at my last job, as I was absolutely convinced that nearly all our CPU criticals in Nagios were i/o bound, and that they were largely caused by spam. One time, I took a server (a dell 2950) down from a load of 15 to a load of 3, just by blocking one IP address I found connected to SMTP 6 times, and causing spamd to churn, according to the Exim logs. The majority of the spam that I saw would come from Brazil, Columbia and Italy. One time, we hit a flood so bad of Brazilian spam, that it maxed out SMTP connections on half our west coast shared hosting servers, and caused one of our caching nameservers to crash from all the rbl look-ups.
I can't really say I'm surprised by this at all.
I've been thinking about this for a right while, and this is just the straw on it for me. No, it doesn't surprise me at all, but what surprises me is that vast numbers of people have, for quite some time now, been not only "ok" with Google having access to all their data, but also actively putting more and more of it DIRECTLY into their hands.
Say I log into Gmail. Whether I got a message from a friend or relative, or whether it was from something to which I had subscribed, I am going to be greeted with ads trying to sell me stuff based on key words in the message itself. Perhaps that's the "cost" of the "free" service, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. I run my own mail servers, I don't need to use Gmail anymore. Back in 2003-2004, that wasn't the case, and I did make heavy use of it. Now, not so much, but I have a lot of stuff archived there.
Then, there is Google Docs. Yes, by all means, lets all put all of our school papers, work documents, personal projects, etc, onto Google. Then we have no more physical control over it, and who knows what might happen to it, or why. The same argument could be used about any "cloud" service, or even hosting provider. I was as system admin at the hosting provider which contains my mail server, and even though I just moved to a different company, I still maintain root access to my machine and trust all the people who still work there, which is a slightly different situation.
I really don't use any Google services anymore, except for search. But now, apparently, even if I don't log in, then they're going to track my searches and customize results based on cookies and whatnot? Tres uncool. Of course, Now with the Yahoo-MS search deal, that's pretty much no good. AlltheWeb seems to provide reasonably good results, and doesn't push advertising at me, so I'll probably start moving towards that for search.
But, I don't need Voice, don't want Wave, am completely disinterested in Android as a platform and am so repulsed by the droiddoes.com website, which, imho, is the goatse.cx of cellphone sites, that I will not ever purchase one of those either. Google is not my friend, and I'm not their fan. I don't see the point in putting them up to hero worship any more than any other company. I'm typing this on a new MacBook Pro, but I don't give a crap about Apple, I just wanted a desktop Unix that would actually have reasonable power management. My servers run FreeBSD and Linux. I don't "hate" Microsoft, but I don't love them either, and I use their product where appropriate. However, these are things that aren't really "services" that I am capable of providing for myself. Mail, web hosting, and all that jazz, I can set up for myself. I contract a hosting provider to give me space and bandwidth, but that's about it.
I'm not paranoid, really, and I do understand the reality of the situation. However, what I don't understand is writing off risks posed by trusting far-off corporate entities such as Google, Apple, or anyone else to integrate my entire life and shove it back to me, or anyone else who cares to investigate.
I have long suspected that you and your company were, in fact, completely evil and not deserving of the hype surrounding you, nor the trust placed in you. I will now no longer be using my Gmail account, which I have had for years. The few things which are still sent there regularly, I will be changing to send to another address on my personal mail server. I will continue not responding to Voice and Wave invites. I will no longer be logging into Google for search results, nor will be accepting cookies from you, and as soon as I can find a reasonable search engine to replace you, I will not be coming back.
At least this will give me something to do this morning.
I have the Storm, and I can use the GPS with Google Maps just fine. The GPS chip doesn't work when you're on a phone call, but I think that's a function of hardware rather than Verizon.
Despite this being a thread about me hating on Google at this point, Google Maps on my phone is alright. It's free, and it dosn't advertise at me. It's not as nice as Verizon's product, but it costs $5/mo less for something I really don't use all that regularly.
Maybe I should turn in my geek card, but I'm just not really interested in most of the new stuff coming out of Google. I'm happy with my Blackberry on Verizon (they don't really lock down the BB devices, so I don't need Google Voice, or Android). I run my own mail servers, so I don't need to use Google Mail anymore.
I've taken a poke at Chrome, but I really wasn't that impressed with it. I don't have any interest at all in ChromeOS, either.
Most of my criticisms against Google could be levied at any other "cloud" type service provider, and that is lack of any real control. But the fact that it is obvious Google indexes your emails and then inserts targeted ads based on the context of personal communications is just disturbing to me.
and one of the world's largest advertising companies, masquerading as a technology company (though only as a vehicle for their advertising) isn't EVER going to start throwing up link farms or ads in response to NX queries? You, sir, have more faith than the pope.
I've always assumed that my mother was probably smarter than my father, or at least more educated. She went to Princeton, and my dad went to a public school in Florida. She studied Romance Languages, particularly French and Italian, and currently has a masters in Spanish. She used to be an investment banker with a Japanese company, and as she speaks 7 languages, was heavily involved in a lot of deals. My dad was an airline captain for many years, and he's good at maths and stuff though. On my dad's side, my grandfather was a navy pilot with a civil engineering degree, and my grandmother was a calculus teacher though. On my mother's side, my grandfather had a business degree, also from Princeton, and my grandmother was a model, and I don't think she went to college.
So, in my family its evenly matched (and perhaps actually stacked in favor of the women). However, that's just one more anecdote and not a real data point.
Much of system administration scripting is manipulating text. Nearly every log or config file is in pure text, and commands take text in and spit text out, which is why Perl is so great for system admins. The general purposeness of it helps make the program flow easier to deal with for me. If I'm throwing something together on the command line, then awk, sed, cut, etc are fine. If its something I intend to use over and over again, then Perl helps me write a more permanent solution, which, at least to me, will be easier to modify later on as well.
Perl 6 is NOT Perl 5. Perl 5 has been under active development, introducing several new features. CPAN is constantly getting new libraries and whatnot, which and its possible to throw together quick hacks and elegant solutions in Perl, depending on what you want to do.
Maybe Perl is more for a systems administration language (it started out that way) than a software development language, but that's what I need, and that's why I like it. Perl combines the features of awk, sed and shell scripting with those of other languages as well, wraps them up in a C-like syntax, but removes all the hard syntactic bits of C that make it harder for processing strings, or just generally cumbersome.
For me, Perl 5 is perfect. It's pretty much the language that I would have designed if I designed programming languages -- it i well suited to the tasks I do, the problems I tackle, and is expressive in the same way that I think about writing code. That said, I don't give a flying fuck about Perl 6 at all and really have no interest in it at all.
I mentioned in another reply already, but given your name, I'll just say again, the function is in shutdown.c in the sys source tree. Check it out, its funky.
If I were to ask people what kind of technology they use and then ask them how well they hold their liquor, without testing the second half, then I haven't really done any research at all, have I? No. This could just as easily have said "children who use technology tend to think they're way smarter than everyone else." It may turn out to be true, but that doesn't mean the research is actually valid. Just sayin'.
It's from the FreeBSD shutdown.c source file.
What could possibly be bad in a code base that contains functions such as "void die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog(void)"?
There is a time and a place for the easy stuff. Running FreeBSD on a laptop is a bitch, so I finally sucked it up and bought a Mac, but I still live in the terminal and do everything that way whenever possible -- but I don't have to worry about power management and wifi. But, I started out terminal-only, via telnet, to a FreeBSD 2.2.8 shell account on my dial-up ISP years ago, then with FreeBSD 3.0 and RedHat 5 at home shortly there after. Google wasn't even really around yet then, so you had to rely on less-than-great search, man pages, printed books, or help on irc and mailing lists.
I spent the last 14 months playing sysadmin for a rather large fleet of CentOS-based web servers, and now am moving into straight networking and security type stuff. I'm competent at my job and when I come home, I don't want to have to write wpa-supplicant files by hand. That shit is for suckers, but if I were installing a wireless LAN for PCs that I didn't intend to move around, then it's worth it to write the files and be done with it.
If you use a long-form BSD license (with the credit clause), then they can't take the all the credit -- they have to indicate that they borrowed your source as a starting point.
I don't do much coding, so I don't release a lot of code beyond some Perl or Shell stuff, but when I do, I prefer BSD licensing to GPL licensing. Maybe I just don't think my code is novel enough for anyone to want to hijack anyway.
That's because its really difficult to determine what's "Linux" when you're talking about Linux. What works on RHEL/CentOS won't necessarily work exactly the same on Fedora, and will probably be way different than on a Debian box.
Contrast this, however, to one of the BSDs, say FreeBSD, which I am the most familiar with. Let us take a look here: http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html. All of these documents ship with the OS, so if you don't have a network connection (for instance, you need the docs to help you set it up), then you have them there as well. The FreeBSD Handbook covers everything from installation to configuring BGP.
There is a separate Developer's Handbook (which even contains a primer on x86 asm), a Porter's Handbook, etc. The docs that ship with the OS include even The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, which is somewhat dated at this time, but still a great help in theory.
Then, of course, there are the man pages that everyone always mentions, which are awesome, but don't really help make the point I'm putting forward. Of course, the fact that FreeBSD can ship such thorough documentation is because FreeBSD is FreeBSD anywhere, where "Linux" is not. So, perhaps the problem isn't with "Linux," but with certain distributions not taking documentation seriously enough for the various common tasks and interfaces.
What I'm really getting at is, I should not have to Google around for random blogs and wikis to find out how to do a common task that I may be getting to for the first time, hope that I can find an answer, and that the source can be trusted. Any of the distributions which have any sort of commercial or foundation backing at all, really should just bite the bullet and hire on a few technical writers to actually make proper documentation, and then keep it up-to-date. Hell, even Microsoft updates their online help files, and most tasks in Windows are straight forward enough that only 4th grades and 60 year olds need to ask about it.
Relying on GUI config tools, DHCP, and other magic to keep "newbies" from needing to actually learn anything is counter-productive and isn't going to help create new professionals. "RTFM" shouldn't be a put down or a dirty word, but TFM needs to actually contain TFInformation. Is that really so much to provide?
Frankly, would you want to see a sex tape of the average Slashdotter? Or ever be able to look at that person again? Be honest.
Wow, the 2010 Fiscal Year is ONLY 8 months away when 2010 is only 4 weeks away? Yeah, better start planning for this massive and abrupt shift... (yeah, I know the difference between a fiscal and a calendar year).
Seriously, though. Good for them. I think XP was out way too long and while I never really had a problem with it that wouldn't be inherent in any type of Windows (I'm just old enough to have missed out on needing to learn much about DOS, and PowerShell pisses me off by not being tcsh), and I think people got complacent with it. The long run of XP probably had as much to do with Vista fears as early bugs did. I purchased a copy of Vista Ultimate a few months ago, and I had no problems with it at all, other than shitty command line, but I was never really an XP user at home anyway.
The story yesterday with regards to Win 7 stealing more XP market share than Vista market share, I think backs this up. The XP users who were still hanging on were doing so because of perceived issues with Vista, which may or may not have been valid, so Win 7 is more for them than for anyone currently using Vista by choice. Kicking up the Win 8 cycle should keep interest higher, and hopefully they'll be able to deliver on time (yeah, yeah...), because 2 years plus 8 months is still sort of slow compared to Apple's releases, and like a glacier compared to some of the major Linux distributions or BSDs which are on might tighter release schedules.