“High school is bizarre enough, but a private high school is an environment uniquely removed from
reality. S. and G., two sophomores at such a school in one of the United States’ hot technology
corridors, put up a couple of private websites with their unflattering thoughts about the school
experience. Last week those sites got them suspended for two days. Worse — because he wasn’t
familiar with the distinction between perl’s scalar and list context, S. now has a police record.” Read more at Slashdot.

SeattleTimes: “Streaming-media giant RealNetworks has alleged a former
employee stole crucial business secrets and gave them to
LockStream of Bellevue to develop competing products, court
records show.”

Chris Tom writes “AMD and Linux NetworX have announced today that they have delivered a Linux Supercluster to Boeing. This one has a whopping 96 Athlons!: AMD announced today that The Boeing Company has implemented an AMD Athlon processor-based supercluster developed by Linux NetworX. The high performance cluster system, featuring 96 AMD Athlon(tm) processors, is running computational fluid dynamics applications in support of the Boeing Delta IV Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program at the company’s Space & Communications division in Huntington Beach, Calif. Boeing Delta IV engineers tested several other processor platforms at Linux NetworX facilities before purchasing the AMD Athlon processor-based cluster. The Delta IV is the newest class of rockets developed by Boeing that will enter service in 2002 and will have the capability of lifting satellite payloads of up to 29,000 pounds into geosynchronous transfer orbit. “

ZDNET.co.uk: “Computers are illogical machines in dire need of a total overhaul, and
the information technology industry is completely screwed up.

That’s the gist of what academics and engineers told IT workers
gathered here this week for the three-day Association for Computing
Machinery conference. The event is typically a sort of group hug
between computer programmers and scientists, but the mood turned a
tad nasty Tuesday as researchers lightheartedly ripped on computer
scientists, who made up the bulk of the 200-member audience.”

ZDNET.co.uk: “A new version of SubSeven, a powerful and well-known backdoor
program that gives attackers almost complete control over a victim’s
computer, is making the rounds on the Internet.”

Charles Connell writes “I teach software engineering and I know what “real” computer scientists think about my subject. It is soft. It is not quantitative. It is little different from sociology (gasp!) since it partly concerns the behavior of people in groups. Real computer scientists prefer topics such as cellular automata, undecidability, lambda calculus, and probabilistic factoring.

In graduate school I signed up for the only course on software engineering. On the first day of class, the professor announced, “Software engineering is bullshit. There is nothing to teach about it. So we are going to study Unix internals instead.” And that was that. I learned nothing about software engineering during my four years at graduate school. This article is about why software engineering is not bullshit. In fact, it is a long way from excrement and may be more worthy of serious study than some traditional computer science topics.

Click here for the full text…“

cnb writes “If you wonder about safely allowing a user to run a program on your Unix box
requiring root privileges and feel uneasy about options like sharing the root
password or using setuid bits then sudo is the program for you. This
article on
FreeOS will help you set up sudo.”

Jay Sulzberger of LXNY sent us this heads up about the next GNUbies meeting:

This meeting is free and open to the public.
 
 The meeting runs from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm.
 
 Thanks to support of CALC/Canterbury, the meeting is
 in their space at 780 Third Avenue 
 between 48th and 49th Streets on
 the East Side of Manhattan.  Ask at the front desk for
 CALC/Canterbury, which is on Concourse Level 1.
 
 Times:
 
 6:30 pm General Q&A
 7:00 pm Jay Sulzberger will commence ranting
 
 Subway stops:
 IND E and F, the Lexington Avenue stop
 IRT 6, the 51st Street stop
 
 If you plan to attend, please visit the Beginners
 web page at
 
 http://www.gnubies.org
 
 and follow the attendance link so that we can
 arrange for the appropriate amount of space.
 
 
 Today there is no competent mass market small office
 lan product, neither a source secret product nor a free software
 product. We will argue that the correlation of forces favors free
 software in the coming drive to lower Operating Costs and raise
 Return on Investment.
 
 http://www.fsf.org
 http://www.debian.org
 http://rsync.samba.org


 http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
 http://sicp.ai.mit.edu/Spring-2001


ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/cs345/schintro-v14/schintro_75.html#SEC82


ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/cs345/schintro-v14/schintro_141.html#SEC264


http://slashdot.org/interviews/01/03/13/1420210.shtml


http://hotwired.lycos.com/collections/connectivity/5.10_eli_noam1.html


http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9708/0412.html
 
 info tar
 man apt-get
 
 I will also install from scratch a Debian system in
 two different ways, one of which requires 
 exactly three keystrokes.  The author of the three stroke
 install utility will heckle throughout.
 
 Jay Sulzberger 

ZDNET.co.uk: “Microsoft plans to port its .Net technology to competing operating
systems including the upstart open source offering Linux, according to
press reports Tuesday.

The software powerhouse will next Monday unveil software to allow
non-Microsoft platforms to implement .Net, its technology to deliver
software and applications over the Internet.”

ZDNET: “Transmeta, the employer of Linux founder Linus Torvalds, has
released Midori, its version of Linux for mobile devices.

Transmeta, which sells low-power, Intel-compatible processors
called Crusoe, previously referred to Midori as Mobile Linux.
Transmeta has been working on the Midori additions to Linux for
more than a year. Now it has released the software as an
open-source project at VA Linux Systems’ SourceForge site.” (Note: VALinux also owns Newsforge.com.)