Softpanorama Bulletin.
Vol.11. No.1 (January-March, 1999)

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Instead of Foreword

Nikolai Bezroukov OSS As Academic Research

I believe that Eric Raymond bazaar model provide too simplistic view on the open source software (OSS) development process. This paper tries to explore links between open source software development and academic research as a better paradigm for OSS development. The author argue that open source software development should better be viewed as a special case of academic research and that both suffer from the same set of the problems. IMHO that probably can lead to better understanding of open source phenomenon that artificial bazaar constructs.

NEWS CONTENTS

Old News ;-)

[July 7, 1999] Experts question "attacks" on DOD computers

What They're Not Telling You About Speech Recognition

• PC Magazine Speech Recognition -

[March 17, 1999] CPU Review -- RedHat 6.0: A First Look by William Henning

Linux Today High School Linux User Group formed

Zipslac -- 100 M installation of Linux on windows system

Slackware Linux is one of the oldest and most stable distributions of the Linux operating system, which is released under the GNU Public License and is therefore free for anyone to use and modify. Slackware's creator and maintainer, Patrick Volkerding, has always followed the philosophy that simplicity and stability make an operating system great. Now at version 3.6, Slackware still reflects that philosophy. A special version of Slackware, known as ZipSlack, is designed to be installed on a DOS or Windows(tm) system with about 100MB of free space. ZipSlack is an excellent avenue of exploration for those who are not quite ready to switch operating systems, but who are interested in the Linux OS.

• [Jan 27, 1999] Personal Home Page - reggers Reginald (Reg) E. Quinton [email protected] Information Systems and Technology University of Waterloo -- VERY INTERESTING DOCUMENTS AND LINKS

Linux Today Quad Xeon Processors Running NT Are A Weak Value Proposition

[March 16, 1999] AMD K-6-III and Pentium III

It seems the AMD K-6-III chips have both better absolute performance and better price/performance ratio that PIII. Integrated 256K cache is a really great feature. The AMD chip has a Level 1 cache of 64KB, compared to 32KB on the Pentium III. The Level 2 cache on the AMD chip is 256KB, and it's integrated on the same piece of silicon as the processor, letting it communicate with the processor at a much faster speed. The Pentium III Level 2 cache is 512KB, but it's outside the chip. tests with NT using the Ziff-Davis (Z-D) CPUmark 99 benchmark test "any K-6-III runs more than 30 percent faster than the similarly clocked Pentium III."

Pentium III performance is equivalent to Pentium II chips at the same frequency except with software that supports the Pentium III's new parallel processing instructions. The new Pentium III SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) extensions, like the MMX instruction set, provide parallel processing that will give the greatest boost to games and other entertainment software, not to business applications. That means that the Pentium III could be difficult to justify when a less expensive Pentium II- or Celeron-based system is almost as fast. In fact, the most significant advantage of introoduction of Pentium III's may be that it will drive down the prices of Celeron systems.

[March 20, 1999] Really cheap computers ?

According to CNET News.com, Internet auctioneer Onsale will start selling personal computers and accessories at the "same wholesale price it pays for them...Onsale said it aims to generate a small operating margin from advertising on its Web site, fees for service contracts and leases, and a nominal handling fee for each order". (emphasis mine). I've always known that handling fees in "shipping and handling" were simply scams to allow unscrupulous companies to charge more than the advertised price, but is this the first time I've seen it stated so bluntly.

[Feb 8, 1999] Expect Celeron 400 for $90 soon (street price)

The low end of the market has all the hallmarks of a price war. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) chips, for example, are expected to go for as little as $40 in March, almost unprecedented in the Intel-compatible chip market. K6-2s in March will be about $40 for the 333-MHz version and $60 for the 400-MHz processor. Intel Celeron:
• 400 MHz: From $170 to $140 (or below)
• 366 MHz: From $130 to $100 (or below)
• 333 MHz: From $90 to $70
• 300 MHz : From $71 to $60
Sources: various. Notes: Intel price cuts start next week.

[Jan 4, 1999] Celerons (a 366 and 400 model)

"Intel announced new Celerons (a 366 and 400 model) this morning - still a 66 MHz bus, but now they offer a low-cost chipset (the 440ZX-66 AGPSet) that allows you to use the new Socket 370 form factor - finally, good old baby AT size motherboards can reappear! With the same low prices. The reference board they show is nice and small. I wonder just how overclockable these might turn out to be, and whither they will cannibalize the Pentium II cash despite slower bus speed

[Jan 2, 1999] 400 MHz Celeron Screamers

...On our ZD Business Winstone 99 tests, 400-MHz Celerons scored 13% higher than 333-MHzb Celerons, on average. By comparison, the 400-MHz Celerons' scores were 20% lower than the 400-MHz Pentium II average from PC Magazine's December 1, 1998 evaluation. You can expect the performance of Celeron 366 PCs to be about 6% better than that of Celeron 333 PCs.

It's more interesting to compare the 400-MHz Celeron with AMD's new 400-MHz K6-2 processor with 3DNow! Technology. We saw a Compaq Presario 5190 Internet PC, the first system on the market with this flavor of K6-2 (click for more). Given that the 5190's graphics and disk subsystems were less capable than the Celerons we tested, we weren't surprised by its 19% lower Winstone test score. What did take us by surprise was the 5190's CPU score: 16% higher than the Celeron 400 average. We suspect in this case, size does matter: The 400-MHz K6-2 has 512K of L2 cache -- four times that of the Celeron.

For our first Celeron/400 evaluation, we gathered three machines: the Compaq Deskpro EP C400/6400/CDS ($1,780), the Dell Dimension V400c($1,699) and the Micron Millennia C400 ($1,519). Performance was comparable on all counts, except on our ZD 3D WinMark tests. Here, the Deskpro's STB Velocity 4400 graphics board contributed to a score that was 3.6 times as high as the Dimension's score and about double that of the Millennia. Both the Dimension and Millennia use integrated graphics solutions that can't handle as many complex 3D functions in hardware as the Deskpro's nVidia RIVA TNT-based board can. but we found it didn't make a huge difference in actual game play.

[Jan 2, 1999] Tom's Hardware Guide

Intel Celeron seems to be a top low cost CPU now, but not when K6-3 will ship.

[Jan 2, 1999] Tom's Hardware Guide -- more on Celeron -- there is no reason now to buy Pentium II

[April 2, 1999] CU Math On-Line Manuals and Tutorials

[February 22, 1999] Data Structures course - Spring 99

[February 12, 1999] Collection of Lecture Notes Survey Papers etc

[February 12, 1999] Theory Related Software by Suresh Venkat

[April 20, 1999] NEW EBOOK AVAILABLE IN THE PERSONAL BOOKSHELF
Sams Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours ISBN: 0672310686 -> http://www.mcp.com/personal/

WorkShop 4.0 Documentation -- good doc for DBX

• Command-Line Utilities Contents -- dbx

[March 10, 1999] IBM graph foundation classes for java

[Feb 12, 1999]12-8-98 - JAVA WORKSHOP SOFTWARE will be available as open source at second quater 1999

[Feb 12, 1999] JIKES NOW OPEN SOURCE -- IBM Research has finally made the Jikes source code available. Jikes is faster than most Java compilers and can compute the complete dependency relations in program files.

[Feb 12, 1999] The FreeBuilder Project - Java IDE, development tool, RAD, JavaBeans, Linux -- FreeBuilder prototype now available! Try out the latest version of FreeBuilder now. Click here to download.

FreeBuilder is a FREE, visual programming environment based on Java™ technologies, making it easily customized and extensible. FreeBuilder is designed using Java Foundation Classes (aka JFC or Swing) for its look and feel. The IDE also runs on any platform that supports JDK 1.1.x, including Win95/98/NT, Linux, Solaris, Mac ...

[Feb.8, 1998] I have found that Smith Resources has released JaDE 2.0, a $20 shareware, cross-platform IDE for Java that supports Java 1.2. Bundled plugins include: javac, rmic, mpedit, javapp, MassMover, JarIt, NativeEdit, NativeAppletViewer, and JaDEScript. An SDK is provided so that specialized compilers or other tools can be added by writing new plugins.

[Feb.7, 1998] Visual Age for Java -- entry level edition (64M file) is freely downloadable from the IBM site http://www3.software.ibm.com/download/ (you need to register to download ). The software is limited to the creation of 500 new Java classes, so it's not clear it it worth trouble of downloading and installing.

[Feb.7, 1998] Visual J++ on SBN -- you can get J++ 6.0 30 day trial edition.

[Feb. 15, 1999] New choices for scripting - SunWorld - February 1999

...Even after years of confronting it, the popular belief that scripting is "unsafe" or "only for toy problems" continues to surprise us. Part of the difficulty is that many of the specific details for which critics fault such languages are in fact strengths or, at worst, non-issues. (Example: Yes, there are far fewer software engineering utilities sold for Perl than for C. Any dispassionate observer, though, would agree it's a good thing that Perl semantics don't permit memory violations, and thus don't deserve all the checking that is a practical necessity when coding in C.)

...Beside algorithmic expressiveness, one of the best things about scripting is that it encourages practitioners to exploit code-data dualities. This is crucial in such examples as Tk's remarkable success as a cross-platform, cross-language graphical toolkit. The same principle of communication through exchange of simple, human-readable encodings, has powered scripting's dominance in network domains like CGI and exploitation of new protocols.

...The problem seems to be this: High-level coding is so easy and even fun that programmers quickly become expert at it. They become expert at clever and supple construction of subtle algorithms. Designing robust architectures, though, is very different, and many of the same programmers never learn the necessary skills. Their instinct is to just keep programming until a problem gives up from exhaustion.

...Scripting, especially string-oriented languages such as Tcl, have the potential to merge stored and loaded data "formats", and get rid of this whole mess. The missing link is the ability to reorganize live data. ...

• Douglas Bennett's Designing Hard Software http://www.manning.com/Bennett/index.html
• Conferences hosting Python Tutorials http://www.python.org/psa/teachers.html
• Eighth International World Wide Web Conference http://www8.org/
• Developers' Day at Eighth International World Wide Web Conference http://www8.org/developers.html
• Full listing of past Regular Expressions columns http://www.sunworld.com/sunworldonline/common/swol-backissues-columns.html#regex

[Feb. 4, 1999] PHP became primary language for server side scripting

[Jan. 31, 1999] Useful script search sites:

• http://www.scriptsearch.com -- all sorts of scripts/programs and is searchable

• http://www.cgi-resources.com -- also good...

• http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/

Perl

[April 9, 1999] The Perl Filesystem for Linux now you can write file systems in perl, instead of C.

[March 18, 1999] perl.oreilly.com -- Open Source Profile Douglas Battenberg

[March 10, 1999] http://www.grovehillsys.com/scripting/

[Feb 10, 1999] Free Perl Scripts At The Free Well -- good collection of Perl links

[Jan 7, 1999] Selena Sol The WDVL Introduction to Databases for the Web

[March 28, 1999] Linux Today Worm for Linux x86 found in wild

[March 28, 1999] 32BitsOnline.com - Security Tools [Regular Columns-Platforms-Linux-Linux Journeys]

[March 18, 1999] Under fire! -- an important article of troyanization of open source

[March 18, 1999] LWN - Security -- good source of security-related news.

[March 18, 1999] SecurityPortal

UNESCO Observatory on the Information Society - Themes - Content Regulation - Violence in Cyberspace -- International review of criminal policy - United Nations Manual on the prevention and control of computer-related crime

The burgeoning of the world of information technologies has, however, a negative side: it has opened the door to antisocial and criminal behavior in ways that would never have previously been possible. Computer systems offer some new and highly sophisticated opportunities for law-breaking, and they create the potential to commit traditional types of crimes in non-traditional ways. In addition to suffering the economic consequences of computer crime, society relies on computerized systems for almost everything in life, from air, train and bus traffic control to medical service coordination and national security. Even a small glitch in the operation of these systems can put human lives in danger. Society's dependence on computer systems, therefore, has a profound human dimension. The rapid transnational expansion of large-scale computer networks and the ability to access many systems through regular telephone lines increases the vulnerability of these systems and the opportunity for misuse or criminal activity. The consequences of computer crime may have serious economic costs as well as serious costs in terms of human security.

Cyberstats for December 1997 -- is this a hype or what ?

• 64% of an estimated 250,000 attacks on U.S. DOD systems resulted in access to unclassified information.

• 4% of the attacks are detected, and of those only 27% were reported.

• By 1998, macrovirus infections will account for at least 60% of all incidents, and most infections will be spread via e-mail and Internet technology.

• By 1998, network services will become a necessary component in the defense against virus attacks.

Five Security Secrets -- ZDNet Products

Alerting Wares Keep Downtime To a Minimum

Internet Security Systems Inc. RealSecure 2.0

Story Your Biggest Security Threat. (It Isn't What You Think)

Have you ever looked at murder statistics? The media focuses on mysterious killers who murder strangers. Sure, it happens. But in reality, you are most likely to be killed by someone you know. The same thing holds true with network security. Everyone focuses on mysterious outside hackers. But in reality, your network is most likely to be compromised by people inside your organization.

...To prevent unauthorized access to private networks, companies typically set up firewalls where the internal network meets the (external) Internet. Fine and good. But a new report by enterprise network services company NetVersant Technologies reveals that firewalls don't protect you where you are most vulnerable. Because they don't shield you from the people inside your own organization. The two biggest inside problems are:

• Internal attacks. According to the Computer Security Institute/FBI and Ernst & Young,
  nearly 50% of all network attacks come from the inside. Often, from unhappy workers.
  Which explains why 76% of the IT executives surveyed by NetVersant said they were
  concerned about inside attacks from unhappy employees.

• Non-compliance. Who cares how good your systems are if employees ignore them? In the NetVersant survey, 82% reported spotty -- or no -- compliance with their company's network security policies. 85% say a properly-implemented firewall would still be at
  risk from a disgruntled employee. And 75% say the firewall is at risk from garden-variety employee incompetence.

[March 29, 1999] Melissa

Note on Virus Paranoia -- why server-based AV protection is a bad idea and why virus protection should be considered as part of the cost of the ownership of the Microsoft Platform.

[ March. 10, 1999] The Best Windows File Server Linux!

NetBench 5.01 shows how well a network operating system does at the mundane task of file serving, by measuring Wintel file input/output. Natively, Linux doesn't work with DOS/Windows files, but Samba, an open-source Server Message Block (SMB) client and server that ships with all commercial Linuxes, provides that capacity. And how!

You might think that Linux would operate at a disadvantage here, but Linux kicks NT's butt. Only at the lightest loads does NT hold any advantage over the Linuxes. Once the load moves to 12 clients, all the Linux platforms take commanding leads over NT. At 32 clients, SuSE, the weakest Linux, has more than double NT's throughput, and Red Hat, the leader, extends its lead to almost 250 percent of NT's performance.

• [March 7, 1999] GNU Interactive Tools - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) -- non- orthodox, but very modular -- contains components that can be reused in other GPLed OFMs (suggested by Juhapekka Tolvanen <[email protected]>)

• [February 27, 1999] XTree Fan Page More On XTree Links -- an interesting information about Xtree-style managers

• [February 27, 1999] Window Managers for X -- good site

• [March 12, 2019, from slashdot ] Windows 9x/Nt users might want to check out Litestep at www.litestep.net or floach.pimpin.net. It looks like a Next/Afterstep clone which replaces the standard Explorer shell. Features include virtual desktops, dockable apps, popup menus, etc. still beta. Feels faster than explorer and is an open source. floach.pimpin.net features news, etc on the above and various other win32 shell replacements (including the as-yet-unnamed port of Enlightenment for windows and KDE-NT) (See also slashdot discussion SlashdotWindow Manager Bits )

Linux Today Linuxbox offers FREE hosting to the GNUOSS development community

Linux Support Line open for business (Jan 15th, 14:28:07 ) "Welcome to Linux Support Line! Your only source for fast and simple technical support for the Linux operating system. Can't wait for Red Hat to finally turn their phones on? Call us! We will help you now!"

Slashdot/ Boeing uses real time open source CORBA ORB

ZD Net Linux bandwagon gains Compaq

VNUNet News Link -- Lotus notes on Linux

• [March 30,1999] I start collecting material of various forms of free software licensing. See BSD License for some new items.

• Impact F96 Homepage -- As new technology makes the shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting more feasible, how will people get their news, culture, and other information? This course will examine past predictions, currently available services, and future delivery mechanisms.

  • Syllabus

• Debunking the Software Patent Myths

• USPTO Hearings in January-February, 1994 -- Open Discussion on Controversy And Solutions for Software Patents

• FPLC - The Intellectual Property Mall Annotated Guide

• Information Law Alert

• INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY CENTER

• The Intellectual Property and Technology Forum

• cni-copyright forum

MCB Unix/Internet Related books

See Macmillan Computer Publishing Personal Bookshelf -- the leading Unix/Internet Computer-related public library (free registration required).

Softpanorama Bookshelf/Java books

[April 15, 1999] NEW BETABOOK AVAILABLE
Developing Java Servlets ISBN: 0672316005 -> http://www.mcp.com/betabooks/

[March 22, 1999] New E-book at http://www.mcp.com/personal/
JFC Unleashed ISBN: 0789714663

JAVA 1.2 CLASS LIBRARIES UNLEASHED Gives you an annotated class library reference with code
examples and professional programming techniques. http://www.mcp.com/catalog/corp_bud.cfm?ISBN=078971292X

MCP.COM JAVA RESOURCE CENTER http://www.mcp.com/resources/webdevelopment/java/

Developing Java Servlets Betabook Author: James Goodwill, Sams Publishing
Scheduled to be available in bookstores: June 30, 1999

[Feb.28, 1999] Cd from Advanced Java(TM) 1.1 Programming by Jeffrey C. Rice and Irving Salisbury III is available from the McGraw Hill site Advanced Java 1.1 Programming

[Feb.9, 1999]

***+ JAVA 1.2 Unleashed ~ Usually ships in 24 hours. Full e-text available from www.mcp.com

Jamie Jaworski, Jamie Jaworksi / Hardcover / Published 1998
Amazon Price: $ 34.99 (30% off) Decent second book on Java. More up to date than Thinking in Java. Recommended.

Feb.7, 1999

[Jan 10, 1999] ...SlashdotReview: Advanced C Programming by Example

• Articles/Linus Story in Salon -- slashdot comments

• GAP's Survival Tips for Whistleblowers -- from Government Accountability Project Whistleblower Support

• SAFE SCIENCE! Whistleblowing on the Web.

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Feb/ntguru.html -- suggested by Vadim Zaliva

I was on my way home last night, when I found myself behind a car with the license plate "NT GURU". I figured the car would just stop working with no warning, or turn blue and crash violently. I quickly passed him.

ERICA AWARDS -- Technology Funding Opportunity

The ERICA Awards Starting January 11, 1999 and running through March 31,1999, LM Ericsson, a global data communications and telecommunications company is offering $250,000 in Web development services and expenses to non-profit organizations from around the world in the inaugural Ericsson Internet Community Awards, the ERICA. ERICA is seeking new and creative ideas for technology applications that take advantage of the community-building power of the Internet. The program is open to all charitable non-profit organizations (U.S. 501(c) (3) or equivalent). For information and to submit entries online, log on to the ERICA Web site, www.ericsson.com/erica after January 11th. For information write to ERICA, c/o Edelman Public Relations, 1200 Brickell Avenue, Suite 1270, Miami, Florida 33131.

[Feb 2, 1999 ] In search of knowledge

Professors at Harvard Business School are famous for their case study style of teaching, in which they shine a bright, critical light on real-world companies and their strategies. Until recently, however, HBS itself easily could have served as an object lesson in how not to manage massive amounts of unstructured data. After years of recording classroom lectures, HBS and its users were awash in a sea of thousands of hours of unstructured videotape. Though available to researchers, the videotape brain trust went essentially untapped, since users couldn't easily navigate the content to locate relevant information.

"Nothing was indexed or easily accessed," recalls Larry Bouthillier, head of multimedia production at HBS. "We were able to do some keyword searches using transcriptions of the audio, but it was hard for people to find stuff that we didn't know we had."

Bouthillier's dilemma is shared by hundreds of companies, many of which have been struggling for years to create enterprise data warehouses designed to give top decision makers access to all the data generated by key operational systems. After finally getting those large decision-support systems into production, however, these companies are finding that the new data warehouses hold, at most, between 10 percent to 15 percent of all the data used daily across an enterprise. The other 85 percent to 90 percent is unstructured data--documents, images, text files, video, audio and other types of content that don't fit neatly into the rows, columns and access methods used to manage most data generated by transaction-oriented systems. Yet, for many companies, including HBS, that unstructured information can be every bit as important as the data from traditional operational systems such as financial and manufacturing applications.

As a result, many IT managers are hunting for tools that can manage unstructured data in much the same robust way with which they are already able to manage structured data. That means capturing it in electronic form, checking it for quality, indexing it in ways that allow users to find pertinent information quickly and providing easy access to it from the Web.

"What's needed is a way to help users get through the huge overload of unstructured data that already exists in their organizations," says Ralph Sprague, a professor in decision sciences at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu. "We need a lot more than keyword search engines and document management systems. We need a way to catalog and understand the semantically rich content that exists in unstructured data such as images, video and documents."

The good news is that IT managers are finding a wide range of tools that do just that. A multitude of vendors--including makers of content management systems, search engines and even data warehouses--are beginning to extend their products to support advanced management of unstructured data types. In some companies, such tools are becoming the foundation for knowledge management. But there's also some bad news: Many of these tools are still immature. As such, they're often narrowly focused on one type of unstructured data such as documents or video. Many also lack support for critical standards such as XML (Extensible Markup Language).

Information overload

Even so, this new class of software is attracting the attention of IT managers anxious to provide users with a way to navigate through a vast and growing sea of unstructured data. HBS' Bouthillier is one. Three years ago, Bouthillier began making videotapes of the school's lectures available to researchers via streaming video running on five Sun Microsystems Inc. SPARC servers and accessed through a switched Ethernet network. When that setup failed to deliver easy access, Bouthillier took another stab at getting all of that video under control.

His solution: Video Cataloger, an indexing and retrieval engine from Virage Inc., of San Mateo, Calif., that, in effect, lets users query large amounts of video data by subject or image type. Video Cataloger scans video, looking for hints about its content based on displayed text information, audio, time codes and images. Then the product creates an index that can be used to search for specific video content. Hits are shown in the form of freeze-framed images of storyboards of the video.

Bouthillier has begun to allow students and researchers to query the video data over the school's intranet from Web browsers. The only drawback: It takes time to scan each video into the system.

And HBS isn't the only organization being overwhelmed with unstructured data. Far from going away, documents, text files, video and other types of unstructured data are proliferating in most organizations. Gartner Group Inc., of Stamford, Conn., estimates that U.S. companies produce 5.5 billion documents annually. And most of them -- 59 percent -- are still being accessed and retrieved manually.

... In response, many organizations are attempting to build portals on their intranets that, among other things, can act as central repositories for documents, images and other types of unstructured data. That's what professional audio workstation maker Digidesign, a division of Avid Technology Inc., is doing. In the process of attempting to get ISO 9002 quality certification, managers at the 300-person global company early this year discovered that it was practically impossible to find all the information about how Digidesign goes about building its products.

"Most of it was located on a multitude of servers in dozens of different file and security formats," says Bill Schwartz, Digidesign's operations project manager, in Palo Alto, Calif. "At a minimum, we needed to get the documents that described our policies and procedures into one place so that anyone in the company, anywhere in the world, could access it. And we were talking here about thousands of documents."

[Jan 15, 1999 ]Man Crashes Car As 50 Pagers Ring At Once -- pretty funny

KIEV (Reuters) - A Ukraine businessman who bought a pager for each member of his staff as a New Year gift was so alarmed when all 50 of them went off at the same time that he drove his car into a lamp post, a newspaper said Thursday.

The unnamed businessman was returning from the pager shop when the accident happened, the Fakty daily reported. ''With no more than 100 meters to go to the office, the 50 pagers on the back seat suddenly burst out screeching. The businessman's fright was such that he simply let go of the steering wheel and the car ploughed into a lamp post.''

After he had assessed the damage to the car, the businessman turned his attention to the message on the 50 pagers. It read: ''Congratulations on a successful purchase!''

Information Overload -- a short except from Computer Life

Remember when you thought cell phones, pagers, and laptop computers would make your life less complicated? Instead, technology has infiltrated every aspect of our lives. We are faced daily with more information than the average person in the seventeenth century dealt with in an entire lifetime. So what, short of throwing your computer off the roof and moving into a cave, can you do to survive? What you have to do is practice triage. For doctors, triage is the system of prioritizing patients in an emergency situation to ensure medical care of the greatest benefit to the largest number. For you, information triage means prioritizing, delegating, and just letting some things slide. A doctor wouldn't set the arm of a patient before attending to a gunshot victim just because the guy with the broken arm got there first. You have to assess your priorities and then take actions that allow you to get the most done.

• Control Junk Mail
• Control Voice Mail
• Paper Pileup
• Control Free Time
• Control Web Searches
• Always Remember
  • Information FatigueSyndrome: Symptoms include paralysis of analytical capacity, increased anxiety, greater self-doubt, and a tendency to blame others. When people are faced with more information than they can process, they become unable to make decisions or take action.

Sites to visit

Freshmeat -- great site to look for open source applications; has applications index

Linux Gazette Have several mirrors in Ukraine:

• WWW: http://linux.dn.ua/docs/lg/index.html FTP: ftp://ftp.aist.net/pub/Linux/LG Contact Person: Serge Pavlov <[email protected]>

• FTP: ftp://ftp.franko.lviv.ua/pub/Linux/lg/ Contact Person: Petro Danchak <[email protected]>

LinuxFocus (some articles are available in Russian translation)

Linux Journal

Linux Weekly News

Linuxmall News

SlashDot

Web Review

ALL UNIX NEWS

itmWEB Information Technology & Systems Management

Swaine's World Front Page

The Linux Mall - Home Page -- interesting selection of articles to read

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

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Last modified: March, 12, 2019