An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

An anonymous reader writes "Laura DiDio, research fellow at the Yankee Group, published a column this morning in which she discusses key findings from a new survey on the total cost of ownership of Windows vs. Linux. DiDio often is written off by the Linux camp as being pro-Microsoft, but she offers excellent, neutral advice for any IT department considering a fundamental systems switch: 'If you do not know what is on your network, if you cannot at least estimate the hourly, monthly or yearly cost of downtime, if you do not know how long it takes to recover from a security outage, if you cannot answer questions about the extent of your company's license compliance, then you cannot truly evaluate whether Linux, Windows or Unix is right for your business. Chances are, if you cannot answer most or all of those questions, it does not matter what operating system you have because ignorance of the core TCO tenets means that your business is not getting the most out of its networks.' "

wandazulu writes "Peter Salus over at UnixReview.com is reporting that AT&T Department 1127, responsible for creating and maintaining Unix, has been officially disbanded. The article provides an interesting "where are they now?" list of the original authors of Unix."

canfirman writes "Well, it seems Darl is changing tactics as he's now published an open letter proclaiming the benefits of UNIX over any other operating system. However, most of his letter involves comparing SCO Unix to Linux from not only a business acceptance point of view, but from a technical point of view, too. Darl throws in a bunch of stats in there, too: 'In a study conducted only seven months ago they found that overall, the most vulnerable operating system for manual hacker attacks was Linux, accounting for 65.64% of all hacker breaches reported.' I'd love for somebody who has more technical knowledge than me to look at his points and see if what he says is true or not -- assuming anything coming out of Darl's mouth is true."

Rob writes "The bi-annual LinuxWorld trade show is under way this week in San Francisco, and once again the major platform makers are swearing their fealty to Linux and trying to figure out any angle they can to use Linux as a lever to wrest sales away from their competition and money out of their customer bases. The Linux market has largely proven itself (even if it is still dwarfed by Windows and Unix), and now the major server makers are getting down to the brass tacks of marketing as well as broadening and deepening their support of Linux on their platforms." Also FYI, I will be attending the Slashdot BOF session on Wednesday and answering questions. I'm hoping to be able to show people a good demo of Slashdot in CSS!

Bill Hilf, Microsoft's Linux Lab Manager, got his answers to your questions back to us in time to publish them just before the San Francisco LinuxWorld, where he is speaking. Before you ask: Yes, Microsoft PR had a look at his answers before he sent them. So if you have any follow-up questions for Mr. Hilf, please post them below and I'll try to ask at least a few of them in person at LinuxWorld.

An anonymous reader writes "Five proof-of-concept viruses that target Monad, the next version of Vista's command prompt, have been published on the web. Monad is a command line interface and scripting language that is similar to Unix shells such as bash, but is based on object-oriented programming and the .Net framework. The viruses' only action is to infect other shell scripts on the host's operating system. They would cause little harm in the wild, but would be relatively easy to modify using the information from the article, said Mikko Hyppönen, the director of antivirus research at F-Secure."

Scott Pinzon writes "Writing sonnets, screenplays, or an epic poem in your third language is a breeze compared to the toughest of art forms, didactic fiction. That might explain why the various chapters of Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity range from appalling to exciting. Whether you see the glass of STN: Identity as half empty or half full depends on whether this is your cup of poison -- but on a technical level, it rocks." Read on for the rest of Pinzon's review.

TractorJector writes "In a well-written interview with Mad Penguin, techmeister Leo Laporte (formerly of G4/TechTV fame) discusses his vision of the future of proprietary and open platforms: 'I think there's a lot of hope for Linux, although I don't think that Linux is the answer. I think that UNIX is the answer, in some form or fashion. It might be BSD, it might be Linux, it might be some third thing. But UNIX is such a well understood and smart to handle the issues that an operating system has to handle that it ultimately will prevail.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth."

aussersterne asks: "Every now and then while reading Slashdot comments, I realize that most people have no idea that -the network was the computer- for decades before Amazon.com and Google ever appeared, taking for granted the rather boring state of commodity computing that dominates the marketplace today. Unix and dial-up shell users remember bang-paths, 110 baud BBSing, 'luggable' computers, UUCP, DC600 OS media, VT100s connected to dumb terminals, and 1152x900 8-bit color web browsing before most PC users had even shelled out for their first copy of Windows 3.x and the free 'serial mouse' it included. Middle-aged geeks, what are your favorite recollections from from the '80s and '90s computing, network, and hardware world, as full of platforms and innovation as it was? Which computer system is still 'your baby' all these years later? Anybody still have a running Sun2? A running FHL UniQuad? Anybody still use KA9Q?"

mnjaga asks: "What is your solution for handling 'reminders' with Unix? I was using a little freeware called KirbyAlarm , when I was using Windows. After migrating to Linux, it took a while to get a handle on things. Currently, I am using a mixture of cron, remind, and mail . However, I am interested in a better solution than what I am presently using. How do you handle your pop-up and e-mail reminders?"

prostoalex writes "The inventor of Ethernet Bob Metcalfe is interviewed by AlwaysOn on current issues. Metcalfe is known for challenging commonly accepted wisdom and this time he's quite confrontational. On open source and operating systems: "If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?" On IPv6 adoption and IETF: "Back when you attended the IETF, you all looked down your noses at the ITU (or I guess it was called CCITT at the time)--the entrenched, corporately manipulated, corrupt, competent standards being embodied in IT. We were the IETF--the swashbuckling, institution-oriented, open people, the rebels. That's changed now. The Internet has arrived, and all of those people are now just like ITU: IETF has become the ITU.""

An anonymous reader asks: "A couple years ago Joel Spolsky wrote an interesting critique of Eric S. Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming wherein Joel provides an interesting (as usual) discussion on the cultural differences between Windows and Unix programmers. As a *nix nerd in my fifth year managing mainframe developers, I need some insight into mainframe programmers. What are the differences between Windows, Unix, and mainframe programmers? What do we all need to know to get along in each other's worlds?"

daria42 writes "The SCO Group has slammed as 'inaccurate' suggestions that an e-mail from one of its own engineers showed Linux did not contain copyright Unix code, and even forwarded its own historical memo to journalists in an attempt to discredit the e-mail published on Groklaw." From the article: "This memo shows that Mr. Davidson's e-mail is referring to an investigation limited to literal copying, which is not the standard for copyright violations, and which can be avoided by deliberate obfuscation, as the memo itself points out..." We reported on the email yesterday.

rm69990 writes "In a recently unsealed email in the SCO vs. IBM case, it appears that an outside consultant, hired by SCO in 2002, failed to find copyright violations in the Linux Kernel. This was right around the time Darl McBride, who has before been hired by litigious companies as CEO, was hired. It appears that before SCO even began its investigation, they were hoping to find a smoking gun, not believing that Linux could possibly not contain Unix code. Apparently, they ignored the advice of this consultant."

beetle496 asks: "Okay, so I didn't research my choice of ISP adequately. Despite running Apache 2.0 on Red Hat, the only option for dynamic content they support is FrontPage Server Extensions. I am quite comfortable with X/HTML and CSS, and am okay with JavaScript. I am annoyed enough that I would buy FrontPage, were it available for my preferred platform. I've performed the customary MSDN and Google searches. The best I came up with was a page on FrontPage UNIX Server Extensions, which sounds exactly on target, but didn't help me. Can anyone point me toward a resource on writing HTML code to make use of FPSE (aka, webbot) -- without using FrontPage?"

Eater writes "W. Richard Stevens wrote Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, which was published in 1993 by Addison-Wesley. It quickly became the cornerstone of many bookshelves. The original edition has been revised by Stephen A. Rago to more accurately reflect the current landscape of UNIX and UNIX-like systems. APUE is targeted at the experienced C programmer with a working knowledge of UNIX. It includes chapter long examples of real-world applications, and--as with other works by W. Richard Stevens -- somehow manages to serve simultaneously as an enlightening tutorial and a valuable reference book." Read on for the rest of Eater's review of the book's recent second edition.

atlantageek writes "Is the IT job market improving? Is the growth in Unix or Windows? Should I study Data Warehousing or E-Commerce? Identify the recent trends with CJ Miner, a small tool I've written that has been monitoring the Computer Jobs website for the last year."

Richard Finney writes " The stock chart tells the story: One time Silicon Valley high-flyer and contender for the Unix crown, SGI stock price dropped 20% on Friday ... deep into penny stock territory ... after releasing fiscal fourth quarter results. The Mountain View, California maker of high end computers is ' exploring financing alternatives with its lender and other sources.' With mounting losses and investors giving ol' Silicon Graphics the thumbs down, things aren't looking good."