We've reviewed Wall Street Meat, by Andy Kessler. Andy's recently released Running Money. Andy sent this piece on to us, and it's one that I think will be appreciated.

kelnos copies and pastes: "The Xfce Team is pleased to announce the availability of Xfce 4.2.0, the next major version of the Xfce Desktop Environment and Development Framework for Unix and Unix-like platforms. Xfce 4.2.0 can be downloaded here. Xfce 4.2.0 includes new applications like a session manager and an application finder, a new and beautiful icon theme, support for bleeding-edge features (like the X.org Composite extension), usability and performance improvements, better support for multihead desktops, new and updated translations, additional themes, and various other improvements over the previous stable releases. See this page for a complete list of changes between Xfce 4.0 and Xfce 4.2. Furthermore, Xfce 4.2 is the first desktop environment to ship with an easy-to-use and platform-independent graphical installation wizard, which takes care of compiling and installing Xfce on your system. Visit the os-cillation installers website for download links and instructions. If you want to try Xfce 4.2.0 first, without installing anything on your system, you might want to try the Xfce Live Demo 0.2, provided by os-cillation, to discover the power and efficiency of Xfce."

norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser) writes "If you own the first edition of this book, then it's probably dog-eared and well thumbed-through, so now's a good time to upgrade to this extensive volume, Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, second edition. This book covers Fedora Core 2 (2.6 kernel) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3 (2.4 fork version with 2.6 kernel features) and includes Fedora Core on four CDs, which comprises the complete release. Mark G. Sobell accomplishes what many fail at: he has successfully crammed a huge amount of information into one volume in a compact, perfectly readable manner. This second edition serves two audiences, the end user and the administrator, and consequently combines two topics that easily could have filled separate books: Fedora Core and Enterprise Linux." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

theRG writes "Google just released its 20-Year Usenet Timeline. Among the highlights: First Mac rumor, first 'me too' post, Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the Web, and Linus' announcement of Linux."

sborisch asks: "I have tried at least 15 different Internet Radio/Shoutcast players, looking for one with a scheduler (recorder) capability that actually works. The closest I have found are IRadio and Replay Radio, but IRadio depends on the Windows scheduler, and isn't the least bit reliable in my test of it. Replay seems to want to send everything through your sound card, and hence makes it impossible to listen to something and record something else at the same time. It does have a so-called direct download option, but this doesn't seem to work either. Surely someone has found a better solution than this. Please let me know." How would you schedule a recording streaming audio from either Windows or Unix?

aaron240 asks: "When Google published the GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test) the Unix question was intriguing. They asked an open-ended question about what is wrong with Unix and how you might fix it. Rob Pike touched on the question in his Slashdot interview from October. What insightful answers did the rest of Slashdot give when they applied to work at Google? To repeat the actual question, 'What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?'"

Quiberon writes "A distribution of Knoppix loaded with games has a bootable CD with 700 MB of open-source games, 3d support for NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel Extreme, gamepad support for XWindows. uni-kl is University of Kaiserlautern, the first on the list for distributing SuSE fixes - they are good. Every kid should have one for Christmas morning."

generationxyu writes "D. J. Bernstein, better known as DJB, has announced the discovery of 44 security holes that were found by students in his course MCS 494: Unix Security Holes this fall at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Vulnerable programs of note include: CUPS, NASM, mpg123, MPlayer, xine-lib, and numerous others. Copies of the notification emails are here. The homework for the course was to find and exploit 10 previously undiscovered security holes in currently deployed Unix software. In a class of 25, 44 security holes seems a bit low. Most of the class failed. I was credited with bsb2ppm (actually libbsb) and jpegtoavi. After 300 hours of work and an A average on the exams, I expect to fail the course."

A not-so anonymous Anonymous Coward puts this tough issue up for discussion: "There seem some more determined efforts underway currently in some corners of the KDE project to port substantial parts of the software stack to the MS Windows platform. These efforts are now met by fierce resistance on the part of some of their core developers. Aaron J. Seigo summarizes his reasoning in his blog: 'If the applications people want are available on Windows, they will tend to stick with Windows...by porting software to Windows, we eliminate the majority of the competitive advantage of Free Software desktops in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of consumers while Microsoft has all the rope they need to shut the door once again on us ... Free Software desktop applications on Windows represent a no-win situation for Open Source, but Open Source desktops on Free Software operating systems do.'" (Read more below.)

SilentChris writes "Good article over at CNet regarding Microsoft's internal IT practices. Some intriguing statements from the CIO, from the obvious ('It's an easy choice for me--to run Microsoft technology. We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run Oracle.') to the not-so-obvious ('Our users are the admins of their machines. They can load whatever software they want on their machines, but we do audit the network continuously.') I wonder how much time is spent combatting spyware?"

twener writes "Version 3.7 of the bootable GNU/Linux Live CD Knoppix has been released and is available via Bittorrent or on the Knoppix Mirrors. Some of the new features are lots and lots of package updates including KDE 3.3.1, Kernel 2.4.27 + 2.6.9 (w/ ACPI), Java security update (1.4.2_06) and more supported graphics cards."

Uberhacker.Com writes "HP has given up on trying to bring key parts of Compaq/DEC's Tru64 operating system into HP-UX. They had once planned for the Tru64 goodies to arrive this year and made a big deal of this quick turnaround when it first acquired Compaq. Ironically, HP also announced today that it is expanding its Alpha RetainTrust program for Tru64 UNIX customers." The linked article also notes that HP has decided that it will proceed forward with purchasing some of the technology from Veritas.

slipandfall asks: "I just started work at a 100% Windows shop (no chance of changing this) and would love to implement Bugzilla for issue tracking but statements like this - 'Making Bugzilla work on Windows is still a painful processes.' in the OS-Specific installation notes don't make it seem reasonable. Since there is no chance of using Linux/UNIX here, can I get people's experiences using Bugzilla on Windows or experience with a tool (open source or not) on Windows with similar notification, discussion and issue tracking features?"

Fahrenheit 450 (William D. Neumann) writes "Developing Applications With Objective Caml was originally published in French by O'Reilly, and later translated into English by a group of volunteers (note that the reviewer was a volunteer proofreader during the translation effort), and graciously made available online as HTML or PDF at the Caml website. For those not familiar with Objective Caml (or OCaml, as it is commonly called), it is a strongly, statically typed (but don't be thinking about Pascal-style typing), eagerly evaluated language with a functional core that also offers many imperative programming features. OCaml also has full support for object-oriented programming that fits in completely with OCaml's strong type system. On top of that, OCaml code can be interpreted for simple scripting, compiled to bytecode for portability, or compiled to native code for speed and resource utilization that rival even that of Intel's C++ compiler. Intrigued?" If so, read on for the rest of Neumann's review.

davidwr writes "Groklaw has the newly-released-previously-secret 1994 Berkeley/UNIX Systems Laboratories settlement which gave rise to BSD4.4(Lite) (as pdf and text with commentary). This may have an impact on the SCO vs. Linux war."

sympleko (Matthew Leingang) writes with his review of Running Mac OS X Panther, by James Duncan Davidson. "The Macintosh has come a long way in twenty-plus years. Much has been said of Mac OS X being the perfect union of a rock-solid operating system with a beautiful and functional user interface. Since the iMac, Apple's market share has been steadily increasing, and since OS X, Unix users have been making the switch. My last computer was a dual-boot box that I kept finding excuses to keep from booting to Windows. My PowerBook is literally the best of both worlds. I can run the older unix-based apps I need to for work, and use Microsoft programs and play fancy games when I want. It's also essentially two different computers. This book is about using that second computer, the workhorse behind the scenes." Read on for the rest.

Craig Maloney writes "I'm skeptical whenever a publisher uses the words 'Definitive,' or 'Complete,' or (especially) 'Ultimate' in the title of a computer book. Sadly, the typical book so labeled is a jumble of incomplete ideas crammed together with very little depth. Worse, some books do little more than re-print the various command-line switches for the application. Michael Kofler's The Definitive Guide to MySQL (2nd ed.) is just the opposite. There're still lots of ideas crammed inside of the book, but they're carefully explained and expanded. The book weighs in at a hefty 802 pages, with very little fluff. " Read on for the rest of Maloney's review.

pariahdecss asks: "I have just been hired as the webmaster for local college. The website for which I am responsible is hosted 'in-house' and controlled by the college. The server box does not have any other production systems on it besides my website. The website that I have inherited is driven by an amalgam of Embedded Perl and PostgreSQL. Now to the politics...the UNIX Administrator does not want to give me root access to this box. What have others done when faced with this type of systems politics? Is it even possible to function as a full scale webmaster without root access to the box you serve from?"

Daniel Shefer writes "Joel on Software is a collection of essays from the Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software web log. Spolsky is also the author of User Interface Design for Programmers (previously reviewed on Slashdot) and is the principal of Fog Creek Software. In this book, Spolsky distills his technical knowledge, wit, and years of experience into an engaging collection of essays on programmers, programming and the software world. Spolsky covers everything from the technical aspects of writing code to software project management, and even offers insights into software marketing." Read on for the rest of Shefer's review.

rocketjam writes "CNET is running a long question-and-answer format article which takes an in-depth look at the relationship between Microsoft and SCO and the financial support SCO has received both directly and indirectly from Microsoft in their ongoing litigation alleging that Linux violates the intellectual property rights they claim to hold on UNIX. The article details the money Microsoft has paid to SCO to "license" UNIX as well as the role they played in BayStar's $50 million investment in SCO in late 2003. Microsoft paid SCO $16.6 million for a UNIX license. The only other company that has come close to paying SCO that much money for a license is Sun, who paid $9.3 million to license UNIX for their Solaris operating system."