Martin C. Brown

U R G E N T    A P P E A L Distributed Denial of Service Attacks against SCO, or anyone for that matter, are a clearly unacceptable activity. While many in the Open Source community are not pleased with SCO's lawsuit against IBM, or their proposed legal challenges aimed at Linux users, these DDoS attacks do not promote the Open Source cause, and are not consistent with Open Source values. The Open Source community is based on the notion that principals of free speech should be applied to software development. DDoS attacks clearly deny the victim the ability to communicate freely on the internet. The fact that someone, or some group disagrees with the policies and/or practices of another person or group does not justify this type of attack. We strongly urge whoever is resp... (more)

Book Rookery: Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

In this installment of the Book Rookery, Martin C. Brown speaks with Dave Taylor, author of Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, about all the fun things you can do with shell scripts, whether you're running Linux, Mac OS X, or even a mainstream Unix system. Can you tell us more about the book and what's inside?For years I've picked up different programming books and lamented that they weren't fun... (more)

From the Editors of Linux.SYS-CON.com

Related Links: From the Publisher of Linux Business Week Dear Linux.SYS-CON.com Readers, Publishing is a fickle business, and in today's world where your comments and responses can immediately be denounced and exposed, even more so. There has been a significant amount of discussion regarding recent Maureen O'Gara stories published in LinuxBusinessWeek regarding the SCO/IBM case. As we under... (more)

Sun Fire V40z Server

With their Sun Fire V40z Server, Sun is moving into new realms in three different ways. First, it's a move onto a new hardware platform - namely the AMD Opteron CPU. Second, it's a move into the 64-bit arena on a platform other than their familiar UltraSPARC environment. Third is the adoption of a mainstream Linux distribution as a primary operating system choice. We tested a V40z with fo... (more)

Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization

Getting the design of your database right has a huge impact on a number of issues. Primarily performance, but it can also affect other areas like the flexibility of your database and how it integrates with the application-level solution, such as PHP or Perl, that you're using. Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization by Jon Stephens and Chad Russell covers the whole gamut of datab... (more)