Linux News from O'Reilly Network

Rejoice, rejoice, for you won't hear any more about the Red Sox or baseball from me for at least half a year. I can't promise the same about (American) football, especially come January. Meanwhile, I can't help but feel amused by the degree of meaningless data mining that television commentators engage in these days. It's practically a given that sometime during a broadcast, you'll hear a gem like "Brady has never lost a game when he scored three times in the first quarter." I call this effect "The Law of Small Numbers." Because every play that every player in every sport has ever made is now instantly accessible, it's easy to find a trend or correlation for just about anything, if you narrow the sample size enough. So, if a team has only been in four championship games, and it turns out that they won the three games where there was a full moon, and lost the one where there was a new moon, there's significantly more chance that it's just a coincidence than that there's actually any lunar effect on the play.

This same thing is happening to "records." It used to be a simple subject. You had hit the most home runs or had the longest winning streak, etc. Now, with the faithful database handy, you get "records" like "Most games starting a season where the team scored over 34 points" (an actual "record" currently being set by the New England Patriots.) The overall effect is to cheapen the legitimate accomplishments. Personally, I think it's fueled by a need to make every game extraordinary in some way.

Here at ONLamp & Co, we make every effort to make our articles extraordinary, of course! And this week, you'll get two doozies, starting with a massive overview of what's new in OpenBSD 4.2. Our faithful BSD interviewer, Federico Biancuzzi, got 23 of the key OpenBSD developers to dish out the tasty details. Look for "Puffy's Marathon: What's New in OpenBSD 4.2," available for your reading pleasure tomorrow.

Meanwhile, you can get up to speed on the Dojo JavaScript framework, with a great introduction written by Matthew Russell. Matthew has just finished "Get Up And Running With Dojo," an O'Reilly Short Cut, and he's boiled down the essence of Dojo into a highly readable and informative primer, just for us. You can learn "The Mojo of Dojo" on Thursday.

New Desktop Face-Off: Gnome 2.20 vs. KDE 3.5
A reminder that if you're interested in Linux Desktop environments, Judith Myerson ran down the new features and differences between the latest releases of Gnome and KDE last week.

Yeah, Like That Will Happen
This week, our lil' webcomic reaches a dramatic high point, as the desert conditions finally take their toll on one of our heroes. Check out "The Watering Hole" tomorrow, and enjoy last week's strip at the bottom of the newsletter, if you're an HTML subscriber.

Facebook Acquisition Cost per Zombie Bite
Turning to the blogs, chromatic took a look at the financials of the Facebook deal, from an undead perspective.

FSOSS 2007 on the Web
Chris Tyler has a pointer to where you can get the current news out of the FOSS 2007 Symposium.

Leopard Just Came Second Ago via FedEx
Noah Gift got an OS X Leopard care package in the mail, and took a quick pass through all the nice developer features included.

PyMOTW: Commands
Python is full of cool modules, and this week Doug Hellmann highlights the shell command support.

Rsync Version 3 Alpha Out
Rsync has a new release out, and Noah Gift wants to know if anyone has tried out some of the cool new features.

Thank You, rsync!
And chromatic thanked the world for rsync in general.

Debugging GC Problems (in Parrot)
He also related his experiences uncovering GC problems in Parrot.

Tiny Leopard Tip: Switch to Z-Shell Permanently
And Noah continued his look at Leopard with a top on how to permanently change the shell to Z-Shell.

CUPS and Printers Stopping
Juliet Kemp has a printer that keeps stalling out via CUPS, and looks at why.

How Can Linux Market Share Be Accurately Measured?
How do you measure the size of the Linux market? Caitlyn Martin doesn't think you can, but evidently eWeek thinks they can.

Leopard's Built-in RoR
Tired of all the Leopard blogging yet? Well, Timothy M. O'Brien chimed in too, bragging about the baked in Ruby on Rails support.

Tech Company Legal Smackdown
Sun is being taken to court by NetApp. Chris Josephes thinks we should be afraid, very afraid.

Tracking Spam: One Man's Adventure
He also has the riveting tale of one man's quest to track down a spammer.

Finally, an quick request from your humble editor. You may notice a new "Digg" badge in the upper lefthand corner of articles. If you like an article, we encourage you to give it a click. The more Digging we get, the more great articles we can bring you.

Until next week, Happy Halloween!

Click to Expand

James M. Turner
Site Editor, ONLamp.com
turner@oreilly.com