A not-so anonymous Anonymous Coward would like to put this query before you: "I'm not a fan of Windows, and never have been, but I am a fan of the x86 architecture. I really like Linux, but there are still a few issues that are keeping me from switching completely. I really like Mac OS X but I don't want to drop $2000 on a computer that is only as fast as an x86 computer at half the price. Darwin, Mac OS X's unix-ish core, has been ported to x86 and Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn OS seems to be disliked by everyone but Microsoft. If Apple released Mac OS X to compete with Longhorn, would you switch?"

spirality asks: "I've been developing under *NIX since I started writing software about ten years ago, and my company has been developing its product under *NIX since its inception. Until recently that is. We just completed the first Windows version of our product. Under Unix we used CVS with a custom build environment that we developed in house, and it simply can not be ported to Windows. What are Slashdot users, who must develop under Windows, using for a development environment?"

XsynackX writes "The SANS Institute released its Top-20 list of the biggest vulnerabilities on the web today. The SANS Top 20 Internet Security Vulnerabilities list is actually a compilation of two lists--the top 10 Windows vulnerabilities and the top 10 Unix vulnerabilities. The list goes into almost more detail than any one person could ever take in on individual security flaws, but provides a wealth of knowledge for those who like to get in-depth. Interestingly enough, the browser section of the Windows vulnerabilities lists everyone's favorite browser Internet Explorer with 15 flaws and Mozilla with only 7."

norburym writes "W. Jason Gilmore and Apress have put together an impressive volume, both in girth and content, in Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL, From Novice to Professional. At first glance, it appears that any technical manual that tries to approach such heady stuff such as PHP and MySQL for an audience ranging the span from beginner to the uber-geek is headed for failure. Happily, I can report that Gilmore and Apress have given the world one book that will replace many other PHP and MySQL volumes. This is one that the reader will consistently rely on and keep near to hand." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

Today we return to our Slashdot interview roots with a "Call for questions" for Rob "Commander" Pike, who has been involved in the development of many modern programming concepts, GUI advances, character sets, and operating systems. We'll email 10 - 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Rob and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

GraWil writes "As previously reported, the Apple Newton refuses to die! The Worldwide Newton Conference 2004 has wrapped up (photos) and, thanks to Paul Guyot, there is real hope for an emulator. His talk, titled 'Newton never dies, It only gets new hardware,' describes and shows the Einstein Emulator, that will eventually allow the Newton OS to be built and run on top of Unix. Will your next Linux PDA boot Newton OS next year?"

fname writes "The recent shutdown of LAX due to an FAA radio outage was apparently caused by a Windows 2000 integration flaw, possibility related to an old Windows 95 bug. An article at the LA Times claims that the outage was caused by human error, as the system will automatically shut down after 49.7 days (related to this Windows 95 flaw?), and a technician didn't reboot the system monthly as he should have. This happened after an upgrade from Unix to Windows. I don't think blame should be assigned to the technician who missed the task; rather, it seems a gross oversight for the FAA to guarantee that such a critical system will crash after only one missed maintenance task. Who's really at fault?"

Watercooler Warrior writes "Slashdot originally broke the news that a new Microsoft command shell was in the works when a reader noticed a suspicious job posting by Microsoft India. Today Microsoft released the first really usable version of the shell (codenamed Monad) to beta testers - and anyone who carefully reads the WinHEC slides about Monad will find how to join the beta and get a peek at it. The shell looks like a bunch of old-school Unix and Perl hackers were given free rein to do what they wanted with the .NET framework, and from what is known about the backgrounds of the Monad developers this is probably pretty close to the truth."

Mick Ohrberg writes "As reported by Groklaw, Randall Davis, renowned professor of Computer Science at MIT has after an extensive search found no evidence of SCO's claims that IBM has incorporated parts of the Unix System V code. Davis says "Accordingly, the IBM Code cannot be said, in my opinion, to be a modification or a derivative work based on the Unix System V Code." Surprised, anyone?"

sl0wp0is0n writes "Computerworld has published an interview with Microsoft's chief Linux strategist, Martin Taylor. It's interesting to find out that Microsoft thinks and predicts Novell (SuSE) will be the dominant Linux distribution they'll have to compete against. The interview also has Taylor talking about indemnification, IBM and his realization that customers generally adopt Linux to get a better TCO than Unix, not Windows."

DNAspark99 writes "It seems Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in GdkPixbuf, which can be exploited by malicious people to DoS (Denial of Service), and potentially compromise a vulnerable system. Personally, I wasn't concerned about this until I ran 'ldd firefox-bin | grep libgdk_pixbuf'" There's no official patch yet, but the article notes several Linux vendors have issued updates. Worth keeping an eye for those who use libgdk_pixbuf under other Unix-style operating systems as well.

An anonymous reader writes "Amit Singh has a piece on his site about running the 5th edition UNIX distribution on a Nintendo Gameboy, of all things. Tons of screenshots and source included but what really makes this entertaining and informational in an ubergeekly sort of way is his side stories on UNIX history ... ARM CPU ... compiling and running random programs on the Gameboy, etc. There are even notes on recompiling the original Unix kernel to make it smaller for the GBA!"

mAriuZ writes "From Jim Starkey: "September 4th is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird. I quit my job at DEC in August, took a three day end-of-summer holiday, and began work on September 4, 1984 in my new career as a software entrepreneur. As best as I can reconstruct, the first two files were cpre.c and cpre.h (C preprocessor), later changed to gpre.c and gpre.h. The files were created on a loaner DEC Pro/350, a PDP-11 personal computer that went exactly nowhere, running XENIX. Gpre was my first C program, XENIX was my first experience with Unix, and the Pro/350 was my very last (but not lamented) experience with PDP-11s.""

Torsten Rahn writes "The KDE Project is pleased to announce the successful completion of the KDE Community World Summit ("aKademy 2004") in Ludwigsburg (Germany) taking place from August 20th to 29th. With more than 230 KDE core developers, usability and accessibility experts, translators, editors and artists participating, the event is expected to have a huge and lasting impact on the next major releases of the leading Linux and Unix desktop environment. In addition, 270 visitors from the KDE user base and from other Free Software projects brought the total number of attendees to 500. The international participants, coming from 5 continents, took part in 65 talks, 10 full-day tutorials and numerous BoF-meetings over the course of 10 days. Thanks to this huge turnout and the numerous activities, the event evolved into the largest conference ever held that focused on a single open source desktop environment."

MaufTarkie asks: "My manager just handed me a 256 megabyte thumbdrive. I already know about UnixKit for Windows and the WEP Key Generator Utility for Wi-Fi Networks, but I'm interesting in hearing what other people are putting on their drives. My drive will potentially touch a range of systems (Windows, Unix, and MacOS X), so any software is fair game. What are some essential tools I can (should) put on this?"

Nutria writes "This article got me thinking: What's a poor Unix-using guy to do, when he needs to grep text, compressed tarballs, OO.o documents, Debian archives, mime-encoded files, Evil Microsoft documents, PDF files, compressed AbiWord files, etc." Is there an extensible searching program for Unix that can handle a variety of different file-types? Search engines like ht://Dig can accomplish part of this task, however currently it doesn't index the whole file (just portions of the metadata). If you had to perform a substring search on a set of documents of different types, what tools would you use to accomplish this task?

Olivier Van Acker asks: "Since I started working at my current job a year ago I've installed on average one (Gentoo) Linux machine a month. Included are developer desktop machines, development servers, router/firewall, web servers, video server, MPEG encoders, etc. (It's a platform for interactive television). Since I'm the only one who is able to maintain them I want to train two of my colleagues. I've got three days dedicated time, three computers to work with and they are both Linux/Open source newbies (A technician and a programmer). What should this crash course include, what is the best learning method and what resources are available online?"

Gianluca writes "If security is not a concern, installing the Apache web server is a simple task even for an inexperienced system administrator. The problem is that security should always be a concern, and in case of Apache the information about making it secure can be sparse and fragmented. This is probably the reason why many web administrators are pretty clueless when it comes to Apache security. Needless to say, this creates a worrisome situation (to say the least): many web servers are vulnerable and exposed to thousands of potential attackers." Read on for Gianluca's review of Hardening Apache, a book intended to consolidate and clarify that information.

4A6F656C writes "In an article on LinuxWorld.com.au, Kieren O'Shaughnessy, director of SCO Australia and New Zealand, details SCO's plans for Australia, stating that they have 'prepared a hit list' and "would approach Australian Linux users to ensure they had an IP licence." In closing, he adds 'Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix'." UnknowingFool writes "IBM's lawyers have been busy the last few days. Groklaw has reported a number of different filings. On the heels of last week's motions (1) and (2) for summary judgement, they have filed more documents. First, IBM wants large portions of SCO's testimonies striken (removed) on multiple grounds. Deep in the motion, they call out SCO to produce the 'experts' that did the code comparison analysis. If IBM wins on most of these points, SCO will have very little left in the way of legal evidence. SCO answers on IBMs 10th counterclaim. IANAL but from I understand SCO says this copyright infringment that SCO has allegedly committed on one of IBM's patents is irrelevant to the case and the court doesn't need to decide on it. So SCO is saying that they can sue IBM for infringing on their Unix copyrights and patents but IBM can't counter sue on a specific patent. IBM also filed another memo to support summary judgement. As a matter of law, SCO has to produce evidence to backup its claims. This mountain of evidence SCO has claimed all this time: If they don't produce it, the court has to rule in IBM's favor."

sameerdesai asks: "While working on a project that required client-server functionality I was running into processes that wouldn't finish and eventually hang. While running packet tracing, I found out the tcp_fin_wait_2_timeout setting on the server side (UNIX) was too low for the Windows client, and after increasing that value it worked great. I am trying to apply a similar technique for a Windows server and was wondering what the equivalent registry key is for UNIX's tcp_fin_wait_2_timeout setting? Also, is there a guide out there that compares TCP setting in UNIX with Windows?"