upFRONT

They shine like pearls in the bathwater, these seventeen-word “found haikus” that Don Marti extracted from the Linux HOWTOs. All are syllable counts for words that appear in the CMU pronounciation dictionary.

A super daemonis bloat for those who onlywant one small feature—Werner Hauser, Linux Laptop HOWTO

I suppose you haveto fiddle around a bitto get this working—Werner Hauser, Linux Laptop HOWTO

It only takes auser with a modem tocompromise your LAN—Mark Grennan, Firewall and Proxy Server HOWTO

Examples of smoothrunning existing systemsare also welcome—Stein Gjoen, HOWTO: Multi Disk System Tuning

CD-ROMs have aspiraling track much like anaudio record—Skip Rye, Optical Disk HOWTO

Rest assured that theycan determine that it's thereand will exploit it—Kevin Fenzi & Dave Wreski, Linux Security HOWTO

The one conditionis that credit is givenwhere credit is due—Harvey J. Stein, The UPS HOWTO

-Doc Searls

We have a highly skilled group of patent examiners with a technical background that matches up very well with the kind of technologies they are seeing—and we think we issue patents of an appropriate breadth.

—U.S. Patent & Trademark Office Commissioner Q. Todd Dickinson in IP Worldwide

Amazon.com Patents Enemy-Making Process

—Headline in The Industry Standard

Windows CE is an environment where Microsoft says, “This is what the reference design looks like, and as long as you build this, Windows CE will work on it.” Linux, on the other hand, is an erector set, where we design the reference hardware to meet the problem we're trying to solve and then go to Linux for the piece parts from the bin to build exactly what works.

—John Bork of Intel in an interview with Linux Journal

Open Source developers understand UNIX. This is part of what made it possible to create a better UNIX: Linux. In order to create a better MS Office, Open Source developers need to understand MS Office in as much detail as they understood UNIX. My fear is that the Open Source developer community doesn't understand Office. It can't create what it doesn't understand. What we need are more developers using Windows and Office.

—Larry Augustin, VA Linux Systems, at the New York New Media Association

Web pages use a publishing metaphor—they are pages, after all. We write, open, read and bookmark them. We assume when a page downloads from a server, it's a one-way deal. The HTML describes the page, lays out the print, loads the graphics onto the page and into the cache. There is the presumption of privacy. After all, this is a published page, and reading is a personal, even an intimate, act. At those times when interaction is required, such as when we fill out a form, there's a “submit” button that sends information back to the other end of the line. We're still in control.

Most of us know how cookies work. They carry the potential for evil, but most serious e-commerce sites are careful not to abuse a customer's trust. But the truth is, we are being watched—a lot—and not just by cookies. The following three web sites will be of interest if you are concerned about this issue—and you should be.

It turns out that some companies are including 1x1 transparent GIFs from the web ad agencies on some pages, so you can be tracked on pages where there's no visible ad. Example: http://www.fedex.com/us/tracking/—FedEx's package tracking page. (Who's tracking who?)

Please implement some kind of banner blocking, whether it's Junkbuster, the “webclean” configuration file for Apache proxy, Squid, or just making your name server authoritative for the domain names of the big web advertising agencies.

—Doc Searls