Letters

While flipping through the latest LJ, I saw a small section at the beginning, labeled “Important Linux Web Sites”. What surprised me the most was to see http://slashdot.org/ as the top site listed. This may be a result simply of a sort when putting the list together, but I think many readers would agree that slashdot.org is not a good representation of the Linux operating system or community. Opinions by both the maintainers and visitors of that site are usually overly biased, ignorant or flame bait. If someone were to open an issue of LJ for the first time and wanted to learn more about Linux, I would much rather see them go to a more professionally run site, such as www.linux.com/ or www.gnu.org, than sites that sometimes make me embarrassed to be involved with Linux, like slashdot.org.

—Brian M Dial brian@flylife.org

In the August issue of LJ, Linley Gwennap reported that the Delphi Automotive Systems Palm docking station (or MPC, short for Mobile Productivity Center) uses Windows CE. While WinCE plays a prominent role in Delphi's overall product strategy, it was not an appropriate choice for the MPC. Instead, we chose to use the eCos real-time kernel from Red Hat. I would appreciate it if you would publish this correction in the next issue of LJ.

—Brad Coon MPC Product ArchitectDelphi Automotive Systems bradley.s.coon@delphiauto.com

I was reading my fresh new copy of issue 75 of LJ. In particular, I was reading “Collecting RFCs” and found this first statement: “Requests for Comment (RFCs) are the standards of the Internet”.

It's not really true, because RFCs are what they claim to be, requests for comment from the Internet community. RFCs are the second stage of the life cycle of the “official” Internet community documents. They start as “drafts” proposed by someone. After a while, they become RFCs and then, after having received some comment from someone else, they become STD (Standard), FYI (For Your Information) or BCP (Best Current Practice). So, RFCs are not standard, but only a mature stage of a proposal for a standard.

You can find the same document with two different names, one for the last RFC status and one for the definitive status; e.g., we have RFC-2026 (modified from RFC-1602) and the BCP-9 that is titled “The Internet Standards Process—Revision 3”. Or STD-1 that collects (and obsoletes) RFCs 2500, 2400, 2300, 2200, 2000, 1920, 1880, 1800, 1780, 1720, 1610, 1600, 1540, 1500, 1410, 1360, 1280, 1250, 1200, 1140, 1130, 1100, 1083. For more information about this, try www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html.

Anyway, I found your article very interesting and love LJ. Go on this way!

—Vincenzo Romano vromano@mail.com