News from PANUG/BizNix - October 3, 2002 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org EVENTS PANUG and BizNix are hosting a 3-day version of the LINUX BOOT CAMP. The course will be held on November 12-14 at Novell's office in Tigard. For details, visit the PANUG or BizNix Web site. On December 11, BizNix and PANUG are holding a Linux Live session at the Oregon Convention Center running concurrent with the Itec show. You can get details here: http://biznix.org/linuxlive/ This note is from Lorraine Renard, a PANUG Board member: PANUG and BizNix will have a booth at the Itec show on Wednesday, December 11 and Thursday, December 12. This is a wonderful opportunity for both groups to gain local industry recognition as well as build our membership. However, we need volunteers for staffing the booth. Anyone interested in donating their time on these two dates, please contact me at lrenard@pcc.edu. [Ed: Unemployed members should seriously consider volunteering. Who knows, you might meet your future employer in the booth.] NEWS Effective yesterday, Western Digital WD Caviar Special Edition hard drives are covered under warranty for a three-year period. All other Western Digital products are one-year. Last week, Microsoft announced a flaw in the SmartHTML Interpreter contained in Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions that could allow a hacker to run malicious code or carry out a denial-of-service attack. If anyone knows whether this affects users of FrontPage Extensions for Unix (used along with Apache) please let us know. If it does, this would be rather serious. THE PHILOSOPHICAL MISTAKE OF COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE by David May Bill Gates became the richest man in the world by exploiting a common philosophical mistake. A computer is a thing. In other words, a computer is the answer to a "what is it?" question. Computers are subject to the laws of physics, they are physical things. A computer can not exist in more than one place at a time, and although many people may exercise control or ownership over this computer it is SHARED control. If I am running a program that is consuming all the memory you cannot do the same at the same time. Software is not a thing. It is the answer to a "how to" question. Granted this answer is formed in such a way that only a computer can ask it, But it is still a "How to". A recipe. Software, unlike a computer is not bound by physical laws. It is not a physical thing, but a way of doing something. It can exist in a multitude of places simultaneously. And control of this recipe can be exercised by many people on many different computers in complete independance. It follows then that it is an error to apply market dynamics to software, because once it is authored is an unlimited resource. The law of supply and demand is imapplicable. A famine in the land or a shortage of certain metals might limit the supply of computers. But nothing limits, at least not naturally, the supply of software once it is authored. It may go out of fashion, but is never used up or worn out. You can rent a house to 15 people all for the same amount. But you cannot rent the same house to 15,000 people for the same amount. Physics will get in your way. This is not true of software. Once authored, there are no NATURAL limitations on it's use. This bears repeating. There are no NATURAL limitations on the use of software. We must create artifical means to function in place of the laws of physics. This is the genius of Microsoft. They convinced people to pay for something that has exactly the same limitations as the word "the". They turned a "how" into a "what".