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Contents:

¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

I love Linux

Reading/writing large buffers to Fibre Channel

cannot talk using "talk"

Tripwire

Greetings from Heather Stern

Greetings, everyone, and welcome once again to the world of The Answer Gang.

I had plans for this month on a wonderful blurb about the nature of advocacy in the linux world.... by which I really mean, not just how you get one person here or there introduced to the time of their life and being in more control of their personal computer than they ever had before with The Beast From Redmond, but how you generally behave so as not to make the average person who is willing to chat computers because "hey you look like a techie, I was wondering...?" think "gawd, I don't want to be like or deal with these kind of people, Linux must make them crazy."

Yet I find it's just as important to consider how to behave inside your local user group. New people drop into these places. Do they see a batch of people having a great time yakking about xine versus mplayer and whether nvidia frame rates make you dizzy now that you've installed the driver? Or do they see people playing "my distro's better than yours" games that rival the recent political "debates" and make everyone look like control freaks? They look at whatever they find, and sure, they're going to ask their questions about the lil' penguin and his OS, but they are also thinking to themselves, is this going to be fun for me?

This is October, and in past years there's been tons of fuss on "Halloween" documents. Leaks and spooky measures to rival the cigar filled rooms cough cough of an earlier era. What sort of light does this put on us? I'd rather see Tux as the defender of freedom than the whisperer among spooks. But people are spooked by all sorts of things these days.

Be good to each other, people. Have a good month.