I'm assuming the question was "What was the first computer you accessed." If you want to talk about the first computer that I touched myself, that would be an IBM 1130. Then there were the computing calculators I played with at SIU Carbondale. If the question was "What was the first computer you owned" the answer would be the original Compaq Portable, the IBM PC clone with a handle. THAT computer is the one that launched me into a career of writing, as a co-worker saw my computer and asked me, "do you want free software for that?"

So many possible answers.

Where is this wiki you are talking about? The only "current documentation" is in the Git repository in the form of source code.

But you make an interesting suggestion: provide links to the current documentation about the protocols. That would be the RFCs that the IETF have released. That's the original source material. All I do in the gray matter sections is combine the information from some number of RFCs into a single whole.

Reference links for each section. That's the ticket.

Thought I'd pass along an interesting question I received in e-mail: "How do you deal with 'Bandwidth Exceeded' in your Web book?"

Answer: I host it on my own Web server, not a Web host. (That could change sometime, but not soon.) The server sits on a 100/20 AT&T fiber link. If traffic increases to fill that 20 megabits, then I'll upgrade to a 100/100 circuit. If the book ever gets that popular. Judging from the royalty reports on the first edition, I don't expect this to be a problem. But I do Have A Plan(tm) if it does.

Which reminds me, I need to install MRTG somewhere sometime to monitor the traffic. Be a good little sysadmin.

If you give it away, they treat it like trash; if you make them suffer, even a little bit, for it, then they start defending it because their self-esteem rests on that sunk cost being a good decision and not a bad one. How does he get paid for this book? Advertising? Google seems to pay exactly $0.01618 per view, so until you get into the millions you are still living on California welfare wages.

No, I'm living off of freelance writing, Social Security (at least, I will be in six months), the severance from my last job, and money I have in the bank. Right now, writing the Second Edition is more of a hobby than a money-making enterprise, to help me keep sharp and busy between writing assignments. Or alternating with writing assignments, as if/when the market bulds up for me.

There is another aspect. Back when I talked about this in 2000, there were a number of comments that I should "publish" as an open-source project. To me, that means "free for everyone." I don't have a problem with that. "Open source" means I can update whenever I want without having to schedule a press run. Moreover, I may be able to accept section (chapter) contributions wholesale, as well as critiques and errata notices retail. In short, I want to fulfill the promise in the original edition of "continuous update."

As for publishing in paper, the design of the Web book is such that transferring the content to the printed page should be pretty simple, if tedious. The sections in both the articles and commentary correspond to chapters in a book. The downside is that publishing on paper means the content is frozen in time. If you look at Linus' Git repository for the kernel, it's by no means frozen. Indeed, the velocity of releases is increasing, particularly as the IETF RFC document numbers are about to break into five digits.

The audience for my book is very much into mobile devices: phones, tablets, and other neat gadgets with small screens. Also, we may see something like Google Glass make an appearance. (Wonder how my book would render in eye-phones?) A very small number may elect to kill trees retail, so why should I kill trees wholesale? (No, I'm not a tree-hugger: saving paper is not in my list of goals for the second edition.)

Repeat: this is not a money-making project for me. I want to give back to the community that has supported me so well over the decades.

And that's the tooth. (<Bronx cheer>)

So my answer, if Dropbox remains adamant, is to go to the used computer store, pick up the cheapest Windows box that will accept a 2-TB drive, and let Dropbox run on THAT. Share the Dropbox folder. On the Linux systems, you use Samba client, or mount using the cifs filesystem type.

I'm the only person using Linux desktop in $DAYJOB, so I'm the only one facing the November 7 deadline. What about away from my LAN? I would just VPN into my firewall and access the share that way.

When I first saw the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, I read through it cover to cover. When I prepared my response, I made an effort to answer all of the questions I was competent to respond to. I also made a proposal (in a separate comment) of an alternative to the black-and-white stance, by providing a nice grey option. I've not seen any response to either. And, given the bias of the current Commission, I don't expect to see any discussion of my contributions. Feh.

I just checked, and they have moved their name into a different subnet. Snowshoes in action.

I checked the owning subnet, and found that I had already blocked the entire allocation for SSH abuse. Seems there are multiple bad actors in that part of the world.

Quite some time ago, I took global warming to heart and had a vasectomy. I make the affirmative decision not to have children. So, how many of the eco-alarmists have done the same thing? The problem isn't "man-made CO2", the problem is that we have too many men/women on the planet, with no sign of slowing. But global warming isn't the only problem. Wait until the population outgrows the food supply.

The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.

I have a Lenovo laptop with Windows 7 Professional on it. Sometime in the last nine months, Windows has forgotten how to talk with much of the hardware in the laptop. This includes the finger reader and all networking devices. I called both Microsoft and Lenovo, and both refused to help.

So I never see the nags!

The hardware works fine, as proven by the copy of Fedora 20 I have running on the thing -- when I need to network, I just boot into Linux and have at it. RJ-45 port. Wifi. All happy. (I haven't tried installing the finger reading software yet, because I don't have much use for it.

When I need to copy software across, USB sticks and Blu-Ray drive work just swell. That's how I keep the DVD/BR reader up to date on the laptop that runs in the Windows side.

So, no problem. That doesn't help the folks in hospitals or out in the field...

I've been worrying about the ability for wireless routers to withstand any significant attack, particularly given the reponsiveness of the manufacturers of the things (like, none at all) to exploits. So I made a decision to put my wireless router behind a firewall that keeps bad people in the cloud from playing.

Yes, the firewall would cost money ($70 for the computer, $0 for the firewall software -- I'm using CentOS and IPTABLES) and it's another box, but that box protects my inside network, so that I abide by the rule "Never expose Microsoft gear to the bare Internet." As a bonus, I run the router in bridge mode, so that my firewall gets to answer DHCP requests instead of the router. Makes packages like Dropbox work properly even for wireless devices.

I use LANsync quite a bit, because the repository at work has some DVD ISO images, and an update or addition causes quite a bit of network traffic without LANsync. With LANsync, the traffic is between my fileserver and the wireless device, and the uplink carries only the administrative traffic.

What I'm looking for is a wireless card I can put into a CentOS 7 box, so that I don't have to have the lashup I have now. It also means my resulting wireless router/server would be considerably more future-proof than my no-longer-supported Cisco branded router is. (Rebanded Linksys, I think.)

It is very easy to whip up a systemd script to manage the software no matter what quirks the software has about running as a daemon.

I've been looking for a concise, complete HOWTO on how to take an existing daemon program running in the old init-script environment and make minimal changes to have it run in the systemd environment. Can you point me to a URL?