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this is OLD news. AT&T has been capping their bandwidth for a month now.

AT&T has been providing quality service for all your needs

I currently use fvwm2 because kde 2.x doesn't support more than one kde session per user per machine.

Has this changed in kde 3?

Press Release

The ATTBI service agreement was just about the most restricitve contract I've ever seen at an ISP. You weren't even allowed to post material that would be "considered embarrassing to a reasonable person"! Maybe this merger will make the agreement a little more sensible (and increase the bandwith cap while their at it too!)

I guess Internet2 is nice in that it doesn't have to share traffic with the commercial Internet, but I still would've expected an academic network to have faster connections than what the rest of us get to use :)

• Telemarketers are regulated under Federal law. If many people complain about a given telemarketer, their sworn statements could be use to severely increase the penalties to particularly abusive companies.
  
  
• Statistics can be collected to create a "most annoying companies" list.
  
  
• Blacklists can be created to discourage consumers from patronizing companies with evil telemarketing practices.
  
  
• Users with an always-on connection can query a MAPS-like server in real time to determine whether to answer an incoming call with a handset or with a screeching 'ATA' modem tone.
  
  

First, as others have mentioned, lighting can work wonders. The overhead lights (florescent) are about the worst thing you can use in an office environment with computers. On the other hand, too little light can be just as bad. I had a floor lamp (one of the ones that opens up toward the ceiling) that had a bulb go out, so I temporarily used a small (and very dim) desk lamp. It was about as bad as having too much light. The floor lamp is much better.

Also, here's a few other tips (some have been mentioned previously) that work for me:

• Keep background noise and distractions to an absolute minimum. This will do wonders in improving your train of thought.
• If you have the luxury of a DOOR for your office (or cubicle) then CLOSE IT. If you do not have a door, install one. :)
• Find some good classical music to listen to as you work. If you have an Internet connection at the office, check out my favorite. (If you don't, check out the local radio stations.)
• Most phone systems have a DND (Do Not Disturb) button on the individual phones. It's there for a reason -- use it. If you don't have a phone in your office, be thankful.
• On a similar note, if your phone system has direct dialing from outside (either via DNIS or an automated transfer) only give your extension number to close friends/family that you don't mind interrupting your coding. (Make everyone else go through the operator.) If you DND your phone, they will usually get your voice mail if they dial you direct, but still, if you phone doesn't have DND, this is your second line of defense.
• Don't keep your E-Mail client open while you work on other things. I have found that doing so creates a temptation to go read your new mail whenever it comes in.
• Minimize any other distractions that you may come across. Encourage people to send E-Mail or leave voice mail when they need something, instead of bothering you personally. Every time you stop and help someone, you have to spend time getting back into the swing of things. (I know this may sound a bit mean, but you do have a job you have to get done, right?)
• Depending on your network and/or what type of access you have to things, you may be able to install VNC on your machine and then work remotely from home if things get too nasty.
• Customize the color configuration of your software. I do as one other person has mentioned here - black backgrounds with white (or gray) text. Most of the time I even turn off the syntax highlighting of my favorite editor when coding.
• Anything else that might make you more comfortable and able to be more productive...

Also, a lot of what works and doesn't work will depend on the person and possibly the company you are in. Each person has their own needs and what environment works for me may not work for others. YMMV.

Oh, and if your phone system uses standard phones (in other words, no proprietary multiline garbage, your call hold/transfer/conference uses flash hook, and you can use standard Wal-Mart phones on it) then you most likely don't have a DND button. Nortel's Meridian system can have add-on cards to support standard phones, as can many others. Just buy a project box, mount a SPST switch in it, connect one leg of the switch to one leg of a 600 ohm resistor, the other leg of the switch to one side of the phone line, and the remaining leg of the resistor to the other side of the line. When you flip the switch, it puts a 600 ohm load across the line, which is like taking the phone off hook. Instant busy signal. :) (Just make sure it is a standard phone compatible system -- else things can get a bit hairy when you start plugging things in like that.)

Take out the space between the 4 and the 16 and the link will work fine.

The main reason I chose to look elsewhere is their new subscriber agreement specifically states that you are stealing their service if you hook up another computer to the network:

(g.) Theft of Service. Customer shall not connect the Service or any AT&T Broadband Equipment to more computers, either on or outside of the Premises, than are reflected in Customer's account with AT&T Broadband. Customer acknowledges that any unauthorized receipt of the Service constitutes theft of service, which is a violation of federal law and can result in both civil and criminal penalties. In addition, if the violations are willful and for commercial advantage or private financial gain, the penalties may be increased.

Here is a link to the migration timings for AT&T customers:

http://help.broadband.att.com/faq.jsp?name=srvc_av ailable_frmrtci

I am still without cable modem access, and without any other choice for a high speed connection.

As soon as I do have a choice, I'll be running away from AT&T. This debacle is AT&T's fault, they failed their customers, and should have had an immediate backup plan when this happened.

"AT&T say that as of Tuesday morning they have moved 500,000 of their subscribers over to their network."

But I am not one of them!! As I have stated in my comments to the other @Home posts the last few days, I have still not been contacted in any form by AT&T regarding my loss of service either before or after the service was turned off. The lastest update on the AT&T website says that the Sacramento area should get service Wednesday of Thursday and that a representative will call when service is restored. We'll see if that really happens.

Now I can only read /. from work ;-/

VNC If your nokia has a web browser, you can control your windows desktop from anywhere.

Actually, windows 2000 has a telnet server if you choose to enable it. The problem is that all files are basically a+rwx in windows and you have to setup ACLs on file access for the whole system if you have any other people with log-on rights to the system if you want to have any kind of security. I'm not talking about share security, if any users telnets in they can "DIR" their way anywhere on the system and do whatever they want with the files. If you don't have anyone else using the machine it's not a problem though.

The other problem, of course, is that you just can't really do that many on windows with just the command line :(

about running a server, att seems to have some mixed signals on their website, the service agreement obviously being the definitive resource:

FAQ: can I run a server?

AT&T Broadband does not allow servers to be connected to the cable modem. This means that no computer in a personal network can be used as a server.


What the hell does this mean? I can't have a file/print server within my home network? Or are they tring to say the machine(s) connected directly to the modem can't be servers?

http://help.broadband.att.com/faq.jsp?name=srvc_av ailable_frmrtci

Is it just me, or is the news server only serving up at 150K? I used to get 400K.

To Those on attbi.com
Here is the important part of this post

All reports I've heard indicate a 1.5 mbps cap on the migrated users. This may be a temporary measure to ensure bandwidth availability during the migration period. But if no one complains, I wouldn't be surprised if ATT retains it, so let someone know you are not entirely happy!

Is it just me, or is the news server only serving up at 150K? I used to get 400K.

To Those on attbi.com
Here is the important part of this post

All reports I've heard indicate a 1.5 mbps cap on the migrated users. This may be a temporary measure to ensure bandwidth availability during the migration period. But if no one complains, I wouldn't be surprised if ATT retains it, so let someone know you are not entirely happy!

I haven't had any problems so far *fingers crossed* and I don't use their crappy mail servers anyway.

The biggest downer is that we're now capped at 1.5Mb/s which means I get around 120-150KB/s downloads. With @ home I got 0.8-1.0MB/s downloads. Interestingly their new terms of agreement terms say that we're capped at 1.5MB/s which would be nice, but untrue. I'm sure they'll just quietly update the terms to 1.5Mb/s any day now.

Here is the migration schedule by city for as of this morning. . .

On Now - Oregon, Washington , Dallas
Mon, Tues - San Francisco, Illinois
Wednesday - Denver, Salt Lake
Thursday - Hartford, Conn., Pittsburgh, Sacramento, and the Rocky Mountain region in the mountain West

See the press release here

>switching current customers to a new network will take about 2 weeks

What is the source for this? AT&T has said 7 -10 days fairly consistently. Over 40% of customers are already on attbi. AT&T said they will have 600,000 subs moved over by the end of the day Monday, with the rest back up by Friday.

according to reuters:

...it has already moved to its own high-speed Internet network nearly 40 percent of the 850,000 customers who lost service this weekend...

About 330,000 subscribers in Oregon, Washington and the Dallas area have been moved to the new AT&T Broadband network, the company said in a statement. Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to be moved during the day on Monday, and by day's end it expects to have switched 657,000 subscribers to its network.

The balance of its affected customers will be switched by Friday, it said


and here, from an AT&T press release:

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. - AT&T Broadband moved about 330,000 cable Internet customers to its new high speed Internet network as of Monday morning, Dec. 3, less than 48 hours after the At Home Corporation shut off service for more than 850,000 AT&T customers. The At Home Corporation's action followed a decision in U. S. Bankruptcy Court to cancel cable company distribution agreements with At Home.

The customers moved to the new AT&T network so far reside in Oregon, Washington, and metro Dallas. Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to be moved today and tomorrow, bringing the total added to the new network to about 657,000.

There are lots of other details in the AT&T press release, including what will happen to customers still on the MediaOne network in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Atlanta; Jacksonville; Los Angeles; the Stockton and Fresno areas of Central California; New England; Richmond, Va.; and St. Paul, Minn.

Customers formerly served by MediaOne are remaining on a separately operated network
...
For the group of customers in the markets being served by this separately operated network, the service will be re-branded as AT&T Broadband Internet. For the majority of customers in these markets, the network, Internet service connectivity, email domain names, and data transmission speed won't be affected. The only change these customers will see is new content provided by Yahoo! To access this new content, customers can direct their browsers to http://home.attbroadband.com/.

The one thing that 3G is going to do for me is FINALLY provide a decent wireless service for my PDA that i can pay for along with my cell phone.

Heh, I'm sure with the wonderful providers that exist in the United States, you will probably have the luxary of paying for the added services on a "per-byte" basis...

I think you mean http://www.att.com/press/item/0,1354,4100,00.html. ;)

--pi

as of 12-2-01 at 3:30am I was moved over to attbi.com but the dns servers didnt work, neither did the news server. One thing I dont get is they have 2 different AUP's for attbi and the @home customer care couldn't tell me which one that I am going by, http://newuser.attbi.com/attbi.com.ATTB_Sub_Agr.ht ml and http://help.broadband.att.com/faq.jsp?content_id=1 107&category_id=34&lobid=1 the first listed AUP does not say you can not run a server but the second one says you cant.

"AT&T Broadband has communicated with all of its high-speed cable Internet customers during the past few weeks to help them prepare for these developments."

I'm not sure it will help a lot of people, but this is what I just did to get reconnected. (Gotta feed the /. habit.) I'm in Fort Collins, CO if that's relevant to anyone. I haven't got a phone call from AT&T yet. But that may well be on account of the phone number they have listed for me is disconnected right now.

I did try sending out DHCP requests before doing this, but never got any replies. I wouldn't call this course of action exceptionally friendly behaviour. But the web sites AT&T listed in some email this past week are either unreachable or have nothing helpful.

• Listen for IP traffic coming over the modem. I did tcpdump -n -i eth0 and figured that the not-10.x.x.x router doing all the ARP requests was the neighborhood router.
• Make note of several of the IP addresses that the router continues to ask for and stop tcpdump. Also note the suspected router address.
• Set your IP address to one of the addresses from the previous step (see ifconfig(8) for help on that.) Add a default route through the router you found in the last step. route add -net default x.x.x.x )
• Hope someone follows up with a suggestion on getting DHCP working again or that you get a phone call from AT&T.

• You may well be hijacking someone else's legitimate IP address. And quite possibly violating your AUP in the process.
• Your cable modem does need to think it has a good connection to the network. Look for a set of lights glowing steadily. Or if it has a web interface, look at that. My RCA cable modem has a status page at http://192.168.100.1/

Good Luck!

Um, are you sure you have AT&T as a cable provider? AT&T more or less pulled out of Iowa earlier this year. Those AT&T cable/broadband assets in Iowa are now owned by Mediacom.

Not all their customers...yet. Here's the latest on the migration plan.

After checking in with a couple friends today, it's official, our AT&T@Home cable modems are completely off-line. This isn't just dead DNS, this is a blinking cable modem light representing no service at all. Stories are reporting 2-10 days outage, and from past experience, I'd lean to the longer timeframe. Here's AT&T's Press Release on the subject. -T

I got up this morning an noticed my linux box churning away on the hard drive -- turns out att rolled dhcp last night, and while a got a new ip and entries for dns servers in resolv.conf, the routes hadn't updated properly. One reboot and I'm up. For those of you that were on at&t, here's some info:

AT&T's new user page is up, and so is their help page, but who knows for how long (these were both down last night).

The new user page has the info about how to change your settings to get on attbi. If you are using windows, just use the auto config utility. If that doesn't work, or if this page goes down again, here's the info I got:

1. Use dhcp (it looks like the IP's are really dynamic now -- you get a new one every time your lease expires, unlike @home. This will be very annoying for some people, depending on how long the leases are. The lease time I got was 3600. I am assuming that is in seconds, so that's hour. Maybe they'll change this later?)

2. The dns servers I got were:
204.127.198.4
63.240.76.4
12.242.16.50
12.242.16.34

3. The mail and news servers are:
POP3:mail.attbi.com
SMTP:mail.attbi.com
news:netnews.attbi.com

4. Email is now username@attbi.com

As I am writing this, I got an automated call from at&t saying that service is up in my area.

Hang on, Seattle, I'm sure it's comming!

From what I can tell, AT&T wins either way. They do sell DSL service too, after all.

What they didn't teach you in elementary school was that there might be any more than TWO levels of precedence. Nothing from elementary school prepared you for the FIFTEEN or so levels of precedence on C. Two levels was bad enough, but FIFTEEN is RIDICULOUS.

The fact is that the rules DO change from language to language. Each language with precedence rules has ITS OWN SET OF OPERATORS. Some blindly copy the precedence rules of C, but none of them are exactly the same.

And the rules of C++ have been changing for many years, so much that it's a running joke. If you think mathematical notation is so wonderful, then why can't you multiply a and b by writing "ab"?

Now do you still really want to blindly copy mathematical notation? Read Bjarne Stroustrup's paper, "Generalizing Overloading for C++2000" to see where that will lead. If you still think it's a good idea after reading that, let me remind you he wrote it as an April Fools joke. (The paper, not C++.)

Relying on precedence most certainly DOES make code hard to maintain, and easy to break ("brittle").

It's a fact that code changes over time, and many different people make those modifications. If any of those people did rely on precedence instead of using extra parenthesis, the chances are much higher that the code will break whenever you or somebody else modifies it. Much worse than simply breaking with a syntax error: its meaning will change, but it will still compile without error, so you probably won't even notice you made a mistake.

By "brittle", I mean that code should be ROBUST in the face of CHANGE, and precedence flies in the face of that.

For example, if you foolishly write a big "if" statement that spans several lines, has many sub-expressions with addition, multiplication, shifting, ?: conditionals, ands, ors, or any other operators at different precedences, it is extremely difficult and time consuming for anyone else to come along and modify that code, without reindenting it and wrapping it all in parenthesis, simply to understand what it does.

Second of all, you are probably responsible for many bugs youself, because you reply on precedence! How is the poor sucker who has to debug your code supposed to figure out if you really MEANT to depend on the subtle order of evaluation, or if you were simply too foolish to put in enough parenthesis so there was no visual ambiguity, therefore no bug?

If you're DESIGNING a language for expressions, you've got to design GOOD, SIMPLE, CONSISTENT, EASY TO REMEMBER RULES, or else the poor victims who have to use your language will waste a huge amount of time and energy trying to make up for your stupid mistake as a language designer, and fixing bugs they never would have encountered were it not for your short sightedness.

This is a discussion about the DESIGN of programming languages. It's acceptable to QUESTION the rules, instead of blindly following them, and blaming the victims for the mistakes they couldn't help but make, because their language was badly designed.

Don't act like such a pedantic school teacher with a ruler always ready to smack the hand of anyone who makes a mistake. Rules should not be designed as opportunities to PUNISH people for breaking them. They should help people get their work done more easily and efficiently, instead. And precedence rules cause much more harm than they do any good.

How does not having to type parenthesis really improve your life? If you were a good programmer, you'd type them anyway, because it's your duty to write robust maintainable easy to read code. Precedence rules only open up the door to hard-to-spot mistakes, they don't prevent any.

Precedence rules come from written mathematical expressions, which is a two dimensional visual language. Conventional programming languages are written in ASCII, which is a one dimensional string of characters. It's not possible to directly express the two dimensional branching and grouping in ASCII that you can in written mathematical expressions, therefore you have to use parenthesis and other explicit grouping and associative techniques. Precedence rules are subtle, invisible, and a totally arbitrary convention copied from mathematics and then taken to a ridiculous extreme. There's absolutely nothing "natural" or "essential" about it, like the rest of math. It's like arguing that racial prejudice is good and natural, just because you learned it from your parents.

Mathematical notation was arbitrarily made up over history by many different people. As you should know, there's no rhyme or reason to most of it, and a bad notation can certainly get in the way of understanding the problem.

That's why Alan Turing and others had to invent their own ways of writing expressions like differential equations, that make the problem easier to understand and work with. There is certainly room for evolution and improvement -- mathematical notation was not carved on stone and handed down to us from God.

It's ridiculous to say that precedence rules are easy to learn, because they're based on mathematical notation. People aren't born with it. They have to learn it over time, just like any other syntax in any programming language. Most people in this world have very little understanding (and a lot of misunderstanding) about math, and couldn't give a flying fuck about traditional mathematical notation.

I don't believe knowing grammar is optional, but I do believe the grammar should be simple and well defined enough that you can quickly learn ALL of it. This is certainly NOT the case with C++. Off the top of your head, what's the syntax for declaring and using a pointer to a member function? How did your knowledge of mathematical notation help you with answering that question? And what's the relative precedence of that syntax, compared to pointer indirection? How do you use an array of pointers to member functions?

Whatever it is, you'd better put in a lot of extra parenthesis, and use temporary intermediate typedefs and variables, if you want your code to be readable, maintainable and robust.

If you protest that it slows down your code, you don't know the first thing about compilers. If you protest that it slows you down, then that's good, because you should realize that writing robust code prevents bugs and saves a whole lot more time and energy in the long run.

-Don

How anonymous can Crowds be? At the end of the Crowds page you read "Users who keep their Crowds servers alive all the time will be identified and rewarded with a free Crowds t-shirt "

Seven Crowds members have thus far been awarded a tshirt, and are listed by name!

How anonymous can Crowds be? At the end of the Crowds page you read "Users who keep their Crowds servers alive all the time will be identified and rewarded with a free Crowds t-shirt "

Seven Crowds members have thus far been awarded a tshirt, and are listed by name!

haha...

from http://www.research.att.com/projects/crowds...

THE CROWDS CODE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD

If you would like a copy of the code, please send mail to crowds@research.att.com
with a copy of the following license and indicate that you agree to the license.
Request may take a little while to process.
The Crowds software is available for free, non-commercial use in the United States. To obtain the software, please provide the following information...

So it goes. Anyone have a copy of the code? It's a proxy, written in perl. Intriguing enough to want to take a look at.

There is still work being done with AT&T's crowds. Basically, the caveat is that you have'ta share the load if you wanna use the service. Good karma there.

./configure --enable-objprelink

and watch your kde app startup times get cut in half! this a great reason to compile kde yourself even if you don't want to run cutting edge cvs code as some distributions (ahem--redhat) just didn't bother with their binaries.

Have a look at ACE. It provides all you'll need - and probably a lot more!

For a simple, free, portable threading library, also have a look at OmniThread.

Text to speech can sound very lifelike, the first time I used AT&T TTS I was shocked at how realistic it was. check it out here. http://www.research.att.com/~mjm/cgi-bin/ttsdemo

graphviz

At first, I thought this was a joke. But, a quick search to google later, I'm now even more confused. According to this article, Windows for Pens came out some time in 1992. To use the theories of the great Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, since I have no recollection of this whatsoever, it must have flopped pretty hard. Did anyone actually buy something that can run windows for pens? Can you run Linux on it?

fwiw, AT&T@Home has already partnered with Google, for getting a better search-engine on the support site of the former : http://help.broadband.att.com

As long as you can get it onto the LAN, it isn't really too hard to copy files back and forth between Windows and Linux. So bring in your own Linux machine (laptop would be even nicer) and develop using that. This will only work if you're not doing things where you really need the Windows developer tools.

There's also vnc which allows you to not bring in an extra monitor, keyboard, or mouse.

I did this and saw my productivity go way up.

How do I run it on the machine hooked into my stereo from my desktop with the display that is in the other room?

Attach an old PowerBook to your home audio system with a $5 phone->rca adapter from radioshack, and install a vnc server on it.

Then you can control iTunes (and any other audio source you'd like to pipe through - internet radio anyone?) from ANY machine on your home network, including your windoze, wince and *nix boxes, or better yet your 802.11b-enabled PalmOS device!

This is trivial and elegant in my UNIX environment.

Just because it's not a UNIX environment doesn't mean it can't still do things elegantly...

Use VNC (free; open source; multi-platform). If you have the multiple machines networked on a resonable network (10 Mbps is fine, 100 Mbps is completly lag free -- even works OK through cable modems). Then all you need to know is the IP address of the machine, and you get an instant view of the desktop and you are able to move the mouse around, use the keyboard, etc. It's kind of like PC Anywhere, without the bloat and it's cross-platform and performs very well. If you have a DNS server, you can even assign computers a name.

No switches or cable to deal with, and best of all you can use multiple machines at the same time (e.g. at a resolution of 1600x1200 with 800x600 VNC windows), and also use your main computer. With KVM switches, you physically switch everything over, which when done many times risks damage. Not to mention all those cables going to all the different machines to do the switching.

KVM is a thing of the past, right next to the 300 baud modem rack hosting the ASCII art BBS, when you needed to view the screens of several 386's. It also doesn't make sense, to say, use a KVM switch for 10 computers. However, with VNC you have the limits (on a private network anyway) of the entire IP dotted-decimal.

testing please ignore.

This post shouldn't work due to a bug. If it is actually posted, please ignore it. :-)

Here's a less expensive solution.

It can't do everything (it irks me that I can't log onto my 2K box through it), but it also doesn't limit you to a few feet away.

Palm must have really wanted to Mr. Nagel to leave his job at AT&T because his compensation package is a sweet deal. In addition to his $620 thousand salary he got a $200 thousand hiring bonus and can participate in a discretionary cash bonus plan giving him up to 70% of his base salary.

Not sure if that was a wise choice, leaving ATT Labs... They have some sweet projects. In fact im using VNC right now. Thou a 650K a year, damn...

Palm must have really wanted to Mr. Nagel to leave his job at AT&T because his compensation package is a sweet deal. In addition to his $620 thousand salary he got a $200 thousand hiring bonus and can participate in a discretionary cash bonus plan giving him up to 70% of his base salary.

Not sure if that was a wise choice, leaving ATT Labs... They have some sweet projects. In fact im using VNC right now. Thou a 650K a year, damn...

I think the above post is slightly misleading. If you release methane, it is a very harmful greenhouse gas. However, if you burn it, its not too bad. References below:

http://www.naturalgas.org/ENVIRON2.HTM
http://www.iclei.org/efacts/natgas.htm

Also you can actually harvest naturally occurring methane to power things:
http://www.att.com/press/0692/920625.cha.html

Here are just a few of the tools that are considered traditionally in UNIX/Linux/BSD territory that are available for Win32. In all actuality, there's enough out there to get as much of Linux running on Win32 as Win32 running under WINE.
XFree86: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/xfree/
KDE: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
GTK/PHP/Libglade: http://gtk.php.net/download.php

Apache: http://www.apache.org
PHP: http://www.php.net
PHPTriad: http://www.phpgeek.com
Perl: http://www.activestate.com
Ruby: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ ruby-install.html
Python: http://www.python.org/download/download_windows.ht ml
TCL/TK: http://www.pconline.com/%7Eerc/tclwin.htm

MySQL: http://www.mysql.com
MySQL ODBC: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc.html
PostgreSQL: Included in cygwin (only works on NT)

ATT's U/WIN* Unix for Windows: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
Cygwin: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/
DJGPP: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
Native UNIX command-line binaries: http://www.wzw.tu-muenchen.de/~syring/win32/UnxUti ls.html

vi: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
Emacs: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs .html
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org

Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org
GIMP: http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/

List of GNU software for Windows: http://www.gnusoftware.com/
And so on . . .

There's a list over at DMOZ.org of a lot of this.

There are two nice things about this setup IMO.

1. You don't need any special dedicated software. Anything you can do with a real PC, you can do with the PC without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor you have sitting next to your stereo. Just use winvnc or a similar program to log in from your real computer. No waiting for patches for the special-purpose software that the company provides.
   
2. It's really, really cheap. You can get an old computer for way less than $300... doubt mine's worth half that. It's slow as hell, but the processor almost never pins on playback and it's reliable--weeks of uptime, even with Win98. Tack on an irman and you're ready to roll.
   
   Anyway, as far as I can tell this looks like a problem that didn't need solving in the first place. Maybe if the appliance were cheaper than a computer that would really work just as well, they'd have something.