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Unfortunately, the error handler crashes on exceptions.

This is where I always get confused, especially when writing programs. A few years ago, I learned about a nifty little python trick, where you map sys.excepthook to a function in your application. When I use pykde, I usually map this function to an error dialog that displays the error message and a traceback in a text area.

http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/useless/trunk/useless/kdebase/error.py

Anyway, I was creating an application for a friend, and I decided to make a different kind of dialog window that had an "email developer" button on it that would let my friend automatically email me when she encountered and error, putting the traceback in the body of the email, but it wouldn't work properly, and the error handler was crashing while it was handling an exception. I had the hardest time trying to figure out what to do about it.

1987 is about the time I stopped playing with computer games. I held on to my c128 as my primary computer up until 1998. In fact, one of the reasons that I bought my first PC ten years ago was the fact that I had just found out that it would run a c64 emulator.

As a result, I missed out on many of the old DOS games, excepting the ones that I got a chance to play at a friends' houses. In a way that's been good for me, as I can now go back through and play ten years of games that I had missed using dosbox. I have been working on a frontend program to help keep track of the games:

http://dosbox-pykde.berlios.de/

The application is in bad need of being updated, as it's set to work with an older version of dosbox, and they seem to change their configuration in drastic ways from release to release. I may spend some time getting it workable with a newer release of dosbox here shortly, as I feel a slight urge after reading these comments to try out some of the DOS games that I have missed out on.

BTW, I always wanted an Amiga, but could never afford one. I would've liked to see what it was like to use one of those.

IDE has a rather strange notation to it, because it intents to do anything which it never can.

To really code I use a combination of various editors (based on mood and complexity of the task at hand) and to analyze source code there is nothing like Source Navigator. It builds various cross-referencing, symbol and function tables and has a very basic, but still functional and coloring editor window, too.
It can even launch your favourite editor for the current file right with 1 right mouse click.
It's not overly fancy, but everybody tells me: it really gets the jobs done without trying to get into your way (OK, the GUI is rather old-school and has certain quirks).

Cheers.

Eclipse has IMHO the best configuration for selecting the files to tag with the "Derived" folder property. I am willing to put up with fact that it is slower and buggier than most of the competing solutions primarily because of how much easier it is to manage tagging for large projects. The indexer itself is slow for C/C++ files and fairly buggy (both the quick and full versions tend to hang on large projects a lot).

http://www.mojavelinux.com/blog/archives/2006/03/eclipse_resource_filtering_using_derived/

For extremely large projects, I still tend to use Visual SlickEdit (fairly expensive). It is extremely quick when updating tags for extremely large projects. I would prefer to use a cross platform open source editor, but none of the ones I have evaluated can match it in speed yet. Eclipse looks promising and might be able to close that gap in the future.

In terms of feature set, I am not aware of anything that can separate reader tags from writer tags like Source Navigator is capable of. The project was abandoned a few years ago, but some new maintainers have recently made a new release.

http://sourcenav.berlios.de/

If you do any work on headless servers or embedded systems, you will likely have to pick a console editor like vi or Emacs along with cscope in addition to whatever GUI tools you choose.

Time to dig a little deeper; you'll find the NX protocol. Open, free, at least as fast as RDP and allows for session disconnect and reconnect.

FreeNX:
http://freenx.berlios.de/

and NX's commercial face:
www.nomachine.com

Do I have to go back to XMMS just because everyone's so fucking Web 2.0 now?

Check out Sonata (a UI for MPD). They work great.

In fact, the whole KDE4 thing looks like they want to deliberately lose every user who wants a simple, clean, responsive, effective UI. They overhyped the API changes so much, they forgot about the users. Why do you force me to use Fluxbox?

Nothing wrong with Fluxbox, but XFCE is a great "in-between" for KDE/GNOME and Fluxbox. More of an actual platform than just a window manager.

I've already given up on Azureus, they did the same thing with Vuze.

There is a setting somewhere in the config to turn that off. I can't remember what I did but my 'Vuze' looks and acts just like Azureus did.

- paragraph hyphenation is brain-dead one-line at a time
  - one must invoke commands to generate the ToC and Index and remember to re-invoke them if pagination changes
  - documents are non-portable / formatting is dependent on currently installed printer
  - graphics can be embedded and can be nightmarish to get out in a press-ready form
  - citations require third-party extensions which can interfere w/ importing / processing documents (hit Command shift F9 to convert all selected form fields to text)
  - There is no easy way to assign paragraph styles --- one has to build a custom toolbar to have them all available w/ a click, the arrangement of said toolbar is dependent on the _length_ of the stylenames --- why the outline view can't have some sort of pop-up menu or ability to assign more than Heading 1--n and Normal is beyond me
  - local formatting is insidious --- create an InDesign document, assign styles to everything, formatting everything w/ styles, take it into Word, then bring it back into InDesign and one will still have to clear over-rides to keep the text from being formatted as Times New Roman

and all of that doesn't consider stupid / ignorant users and the visually formatted, but not structured documents which they always create. Best indictment of that here:

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient by Allin Cottrell
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

If typography were easy, Word wouldn't be the foetid mess which it is.

One will also never use Word as the basis for back-end typesetting systems --- I've done them for customized children's stories and telephone directory line ads --- a co-worker (Jeff McArthur) at my previous workplace developed one which would do customized versions of the CIA World Factbook as a demo --- the original version did the typesetting for a 2,200 page register and the technology was customized and sold to several customers.

Also, to be fair and accurate, Quark XPress and several other DTP programs handle OpenType features in addition to InDesign and XeTeX/XeLaTeX http://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex and the nascent luatex, http://www.luatex.org/ (as well as ant http://ant.berlios.de/).

William
(who wrote a several thousand line WordBASIC macro to handle the formatting for a review journal for a major sci-med publisher so that the text could be pulled into Quark XPress 6, then 7, then finally InDesign CS3 --- I also wrote a xelatex package for typesetting the journal, but that was nixed by my boss 'cause if the journal had been done in TeX it would've been outsourced to India)

Well, er... not quite. Anybody can connect to the same torrent, and they can connect to peers as well. Then all they have to do is nslookup the IP numbers, identify the ISP, and then with the ISP's cooperation they can get my personal details.

Well if I know (or can find out) those companies who may be interested in connecting to me for this reason. Then I can simply stop tme connecting to me and vice-versa

In fact such lists and maintainers of list already exist, very much similar to ad blocker lists.

peerguardian2 haven't tried in years

for real nerds linux:

moblock (google for debs)

Question: how do you burn a digital book?

Well, Jörg Schilling is pretty unhappy with people whom use Debian's wodim / cdrkit fork of his packages after his license change...

http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html#violations

As a daily mac user, I can say that the author does point out some of the well-known gripes about leopard: 1) the stacks feature of the dock is just weird, and somewhat impractical to use with a folder with a larger number of items (although it has gotten better with one of the updates). 2) Spaces is not well implemented. A standard pager would have been a better choice, so you can see what windows are where. 3) Perhaps the biggest issue, a lot of people suspect (and this is supported by benchmarks) that Leopard is streamlined for intel macs, anybody with a G4 or G5 PPC can run it, but it doesn't run well. This is the first point release of OS X that hasn't been faster than its predecessors and that should say something. I nearly installed it myself on my dual G5, but after looking at the benchmarks, decided that 10.4 ran just fine, and I have a real pager already.

As for Ubuntu, the real thing keeping me back from using it is the gnome interface. There are basically two problems I have with it, the first is right what you point out, to be blunt, I find gnome and to a lesser extent, gtk, to be ugly. I really don't like it. It works, but QT is much nicer looking. That said, my other major problem with gnome is the minimalist design paradigm. Whenever I use gnome apps, I often find myself getting irritated at the lack of options. It wouldn't kill them to have a few more clicky things on their preferences windows. For the record: I use e17 as my desktop manager and run a mix of gtk, qt and kde 3.5 apps (won't use kde 4 because they nuked the konqueror, which is my favorite file manager of all time).

I use rtorrent with Moblock to filter connections to known copyright enforcer's IP addresses.

I know this doesn't address your point, but here's a couple ideas to solve those problems.

If you're using Gnome, try Gnome Art Next-Gen. It's not very polished, but it has a simple GUI that lets you customize your UI easily.

And about stuff working out-of-the-box? I know "try another distro" is a worn-out answer, but seriously... instead of installing Ubuntu, next time try Linux Mint. It's an Ubuntu-derivative that has lots of extra stuff already set up (Flash, Java, codecs, DVDs, mp3s...). It goes a long way toward making the "bare basics" work immediately, so there's less stuff you have to tinker with to get it functional. Although I still like to install VLC.

I've had pretty good luck with lxdvdrip, a command-line based dvd ripper/shrinker.

There's also a spinoff project of torrentflux, called torrent-b4rt. It adds support for other torrent clients, grabbing torrents from rss feeds, nzb support for usenet, etc.

I do this myself. One thing I like though is to pull in other e-mail accounts and have everything just appear in my inbox without having to have Thunderbird open all the time to automatically check. So in addition, my setup uses fetchmail.

This or that application doesn't work on Linux or there isn't a comparable one (my favorite to mention is Sibelius's music notation software, aptly named Sibelius [or Coda Music's Finale, but I hate Finale]), it's not as easy to use, hardware, etc.

Some music notation software on linux (not complete list, just a quick search):

• Lilypond ( http://www.lilypond.org/ )
• Denemo ( http://denemo.sourceforge.net/index.html )
• Rosegarden ( http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ )
• NoteEdit ( http://noteedit.berlios.de/ )
• Brahms ( http://brahms.sourceforge.net/ )

In Germany we have a government payed open source site since 2000. They provide good service for free, to anybody and without commercial annoyances. I especially like the choice between CVS/SVN/Mercurial/GIT.

SLiM - http://slim.berlios.de/

No Machine so far has been a great alternative for VNC and the like to work with remote Linux desktops and even virtually. I've tried both their free NX server edition and the FreeNX server. FreeNX still needs some love/work in making it easier to get up and going, especially on Debian. The free NX server edition works better than FreeNX because I've been experiencing refresh/display corruption over time using FreeNX and not with the retail/free NX server using the same NX client (of which is always free, currently anyway) on Windows and Linux desktops.

I especially liked how extremely well NX works with slow connections, not necessarily slow on the client side, but with extremely pitiful 128kbps upload speeds from the server such as my home DSL connection when I'm away. I use to prefer VNC until I found out about NX of which is just more enhancements to the X11 protocol over SSH as far as I can tell (I'm definitely no expert as to what all goes in behind the scene). It Just Works(TM). :)

Don't you know how to use Fetchmail then?

I would simply mod you down, but someone might get the impression that you have made a valid point.

According to http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/

A Linux driver for the Broadcom bcm43xx wireless chips.
Broadcom never released details about these chips. So this driver is based upon reverse engineered specifications.

The same applies to ATI, which only recently began releasing full specs and developing Linux support for newer chipsets.

HP has definitely not "always supported open source". And they have in the past announced similar small-business-focused marketing initiatives for Linux that turned out to be half-hearted.

pin density is one factor that certainly weighed on that decision.

We are in 2008. Why would you even need to have a separate pin for everything ?!?

We have very nice, completely standardized connection such as :
- USB (specially since the On-The-Go and Pict-Bridge standards where the same physical connector can switch between master and slave depending on needs).
- FireWire (which has the advantage of allowing several masters on the same bus and device sharing both master and slave role - just like SCSI. And has overall much better latency and bandwidth once you factor all possible overhead)

They are almost ubiquitous. Today it's hard to find a device which is NOT USB-enabled. (although not all FireWire connectors you may encounter are 6pins with power. 4pins data-only are popular on some portable device).

And they can easily do pretty much everything you cited and much-much more.

Audio/Video (+controls for it) over FireWire is just a piece of cake, the standard was created with that purpose in mind.

how would you create video out from a USB port?

- If the device is a master and is PUSHing video OUT, video-over USB was among the first standardized stuff, with USB-to-VGA dongle being very popular. It's already a very popular method to get 2ndary output from device which lack a VGA or DVI out. Or get a 3rd output.
- If the device is a slave and you are PULLing video FROM device, then a USB video device is perfect for it, just like thousands of Webcams, video receiver, etc. There's even an emerging standard called UVC - USB Video Class (Before UVC, every webcam USB chip used a different protocol requiring several different procols).

Given the sensitiveness of analog to electronic noise, digital video out makes A LOT of sense. And given that hosting the electronics for a DVI/HDMI/miniDisplay port would unnecessarily increase the costs of the device, the USB-to-VGA or UVC is the best compromise.

the radio

You must be joking. Just look at the crazy amount of USB FM+TV+DVB+DAB receiver dongles.
There's a custom version of the OpenMoko sold with such an USB receiver contained in a spacer between the battery and the original cover.

If you want a radio *emitter*, see next question about audio.

headphone adapter?

Still keeping with the everything over USB :
- USB audio is an absolutely standard protocol.
In fact dozens of headphone made for laptop/skype don't plug into the audio in/out ports, but instead plug into an USB port.
As USB Audio does both input and output, it doesn't matter which is master which is slave, you can establish an audio link over USB.

Now, plain analog audio has had a standard for many years : the simple 3mm Jack. For a quick and easy analog access you should leave an audio jack on the machine.

For even more practical solution, you could go for a 3 or 4 ring jack instead of a classical stereo one, and carry video, s-video and/or mic.
Put a LED on the bottom of the connector and it can also work as a nice digital out (Sony's MiniDisc already used hybrid optical+analog contacts for quite some time).
Put them in line with the usb at very specific distance one from each other and you have a perfect connector with both analog and digital.

The only reason not to do this is because by letting normal audio connection (jack), the constructor lose the incentive for users to buy the more expensive USB-based peripherals.

artist/song/albumart along with audio out for the dock devices?

That is just plain stupid.
All this meta-data you cite is never going to be transmitted by lots of dedicated pins.
Normally such kind of data is just emitted over a serial connection. (Even before the age of USB, Sony MiniDisc already used a serial link to transmit this. Audio goes through analog+optical jack, meta-data

"but if I wanted fancy multiple desktops I'd have to pay to update to 10.5, and that doesn't sound very free to me." Free multiple-desktop apps have been available for OS X for years. You are spreading BS. http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/

Warning! Offtopic post!

Rhythmbox isn't but I can't stand those silly sideways tabs in Amarok.

Perhaps take a look into MPD. It has various clients that can connect to it and control it.

I personally use Sonata. It's simple and fits my needs.

Pfft, anything less than torrentFlux is for noobs.

MikeOS should do the trick! mikeos.berlios.de

He might have a problem getting it to work,driver wise. He also said he wanted USB support,which is a royal PITA. Might I suggest you look into either Puppy Linux,DSL Linux or Feather Linux. I have put all three on many different kinds of hardware and they are all quite fast. You did not give the specs of your hardware so I will just give you my general observations. For older hardware Feather will give you the most speed,followed by DSL and Puppy,but there is only a few seconds difference.

That said I much prefer Puppy,as there are several builds and you can simply choose which version suits you. On a laptop MacPuppy is quite nice,and I have my most used programs at my fingertips thanks to the dock. But any one of these will give you the requirements you specified in your FA: Quick boot,USB support,and easy text editing. If you have USB 2.0 and a fast flash stick you might even prefer to leave the OS on the stick,which will allow you to carry your Operating System envirnment with you in your pocket. I hope this helps,and have a good weekend!

I've not used it cross-platform (the creator does) but you might want to take a look at Stani's Python Editor. Releases aren't that frequent, but the repository is updated more often and generally seems stable.

There's an out of date project on Sourceforge; development moved to SPE Project Page here.

Frankly, given Google's record, I refuse to host any of my projects on Google Code, or to participate in the development of any projects hosted there. I use Sourceforge (has svn and ssh access) and Berlios.

That is true and with that Pentium you could emulate an Apple II or any number of other old computers.

http://applewin.berlios.de/
http://kegs.sourceforge.net/

http://www.zophar.net/windos.html
http://www.zophar.net/linux.html

:-) Yay for PvPGN.

It's not quite the same for a few reasons, though
-PvPGN deals with the server side of Blizzard's game. With WoW this would be potentially much more destructive to their revenue stream
-PvPGN emulates servers that really only cost Blizzard money, except for people that buy Diablo I and Diablo II to play it online and wouldn't have bought it if they hadn't known about some PvPGN server (probably very few people)
-bnetd was already Free and Open

As a side note, I have a 15-hour LAN party coming up tomorrow, and you can bet that PvPGN is what I'm using for the Starcraft and Warcraft III tournaments.

Regarding the awkward font mechanism, have a look at Xe(La)TeX: http://scripts.sil.org/xetex (or the upcoming luaTeX, http://www.luatex.org/).

For an experimental from-scratch replacement, look at Ant, http://ant.berlios.de/

Concerning bibliographies, the biblatex package is moving things forward (together with the many bibtex-aware bibliography managers). Graphics have gotten a big helper since the inception of the pgf/TikZ packages (for info about packages, see http://www.ctan.org/)

A lot of good editors are around to lighten the (not-so-heavy) code burden: emacs, kile, winedt, texshop, ...

If you want things to be simpler, but still get acceptably typeset (math/science) stuff, you're currently out of luck.

How did you get an Atheros in your Santa Rosa? Lucky bastard. Most of them have the Broadcom 4328 which is wireless-n and apparently is far away from being reverse engineered. https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/2008-May/007517.html The broadcom linux wireless driver project doesn't have enough people willing and able to reverse engineer that card and the wireless n layer it seems.

Actually it is in reverse for webcams: initially USB webcams required proprietary vendor drivers but now more and more webcams support UVC - USB video class.

Actually I've chosen XFS over RaiserFS way before this case. It was his "craziness" and incisiveness on spamming users with copyright info every bloody time they use any tool drove me away from the entire FS. And on top of that, calling the FS after yourself, raised some flags for me regarding the ego and "need for attention" and overall metal health of the original author.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/04/msg01295.html

Calling removal of excessive copyright statements plagiarism is a little crazy to me.

There is a similar "aura" around the author of cdrecrord

http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/cdrecord.html

Of course, I'm not implying that there is any comparison between the individuals, they just both seem "overbearing".

"Warning: do not use Debian binaries/sources as they include many Debian specific bugs and still do not run correctly on Linux-2.6" in bold red letters on the front page is a little confrontational.

But then I guess there are "crazies" in the proprietary world as well :)

That's nothing. The standard Linux GPS daemon (gpsd) still doesn't let a user use an authentication mechanism or even specify an IP other than 0.0.0.0 to listen on. As a result, anyone scanning for port 2947 (at least this is changeable) can dump out the location of an IP-accessible Linux box that has a GPS device attached. At least only the phone companies and whoever they sell or give your location data to know about your cell phone location -- a Linux box is rather more exposed.

As everyone else says, check out FreeNX

It's simply fantastic. Works great over low bandwidth connections, easy to setup, supports suspending sessions.

It's awesome. Check it out.

For persistent GUI sessions, I generally use nx/nxserver/freenx:
http://freenx.berlios.de/

For console sessions, nothing beats "screen". I use the command "screen -m -R" to create and/or reconnect to an existing session.

I used to like VNC, but I got tired of how difficult it was to set up. On Windows boxes, I stick to Remote Desktop Connection.

I think the Deep Belief Networks of Hinton et al are way ahead of Numenta.. in that they are real science with measurable results that has been reproduced by multiple implementations. The 2006 paper that started it all and Hinton's presentation on google video:

http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~ywteh/research/ebm/nc2006.pdf
http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=228784531481853811

A formal analysis:

http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2007/inf_deep_net_utml.pdf

Application to natural language processing:

http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/cs81/s08/DahlLaTouche.pdf
http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/425.pdf

Reproducing Hinton and extension to and evaluation in other domains:

http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/331.pdf

Use in Computer animation of facial expressions:

http://aclab.ca/users/josh/downloads/pubs/23_Susskind_Hinton_Movellan_Anderson.pdf

Most impressive:

http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2007/aistats_multilayered.pdf

A C++ implementation (although it has much Python love):

http://plearn.berlios.de/

So yeah, there's some pretty good demonstrations of how powerful DBNs are.. Numenta is lagging behind.

Remote desktop is kind of a joke in comparison.

Remote desktop is just better. Vastly more usable on low-bandwidth (or high latency) links and when your session drops out for some reason you can reconnect and not have lost everything you were working on.

It occurs to me that this debate has lots of comparisons with the current minor furor over the rise of multiple CPUs. Many in the programming industry are despairing because we are being forced to design software that runs on multiple CPUs at once, rather than just getting more CPU speed. And again, it's due to externally imposed constraints. In the automobile industry, the catalytic converter was that constraint, in the lead electronics debate, the RoHS is that external constraint.

In the programming world, I expect things to be resolved the same way: by superior engineering, taking advantage of the mountains of research and practical application of parallel processing designs that have been going on for decades. My favorite language Python is particularly sensitive to this debate due to something called the GIL, but solutions abound, including the newly accepted pyprocessing module or any number of things you can do with Twisted, both of which stand as examples of better, practical engineering taking advantage of known solutions to the problem.

Engineering fixes most problems that changing standards and regulations cause, eventually.

FreeNX - http://freenx.berlios.de/ :)

Yes and no. Most of the core technology is GPL, but the front-end stuff, and therefore the actual client and server packages, are freeware or commercial. FreeNX is a fully-GPL fork.

X/ssh is a bit slow for poor network links. Check out NX server, that'll give you a full desktop or app over GPRS. It's also GPL, and you can have NoMachine or FreeNX (the free and hard to use version :) )

• Break the underlying cryptography (AES - unlikely, SHA-1 - maybe).
• Micro-probe to your CPU (have fun with 45 um cores!)
• Don't buy anything which has this protection.

Linux Games..

http://savage2.s2games.com/main.php
http://www.eve-online.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://www.flightgear.org/
http://www.freeciv.org/
http://www.sauerbraten.org/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://wz2100.net/
http://www.cubeengine.com/
http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wormux.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.ufoai.net/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://tremulous.net/
http://www.eternal-lands.com/
http://www.enemyterritory.com/

Perhaps you could stop with the "No games for Linux" BS already as you obviously have your head up your ass.

Apple has also done some serious innovating in OS X: expose, ubiquitous zeroconf, system services, launchd, etc. What I find interesting is that major Linux developers don't copy those features from OS X. [emph mine]

Let's have a look at your examples.

Zeroconf - Avahi
Expose - Kompose
System services - errr, that's been replaced by Launchd on your list.
Launchd - ReplacementInit - Considered Apple's LaunchD and Sun's SMF amongst others, but none were quite the right fit.

I have several theories as to why this is.

Out of the three feature examples you've given, two are implemented in linux, your premise is incorrect, your theories are utter bollocks.

My big complaint about spaces is that the pager doesn't show what's in the desktop. I greatly prefer Desktop Manger as it gives you a real pager.