Slashdot Mirror

You seem to have entirely missed the point that your own presented alternative to for-cost tax software (spreadsheet or paper and calculator) makes even less sense and is more error prone than even fairly raw open source tax software.

Why don't I write such software myself?
1) I don't have that itch.
2) Even if I did, it would be foolish to start from scratch.

What do you call this?

This would have been better answered with a search on Freshmeat (see here) but the first hit seems like something mildly useful if you want to do some work that isn't necessarily point and click.

OpenTaxSolver with a screenshot here.

Me? I'd pay the $175 to a real live person. They usually save you at least two times what they are worth over a commercial software package. YMMV.

Not Reiser4, but there are some tools to access Reiser3 from Windows: RFSTool, and YAReG, a graphical frontend for RFSTool.

I was surprised to find it myself last night, but there are already projects like the Open Tax Solver which are already useful and are heading in that direction.

Also check out a search for "tax" on freshmeat for other projects. (I usually reverse-sort by vitality to see the most active projects).

Mike

I was surprised to find it myself last night, but there are already projects like the Open Tax Solver which are already useful and are heading in that direction.

Also check out a search for "tax" on freshmeat for other projects. (I usually reverse-sort by vitality to see the most active projects).

Mike

Remember, because it costs almost nothing to make

Oops. Typo? Freudian slip?

Software has a very high cost to make. It requires highly skilled laborers, and lots of time to make. Making high-quality software is difficult, and by the nature of things it's difficult for a programmer to make software that's easy to use.

Notice I never argued against open licenses. Also, I never argued that software costs little to reproduce. It costs about $0.50 to make a CD-R, if you don't mind a vanilla, paper case.

I argued (and still argue) that software piracy reduces the actual saleability of soft wares. It essentially makes a vendor compete against himself, and therefore should legitimitely be called "theft", because doing so takes value away from the goods that highly qualified personnel spent lots of time to create.

If you want to gouge people, then you can hardly blame them for using it and not paying you.

Don't like the price? Don't buy it. Think it's wrong? Write your own open-licensed product and give it away. There's certainly plenty of people who are.

The ONLY time your arguments might have weight is in the case of a monopoly, and in these United States, we have protections for that, too.

Why do you feel the need to justify theft? Your arguments cast a pall from those of us who are dedicated to using and supporting truly open, free licenses on software!

• Alexei Vladishev
• Francesco
• Gerbier Eric
• Jerome Couderc

No need to set up any fake-pirated-movie honeypots; the MPAA is already sending out enough frivolous legal threats to random websites for no apparent reason as it is.

For example: Scene.org got a copyright infringement notice a while ago claiming that a 62kb file supposedly contained an entire season of a television series. (What's funniest about this is when they sent the notice, the file wasn't even downloadable because it was still in /incoming!)
Linux Australia was the recipient of a similar notice about a couple of movies that they never had, Grind and Twisted. The files in question were Valgrind and Twisted Matrix.

What educational software packages are available for Linux?

I'm not sure what you're looking for exactly, but off the top of my head (and a little freshmeat help):

Primary school level: Gcompris is great, has a large bundle of games targetting everything from spelling to geography to math, and is easily extensible.

Astronomy: Both Celestia and Stellarium provide great tools for teaching kids of all levels about our universe.

Mathematics: You can use basic spreadsheets if you like, but there's also Octave for vector and matrix mathematics and Maxima (and several others that I can't recall right now) for symbolic algebra.

Chemistry: There's stuff like Ghemical and Gperiodic which aren't half bad for exploring various chemistry concepts. Then there's stuff like GenChemLab which is pretty neat.

Physics: There's physics simulation software like Physics3D , and there are others around if you care to look.

Computing: Well, you've got all the programming tools you want, but also things like DrPython to make it easier/fun for students (even at lower school levels).

General knowledge: Wikipedia is accessible from anywhere.

Okay, there's a science bias there, but it's not a bad start for what I can think of, or find in 2 minutes of freshmeat.

Jedidiah.

As far as programs, Debian has several, but don't forget to check out Sourceforge and Freshmeat for software.

If you really want to strip down to the barest of bones, try tinywm. Maybe not generally useful, but great for kiosks, under-powered systems, etc. In only 44 LoCs!

I'm writing this as a mere user, not as a developer, but from my point of view assembly really is impressive. Just looking over the list of apps on freshmeat shows that assembly really seems to give developers a framework that let's them develop great application in a relatively short time and in the end it's users like me who profit from that. ;-D

Great works, assembly devs.

And to all those trolls that will come out of the woodwork with every assembly story, telling us that assembly is the end of open source:
Please, for once in your miserable lifes try to provide arguments for your point that go beyond low level is evil (though I would readily agree with that) and therefor assembly is the suX0r.

You forgot SOX, which also got a mention. :) I never knew a sound processor could be used for security.

Take a pinch of Standard Linux
Wrap it up in Xen
Add a touch of SELinux
And a little bitty bit of Globus
Oh like a Sandboxed Platform
Oh Lordy, Lordy, mixed with Free and Open Source Code
You know you lump it all together
And you got a recipe for a Multi Vendor Development scene
It is coming though, you know, you know.

What we have is a great big melting pot
Big enough enough enough to take every vendor and all IT's got
And keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out Application Service and Content Providers by the score.

With apologies to Blue Mink .

Could somebody please explain what the problem with DHCP is? There certainly seem to be plenty of documents to enable open implementations to me. Or are they talking about some proprietary Microsoft extension to DHCP that is rightly being ignored by everyone else?

Could somebody please explain what the problem with DHCP is? There certainly seem to be plenty of documents to enable open implementations to me. Or are they talking about some proprietary Microsoft extension to DHCP that is rightly being ignored by everyone else?

Actually, most *NIX rootkits have been intercepting system calls to the kernel and replacing common command tools that might be used to detect and remove them for ages. I haven't heard of one that can avoid detection by the likes of Chkrootkit and Rootkit Hunter yet, other than by being brand new of course. Naturally, that doesn't automatically mean that it's impossible to write one though.

Actually, most *NIX rootkits have been intercepting system calls to the kernel and replacing common command tools that might be used to detect and remove them for ages. I haven't heard of one that can avoid detection by the likes of Chkrootkit and Rootkit Hunter yet, other than by being brand new of course. Naturally, that doesn't automatically mean that it's impossible to write one though.

The new version of the BSD license states the opposite

I think more people generally see the GPL as freer, or perhaps fairer, in that it seems to closely follow the Golden Rule (so close to common sense that it seems too fancy to call it a philosophy).

= 9J =

What's different is the increasingly strenuous tone calling for people to reign in the number of licenses. In many ways, this basically demonstrates that OSS/FS has matured. Lots of people have created new licenses, essentially experimenting with different approaches. The marketplace of ideas has selected a few "winning" ideas, and it's getting increasingly hard for even a good new license idea to overcome the many problems of incompatibility with what already exists. Commercial development and use of OSS/FS is now widespread; a consolidation of common licensing approaches appears inevitable as the whole approach becomes common.

There's at least one simple test: make sure your license is GPL-compatible. You can do this by using the GPL, using a different license that is known to be GPL-compatible (in particular the LGPL, MIT/X, or BSD-new (modified BSD) licenses), or by dual-licensing the program (and ensuring that one of the licenses is the GPL). See my essay for info on why GPL compatibility is so important.

In many ways, this license winnowing is happening anyway. My paper More than a Gigabuck found that only a few licenses were used by nearly all the code; at the time it was (in order) GPL, MIT, LGPL, MPL, and BSD (counting by lines of code). You can look at Freshmeat's statistics, which counts the licenses per project. Today, 2005-02-16, the OSS/FS licenses in order of popularity were (from most popular) the GNU General Public License (GPL) (67.99%) GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) (5.89%), BSD License (original) (3.54%), BSD License (revised) (1.92%), Artistic License (1.80%), MIT/X Consortium License (1.26%), Apache License (0.72%), Mozilla Public License (MPL) (0.57%), Perl License (0.39%), and Apache License 2.0 (0.26%). I see a short list here, and notice that even in this list of the most popular licenses, the dropoff between the most-popular licenses and the next most popular licenses are really steep. Every project whose license is incompatible with all of these has a serious liability, and in fact, being only compatible with the lower-popularity licenses is a real problem. Few think Sun's CDDL code is going to go anywhere, solely because it's an odd license incompatible with the millions of lines of code already out there.

I wish he'd used proper terminology - I think he meant "proprietary" not "commercial". Last I checked, Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Sun, and many other distributors of OSS/FS programs (including those using the GPL) were commercial companies.

You didn't specify what kind of learning disability your brother had. The most common kind of disability that affects reading is Dyslexia. It could also cause problems with math since if you don't perceive the digits and symbols in the same order they appear on the page, you are going to have trouble with math. Dyslexia is itself a rather vague diagnosis.

I can't really recommend specific software but I can share some observations from personal experience. Attitudes towards disability can make a huge difference. Expectations of failure can be self fulfilling prophacies.

A friend of mine was diagnosed as Dyslexic when he was young. His parents were told by doctors that he would never learn to read. Fortunately, his parents did not listen. They spent time tutoring him and enrolled him in a special school. My friend not only reads better than the vast majority of the population, he is extremely well read and has a Ph. D. in astrophysics.

I myself was diagnosed in high school as having dyslexia though that came as quite a surprise since I was reading at a 12th grade level in the 6th grade. When I was a kid, my mother read to me a lot.

Another friend has dyslexia. His parents took the attitute of steering him away from activities that he would be likely to fail at. As a result, he is functionally illiterate but slowly making progress on his own. It may have helped that I was able to counter some of the defeatist non-sense.

Your brother might benefit from using the English subtitles availible on most DVD players. As long as he tries to read them rather than just relying on the audio, the effect could be similar to being read to. He could choose content that was interesting to him. An interesting technological twist would be to modify an open source software DVD player such as Ogle to deliberately desynchronize the audio so the words would be spoken only after he had a chance to try and read them himself. Neurologically, being forced to make the attempt and then being corrected or reinforced immediately thereafter is important to the learning process. Of course, he may not be far enough along that he can follow the subtitles. He might be able to try to get the first word out of each subtitle, then work up to the first two words. It is important to be aware that sometimes the subtitles and the dialog do not match (subtitles having been copied from the script not transcribed from the actual performance) but they match often enough that if you take this into consideration it could be useful. Another variation would be to make the DVD player software automatically pause after each new subtitle is displayed.

Similarly, text to speech can be integrated with applications such as instant messaging and slight modification would create a delay between presenting the written words and speaking them. Of course, he would need to be litterate enough to be able to write something back in the case of instant messaging unless he is just lurking in some chat rooms. In the latter case, logs could be used so he doesn't have to keep up with the frantic pace in many chat rooms.

Dyslexic.com has some information on technological aids for dyslexia. Hierarchical Program Tree is a package listed at freshmeat that is intended for dyslexics. There is probably some more stuff out there.

I think there is a lot of potential for educational software that is designed to take particular learning disabilities into consideration that may not have been realized yet. As an example, a dyslexic may be able to make out the individual letters in a word but have difficulty perceiving them in the order they appear. So, "tea" and "ate" might be hard to distinguish. A program could sort through the dictionary finding words that are different morphologies of the same letters and speak a word and present similar words as a multiple choice test. Educational softw

The Condor project looks promising. I've been looking for something similar as an alternative to LSF.

Fortunately, if you don't want to download the latest bleeding-edge Debian just to try out X.org, you can always grab a tarball of Duke Nukem Forever off of Freshmeat. After that's installed, X.org goes in pretty easily.

;)

This is why I use ratpoison+screen, that and because keyboard input is much faster and more efficient than the rodent.

This is also why I stopped using multiple monitors, just too distracting and not a huge benefit.

BioForge? Next thing you know they'll have open source GM animals and a web site called Freshmeat.

I'm pretty sure cdrecord (at least) is already on windows...

A glance at the freshmeat page would agree, but it appears the homepage is down

Bill.

Once Longhorn comes out, Microsoft will again be so far ahead, it won't be easy, or even possible, for enthusiasts to catch up.

Hi Mr. Troll...have some food:


1. The entire OS will be accessible through a set of managed APIs. This makes coding 10 times easier and faster, and raises productivity to unprecedented levels. This also makes buffer overflows and some other security issues a thing of the past.

Good idea...let's call them shared libraries. They can handle all the functions that a modern program will need. We'll put them in a central location, like a "lib" folder, and then release their header files in a "devel" (short for developer) package. This means that any program writer will be able to see exactly what functions he needs to use. We'll also put all our trust in the security of one developer, and forget security as our responsibility.

2. New, resolution independent, vector based, GPU-enabled UI engine.... What's KDE/Gnome users gonna do? That's right, try to discern tiny non-scalable icons on these displays.

That's right...those damn communists will have to develop SVG Icons to compete.

3. Completely new UI, including some significant paradigm changes.

Because we all know that a new UI is far more important than stability, performance, security, ease of use, scalability, compatibility, ease of development, and speed of patch releases...right? Then again, maybe changing to a 3d environment will make it easier for new users, after all, computers haven't been using 2d interfaces for the last 20-some years, right?

Your webapps will actually run sandboxed .NET code on your machine.

Just like, oh, I don't know...Java? Wait... Kind of like applets, but the entire webapp will be built out of them.... oh...I get it, just like a whole Java application. Got it. Silly me, I thought Java was only for applets...
Just think about the possibilities there.Wait! I've heard this before... the possibility is ActiveX...seamless integration of pr0n toolbars^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H client and server, huh?

web service protocol that's supported by the majority of computers in the world (when most people upgrade).
Standard...oh yeah, like TCP/IP, SSL, SSH, Telnet, UDP, and all those other standards...(too many to list)

The most important thing is, all of this will be available to Windows users out of the box, without any tweaking/recompiling/downloading dependencies
Yeah...clicking the icon for Synaptic was getting to be a pain in the ass. I also got pretty tired of having several gigs worth of...well, all the programs I need...included on the installation disks.
Developers will be able to rely on this stuff when building next-gen apps and be reasonably sure that if a user runs Longhorn, the app will run there.
Yeah, let's see how many DLL's we can cram into the system32 folder, eh? Until DLL's are gone (ahem...notafuckingchanceinhell...ahem), there will still be DLL hell.


It's time to stop copying Windows XP, folks.
Are you out of your fucking mind? MS copied Fisher-Price, not vice versa...
It's time to start copying Longhorn.
You know, you're right...let's copy a product that has to have a final specifications sheet, or even a concrete release date. Even better, let's copy our own innovations.

Now that the troll's full, I may as well poke it a bit:

That was by far one of the most uneducated, poorly cocnceived fanboy responses that I have ever read. Even people like Dvorak and Thurrot take more time to look at the status quo before proclaiming innovation.

Cheers,

-maztuh

It's been out for five years on freshmeat, and supports CORBA, RMI, XML-RPC, nativ socket, or persistent HTTP.

See the link at http://freshmeat.net/projects/xmlblaster/.

How about:

FFDSHOW - a top-notch xvid decoder, but more importantly also real-time high-quality video "manipulator" including scaling, transformations, noise removal, subtitling, color correction, macro-deblocking, etc - the list is huge. Play your DVDs through FFDSHOW with the right settings and the good ones start to look almost like HDTV. I don't know of any one proprietary product, or even group of products, that comes close to this level of functionality.

dScaler a very high-quality video de-interlacer for both live and batch processing

DRC - digital room correction and BurteFIR an audio convolver - together they are able to turn your $100 cheap-ass stereo system into something comparable to a $5K-$10K setup. (Ok, there is expensive hardware out there to do something similar, but no software, proprietary or otherwise)

I hope nobody thinks they're the first to notice that GNUStep has a "dated" look.. The users know, hence: itomatOS-icons and these GNUStep Icons They are also contracting out an icon set by a professional artist - Jasper Hauser

I hope nobody thinks they're the first to notice that GNUStep has a "dated" look.. The users know, hence: itomatOS-icons and these GNUStep Icons They are also contracting out an icon set by a professional artist - Jasper Hauser

You don't have to use the full KDE environment to use SuperKaramba.

WindowMaker works great with SuperKaramba. You can even turn off the dock and/or clip altogether and use Kicker and Konqueror instead.

[shameless_plug] There are a few attractive themes for WindowMaker that either don't date back to 1999, or look like it. Like mine![/shameless_plug]

Tho they have slowed, the themes over at wm.themes.org are fine. What's the use in some title bar that looks like an alien (besides the k00ln3$$ factor - which lasts about 5 mins)? I don't think a desktop needs all that extra crap and font sizes and the like can all be adjusted if things look like they take up too much space.

I dunno, KDE makes me wanna barf, so I guess I'll choose the one w/out the sheen.

As for OS X compatibility, name one OS X program that has been ported to GNUStep.

There's many more than one.

As for OS X compatibility, name one OS X program that has been ported to GNUStep.

There's many more than one.

As for OS X compatibility, name one OS X program that has been ported to GNUStep.

There's many more than one.

As for OS X compatibility, name one OS X program that has been ported to GNUStep.

There's many more than one.

So in a nutshell, being a regular guy using my computer, if there was more software available for linux, and it was clear how to acquire it, I would be switching. Most people, like myself just want to put a disc in a drive,install and not worry about it any more.

You want SuSE. It includes not only Linux and the basic utilities, but almost every Linux program (several thousands) known to man. The rest (several tens of thousands) you can get from Freshmeat.

The easiest way to get SuSE is to walk into Best Buy, Fry's, etc., and pick it up. You can also download it, but the download site is quite slow, so it'll take you DAYS...

Sure I could use cron to play a wav...but their is no snooze feature.
Try xmms-alarm plugin http://freshmeat.net/projects/xmmsalarm/

Well, there's the UT2003 livecd...

SIP

I can't make any specific PPC / big endian recommendations, as I don't have a big endian machine. However, I've played with Linphone and it worked alright. Another one I've come across recently is minisip, which looks pretty good, although I haven't tried it.

For some others to look at, try this Freshmeat search - sip

You could go with any number of the "jukebox" devices... or maybe just a software solution like Room Juice or one of the many other freshmeat Music Jukebox projects.

This looks a lot like 3d desktop, but ontop of the desktop instead of the black background.

GLP: 19786 projects
LGPL: 2446 projects
BSD (old): 1456 projects
BSD (new): 787 projects

If you want to find it yourself: go to freshmeat.net, click browse, click license, click osi-approved:
And there you are!

Well there is (was?) the SimplyGNUStep distribution, sadly the development of which seems to have stalled.

1: I'm not sure what you concider a business tool but all the major business tools I can think of run on linux. Many of them started on unix long before windows was around. examples: autocad, wordperfect, oracle come to mind off the top of my head.

2: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=html+editor&section =projects&Go.x=0&Go.y=0/

3: I'm not sure how a website designed to work only with IE is a business to business tool but ok, You can design an apache website to use only IE too.

4: linux terminal servers have been around longer than windows has had that ability. The GUI, http://x.org/, was designed with that very thing in mind.

Now you say that with the linux solution, the small business can't afford to pay for the 10% that linux doesn't offer. How are you going to afford the windows solution for which they would have to pay 100% for? I think you also have the wrong idea about what a software stack is.

There's probbably one out their, but it's not a mainstream linux feature.

Theres an excellent tutorial on
freshmeat. Its secure in a much more meaningful way.