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And even earlier, as freshmeat points out:

Paul Graham kicked off a flood of mail filters implementing Bayesian filtering with his "A Plan for Spam" article in August 2002, though it was far from a new concept. In fact, ifile has used a Naive Bayes classification algorithm since August 1996 to automatically file mail into folders. In academic circles, Bayesian methods have been used in text classification for many years, and for spam detection prior to Graham, as evidenced by the 1998 workshop paper A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail by Sahami, et al.

And even earlier, as freshmeat points out:

Paul Graham kicked off a flood of mail filters implementing Bayesian filtering with his "A Plan for Spam" article in August 2002, though it was far from a new concept. In fact, ifile has used a Naive Bayes classification algorithm since August 1996 to automatically file mail into folders. In academic circles, Bayesian methods have been used in text classification for many years, and for spam detection prior to Graham, as evidenced by the 1998 workshop paper A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail by Sahami, et al.

I use cygwin on a daily basis, was nice to see that on an upgrade it removed all of Xfree and upgraded to X.org X11 server.

Seems everyone is ditching Xfree. (About damn time too!)

BTW, those use mentioned screen because they don't want to use a mouse. There are X window managers like EvilWM or Ratpoison that are mouseless. Though, my favorite WM is IceWM with the PicoGUI theme. Though I like to modify it with additional buttons. Freshmeat has a ton of themes for it.

Take a look at the grsecurity project details at freshmeat for information about the license (not easily found on the grsecurity site itself). It's GPLed, for all of you too lazy to click ;)

Spam filters compared, here. This article was linked from Slashdot a few months ago. Good info, too.

huh? you're just messing round with an XML subsystem instead! several versions the Lisp reader (not the whole of lisp!) is available for C e.g. here> - it's just like any other data format parser, and significantly smaller and faster than XML. You don't need to use lisp to use lisp syntax.

Yeah, this is the kind of /. question that drives me nuts. "I want some map data, with a whole bunch of constraints on what kind it is, and I want it to be free. Oh, by the way, I found exactly that from the USGS. However, in spite of the fact that there are tens or maybe hundreds of open source projects that use it just fine, I can't figure out how. So that's no good."

The first page of freshmeat.net after searching for "tiger" contains a link to this open source TIGER map server. Maybe that would be a good starting point. Further down the page are getmap and geotools, which also support TIGER.

I wish submitters and especially editors would realize that when they don't do their homework, they're wasting the time of literally hundreds of thousands of people. Sometimes a lot of time, like when the idiots actually waste extra time writing a long-winded reply.

Yeah, this is the kind of /. question that drives me nuts. "I want some map data, with a whole bunch of constraints on what kind it is, and I want it to be free. Oh, by the way, I found exactly that from the USGS. However, in spite of the fact that there are tens or maybe hundreds of open source projects that use it just fine, I can't figure out how. So that's no good."

The first page of freshmeat.net after searching for "tiger" contains a link to this open source TIGER map server. Maybe that would be a good starting point. Further down the page are getmap and geotools, which also support TIGER.

I wish submitters and especially editors would realize that when they don't do their homework, they're wasting the time of literally hundreds of thousands of people. Sometimes a lot of time, like when the idiots actually waste extra time writing a long-winded reply.

Yeah, this is the kind of /. question that drives me nuts. "I want some map data, with a whole bunch of constraints on what kind it is, and I want it to be free. Oh, by the way, I found exactly that from the USGS. However, in spite of the fact that there are tens or maybe hundreds of open source projects that use it just fine, I can't figure out how. So that's no good."

The first page of freshmeat.net after searching for "tiger" contains a link to this open source TIGER map server. Maybe that would be a good starting point. Further down the page are getmap and geotools, which also support TIGER.

I wish submitters and especially editors would realize that when they don't do their homework, they're wasting the time of literally hundreds of thousands of people. Sometimes a lot of time, like when the idiots actually waste extra time writing a long-winded reply.

For the open-source projects I have, I simple made them available via freshmeat. My CVS repository is on my own machine. I have the projects' home pages on a seperate web server machine. That's it.

As for remaining involved, I'm still involved almost exclusively. I know the romanticized "bazarr" model of development envisions lots of contributors. The reality is that most open-source projects just get downloaded. Rarely do they accumulate talented people who make contributions. For all my projects combined, I've maybe gotten a handful of patches over the years (and most of those were pretty crappy quality, so I ended up rewriting them).

Hence, unless you expect your project to be wildly successful, don't expect much of anything, problems or otherwise.

hey look features are features but a few are missing

I would like a IM client (IRC does not rock my world) a Jabber client would be good

jabber support

I would like a iCal clone... (in process)

Indeed it is :)

I would like OpenPGP intergrated (only 128bit to save the export legal stuff) just basic crypto would be great (make it easy to setup as well)

There's a gpg extension, will that do?

There'll be an update this summer but the current version can run Clamav and check Spamhaus for blacklisting.

All written in Perl so it should run fairly easily on everything.

TWW

You can find it at pmk.sourceforge.net

Or else, you can have a look at A-A-P, by nobody else than Bram Moolenaar, the author of the One True Editor, a.k.a. ViM :-)

There is also Package-framework, by Tom Lord, the author of the infamous Arch SCM.

I was about to mention SCons, too, but other people already did (it always pay to check other comments just before posting, especially on /. :-)

To sum it up : there is no shortage of alternatives to the incredibly hairy Autoconf/Automake nightmare. The problem is, people are still using them for the very same reason they use CVS instead of Arch/Subversion, or Sendmail instead of Postfix/Exim : because they're considered ``standard'' tools, and people feel more comfortable with software they know to be used by plenty of other people (millions of programmers can't all be wrong. Can they ?). I really hope they'll stop making this kind of mistakes soon, so I won't need to curse them everytime I have to debug some Autoconf breakage...

...free as in beer, might I suggest starting by looking at freshmeat.com, and typing 'pic' in the litle search field. When I did it came back with this url which lists several pic programers. The first three specificly indicate they are for Linux. Several of the others indicate that Linux support is included. And so on.

I think you would probably find something similar for Basic Stamp, but I think that I have provided enough suggestions that you might be able to figure out how to look for that as well...

Then again, I could be wrong. Things like that are known to happen.

-Rusty

GarageBand isn't open source

I have rarely seen Apple products on Freshmeat.

GarageBand isn't open source

I have rarely seen Apple products on Freshmeat.

GarageBand isn't open source

I have rarely seen Apple products on Freshmeat.

GarageBand isn't open source

I have rarely seen Apple products on Freshmeat.

GarageBand isn't open source

I have rarely seen Apple products on Freshmeat.

Amen to that - as well as FreshMeat.

One question is, how bad can it get? Will there one day be a "Worthless" project? There is already a "Waste".

Well, I've seen better names than ProjectTraq Intranet System Services aka "PISS" anyway.. ;)

MUTE File Sharing is an anonymous, decentralized search-and-download file sharing system. Several people have described MUTE as the "third generation file sharing network" (From Napster to Gnutella to MUTE, with each generation getting less centralized and more anonymous). MUTE uses algorithms inspired by ant behavior to route all messages, include file transfers, through a mesh network of neighbor connections.

K's QT isn't truely OSS since you have to pay out the ass to use it on Windows, so I avoid it on principle.

"Overall Ext3 was disappointingly slow surprisingly often."

I disagree, plus this test is obsolete, why did he use a 2.4 kernel?!

from: http://freshmeat.net/projects/linux/?branch_id=463 39&release_id=160407

"Linux 2.6.6
[...]
Changes:
...ext2 and ext3 filesystem performance was significantly improved. "

And thats just from today's kernel release. What about all the changes between 2.4 and now?

Considering the conveniance of backward compatability, and the fact that ext3 wasn't the worst in every category, and it looks like maybe uses less cpu than some, it seems like ext3 is the hands-down winner of the test, not the looser. ext3 did as well in tests that IMO represent everyday use. Who creates 10k files in a folder? I would have liked to see a linux kernel COMPILE using the fs. Thats something we all could appreciate.

XKobo is one of my favourites, and I still play it today (I'm in stage 242, and there are only 50 stages, they begin repeating after that. Not that I'm addicted or something.. :)
The gameplay basically about dodging enemies in a two-way scrolling space, trying to destroy the bases. The level 6 and some later levels are very hard.

There is a modern version in SDL, called Kobo Deluxe, but I still prefer the original. Beware!

So if that's a goal of ours, perhaps it's a goal of another race's. And perhaps they got a head start on us, and that large percentage of "dark matter" actually consists of Dyson Spheres which capture everything, so are "undetectable" by us. That's pretty scary, to think that we just lost that much playground, and will eventually have to deal with the bully--on his own terms perhaps.

I mentioned this a year ago or so, and someone pointed me in the direction of Matrioshka Brains, so I will include some links for that as well. And an excellent discussion.

I would add to the last part that the larger planets could be taken apart by space elevators as well. They'd just start with the upper atmosphere; then work their way down. All the time the mass is getting smaller, and the elevators are pulling mass out so they can make themselves bigger in order to reach deeper. I think it's workable, and appears to be the most efficient way to do it--get the mass all out into "orbit" first. Actually, when you're about halfway done you can then start shipping what you mine off to other locations, and taking that amount of mass out of the elevators as well since they won't need to counterbalance as the planet's now smaller. (I don't know what the mathematical "middle point" where you start dismantling the elevators actually is--it could be something other than 50%.)

We could have "planet splitter seeds" which we shoot off to other stars, and they start with a tiny, correctly-placed elevator and build more of them as fast as is physically possible; the seed would be smart enough to calculate all the masses and start with the most effective one that would lead to the earliest date at which the entire mass of the star system is being used for computation.

The only problem is if we encounter life. Will our machines just assimilate it? Are the ones out there programmed to preserve us? Have they already done so?

Freshmeat turns up plenty of possibilities, including some standalone apps and some lightweight ones. Self-promotion: I wrote a really tiny, simple one called When.

You can always put NX on a USB with the other stuff you need. Never leave home without your NX Client!!

It's great to see that NX
from NoMachine
is finally coming out on Linux distros. Will it be coming out with any others?

If you're gonna check out Knoppix then have a look at KnoppiXMAME too.

I ran across it cruising through Freshmeat to see if there were any good 3D animation programs that I had missed.

Really, there's not much out there. Blender is the best and most capable, but (despite many advances) it's UI has a steep learing curve. But if you stick with it, you can do amazing stuff, and to be fair, the UI is way better than it used to be, and promises to only get better.

Anim8or is an Windows program by Steven Glanville. (It works fine under WINE.) It's free, but closed source, because Steve doesn't want to deal with people bugging him about unofficial releases - I understand the sentiment! It's a great modeller, and I think the scanline renderer is underrated, but the animation features are a weak - for example, it doesn't yet have IK. However, the next release promises to include it, so it's definately something worth watching.

Art of Illusion is an open source Java program by Peter Eastman, and I suspect that most people - if they've heard of it at all - know that it's a full-featured raytracer, but don't realize that it supports animation. The bones based animation uses a 'pin and drag' interface based on Animanium, and it's very cool. Unfortunately, you can only do animation via pose morphs in the current release, but the next version promises support bones animation on a seperate IK track. By the time 2.0 comes out, I think it'll be an excellent program for doing character animation.

There have been rumors that some day Björn Gustavsson's Wings3D would support animation, but so far, that's only rumor. Wings3D started out as an open source version of IzWare's Nendo modeller, but has in many ways surpassed Nendo since then, so it's possible...

Finally, there's Sascha Ledinsky's Java based JPatch program, a successor to Mike Clifton's now abandoned sPatch program. Although it's currently only a modeller (the beta should be ready by the end of the month), it has designs to support animation - sort of an open source version of Animation:Master. It may not look like there's much going on at the site, but I've had a chance to play with some of the development versions - it's worth keeping an eye on.

If anyone knows of any open source/non-commercial programs capable of producing character animation, I'd love to know about them!

You're seeming to neglect just how large the open source community is. For every project you listed above as being well thought out, I could list a dozen more. However, the vast majority of open source projects *are* ill conceived and thrown together with little or no thought given to structure. For a very large sample that follows this norm just browse around freshmeat and sourceforge for awhile.

I use:

1. kmousetool to click the mouse for me. Takes some getting used to but I can't live without it now.

2. Xwrits to force me to take 5 minute breaks every half hour. Use the breaks to get up and stretch.

3. A good massage therapist.

(Please correct me if I'm wrong about this, IANAA yet)

However, aren't we (the technologically advanced countries) going a little overboard? According to the current version of the USDA nutritional database (v16-1, as used in my handy copy of nut, 41.5g (1.46 ounces) of carrot is provides enough vitamin-A for your typical 2000-calorie diet per day.

Carrot!

Carrots are a fairly easy-to-grow, well-known crop. Judging by the bulk prices (pretty darned cheap, in my opinion) of carrots at every grocery store I've ever shopped at, they must be in surplus, easy to grow, and easy to ship (or all of the above). Anyone with knowledge of root cellars knows that carrots last a good long time under the right conditions.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to simply ship every family in Ethiopia few pounds of bulk carrots ever month or so, than to spend the hundreds of millions (or even billions, perhaps?) to genetically engineer a strain of rice with bloody dandelion genes? It would also be immediately available, rather than the required wait for testing/approvla and whatnot required for GE foods? Hell, send 'em sun-dried carrots -- no refrigeration require and less shipping weight!

Using the same software, and sorting foods by vitamin-A content, there are several hundred foods which, per 100g, exceed the daily vitamin-A recommendations. Many of those are considered weeds in the right context (and grow as such -- such as Lamb's Quarters). Surely there must be something that will grow (either naturally or in agriculture) in Ethiopia that will supply the majority indigent population with the needed vitamin-A it needs? Why not introduce dandelions themselves? They're (obviously) high in vit-A.

I'm being a wise-ass on purpose, but I'm not trying to be insensitive to the plight of Ethiopian children. There are certainly logistical problems with sending carrots to (or even growing then in) Ethiopia. However, I believe there must be a better way to go about this than creating a Frankenstien variety of rice. We are far from the point where we need to muck with mother nature's dip switches in order to reliably feed the population now or in the future (this assertion is based on the assumption that the studies/reports in the parent post deal with standard agriculture practices).

I'd go into a rant about how industrialized agriculture doesn't use sustainable methods, and how it can do much better with more natural methods vs methods which enrich companies and ruin farm land, but I've posted enough right now.

Some of it comes with the base debian install:

GCC,G++
<flamewar>vim/emacs</flamewar>
links-ssl/curl-ssl-wget
ssh
Perl

Then a whole lotta debs for Gnome/KDE...

Then the actual desktop GUI:
GDM
IceWM
Idesk
Endeavour 2


Then the base apps
Anjuta (C++ IDE)
Gedit Notepad
Mplayer + plugins
XMMS + plugins
ALSA framework
Frozen Bubble!
the GIMP
Open Office
Thunderbird+Firefox
GAIM
Gnome-meeting

And the latest 2.6.x kernel

I've created a CD which will give you all the above in one disk. Automatic installations. Just create a linux/swap partition, and it will install to the largest available 'nix partition, also adding any windows partitions to the lilo.conf

ALSA Sound support is ready (though you must edit /etc/modules with whatever soundcard module you have)

X GUI starts in SVGA mode (best to xf86config and choose your GUI)
USB mouse support through /dev/input/mice

I'm considering putting it up online, but at about 620MB for the ISO I'd need some decent hosting space for that. So far we're using it at work to convert windows desktops to dual-boot... it's XP themes so the windows lusers can figure it out rather easily.

It's also configured to build the base menu structure when a user logs in... and idesk will mount a CD+browse with endeavour on doubleclick, or unmount+eject on a right-click.

After dealing with funky windows issues that occur after software upgrades or funky DLL's - I finally got smart.

Since my PC is a dual-boot (windows/linux), I wiped out the XP partition, reinstalled from scratch and put all my base programs on, plus patches,drivers:
GAIM
Winamp
Putty
EMule
Firebird/Thunderbird
Filezilla
WinSCP3
Openoffice
CDex
VirtuaDub
Audacity
Hardware-related (SBLive EAX panel, etc)
PowerDVD
Nero

Those last few came with hardware or at a cost...

Now... one of these days I may have to do it all over again. Rather than dealing with that, I booted into 'nix, revved up partimage and built an image of the drive in 500MB chunks. They're small enough to fit on a DVD - and I keep another DVD-RW with software updates for stuff like GAIM and others.

Should XP ever go down in flames, I can leave partimage doing a restore, come back, and I'm fresh to go.

Even the google cache copy seems inaccessible.. Here is the Freshmeat Project Page for Scribus 1.1.6, and I also have a link to the home page
____________________
Seun Osewa's Afriguru.com grows daily.

Here's a quick review talking about the enhancements since the last version.

surely DNS blacklist's are a more realisitic solution when combined with a realistic database blacklist

That's awesome - it's exactly what I needed!

I used GPSBabel to convert my NMEA data to GPX format, uploaded it to GPS Visualizer, and voila! Thanks!

Freshmeat.net can be reached at http://freshmeat.net/.

HTH

You could try realcap. This is a realmedia capture script I wrote (well, adapted) to cap dramatisations of Terry Pratchett books from BBC7.

More info here

Some useful links to information on ethical and anti-war licensing issues:

Slashdot thread

Open Source Software License discussion list thread

Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement: an example of a license which takes ethical issues in to consideration

Freshmeat thread

Advogato thread

UserLand thread

Yahoo group to discuss open source ethics

There's already ccache which does a great job of speeding up second time compilations. Yeah I know there are all kinds of differences between this and precompiled headers, I was just pointing out another build speedup method.

= 9J =

Since you brought up Xandros I'll pimp that for a second.

Xandros looks like it may be a decent Desktop system although it is a commercial distro and I don't want to spend the money to find out. This is the first I have ever heard of it so if they can come out with a Free/Lite edition and get on TechTV and somehow get the general public's interest it may take off.

But my question still is how will the second group react to these distros? Will they feel that they have lost too much control? Will they suffer from command line withdrawl?

Some people don't like smart installers because you don't learn anything that way. (On the other hand isn't that the point of a smart installer, to guess what you may not know?)

Personally I would be happy with a combination of Debian for servers and Xandros for Desktops.
* Misc *
Lindows
For info on Knoppix check out http://freshmeat.net/projects/knoppix/.

The themes that were pulled didn't just copy the "Aqua" UI, they used the trademarked apple logo. There are quite a few aqua-style themes out there.

The themes that were pulled didn't just copy the "Aqua" UI, they used the trademarked apple logo. There are quite a few aqua-style themes out there.

Linux is doomed if it can't even Ding! when email arrives.
Linux doesnt need no stinking "Ding!".
We have the far more superior beep!