Slashdot Mirror

i run a FreeBSD shop. i check out FreshPorts.org and there is nothing about SAP-DB to be found. there is MySQL and PostgreSQL a-plenty, though.

freshmeat.net has TWO projects listed: SAP Database and SAP DB. both link back to sapdb.org.

i run a FreeBSD shop. i check out FreshPorts.org and there is nothing about SAP-DB to be found. there is MySQL and PostgreSQL a-plenty, though.

freshmeat.net has TWO projects listed: SAP Database and SAP DB. both link back to sapdb.org.

I think aalib get's my reward for geekiest thing ever. I mean, it took ascii art, which is in itself pretty geeky, and single-handedly made it completely obsolete. You can render anything with aalib, your pr0n included, and it comes out as beautiful ascii art. What more could you ask for?

Take one of thease
Add a little, traveling a sales man
and a few neurons

Take one of thease
Add a little, traveling a sales man
and a few neurons

for our windows OSs is actually a Linux boot disk with parted

(any major distro has parted) parted can copy, resize, move etc. partitions like a command line Partition Magic.

Can't resize NTFS though, but we can still move it with dd.

I'm sure there are things which spreadsheets can't handle well. Off the type of my head I can think of derivatives, integration, and solving simultaneous equations.

The one thing that I have found lacking in most spreadsheets is an easy way to fit curves to data sets. This is pretty glaring omission, given that you have both the data sets and a graphing tool in most spreadsheets. But then, I suppose that curve fitting is an alien concept to most of the financial world (though, I would think, statisticians might have some use for it).

A quick browse, however, through the Gnumeric Manual indicates that it has a linear solver and a host of statistical tools, which should allow you build almost any other numerical analysis tool you want.

Now, if you want to get symbolic results from a spreadsheet, you are probably screwed. But there are other tools that are better suited to such tasks than spreadsheets.

I think a more effective way to "evangelize" open source projects is to emphasize the superiority of the development model for human creativity projects.

I think the key concept here is "creativity"(1). Perhaps the open source development model (typically defined as being a loosely-collected group of developers working together via some collaborative medium such as the internet, for fun and not necessarily profit) works well for projects that can be said to be "creative", but unfortunately 99.995%(2) of all software projects are not what I would consider "creative". They may be reimplimentations of something that's already been done (say, a media player, or a word processor, or a text editor, or a compiler, or ...), though they may be adding new concepts and capabilities. They may also be just plain drudgery (specialized software for an accounting firm, for example). Are these projects "creative"? Depends. I'd probably say "no", for the majority of them, but you may have a different opinion. As well, even where "creative" applications are concerned, a majority of the code is boring code that needs to be written but is more busy work than anything else. In general (and there are exceptions to this, of course), most open source developers prefer to focus on the more "fun" parts of the software rather than doing the various menial tasks that need to be done(3). This is understandable, because if you're not getting paid to do this, you're doing it in your spare time. Why would you want to spend your spare time doing something boring when you could be out doing something else instead?

Anyway, on to my point. What I'm getting at here is that the open source development process is not necessarily superior to more traditional proprietary development processes, nor is there an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that it may be. For every successful open source project out there that can be held up as a shining example of the open source development process, there are hundreds of projects languishing under the model, with little or no "external" (ie, outside the initial author or group of authors) development or bug reporting, and a whole lot of these projects have only gotten so far as implementing some of their cool ideas and just get bogged down when they get into the other 80% or so of the code that's not "cool"(4). At least as far as proprietary software is concerned, you can be reasonably sure that the boring parts will get done as well as the interesting parts, because there is incentive to do the boring work (ie, a paycheck).

------

1. For "creativity", I'm using the definition of the base "creative" as "Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative", and not the more broad "Having the ability or power to create".

2. I'm making up my statistics, but the actual numbers are not important. What is important is that the number is large. It may be 75%, or 83%, or 99%, but it's still a large majority.

3. Prime example: the addition of fairly useless "fun" things to Mozilla, like Chatzilla, at a point in time where development resources would've been better spent fixing bugs aiming towards a 1.0 release. Yeah, yeah, Mozilla did finally release their 1.0 version, but the fact still stands that many of the contributing developers apparently were more concerned with writing "cool code" than with fixing bugs.

4. Check Freshmeat or SourceForge (SourceForge is much worse about this than Freshmeat) some time and see all the stagnant open source projects that have never gone anywhere, nor ever will. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of them. Temper the successes of each Linux, Apache, FreeBSD, or other high-profile open source project by the failures of all of those projects. Note that I'm not saying the ratio is any better in the proprietary world (though if I had to guess, I'd say it is), but at least with proprietary software there's some form of motivation aside from "This'd be cool".

This is probably more robust
http://freshmeat.net/projects/checkinstall/

Those who actually search for software can also look in freshmeat.net and newsgroup comp.os.linux.announce and linuxapps.com and a buyer's guide.

Some way of telling apt-get that its idea of what's installed or needs to be installed is sometimes wrong is needed before it's usable for me.

TWW

nonsense.

Try this.

Open source projects succeed because the people working on them actually enjoy working on them.

You're almost right.

Open source projects usually don't succeed. A quick browse of SourceForge or Freshmeat will verify that most OSS projects are poorly-crafted code-trash which deserves never to see the light of day. A few OSS projects are worth using. Those tend to be the ones written by people who like writing it, yes, but also know their ass from a null pointer and are willing to spend time coding it.

on a personal note, you're a karma-whoring fuckknob without a grain of wit from your misshapen head to your ingrown toenails. i sincerely wish that you will be involved in a high-speed automobile crash in the near future.

You may want to look at the fnk (or cipherfunk) kernel tree (no this is not carried on kernel.org). The link at freshmeat for cipherfunk kernels has connections for downloading and so on. His kernel tree contains the GRSecurity patches, a fair number of other patches (eg: FreeS/WAN), and any fixes he's made to get the lot running.

Basically this guys motivation is security and stability. He puts the whole lot through a barrage of tests, and makes sure things work, or at least determines if there is a problem and makes note of it.

• I would use the QPL as the initial license. Since the QPL is an open-source license, but requires that changes be distributed as patches against the original distribution, this should discourage code forks (although they're still possible) and make it clear which code I've "blessed" and what code is modified. (I don't want to be blamed for a bug someone else introduces...)
• Ultimately, I expect to switch to another license (probably an MPL/LGPL/GPL triple license a la Mozilla), but not until my project is sufficiently well-established that it can't be trivially eclipsed by a forked project with a more active maintainer using my own code to compete against me.
• For now, I want to maintain a tree which is 100% my own code, both for "vision" reasons and as a potential demonstration piece for my programming skills. However, I don't expect this branch to last forever; once my initial vision is "finished" enough and up to my own quality expectations, it will no longer be important to have 100% of the code written by myself.
• Meanwhile, if others contribute worthwhile code, I expect to branch a new "community" version which will include code contributed by others, as well as my own code. This version would probably become the recommended version, and I'd probably have to work harder to apply my own changes to both branches. (Rather than branch a new version for this, it may take the form of branching the "100% mine" version and considering the mainline version to be the community version.)
• I won't accept code (even for the community branch) that is poorly written or seems to fundamentally conflict with the rest of the project. However, I will happily maintain a "contrib" area of patches that I choose not to integrate, so others can apply them if desired. (Hopefully, this should reduce the incentive to fork the project, also.)
• For worthwhile code contributions that constitute an unwanted shift in direction for the project, it may make sense to create a new branch for that purpose, rather than rely on "contrib" patches on sources that are likely to diverge. (In this case, someone would probably need to volunteer to maintain the branch, if it's not one I'm personally interested in.)
• I decided that it is critical that (potential) contributors never be ignored. Ignoring a contribution is worse than rejecting it outright. A rejected contribution (with constructive criticism) may lead to new and better future contributions, while an ignored contribution is likely to lead very quickly to the loss of interest by that contributor.
• If a patch is incomprehensible, a discussion with the contributor is in order, and perhaps a rewrite as well.
• If someone forks the project, so be it. Hopefully it won't happen, but it's always a risk. It's more of a risk early on, which is why I'm using the QPL for now.
• I decided to treat the project as if it might be used for "production" use, on general principle. However, rather than the simplistic (and somewhat ineffective) even/odd numbering approach of the Linux kernel, I decided to take a different approach to version numbering:
  • Most importantly, I decided that no release will ever be declared "stable" without spending some time out there as a "release candidate" first, to allow time for any bugs to be found and reported. The "stable" release would therefore be virtually identical to a previous "unstable" release candidate, except for the version number and perhaps small nonfunctional changes like documentation No code changes should be introduced as a "stable" release. (This has caused too many "brown-paper-bag" releases in the "stable" Linux kernel series in the past, for example.)
  • To distinguish "stable" from "development" (unstable) releases, I decided that the "stable" releases would be all-numeric (e.g. 1.0.0) while "development" releases would always contain alpha characters in the version number (e.g. 1.0.0.beta.3).
  • To distinguish various levels of stability and approach to stable status, I decided to use word tags like "experimental" (maybe "exp?), "devel", "alpha", "beta", "rc", etc. This would be followed by a sub-release number in the same group.
  • For development releases, I decided to use the next target stable release number as the base, hence "1.0.0.beta.3" precedes "1.0.0" instead of following it. (Of course, "1.0.0.rc.1" would be in between those.)
  • In the case of branches for experimental coding, I decided to use named branches rather than a numeric branching scheme. Hopefully, all branches would start from a stable release, although I suppose they wouldn't have to. (I'm not sure exactly how to number named branches, but starting with the base revision of the branch point seeks probable.) If a branch looks like it will become long-lived and separately maintained, I imagine it would migrate into a new subproject name for the codebase and become the mainline version for that subproject.
• I decided that binary distributions (e.g. RPMs) should be offered for "stable" releases only, not for development releases. (Release candidates would probably be an exception, offering binaries temporarily, until the next release candidate or stable release, since they're intended to be stable releases and should be tested by non-developers...)
• I decided that the cycle between stable releases must be kept short to ensure that development never diverges far from the last stable release. If a non-developer wants to install a development release, that's a sign that the stable releases are too far apart!
• I decided that development releases would come with patches against the previous development release, but that stable releases would come with patches against the last stable release instead.
• I decided that a CVS server should be made available for people who want to track the development without having to download each development release or keep patching.
• I decided to cryptographically sign each release to ensure its integrity.
• I decided that I should have a bugtracking system (like Bugzilla) and place a high priority on fixing any trivial bugs to try to keep prople from getting discouraged when even the simplest bugs they report don't get fixed. Ideally, the bugtracking system should allow for easy integration with bug reporting via email.
• I decided that there should be at least two mailing lists (an announcements list and a developer's list), in addition to Freshmeat announcements of releases.
• I decided that the project should have a website, ideally one which has frequent updates (i.e. news items) every day or three. (There's nothing more boring than returning to a website to find that nothing has changed!) Screenshots are also good, if possible -- people love screenshots!

you might check out songprint.

It sounds like it will do what you're wanting, but the site looks kind of dead - the project may have been orphaned.

hth.

Article Central - a collection of articles related to web development from all over the web. Updated sometimes every day, some times only every other day but always updated. They cover everything from Java to PHP to Macromedia products. Really a must if you are a web developer.

Devshed - I think someone already posted this link, but it's a really good source of tutorials and real world applications.

Freshmeat - Whenever someone tells me that they need a certain functionality, I look here first to save me some time.

Index.html and Index.css at Blooberry.com - no doubt the BEST HTML and CSS references available on the web. Tells you what elements and tags are supported by every browser out there, what version of the browser supports them, and any strange behavior that the browsers might exhibit related to that tag or element.

IBM Alphaworks - Lots of cutting edge software.

I personally use Stunnel on a few boxes, linux/windows/freebsd. It basically wraps your connection with ssl. You set it up on both servers, then connect to localhost:port and it forwards to the remote server ssl encrypted. Like ssh tunnels, but its a stand alone program. Also very transparent to the user.

TLSwrap is another ssl wrapper, used for ftp, but can be used for other ports.
Safetp seems to be a popular one with the college kids. Ive tested it out, and it does encrypt your session, and any ftp client will work since it encrypted the port.

Personally, I dont want command line on windows, I want a GUI for windows. Tight VNC isnt encrypted, but you can use stunnel to take care of that. But I find remote desktop, using rdp 5.1, is fast as hell(compared to tightvnc) and is designed for windows. Very usable over a modem too.

I Love computers and networking, 500 solutions to 1 problem.

My home server, running WormScan:

Nimda - 319242 attacks
CodeRed 2 - 15488 attacks
CodeRed - 359 attacks

All from 5777 unique hosts.

I've developed WormScan, a Java-based program which does exactly this. Have a look at the
Freshmeat listing. If you're interested, you could follow the link to my home server's graphs (be nice - it's not a terribly fast link!)

> Seems Apple, out of the goodness of their hearts, these days is a big believer in royalty free web standards (and open standards period).

If they're so interested in providing free web standards, why haven't they released Quicktime for Unix yet?

For some reason I feel that Apple is not porting Quicktime to Unix for the same reason Microsoft didn't port Internet Explorer to Linux - to prevent unnecessary encouragment of an alternate platform. If you doubt that big compaines do such things, consider why Microsoft ported IE to Solaris and HP/UX , but not to Linux. I can assure it it wasn't the $50 it would have cost them to recompile on their test Linux box. The reason is that Sun and HP aren't marketing Solaris and HP/UX as replacements for Windows and therefore not a potential threat. Proof that Microsoft is more interested in money than improving the world's overall computing experience.

Am I surprised? Not really. I'm also not surprised that I still can't download Quicktime for Linux. If Real was selling an OS, they'd fail to produce a Linux port of RealOne , just as Apple has failed to produce a Linux port of Quicktime.

Seriously though, how fast could this be? I know that there are some ARM processors with built in 3D acceleration.. maybe that's what it's targeting?

Just in case someone is interested:
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=pinball&section=pro jects

Well, there's Advent, which is an open-source adventure game construction kit.

Meta-CVS is a wrapper around CVS that adds directory structure versioning.

I'm very fond of Seb's 3d Tetris for linux.
But let's not forget GTetrinet ah ..

I'm very fond of Seb's 3d Tetris for linux.
But let's not forget GTetrinet ah ..

Needless to say when Linus dropped the bomb, I slurped up a 0.97 Debian system via ftp and started toying with it. Compared to MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, Debian Linux and XFree86 was such a stupendous improvement that any power user literally drooled over its potential...

C.A. 2002 now a new bunch of jerk-wads like yourself with more money than sense wants to support these criminals? Microsoft makes the U.S. Government ( the most notoriously corrupt government in the history of the world ) look like a bunch of wanna-bees. Don't get me wrong here, I like my corrupt government, but I don't want Microsoft to _become_ the government, which it is working very dilligently and insidiously to do.

Windows looks like a PIECE OF CRAP compared to Debian with Enlightenment 16, "Hand of God" theme, and Gnome with "Graphite" theme. The only time I ever boot to Windows is to play Serious Sam . So don't call me "kiddie" and go pay your tribute to Bill "Mammon" Gates, you foolish spendthrift and enemy of freedom. You are buying your way into slavery, fool.

Wheres the friggin' Tequila... arghhh!

Needless to say when Linus dropped the bomb, I slurped up a 0.97 Debian system via ftp and started toying with it. Compared to MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, Debian Linux and XFree86 was such a stupendous improvement that any power user literally drooled over its potential...

C.A. 2002 now a new bunch of jerk-wads like yourself with more money than sense wants to support these criminals? Microsoft makes the U.S. Government ( the most notoriously corrupt government in the history of the world ) look like a bunch of wanna-bees. Don't get me wrong here, I like my corrupt government, but I don't want Microsoft to _become_ the government, which it is working very dilligently and insidiously to do.

Windows looks like a PIECE OF CRAP compared to Debian with Enlightenment 16, "Hand of God" theme, and Gnome with "Graphite" theme. The only time I ever boot to Windows is to play Serious Sam . So don't call me "kiddie" and go pay your tribute to Bill "Mammon" Gates, you foolish spendthrift and enemy of freedom. You are buying your way into slavery, fool.

Wheres the friggin' Tequila... arghhh!

And for an OS without DRM:

Debian

Sure Warez Dude!

Gentoo
Source Mage
Debian
Freshmeat - More Free Wares than you can shake a stick at.

Course, in the world of Free Software we don't need to write wares with a Z, 'cuase it's already free. ;-)

freshmeat

Hmm. Here's a guy who purports to be an "average user", yet he is listed on SourceForge as a Project Admin!!!

Oh yeah! Here's his page on Freshmeat listing other projects.

If only the average users I know could do these things. By the way, I wonder how much he is getting paid by Micro$oft to promulgate these lies.

Try le editor. It is a full screen editor with a blue background (much like the editor that comes with DOS), except way better.

In my biassed opinion, Andromeda is consistantly among Freshmeat's most popular MP3 projects for a reason. Anyways, the free version is free.

Indeed,

And this is an interesting software engineering problem. It is the first internet protocol that has to be designed from the ground up for anonymity and resilience. And that will grow in a hostile enviroment.

The TCP/IP stack was designed for resiliency and they did a good job, but this has to be even better, and we don't have the goverment on our side!

There are a couple of attempts at this. One is www.freenetproject.org (that seems to be stalled) and the other one is gnunet.

GNUnet is a decentralized network with confidential and authenticated communication. A first service implemented on top of the networking layer allows anonymous distribution and retrieval of content. GNUnet supports accounting to provide contributing nodes with better service.

If the motherboard supports temperature and fan monitoring (and the power supply and processor fan supply a fan clock to the monitoring circuit) you can install an utility like MBM (Windows) or lm_sensors (linux) together with a shutdown utility like "ShutDown NOW!" (http://www.dworld.de according to my link list, but the site seems to be down).

If a temperature, voltage or fan speed exceeds the limit set by you or falls below it, the system is shut down after a warning.

Damn near anyone on your LAN can snoop on you. Ettercap can even do things like sniff passwords on a switched LAN.

With a name like snort he is probably making a bunch of money off of people who think they're buying some cocaine.

Nah, they are still waiting on Blow.

fwiw, Andromeda has been well received on Freshmeat. -Scott

Here's a hypothetical strategy:

Open source the project. Then, with sufficiently quick and easy installer (not there yet), and easy-to-use broadcasting software (getting there), massive proliferation could result.

Then you're off to the law of large numbers. If it is really this easy for anyone to broadcast, there should be thousands of these small "community" radio stations.

There would be many to prosecute all of them, and it wouldn't be worthwhile because the number of listeners these stations have is so small. It would become a bit like speeding, technicially 5mph over the speed limit is illegal, but generally you won't get pulled over unless you up the numbers...

I encourage you to check out OPENdj, my rendition of an open source, UNIX-based distributed streamer. It is very full featured and has been operating on http://opendj.com/ for over a year.

It is open source software, available for anyone to download, play with, and use.

- jonathan.

Check out OPENdj, my rendition of an open source, UNIX-based distributed streamer. It is very full featured and has been operating on http://opendj.com/ for over a year.

It is open source software, available for anyone to download, play with, and use.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

- jonathan.

Check out OPENdj, my rendition of an open source, UNIX-based distributed streamer. It is very full featured and has been operating on http://opendj.com/ for over a year.

It is open source software, available for anyone to download, play with, and use.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

- jonathan.

Hello folks, Since it seems other folks are getting lots of attention, and this "P2P streaming" stuff is exactly what my OPENdj project is all about, I feel I've got to pitch OPENdj to you...

OPENdj is a distributed streamer, allowing DJs to schedule time on streams through a web based interface. It's pretty full-featured, with automatic archiving of all broadcasts, meta-tagging on broadcasts, searching on those metatags, listener counts, chat room features, etc.

OPENdj is open source software, available for anyone to download, play with, and use.

Check it out, let me know what you think.

- jonathan.

It is not an indefensible position. This is just a piece of software. The fact that it may be used to stream copyrighted content does not mean that it is illegal. Certainly many forms of talk radio do not infringe on anyone's copyrights.

For the record, OPENdj has been doing this "P2P streaming" stuff for over a year.... and is open source software

- jonathan.

I need Emacs-style keybindings. I don't expect everybody else's hands to work just like mine. Other people may legitimately be more comfortable with another arrangement. That's fine. Nobody suffers if we get a choice. Somebody operates in suboptimal conditions if we don't.

There are other issues like colors and fonts. There is no One True Aesthetic. People like different looks and that's OK. It's like decorating your cubicle walls. It might not make my interface technically better (as some of the content at themes.freshmeat.net proves, it might even make it worse ;-), but controlling things like appearance let me feel better about it (which does help me work better).

I don't believe that one interface fits all. People are not all the same. Why force them to work the same way? I'm not saying that I have needs "over an[d] above" the average user. I'm saying that the best interface for me is different than what most people seem comfortable with.

Whether the differences are physical, cultural, or just plain individual, people have different needs and expectations. It is good to work toward finding a single interface (to be the default) that meets the most needs of most of the people. But it can't be be the best for everyone, so options and the ability to customize are important.

For package management, there is one smart system to standardize on. And that system is alien.

Is avalible at Freshflames!

Pardon me for the shameless plug, but as you see it has some relevance to the comment. I am the author of Freecell Solver, which is a library and a stand-alone command line program that solves games of Freecell and similar solitaire variants. Now, since its first public version, I posted announcements for its subsequent releases on Freshmeat, each time announcing new features.

As a side-effect of this publicity, the Google search for "freecell solver" yields almost exclusively hits that has something to do with it. However, the query itself is generic enough that a user would just want to find a solver for Freecell, not necessarily my own.

I call this phenomenon the "Freshmeat Effect", albeit it is by no means restricted to Freshmeat. Is there anything Googlers plan to do to restrict such clogging of searches by constant publicity of a package with a mis-chosen title?

(Refer here for a slightly earlier record of this effect, and a call for developers to use original names to avoid it.)