Slashdot Mirror

First, by discouraging entry into the software market, the GPL reduces the number of competitors. This means less consumer choice, not more.

If 'professional' software is not worth the extra pennies over something someone knocked up in his spare time then that software deserved to die. Raising the bar forces software companies to offer value for money. Personally I think you are fundamentally wrong. With closed source software each competitor is forced to reinvent the wheel. GPL software enables people to build upon the work of others. I think a quick trip to Freshmeat will show ample choice in GPL software.

When GPL software dominates a market, we are left with low-quality free packages on one end and expensive "industry standard" or "specialized" software on the other.

Like Apache in the web server market? Or MySQL/Postgres in the DB market? Sorry but you're wrong. The middle ground may get squeezed but the services area expands. Take the market for PHP programmers as an example. I've even seen jobs to write PHPNuke add-ons.

The other problem is that when GPL projects fail to keep pace with technology, there is the danger that people will make arguments that the government needs to step in and take over the project.

With GPL you cannot "take over" a project as it belongs to no-one.

Already, there are too many government workers writing software who should instead be using a diverse array of packages from different vendors, linked together by open standards

Without any figures to back this up I won't believe you. Every government project I've heard of outsources the programming.

Perens is right in the short-run: Socialism always does well in the beginning because it lives off the fat of the land that has been stored up. In the long-run though, it drags the economy down.

Drags the economy down? If it creates an expansion in services at the expense of shrink-wrap software, it's my guess that it will generate more wealth than drag the economy down.

Phillip.

Grab 'avifile'. Nice little app that uses windows libraries to do the decoding. Works perfectly on every avi I've found. Check it out here.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/pnet/ you can find C# for linux...

http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html Why not?

This is an obvious act of desperation. Everyone knows that internet ads no longer pay any money. This is not 1998 anymore. Mostly, the only people who ever clicked on them were the newbies to the internet... and it didn't take long for them to learn their lesson. The rest of the people have either learned to ignore them or they use a proxy server like Junkbuster or Filterproxy .

This is so predictable. They say that history repeats itself, but this is too much for even me to deal with. Most websites that do this are dead within a year. Everybody knows that internet advertisers no longer pay any money. How much money do they expect to make from 0.2 cents a click when Slashdot caters mostly to internet veterans who have either learned to ignore adds or use a proxy server religiously?

Slashdot has become "a victim of its own success." Can you imagine how much money it must cost to pay for their bandwidth alone? If you've done a lot of browsing over the last 5 years and seen this happen to many of your favorite websites you know that intrusive adds are the first step. Next comes restricted usage for non-subscribers. Next comes access denied to non-subscribers. Next comes the obituary and farewells.

Bye bye Slashdot. We knew ye well. :-\

it might work a bit like this open source software.

Recompress jpegs with higher compression, remove banner ads. Gzip the remaining page and hey presto faster download, though of course that doesnt need any client side software apart from a browser that will accept gzip compression (most do).
I guess these guys are using some proprietary or obscured format for their compression, to help them cash in.

Not much use to those on fast connections but for a modem user the time taken to encode/decode may be faster than downloading the normal pages.

/.-ed twice? Yet more proof that p2p is a hype technology.

I still remember talking to a Mojo developer at a con about what really happens with distributing file slicing:

Me: "So what if all the peers with my file are down?"

Developer: "They won't be. You'll still be able to get your file."

Me: "How?"

Developer: "You'll still be able to get your file."

?!?!?

Rather telling, actually; it's been 2+ years since gnutella. The number of novel p2p applications out there is slim. The number of platforms is even slimmer, which is really disappointing. P2p was supposed to revolutionize everything, not just vaporware.

There is a promising platform for running p2p services at PeerMetrics. Another one is JXTA. Both come with source. I was looking forward to World OS, but it appears to be dead. Most p2p endeavors are still unreleased, like Ocean Store.

I hope more people get to put in some dev cycles on p2p platforms. Applications like The Circle are cool, but as a standalone app the code isn't really leverageable. We need more shared effort. The economy aside, I believe it's taking forever because p2p is harder to write for than expected.

Hopefully this isn't true, and in the next year we'll finally see some real progress. Either way more p2p hype storms are a sure bet.

I started using CUPS about a year ago, and I really like it. I'm running it on RH 7.2, using the gimp-print drivers. It is incredibly easy to set up printers, especially non-PostScript ones - something that vexed me no end under Linux. The gimp-print drivers are very high quality.

The only thing I'm not crazy about is the default Web front end for CUPS. You might want to do a search on FreshMeat for CUPS, to see the different GUI frontends available. I haven't found one that totally replaces the Web interface unfortunately.

You could try the alpha version of my own printing system which I've written in Perl after three attempts to get CUPS to work ended in failure. I use it to print across the network to my Epson S.P. 1290.

TWW

I think they should implement a micro-ad policy as well. The average user buying the smaller banner type ads for whatever purpose for a small payment (heck, the bigger players don't want those ads anymore, might as well release them to the people).

Might this be an opportunity in the making? Instead of paying $1-5 here and there... pay a central authority for access to affiliated sites. I know this has shades of Passport (which I don't support), but it could be great. Pay $5 to OSDN and get access to every OSDN site (I bet they are all going to try out similar policies in the future), not just Slashdot (Linux.com, Newsforge.com, Freshmeat.net). Or pay $3 to NewsFactor Network for access to all of its affiliated sites like OS Opinion and so forth. It should cut down on some of the payments. Then each affiliate would get its cut based on unique page views or some other metric.

I guess I am saying that a network TV or Radio model might work a little better here.

I could be completely off base... but if not and hiring personnel from OSDN, NewsFactor, or some other "web network" are reading, I am willing to entertain consulting or full-time position opportunities =^) .

So, while I wrote this post I decided I should do my homework first. On Freshmeat I found a defrag program for linux, but it seems to be totally dead, abandoned since 1998. On sourceforge a search for defrag only gives a hit for some Windows application. A Google search finally points me to a Debian page which advertises exactly the kind of defrag program I was looking for. The buglist shows that it is still being maintained, but there does not seem to be much going on (which might be a sign of stability, but the developer could have tried to impress me with promises to support more filesystems than only ext2, minix and xiafs). Why isn't this program a standard solution that makes fragmentation a non-issue? Do people here have experience with this tool?

Give mplayer a try?
I've watched movies with broken indexes on the fly (.asf, divx .avi) with a amd 350

Great program, inlove. Lack of linkage though..

freshmeat.net

• Learn how to work off/with IRC! This is very important b/c *almost* every project uses IRC as a key point of communication...this is where you'll meet the developers of said project and they may "task" you to do something.
• Be relaxed! I got in there and started throwing around the computer science terminology I was learning from class. Turns out I was annoying some of the developers on the project. They thought I was taking my work (well, their work really) too seriously. Some people just do this stuff for fun. Keep that in mind.
• Email one of the developers! Find someone within the project that is working on something that maybe your strong point or interest area. Make sure to be up front with them about your "newbie-ness".

Well, to answer my own question, on Freshmeat there appear to be one or two.

Have fun!

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

Well, to answer my own question, on Freshmeat there appear to be one or two.

Have fun!

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

ICBW but i think glasscode might be what you're after. haven't tried it myself, just ran across it about a year ago...

Full disclosure: Although not "officially" associated with YAWNS, I've contributed some code to the project and plan to contribute more.

Shayne

What they mean with "Ip over MPEG" is nothing else than IP over DVB - Digital Video Broadcast. DVB is the digital television standard in Europe, and NOKIA is a major player in it, as is Fujitsu-Siemens and others. There exist three DVB transmission styles:

• DVB-T (terrestrial, antenna)
• DVB-C (cable)
• DVB-S (sattelite)

and a similare audio-standard, named DAB - Digital Audio Boradcasting. DAB will replace the FM tuners over the years, and DVB will replace the conventional TV broadcastings.

Still we do not know what "IP over MPEG" is, right ? Well, DVB transmissions consist of a subset of MPEG2. I think this is what they meant with this. I have such a DVB-Card in one of my PCI slots. Together with my USB Host-To-Host bridge, my D-Link NIC this is the third (never asked for, since I use DVB for Television only) network card I have in my system. The DVB standard not only transmits audio/video but also (since we are talking digital, you guessed it...;-)) generic information, as in this case, TCP/IP packets. With this it is possible to use a sattelite (with the SAT version) as network-downstream. This still would require the upstream to go through a conventional method, however. I guess this will change in the next ten years, and DVB will become a standard way to access the Internet...

What is especially interesting are the things going on "behind the scenes", especially from an Open Source point of view:

• NOKIA is a major player/contributor to the MHP - Multimedia Home Platform specification/project.

  MHP is a standard, that will incooperate DVB but make it a real standard. At the moment each broadcaster tries to enforce its own modifications and incompatibilities on the users (Germanies largest broadcaster did so, some French pay-channel did, etc.), just as we know similare practices from M$.

• Now, another important developer of MHP is noone else than Convergence.De AKA LinuxTV.Org, AKA DirectFB (a related project is Diet LibC, for the interested).

  LinuxTV.Org also wrote and/or hosts the important (GPL'ed) software for the DVB cards on Linux, both the v4l compatible TV drivers as well as the IP over MPEG ;-) driver. In addition they host a very cool Linux project, named VDR, which makes a harddisk-video recorder out of any linux compatible PC with one ore more DVB card(s).

BTW: see also DirectFB stuff on Freshmeat and for Gods sake, have a look at this amazing GTK+ desktop with full aplpha blending or the "rootless X Server"(1) (2) or "ten MPEG Videos playing at once, blended, without framedrops". You will find their GTK+ patches here and the DVB stuff here

All in all this is perfect for embedded systems and desktop boxes as well as it will be for full blown deksktops. (Linux desktop without X, digital video and audio broadcast based on free and open standards etc.)

What they mean with "Ip over MPEG" is nothing else than IP over DVB - Digital Video Broadcast. DVB is the digital television standard in Europe, and NOKIA is a major player in it, as is Fujitsu-Siemens and others. There exist three DVB transmission styles:

• DVB-T (terrestrial, antenna)
• DVB-C (cable)
• DVB-S (sattelite)

and a similare audio-standard, named DAB - Digital Audio Boradcasting. DAB will replace the FM tuners over the years, and DVB will replace the conventional TV broadcastings.

Still we do not know what "IP over MPEG" is, right ? Well, DVB transmissions consist of a subset of MPEG2. I think this is what they meant with this. I have such a DVB-Card in one of my PCI slots. Together with my USB Host-To-Host bridge, my D-Link NIC this is the third (never asked for, since I use DVB for Television only) network card I have in my system. The DVB standard not only transmits audio/video but also (since we are talking digital, you guessed it...;-)) generic information, as in this case, TCP/IP packets. With this it is possible to use a sattelite (with the SAT version) as network-downstream. This still would require the upstream to go through a conventional method, however. I guess this will change in the next ten years, and DVB will become a standard way to access the Internet...

What is especially interesting are the things going on "behind the scenes", especially from an Open Source point of view:

• NOKIA is a major player/contributor to the MHP - Multimedia Home Platform specification/project.

  MHP is a standard, that will incooperate DVB but make it a real standard. At the moment each broadcaster tries to enforce its own modifications and incompatibilities on the users (Germanies largest broadcaster did so, some French pay-channel did, etc.), just as we know similare practices from M$.

• Now, another important developer of MHP is noone else than Convergence.De AKA LinuxTV.Org, AKA DirectFB (a related project is Diet LibC, for the interested).

  LinuxTV.Org also wrote and/or hosts the important (GPL'ed) software for the DVB cards on Linux, both the v4l compatible TV drivers as well as the IP over MPEG ;-) driver. In addition they host a very cool Linux project, named VDR, which makes a harddisk-video recorder out of any linux compatible PC with one ore more DVB card(s).

BTW: see also DirectFB stuff on Freshmeat and for Gods sake, have a look at this amazing GTK+ desktop with full aplpha blending or the "rootless X Server"(1) (2) or "ten MPEG Videos playing at once, blended, without framedrops". You will find their GTK+ patches here and the DVB stuff here

All in all this is perfect for embedded systems and desktop boxes as well as it will be for full blown deksktops. (Linux desktop without X, digital video and audio broadcast based on free and open standards etc.)

I would say that the self service advertising model is one reason it can work.
People who go to the site will advertise on the site.
Look for a combination of google self-serve adwords and what is already going on. at slashdot.

What I would really like to know from both companies, is where the opensource variants of their ad software can be found? Is there software out there that I can use for my own site like this? To let the people who actually use the site become advertisers on the site which in turn will pay for the site?

I looked on freshmeat but came up blank :(

I guess neither google or OSDN want to free their ad software...pity

The tinfoil hat only serves to deliver a false sense of security.

To be truly secure, you need to build your own distribution. You need to understand what is being put on your system, and why. You need to be able to verify that the program that says it edits streams really does that, and does it without any funny business.

I ***know*** what it running on my system. I know this because I built the binaries myself. I know this because I can look at the source code and see what it does. This is the most beautiful feature of open source; the ability to let tinfoil hat wearers like myself have near-total assurance that our systems are running only the code we want them to run.

You don't get to say that if you're running Red Hat or Suse, or Windows or Mac. How do you know that any of these companies haven't been approached by the Feds and forced to include code that compromises your security and privacy?

Admittedly, it's going to be some time before I get to running KDE or Gnome. Of course, I can always install a standard distribution and see what is available today. But I appreciate the ability not to have to trust one of these distributions with my personal data, or my source code.

Actually, I'm still not to the point where I can run XFree86 yet, but EMACS using SVGATextMode on new hardware is so obscenely fast, why should I care? Except when I want to look at naked women.

That's why I have a Mac.

Then how about a network clipboard that enable copy/pase functions between unix/linux/windows PCs?
Once you put something in that clipboard it will be accessable to any machine you want to access it from.

For more information on ROX Desktop, check out the Freshmeat details.

For more information on ROX Desktop, check out the Freshmeat details.

NetInfo exists for the same reason NIS, NYS, YP, etc exist; to centralize system configurations across a network of machines. Things like printer configurations are typically the same in a corporate environment.

NetInfo is actually Open Source. Though I'm not sure how up-to-date it is.

As for /etc... some of those are synchronized from NetInfo, not the other way around. A good number of them are just stub files, but there are a few that do not exist at all in NetInfo at all.

If anyone wishes to add to or improve this code, I'm sure the changes would be welcomed.. I'm no longer maintaining the code but there is a mailing list at the project site which can be posted to.

Linux may already have something similar to this--it appears you can set priorities from 0-99. There are three types available: FIFO, Round Robin, and the old style priority. I don't know much about real time scheduling, so I'm not sure if this it what you wanted or not.

For more info, try man 2 sched_setscheduler, and if you check the kernel syscalls (look in the kernel include files--probably at /usr/include/asm/unistd.h), you'll find that it is an actual Linux system call.

Someone made a little utility called setpriority-check it out at Freshmeat.net. It appears to only be able to set the schedule after the process is started (like renice), but I imagine it would be trivial to make a utility that will run a program with a specific priority set (like nice does)

I don't know where the project's homepage has disappeared to, but here's amorMD2's home on Freshmeat.

Also here

The Files are Here if you'd like them.

or "rf:gaim" to search freshmeat?

I just thought I'd make a correction for people who are not familiar with this (totally freakin' awesome) feature.

rf:gaim - The "rf" is for searching RPMFind.net
fm:gaim - The "fm" is for searching FreshMeat

You can see many more things available to you by going to:

Control Center --> Web Browsing --> Enhanced Browsing

Very cool stuff...

MOSIX 1.5.7 for Linux 2.4.17 (K-MOSIX) is out, according to Freshmeat. Therefore "the last Mosix (1.5.2 for 2.4.13) kernel" seems incorrect.

Okay, the concept is good, but I don't see anyone paying $20k for it. I think we'll see a clone of this on freshmeat.net in about two months.

http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/157

The group I'm in actually have a lot of these practices in place, and life is beautiful for us geeks...

I'll start with the obvious - did you search Google or Freshmeat for Time Reporting solutions?

You don't say how many users you are supporting, but if it's less than ten I have an answer for you. Journyx has a timesheet program that is free for less than ten users. It is commercial software that runs on Windows NT, Windows 2000, AIX, Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD. Annual maintenance (giving you priority tech support)runs $435, within your limit. Pricing beyond 10 users is above your price limit, starting at $1375 for the next 10 users.

They also offer a hosted version of their app, with the following pricing: a minimum purchase bundle of 25 users, a monthly cost of $7 per user, and an initial setup fee of the higher of $250 or $10 per user. I can't tell from your problem description if this will fit your needs or not, as, for example, if you had 25 users this would have an inital cost of $250 and then an ongoing monthly expense of $175, costing $2350 for the first year. There are also online partners running 5- or 10-user hosted sites free, if you have this few users and don't want to run the application in-house.

This is a web-based solution - users would log in to the web page and clock in or out themselves. Reporting capabilities are built-in. The fact that the app is web-based permits you to secure the host and fulfills your requirement that time reporting be secured from end-user tampering.

Katie. It's great.

Except of course that ClearCASE costs money
Actually, I wrote an open-source implementation here (with a few additions: mounting the repository as a filesystem, and a couple of other things as I note them.). Actually, I didn't really "write" it, just cleaned it up a little (besides these additions).. The original "implementation" in open source is just the output of program to turn my reverse engineered bytecode into pretty object code. Then I gave it names and stuff.
NOTE: You can only do this with COPYRIGHTED but UNPATENTED software. You can't circumvent a patent by reimplementing it with different control structures and variable names. You CAN do so with a copyright. If the binary is totally different (based on objectification), then so is the content. (This is the "clean room" reimplementation you sometimes hear about.)

Of course, rather than pirating such software, one should write their own or use free equivalents.

It's working on my laptop.

Install alien if you don't have it yet, then grab lilo.rpm from one of the SUSE mirrors the author of the eye candy pointed out above. I ran "alien lilo.rpm", then "dpkg -i lilo_21.7.5-55_i386.deb" because I wasn't familiar with the alien -i option...

It works, although my text is all squishy right now. It makes me consider getting the Linux Progress Patch (the homepage is currently fallow, it seems) and gdm or xdm just for uninterrupted graphics.

I think it could make my parents go "ooooh."

Well, I've only done a little tinkering, playing with motion, which runs on Linux. I pointed a USB EZCam out the window and recorded a collection of cars passing, pedestrians, and bicyclists. The problem was the low resolution and the poor low-light sensitivity of the camera. I wouldn't want to try identifying anyone with the images. But a better camera should help.

look here
and here

Maybe there is such a beast...take a look.

It's not completely free. You can't get the source.
Read http://freshmeat.net/projects/blender/

--mycr0ft

you did WHAT with gcc 3.1?!?!?!?

no. no no no no no!

you use the STABLE gcc and compile WITHOUT the unstable binary optimizations and you'll have a *far* more stable server environment that will STILL outperform win2k.

ALSO, your allegation about a lack of smp support is flat wrong, as well as the lack of journaled filesystem support; although reiserfs may (i don't remember) not have been in the kernel at that time, it certainly was stable, and if you're smart enough to go jerking around with gcc as you say you did (i'm just gonna assume for the sake of this argument that you did that part correctly) then you certainly should have been smart enough to go to freshmeat to get the reiserfs stuff.

and, btw: i could load any of a number of beta software programs onto a win2k box and have it crashing left and right in short order, without nearly as useful error information at that.

(note to moderators: at least READ the parent post before you mod me down. christ save the linux community from idiots like this.)

Well, I'd just recommend a quick visit at freshmeat's browse by programming language page. There are 3.01 C programs for each Java program. And that's not counting C++, C# and Objective-C, which will make it 4.21 C derivate programs for each java program.

I do agree that the motives he stated are somewhat trivial. My quick statistics are far better. A pity I can't easily count the lines of code, I'd laugh even more of java (of course you must count the real program lines and not the library lines, although they should also be taken in account for greater fairness).

Hugs, Cyclops

For non RPM systems see Libranet and Gentoo Linux

Check out Printbill. It provides a fair way to bill printjobs. Basically, when you print a job, it scans the document and analyzes the amount of ink that is actually used. Then, it charges the user for cost of the ink and the paper. If the user has a sufficient quota to cover the job, it'll print it.

It's designed to be used in a pre-pay system. But it's all in perl, so you could easily hack it to support other methods (i.e. email them a bill at the end of the semester, etc.)

-Andy

MOSIX

There are Open Source variants of these, a few of which I have used as well as some I haven't. Try them out, there are student editions of the commercial packages.

rlab

SciLab

Octave
Euler

Q

Kalamaris
Good luck, perhaps you can review these packages and post a response.

There are Open Source variants of these, a few of which I have used as well as some I haven't. Try them out, there are student editions of the commercial packages.

rlab

SciLab

Octave
Euler

Q

Kalamaris
Good luck, perhaps you can review these packages and post a response.

There are Open Source variants of these, a few of which I have used as well as some I haven't. Try them out, there are student editions of the commercial packages.

rlab

SciLab

Octave
Euler

Q

Kalamaris
Good luck, perhaps you can review these packages and post a response.