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Maybe you don't, but I certainly do. Not everything of course, but in my experience there are a lot of people who look at and learn from the source code of a package, just for fun. They won't actively develop or even provide a little patch, but they look at the source nevertheless.

I've experienced this on several occasions, once when looking at Snort (an intrusion detection system) and more recently when looking at TOra (a database client). In both cases when I asked questions on the developer list, people replied who were not active developers but just had a go scrolling through the source to see what it was doing.

I find TOra to be very good.
Its aimed more at Oracle, but will work wth MySQL and PostreSQL.
I use it mainly for inputting and modifying data in a sensible way.

Is here

Do you need sophisticated, automated input? Use sqlloader. Need sophisticated, automated output? Use rman. Need sophisticated, automated schema management? Use sqlplus.

Oracle comes with gobs of very powerful tools, and sqlplus is just not designed to do what you think it should be doing. It seems like you are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's like complaining that climbing a fire escape is hard when you live on the third flool. Use the stairs.

BTW, if your doing SW development with oracle, use tora(free) or toad($$$). Both these tools make poking around and doing arbitrary queries a snap. Or, take your pick of the thousands of jdbc-based apps that live on sourceforge.

I mean, if you want to use Windows applications, just install the Windows that came free with your computer. For the cost of Win4Lin or Wine, you can get a whole nother hard drive to dedicate to Windows, and it will be fully compatible.

Yes, but that means you have to dual boot... I stopped doing that a decade ago. It was a PITA, and you lose state -- if I'm working on something in one window, and need to work on something else, I shouldn't need to reboot. I often leave 3-4 windows up with development stuff (code, running programs, log files, etc) while going off to do other stuff. If I have to reboot in order to do "other stuff" then I have to quit out of any files I'm editing, close all my windows, and reboot... odds are I won't remember precisely where I was in the coding cycle when I come back to it unless those windows are still present.

It would be even worse if the documentation for the project (largely in Word docs, some in a wiki) meant I had to reboot everytime I wanted to view the latest copy.

Dual booting is a kludge IMO.

On a related note, how come there are no Linux emulators for Windows? Is it because Windows has better alternatives to any Linux program, or is there some sort of GPL patent issue?

Nice troll.

It's because the Linux/Unix/POSIX APIs are clearly documented and well known (which is not true for the Windows libraries). In fact, Windows uses most of the very same system calls. Many Linux programs are portable and can be compiled not only on other Unix systems, but also on Windows. Cygwin is a port of the basic Unix libraries and a boatload of Unix utilities, along with an X/Windows Server, to Windows... there are also cross-compilable graphics toolkits like Qt that help in porting graphical apps.

The better bit is particularly funny... the best Oracle client I've used is TOra, which was originally developed for Linux and cross-compiled to Windows. The best MP3 tagger I've found is EasyTag, only available on Unix systems. Most of the better programming tools are Unix oriented, with backports to Windows (if ported at all).

Song groups and playlists Many MP3 players include playlists to permit a collection of songs to be played as a whole. Plenty go further and permit the contents of a playlist to be played in random order. GJukebox improves on this through the use of song groups. When selecting songs at random, Jukebox can be set to include songs in certain groups exclusively, non-exclusively or to exclude songs from a group. When organizing your songs you simply create groups to contain for example, Jazz and Blues. You can then play just Jazz, just Blues, both or neither ( ie everything else ). Instead of forcing you to tell the Jukebox explicitly what you want to hear, you can use the groups to define moods and occasions. It's simple, logical and powerful.

Take a look at Globecom Jukebox. It's pretty simple to set up, and can handle streaming the audio out to client machines. It can also be plugged into a stereo and controlled via a web interface. Of course it also handles ripping, CDDB, audio CD's, pretty much everything you'd expect from a $2000 box, except they aren't charging for it. :)