Slashdot Mirror

Bounce ya' boobies.

--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

Bounce ya' boobies.

--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

For those of you who are really interested in the history of programming languages:

Donald E. Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo: The Early Development of Programming Languages. In A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, Proceedings of the International Research Conference on the History of Computing. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, June 1976, pp. 197-273. Academic Press 1980, ISBN 0-12-491650-3.

You have to go to a library, actually; the article is not available online. But it pays back with the wonderfull style of DEK.

Online addicts may want to check The historical development of Fortran.

You could do what I do - use Nifty Telnet SSH to scp files around, tarring them from the shell if necessary. It's nowhere near as convenient as mounting a directory remotely, but it is far more secure.

--

Having some tools is illegal in some cases. Try carrying (in the U.S.) some of those tools described in the MIT Guide to Lock Picking without being a licensed locksmith and you will find out quickly enough. So, it would have been better for the MPAA lawyer to have described it as a digital lockpick rather than a digital crowbar. Joe Sixpack has a legitimate use for a crowbar.

Of course, the two most important points in the whole DeCSS/DMCA mess are that (i) I have a legitimate use for DeCSS, in that I would like to play DVDs on my non Win/MacOS Box; and (ii) CSS does not prevent those seeking to violate copyright from making copies of DVDs anyway.

Cheers,

Craig

--

who can post a few links to good Lisp reference sites?

• Association of LISP users : Best place to start browsing
• CMU Common LISP : Best LISP implementation available on Linux
• Common LISP the Language : The language reference for the most commonly used LISP variant
• The Common LISP Hypermedia Server : a big LISP open-source application which is a great thing to download, examine, and learn from

I'd like to point out how bad the I/O is in Lisp

LISP has had highly sophisticated I/O for many decades. This is why it's so widely used in parsers, text processors, editors and so on. The (Common LISP) I/O specification is here.

...and how hard it is to properly handle the myriad possible errors a program has to handle gracefully when working with humans

in fact, of course, LISP has a condition handling system at least as sophisticated as any other language. The specification is here.

Also, most lisp engines I've seen are interpreted (save for things like the Lisp Machine).

Originally LISP was a compiled language. However it is extremely easy to write a LISP interpreter in LISP, so most LISP systems area able to execute both interpreted source and compiled code. Furthermore, interpreted code can call compiled code and vice-versa. Documentation on the Common LISP compiler is here.

Only a few toy LISP systems lack a compiler.

Now this doesn't prevent you from doing very powerful very high level things with Lisp, but for the most part you can do them easier and faster with C

You really never have used the language, have you? If a programming problem can be solved easier by a good C programmer in C than it can by a good LISP programmer in LISP, it wasn't a problem in the first place. For example, I wrote a CASE tool for expert system design in LISP by myself in three months; it took a team of four programmers two years to produce the production C version of the same program.

I'd like to point out how bad the I/O is in Lisp

LISP has had highly sophisticated I/O for many decades. This is why it's so widely used in parsers, text processors, editors and so on. The (Common LISP) I/O specification is here.

...and how hard it is to properly handle the myriad possible errors a program has to handle gracefully when working with humans

in fact, of course, LISP has a condition handling system at least as sophisticated as any other language. The specification is here.

Also, most lisp engines I've seen are interpreted (save for things like the Lisp Machine).

Originally LISP was a compiled language. However it is extremely easy to write a LISP interpreter in LISP, so most LISP systems area able to execute both interpreted source and compiled code. Furthermore, interpreted code can call compiled code and vice-versa. Documentation on the Common LISP compiler is here.

Only a few toy LISP systems lack a compiler.

Now this doesn't prevent you from doing very powerful very high level things with Lisp, but for the most part you can do them easier and faster with C

You really never have used the language, have you? If a programming problem can be solved easier by a good C programmer in C than it can by a good LISP programmer in LISP, it wasn't a problem in the first place. For example, I wrote a CASE tool for expert system design in LISP by myself in three months; it took a team of four programmers two years to produce the production C version of the same program.

I'd like to point out how bad the I/O is in Lisp

LISP has had highly sophisticated I/O for many decades. This is why it's so widely used in parsers, text processors, editors and so on. The (Common LISP) I/O specification is here.

...and how hard it is to properly handle the myriad possible errors a program has to handle gracefully when working with humans

in fact, of course, LISP has a condition handling system at least as sophisticated as any other language. The specification is here.

Also, most lisp engines I've seen are interpreted (save for things like the Lisp Machine).

Originally LISP was a compiled language. However it is extremely easy to write a LISP interpreter in LISP, so most LISP systems area able to execute both interpreted source and compiled code. Furthermore, interpreted code can call compiled code and vice-versa. Documentation on the Common LISP compiler is here.

Only a few toy LISP systems lack a compiler.

Now this doesn't prevent you from doing very powerful very high level things with Lisp, but for the most part you can do them easier and faster with C

You really never have used the language, have you? If a programming problem can be solved easier by a good C programmer in C than it can by a good LISP programmer in LISP, it wasn't a problem in the first place. For example, I wrote a CASE tool for expert system design in LISP by myself in three months; it took a team of four programmers two years to produce the production C version of the same program.

Nah. The standard rules of C++ could be amended to deal with these new types. After all the +- operator already work on:
char, short, int, long - all signed or unsigned and T* where T is a type.
Other strongly typed languagesw such as Pascal already behave in this way, so it is possible to make it work.

Isn't it funny that all the while C* programmers have been tripping over themselves and shooting themselves in the foot with C*'s easily obfuscated syntax, Pascal programmers have been able to enjoy extensions to the language that effectively cancelled all objections given against Pascal?

So, you have a group of people still untangling their spaghetti-pointers and memory leaks, whilst the other have been concentrating on their *REAL* job, programming?

--

Maybe it would help to add context-sensitive pulldown object type menus to the UML objects in Dia. Make the objects so only the proper kinds can connect and restrict the selection to relevant types?

C and C++ have had this for years.

Here's a link.

Dancin Santa

Also, I may be a dying breed, but I like pinball and I can't play the new pinball machines anywhere but at an arcade. There, at least, is a market (tiny as it is) that consoles can't usurp.

Um, I hate to be the one to tell you, but pinball isn't just dying. It's dead. Sega bailed out of the market. Capcom bailed out of the market. Even Bally/Williams has bailed out. The only company left making pins is Stern, and I've never actually seen a machine from them. (At least, not one made since they restarted the pinball division after Williams shut down.)

Yeah, it sucks. I was a programmer at Capcom Coin-Op (the pinball division) when the axe fell. I love pinball, but let's face it: From an operator's perspective it's a nightmare. The machines are expensive; they have a ton of moving parts which can break; they need constant maintenance (cleaning the playfield can be a bitch!); and they really only serve a niche market of hardcore fans.

Sigh. At least I have a Big Bang Bar in my basement to go play when I'm feeling depressed about the whole thing...

Yes, we here in Sweden are probably going to fold under pressure. But atleast we made a good stand.
Some years ago, there was a lot of turbulence when Zenon Panoussis was in court with the Church of Scientology (Actually a real interresting read). Using a law here in Sweden: offentlighets principen, he handed in the texts. An action that resulted in that the text went accessible to everyone.

After realizing this CoS's laywers tried to make a change in our Grundlag (I.e think constitution). A laywer with that attitude, is very hard to stop, and is bound to have a lot of resources. But if the Netherlands can make a stand for it... then I will be proud of you.

A ruling like this has a chilling effect on free speech.

We need this concept in the U.S., but without this latest court ruling.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/(print)/nordic/div/offen tlighet.html

But the other part is: the right, whomever it may be, to anonymously and without giving any reason, immediately and on the spot read public papers in courts and agencies of the municipalities and the state, and to get copies, and publish them, irrespective of the wishes of the original author.
3rd paragraph

So we can read DECSS code into swedish public record and make it "officially" legal (again), as well as PGP code, proprietary source code to broken authentication algorythms (MSKerberos anyone?)

Of course, this depends on your definition of "public", because if it's already public, then it's presumeably already in the public domain...but this is worth considering.

Imagine reciting the lyrics to "oops - I did it again" with the defense that it is a public document of record in Sweden.

• One-pixel polygons are good. Perhaps not in yesteryear's games, which feature huge flat surfaces, but various forms of higher-order surfaces with curves are definitely the trend today. Pixar render their movies using subdivision surfaces tesselated until each polygon is less than one pixel in the final image. We want that.
• Multi-pass rendering is good. Many effects in games are achieved by rendering each pixel more than one time. 3dfx realized this back with the Voodoo2, and added support for multiple textures per pixel. That is good, because it allows you to send a triangle to the hardware once, but get it textured twice. This saves one pass of geometry transform. As soon as an effect requires an additional pass, that reduces your effective polygon throughout quite a lot, of course. So, my point is that even though it might sound excessive based on simple "# of pixels on screen" arguments, huge polygon and pixel fillrates are good, because they allow more passes and thereby more flexibility and coolness in effects.

KDE comes with so many other good programs as well, like KNode (News reader) and KMail (lightweight email program)... Does GNOME have any comparable programs?

Errr... yes! Pan is probably the best free newsreader for any platform, Evolution is an incredibly well-integrated mail, calender and addressbook program, and Balsa is a very decent more lightweight mail reader. For office programs, Gnumeric is way more advanced than KSpread, Guppi (still in CVS) is one of the only serious free graphical data analysis tools, GnuCash is very polished, and Dia rocks. Graphically, Sodipodi is shaping up very nicely, gPhoto rules, and the GIMP integrates better with a GNOME environment than with KDE. And then there's XMMS (the best mp3/ogg/mpeg/divx Linux player), Grip (the best CD player/ripper combo) and GStreamer for multemedia; there's GnomeICU, Gabber, Gaim and X-Chat for messaging; there's Gnapster for file-sharing; and there's more useful utilities (e.g. Bug Buddy), system utilities (e.g. Red Carpet), and panel applets than you could shake a stick at. And I know I've missed out quite a few more (Gnome-DB, Oregano and Dr. Genius have just spring to mind - and, yes, Galeon, which rocks and is now my primary browser). In other words, GNOME is hardly short on applications.

If anything, I've often found it to be the other way round. While Konqueror rules, and KWord is much better featured than AbiWord (though I personally dislike the interface), I think where KDE usually excels is in the underlying desktop core, rather than the applications. But that's just my opinion.

PS Sorry for ranting.

I made no such claim of perfection - you read that into my post.

My apologies then.

I agree with you to some extent that the US constitution has probably influenced other constitutions. But the US constitution in turn was clearly inspired by other constitutions as well. Many good constitutions are significantly older. While not all of them (and associated laws) included what we today consider basic rights from the start, they laid the groundwork. And modern democracy is really quite young, in any nation. For example, many modern nations did not have universal suffrage until well into the 20th century. (1921 in Sweden and 1947 in the US.)

The Swedish constitutions or "grundlagar" (they are actually four) date back to the 14th century, and many basic principles of democracy have been part of those constitutions for hundreds of years. Two examples are the freedom of press (prohibition of censorship, etc) and offentlighetsprincipen that were both made part of the constitutions of Sweden in 1766, ie 22 years before the US constitution was drafted. The offentlighetsprincip deserves special attention, since it probably has nothing quite comparable in other constitutions except the Finnish. It guarantees access to most documents and communication at courts, govermental agencies and institutions.

That principle was reason for a dispute with the US Congress a few years ago (acting on behalf of lobby groups with no real national interest in the issue) when Swedish authorities published the Bible of Scientology and made copies available to anyone in the world. It all began after a citizen began sending the Bible to parliament, courts and other institutions. Letters of protest sent by a US congressman and a US commerce agency spokesman also became public, much to their surprise and dismay. All these texts automatically became public according to the constitution, there was no way around it. The principle has been the cause of many politicians' fall, since the media routinely browse new documents and find out things they otherwise would not have.

For more info about the Swedish constitution:
ICL - Swedish Constitution
The Finnish-Swedish Offentlighetsprincipen (s.c.nordic FAQ-related texts)

For more (but partly outdated) information about the very fascinating Scientology case in Sweden, these sites are recommended:

Failed US pressure on Sweden
Zenon vs CoS - the A.R.S. Posts
Operation Clamblake: Zenon Panoussis vs. Cult of Scientology

Moving on to the federal constitution of Switzerland, it is admittedly significantly younger (from 1848, although its democratic traditions are quite old and direct democracy has been an integral part of the country's history for some time. In my opinion, the Swiss constitution is the best overall, despite that the democracy comes with a price: slow decision making.

If anyone wants more info about the Swiss constitution, I whole-heartedly recommend the book "The Referendum - Direct Democracy in Switzerland" by US political scientist, professor Kris Kobach. The following URL can also be useful:

Global Ideas Bank - Exporting the Swiss constitution
ICL - Swiss Constitution

Whoa. I'm there, dude.

I figured back in 1993 or so, after thirteen years of:

10 hack
20 slash
30 goto 10

Hey, what if all these people and monsters acted like people do in real life? I decided that my campaign world would probably have a lot more sex, dope smoking and petty theft than cataclysmic battles between the forces of light and darkness. Witness the divine fire of creation in my artwork! Or something.

some artwork

You know, I think the parent thread will inspire me to finish the damn thing.

Also, RDBMS vendors will likely always use assembly. The locking code for an RDBMS needs to operate in fewer than 100 instructions to guarantee the possibility of concurrency -- and that includes deadlock detection. Furthermore, the "latches", or internal locks on the buffer pool, etc., must execute in under 10 instructions.

Assembly language is important, especially since highly-optimized C code is faster than unoptimized C code by a factor of 5 or more. How do you think that those optimizations get into the compiler? Sure, no one writes applications -- or even, at this point, games -- in assembly, but today's processors are so complex that

• You NEED to hand-optimize some speed-critical things
• A simple syntax-directed translation scheme is more inadequate than ever for today's compilers -- if you're writing compilers, you really get to worry about speed.

..but the reality is that he's selectivly enforcing his invalid trademark (check the trademark db if you don't believe me). And he's doing this enforcement against the product that's **gasp** putting him out of business. If he really wanted to protect the (tm), he would need to go after:

O SSH
TTSSH
NiftySSH
MacSSH
Java-SSH
TGssh
sshCE
An OpenVSM project called just SSH
SSH-OS2
...

and, well, you get the point. He's just going after OpenSSH because they're beating him in the market. And not only does he have no legal leg to stand on, but he's being a real slime by only going after the successfull one. Theo would be right to tell hime where to stick his lawyers.

Three words:
Ben Bova "CyberBooks"

Probably the best site for Mac tools/utlities is versiontracker.com. Try Nifty Telnet, I found this to be the "best" for the Mac. There's also a Nifty SSH client as well. If you want to do tracerouters, PINGs, etc... try What Router

Alex just posted another screenshot to gtk-devel-list. This one is of dia, and is a little more interesting then the ones above.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/files/diafb.png

Did you really look at the screenshots before posting this? Take a look at the anti-aliasing of the fonts, rendering of Hebrew and Arabic characters, bi-directional text and other features. I honestly do not think that some other toolkit has been doing this for ages... (anti-aliasing yes, BiDi no)

Another minor point: Qt/Embedded is released under the GPL (or Qt Professional Edition license), while GtkFB is released under the LGPL. This makes a big difference if you want to develop a commercial application. This difference can be better or worse, depending on your point of view.

Yes, it is a hack.

What you have to remember is that not all hacks are related to software.

This is a hardware hack, just like taking an old Amiga 1200 and making it into a portable computer system.

Please don't be so narrowminded as to assume that hacking requires that you code. Hacking merely requires that you do something that transcends ordinary thinking... Like Al Gore hacking the Florida election process...

NannyMUD used to have a six-dimensional maze in a Discworld-themed area done by Profezzorn. The maze was set in a 2x2x2x2x2x2 "cube" where the possible directions of travel were north/south, east/west, up/down, meta-north/meta-south, meta-east/meta-west, and meta-up/meta-down. The "goal" of the maze was to locate the one room out of the 64 that was not accessible and then use a one-shot device for destroying the wall. Conceptually, the way I envisioned the maze was as 8 separate 2x2x2 cubes. Each time I moved in a meta direction, it was as if I teleported to a different cube, while retaining my same spatial coordinate. I also named each cube using an ordered triple of its meta-coordinate. So the initial cube was (0,0,0). If I went 'meta-up', I was in the cube identified as (0,0,1), and so forth.

NannyMUD used to have a six-dimensional maze in a Discworld-themed area done by Profezzorn. The maze was set in a 2x2x2x2x2x2 "cube" where the possible directions of travel were north/south, east/west, up/down, meta-north/meta-south, meta-east/meta-west, and meta-up/meta-down. The "goal" of the maze was to locate the one room out of the 64 that was not accessible and then use a one-shot device for destroying the wall. Conceptually, the way I envisioned the maze was as 8 separate 2x2x2 cubes. Each time I moved in a meta direction, it was as if I teleported to a different cube, while retaining my same spatial coordinate. I also named each cube using an ordered triple of its meta-coordinate. So the initial cube was (0,0,0). If I went 'meta-up', I was in the cube identified as (0,0,1), and so forth.

Whenever anyone asks me for a hosting recommendation, I always recommend Seagull.

No, Seagull is not an ISP. While it would be nice to have a secure ISP, you're better off using any random joker for your ISP, owning your own domain name so you can relocate it in the event your service tanks (I discuss this in Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants) and accessing the hosting service via SSH and SCP (secure copy). Note that it does no good to only use SSH - you have to use SCP as well.

Here's a sample SCP command line, in case you can't figure it out, it's very simple but I had a hard time from the man page:

scp foo.bar crawford@www.goingware.com:.

The above places file foo.bar in the home directory of user crawford on www.goingware.com.

scp crawford@www.goingware.com:web/index.html stash

This copies index.html from directory "web" on www.goingware.com and places it in directory "stash" on the local machine.

Please read my web page on Why You Should Use Encryption

Besides being a good service, it's a small enough company to offer personal service. I've sent support email to the webmaster at 2am his time and had the problem fixed and the mail answered within the hour.

But even though it's a small service, it's not a low-quality service. They have high-performance machines, they are in a good colo facility with a high-speed connection to the backbone, they upgrade their service regularly and the webmaster, Paul Celestin, is just a damn nice guy.

I'm not sure if he still publishes it but Celestin used to produce a CDROM full of useful free source code for the Macintosh. Some of my own Mac open-source programs were on it.

These are the sites I personally have located there:

• http://www.goingware.com/ - My consulting company, GoingWare Inc. My livelihood depends on the reliability of this site.
• http://www.wordservices.org/ - Seagull hosts this public-service site for free in exchange for me placing a small banner ad on some of the pages
• http://www.geometricvisions.com/

I have a couple tips for you on checking email. I use PGP when I'm trying to be secure, but it's really not that much that I really care for complete security. But I just don't like people snooping on me, mostly I think it's none of their damn business what's in my mailbox even if it's spam.

So mostly I read my email at seagull using elm while logged in via SSH, and when my mailbox gets big, I move it to my home directory and copy it to my home machine via SCP:

goingware$ cp /usr/spool/mail/crawford ~

goingware$ echo "" /usr/spool/mail/crawford

back on my home machine:

C> pscp crawford@www.goingware.com:crawford .

It is also possible to download your email via POP with SSH via port forwarding. I describe this on the BeOS Tip Server. It doesn't seem to be responding right now but if you go to its search and enter "ssh" you'll find the tip I submitted called something like "Secure email download via ssh". The instructions have some BeOS specific items but most of what's there will work on any systems.

Don't have SSH? Try one of these:

• Nifty Telnet/SSH for Macintosh - includes a graphical SCP client!
• putty for Windows (also supports NT/Alpha) and pscp for secure copy
• CygWin - a GNU environment for Win32 - use bash, compile with GCC, a lot of linux code builds right out of the box in Cygwin
• The Secure Shell Community Site
• SSH Communications Security (commercial)

Dia is another open source visio replacement. I never used it for network diagrams, but it has the capability. You can get it at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia /di a.html

cristiana

annotated http://socrates.clarke.edu/aplg0150.htm

lynx friendly http://www.knuten.liu.se/~bjoch509/works/plato/eut hyphro.txt

down, drive failure http://classics.mit.edu/

I really like the IMHO webmail system.
I use it both at work, and on my home system.
The install is a snap, configuration is easy, and it has a lot of nice features (spellchecker, LDAP directories, etc).

The only real thing that I think some people might see as a disadvantage is that you have to be running Roxen to use it
(I see this as an advantage, but I really like Roxen).
--

I use IMHO to do pretty much what you describe: One box running IMAP that I either access from a normal client, or via the web mail interface. It works great for me.
Plus, I can keep an eye on the security of my mail, and be (reasonably) sure that no one is snooping around.
--

Hm. You mentioned Pascal, and the entire thread is about an interview with Brian Kernighan. I think that makes this link fantastically topical. It's a paper/writeup/whatever by BWK, entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language". Being from April, 1981, it's quite dated, but it shows how to bash stuff in style. A good read. ;^)

A few hints can be found in various code style guides, but the only way to learn to write good code and comments is to read good and bad examples of other people's code, and to practice.

Actually, you can interchange KDE and GNOME applications if you have both the QT and GTK libraries installed. For example, I can run Dia or Gimp whilst using KDE. Hell, I have run KDE applications using FVWM.

Your comment is a common misconception about the power of the X windows environment. If you want to know why, read this page.

--

1) Lego Mindstorms...
2) Games games games...
3) Simulation...
4) Simple AI...


That reminds me: I think that having a class-wide RealTimeBattle competition would be awesome. RealTimeBattle kind of incorporates all of these four elements: you have a computer-simulated robot that competes with other computer-simulated robots in a simulated world where they (what else?) try to blow each other up. Really easy to make a dumb robot, really hard to make a great robot. I have always thought that RTB would be a great way to suck kids into liking CS.

IIRC, RTB is GPLed but currently only runs on Linux. On the other hand, the robots can be written in anything (server spawns child processes and talks to them via stdin/stdout) and I bet it wouldn't be too much of a trick to write a "wrapper" robot that ran on Linux and just forwarded requests and responses over a TCP connection, so the robots themselves could be running on a Windows or Mac box.
--
-jacob

What if we put our opposition to your viewpoint this way: It is possible to shape clay into a brick, and the vast majority of all bricks are not really works of art. But this does not mean that all acts of shaping clay are necessarily lacking in creativity.

In the same sense, a great deal of source code is not terribly artful. But, so are exquisite expressions of ideas or arguments that are difficult to express as well by any other means. I think there are probably more of these than many people realize. My favorite example is Duff's Device. Duff's Device is an answer to the argument that there is never any good reason to depart from some religious ideals about coding. The code used to express Duff's Device is the argument in its most concise form. The device is typically shown as:

send(to, from, count)
register short *to, *from;
register count;
{

• register n=(count+7)/8;
• 
  switch(count%8){
  case 0: do{ *to = *from++;
  • case 7: *to = *from++;
  • 
    case 6: *to = *from++;
    case 5: *to = *from++;
    case 4: *to = *from++;
    case 3: *to = *from++;
    case 2: *to = *from++;
    case 1: *to = *from++;
    }while(--n>0);
  }

Understanding why this is significant involves a long standing controversy about programming style. The controversy itself is not important, here. What is important is that Duff's Device does provoke thought and some strong emotions amoung people involved in the controversy.

Adrian

There are some solar sails among the images i have at Elfwood.

Like Captain Poppins kite and the U.N. solarsail 'Chinook'. Please check them out and leave me a comment or two. Maybe my images are good enough for NASA, if that is the case then feel free to give me a job... ;)

There are other pictures in the gallery too... :)

There are some solar sails among the images i have at Elfwood.

Like Captain Poppins kite and the U.N. solarsail 'Chinook'. Please check them out and leave me a comment or two. Maybe my images are good enough for NASA, if that is the case then feel free to give me a job... ;)

There are other pictures in the gallery too... :)

There are some solar sails among the images i have at Elfwood.

Like Captain Poppins kite and the U.N. solarsail 'Chinook'. Please check them out and leave me a comment or two. Maybe my images are good enough for NASA, if that is the case then feel free to give me a job... ;)

There are other pictures in the gallery too... :)

For those of you interested there are movies and pictures of the machines at here.

http://www.ifm.liu.se/Applphys/ConjPolym/research/ micromuscles/CPG_micromuscles.html

http://www.ifm.liu.se/Applphys/ConjPolym/research/ micromuscles/CPG_micromuscles.html

http://www.ifm.liu.se/Applphys/ConjPolym/research/ micromuscles/CPG_micromuscles.html

"free/legal clients for Mac and Windows."

Putty for Windows

and

NiftyTelnet 1.1 SSH for the Mac.

I've used both and they work well

For MacOS, there's NiftyTelnetSSH, which includes SCP support. (and decent, fast terminal emulation, unlike NCSA telnet.)

All these programs are gratis, but NiftyTelnet might not be libre. (PuTTY and pscp are.)

For Unix, of course, there's OpenSSH.

For VMS, there's an FAQ, which recommends a server and a client.
#define X(x,y) x##y

There's always the option of buying, or in my case (with a limited budget) build a sound-absorbing box and put the case inside it. I have a description of my box here: http://www2.lysator.liu.se/~f orsberg/silence_box.html It works quite well. I have a Dual PIII-450 with a 7200 IBM SCSI disk in there. And a Riva TNT board.. I use to have a small "daemon" running that checks the temp and shuts the machine down but usually it doesn't have to.