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Mldonkey and using the option to use port 80 would solve your problem, I'd guess...

How well are these new implementations interoperating with the reference implementation?
And do you cooperate on the protocol design with those developers?

Check out GTKtalog. Not only does it do catalogs, it also uses file and other such utilities to save more info about the files - MP3 tags/bitrates, etc. It also will look inside of archives like .tar.gz, rpm, .zip, so you can search for a file inside of the archive. It's been very useful for cataloging my MP3 CD's and download archives.

Bayesian filtering could stop all the spam that easily? This is great! Where can I download a filter like this?

You can try bogofilter, ifile, SpamBayes, or POPFile. The newer versions of SpamAssassin also implement some kind of Bayesian filtering.

There are no toy languages, only toy programmers ;)

I'm sorry-- excuse me? What client are we talking about here? For Windows, EMule isn't harder to use than your average other file sharing app and with LMule you'll have this GUI available on Linux. I even find compiling/installing mldonkey to be a breeze and that one even supports BitTorrent now!

I also don't see how BitTorrent would be technically superior to ed2k, were it not that people say BitTorrent is blazingly fast, while edonkey is kind of slot (but downloads always complete). There are also many sites that put up ed2k links.

I've said this before...

W3C cames up with XForms - The Next Generation of Web Forms in 2002, but XForms - a GUI toolkit for X has existed for a long time (initially here).

Indeed. I just recently fully migrated from my abominable Hotmail address to my POP3. I can't believe how bad Hotmail's gotten, between popups, appending service ads to your outgoing mail, changing their login screen to be full of (guess what) ads, and not letting you correctly apply your own spam filters.

Agreed. I've been a hotmail user since the pre-Microsoft days, but now use another account. However you can forward mail easily using Gotmail if you want to keep an eye on it.

For example, one of its features is the ability to read headlines from news sources such as Slashdot. While its nice to see the headlines right on your desktop, how useful is it? If you want to read the whole story you have to fire up a browser anyways to read it. So whats the point?

The point is that, instead of reloading the Slashdot home page all day, you only have to fire up your browser when you see a headline that piques your interest.

I've never used Karamba, but I find RSS news aggregators (for example, Straw or Netnewswire) quite useful in this regard.

Protux moved to http://www.nongnu.org/protux/.

Extrapolating my rate of progress it should be done in about three hundred years.

Check out the FCP. The project is really at a stand still right now, but interest breeds progress.

-Peter

Thanks, I really appreciate the freenet link... When freenet works, it's SO much better. downloading now, hopefully it'll find the blocks too. :P

Also an edonkey link here.

Not my share, so no guarantees.

For *nix, there's at least Lmule and Mldonkey to get a hold of it.

Try MLDonkey. Completely open code, runs on virtually all kinds of P2P networks/hardware/operating systems. Even works well on PPC/Linux! ;)

Tiger it is not a logchecker, nor it focused in integrity analysis. It does "the other stuff", it checks the system configuration and status.

Just read the manpage (and it's not fully up to date, i.e, it does not include the new checks). I bet you will be surprised. For example, it has a module that can determine which network servers you are running are using deleted files (because you patched the libraries through a package upgrade but the server was not restarted).

As for system security checks that Tiger provides that others do not you can read this (short) comparison.

I do not know about all the Asian languages - but I am actively involved in the Indian language scenario, and I would try to answer your questios from that perspective.
1. We cannot do anything inthe text mode, as text mode only supports "fixed width" fonts. This won't do for Indian languages. However, some developers have tried to modify the kernel and other hacks, but the results are not very interesting.
2. Fonts are a real bottleneck. We cannot work with plain old TTF fonts - we use a new format called OpenType (search microsoft.com). That adds a lot of complications - and usually each font works with one language. For example, you may check ot http://www.nongnu.org/freebangfont which works with Bangla (the 4th largest language in the world in terms of the number of people speaking it). I am the coordinator of this project - and working on this can be really troublesome.
Recently, there has been proposals on a grand unified Indian font - let's see what happens.
3. Hardcoded software has to be changed - nothing doing - no alternative way exists.
4. Input method (IM) is yet another problem as a result of lack of proper well publicised standards. X has a fairly good Input mechanism - and GTK2 has one of its own too. You are free to choose whichever you want to use.

Actually, if you set-up a Linux workstation/firewall running mlDonkey, you can use the web interface to search and initiate the download. Find your ISO's, MP3's, almost anything. It lets you connect to a variety of P2P protocols too.

W3C cames up with XForms - The Next Generation of Web Forms in 2002, but
XForms - a GUI toolkit for X has existed for a long time (initially here).

Cg is not an API, it is a programming language. It compiles to Direct3D and OpenGl. As for proprietary GL extensions, ATi has EXT_VERTEX_SHADER and ATI_FRAGMENT_SHADER.

Hm.... that's true in some sense. I mean, the user/group creation is done via a cronjob; it's not manual, but it's not immediate, either. I suppose you could set the cronjob to run every 5 minutes, but there would still be a lag.

I haven't used the LDAP code, so I can't speak to that...

Yours,

Tom

I am working on a library to help newer programmers get started with programming. The first section uses something like turtle graphics, but it is all written in and controlled with python and pygame. The first game is pong. There are also a bunch of demos and a couple of other games with the distribution. It is available at: http://www.nongnu.org/pygsear/

Sounds like MLDonkey where the client has plugins for edonkey2000, overnet, direct connect, gnutella, soulseek, and opennap networks. The gui is seperated from the core so you can run it on a server and check up on it via the web, telnet, or some other gui.

then you're not doing enough. for instance, yesterday's reason for continuing to run linux was rdiff-backup (note: this "solution" doesn't work)

Well, it's still not possible for me to access those distributed objects from the command line.

Well, in fact you can query them, but in general if you're poking objects from the command line this is more a case of scripting IPC than objects.

Talking with a few GNOME developers, it seems that something this simple, this useful, is still not possible in GNOME (Please, correct me if it is! I hate being misinformed).

If the media player exposed a CORBA/Bonobo object (i believe rhythmbox does), and if there was a bash "poke me" CORBA client (i don't think there is), then there'd be nothing really stopping you. But CORBA isn't so hot for DCOP style simple scripting - the recent threads on desktop-devel-list contain more about that.

As far as the 'distributed' nature of CORBA: Can you show me how to take advantage of this?

By distributed, I don't necessarily mean distributed between different physical computers. If you look at DCOM on Windows, it's most often used to marshal calls between different processes or threading contexts. It's rarely, if ever, used for network transparency. But as the technologies are practically identical.....

The language-neutrality I'll give you, but in response to that: How many useful Bonobo parts are being implemented in Python? How about ruby? Or Perl? Or maybe Smalltalk, or Java? No? Why are they all in C, if the language doesn't matter? (Again, correct me if I'm wrong - but I've yet to see a Bonobo part implemented in C++, let alone any scripting language.)

Most stuff in GNOME is C, because C is easy and that's what the developers know and like (just like, why is the media play in KDE in c++, when really that kind of thing is better off in python imo).

There aren't any Bonobo objects defined in Python (although there are some used) as far as I'm aware, simply because the GNOME CORBA efforts are seriously starved of manpower. It's a technology with much potential, after all, look at DCOM/ActiveX on Windows, which is very similar in ideas, but little usage. Partly that's due to it being complex, and due to lack of good working documentation. I only "got" CORBA after reading an (old) Bonobo/Python tutorial. I realised how easy it was to load and use objects, without having to care what they were written in. It was COM, but for Linux, and better! Unfortunately, the hill it has to climb for general acceptance is too steep. Eventually I'll let go, and realise that politically we probably have to start again with a neutral solution. We'd end up reimplementing CORBA under a different name, and it wouldn't be standards-based, but maybe it'd be better as well.

I'd note that a bigger problem is lack of good dependancy management. I'm firmly of the opinion that most desktop apps should be written in Python/Ruby/C# - not C++ nor C. The main problem is that for instance, Straw, an RSS reader using the GNOME/GTK python bindings, has a list of dependancies that is positively scary. The GNOME parts aren't so bad, but it needs bindings for all kinds of wierd database libraries and so on that have to be built separately. So, many people don't use it, cos they can't install it. That's one thing I'm trying to work on. Objects would have the same problem.

In short, I find that the KDE technology gives us flexibility that we don't see in GNOME, and it works plenty fast enough for our uses, while also being easily accessible to new developers.

Partly that's because KDE is C++ only. I think these C vs C++ arguments are pretty silly, neither of them are all that great for desktop apps, even games! Try frozen-bubble. It's written in Perl/SDL. Easy peasy.

How long do you suppose it takes a new GNOME developer to get up-to-speed on using ORBit?

Much longer, but it's apples and oranges. You can use CORBA to do DCOP style scripting, and also distributed (ie process/network-transparent) objects. You can't really use DCOP for such objects, not without huge, enormous pain. The whole DBUS vs CORBA thread in gnome is about that distinction.

Yep, a while back they fixed the problem with over 250K messages hanging the milter. It is quite solid in my experience.

I'm running Debian 3.0, sendmail 8.12.3-4, spamassassin 2.50, and spamass-milter 0.1.3a.

Incidently, has anyone rolled Nethack into Emacs yet?

Working on it: nethack-el, currently alpha state software.

Plex86 Virtual Machine

I was just reading about this one today before this article was posted. Which one is the real plex86?

Some folks think that MMOGs are the next generation of MUDs, but I think not.

MMOGs are the AOL of the internet - a prepackaged, lowest-common-denominator experience. That's the economics of paying for the bandwidth and paying for the servers - you need so many customers. Because of that, MMOGs are simply not going to be as challenging as the single-player games in difficulty, but are still not going to allow everyone to complete the game. What will be challenging for the 10 hour a day player will be impossible for the 10 hour a week or month player.

The MUDs were so great because of the connection between community and the creators of the content - often there was overlap.

There are some open-source mmog projects (mmog open-server) and Nel. There is some hope of community-driven content in mmog gaming. Of course, there is also, NeverWinterNights, which although proprietary, still is really taking off in terms of its community and its player-created content.

Some nice folks at Stanford are also creating a different flavor of network backup called rdiff-backup. I'll just plagiarize the description from the homepage:

rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership (if it is running as root), and modification times. Finally, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted.

The homepage also links to a project called duplicity, which operates on a similar principle, but uses GnuPG to encrypt data to prevent spying/modification.

Why does no-one ever mention ifile? They seem to have been doing this for quite some time (since 1996?) and have a neat trick for avoiding all those boring "training" steps (you tell ifile how to classify messages by moving them into the folder you think they should be in).

You should check out the book I'm writing - Programming from the Ground Up - http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/

>They're planning to release open API's, anyone can create their own objects and sell/share them, create new parts of There for themselves and other.. once you start doing that, the 'Metaverse' moniker starts to stick.

It remains to be seen how "open" the APIs will be. And most importantly, under what license...

At my new company (Mekensleep) we are working on something quite similar to "There", except that the engine we are using, called NeL, has already been released under the GNU GPL.
In addition to our new -still secret! ;)- project, NeL is being used in my previous company's MMORPG: Ryzom (see here for more screenshots..

>I find it hard to believe so many of them would back it to the tune of $33 million if they didn't see a heckuva lot more potential in this than just another virtual chat room.

On the other hand, I vividly remember how much money was burned on idiotic business plans during the .com era.
So I think I can safely say that the amount of money invested in a company is not necessarily the best way to measure the quality of its project...

The GPL arial is not as bad if you look...

freefont-ttf.tar.gz

Jamie.

I kinda assumed that the mathematical definition of volume is consistent, regardless of the dimensional propreties of the object in question. If not, I think our heads could start hurting even more ;)

1. Bengali - www.bengalinux.org, www.nongnu.org/freebangfont, www.banglapenguin.org
2. Hindi - www.indlinux.org

Mod parent up. Mldonkey is a client for the eDonkey network, which is really good. There are also compiled OS X binaries available. It's not as good as the windows client eMule, though (hoping for a Mac OS port soon!).

Kevin Lawton got fired from Madrake (?) a couple years ago, and plex86 has been dead ever since.

It still exists here

(there is also a free project similar to vmware, called plex86, I think).
Plex was dead, man. But long live plex! It had the goal of replacing VMWare, but Kevin Lawton lost his job at Mandrake, I believe, and it was orphaned for about a year, but it is now being developed by Rivnphnx at savannah.
Hope it gets on its feet again! Dan

www.plex86.org sends a 404. And plex86's Savannah project page doesn't show much sign of activity. Is it moribund? Dead? How did it compare with vmware at its last sign of life?

Is BOCHS smart enough to let the host machine run the non-privledged instructions if the host happens to be an x86 chip?

No, Bochs is a pure interpreter. A less mature project that attempts to do this is Plex86, and a commercial alternative is VMWare.

Try mldonkey , it's a linux client for the edonkey/emule network. Works for me.

Still dosent support PS/2 mice!

AND IM NOT JOKING EITHER!

This hits particularly close to home for me -- I developed a Linux game for a class this semester, and one thing I had to throw out was 3d audio, because there's piss-poor 3d audio support on Linux. Don't get me wrong -- I love Linux, and chose not to work on Windows -- but I had to throw out a feature that would have been relatively easy to do with DirectX.

The entire state of Linux sound support is somewhere between "bad" and "pathetic". Let's take a look:

* Sound servers. Sound servers are essentially the currently accepted way to do sound mixing on the local host. They are, however, simply awful from a performance standpoint -- high latency, CPU overhead, and inability to take advantage of hardware mixing capabilities are pretty much showstoppers.

Esd is probably the best general-purpose Linux sound server. It has an ugly hack for "giving up" the sound device -- a simple time delay. It's very inefficient and blows CPU time, and adds latency. The quality of its resampling sucks. It has notoriously poorly written internals, and the author (and maintainer) has been out of the picture for years. The GNOME Project adopted esd, but has done very little work on it.

Artsd is, impressively, even worse than esd. It is *extremely* heavyweight in RAM and CPU usage. It's a pain to get it to give up the audio device. It's even slower, and as most distros I've seen don't nice it to a negative value, it's frequently the cause of audio breakups. One of the ugliest parts of KDE, and a very ugly wart to new Linux users.

The only legitimate reason to have sound servers is to do network-transparent sound. And while I frequently use network-transparent graphics, I and the vast majority of people simply do not care about network transparent sound (other than beeps, which X does nicely). You can't reasonably stream a decoded sound stream over the network with sane performance.

Sound servers should be *much* less common than they are now. They give Linux awful media performance, are confusing to new users, and have almost no utility to most users.

* OSS/Free

OSS/Free is, well, free. It's also fairly reliable and simple. That's about it. It has only supports common sound cards. It doesn't do cards that require NDA, supports essentially no advanced features (wavetable MIDI, hardware mixing, bass/treble/reverb/etc on the DSPs). It doesn't manage sound requests at *all* -- basically, if you've got the device, you've got it, and if you don't have the device, you don't have it. End of story. The vast majority of Linux installations are still using OSS/Free.

* OSS/Linux
Supports some less common sound cards, since it can use information released only under NDA. Costs money, so very very few people use it. Fixes some of the failures of OSS/Free (like a lack of hardware mixing), but the pricetag pretty much kills it as a general solution. If you're doing hardware mixing, but all the channels on the card are currently being used, this thing simply fails. There's no "software mixing" fallback that starts being used if all the existing hardware channels are being occupied.

* ALSA
This is The Future. It has good support for many modern features. *Still* does not support major features for which commercial documentation is available for -- no treble and no bass on my SB Live, for instance. More than a little complex to set up, though most distros have patched over the ugly installation process by giving you a GUI that autogenerates necessary files. Supports hardware mixing, but again has *no software fallback* (which the ALSA coders have specifically said they will not support). I can't have an 8 channel soundcard, play 8 sounds at once, and then have the next sound be mixed in hardware. Half of the software out there is written to the incompatible and obsolete version .5 API instead of the .9 API. This is the best bet if you're willing to do some work -- xmms actually now has an ALSA plugin that *works*.

* Linux kernel SB driver
If you have an SB-compatible soundcard, you can probably use this. It has somewhat less than convenient hardware mixing support -- the series of dsp devices, each of which can only have a single program attached, may be technically accurate, but is incredibly annoying to use -- you have to arrange your applications to share your DSPs (in my case, only two -- and I wanted to be able to play snes games, play mp3s, and still get ICQ sounds.

Creative Opensource drivers:
Not pre-installed, so essentially not acceptable for a newbie. Even though this is from Creative, incredibly enough, it does not do MIDI synth OR have bass/treble/reverb/etc support.

I've poked around with the sound system on my box for quite some time, and have worked with a number of sound cards -- at the moment I have multiple ones installed. I'm fairly disappointed with the piss-poor functionality that users can expect from their audio hardware under Linux.

Let me prepend this by saying that I really do not like ocaml or other ml languages, but if you're into functional languages, you may like it. There are some things that are done right, like a very strong type system.

Unison, a file-sychronization tool, and MLDonkey, a P2P client that supports just about every significant P2P protocol out there (except the closed version of FastTrack) are both written in ocaml. That's all I know of, though.

Give me something like ocaml but without type inference (most annoying invention of all time) and not a functional language (sorry, just don't think that way), and I'd be pretty happy. It's about the fastest safe language out there, followed closely by eiffel.

if apple can do it

The Classic application environment is more of a virtualized native environment than it is emulation of hardware.

Carbon vs Cocoa, on the other hand, is like Winelib vs Qt, just a different toolkit to access the same underlying graphics system (Quartz or X11).

the onus isnt on the user to recompile

But if your proprietary software publisher refuses to recompile its application for your hardware platform, tough shit. One more reason for free software.

No I don't mean get a copy of MAME, I mean use software like VMware or Plex86 to emulate any of the less resource demanding games. Also, bear in mind Linux has a plethora of FREE games available, many of which I find more mentally stimulating than their win32 based counterparts. And about worrying if it will be user friendly for your kids, computers weren't too user friendly when I was a kid, but I lernt em anyways :) Seriously, just stick your kids on a Linux box and they'll 0wn your root in no time

Something called iFile has been doing something similar since 1996. Changelog and readme document this. Some thoughts from the POPFile project (my sources for those links).

Something called iFile has been doing something similar since 1996. Changelog and readme document this. Some thoughts from the POPFile project (my sources for those links).

Don't see how this would apply here. There's no interference. The receiver of the mail still has the last word on what happens with his mail. It's just another way of filtering mail but not based on regexps on subject, sender etc... but on the likelyness of being junk.
For the moment, the filter only flags mails, it doesn't even delete/move them. At most. it will only move mail to certain folders (if you like the Trash folder).
I use Ifile and procmail to filter my mail. What would be next? A law prohibiting the use of filters on mail?
I guess spammers would like to see a law that forces me to look at spam but I don't see this happen.

I've heard reports that some spammers are fine tuning their emails to just miss the SpamAssasin regexs, and stuff like the Mozilla bayesian mail filters only react to what you get, the Razor reacts to what 180,000+ people get.

I've been using the freefont fontset, and find them pretty nice.

http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/