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From the email I've gotten on it, it seems like a whole passel of schools have at least a homegrown solution to CS cheats.

Perhaps the cute dog will end up changing Sony's stance? CodeMonkey555 writes "Here is a story that chronicles Sony's little foray into the DMCA with a hacker who added software for the Aibo robot."

It's nice to see that publications like SciAm are following the results and consequences of the DMCA.

Care to help edit an online software reference? SteveMallett writes "We at Open Source Directory (OSD) have opened the directory to volunteer editors now that we've given app authors and maintainer's a good chance to start and/or maintain their own listings.

Those interested may wish to visit our volunteer page which outlines what we're looking for. Don't worry. We're not that picky. The outline includes guidelines and tips for being a volunteer. Unlike dmoz, which has volunteer editors, we _will_ delete unupdated or neglected editor work in accordance to our Social Contract.

We hope that editors will help fill in the missing apps, take over those listings that they can do a better job of or have become neglected, and find those diamonds in the rough."

See our earlier post about the project if you're not sure what this is about.

Yes, someone has to read all those emails. kcurtis writes "Boston.com's tech site has this AP article about the large response to the Court's request for comment on the MS case's proposed settlement."

Now all they need is a trowel with an emblazoned smiley. enigma48 writes "Looks like the C'T article a little while ago about Smoothwall prompted some changes after all. Juergen Schmidt even gets a little credit. Shadow passwords are now in, but it looks like the ppp secrets file is still open (they describe it as being a "non-vulnerability"). A-patchin' I will go, a-patchin' I will go..."

So you don't have to stop playing your games ... Scott Draeker of Loki has some encouraging words for those who thought the announced (upcoming) closure of Loki would mean the loss of Loki's code and community. Draeker sent word of this a few days ago, but here are more details.

He writes:

"We have prepared tarballs of the public CVS, FAQs, mailing list archives, demos and Loki_Update which will be available for people to host. That's exactly what's going on with icculus.org.

The official repository will be hosted by the SEUL group at MIT. Once that site is set up we'll point the loki domains that direction. They'll also be adding some Loki projects to public CVS which were never completed."

From the email I've gotten on it, it seems like a whole passel of schools have at least a homegrown solution to CS cheats.

Perhaps the cute dog will end up changing Sony's stance? CodeMonkey555 writes "Here is a story that chronicles Sony's little foray into the DMCA with a hacker who added software for the Aibo robot."

It's nice to see that publications like SciAm are following the results and consequences of the DMCA.

Care to help edit an online software reference? SteveMallett writes "We at Open Source Directory (OSD) have opened the directory to volunteer editors now that we've given app authors and maintainer's a good chance to start and/or maintain their own listings.

Those interested may wish to visit our volunteer page which outlines what we're looking for. Don't worry. We're not that picky. The outline includes guidelines and tips for being a volunteer. Unlike dmoz, which has volunteer editors, we _will_ delete unupdated or neglected editor work in accordance to our Social Contract.

We hope that editors will help fill in the missing apps, take over those listings that they can do a better job of or have become neglected, and find those diamonds in the rough."

See our earlier post about the project if you're not sure what this is about.

Yes, someone has to read all those emails. kcurtis writes "Boston.com's tech site has this AP article about the large response to the Court's request for comment on the MS case's proposed settlement."

Now all they need is a trowel with an emblazoned smiley. enigma48 writes "Looks like the C'T article a little while ago about Smoothwall prompted some changes after all. Juergen Schmidt even gets a little credit. Shadow passwords are now in, but it looks like the ppp secrets file is still open (they describe it as being a "non-vulnerability"). A-patchin' I will go, a-patchin' I will go..."

So you don't have to stop playing your games ... Scott Draeker of Loki has some encouraging words for those who thought the announced (upcoming) closure of Loki would mean the loss of Loki's code and community. Draeker sent word of this a few days ago, but here are more details.

He writes:

"We have prepared tarballs of the public CVS, FAQs, mailing list archives, demos and Loki_Update which will be available for people to host. That's exactly what's going on with icculus.org.

The official repository will be hosted by the SEUL group at MIT. Once that site is set up we'll point the loki domains that direction. They'll also be adding some Loki projects to public CVS which were never completed."

From the email I've gotten on it, it seems like a whole passel of schools have at least a homegrown solution to CS cheats.

Perhaps the cute dog will end up changing Sony's stance? CodeMonkey555 writes "Here is a story that chronicles Sony's little foray into the DMCA with a hacker who added software for the Aibo robot."

It's nice to see that publications like SciAm are following the results and consequences of the DMCA.

Care to help edit an online software reference? SteveMallett writes "We at Open Source Directory (OSD) have opened the directory to volunteer editors now that we've given app authors and maintainer's a good chance to start and/or maintain their own listings.

Those interested may wish to visit our volunteer page which outlines what we're looking for. Don't worry. We're not that picky. The outline includes guidelines and tips for being a volunteer. Unlike dmoz, which has volunteer editors, we _will_ delete unupdated or neglected editor work in accordance to our Social Contract.

We hope that editors will help fill in the missing apps, take over those listings that they can do a better job of or have become neglected, and find those diamonds in the rough."

See our earlier post about the project if you're not sure what this is about.

Yes, someone has to read all those emails. kcurtis writes "Boston.com's tech site has this AP article about the large response to the Court's request for comment on the MS case's proposed settlement."

Now all they need is a trowel with an emblazoned smiley. enigma48 writes "Looks like the C'T article a little while ago about Smoothwall prompted some changes after all. Juergen Schmidt even gets a little credit. Shadow passwords are now in, but it looks like the ppp secrets file is still open (they describe it as being a "non-vulnerability"). A-patchin' I will go, a-patchin' I will go..."

So you don't have to stop playing your games ... Scott Draeker of Loki has some encouraging words for those who thought the announced (upcoming) closure of Loki would mean the loss of Loki's code and community. Draeker sent word of this a few days ago, but here are more details.

He writes:

"We have prepared tarballs of the public CVS, FAQs, mailing list archives, demos and Loki_Update which will be available for people to host. That's exactly what's going on with icculus.org.

The official repository will be hosted by the SEUL group at MIT. Once that site is set up we'll point the loki domains that direction. They'll also be adding some Loki projects to public CVS which were never completed."

Providing a list of applications stable enough to recommend to non-gurus is a worthy endeavor, so it's great to see this project slowly becoming more useful. There are gaps to plug going forward, though. The default text strings can be ambiguous, and the information provided on individual projects doesn't always give much to go on. For instance, look at the Mosix page, where you'll find that "This product has no Latest version yet," "This product doesn't fix anything," and "This product is not like any other," but no email contact information for Mosix authors. Similarly ambiguous pages are provided for Gnucleus and OpenOffice.

I exchanged some email with Steve on the state of the entries in the database, and asked about how the missing information could be filled in. He told me that while project maintairers (and site administrators) are the only ones who can update entries, users can contact the administrators of individual projects directly through the OSD site to suggest changes or clarification.

"We're trying to make things easier for the maintainers. ... I think there is a serious lack of product maintainers to help authors," he said. To that end, Mallet may soon provide example projects for software authors to emulate, and is in the early stages of a unified project-listing tool which would update listings on various web sites. Given the number of sites that offer downloads or simply track various software projects, that could be a boon to developers.

Hopefully, this will turn into the sort of tool that you can show a boss or teacher to answer the bugaboo of Free / Open Source being unready for prime time (or just overwhelming and undifferentiated).

Providing a list of applications stable enough to recommend to non-gurus is a worthy endeavor, so it's great to see this project slowly becoming more useful. There are gaps to plug going forward, though. The default text strings can be ambiguous, and the information provided on individual projects doesn't always give much to go on. For instance, look at the Mosix page, where you'll find that "This product has no Latest version yet," "This product doesn't fix anything," and "This product is not like any other," but no email contact information for Mosix authors. Similarly ambiguous pages are provided for Gnucleus and OpenOffice.

I exchanged some email with Steve on the state of the entries in the database, and asked about how the missing information could be filled in. He told me that while project maintairers (and site administrators) are the only ones who can update entries, users can contact the administrators of individual projects directly through the OSD site to suggest changes or clarification.

"We're trying to make things easier for the maintainers. ... I think there is a serious lack of product maintainers to help authors," he said. To that end, Mallet may soon provide example projects for software authors to emulate, and is in the early stages of a unified project-listing tool which would update listings on various web sites. Given the number of sites that offer downloads or simply track various software projects, that could be a boon to developers.

Hopefully, this will turn into the sort of tool that you can show a boss or teacher to answer the bugaboo of Free / Open Source being unready for prime time (or just overwhelming and undifferentiated).

Providing a list of applications stable enough to recommend to non-gurus is a worthy endeavor, so it's great to see this project slowly becoming more useful. There are gaps to plug going forward, though. The default text strings can be ambiguous, and the information provided on individual projects doesn't always give much to go on. For instance, look at the Mosix page, where you'll find that "This product has no Latest version yet," "This product doesn't fix anything," and "This product is not like any other," but no email contact information for Mosix authors. Similarly ambiguous pages are provided for Gnucleus and OpenOffice.

I exchanged some email with Steve on the state of the entries in the database, and asked about how the missing information could be filled in. He told me that while project maintairers (and site administrators) are the only ones who can update entries, users can contact the administrators of individual projects directly through the OSD site to suggest changes or clarification.

"We're trying to make things easier for the maintainers. ... I think there is a serious lack of product maintainers to help authors," he said. To that end, Mallet may soon provide example projects for software authors to emulate, and is in the early stages of a unified project-listing tool which would update listings on various web sites. Given the number of sites that offer downloads or simply track various software projects, that could be a boon to developers.

Hopefully, this will turn into the sort of tool that you can show a boss or teacher to answer the bugaboo of Free / Open Source being unready for prime time (or just overwhelming and undifferentiated).

Providing a list of applications stable enough to recommend to non-gurus is a worthy endeavor, so it's great to see this project slowly becoming more useful. There are gaps to plug going forward, though. The default text strings can be ambiguous, and the information provided on individual projects doesn't always give much to go on. For instance, look at the Mosix page, where you'll find that "This product has no Latest version yet," "This product doesn't fix anything," and "This product is not like any other," but no email contact information for Mosix authors. Similarly ambiguous pages are provided for Gnucleus and OpenOffice.

I exchanged some email with Steve on the state of the entries in the database, and asked about how the missing information could be filled in. He told me that while project maintairers (and site administrators) are the only ones who can update entries, users can contact the administrators of individual projects directly through the OSD site to suggest changes or clarification.

"We're trying to make things easier for the maintainers. ... I think there is a serious lack of product maintainers to help authors," he said. To that end, Mallet may soon provide example projects for software authors to emulate, and is in the early stages of a unified project-listing tool which would update listings on various web sites. Given the number of sites that offer downloads or simply track various software projects, that could be a boon to developers.

Hopefully, this will turn into the sort of tool that you can show a boss or teacher to answer the bugaboo of Free / Open Source being unready for prime time (or just overwhelming and undifferentiated).

Providing a list of applications stable enough to recommend to non-gurus is a worthy endeavor, so it's great to see this project slowly becoming more useful. There are gaps to plug going forward, though. The default text strings can be ambiguous, and the information provided on individual projects doesn't always give much to go on. For instance, look at the Mosix page, where you'll find that "This product has no Latest version yet," "This product doesn't fix anything," and "This product is not like any other," but no email contact information for Mosix authors. Similarly ambiguous pages are provided for Gnucleus and OpenOffice.

I exchanged some email with Steve on the state of the entries in the database, and asked about how the missing information could be filled in. He told me that while project maintairers (and site administrators) are the only ones who can update entries, users can contact the administrators of individual projects directly through the OSD site to suggest changes or clarification.

"We're trying to make things easier for the maintainers. ... I think there is a serious lack of product maintainers to help authors," he said. To that end, Mallet may soon provide example projects for software authors to emulate, and is in the early stages of a unified project-listing tool which would update listings on various web sites. Given the number of sites that offer downloads or simply track various software projects, that could be a boon to developers.

Hopefully, this will turn into the sort of tool that you can show a boss or teacher to answer the bugaboo of Free / Open Source being unready for prime time (or just overwhelming and undifferentiated).

Providing a list of applications stable enough to recommend to non-gurus is a worthy endeavor, so it's great to see this project slowly becoming more useful. There are gaps to plug going forward, though. The default text strings can be ambiguous, and the information provided on individual projects doesn't always give much to go on. For instance, look at the Mosix page, where you'll find that "This product has no Latest version yet," "This product doesn't fix anything," and "This product is not like any other," but no email contact information for Mosix authors. Similarly ambiguous pages are provided for Gnucleus and OpenOffice.

I exchanged some email with Steve on the state of the entries in the database, and asked about how the missing information could be filled in. He told me that while project maintairers (and site administrators) are the only ones who can update entries, users can contact the administrators of individual projects directly through the OSD site to suggest changes or clarification.

"We're trying to make things easier for the maintainers. ... I think there is a serious lack of product maintainers to help authors," he said. To that end, Mallet may soon provide example projects for software authors to emulate, and is in the early stages of a unified project-listing tool which would update listings on various web sites. Given the number of sites that offer downloads or simply track various software projects, that could be a boon to developers.

Hopefully, this will turn into the sort of tool that you can show a boss or teacher to answer the bugaboo of Free / Open Source being unready for prime time (or just overwhelming and undifferentiated).

Providing a list of applications stable enough to recommend to non-gurus is a worthy endeavor, so it's great to see this project slowly becoming more useful. There are gaps to plug going forward, though. The default text strings can be ambiguous, and the information provided on individual projects doesn't always give much to go on. For instance, look at the Mosix page, where you'll find that "This product has no Latest version yet," "This product doesn't fix anything," and "This product is not like any other," but no email contact information for Mosix authors. Similarly ambiguous pages are provided for Gnucleus and OpenOffice.

I exchanged some email with Steve on the state of the entries in the database, and asked about how the missing information could be filled in. He told me that while project maintairers (and site administrators) are the only ones who can update entries, users can contact the administrators of individual projects directly through the OSD site to suggest changes or clarification.

"We're trying to make things easier for the maintainers. ... I think there is a serious lack of product maintainers to help authors," he said. To that end, Mallet may soon provide example projects for software authors to emulate, and is in the early stages of a unified project-listing tool which would update listings on various web sites. Given the number of sites that offer downloads or simply track various software projects, that could be a boon to developers.

Hopefully, this will turn into the sort of tool that you can show a boss or teacher to answer the bugaboo of Free / Open Source being unready for prime time (or just overwhelming and undifferentiated).

For better, for worse, for what it's worth. Thanks to the people who pointed out reviews of Mandrake 8.0 after I complained about a dearth of these when posting a couple of other reviews

Chris "soup" Campbell, for instance, points to his 8.0 review at Binary Freedom, and the_rev_matt writes: "Timothy was bemoaning the lack of Mandrake 8.0 reviews, so here is one." There's also a pctalk.org review discussed at the excellent Mandrakeforum site, as well as quite a few harsher comments when the release was announced. (I wish other distros would put comments in a forum like this, too.)

You know, 'bouncy bouncy'! Illah Nourbakhsh of CMU's CS lab (the same folks who brought your the Palm Pilot robot kit) writes: "... So here is the newest thing we've done. We make one-legged hopping robots that use an unusual spring system. We wondered what would happen if we scale the hopping robot up so it's much larger than 6 inches-- big enough to carry a human being. Then we can throw away the computer and the human can do the control. The result, the BowGo, enables ordinary humans to jump very, very high into the air and over obstacles. It is a far more powerful Pogo stick. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bowgo - there are both pictures and videos available from there. This is from the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University."

Please give these people your venture capital, because I want to ride one of these! Mountain pogo-ing looks fun.

How can a jump rope be "open"? An unnamed reader contributes: "I've kept my eye on the guys over at the open source directory since I saw them take a good tongue lashing on /. a few weeks ago. They aren't doing too bad getting some listings, but the ones they have gotten seem to be making some waves. By my math, it looks like they've somehow gotten *two* new open source licenses passed through the boys at OSI (open source initiative) since they started three weeks ago."

Well, my tongue is out of lashing practice, but queries for "nano," "bluefish," "gimp" and "python" all return zero matches, so it doesn't seem like the first place I would go "to find Open-Source applications that are stable." The site still looks like a good idea, but is it eclipsed by existing resources? Maybe if enough people go visit it and add entries ...

A high-security remote terminal app by any other name nodvin writes: "In a Slashdot story on Mar. 22, 2001, it was stated Secure Shell Will Remain 'SSH'. However, the draft documents
now start with the title "draft-ietf-secsh-" rather than "draft-ietf-ssh". The charter is now found at: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/secsh-charter.ht ml and the mail archive is now at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/secsh/ "

Say it ain't so.