Domain: sf.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to sf.net.
Stories · 151
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Ask Slashdot: What Defines Success In an Open Source Project?
rbowen writes "Nine years ago, Slashdot readers discussed what makes an Open Source project successful. The answers were varied, of course. An academic paper summarized the results, agreeing (albeit with more precision) that motivations for Open Source projects are varied. Has anything changed since then? In the era of mobile apps, social media, and Google Ad revenue, have the definitions of Open Source project success changed at all? Have your reasons changed for being involved in Open Source?" -
Neural Nets Make Art While High
brilanon writes "Telepathic-critterdrug is a controversial fork of the open source artificial-life sim Critterding, a physics sandbox where blocky creatures evolve neural nets in a survival contest. What we've done is to give these animals an extra retina which is shared with the whole population. It's extended through time like a movie and they can write to it for communication or pleasure. Since this introduces the possibility of the creation of art, we decided to give them a selection of narcotics, stimulants and psychedelics. This is not in Critterding. The end result is a high-color cellular automaton running on a substrate that thinks and evolves, and may actually produce hallucinations in the user." -
Cryptographically Hiding TCP Ports
JohnGrahamCumming writes "The shimmer project implements a cryptographically-based system for hiding important (e.g. SSH) open ports in plain sight. By automatically forwarding from a range of ports all but one of which are honeypots and by changing the ports every minute only a user knowing a shared secret can determine the location of the real SSH server." -
GNU Octave 3.0 Released After 11 Years
Digana writes "GNU Octave is a free numerical computing environment highly compatible with the MATLAB language. After 11 years of development since version 2.0, stable version 3.0 released yesterday. This version is interesting because unlike other free or semi-free MATLAB competitors like Scilab, specific compatibility with MATLAB code is a design goal. This has manifested itself in goodies like better support for MATLAB's Handle Graphics, a syntax closer to MATLAB's own for many functions, and many functions from the sister project Octave-Forge ported to the core Octave project for an enriched functionality closer to the toolboxes provided by MATLAB. GUI development is underway, but still no JIT compiling, which is a show-stopper for Octave newbies coming from MATLAB with unvectorized code." -
Futurama Movie Set For November 27
kevin_conaway writes "TV Squad informs us that the new Futurama movie will be available on November 27. The show will return as a full-length, high-def film sold on DVD. It will be followed by three additional films, and each film will be divided into four episodes, each to be aired on Comedy Central. So, that's 4 DVD movies or 16 new episodes." -
Gentoo/FreeBSD On Hold Due To Licensing Issues
Alan Trick writes "Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected.
The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good new is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed.
At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors." -
How Do You Handle New MS Word Vulnerabilities?
chipperdog asks: "With yet another zero-day exploit of MS-Word document files, what are fellow system admins doing to protect themselves against these threats? I have been blocking all .doc and .dot at the mail and proxy servers until malware scanners have signatures to detect and block the malicious files. Of course, this caused a uproar with the users, as there were continuous calls like: 'When can I send and receive Word files again' and 'I can't get anything done if I can't send/receive Word files'. Any suggestion of sending documents in different formats (like rtf, html, txt, or pdf) results in even more creative user 'feedback'. Has anyone done anything creative in their handling of word files — like having qmail-scanner pipe all .doc attachments through something such as wv to convert them to a less exploitable format?" -
Stuart Cohen Predicts Office for Linux
wysiwia writes "Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL, said during an interview with vnunet.com at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco that it's 'inevitable' that Microsoft will release a version of Office to run on Linux within the 'next couple of years'. But when one reads the OSDL survey about the 'Top inhibitors of Linux desktop adoption' this 'next couple of years' might mean quite a long time. This leads to the question, has Stuart Cohen read his own survey and how does he overcome these inhibitors so MS really will think about MSOffice for Linux." I think the bigger question is 'In reality, how likely is Office for Linux?' I'm not sure that I agree with his assumption. -
Slashdot CSS Redesign Winner Announced
The winner of the contest is Alex Bendiken. He will receive a new laptop as well as bragging rights as the creator of the new look of Slashdot. You can see his winning design in a near complete form now. Feel free to comment on any compatibility issues. We plan to take this live in the next few days. There will undoubtedly be a few minor glitches, but please submit bug reports and we'll sort it out as fast as possible. Also congratulations to Peter Lada, our runner up. He gets $250 credit at ThinkGeek. Thanks to everyone who participated- it was a lot of fun. -
Improving Software Usability?
kevin_conaway asks: "Software usability is one of the hardest things to get right. Writing good, usable software is the holy grail of software development, yet few developers give it more than an afterthought. As a professional developer, I delight in writing software for other developers but shy away from writing an interface that the end users will see. What resources/books are recommended for improving your Human Computer Interaction (HCI) / software usability skills?" -
NetBeans 5.0 Released
pgsqlDAO writes "NetBeans 5.0 has been released. The new version of the cross platform, extensible, award winning Integrated Development Environment (IDE) comes out with some impressive features that make developing GUI and Web applications easier as well as new modules for creating extensions to NetBeans. The new Matisse GUI Builder makes it easier to layout professional looking windows and dialog boxes. On the web front you can register JBoss and Weblogic servers to deploy and test your applications intuitively from within the IDE. Better integration with popular web frameworks such as JavaServer Faces and Struts has been added including templates for the creation of JSF Managed Beans, Struts Actions, and Struts Form Beans. Other features included better tools for Web Services, Version Control, Debugging, Code Completion, Refactoring and more. Sun has also set up a free beta program to provide technical support to developers." -
Oracle Joins IBM AIX Collaboration Center
pgsqlDao writes "CRN is reporting that Oracle is joining IBM's AIX Collaboration Center. 'IBM announced the center Dec. 16 as a $200 million investment where it will centralize AIX development, customer relations and advanced features for independent software vendors. While the figure represents existing salaries and equipment drawn together under one roof, it also represents some shift in emphasis by IBM from Linux back to its mature Unix operating system.' In November Oracle announced that it has chosen Solaris 10 as it's preferred development and deployment platform for X64 computing." -
Batch Cataloging of Scanned Documents via OCR?
munwin99 asks: "I am looking for some software to process a batch of images (scanned forms). We want to use Gallery to view the images, and be able to search them by 3 or 4 attributes. We want to get these attributes from the form (date, name, etc). We want it to check a section of the scanned form, read the info from that section(s), and dump the retrieved info into Gallery (using OCR / ICR). Is there any (preferably) free or open source software that can do this? Supported OSes should include either Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. Even Gallery is optional, if someone has a better suggestion." -
Batch Cataloging of Scanned Documents via OCR?
munwin99 asks: "I am looking for some software to process a batch of images (scanned forms). We want to use Gallery to view the images, and be able to search them by 3 or 4 attributes. We want to get these attributes from the form (date, name, etc). We want it to check a section of the scanned form, read the info from that section(s), and dump the retrieved info into Gallery (using OCR / ICR). Is there any (preferably) free or open source software that can do this? Supported OSes should include either Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. Even Gallery is optional, if someone has a better suggestion." -
How to Go About Team Building?
B1-66ER asks: "I'm trying build a team of elite overclockers for HWLogic, and a group of developers for our mulit-platform benchmark CPU-XMark. Now, before you tell me to use SF's Project Help Wanted, just remember: Linus Torvalds didn't have the online community development tools that we use now. I'd like to go beyond the help of SourceForge [which is part of the same company as Slashdot] to ultimately create my own organization in the way that Linus has now. It is my goal to one day get CPU-XMark to be a multi-platform Open Source clone of Futuremark's 3DMark05. Any suggestions?" -
How to Go About Team Building?
B1-66ER asks: "I'm trying build a team of elite overclockers for HWLogic, and a group of developers for our mulit-platform benchmark CPU-XMark. Now, before you tell me to use SF's Project Help Wanted, just remember: Linus Torvalds didn't have the online community development tools that we use now. I'd like to go beyond the help of SourceForge [which is part of the same company as Slashdot] to ultimately create my own organization in the way that Linus has now. It is my goal to one day get CPU-XMark to be a multi-platform Open Source clone of Futuremark's 3DMark05. Any suggestions?" -
How to Go About Team Building?
B1-66ER asks: "I'm trying build a team of elite overclockers for HWLogic, and a group of developers for our mulit-platform benchmark CPU-XMark. Now, before you tell me to use SF's Project Help Wanted, just remember: Linus Torvalds didn't have the online community development tools that we use now. I'd like to go beyond the help of SourceForge [which is part of the same company as Slashdot] to ultimately create my own organization in the way that Linus has now. It is my goal to one day get CPU-XMark to be a multi-platform Open Source clone of Futuremark's 3DMark05. Any suggestions?" -
Columba 1.0 "Holy Moly" Released
Frederik Dietz writes to tell us that after three years of hard developement Columba 1.0, codename "Holy Moly!" is ready for general consumption. Columba is an email client written in Java that boasts a 'user-friendly graphical interface with wizards and internationalization support.' Slashdot covered an interview with the Columba team earlier this year. -
Columba 1.0 "Holy Moly" Released
Frederik Dietz writes to tell us that after three years of hard developement Columba 1.0, codename "Holy Moly!" is ready for general consumption. Columba is an email client written in Java that boasts a 'user-friendly graphical interface with wizards and internationalization support.' Slashdot covered an interview with the Columba team earlier this year. -
Columba Developers Interview
Anonymous Coward writes "Scott Delap's ClientJava.com has an interview with the developers behind Columba, an open source Java email client. They answer questions about Columba development and general Java/Swing issues desktop Java applications face nowadays." -
Linux 3D Input Driver Project Started
zratchet writes "Mikey Lubker reports in his blog that a new project has been started to create drivers for 6-degree-of-freedom 3D input devices. The project hopes to support SDL_Input, XNA, DirectInput, and other major controller API's including game consoles and embedded systems, including controllers for home entertainment systems, robots, modeling clay, games, home automation, and more. Check out the project here and the (soon to be) tech-demo Snowball Surprise: Adventures in Avatarctica." -
Simple Cross-Platform File Sharing with Chungles
rammerhammer writes "Sharing files amongst different platforms has most always resulted in using samba -- a program based around the windows file sharing protocol. Chungles aims to provide a nice, graphical, easy configurable file sharing alternative. It's written in Java, uses SWT for the UI, and JmDNS (Rendezvous/ZeroConf/Bonjour) for discovery of computers running Chungles." -
Simple Cross-Platform File Sharing with Chungles
rammerhammer writes "Sharing files amongst different platforms has most always resulted in using samba -- a program based around the windows file sharing protocol. Chungles aims to provide a nice, graphical, easy configurable file sharing alternative. It's written in Java, uses SWT for the UI, and JmDNS (Rendezvous/ZeroConf/Bonjour) for discovery of computers running Chungles." -
CherryOS is dead! Long live PearPC!
trygvebw writes "Earlier today, an entry was posted on Arben Kryzeiu's blog, stating that he was stopping development of CherryOS. CherryOS was an application sold by MXS, inc, which was clearly an illegal rip-off of the open-source PowerPC emulator PearPC. CherryOS is dead, long live PearPC!" -
Enforcing Crytographically Strong Passwords
Saqib Ali writes "The WebAppSec mailing list at SecurityFocus is currently having an interesting discussion on how to force users to use cryptographically strong passwords. The original poster suggested displaying a list of randomly generated password for the user to choose from. Two issues pointed with this concept, were Shoulder surfing and the fact that a bunch of randomly generated passwords are hard to remember. A counter proposal was to use pronounceable but randomly generated password. A full summary of this discussion is available. Any thoughts from slashdotters?" -
Logitech MSN Webcam Codec Reverse-Engineered
Alexis Boulva writes "Tonight, Ole André Vadla Ravnås of the Farsight project (LGPL), which 'is an audio/video conferencing framework specifically designed for Instant Messengers' for the GNU Linux operating system, finished coding a release candidate of libmimic, 'an open source video encoding/decoding library for Mimic V2.x-encoded content (fourCC: ML20), which is the encoding used by MSN Messenger for webcam conversations.' Ole, on the libmimic site, remarks that 'It should be noted that reverse-engineering for interoperability is 100% legal here in Norway (and in most European countries).' Looks like the Free/Open Source Software movement is very close to closing up one of the most noticeable software gaps remaining from its glorious efforts." -
Gallery and Coppermine Merger
ckdake writes "In a move designed to stun the market, the Gallery team has publicly announced its plans to merge with the Coppermine project. 'After Yahoo bought Flickr we started feeling a little bit left out! Why do those corporate droids get to do all the acquisitions?' asked Bharat Mediratta, co-founder of the Gallery project, in a joint press conference. Joachim "GauGau" Müller, the lead developer for Coppermine, added 'It's time for us open source guys to get in on the fun of burning money by making senseless acquisitions!' Get the full story at coppergallery.org (Coral link)" -
Audioblogging From Kilimanjaro Via Satellite Phone
GlucoPilot writes "Apparently a charity called Cops On Top is climbing Kilimanjaro as a memorial to the late Officer Isaac Espinoza of the SFPD. That in itself is pretty amazing, but the /. amazing thing is that they are AudioBlogging the whole thing via Satellite Phone by calling to an audioblogging site and having their MP3s automatically posted to their dasBlog (open source blogging system) at www.copsontop.com/climblog. Cool stuff. Their latest blog post is at 15,500 ft." -
xine-lib 1.0 Released
gooofy writes "After two years of intense testing and continuous improvement, the xine development team proudly presents the final xine-lib 1.0 release. Compared with the latest release candidate, there are not many changes. However, a security issue regarding the AIFF demuxer (CAN-2004-1300) is fixed, as well as some issues that might have appeared with the way the Xv plugin has been linked in 1-rc8. Therefore, upgrading to 1.0 is strongly recommended. Thanks to the whole xine team for making this happen!" -
First ZSNES Release In ~2.5 Years
Anonymous Coward writes "The best SNES emulator, and the only GPL one -- ZSNES -- has had the first release in almost two and a half years! Looks like those smart coders reverse engineered quite a few new special co-processors for this release as well." -
BZFlag goes Platinum
morrison writes "A little over four years after moving to SourceForge at a current rate of several hundred downloads every day, BZFlag has finally "gone platinum". With over 1,000,000 SourceForge downloads, BZFlag looks to be the third game (following Tux Racer and StepMania) to go 'sf platinum'. While this doesn't include the many tens of thousands distributed prior to the project's migration to sf.net during the SGI days, it's a momentous occasion for open source gaming regardless." -
BZFlag goes Platinum
morrison writes "A little over four years after moving to SourceForge at a current rate of several hundred downloads every day, BZFlag has finally "gone platinum". With over 1,000,000 SourceForge downloads, BZFlag looks to be the third game (following Tux Racer and StepMania) to go 'sf platinum'. While this doesn't include the many tens of thousands distributed prior to the project's migration to sf.net during the SGI days, it's a momentous occasion for open source gaming regardless." -
Intel Linux Driver Version 1.0 For Centrino WLAN
Werner Heuser writes "Intel has just released Linux driver version 1.0.0 for the Centrino PRO/Wireless 2100 chipset. Almost two years, since the first Centrino generation with Pentium-M Banias has reached the market, a stable issue of a native Open Source driver has become available. The Wireless LAN driver for the current Centrino generation with Pentium-M Dothan and PRO/Wireless 2200BG chipset is still at version 0.13. This driver is intented to support also the third generation of the Intel miniPCI WLAN adapter named PRO/Wireless 2915ABG. Though Intel intended these projects to be community efforts, there are some possible working constraints. Mainly, no hardware documentation is available." -
Xen 2.0 Virtual Machine Monitor Released
An anonymous reader writes "The Xen team are pleased to announce the release of Xen 2.0, the open-source Virtual Machine Monitor. Xen enables you to run multiple operating systems images concurrently on the same hardware, securely partitioning the resources of the machine between them. Xen uses a technique called 'para-virtualization' to achieve very low performance overhead -- typically just a few percent relative to native. This new release provides kernel support for Linux 2.4.27/2.6.9 and NetBSD, with FreeBSD and Plan9 to follow in the next few weeks. Xen 2.0 runs on almost the entire set of modern x86 hardware supported by Linux, and is easy to 'drop-in' to an existing Linux installation. The new release has a lot more flexibility in how guest OS virtual I/O devices are configured. For example, you can configure arbitrary firewalling, bridging and routing of guest virtual network interfaces, and use copy-on-write LVM volumes or loopback files for storing guest OS disk images. Another new feature is 'live migration', which allows running OS images to be moved between nodes in a cluster without having to stop them. Visit the Xen homepage for downloads and documentation." -
Xen 2.0 Virtual Machine Monitor Released
An anonymous reader writes "The Xen team are pleased to announce the release of Xen 2.0, the open-source Virtual Machine Monitor. Xen enables you to run multiple operating systems images concurrently on the same hardware, securely partitioning the resources of the machine between them. Xen uses a technique called 'para-virtualization' to achieve very low performance overhead -- typically just a few percent relative to native. This new release provides kernel support for Linux 2.4.27/2.6.9 and NetBSD, with FreeBSD and Plan9 to follow in the next few weeks. Xen 2.0 runs on almost the entire set of modern x86 hardware supported by Linux, and is easy to 'drop-in' to an existing Linux installation. The new release has a lot more flexibility in how guest OS virtual I/O devices are configured. For example, you can configure arbitrary firewalling, bridging and routing of guest virtual network interfaces, and use copy-on-write LVM volumes or loopback files for storing guest OS disk images. Another new feature is 'live migration', which allows running OS images to be moved between nodes in a cluster without having to stop them. Visit the Xen homepage for downloads and documentation." -
GForge 4.0 Released
jaaron writes "Ever wanted your own personal SourceForge? If so, then be sure to check out GForge which just released version 4.0. GForge is a fork of the original GPL'd SourceForge code and like sf.net provides forums, mailing lists, revision control via CVS or Subversion (yes, Subversion!), issue trackers and much more for any number of teams and projects." -
CherryOS Not All It's Cracked Up To Be
CherryBS writes "The CherryOS emulator, claiming that it could seamlessly run Mac OS X at 80% the speed of the host computer on standard x86 hardware (covered here previously), has created some controversy about stolen code. It turns out that CherryOS's emulation engine is nothing more than that of PearPC, an open source GPL project to create a PowerPC motheboard emulator." Read on for more details.CherryBS continues "PearPC developers who have seen CherryOS have confirmed it is a fraud, while others remaining anonymous have posted the 'strings' output that CherryOS and PearPC share, showing many function names, warning/informational message strings that exist verbatim in PearPC. Additionally, now-pulled screenshots of CherryOS, mirrored in the long thread at pearpc.net, show CherryOS's boot process revealing variable names and missing or incorrectly emulated hardware in such a way as to be specific to PearPC. Arben Kryeziu, the developer of CherryOS, claims that no code has been taken from PearPC whatsoever, and that he will release a trial version this week. However, with the amount of deception on the part of the company, and considering this wouldn't be the first time he's violated the GPL, it's hard to believe they're telling the truth. Additionally, Kryeziu now claims the "trial" may "disable modules like sound or drag and drop"...likely because PearPC itself does not support such features. To further add to the tale, someone who was likely Arben was specifically asking for video server load testing for their vx30.com video codec/server product, even specifically mentioning slashdot as a great candidate, and in the days following the CherryOS story unfolding, went back and deleted the posts. The first day, all that was left online were two videos, one of which was subsequently removed because of PearPC-specific strings in the boot process shown in the video..."
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New Version Of Ogg Audio Encoder
drapmeyer writes "Xiph.org has released a new version of the Ogg/Vorbis endocer: libOgg1.1.2 and libVorbis1.1.0. Point your browsers to the tarball for maximum excitement. Changes include several platform and build fixes, documentation for multiplexed streams, and other goodies. Also look at rarewares." -
Crossplatform iTunes Sharing and Trading
An anonymous reader writes "As reported on Cnet and others, an open source java iTunes client named ourTunes has been released under the GPL by a group of anonymous hackers. Unlike the Apple iTunes for Windows and Mac, ourTunes allows a user to queue up and save to disk the music shared by other users. Recent court rulings have held that developers of p2p file sharing software cannot be held liable for 'for any copyright infringement committed by people using their products.'" -
Unlocking The Power Of the Magstripe
Acidus writes "While researching for an embedded systems project (a magstripe enabled Coke machine), I was shocked by the lack of magstripe information: Programs/code that would run on a modern OS were all but nonexistant, articles that were 6-10 years old, etc. Further research proved hard, because I had become google's authoritative source. So Stripe Snoop was born, and is now at 1.5 . Stripe Snoop is a suite of research tools that captures, modifies, validates, generates, analyzes, and shares magstripe data, with an ever-growing database of card formats. Decoding everything from driver's licenses to banking cards, its features can analyze non-standard cards, such as NYC's Metrocard." -
Unlocking The Power Of the Magstripe
Acidus writes "While researching for an embedded systems project (a magstripe enabled Coke machine), I was shocked by the lack of magstripe information: Programs/code that would run on a modern OS were all but nonexistant, articles that were 6-10 years old, etc. Further research proved hard, because I had become google's authoritative source. So Stripe Snoop was born, and is now at 1.5 . Stripe Snoop is a suite of research tools that captures, modifies, validates, generates, analyzes, and shares magstripe data, with an ever-growing database of card formats. Decoding everything from driver's licenses to banking cards, its features can analyze non-standard cards, such as NYC's Metrocard." -
Doom 3 - Linux, Multi-Monitor, DirectX 8 Solutions
nukem996 writes "While the official port of Doom 3 to Linux is still not complete and we still do not know when it is going to be out, other then 'in a few days after the Windows release', Linux users can finally play Doom 3 on Linux with the help of Wine." Elsewhere, an anonymous reader points to a post on the GideonTech forums explaining multi-monitor Doom 3 play, with the caveat: "Doing this with only 2 monitors completely sucks. You want atleast 3, or 5.. or any odd number of monitors (so your center of playing field isn't split between two monitors)." Finally, toasted_calamari explains: "We have written a guide to optimizing Doom 3 for DirectX 8 systems, particularly older ATI Radeon cards. This guide should assist owners of older hardware in running Doom 3 more effectively without upgrading." -
Running Linux an Archos Multimedia Player
An anonymous reader writes "A new project is developing a Linux port for Archos portable multimedia harddisk player/recorders. The LinAV project began in April, and has focused initially on the AV3xx-series devices, so far releasing a working kernel and a build environment for graphical applications based on the nano-X API. The LinAV project appears to be the first to actually achieve a Linux port to an Archos product. LinAV is based on uClinux, the version of Linux for devices based on processors without a memory management unit (MMU). However, at CEBIT last year, Archos was rumored to have a next-generation AV500 portable multimedia player that appeared to be running Linux." -
Office 2003 Pro as an XML Authoring Application?
Saqib Ali asks: "Office 2003 Pro as been out for quite some time now. I was wondering how many large corporations have been to able use it as a XML authoring / modelling application? I have been involved in evaluation of several XML authoring / modelling applications and am planning to evaluate Office 2003 for it's XML authoring capabilities. The scope of my evaluation is limited to capabilities required for authoring technical documentation, preferably in DocBook XML. Is there anything I should keep in mind before starting the evaluation? One feature that I like about Office 2003 is its support for WebDAV. Our homebrewed CMS (Content Management Systems) supports WebDAV, which makes publishing the content a breeze. Except for OpenOffice, I haven't seen any other XML authoring application that has support for WebDAV. Any suggestions?" -
Collaboration Tools for Cross-Site Development?
Coordinator asks: "The company I work for has software development activities going in in several sites located around the world. We are looking for tools to help with cross-site collaboration. I am concerned about a one solution fits all approach, as well as something that requires too much time and effort to maintain on the part of our existing developers. A commercial product, or an open source product with a good support base would be very reasonable. What experiences have others had when trying to build a cross-site development environment either from scratch, or with existing tools or vendors. We are looking at some of the obvious places like sourceforge.net, gforge.org, and collab.net. Furthermore, we are looking at content management systems for knowledge base solutions such as TikiWiki or egroupware." -
To Citrix or Not to Citrix?
Saqib Ali asks: "These days, it seems almost any application can be served on a Citrix Farm . However, not all application are best fit for a Citrix environment, and I am sure most IT admins are faced with the tough decision of whether to host an application on Citrix or not. What questions should an IT administrator ask before deciding whether to serve an application over Citrix or just plainly install the application on each desktop? I am NOT looking for the benefits of using Citrix, as I'm very well aware of them. What I want to know is, what criteria should be used in determining whether to use Citrix for an application or not. I just don't want to use technology for the sake of using technology. There should be a methodical way (like a checklist or questionnaire) for determining the feasibility (NOT PROs and CONs) of serving an (any) application on Citrix. Here is a Checklist/Questionnaire that I have come up with. Any more suggestions to add to the checklist?" -
Vorbis And Musepack Win 128kbps Multiformat Test
technology is sexy writes "After 11 days of collecting results Roberto Amorim today announced the results of his 2nd Multi-Format listening test: Vorbis fork AoTuV scored the highest and ranks as the winner together with open source contender Musepack closely followed by Apple's AAC implementation and LAME MP3, which improved markably since last year thanks to further tunings of its VBR model done by Gabriel Bouvigne. Sony's ATRAC3 format ranks last after WMA on the third place. The suprising success of AoTuV (compared to last year's performance of Xiph.org's reference implementation) shows the potential of Vorbis and possible room for further tuning and improvments. Take a look at the detailed results and their discussion at Hydrogenaudio.org." -
What's the Right Way to Accept Donations?
Schapht asks: "Not long ago, SourceForge.net started offering users and projects the ability to accept donations. But there doesn't seem to be much information on the legal implications of accepting donations. Should open source projects start registering themselves as businesses? Would there be fines if they didn't? Are there any options for a project that can't afford the processing fees involved in registering a business?" -
Pointers for Developing x86 Virtualization?
josh asks: "For my next project, I've decided I want to do something related to x86 virtualization (the way VMware does it or Plex86 not Xen/Bochs/etc.) but I really don't know where to start. Googling hasn't been helpful (just look at the results if you don't believe me). Are there any resources for learning about this kind of x86 virtualization? I know virtual 8086 mode wouldn't work, but without that what advantage does something like VMware have over something like Bochs? Are there any F/OSS projects aimed at something along the lines of my thinking? Please enlighten me with any references and resources you might have. Thanks!" -
Atari Lynx Emulator Goes Open Source
Bill Kendrick writes "Handy, the Atari Lynx emulator, has been re-released as Open Source software. (So that libSDL port I've always wanted might become a reality!) Handy's official website has moved to SourceForge, and the source-code is in CVS!" There are some neat homebrew Atari Lynx titles, both demos and game prototypes, available, too.