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http://dosbox.sf.net/ is probably a pretty safe bet

How about something like this? I personally haven't tried this one (I don't listen to too much music myself), but I'm organizing my movie collection using a mySQL database ("wuff's moviedb"). Incidentally, this looks like it can play your music too, and an awesome plus is being able to access your database from anywhere!

You don't have to use that one...just go to SourceForge and search for something like "movie database". I personally prefer the PHP/mySQL ones, but you may have different needs :)

It is very nice that this bozo has a (very expensive I read) little program that tries to detect problems when they have already happened. So along comes mr friendly one day (or more?) after the fact to dicipline the programmer? That does not sound like a very positive approach to me.
If you want to learn someby something (I hope mr belittle does) it works much better if you have a quick feedback loop, react immediately when something is going wrong, not one weekend later when the programmer has all but forgotten why he did it that way. I agree you cannot use a mr little for such feedback, but unittests and other tests that have to run before the developer can turn in his work can be run automagically. Test are not partial, do not have favorites, and are easy to understand by a programmer. Mr little is probably the opposite. You will either need a pairprogramming or review process to prevent programmers from just disabling the test that fail, but with such a process you will have good software and happy programmers. Mr Little does not make programmers happy.
Have a look at aegis, a Configuration management system that can enforce such a process and do a lot of other commonsense things. The 'problem' with aegis is that it does not have a pretty pictures interface, so it's advantages are hard to explain to pointy haired bosses.

Static analysis is great stuff. I've worked on an open source Java static analysis tool, PMD, for the past few years and I've gotten lots of feedback from folks who have used it to find all sorts of things in their code. Just a quick scan for unused variables can yield some excellent results, and the copy/paste detector works quite nicely too. And there's a book, too!

Coverity's doing a nice job with their tech marketing, too - l think a couple of open source projects are using the stuff they found to clean things up. At least, there's been a fair amount of traffic on the Ruby core list about some things Coverity's scan found. Good times...

Spoofed packets were the idea behind an anonymous P2P network I envisaged, and designed a few years ago. udpp2p.sf.net, if you're interested. Man, that was ropey code. (I didn't write any of it, by the way!)

For 50 people or less, this service is called Waste, and it was originated by Justin Frankel of Nullsoft several years ago. He built it, released the source code on Nullsoft's site, and AOL pulled the code within days. He knew what he was doing though, and the source code made it into the open under GPL, to be further developed by others. Waste is somewhat unrefined and development has stagnated, but it's fully encrypted and each network is restricted to known clients, and it seems to work quite well apart from a few minor inconveniences.

Schwartz praises MacNealy for holding down job cuts in R&D. But you have to ask "What the hell are 30,000 people doing at Sun?" when Apple somehow manages to make the best personal computer hardware, and personal computer OS software, and the best consumer electronics device on the market, all with one quarter of the number of employees as Microsoft.

You also realize that Apple and Sun are in very different markets, right? Non-geeks won't see too many Sun logos while they're walking down the street. That's because Sun makes servers and workstations, not PCs or MP3 players. The work Sun does really happens within the geek world and is not very visible to the general public.

Apple, on the other hand, makes a business out of being visible. I concede that Apple does make a lot of good technology, but you consider Apple to be the "best" when that is really debatable. The "best PC hardware?" Unlike Sun, Apple isn't responsible for the design of its hardware; Intel is (IBM was before). Sun, on the other hand, makes SPARC. The "best PC OS?" Well, first of all, Solaris isn't intended as a PC operating system, but second of all, since when is OS X "the best?" Apple manages to improve how people perceive the quality of the operating system by making sure that it's installed only on hardware Apple controls; this isn't innovation, it's just taking control from the user. "Just works(tm)" largely translates into "just our hardware." That's a crutch that Solaris, Linux, Windows and nearly everyone else doesn't have. Finally, unlike Solaris, (and I as a sucker for eye-candy can say) OS X just looks very nice and polished. I like it so much that I use an Aqua-like theme here on my Linux desktop. For some reason, we are often under the illusion that slick icons and a pretty GUI mean that a technology is superior. The same applies to the shiny white cases of Macs and iPods. This effect is how Apple manages to sell $99 pouches for iPods (there's an example of 0% innovation and 100% Apple trendiness).

So, although Apple does make good tech, it's sometimes hard to tell how much of it is real innovation and how much of it is the spell of Apple eye-candy and marketing. Sun makes servers and workstations; people don't use these machines to show how stylish they are or even necessarily to have fun. Sun can't make commercials with black silhouettes of people dancing to music as they write a Java program on their new SPARC workstation; it just isn't "hip." But that doesn't mean that people at Sun are sitting on their hands while the Apple guys are rocking out with their iPods. What are 30,000 people doing at Sun? Creating lots of technology that benefits millions of people who will probably never hear about it.

You're running Windows in a non-admin account ? Whoa ! That's rare, but very good !

Solution that is recommanded almost everywhere :
- Use the "Run as..." feature of WinXP to run only "explorefs2" in an admin account and the rest in normal accounts. Therefor, only exploits directly aimed at explorefs2 will have admin privilege, if other exploits are encountered (you got an MS-Office-only document. you reboot under windows, you import this MS-Office document using explorefs2 and MS-Word gets exploited) they won't pwn the whole machine.

Solution I use here :
- Get some of the old hardware you have lying around (some Pentium-II/III era mother board and CPUs), a nice netword card (1GBps if you get one. Even if PCI bus won't max it out (33Mhz * 32bits), they're cheap) a lot of memory, nice new shiny disks (the only realy new stuff you buy), and maybe some controller to put them on (if you're unlucky with some pre-LBA48 chipset like 440BX)
- Install a headless linux on it. You may use LVM2 and RAID, even software RAID5 (you don't give a damn if software raid slows your machine : the CPU on this machine is used only by the server. It doesn't slow the CPU on which you're gaming/working). It's like turning your old hardware into a glorified hardware RAID controller. And the good part is, if the CPU or motherboard dies, you'll be able to re-plug the harddrive into any other linux box with instant raid & lvm2 support. (Unlike trying to find a RAID controller of the same exact model). (Besides, as almost nothing runs on this machine, most of the memory will be used as cache.)
- Install a file server on it, using Samba and requiring log-in (no guest accounts).
- Voilà ! You can mount your share from whatever OS you want, underwhich ever user access level you want, the files remain on the server and are only accessed with the right of the user loged in samba. And on top of that, you get a nice journaled file system you choose, with support for >4GB files, even if the clients you connect with don't support it. (like FreeDOS. Reiser & Ext2 DOS tools don't support the journaling. But you can still SFTP or SCP files to/from your server)
Other ideas :
- run clamav periodically on it : virus scanning may slow computers, but it won't slow the computer you're working on.
- use Smart : the disk are the only precious thing that must be monitored. The rest is old recycled crap.
- run some P-2-P software that has distinct core (running on file server) and GUI (on your box). Sancho and mlDonkey are a nice combination. Your torrent keep being downloaded at night, but your girlfriend doesn't complain because you have to keep you "OMG!!LOL!!11!!!"-overclocked-with-ponnies cooled-with-20-12cm-fans-running-at-10'000rpms Pentium Ultra Extreem edition running at night.
- If you need to access other machines at home remotely, no need to keep them on. Only keep your server on, log-in with SSH, and use Wake-On-Lan feature to turn on the other machines.
- You can give the spare CPU cycles that aren't used in software RAID or clamav-scanning to some distributed project at BOINC

- I heard that part of the StarForce protection scheme detects when data is simultaneously streamed from both the harddrive and the cd-rom (id est : DaemonTools reads image from hard-drive and then feeds it as virtual Cd-ROM). Using a server to store disc images supposed to circumvent this part of the protection scheme.

You're running Windows in a non-admin account ? Whoa ! That's rare, but very good !

Solution that is recommanded almost everywhere :
- Use the "Run as..." feature of WinXP to run only "explorefs2" in an admin account and the rest in normal accounts. Therefor, only exploits directly aimed at explorefs2 will have admin privilege, if other exploits are encountered (you got an MS-Office-only document. you reboot under windows, you import this MS-Office document using explorefs2 and MS-Word gets exploited) they won't pwn the whole machine.

Solution I use here :
- Get some of the old hardware you have lying around (some Pentium-II/III era mother board and CPUs), a nice netword card (1GBps if you get one. Even if PCI bus won't max it out (33Mhz * 32bits), they're cheap) a lot of memory, nice new shiny disks (the only realy new stuff you buy), and maybe some controller to put them on (if you're unlucky with some pre-LBA48 chipset like 440BX)
- Install a headless linux on it. You may use LVM2 and RAID, even software RAID5 (you don't give a damn if software raid slows your machine : the CPU on this machine is used only by the server. It doesn't slow the CPU on which you're gaming/working). It's like turning your old hardware into a glorified hardware RAID controller. And the good part is, if the CPU or motherboard dies, you'll be able to re-plug the harddrive into any other linux box with instant raid & lvm2 support. (Unlike trying to find a RAID controller of the same exact model). (Besides, as almost nothing runs on this machine, most of the memory will be used as cache.)
- Install a file server on it, using Samba and requiring log-in (no guest accounts).
- Voilà ! You can mount your share from whatever OS you want, underwhich ever user access level you want, the files remain on the server and are only accessed with the right of the user loged in samba. And on top of that, you get a nice journaled file system you choose, with support for >4GB files, even if the clients you connect with don't support it. (like FreeDOS. Reiser & Ext2 DOS tools don't support the journaling. But you can still SFTP or SCP files to/from your server)
Other ideas :
- run clamav periodically on it : virus scanning may slow computers, but it won't slow the computer you're working on.
- use Smart : the disk are the only precious thing that must be monitored. The rest is old recycled crap.
- run some P-2-P software that has distinct core (running on file server) and GUI (on your box). Sancho and mlDonkey are a nice combination. Your torrent keep being downloaded at night, but your girlfriend doesn't complain because you have to keep you "OMG!!LOL!!11!!!"-overclocked-with-ponnies cooled-with-20-12cm-fans-running-at-10'000rpms Pentium Ultra Extreem edition running at night.
- If you need to access other machines at home remotely, no need to keep them on. Only keep your server on, log-in with SSH, and use Wake-On-Lan feature to turn on the other machines.
- You can give the spare CPU cycles that aren't used in software RAID or clamav-scanning to some distributed project at BOINC

- I heard that part of the StarForce protection scheme detects when data is simultaneously streamed from both the harddrive and the cd-rom (id est : DaemonTools reads image from hard-drive and then feeds it as virtual Cd-ROM). Using a server to store disc images supposed to circumvent this part of the protection scheme.

You're running Windows in a non-admin account ? Whoa ! That's rare, but very good !

Solution that is recommanded almost everywhere :
- Use the "Run as..." feature of WinXP to run only "explorefs2" in an admin account and the rest in normal accounts. Therefor, only exploits directly aimed at explorefs2 will have admin privilege, if other exploits are encountered (you got an MS-Office-only document. you reboot under windows, you import this MS-Office document using explorefs2 and MS-Word gets exploited) they won't pwn the whole machine.

Solution I use here :
- Get some of the old hardware you have lying around (some Pentium-II/III era mother board and CPUs), a nice netword card (1GBps if you get one. Even if PCI bus won't max it out (33Mhz * 32bits), they're cheap) a lot of memory, nice new shiny disks (the only realy new stuff you buy), and maybe some controller to put them on (if you're unlucky with some pre-LBA48 chipset like 440BX)
- Install a headless linux on it. You may use LVM2 and RAID, even software RAID5 (you don't give a damn if software raid slows your machine : the CPU on this machine is used only by the server. It doesn't slow the CPU on which you're gaming/working). It's like turning your old hardware into a glorified hardware RAID controller. And the good part is, if the CPU or motherboard dies, you'll be able to re-plug the harddrive into any other linux box with instant raid & lvm2 support. (Unlike trying to find a RAID controller of the same exact model). (Besides, as almost nothing runs on this machine, most of the memory will be used as cache.)
- Install a file server on it, using Samba and requiring log-in (no guest accounts).
- Voilà ! You can mount your share from whatever OS you want, underwhich ever user access level you want, the files remain on the server and are only accessed with the right of the user loged in samba. And on top of that, you get a nice journaled file system you choose, with support for >4GB files, even if the clients you connect with don't support it. (like FreeDOS. Reiser & Ext2 DOS tools don't support the journaling. But you can still SFTP or SCP files to/from your server)
Other ideas :
- run clamav periodically on it : virus scanning may slow computers, but it won't slow the computer you're working on.
- use Smart : the disk are the only precious thing that must be monitored. The rest is old recycled crap.
- run some P-2-P software that has distinct core (running on file server) and GUI (on your box). Sancho and mlDonkey are a nice combination. Your torrent keep being downloaded at night, but your girlfriend doesn't complain because you have to keep you "OMG!!LOL!!11!!!"-overclocked-with-ponnies cooled-with-20-12cm-fans-running-at-10'000rpms Pentium Ultra Extreem edition running at night.
- If you need to access other machines at home remotely, no need to keep them on. Only keep your server on, log-in with SSH, and use Wake-On-Lan feature to turn on the other machines.
- You can give the spare CPU cycles that aren't used in software RAID or clamav-scanning to some distributed project at BOINC

- I heard that part of the StarForce protection scheme detects when data is simultaneously streamed from both the harddrive and the cd-rom (id est : DaemonTools reads image from hard-drive and then feeds it as virtual Cd-ROM). Using a server to store disc images supposed to circumvent this part of the protection scheme.

Let's see... been programming ever since I got my first copy of HTML for Dummies when I was eight, and now I'm fifteen, and what have I written? To name just a few:

• PyWord, a text editor coded in Python
  (Used to be my most popular, I even had a guy in the Bereau of Labor and Statistics e-mail me once to say he liked it enough that he wanted to use it in his own program!)

• pyprime, a program to find prime numbers
  I actually came up with the entire algorithm for it during theatre class in eighth grade. I've also ported it to my TI-83

• Überpage, a PHP-based Web site engine
  Among other features, it uses a MySQL backend, generates completely valid XHTML 1.1, and if you're wondering, yes, I even designed the CSS theme myself

These days, though, I tend to spend most of my time developing Ultima Linux, which has become – I may as well brag – a very popular distribution. Most of that stuff isn't so much writing programs as compiling them, although I frequently do have to make some major changes to shell scripts, etc., which I've also become somewhat good at.

I've also become fairly decent at writing sed scripts, the occassional bit of JavaScript, and now I'm gradually trying to teach myself C. (Although with all the other stuff, and not to mention my actual life, I never have the time...) And then I also tend to like playing with CSS designs – I've got a Slashdot design I did, as well as a CSS Zen Garden entry and my hand-coded WordPress theme, which I'm rather proud of.

I used to waste endless hours with QBASIC, and then later Visual Basic. I've never really forgiven myself for it until now, but I no longer remember a single line of it so I guess I've repented enough :-)

Let's see... been programming ever since I got my first copy of HTML for Dummies when I was eight, and now I'm fifteen, and what have I written? To name just a few:

• PyWord, a text editor coded in Python
  (Used to be my most popular, I even had a guy in the Bereau of Labor and Statistics e-mail me once to say he liked it enough that he wanted to use it in his own program!)

• pyprime, a program to find prime numbers
  I actually came up with the entire algorithm for it during theatre class in eighth grade. I've also ported it to my TI-83

• Überpage, a PHP-based Web site engine
  Among other features, it uses a MySQL backend, generates completely valid XHTML 1.1, and if you're wondering, yes, I even designed the CSS theme myself

These days, though, I tend to spend most of my time developing Ultima Linux, which has become – I may as well brag – a very popular distribution. Most of that stuff isn't so much writing programs as compiling them, although I frequently do have to make some major changes to shell scripts, etc., which I've also become somewhat good at.

I've also become fairly decent at writing sed scripts, the occassional bit of JavaScript, and now I'm gradually trying to teach myself C. (Although with all the other stuff, and not to mention my actual life, I never have the time...) And then I also tend to like playing with CSS designs – I've got a Slashdot design I did, as well as a CSS Zen Garden entry and my hand-coded WordPress theme, which I'm rather proud of.

I used to waste endless hours with QBASIC, and then later Visual Basic. I've never really forgiven myself for it until now, but I no longer remember a single line of it so I guess I've repented enough :-)

Yes, but there's no reason why said driver can't be a thin layer to userspace.

Great explanation. I recently implemented in Ruby a toy script to tally votes by Ranked Pairs (a Condorcet method). (All I found via Google was vote.sf.net which was down at the time; I still haven't looked at their code.) I also recently did some light (web based) research on audio codec comparison, particularly the method known as ABC/Hidden Reference. Scoring these audio comparison tests is done using ANOVA for parametric statistics or the nonparametric Friedman test which is better for voting where citizens are prone to exaggerate their preferences. To my naive eyes it appears very similar to the Ranked Pairs method described at condorcet.org.

On a different note, I have heard defenses of the two-party system that assert that the system causes candidates to reach compromise before the election due to the limitations of the first past the post voting which cannot really handle more than two or maybe three candidates. Because compromise had already been reached, the elected representatives would then be able to "get things done". I'm interested in learning more about any defenses of the two-party system. Personally, I'd be more than happy if Congress never "got things done" because they seem to bungle everything or just claim more and more power.

It's funny, because I was just typing on my iBook G4 and realized how little proprietary software I actually use, aside from the OS itself. Fink provides a lot of it for me, and being a Linux junkie turned Mac laptop user, what I can't get from Fink or elsewhere I compile from source.

Almost everything I do on a daily basis is done in a command prompt, or in an OSS-for-Mac app - Adium for IM, TeXShop for document preparation, Azureus for this and that download, X-Chat Aqua for IRC, Thunderbird for NNTP reading, Cyberduck for SFTP, Inkscape for vector graphics, Frozen Bubble, Armagetron and FooBillard for fun. Notable exceptions are Safari (which is based on an open source rendering engine, anyway), Mail.app and NetNewsWire -- if I find something better that is free/open, I will gladly switch, but what's out there for the Mac right now doesn't really do it for me.

And the "overpriced" thing about Macs is a myth, plain and simple. I run an iBook G4, simply the best bang for buck laptop a student could buy when I purchased it two years ago, and I'd wager that iBooks are still that way for students. iMacs are luxury items, sure, but the Mac mini is a brilliant mid-range computer system for the money (compact, too!).

You'd also be surprised at how much you low level mucking around can do at the OS X command line. If you want to. On my laptop, I don't. I want to get work done.

http://g3d-cpp.sf.net/

-m

Just because HP, Canon and the others can't figure shit out doesn't mean "Linux ain't ready".

These are at least Open, if not Free Software packages, and included in your distro (I've not found one yet that doesn't have them, what with them being FOSS and all.) To use them:

emerge [hpijs|hpoj|hplip]

It is precisely because of this great support that I will be buying an HP Office Jet in the near future. It also makes sense on their part--the software is a way to sell printers, which is a way to sell ink. ;)

Thanks, HP!

Just because HP, Canon and the others can't figure shit out doesn't mean "Linux ain't ready".

These are at least Open, if not Free Software packages, and included in your distro (I've not found one yet that doesn't have them, what with them being FOSS and all.) To use them:

emerge [hpijs|hpoj|hplip]

It is precisely because of this great support that I will be buying an HP Office Jet in the near future. It also makes sense on their part--the software is a way to sell printers, which is a way to sell ink. ;)

Thanks, HP!

...but you can make the standards so good that distributions (and their users) want them.

That's exactly what I had in mind when I created wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) albeit others have to decide themselves if I've come close enough. If I almost get no complains might be a hint but don't know for sure.

O. Wyss

Yes and consistency can only be achieve by standardizing. Unfortunately this doesn't only hold true for the desktop, it's equally or even more important for the applications. So far Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Free Standards Group, doesn't seem to realize this else the FSG would have already standardized on a single set of application guidelines as outlined in wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). Since this isn't the case so far we still have to wait for the breakthrough of the Linux desktop.

If anybody is interested in a Linux desktop and don't want to wait much longer, he should persuade the FSG to come to terms and at least delve and evaluate wyoGuide.

See also http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index.h tml

O. Wyss

And SISC. SISC is actually a living project. I wish the best virtues of the three could be merged. In an Eclipse environment, this would be the most productive of all possible programming worlds.

Mark Shuttleworth call for Edgy Eft (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+specs) is nice but does it really have any impact on improvement on Linux systems, on it's market share. Does he really think that this will produce any new ideas which are needed for the break through of Linux in the desktop area? I think not.

If a developer is interested in edgy work he has to drop a lot of the out dated circumstances taken over from the old UNIX area which is now almost dead. He has to get rid of thinking along all the current implementations and work on something which isn't as limited. There are IMHO two very important areas where hard cuts are a necessity and both are linked with the look&feel.

First any edgy work has to get rid of all the Gnome/KDE/etc desktop guidelines and replace them with a single set of guidelines as outlined in wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). Only then will OpenSource application become competitors to the commercial counterparts.

Second any edgy desktop has to get rid of X11 and replace it with a frame buffer implementation (DirectFB) as outlined in wyoDesktop (http://wyodesktop.sf.net/). Only then will the Linux desktop be possible in a sensible fashion on anything ranging from super computers to embedded devices.

I'm well aware that these two suggestions throws away the most important corner stones of the OpenSource world. I also knows that this means a huge load of work but to become successful this is simply necessary. Believe me if it isn't done and if not soon the OpenSource will fail. So I encurrage anybody, developer or not, to visit the two projects and subscribe to the users mailing list else the Ubuntu Bug #1 (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/1) will never be fixed.

O. Wyss

Mark Shuttleworth call for Edgy Eft (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+specs) is nice but does it really have any impact on improvement on Linux systems, on it's market share. Does he really think that this will produce any new ideas which are needed for the break through of Linux in the desktop area? I think not.

If a developer is interested in edgy work he has to drop a lot of the out dated circumstances taken over from the old UNIX area which is now almost dead. He has to get rid of thinking along all the current implementations and work on something which isn't as limited. There are IMHO two very important areas where hard cuts are a necessity and both are linked with the look&feel.

First any edgy work has to get rid of all the Gnome/KDE/etc desktop guidelines and replace them with a single set of guidelines as outlined in wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). Only then will OpenSource application become competitors to the commercial counterparts.

Second any edgy desktop has to get rid of X11 and replace it with a frame buffer implementation (DirectFB) as outlined in wyoDesktop (http://wyodesktop.sf.net/). Only then will the Linux desktop be possible in a sensible fashion on anything ranging from super computers to embedded devices.

I'm well aware that these two suggestions throws away the most important corner stones of the OpenSource world. I also knows that this means a huge load of work but to become successful this is simply necessary. Believe me if it isn't done and if not soon the OpenSource will fail. So I encurrage anybody, developer or not, to visit the two projects and subscribe to the users mailing list else the Ubuntu Bug #1 (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/1) will never be fixed.

O. Wyss

For something different, you'll find SISC brings actual new expressability to the Java platform, rather than just scripting the same old stuff. This lets you do radically different things, as demonstrated by SISCweb, which allows you to write web applications without dealing with the stateless, page-centric nature of HTTP.

Plus, you'll learn Scheme, which will make you a better programmer.

For something different, you'll find SISC brings actual new expressability to the Java platform, rather than just scripting the same old stuff. This lets you do radically different things, as demonstrated by SISCweb, which allows you to write web applications without dealing with the stateless, page-centric nature of HTTP.

Plus, you'll learn Scheme, which will make you a better programmer.

2) Amateur/hideous UI toolkit for both major Linux desktops. My own game editor's have better/closer to Apple standard GUI elements.

I agree the two default frameworks aren't that terrific but there's also wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/) which even contains a MacOSX port and wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) tells you how to use it efficiently. But what do I tell you, if you really care for moving to Ubuntu you most probably would have known already.

O. Wyss

It's incredible how a lot of companies are going behind a very simple piece of software like it were gold, for Google and Yahoo is an understanable integration but some are full based commercially on these calendar applications.

Just wait some months to see something better on SourceForge for general and private consumption.

Vote for Ajax as the buzzword of the year, and don't forget beyond all these buzzwords powered companies what you see are just Turing machines :-)

You all may know that OpenSource isn't much loved by the ordinary users because of a range of reasons. The OSDL survey (http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005 .pdf) shows that even the majority of the Linux users wish for Windows-Only applications. Novell's cool solution website (http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16798 .html) proves that their users (customers) prefer Windows-Only applications. And the thread at LinuxQuestions.org (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthrea d.php?t=105955) gives more hints. To solve this I've a vision outlined in here (http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html ).

Sure enough this vision can only become true if many of you choose to participate which of course means a lot of work for all of you. But exactly here comes the Google SoC into play it would allow to get your own project be converted to conform to the wyoGuide guidelines (http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/guidelines/conten t.html). So I encourage any project to apply for the Soc (http://code.google.com/soc/) to make it

• conformant to the guideline so any user may feel comfortable
• conformant in the code so any developer may feel comfortable
• conformant in spirit so the Ubuntu bug #1 (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/1) gets finally tackled.

So don't fear to apply even if your project is just a small one since when your project is converted it most probably will attract more users and more developers, soon surpassing any project which doesn't care.

If you are just a user of a project make the developers aware of this. You might even check the guidelines yourself and help in testing. Or you might help in suggestions for corrections, etc. Tell it to your friends, your university stuff or anywhere else. Just make this vision become true and the first Top inhibitors of Linux desktop adoption gets finally solved.

O. Wyss

Everyone speaks about OpenVPN, which is a good piece of software, but software diverisity is desirable, especially in the field of security. It's better if all the Internet is not hacked through a single buffer overflow. IPsec-tools is an alternative to OpenVPN: different implementation, different protocol. A bunch of IPsec extensions have recently been added to cope with NAT, automatic configuration, and user authentication, so it is now really usable for remote user access, which was not the case in the past.

Check Emmanuel Dreyfus' paper on Remote user acces VPN with IPsec presented at EuroBSDCon 2005 for the background about it. There is also a how-to configure it for NetBSD (most of the document apply to Linux).

And you can also check IPsec-tools home page

so I just use the "SendTo" folder in Windows
Is there an installer I missed for wyoEdit, because this is how such a feature would get set up. I also looked in preferences and it isn't there either.

The real solution would be if wyoEditor itself could check the file-/mimetype during startup and pop up a dialog asking for setting it correctly. This is only possible on Windows so far but since wyoEditor also acts as a sample for cross-platform solutions I don't want to implement anything for Windows only. So you either have to live with the "SendTo" hack or encurrage the wxWidgets core developers to finally implement this feature.

Where I said Notepad I meant Notepad++. I had been opennig documents in wyoEditor using File|Open which caused the file to open in a new window, which is different from Notepad++. Opening via Explorer, right clicking and choosing Open With... opens in the next tab, just as it would with Notepad++

Check the "Use tabbed pages" in the setting. If this is set, any new file should open in a tab and not in a window. If it doesn't file a bug report.

I like notepad++'s collapsion better because it shows the beginning and end of the collapsion in the non-collapsed state and is also similar to the way collapsing directories lists look.

Many other users prefer it otherwise.

without a useful mimetype implementation on Linux
One of several reasons I don't use Linux ...

This is really an annoyance which keeps quite a few away from Linux. Unfortunately nobody understands this problem but me (http://wyodesktop.sf.net/mimetypes.html) but I don't have the time to do it myself.

O. Wyss

The above post refers to the killall from the psmisc package.

The Sun Solaris "killall" command kills *all* processes.

AIX "killall" kills all processes (except those in its family tree) owned by the calling user (maybe owned by the calling user *and* attached to the current terminal...).

Um no, but you can get Kaffeine here


--
BSD Podcasts @ http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/

Lots of open-source clients have a "preview" options, which is some kind of "embed webserver" which can stream those parts of the file that are already downloaded.

mlDonkey has one. I'm not sure about Azureus.
Also, most of the P2P clients save their temp files in a flat format which could be opened in a player (although I'm not sure how Windows and it's weird file locking mechanics would accept it), so a plug-in that presents temp-files with human usable names (i-e name of torrent, instead of hash)

Lots of open-source clients have a "preview" options, which is some kind of "embed webserver" which can stream those parts of the file that are already downloaded.

mlDonkey has one. I'm not sure about Azureus.
Also, most of the P2P clients save their temp files in a flat format which could be opened in a player (although I'm not sure how Windows and it's weird file locking mechanics would accept it), so a plug-in that presents temp-files with human usable names (i-e name of torrent, instead of hash)

There's a chilling effect that stems from the harassment of Quinn: other government CIOs are being scared away from the Open Format issue because now they know that Microsoft will do its best to end their careers if they even try. They can see from the Abramoff scandal that Microsoft's influence reaches the very highest level of American politics - and that while Abramoff and Delay were damaged, Gates hasn't been touched.

I always wonder why people complain about Microsoft but when it comes to do something against Microsoft, they fall silent. Also Bruce Perens doesn't give a hint, why? Well let's have a look about some key developments in OpenSource.

Mozilla: It is by far the most successful OpenSource project and it finally forced Microsoft to upgrade IE6 to IE7 and become more standard. Why is Mozilla this successful? Because it runs anywhere (cross-platform) and its look&feel suits enough users so they go for it. Besides Mozilla is developed with its own XUL framework.

OpenOffice: Not as successful as Mozilla but might become as well, albeit there are some reservation. This mostly because there are some complains about performance in their Java parts. Still it will become successful (on Windows and Linux but not MacOS) because it runs anywhere (cross-platform) and its look&feel (since version 2.0) suits enough users so they go for it. OpenOffice is developed with its own framework which allows for a native Windows port and a GTK/X-Server port anywhere else.

Gimp: Why does even the majority of the Linux users wish for Photoshop than Gimp (http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005 .pdf)? It seems Gimp fails to attract even Linux users let alone other's platform users. Because it's not usable as the others and its look&feel doesn't fit.

GTK apps: There are countless OpenSource applications written with GTK but none has become a significant contender in the market. None has threatened any commercial Windows-Only vendor. Because they all fail the usability as Gimp but maybe not as bad.

QT apps: There is no questions QT applications are usable and the look nice enough. But they face another problem, QT as OpenSource is only used within KDE but nowhere else. So even if they theoretically could be cross-platform they practically aren't.

Java apps: I don't know any top Java application, maybe there are but none for the ordinary user. This is amazing since there are lots of millions dropped into Java. Sun (Java), IBM (Eclips) and others spent altogether probably more than halve the money in OpenSource, still all this money seems to have no effect to threaten Microsoft.

Xara: Xara is a rather nice application and with Xara LX becoming OpenSource, there's much expectation it soon will become one of the top. Why can Xara but not Gimp? Maybe because it's written with wxWidgets?

Audacity: It's yet another good sample for a successful application even if it has to compete against lots of free commercial applications. Again Audacity is written with wxWidgets.

wxWidgets apps: There aren't that many other applications written with wxWidgets so I don't know other OpenSource candidates. There are some commercial (e.g. AOL is or was a wxWidgets app) but they don't make it public. But remind they might as easily be released on Linux as Xara is, either commercial or free.

GoogleEarth: No question GoogleEarth is in its area a top Windows application but there is still no Linux release. What do you think when you know that GoogleEarth is a QT application but not wxWidgets?

I think there are enough hints that any GTK application has failed to attract users and QT applications to attract users cross-platform. But to get a bigger market share and to force Microsoft to fight for it, I've design wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) so it's easy to create attractive cross-platform applications.

O. Wyss

Mozilla and Firefox are both written with massive amounts of javascript/xul if its good enough for them.....

So are Thunderbird extensions but after I've written my first and probably last extension (http://wyoguide.sf.net/test/folderselect.xpi), I'm happy to go back to C++.

O. Wyss

It's a code analysis utility.

Its weird how game compatibility goes. We can run almost everything made on things like Commodores and such (various emulators for everything), and with the latest release of dosbox, we can run almost all the DOS and a lot of the Win3.1 (not that there were that many) games. Its the stuff between that and Win2k that's iffy.

It almost seems like there's this hole that's a lack of support, and its shrinking from the tail end while eating up a bigger and bigger time period. Not sure if its expanding faster than its shrinking, but its rather interesting. I think with Vista's release, a lot of older but still-playable games (late 98 era) will become unplayable, and at the same time Wine will keep getting better and will be able to play the oldest games unplayable now (95-era and such).

On a different note, software like dosbox and the like seems to go partway toward nullifying the argument for open-sourcing games. I mean, games that were open sourced (Gladiator, Rise of the Triad, the Dooms and Quakes, etc) do live on today on modern systems, but the games that weren't are still very much alive and playable. In facts, Dosbox's enhancements like modem and IPX emulation make those games better and better! Of course, no matter how good Dosbox gets, it still won't be able to make, for example, the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe be anywhere near as good as OpenTTD, but its still cool how they improve well after their support life-cycle is over.

I kinda lost my point in all that, or maybe disproved it or never had one to begin with, but its still interesting. Maybe a bit off-topic, too....

OK, can gmail do PGP?

Not directly, but by using the GNOME Panel Applet included with Seahorse 0.9.0 you can perform all the usual encryption operations on the contents of the clipboard. Your private key will never leave your personal comuter.

Because the real problem is not so much the used framework but to use a single set of guidelines. The main obstacle of the Linux desktop is the usability, the look&feel of the applications. If one just uses 2 different applications on Linux, one most likely has to learn 2 different ways how to work with. If one uses 10 different application one doesn't have to learn 10 different ways but quite possible 5 to 7.

So I created wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) exactly for this, to finally have a single set of guidelines. And I designed wyoGuide to be cross-platform guidelines since no serious developer codes for a single platform these days. wyoGuide can and should be used on any platform with any framework and any language. Sure I do provide sample code written in C++ with wxWidgets but I'd love to put up others sample code as well. So far nobody familiar with other's framework volunteered.

To stress this point again, the Linux desktop won't become a success unless it can't be agreed on this single set of guidelines. It's possible that everybody sits together and designs yet another set but the outcome won't be much different than wyoGuide. On the other side wyoGuide is still work in progress and I'm open to any suggestion to make it more suitable for anybody.

If somebody doesn't believe me just read the LXer article here (http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index. html) and follow the links to the sources. Or go and read the guidelines themselves at http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/guidelines/content .html.

What I'm curious about is how the Portland project handles this info, the knew it since December 2005 (http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/desktop_architect s/2005-December/000349.html), they seems to already have forgotten. I've also informed Novell and posted it to LinuxQuestions, almost no reaction. So what else can I do?

O. Wyss

Its too bad its written in java.. if it was in C/C++ i would have run a node...

Just find a developer who does a C++ implementation based on the sample code of wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). It shouldn't be that difficult and is cross-platform as well. Sorry, no I don't have the time to do it myself but I'll help with advice.

O. Wyss

It's rather ironic that we're trying to get browsers to do what other application platforms have been able to do since the late 1970s. I sometimes wonder if the web browser, like the gopher client before it, should be dropped for something, well, a little less kludgy and arcane.

I know quite well why my boss fancies Web 2.0 because he hopes it will solve his cross-platform needs. Whatever business you do these days as soon as it gets a certain size you are faced with multiple platforms. My boss hates having different platforms but he couldn't avoid it so far. And my boss also likes to have it nice and beauty. So far none of what he tried satisfied him, even standardizing on Java for everything was enough. But I don't want to rant on Java now, I just want to tell you that my boss now thinks Web 2.0 is the solution. I on the other side know that Web 2.0 has its use for some kind of work (web of course) while Java had and will have its uses for other tasks as will have my own solution for the desktop (see http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html) . But it just needs some time until the hype is over, until everything is sorted out. And of course until people realize what's their best and what's hype.

O. Wyss

That's it. People who don't own one will never see the full range of features that makes Apple superior to anything out there. I am hardly a geek, but after I learned that I can set up my computer to be a web server/ftp server/print server and give myself shell access just by checking a box, I tossed my Windows machine.

Zero configuration, everything works, and if you really want the unix stuff, you get fink and the entire Unix world is available to you.

But, yeah, the coolness factor is there for me, still. The ultimate coolness factor, however, is the pure usability of the whole system. I have not done any maintenance since I bought my Powerbook 3 years ago. I just install programs and use them. Two OS upgrades later, the system works flawlessly, without my performing any maintenance at all. Now, THAT is cool.

Yes, even I, at one time, coded my own CMS. Anyone can do it! Yet I would like to see cleaner code from all CMS projects, rather than more features. Benefits, not features, are the true test of a CMS. I put my CMS on hiatus to explore better ways of offering beneifts, because feature creep was killing my spare time!

I've looked at Joomla and Mambo, yet I couldn't really tell the difference, until you posted that link!

Check it out... Mambo requires root access and shell access. The benefit of not requiring either makes Joomla the easiest choice -- not to mention Captcha. Joomla would have to split from Mambo -- just for the security changes. Thanks for that URL!

Or is it just another FUD? Or is it maybe this here http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html?

O. Wyss

Nothing against Amanda, but I switched from using Amanda to going to BackupPC. http://backuppc.sf.net/

What I really like about BackupPC is the Disk based backup focus of it. It does NOT support tape drives. But for doing backups to hard drives it is great. And with the way it will only keep one copy of a file, no matter how many systems it is on really helps to minimize disk space usage. Example: You have /bin/ls on five of your linux boxes that all run the same distribution. It will only store one copy of /bin/ls on the backup server and use hardlinks to keep track of all the other copies. Plus it compresses the files.

Great stuff!

I like Podget (http://podget.sf.net./ Its a simple bash script optimized for running as a cron-job so I've got all the latest podcasts every morning. Then a simple upload to my Ipod with GtkPod (http://gtkpod.sf.net/ as I check the weather in the morning.

Why sit and wait for downloads when its time to go?

I like Podget (http://podget.sf.net./ Its a simple bash script optimized for running as a cron-job so I've got all the latest podcasts every morning. Then a simple upload to my Ipod with GtkPod (http://gtkpod.sf.net/ as I check the weather in the morning.

Why sit and wait for downloads when its time to go?

Sorry Slashdot mixed up the links:
http://tango-project.org/
http://wyoguide.sf.net/

O. Wyss

MNG support is at http://mngzilla.sf.net/
includes binaries and patches. We were
tossed out of bug #18574 in December.