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I do recall that someone didn't want PDO to be built into PHP. I personally use ADOdb Lite, the much faster version of ADOdb. Now if it weren't such a bitch to port code between different APIs, I'd gladly try out every API under the sun, but for now, ADOdb is fine. Now if only there was a Perl DBI module for PHP and we'd be set. PHP needs more of that.

I do recall that someone didn't want PDO to be built into PHP. I personally use ADOdb Lite, the much faster version of ADOdb. Now if it weren't such a bitch to port code between different APIs, I'd gladly try out every API under the sun, but for now, ADOdb is fine. Now if only there was a Perl DBI module for PHP and we'd be set. PHP needs more of that.

Try mplayer-plugin (known on ubuntu as mozilla-mplayer), and the win32-codecs package. The site you point out works perfectly on my system if I choose windows media (mplayer-plugin) or realplayer (realplayer 10 for linux). As does Apple's trailers site (presently otherwise viewable only with quicktime 7) and a bunch of other stuff -- in fact, everything I've tried except some VRML stuff.

But from a purely browsing experience, I no longer think Firefox is the best open-source browser -- konqueror in kde 3.5 hasn't failed me on a site yet. The collaboration with Apple clearly helped...

I do distribute source but i'd like to distribute binaries as well since building from source isn't what everybody likes. E.g. I've made a simple sample code for the Tor GUI contest (http://wyoguide.sf.net/index.php?page=tormgr.html ) but to build it from the source, to get an idea how it works, isn't easy for everybody. O. Wyss

I know there aren't a lot of large open source games, but there is Stratagus, a RTS game based on the concepts of Blizzard's Warcraft II. Besides, bigger games take a lot of money to make, so you usually won't find it open sourced. However, many game companies are better than others with this with making Linux versions of games (e.g. UT2004) and/or making SDKs to enhance the game (e.g. Half-Life/2).

Being able to start actions with shortcut keys in a GUI is completely different than just using a CLI. With a GUI you have the possibility to access commands either with the keyboard or with the mouse or a stick. And you probably also have all the other good features of GUI (help, i18n, etc). It all depends how the application is coded. To learn how to code applications with a good GUI, see http://wyoguide.sf.net/.

On windows I like Textpad which doesn't do a lot but whatever it does, it does pretty well.

Lol. Though I've taken to using the Win32 builds of GNU software (gnuwin32.sf.net), and have the command-line version and gVim installed under Windows. Outside of a few things, I've almost started replacing my extensive Notepad use with Vi on Windows. (I do like the command-line version of Vi a lot better.)

There's been somethings where searching the source or objects files, or binaries were necessary using grep b/c M$ didn't provide enough documentation. The wonders of what those little tools can do. (For example - try to find out what lib file you have to include for VC++ 7 to be able to find the declaration of IID_IADsGroup.)

Any how...cheers and happy thanksgiving (tomorrow).

Hypnosis indeed works.

Primarily, I use an open source (GPL) program called "Virtual Hypnotist. It took time to get it to work for me (close to a year using it daily), but now I can under when I want to.

I've primarily used it so far to help overcome my shyness, especially around women. So far it's been working. I've also been using it assist with lucid dreams.

...developers need to be aware of how to write secure server-side code. Joseph Hemler's book Network Security Tools has a chapter about finding security flaws with static analysis tools like PMD.

Well, this is totally cool. No other OS i ever used was able to let me run realtime audio processing with a roundtrip latency of 64 sample (that's a buffersize of 32 samples) without any dropouts whatsoever while at the same time compiling a kernel, doing a dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hda2 and downloading large files via bittorrent (POSIX realtime scheduling classes and prioritizable IRQ handlers allow users to really finetune their system).

Ingo Molnar's realtime preemption patches make linux THE superiour OS for all kinds of timing critical media works. It's a crime that media production software vendors are not selling their stuff for linux.

For information's sake. Here's the typical setup for a linux audioworkstation these days:

- Install realtime-preemption kernel

- setup the realtime lsm or rtlimits so mere users can put tasks into realtime schedulnig classes

- make soundcard irq handler rt prio 90

- run jackd http://jackit.sf.net/ rt at prio 70

- leave all other irq handlers untouched at rt prios around 50

Whooops now all properly coded jack client apps i.e. ardour http://ardour.org/ run undisturbed by otherwise dropout producing hd or net activity. Or even normal processes' cpu load.

Have fun,
Florian Schmidt

Have you given SourceForge http://www.sf.net/ a good looking over for projects similar in scope and application to yours? Seems to me it shouldn't be too hard to find a group already working together working on X.application developing in X.language. Good luck...

I think the role of languages that don't rely on a specific platform will become much more important in the future. I write my software in Python and it works wherever Python works (well, not really thanks to GTK+, but its getting there!). As these languages and toolkits mature, I think we'll start to see less of a dependence on the OS

The Atheros based cards are great. D-Link sells a DWL-G650 PCMCIA card and a DWL-G520 PCI card, both using Atheros chipsets, for around $45 ($30-35 on sale usually). The Madwifi project supports these at http://madwifi.sf.net/, and the driver supports the use of wpa_supplicant for WPA.

I use these cards myself and have recommended them to many people, and almost all of them are happy with the results. (The one that isn't apparently got a bad card and is too lazy to exchange it.)

The other thing that helps here is the fact that D-Link doesn't change chipsets in the middle of a product line like other crappy brands (at least, not in _this_ line).

If you're biased against D-Link for some reason, Atheros also has a great list of manufacturers/products that use their chipsets - this is something every chipset manufacturer should have on their page.

Better tell them to read http://wyoguide.sf.net/guidelines/coding.html or even better read http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/guidelines/content .html.

O. Wyss

I'm always amazed that students don't write generalised code right from the beginning! And it's a shame the professors don't care more for correct coding. It's sooooo easy to write good code, even for matlab students, if you know how and it's incredible easy if you start with wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/).

O. Wyss

If you're even considering imaging, please don't. Try unattended. It may take a week or two and a few dozen trial installs but once you get the hang of it you will never want to go back to imaging.

Look at it this way. With unattended, you can assign different profiles to different computers, and they can inherit from each other. Say one group needs x apps, another group needs y apps, and another groops needs x y and z. With unattented that can all be maintained with three very small batch scripts. With imaging you would need to create three large images, and maintain each of them. With unattended, you maintain the master packages and all of your configurations make use of it.

Hardware detection is also easy. When I dealed with cloning I ended up having to keep multiple copies of the same image but configured for each different hardware. With unattended, you extract all the drivers into the $oem$/$1 directory and each computer's hardware is automatically detected and configured during the install. I can easly add any new hardware I want with no additional maintence.

If you need to apply different policies (without AD) learn how to use secedit. It's easy to write secedit and regedit scripts for unattended that will apply all configuration and policies automatically. Microsoft's Windows XP Security Guide covers this well.

Try unattended. You will not regret it.

Also, just as a comment to the above post, it's not neccessary that the NICs support PXE. Etherboot solves that. Etherboot gives a small (15k) image that can be put on a floppy, cdrom, lilo/grub, etc and will boot to PXE. It's not neccessary for the NIC to support it.

Use a client that has privacy options
Gaim and don't forget to get the encrypt plug-in. Both work on Windows and unix variants. Gaim can be persuaded to work on OS X but the encrypt plugin is a different beast in that regard (would need more persuasion).

Use a client that has privacy options
Gaim and don't forget to get the encrypt plug-in. Both work on Windows and unix variants. Gaim can be persuaded to work on OS X but the encrypt plugin is a different beast in that regard (would need more persuasion).

And if a game has been developed for more than ten years (like NetHack or T2T), you get extreme results, a lot better than the typical sell&forget new-fangled stuff.

Or you get ZAngband, which has more key combinations than EMACS.

My roguelike of choice is Tyrant (http://tyrant.sf.net/, site is somewhat broken), which is not text-mode but which also happpens to be only occasinally frustrating. Like in some other roguelikes you can buy food, which means that you no longer starve because the random loot from slaughtered enemies didn't contain something edible for too long. Note to traditional roguelike fans: You still have to constantly reload, for example because you encountered the wrong enemy and get killed or you stepped on a fire trap and lost $PRIZE_ITEM... Additionally you can now reload constantly trying to steal from shopkeepers who are stronger than you are.* You should feel instantly familiar.
Also, being Java-based, it runs on OS X. And it has an interesting everything-is-an-instance-of-the-same-class object model where the only difference between, say, a sword and a pie lies in the objects' properties, which allows for interesting combo items.


* Transcript from a usual Tyrant session where the user tries to steal something: ps= (pick up, shoplift, reload savegame, confirm load dialog with the enter key)
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
psssb (the shopkeeper was a bit faster than usual; the player dies and had to click through the death screens and reload the game)
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps- (this time i worked - pick up, shoplift, save game)

Ahh, great fun.

Why? It's soooooo easy to add a good GUI to any application on any platform even with C++. You don't know how? Go to wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). Ahhhh the developers of your favorite application doesn't know. Just tell them to look into wyoGuide. But ...! Well then I can't help.

O. Wyss

using a plugin called WPG2 written by Ozgreg, I use Gallery 2 exclusively both as a standalone and embedded in WordPress 1.5.x - works great. looking forward to the upcoming WordPress 1.6 souped up with Ajax. =) i strongly believe that these 2 powerful personal publishing platforms will one day become a standard package to be offered competitively by hosting providers. :) Gallery - http://gallery.sf.net/ WordPress - http://wordpress.org/ wpg2 plugin - http://wpg2.ozgreg.com/forums/

A similar product is available using Fuse under Linux called Phonebook: http://www.freenet.org.nz/phonebook/ and fuse: http://fuse.sf.net/

W.A.S.T.E.

iRate Radio

From Vigor's EULA, in a scrollbox that wouldn't let you scroll:

END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

IMPORTANT-READ CAREFULLY: This End-User License Agreement (EULA) is NOT a legal agreement between you (either an individual or a single entity, so take that Fare) and some other unnamed entity for whatever product we feel like it applies to. This includes media, printed materials, online or electronic documentation, products purchased because of or used with the product, or anything that happens to be nearby (SOFTWARE PRODUCT). By installing, copying, downloading, accessing, using, thinking about, hearing of, or being in the same universe as the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, you agree to be bound by the terms of this EULA. If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, you can try to get your money back, but let's face it, that ain't gonna happen anyway, so why bother?

SOFTWARE PRODUCT LICENSE

The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is protected by copyright laws, international copyright treaties, several vaguely defined IPO laws and treaties that are easily clouded in a court of law, and a guy named Bubba with a shotgun.

1. GRANT OF LICENSE.

This EULA grants you the following rights:

• The right to do whatever the publisher says.
• Nothing else.

2. RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE USER.

By agreeing to this license, you agree to the following:

• Give the provider your firstborn son, should the provider deem such is necessary and valuable.
• Become Bill's towel boy for life.
• Whatever else we think of later on, you already agreed to from the shrink-wrap license anyway

THIS TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND IS NOT DESIGNED, MANUFACTURED, OR INTENDED FOR USE OR RESALE AS ON-LINE CONTROL EQUIPMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE, SUCH AS THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, WEAPONS SYSTEMS, INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS, TECHNICAL SUPPORT LINES, NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTERS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE TECHNOLOGY OR NORMAL DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

LIMITED WARRANTY

You have no warranty rights under this agreement whatsoever, expressed or implied. We don't want to hear from you if you've got any problems. We don't give you a number to call for just that reason. You've got to call the poor schmuck who sold this to you; they have to support you themselves, and we won't help them. We don't care. We don't have to.

If you're reading this because it's being displayed as part of the Vigor startup sequence, then please let me know by email at joelh@gnu.org. This dialog box is intended to be long enough so that it won't be displayed on the screen.

Exception: I know that you can click in the text box, and then hold down the down arrow key, and thus bypass the scroll overrides. I'll figure out a way to keep that from happening later.

The first paragraph refers to "Fare", who had made a minor splash the week before Vigor came out by claiming he'd found a loophole in the GPL. The Bill's towel boy crack is from Dilbert. The "not fault tolerant" bit is right out of the Java license; I couldn't think of any way to make that bit funnier.

No way. As long as IBM doesn't recognize that these days nobody wants to or can afford to have several different development lines (except maybe Microsoft), literally nobody will port his applications. And nobody will port his application to Java neither. So the only solution to this problem is wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/), because it allows to merge all platforms into one single development tree. And the easiest way to start this transition goes through wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/).

There are many ways to Rome and there are many ways to get portable code. But when it comes to write full featured portable applications there isn't a better alternative than wyoGuide/wxWidgets (http://wyoguide.sf.net/, http://www.wxwidgets.org/).

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href="//ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167966&th reshold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=158&tid=93&tid=4&mode =thread&pid=14004578#14004712">Re:Decrypt ~and~ analyze by Phanatic1a (Score:2) Thursday November 10, @10:41PM

• Re:Decrypt ~and~ analyze by Genevish (Score:2) Thursday November 10, @10:44PM

Forget Decryption by Propaganda13 (Score:1) Thursday November 10, @10:52PM

Re:Decrypt ~and~ analyze by BiggerIsBetter (Score:2) Thursday November 10, @10:55PM

mostly analysis, I suspect by SuperBanana (Score:2) Thursday November 10, @10:57PM

• For many companies, there are no benefits to going open source, and only downsides. The pragmatist recognises this economic reality, the zealot (and Greg KG is a notorious one) doesn't want to hear it. For instance, let's say nVidia GPLd their driver and got it accepted into the main tree. This gives them a competitive disadvantage because ATI or other companies can now look at how their drivers work with much less effort. It doesn't save them any work, because the community would still expect them to maintain the drivers and add functionality to them (and indeed, for cards that are new to the market or in development, they'd be the only ones who could). And there's no guarantee the drivers would be accepted anyway - simply using the wrong coding style is enough to cause problems in the kernel project, let alone doing the sort of things the nVidia drivers do (for instance they used to use a custom TLS scheme).

  Because of this, I'm 100% not convinced making binary driver developers lives harder changes anything. Are large businesses (the type who make hardware that's difficult to reverse engineer) likely to say, hey, gosh, you know this Greg KH guy kind of doesn't like closed drivers, maybe we should open them up to please him? Nope. They'll just work around the difficulties or not provide drivers at all.

• It's not "impossible" to debug binary software. Please. This is a crappy excuse kernel developers regularly pull out of their asses to confuse people who haven't done much software development. What they actually mean is, "I don't really want to" (and if unloading the driver makes the crash disappear, that's a pretty good way to shift the problem onto the driver manufacturers anyway).

  I've been a Wine developer for years and have spent many hours doing this impossible thing of which you speak, and your average copy of MS Word or Steam is a LOT larger than your average driver. Yes, it's hard. No, it's not impossible. I've heard various excuses as to why kernel development is just different!! to userland software development, and don't buy it. Yes, having to reboot when a crash occurs is a royal pain in the ass, but so is not being able to get a backtrace because the game you're investigating treats any attempt at attaching a debugger as an attempt to hax0r its copy protection. Different space, different challenges. It's still possible.

• A stable binary module interface would help open source developers too (even if it only existed for a single 2.X series at a time), as new software which relies upon kernel modules or drivers would become much easier to distribute and install for non-technical end users. Take for instance ZeroInstall. The main developer, Thomas Leonard, since abandoned the original (imho quite elegant) approach of using a networked VFS because it required users to install a kernel driver, a task which proved hard to impossible for many non-developers. So the whole thing was rewritten to do things a different way and avoid the kernel, despite that coming with some disadvantages. We've also looked at using a kernel module to fix various speed issues for Wine in the past, but the difficulty of getting even minor patches accepted into the kernel let alone major new subsystems nixed that. If there had been a stable module interface we could have skipped all that and gone straight to improving things for end users without having to worry about what kind of indenting or list structure we should be using.

if you want to create your own Flickr of video, you should try LULOP2 open source. Here is a list of available features. Deveforum here. LULOP2 is the software that powers LULOP.com. So, not just Flickr of video, but a professional-grade platform for online video asset management which can be bent to many purposes.

Well, at least Akregator uses Metakit as a storage in KDE 3.5 which is much faster than XML storage it used to use...

> every dollar invested in OSS which leads to publicly released
> code is a dollar whose benefit will last long beyond any potential
> demise of the original VC group and/or development team.

Well said sir. And that's as opposed to those huge corporate systems on which armies slave for years - and then are unceremoniously dumped.

The beauty of it, too, is that a company can have a closed source product and still contribute to open projects. Running a backend database? Contribute something to PostgreSQL. Running a web server? Answer questions about Apache. Coding a propriety Java app? Buy a book on an open source Java code quality tool. :-)

Have you tried Liferea? My favourite feed aggregator and viewer of them all. Fast, lightweight, and sexy.

How is Mono related to GNOME?
In a number of ways. This project was born out of the need of providing improved tools for the GNOME community, and will use existing components that have been developed for GNOME when they are available. For example, we plan to use Gtk+ and Libart to implement Winforms and the Drawing2D API and are considering GObject support. Mono team members work actively on the Gtk# (http://gtk-sharp.sf.net/ project: a binding of the GNOME class libraries for .NET and Mono.

Yes, you can run Mono under KDE. Yes, Novell could get strong KDE bindings into Mono. But Novell develops apps for Mono, and Mono plays better under Gnome on Linux.

The announcement does not mean that Novell is stopping the support of KDE on the desktop, it means that Gnome is the default on the desktop. One could speculate that it is also (implicit) permission for the Novell application developers to stop caring about KDE, but I dont think they ever did.

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dollars to do so. The American Council on Education (ACE) filed an appeal with the circuit court last week against the new rules that Carnegie Mellon Chief Information Officer Joel Smith referred to as "definitely an overkill."

Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994, telephone companies must pay to maintain their systems so that federal agents can easily obtain wiretaps. The most recent orders under this act, issued by the FCC, asks that institutions providing Internet access also reengineer their systems accordingly within the next 18 months. Carnegie Mellon is one such institution. With a subpoena and the flip of a switch, federal officials could have access to e-mail accounts and online information of any student at compliant universities.

"The Department of Justice wants 24/7 access, whenever they need it, and they want remote access. We find that too extremely burdensome in terms of money, staff, and technology," said Maureen McFalls, Director of Government Relations for Carnegie Mellon and the coordinator of Carnegie Mellon's response to this issue. According to an ACE press release, the cost to universities could be upwards of $7 billion, or at least $450 extra on each student's tuition bill.

"Burdensome is really the best word for the new rules," McFalls added.

"Colleges and universities have a long history of working with law enforcement agencies pursuing criminal investigations and are proud of our working relationship," said Sheldon E. Steinbach, ACE vice-president and general counsel, in the same press release. "When you evaluate efficiency versus the incredible cost of compliance, we just dont think it makes a lot of sense."

According to the new rules set forth under CALEA, federal agencies want to be able to access a private institution's network from almost any location at almost any time. Currently, universities take special precautions to make this kind of remote access very difficult, in order to prevent online crime.

"We do recognize the need to be in compliance and cooperate with law enforcement," said Smith, "but it happens very rarely that they need this kind of access, here or nationally." According to a report from Educause, a nonprofit organization that deals with online issues in higher education, there were 3468 wiretaps ordered by local, state, national, and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts in 2004. The report also stated that the number or wiretaps on campuses is extremely small.

So how is Carnegie Mellon's administration reacting to these new proposed regulations? The school plans "to work through the appropriate channels for the University to make our views known, just as a matter of fact, that it would be very costly for every student in every college," said University Provost Mark Kamlet.

"We are going to review the AAU [Association for American Universities] and ACE actions and perhaps take our own if we feel that we may have something different or more important to say than t

SQL has a strong theoretical underpinning in set theory

Only that it forfeited it when IBM chose to populate System R with people who never understood Codd's work and refused to learn from him, in a move many interpreted as trying to create a failure in order to preserve the IMS/DB cash cow.

A clear replacement has yet to emerge.

Yep, but this is not a technical issue, only a market one.

Tutorial D is certainly technically nice

Only that no one defined yet an Industrial D. Rel may yet define it, perhaps, if it ever changes its current exclusive educational focus.

XQuery is a mess and ODBMSs (and their query tools) really haven't caught on.

Thanks God, this would be a 35-years regression into graph-based, pre-relational systems.

There's GNUstep (an article on which was posted shortly before this one). I don't know how integrated it is with the shell, though. Normally to run an application in your GNUStep-equivalent-for-a-path, you run "openapp ". I've never found GNUstep to be particularly usable.

There's also the ROX Desktop. By default, it doesn't interfere with your shell (how could it, if it's distributed as a series of AppDirs?), but someone's written a patch to Bash so that appdirs in your $PATH are accessed by (the executable in an AppDir is named "AppRun", so obviously the method can't be quite equivalent). I've never used it (I prefer zsh) and it mightn't cleanly apply any more though... (If you run "rox ", then the appdir opens; the command "rox" behaves similarly to open on MacOS X or openapp on GNUStep except that rox doesn't maintain its own path. ROX is, after all, a series of AppDirs.) I run a ROX desktop.

modern scanners can produce direct dumps to digital from an mri, pet or ct scanner. i've got software and images which show you what it does..try multislice RTP at http://yhs.sf.net/ ..has source for decoding images as well.
if you have only physical film then any good hospital or uni with a image engineering dept can copy it for you for a nominal fee ($2/film i believe). alternatively try going to a large photolab and they should be able to do it. you shouldnt try using a regular scanner since the bit depths in a CT or mri image are far more than normal scanners can aquire. usually 16 or 18 bit greyscale which translates to requiring a 48 bit color scanner to duplicate properly.

Cool, yup, right on, I should have said "syntax changes", like new keywords or whatever. At least, I don't think any have been introduced.

On the other hand, most folks I know are still on JDK 1.4, so I wonder how many people will move to 1.6? I even still get PMD parsing bug reports and whatnot for JDK 1.3...

Assuming you're on a Windows operating system.

Use of GAIM will only prevent propagation of this worm. There are more levels at play here.

The worm is actually installed from a link you would click on from an infected IM. Nothing fancy here, it's just a simple HTML link. Clicking on this link will call up your web browser. What happens here depends on both the browser, patches, browser settings, and you. In IE, it's likely that the executable will just run it. Or, ask you to download/run said file. The latter true for Firefox or Opera as well as IE.

In any case, if your computer runs this executable, the computer in infected and it's game over. BUT, you won't be spreading the worm to others since you're using GAIM. The spreading of the worm depends on the AIM (or AOL?) client running on the computer.

That is until the worm writers also write for GAIM.

How does that differ from ipw2200 drivers ?

BTW, here's a coral link for the kernel changelog.

True, it would have been better if a single soc_2005 project would have been created and divided into sub-projects similar as wxCode (http://wxcode.sf.net/) is for wxWidgets code snippets.

hmmm , broadcom cards work with ndiswrapper ... my laptop is running ubuntu at 32 bit mode and the broadcom card works just fine ... have no idea if the ndiswrapper dudes at http://ndiswrapper.sf.net/ have found the clues to cut through the 64 bit hassle.

anyway, good luck.

and really, suse has no real fault in this item, except maybe they could suggest to the user that it should download ndiswrapper and attach a proper windows driver for it :D (since they are supposed to be user friendly n stuff like that)

How about this?

http://doxbox.sf.net/

-Ares

Does Minix have a framebuffer like Linux? Then it would be possible to implement DirectFB http://www.directfb.org/ on top of it. This would give me more reason to renew my wyoDesktop http://wyodesktop.sf.net/ project.

This makes it, as far as I know, the only completely BSD licensed Unix-like operating system in the world. Even the big BSDs can't claim that, as they all rely on gcc.

I was in on the Minix beta testing. It's actually extremely impressive. It's quite minimalist; most of the shell commands are pared down to their bare minimum --- for example, tar doesn't support the j or z flags --- and it tends towards SysV rather than BSD with things like options to ps. It runs happily on a 4MB 486 with 1GB of hard drive, with no virtual memory, and will contentedly churn through a complete rebuild without any trouble whatsoever. Slackware users will probably like it.

Driver support isn't particularly great; apart from the usual communications port drivers, there's a small selection of supported network cards, a FDD driver, an IDE-ATA driver that supports CDROMs, and a BIOS hard disk driver for when you're using SCSI or USB or some other exotic storage. The VFS only supports a single filesystem, MinixFS (surprise, suprise!) but allows you multiple mountpoints. In order to read CDs or DOS floppies you need external commands.

There's no GUI, of course.

As a test, as part of the beta program, I did manage to get ipkg working on it. This required a fair bit of hacking, mostly due to ipkg assuming it was running on a gcc/Linux system, but it did work, and I found myself able to construct and install .ipk packages --- rather impressive. Now the real thing's been released, I need to revisit it.

Oh, yeah, it has one of the nicest boot loaders I've ever seen --- it's programmable!

> They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software.

Well, this is partly true :-) I use Dosbox quite often for playing old games, tinkering with TASM, etc.

Hook up a camera to http://effectv.sf.net/ (EffecTV) and play with some of the different effects. Very nifty!

shameless plug, and probably more simple than you're looking for, but who knows...

CGI Calendar
(hosted at Sourceforge, licensed under GPL)

MAC's are spoofable.

They can always shape the traffic they see, that's about it.
When they see ssh sessions passing they can block them if they use something like Packeteer, layer 7 filter or other traffic shaping solutions.

Fuck, my 3rd post in the last year(s), my average is going up again ;)