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nobody would be able to make a living writing software

I have managed contracts to fund developers working on open source software projects. My employer pays programmers to write software and to release it with an open source license. The Department of Energy (our funding source) has spent literally millions of dollars over the last few years on projects like this.

I contest the claim that writing open source software entails no monetary compensation to the software developer.

and HOL is open source

Try Sydney then. The SourceForge page is a little out of date because I've been busy with school/work, but we've done a lot of work at Navtech recently (that's been the work bit of my excuse) to improve Sydney for the live web application we've built on top of it. It gives you combo boxes, tabbed windows, a table widget (a grid control would be an obvious extension to this) and a tree widget, amongst other things, and the Javascript's not crashy.

Other interesting features: cross-browser (works in Moz, IE, Safari, and (probably) Opera--no it doesn't work in Lynx, Emacs, etc.), keyboard support (you can navigate the tree and table widgets with the arrows, etc.), robust library code for managing data-presentation separation, custom context menus, unit test framework modelled after JUnit, and a source cruncher and a server-side include manager for speeding up downloads. I can't remember if any of these features are still only in the Navtech repository, but all the recents in-house improvements will be in the public repository before the end of April, maybe before the middle of April, depending on my final exam schedule.

Sydney works. We've built a complex web application on top of it that consists of more than 90,000 lines (3,000,000 characters) of Javascript (according to `find . -name *.js | xargs wc -l -c`) and several tens of thousand lines of Perl.

Ian -- Sydney maintainer

I'm not going to block anyone from my site - I didn't put it up there to make money, I put it up there to help people.

These days, that seems to be a strange concept.
It's how t'internet started!
My site (steve-parker.org, FWIW) is there to offer assistance to people who want it. I added adverts when I moved from freeloading off my employer to a "real" content provider. Right now, so many people block Google ads, it provides very little income, but it covers my hosting costs (if not my time) so I'm back to where I started... I maintain the site because I believe that people will benefit from it.

I don't see a huge "war" here... I don't block Google ads because I want to see what they're putting on my site (otherwise, I would block them, and have no problem with others doing so). I block as many advertisers as possible. I, as a "publisher" know that people will block adverts. What do people want?

I don't want an Internet which consists solely of people trying to sell stuff to me... that isn't the internet I grew up with in the 90s. That's the internet I liked.
If I want to buy stuff, I'll go to amazon.com / etc; if I want info, I'll go to the "real" internet - sites like mine. If they've got adverts, I'll block them - others won't block them; someone (I don't know who these people are!) click on the adverts. That keeps the cycle going for now;
In a few years time, when (hopefully) the majority are using FireFox and understand the features, then doubleclick, Google adsense, etc, will drop off even more quickly (my Google revenue is 50% at best of what it was a year ago).
So what? There seem to be 3 motivations for putting stuff on the web:

1. Interesting stuff people would like to see
2. Stuff I want to sell to you
3. Fuck all, but here are some adverts

So I'm a happy content-provider, because I believe that what I'm putting out there is a Good Thing.

Just like I put out Free Software (http://speedtouchconf.sf.net/) because that's a Good Thing.

Fairy nuff? Some people actually want to benefit the world, and don't want to profit from it

There's some validity to your point here. In this case, static typing signals you at compile time that you made a "stupid" mistake (ie, a mistake not caused by an improper understanding of the program requirements). But a dynamic language would signal the error just as quickly, because you'll get a clear, obvious error the first time your code runs.

Though the error may be clear and obvious, knowing it the first time the code runs can be too late. I've wrote code that can only run a few weeks every year (nothing important, but the nature of the program limited it to running only at very specific times), and Python has allowed numerous stupid bugs (typos, etc.) to stay dormant until I was able to run it. Static typing would have been very useful in this case.

Pychecker is a step in the right direction. It doesn't do very advanced type checking, but can warn you about inconsistant return types (returning a string in one path, but another data type in another, for example) at least. MJD's Strong Typing and Perl discusses how strong and static typing can be done right (in ML), in order to prevent many bugs at compile-time (in his case, infinite recursion). I hope we see more options for static typing in Python, if only as an option. I wouldn't want to not ever be able to write simple Python programs without declaring every variable, but for larger programs, static typing is definitely useful. Maybe in the future we'll see more languages that are able to prove that a program is correct (using static typing, etc).

This is not possible, because Camera Life (http://fdcl.sf.net/), the superior photo management software, already bought out both projects. They are doing this stunt merely as publicity for the Camera Life parent project.

Hear hear!

I was in a vaguely similar boat, though I can't ever claim to have been a Linux sysadmin - certainly not outside the home anyway. All our machines at home were Windows XP, mostly self-built, and we had Linux for NAT, etc. But all the machines were a constant hassle. The only thing I can be thankful for is that this was before spyware and its ilk got really big, so I never had to deal with much of that.

Anyway, I got an iBook in 2002, after playing around on a very sexy PowerMac G4 server (it had 1.25GB RAM, which was not unimpressive at the time). Looking back now, it was quite crude - Internet Explorer for the web browser, no X11, no Quartz Extreme - but I still switched, and haven't looked back.

Granted, it's a little weird if you're coming from a Linux-centric background - each UNIX has its own ways of doing things and Darwin is no different in this respect - but you can still get down to the nitty-gritty and write your own ipfw configuration if it floats your boat. And, though Fink seems slightly stagnated of late, running KDE on your Mac is just plain cool (from a "because you can" point of view, anyway).

Keep an open mind - I know a friend of mine was a little upset at first because he couldn't start Apache with apachectl start. I was a little terse with him in reply, pointing out that Apple, champion of the GUI, could hardly expect a horde of headstrong OS9 GUI diehards to open up a Terminal to start a web server. Once I pointed him towards the Sharing tab, all was fine.

The wireless implementation is unparalleled. Having taken my first steps in the WiFi world on a Mac, it pains me to use Windows' or Linux efforts (the latter I am having particular trouble with at home). Bluetooth is beautiful - you will, I am sure, find BluePhoneElite and Salling Clicker amusing if not essential toys. iPhoto is really, really nice; iMovie HD is just totally cool...

You almost take it for granted in fact. I installed iTunes on a friend's Windows XP machine the other day, and she was almost bowled over (she has rather poor balance) by the simplicity of iTunes. I now think of it as nothing special, but to someone who has suffered under WiMP for so long, it is truly refreshing.

In the end, all the machines at home now are Macs, save for one Linux server which still does NAT, mostly for my amusement so that I can continue to hack when I want. But I really think you hit the nail on the head with this...

I mess around with things enough at work and home. When I want to play, I have plenty of things to play with. But I want something that I don't have to think about unless I want to. I don't want to have to edit a single god damn configuration file to accomplish the above tasks.

I think I can sum it up succinctly with a line that is sure to appeal to at least the more mature and competent (i.e. less l33t t33n h4x0r) type that reads /. "Hack 'cause you want, not 'cause you have to." Hacking actually becomes fun again. And surely that's something quite hard to put a price on?

iqu :)

Seashore is an open source image editor for Cocoa. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP's technology and uses the same native file format.

Now if these two projects merge we'd be in pure esctasy. I use seashore now and it's great.

Grid Portal is another pure-plugin architecture. It is a single executable JAR file which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and can be started in either GUI or command-line (CLI) mode. It comes with a plugin manager which allows you to easily install, update, and remove plugins. Screenshots are there as well.

Tried out Gaim encryption for Gaim ?

I know it's not necessarily a perfect match (not working on Windows being a major flaw), but you should check out Gambas.

Try ROX. It rocks.

For those not RTFA there are two choices he recommends:

GSB
GWARE

For those not RTFA there are two choices he recommends:

GSB
GWARE

There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same sort of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's _your_ system, so I will also mention their project: http://www.dropline.net/gnome/

he recommends these two

There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same sort of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's _your_ system, so I will also mention their project: http://www.dropline.net/gnome/

he recommends these two

I didn't even know SourceForge had a hall of fame.

let bar = foo.map(int[] x => x[1]);

Re: multiple users, you can do this already, but not like you're thinking. If you use ROX Filer, you can sudo rox [PATH] which will open a ROX window as that user in that directory. In addition to the already extreme handiness of ROX, you can now pop open windows and run commands as that user without further issue.

Conceivably, with multiple screens, you could make a pinboard (the window that puts icons on your desktop) as another user, so everything you clicked would be sudo'd.

Just a thought.

While I understand your point, I'd like to point out that Trillian isn't open source.

On a side note, K-Meleon and Trillian aren't cross-platform. I consistently put my friends and family on Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim, so that when they eventually move to Linux (an inevitability, I think, barring an Apple-based purchase), they'll be well-acquainted with the applications they'll use most.

I'm waiting for their long-awaited IM program to come out. It would be very nice to have a Mozilla-based IM program.

IIRC, versions 6/7 of netscape included a built in AOL client (at least for the linux version). Of course, it was fairly unusable when compared to something such as gaim, but it was there. I'm unaware as to whether the new firefox-based version of netscape includes it, though.

Shameless self plug. I've been working on a Lucene based OSS desktop search engine in pure java named Nariva http://nariva.sf.net/ that incorporates some additional Apache software projects to provide stuff like a XML-RPC interface to the engine.

If a university gives some support to a grad student to carry on research it is likely to be much much lower than what an equivalent job would bring in. So unless the support is such that you can actually say a fair salary was paid or something close to develop the work, then no I don't think people have the right to it. I released my PhD work under the GPL to hopefully at some point attract interest in my cryptography design or perhaps just future job prospects, but I still maintain my right to sell it independently. My college loans and bills aren't going to pay themselves, and the project involved several years of part time work. (For the curious see Project Page or the Sourceforge Page )

But remember, the GPL itself is not specifically "tested", per se, because GPL software developers assert them rights granted to them via copyright on an individual basis. This makes it a sometimes long and arduous process to assert rights and/or prove infringement, but hopefully more precedent will help.

Since the provisions of the GPL have been upheld in a case in Germany as well, maybe PearPC will be able to more easily defend itself against CherryOS, which has blatantly taken GPL code, without release of source code or attribution, from PearPC and several other GPL projects:

eWeek has a general overview of the situation:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1775386,00.as p

Below is a comprehensive collection of evidence, which runs the gamut from CherryOS including original PearPC graphics, extremely unique strings and error messages, debug code from PearPC, the same unique MAC address as PearPC's default network adapter, shared specific functionality, including bugs, and so on:

http://www.ht-technology.com/cherryos-pearpc/cherr yos-pearpc.html

http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/00 0501.html
http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/00 0503.html
http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/00 0504.html
http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/00 0507.html

http://starport.dnsalias.net/index.php?show=articl e&id=348

http://forums.pearpc.net/viewtopic.php?p=16178#161 78
http://www.tliquest.net/ryan/cherryos/
http://dhost.info/kourge/en/projects/frauds/cherry os.php

Additionally, PearPC project authors are already asserting their rights under the GPL:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _id=11116974

And a general compilation of some of the evidence so far against CherryOS:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _id=11125509

Gallery2

See Forums->G2->Development->Sticky Thread for Demo Sites
G2 is beta, quite stable since alpha.

"We come in peace"

Dammit, now I have to go play Starcon 2 again...

Hmm, games I would recommend?

I have a rather outdated page on my outdated website which lists some games I've grown to like you may care to check out

When did you try BZFlag? They've recently made the big milestone of version 2.0.0 and the game is better than ever.

I've never played Glest. I'm glad you mentioned it. I guess now I put some use to that ever-neglected Windows box in the other room. :)

If you dig RPGs, be sure to check out Dink Smallwood. The game is just absolutely crazy.

I'm actually a developer for the Java-based Rogue-like Tyrant. If you liked Angband and Moria, you'll almost certainly love this unless you're the old-schooler type who just can't take Rogue with graphics. :)

By the way, I love the sig. :)

Fear my ability to run the game at 10% the speed of a native implementation!

Well, the justification supposedly is that games are getting more expensive to produce with rendering technologies becoming more advanced and the gradual migration of television owners to high-definition.

I don't feel sympathetic for the game industry. Games are turning too pop-culture for me. The Halo 2 hype we still hear about? Sorry, but that's just too fucking creepy for me.

I'll just stick to writing and playing FOSS games.

I can't believe everyone already forgot Gambas... I just played with it because I don't need it but you can write GUIs in a VisualBasic-like language and works on Linux.

KDE? Yes http://kde-cygwin.sf.net/. Newer versions should start being released once QT & KDE 4.0 are out.

We have some on computers at work. They lag to high hell even running a decent opengl screensaver . Same screensaver runs fine on a cheap desktop with integrated SIS video (not notably well accelerated either).

The only thing Extreme about the Intel graphics cards is the lag... definately not comparable to a decent Radeon. Another laptop has an older radeon-mobile chipset and the screensavers work fine on that, too... though it's a lesser machine otherwise.

you should check out qdvdauthor, still kinda beta, but it works rather well, with dvdauthor you can do it all with xml, and a little more than i've seen most windows dvd authoring software let you.

http://qdvdauthor.sf.net/

apt-get update && apt-get install foo

DBAN even has a bootable cd to do the job, and a custom number of times.

If you want to program in a functional style, and you need lazy evaluation, you're going to find the standard library that comes with the compiler somewhat limited.

I wrote some extensions for programming in OCaml in the functional style. Check out the OCaml NAE project, and look for the Core Foundation (Cf) package.

A schema creator is currently in the works for Luma (http://luma.sf.net/). Depending on how much time I can spend on this, it will be ready in about two weeks. Basicly you will be able to create a pool of attributes and objectClasses and choose from them to export to a schema file. It will have multiple backends for different LDAP server, with OpenLDAP being currently the main focus. But others will follow in time.

Use Azureus with the AutoSpeed plugin. This dynamically changes your global upload speed depending so you are always in that "sweet spot".

A successful enterprise Linux distribution?

Mac OS X + X11 + Apple Developer Tools (Xcode) + Fink

In all seriousness, we have found that a desktop or laptop with Mac OS X, with X11, all of the compilers and development tools, and a ports/package manager like Fink or DarwinPorts, which still allows running normal productivity software like Microsoft Office, mainstream media players, Adobe products, etc., has been the most productive platform of all.

Anyone with PHP and MYSQL can make an awesome photo website. With something like Camera Life. You can put all kinds of pictures up there and make it easy to get around.

Here's an example of a friendly way to put up thousands of pictures and still keeping everything organized: http://camera.phor.net/

gaim-encryption has been around for some time now, if you are that worried about someone else (AOL or otherwise) reading your IMs take the steps needed to ensure they can't.

Pretty simple, next question please...

Yes, GAIM does log if you want it too. I live in Texas, where logging only requires one-party consent, and thus I log every conversation I have, then manually delete the ones I don't want (spambots, etc).

http://gaim.sf.net/ is the GAIM site, so you don't have to go looking for it later.

If you're planning to create your own online gallery, I highly recommend G2, the successor of the original Gallery. It's a solution for personal galleries, for you and your friends and for community / commercial sites.

It features plenty of features and more and more modules for the end user and it's a beauty on the inside for developers.

Autopano and Autopano-sift. I have't had good experiences with the SIFT-based software. They always tend to pick the most inappropriate points, like trees/leaves (that move between shots) and the middle of objects (where there aren't many features). I almost always have to go through and remove the bad points, adding in my own reliable ones (corners, unique features, etc). I just don't use them anymore because I actually spend less time if I do all the points myself manually. The GUI of Hugin usually saves me plenty of time already. It does a good job of picking the matching point when I click on one photo. That's all I need anymore.

Of course, there are legitimate reasons for liking a command line too. It's scriptable. You can set it up to do repetitive tasks automatically. (Not very useful for CD burning since you still need to put in new CDs, but this is an exception to the rule.)

CherryOS
CherryOS
CherryOS
Mac Emulation

OSX windows
Cherry OS
OSX emulator?

CherryOS
CherryOS
CherryOS
Mac Emulation

OSX windows
Cherry OS
OSX emulator?

CherryOS
CherryOS
CherryOS
Mac Emulation

OSX windows
Cherry OS
OSX emulator?

CherryOS
CherryOS
CherryOS
Mac Emulation

OSX windows
Cherry OS
OSX emulator?

CherryOS
CherryOS
CherryOS
Mac Emulation

OSX windows
Cherry OS
OSX emulator?