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...and performs a bit better than Bochs. Install a smallish distro like Crux. QEMU also is supposed to support Windows 95/98/ME/2K but Bochs will probably prove to be more compatible. Don't expect speed demon performance and you'll be OK.

AC

First if you use IVTV it does record mpeg. But besides that nuv is just an encapsulation for various diffrent encoding formats. So even though it says nuv the underlying encoding format is usally either mpeg2 or mpeg4. Now if you want to view them on other platforms mplayer has a patch to play nuv files. Also you could use winmyth to play them on windows. And if you want to easily convert nuv files to divx you can use nuvexport. Or you could play them through mythweb with mythstreamtv.

history-tools, that is. But most people want more than an archive what stupid mistakes they have made over and over. Sometimes you want to restrict who can do what, by using specific roles in the project, So your youngest intern may be able to check out the code and develop a change to it, but he may not check that change directly into the baseline.
You als need to assure his change does not break other stuff, makes mistakes others have allready made.

In ohter words, you need aegis for that.
Have a look at it at here. You will like it if you are serious at software development for more that trivial programs.

...Subversion support is one of the most requested features on RubyForge.

Is there a StatCVS-type reporting tool for Subversion? I suppose StatCVS could be modified to support Subversion... there's been some discussion of it on their mailing list...

erm... I didn't sleep much last night... that should be viking.sf.net ... and it's GPL'd

It seems to me like innovative and experimental software is very commonplace in OSS. Unfortunately, a lot of it doesn't get noticed as it is never rolled into a "usable" product. Tempest, a radio broadcaster using CRT, is a good example.

Another obvious place where OSS seems to innovate is in low level networking programs. Ettercap is absolutely brilliant, for instance, and Ethereal is exceedingly useful as well. Perhaps these were created in part because they were necessary to write compatible higher level software to interoperate with other systems. Also, their internationally developed and non-profit nature might make their authors more likely to tread into "legally questionable" territory than a commercial venture would dare.

Despite the relative lack quality Linux-based music and audio software, there are definitely some innovative tools in this area as well, such as Csound, SuperCollider, and TaoSynth, which provide very interesting programmatic sound modeling possibilities. These programs wouldn't be generally useful to musicians, which is perhaps why they haven't been developed as closed-source commercial products, but for the somewhat rare musician-hackers out there, they're very interesting indeed.

There's plenty of innovation in open source. The only thing is, most of it is so niche that it's hard to hear of it.

The whole idea is a good one, and there's no company nickel-and-diming it to death.

I suppose this is the end of the KDE on Cygwin project, and good news in general for Qt/KDE applications on Windows?

> nvidia implements a standard driver [which X can talk to and works in OpenGL].
> They follow standards. The fact that the source is closed shouldn't bother people.

Speaking only for myself, the main difference is that the nVidia driver has to be linked with the kernel.
This may seem like an unbelievably eggheaded reason to dislike it, but I'll try to explain. When nvidia's
giant binary blob is linked with my kernel, all bets are off as to debugging any problems that might arise. If
the driver crashes, it takes the kernel down with it. The nvidia module lives in the same place as my hard drive and
filesystem drivers, so it could presumably cause data loss. All manner of undesirable consequences.

I work a lot with wireless cards; here's another example. Atheros has generously assisted with the creation
of a very high-quality mostly-open driver for their cards in Linux. I say mostly because of a sizable
binary HAL that is linked in, to prevent free reprogramming of the radio (FCC regs, blah blah).

On the other hand, you have the Intersil prism 54g. It has a fully open-source driver, also high-quality
and functional. They comply with non-reprogrammability requirements by having a binary-only firmware
that is loaded at module init time. Now, there's still closed, untouchable code in there... but it runs on the card's chipset,
not on my CPU where my kernel and other things live. And, since the driver is fully open, it's included with
the mainstream kernel, so much more convenient and more likely to work with any of the weird kernels I cobble together.
And a bug in that card's firmware is much less likely to cause my whole system to come crashing down, although
it's certainly possible.

(All bitching aside, much thanks to nVidia, ATI, Atheros, Intersil, and all the other hardware companies out there
who throw Linux a bone every now and then.)

Hey, I use ROX with openbox3. It does pretty much what you are requesting *shrug*

Go with MUTE and they can't stop you!

Technology that protects your privacy.
Now with three clients for all platforms.
Free, GNU, Open Source and a growing network.

http://www.planetpeer.de/wiki/index.php/MuteDownlo ads/
http://mute-net.sf.net/

It is quite possible, though not very easy, to do, and there are already many excellent tips posted in this thread so I will not repeat them. What nobody seems to be talking about, though, is that you have to be aware of the gotchas of any technology you are going to use. Wireless security is much different than wierd, because your adversary only needs a $50 laptop and Airsnort (so called "war driving") instead of much much more expensive hardware needed to intercept wired communication especially in a shielded medium like STP for Ethernet. The security of your systems is something that you have to design before you do anything else. You cannot just say: "I'll add security later." That's why it is important to understand how the systems in question really work. Good luck.

I'm a big fan of Google Local, but there's one thing missing that always bugs me. So in the category of "developer scratches an itch" is a GPL'd bit of software I've written to plug a hole on Google Local's offering: the inability to import results into your address book. I do this all the time now, especially on my Treo. I'd appreciate feedback/testing if anyone here is interested:

http://gvcard.sf.net/

So, Linux or Trusted Computing. Choose one, because you can't have both.

Really? Then what's this?

TrouSerS - An open-source TCG Software Stack implementation, created and released by IBM.

I don't know the answer, but I guess I'm more qualified to answer than many because I've been coding one on and off for the past three years. I guess the answer is it's hard work. You're also not "following head lights", as even the eDonkey clones do. And the programming is not easy - with C language it's socket programming, which means all kinds of strange things can come over the network which have to be defensively coded against, and since you're using multiple sockets that means threading. And it takes a lot of code to just get a decent app, never mind cool bells and whistles. One reason mine is GPL is, aside from liking the GPL, this is my first big software project so I don't feel I'm at a level where I can sell my code yet. I've also borrowed GPL code from a program called gnut which helped. I would borrow from one called GTK-Gnutella but it's so big and complex it's hard to directly borrow from.

Of course there are exceptions - Gnutella (although AOL/TW killed the eponymous one, leaving only the protocol clones), and Bittorrent. With the Gnutella protocol, Limewire and Bearshare are commercial companies, but they agree on an open protocol, which they share with some free clients (like mine).

There are so many innovations possible - Bittorrent is one of the recent ones - it built on what Edonkey did, allowing hundreds of megs of files to be transferred, except with Bittorrent, it added speed to the picture. So because Bittorrent exists, people now have a better chance of getting ISOs of Linux distros, Indymedia videos or whatnot. It's such a cool area I wonder why the propietary folks so often beat the free ones in terms of innovation. I guess it's a wash now with who innovates more. And also, with sockets, trheading and protocols that obsolete older versions as time goes on (ay de mi!), it takes so long to get a decent app together that innovation seems a long way off.

I suppose another reason is the RIAA/MPAA is suing p2p developers left and right - that might explain why people are hanging back somewhat. It's unfortunate this fear is stifling p2p innovation. In many ways it seems ridiculous to me - on BBSs in the 1980s you had a file section and a message board system. Sometimes you didn't even have a message board - just a file section. People have been trading and sharing files on computers for decades, all of a sudden such communal practices are tainted, with accusations flying on Slashdot on how people use p2p to break some new laws that the big corporations passed recently in Washington DC that protected their soi disant intellectual property. It's ridiculous - there were normal BBSs and warez BBSs back then, just as there is an equivalent nowadays on the Internet. It would be insane for US-legal (for now) things such as sharing ISOs or Indymedia videos is crushed by the evil capitalist bourgeois corporations.

"Auctioning the library off in such a piecemeal fashion just seems wrong, IMNSHO."

Whether that is wrong or not, I do think important historical documents should be electronically 'preserved' and made available for the benefit of the public. Some institutions and companies make an effort but not all and quality is variable - the British Library recently scanned some 17th century Shakespeare Quartos and put images of them up online in jpeg format. They are readable but not as readable as if they'd used something like the excellent DjVu.

It would be good to see documents like those original Turing and other papers preserved and presented like the Shannon example here has been - whatever later happens to the actual physical copies.

After the initial setup, the admin of this system wouldn't compile a line of code. The package building box would do all of that for him or her. The beauty of this system is that it's 90 - 99% automated, but not dependent on RH/Novel/Debian fuckups or incompatibilities that might slip down the pipe. Any fuckups are the responsibility of the admin. They have no scape goat. They have to be on the ball and perform 100% or they will be fired.

Debian, Novell/SUSE, and Red Hat don't have incompatibilities within their own configured setups, and APT (for Debian and Red Hat) and YUM handle the dependencies.

What's more, all of these are well documented, used by multiple distributions, and are supported by teams known for their conservative operations with stringent QA.

Gentoo is known for being bleeding edge and not getting the dependencies right - and is not that well known even in Linux circles. What are the chances the next Linux admin will know Gentoo? Close to zero.

First, the additional work would be in designing and implementing the system. Otherwise he'll probably have the same workload as any other admin. Also, he won't be using the standard Gentoo package set. He'll be using packages custom built on a compilation machine for the specific needs of the site, then deployed based on machine group need (ie, render farm, workstation, mail/DNS/samba server). What would he get? He would have an intimiate working knowledge of the entire system that he designed and implemented himself, allowing for quicker response, shorter trouble shooting times, and increased job security. Generally be a more efficient worker overall because he knows more than the average sysadmin about his system.

And it then becomes his system - not a well-known, plain environment with a toll-free number for support.

If you really want to get a sys admin learning about his system, make him build his personal workstation using the Core Linux Distribution or Linux From Scratch. But if an admin did that on company time, he'd probably be in trouble.

A Linux admin should know about Linux before he starts work.

Yeah, well, you gotta do something to set yourself apart from the hordes of redhat/debian/suse zombies out there with no real job skills other than ability to walk from desk to snack machine 10+ times a day, and press buttons. This is by no means a solution for your standard corporate entity, it's more a flexible, inhouse system for a company that needs it.

...hordes of redhat/debian/suse zombies... ??

Please! I've likely used many more distributions (on more platforms) than you have (but no, I won't get into a competition...) - but the point is that all three of those distributions (Red Hat, Debian, SUSE) have a much stronger QA than anything that Gentoo has, and are much more friendly to a conservative corporate environment than Gentoo is.

What's more, all three have certification programs; Gentoo has none. All three have corporate sponsors. All three have stringent QA. All three have support programs available. All three are time-tested, and extensively documented in and out of the project core.

Gentoo is none of these - and still doesn't have a decent install program.

Gentoo is mainly a hacker toy currently; I'd recommend any of the three you mentioned (Red Hat, Debian, SUSE) over Gentoo in a corporate environment.

All these tools (and also cmake and A-A-P mentioned in the other reply) are great for developers but not ideal for the end user who almost surely doesn't have them installed on his machine.

If you want to use something as easy on developer but which would still require no additional on the users machine, have a look at bakefile. This is a very useful tool, especially for open source programs where users often have or are asked to rebuild the program from source and installing additional tools is just an extra hurdle for them.

Xlobby is also a good choice with a great community, too. I have an XSL-T plugin for it to turn most RSS-enclosure feeds into the Xlobby database. You can get it WritTorrent.

ANT is a video aggregator for video blogs. Check it out!

Also, WritTorrent has a plugin that lets you post to your blog a .torrent of whatever.

I honestly think that BitTorrent + RSS is a perfect software model of a worldwide broadcast. Despite your available bandwidth, you can host a show with a global audience.

I'd pay extra for a properly tested and debugged game. If it was online, for working and reliable servers too. Mostly just a debugged game though.

I think that's why Deus Ex was one of my favourite games - the darn thing worked. Ditto Master of Orion II (though that wasn't entirely bug free), Star Control II (awesome game - check out the now-open-sourced builds), Half Life, etc. OTOH, some games are so awesome it's even worth putting up with bugs - eg System Shock II.

Alas, I doubt it's not going to be a US$10 difference, not if you want the game developer to make that reliability guarantee a legally binding one. Check out prices for SLA service plans at your local ISP and compare them to similar no-gurantee plans and you may get some idea.

I do think that it'd be more viable to offer a "light" guarantee - you know, game will be largely bug free (what a thought!), servers will work at 99% or better if online, etc.

The issue would be how to enforce it. For MMORPGs etc you could use essentially an SLA, probably with free service time as a "payment" for downtime. For other types of game it'd be a lot harder - having the publisher pay out to buyers would IMO just never work.

H! He's just talking about upgrades and patches? That's accountability??? Show me a major Linux distribution that doesn't provide upgrades and patches... next show me one that is slower than Microsoft at doing it.

The only one I can think of might be Slackware, but I'm not even sure about that.

FYI, slackware is very good at patching software. It seems Pat is usually on top of things as soon as necessary. Even with his recent health problems, he designated a specific, trusted source for security patches until he resumed his duty (which he has since done). And IMHO, the slackware method of updates easily beats out any other distro (especially when paired with a tool like swaret, but that's just my own preference.

Of course, the humor of it is, there is a port of file already..

"Advanced binary recognition" my arse. You play with the first few KB, suddenly you've got a legal file!

How silly of them, to reimplement something that already exists with an easy GUI.

You should look at TrueCrypt. Many ciphers, even combinations of ciphers, plus ease of use, key management, and of course (the coup de gras) Plausible Deniability.
Not to mention, it works on an existing file system or to an entire device. And don't forget the hidden volumes!

Okay, so XML's not a scripting language

You sure about that? :) It's been done before. See the stax project: http://staf.sf.net/

A sourceforge project might be nice

http://humane.sf.net/
http://sf.net/projects/humane

A sourceforge project might be nice

http://humane.sf.net/
http://sf.net/projects/humane

Neither is a Sametime client available.

Neither is a Sametime client available.

You already have Azureus (the Bittorrent client) but it requires a lot of RAM to work properly...

And now that Firefox has proven it's superiority to IE, why doesn't some one finish porting KHTML to windows so we have a second good reason against IE ?

Look what we've done with one single engine (20%).
Now imagine what could be done with another free and open engine like KHTML.

Let's hope : another 20% for KHTML, and IE sinking to a mere 45% against two such great competitors.

I echo everyone's concerns about security and having a wiki not being taken seriously because of its silly name, but the important thing to remember about the term is that it's well known in certain circles, and easy to remember. Slapping some marketing oriented name on it is not going to help, either. What kind of message does a name like eCollabWebsite get across? It looks like it wants to be bought, is all.

I use a wiki for my own personal notes, and to get into some advanced stuff, you need to really take the time to learn the markup and stuff. I think busy doctors would scoff at the amount of wiki markup you need to use, just to get things done and formatted.

What the busy person's wiki needs is a graphical text editor with word processor functions that can be embedded in a HTML form, to replace the standard entry form, something like FCKEditor.

Wiki is already very easy, especially for those of us with a technical background. The terribly unfortunate thing would be if a tool like this that could make collaborative writing so simple was avoided because of a few paltry work culture differences.

You mean ... THIS Doom 3?

This thread's context was bound to be left out. We're talking here about end-user machines, not machines built by nerds who enjoy doing things to computers. With this in mind, let me elaborate a little more:

you can't use Linux as a decent desktop operating system, and it really sucks on laptops. Beyond web browsing, e-mail, basic forms of text editing, and the clumsy-assed open-office suite, your average end-user productivity on a Linux system is limited.

Very little Mac OS X can do that linux can't? Get real. iLife anyone? iSync? YOU might not care, but many of us do. Where's the linux address book application that interoperates with many other applications. iCal? It's a whole package, i'm not looking at the kernel. Sure if you say "well, if you install OS X kernel and basic extensions and you do the same with Linux, well you've got basically the same thing". Well you can install and run Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, with X11, for free, on both X86 and PowerPC architectures. Butl that's not what Mac OS X is, it's a complete package of an operating system and productivity apps.

Furthermore, try closing your linux laptop and reopening it. How do you deal with multiple network profiles in Linux? Mac OS X handles this beautifully. Network ports are clearly laid out, for each network profile, each port is easily configurable, in a user-interface that makes sense. Windows' network configuration has always been horrible. Linuxconfig isn't much better.

Linux can't deal with external devices, be they USB, FireWire, Bluetooth, without hunting-down some damned drivers. I can plug ANYTHING to an OS X machine and it just works. Digital Still Cameras, DV Camcorders, i'm using a USB IBM 5 buttons + scroll wheel mouse for which I didn't have to install any software, same goes for ALL USB mice on the market, Bluetooth phones (i use sony ericsson t610), external hard drives, printers, you-name-it, if it you can plug it in, it works.

When was the last time you built a laptop yourself? Or upgraded a laptop's CPU? It ain't exactly the cake-walk that building desktops is. Portable Athlon64 with Linux? I dare you to buy one and use it as your everyday machine.

I've pretty clearly established that there are, indeed, quite a few things that Mac OS X can do, that Linux cannot do. What was the thing you mentioned that Mac OS X can't do that Linux can? Oh yah ... hovering over a window to gain focus? You don't gain focus when hovering in X11, you gain a response from that window, focus is still governed by clicking. But hey, if you don't like Aqua, that's fine, you can run X11 on your mac just fine. Apple ships its own version of X11 on the developer CD that ships with Mac OS X. You can install most everything you run on Linux on OS X, including X11 apps, thanks to projects such as Fink. You had also prefaced your sentenced with "at the expert user, server maintainer, or developer", again, this is not what this whole thread is talking about, we're talking about your average end-user here. I don't believe in machines that are hybrid server/client. While OS X and Linux both allow you to do that, it is asking for trouble. If i run server services in any permanent way, i stick debian or netbsd on some cheap-ol' PC.

Linux on desktop or laptop might be very sufficient to many people who have very limited use for their computer as a typical end-user machine, and a very cost-effective solution too. That doesn't make Mac OS X any less of a far better, more useful operating system than Linux is.

G5 laptops are very-much on the horizon. Java 1.5 has been seeded to developers who are now testing it.

You can now say that linux officially works on Centrino laptops.

This is absolutely true. Just recently, the combination of kernel power management (ACPI) and CPU throttling (SpeedStep), and the wireless drivers have become mature enough for things to work: ACPI is much more mature--in the older 2.4.x and even 2.6.7 kernels I had used, things Oops'ed left and right, locked up my system, and worse, and now everything just works. CPU throttling is supported through the kernel, which now has "ondemand", a policy to automatically raise the CPU speed when required, that can replace userspace daemons like speedfreqd for simple policies (I still prefer speedfreq). Lastly, the Intel PRO Wireless 2200 driver has now progressed from "adding essential features" (for example, 0.2 didn't have transmit or receive functionality) to "feature freeze and debugging mode". It's now at version 0.21. The 2100 driver is already past 1.0, and supports rfmon, which is in the queue of things for 2200 after it is relatively debugged.

Basically all the parts have come together, and my Asus M2400Ne now works like a real laptop. It actually works a little better than under Windows. I really can't blame Intel from withholding the brand name from Linux until today, since my first forays into the Centrino features were wildly unsuccessful, and did give me a bad taste in my mouth about it. Luckily, they've found some non-profit-destroying way to share wireless specs (basically someone writes a new firmware for the driver team, who then writes drivers... the result is that they have a very tight integration of software, firmware, and hardware and can easily add features.) All in all, I'm really happy with how it works.

For some time now, linux drivers for the ipw2200 and older ipw2200 wlan chipsets have been usable. ipw2200 is now moving towards 1.0, beginning with a feature freeze.

I love Linux, have used it quite a bit, set-up a few servers here and there, used it as a desktop a bit, on a PPC processor via LinuxPPC and also x86 with Debian. It's functional. It's nice. and It's free. Makes for insanely great bang for the buck on server platforms.

Furthermore, there is a largely symbiotic relationship between the Open-Source Community and Mac OS X. Innovations on each side are typically great benefits to the Community at large.

With all that said, Mac OS X still blows Linux out of the water, hands-down. I'd be happy to elaborate, but i don't think i need to. Feel free to ask me to. And I will, you better believe it.

I also have a VX-6000 and the radio shack cable.

That damn cable was the best purchase ever, BitPim rocks, it's written in Python and runs on Winblows, Mac, and Linux. I use it to grab all my pics, and my contacts, and backup everything else. That cable is useful for much more than taking pictures off the phone.

Also, few people know, but you can play MP3 ringtones on the VX-6000, it's very picky about the format of them though, it's been a while since I've done it, I think they have to be 65 Kbit/sec, mono, less than 60 seconds length, 22000 KHz, with a .mid extension instead of .mp3. I used http://audacity.sf.net/ to encode them because they didn't work from iTune's encoder.

Also, the USB cable can be used with the phone as a 90K internet connection in a pinch, and yes it works on Mac and Linux too. It comes out of your airtime so you get free internet access on nights and weekends.

For up-to-date web-based administration of PostgreSQL, try phpPgAdmin:

http://phppgadmin.sf.net/

Gunnar Ritter maintains a huge set of SVR4 utilities: The Heirloom Toolchest

Of course, p2p right now is often thought of as a single file - an ISO, an mpg, an mp3, a zip file). I see nugget has posted in this thread - the peer-to-peer programs which he currently helps maintain use p2p to do operation distribution, not file distribution. As does Folding@Home (which studies protein/gene problems in a distributed manner) and SETI. GPU is interesting in this respect as you are the one deciding what operations to perform - from adding 1 and 1, to calculating pi, to whatever. I really like Freenet - it is a very versatile protocol so that web pages, Usenet type forums, and even (small) file trading are all possible. I've even seen people play chess games over frost. And as a bonus, there is the option of (some degree of) anonymity on Freenet, so that is an added bonus.

I really would love to see someone with no money to host such thing create something as complex as Slashdot, with moderation system and all, and do it over p2p, maybe on something like Freenet, or maybe something else. The same with things like Wikipedia. Nowadays, the little guy is punished by high bandwidth costs if what he made is popular. With p2p this is not a problem any more.

Try EDE

Gallery has built-in slideshow capability and you can create unlimited albums and sub-albums. Just e-mail him a link to the latest album on the Web and have him set his Gallery preferences to flip through the slideshow at X seconds per image. Both Web and fullscreen Java slideshow is supported.

As a bit of a side note, you can write your resume/CV in XML using the XML Resume Project and then easily generate PDF, HTML, or plain text from a single source document. You can even tag elements with keywords and then automatically generate targeted resumes for different audiences.

(Note: I'm a developer on the project.)

--Bruce

There are lots of choices, really. I wrote a perl script (using Image::Magick) about 5 years ago that did the same thing as this, and the awesome GQView image manager has had visual image matching for nearly as long. On the Windows side, I'm pretty sure ThumbsPlus has a feature like that, and I'm surprised they didn't build it into XP since they were supposed to be all digital-photo-friendly.

Why not use s-expressions if you need a sleeker representation than what XML gives you ? Admittedly, s-expressions are poorly suited to document representation (ie, openoffice documents), but for places like wire protocols, they seem ideal.

It's already been done! Also see this for details of TOG meetings etc.

This is one _monster_ big deal for Free Software.

This is the code that allows big companies such as IBM, Fujitsu, Entegrity etc. to bid for £500m contracts.

We have FreeDCE already, which is the DCE 1.1 Reference implementation autoconf'd and updated...

Restore is also straightforward - it can be done in place, or by downloading a zip/tar file.

Dijjer can solve this problem quite well.. Dijjer link. There was a story here about it a few weeks ago... they're up to build 62 now... so progress is being made..

And how often would you expect to be on a switch-free LAN? Aren't most (ethernet) networks (even two host home networks) done with switches? The only exception I can think of is WiFi, and I'd say the odds of those having public routable IPs are low.

That's exactly the problem. At the university I attend, we're on a 10MB ethernet network directly attached to smart hubs. The backend uses 100Mbit switches and routers, but the students (dorms, labs, etc) are still only on smart hubs. Something like this could be used on our network to avoid detection by the school (perhaps as a layer between WASTE and the network) but has very little application to most networks or even the internet as a whole where you cannot see your neighbors traffic, which is why it'll probably never be implimented.