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I'm using a Matrox G550. I know, not the latest greatest 3D card, then again, I don't play games, and don't care to compete with the FPS figures of other people. Of course, there are uses for 3D graphics other than games.

If you want get a video card that has open source drivers, have a look at the list of video cards supported by the XFree86/Xwin project, and the DRI project.

Last time I looked, the ATI 9200 series of cards where the latest supported with fully open DRI drivers. Again, not the latest and greatest, still they are still available new, so they a probably adequate.

We are in a bit of a dark period at the moment with drivers. People want fast, yet the vendors aren't releasing programming specs for them. Their "Linux support" is really just lip service.

At least one of the mods marked this as Funny (rather than Interesting), which I hope was the intention of the author. Creative windows drivers are just fine downloaded off the net w/o the original cd, and Creative hosted (and I think was primarily responsible for) the emu10k1 (SBLive, Audigy/Audigy2) opensource driver project (one of the few counterexamples to the overstatement in ALL CAPS).

Is that so? I've never seen that happen. But if you try the same on Linux or *BSD, the last program that tried to access /dev/dsp will hang politely while waiting for the first one to let go of the device[1]. That's why most distros will use esd or artsd, both of which are crap, and will occupy /dev/dsp for apps that aren't aware of the sound server. Yes, Linux does suck a bit when it comes to sound, although its capabilities are quite OK. If only all apps and distros would standardise on JACK, it could become great. In my experience it's quite a bit better than for the author of TFA, though. All sound cards I've tried have worked. Seems like he's just bitter because his particular brand is unsupported, and most of the time that is the vendor's fault.

[1]Unless you have a soundcard with hardware mixing supported by ALSA or OSS.

What's better than an uncompressed format for this sort of archival work?

FLAC.

IYTM "better than a lossless format".

It's not infringement or violation by the strictest legal meanings of those words.

They do however have severe moral/ethical problems with contributing back to the communities/projects they borrow code from. Their strict interpretation makes then only do the very least that's absolutely necessary, and they constantly complain over having to do even this: people who buy their binaries can get the sourcecode if they submit the "written offer" (the one that the GPL dictates) to Hyperion and ask nicely. They don't bother submitting code and patches to community CVS's etc. For example, the source to Hyperion's GPL Quake2 port finally ended up on Aminet only by the action of a pissed off user/customer. Nothing has been contributed back to the GPL U-boot project by Hyperion since Dec. 2002 (a quick patch).

You want "open source AmigaOS"? On good, fast and cheap hardware from this century? Go with AROS.

If you're interested in Atari emulation, you might be interested in looking at Aranym (Atari running on any machine).

They include a Live CD that boots a Linux distro and automatically runs aranym, which I've yet to burn and test :)

Yes, there is Bochs, which is able to run Windows 2000, Windows 95 and a lot of Unices. It is an x86 emulator and according to their own FAQ pretty slow. But if you just want to run some programs from time to time - there you go.
HTH

I pay for them every time I buy blank media. The courts agree.

And I prefer something not quite so random myself.

this app is a "use your webcam as a security camera" program. it can detect movement, and what part of the picture is in (it draws a rectangle arounnd what moved.). would this be useful as a base to using a webcam as an input system? (its a good program, very accurate with my 30 creative labs webcam)

I'm not sure off the top of my head, but I think that digikam for KDE can do all of that.

if you're even remotely a *nix user in os x, you should already have fink and darwinports already installed. it's a simple port install ethereal and you're done.

Waste runs under wine, but there are a lot of annoying issues, and the port seems dead in the water.

I bought Win4Lin ... and WASTE was one of my motivating reasons for buying it. If WASTE is important enough to you, I'd recommend Win4Lin. And you get the addeded benefit of being able to do other Windows things. (Kaaza [though giFT works well enough for me most of the time], and whatever other Windows things you need.) The only "problem" with Win4Lin is that at this point in time it's Win95/98/98SE/ME only. However - if your programs will operate under Win98SE (WASTE will), then it's actually an advantage due to lower resource requirements.

I downloaded this PadLockSL but I'm not really impressed with it. The GUI looks "broken" in several places. Text doesn't line up correctly over the buttons and things of that nature. And it doesn't connect with our WASTE network anyway.

[tom@hal pd]$ wc -l srchwnd.cpp
2503 srchwnd.cpp
[tom@hal pd]$

But there is no good way to get data into that iPod device. You could do a bunch of hardware hackage, sure- but that's is a lot of work. You'd probably be a lot better off with one of those PCMCIA HDs- the kind the iPod has- in a PDA, along with a huge battery extender. Either you are running your bluetooth off of the iPod's battery (thus killing the batt) or you have even more hardware hackage to do.

WinCE would be the easiest thing to do this in. I've done a lot of PDA programming, and I'd take WinCE any day, over PalmOS or Linux. There are a lot of options for programming, you've got a real OS, stable bluetooth [1], lots of libraries, etc. My interest area is largely in programming a PDA on a PDA, with no desktop as a part of the developer process, but that is just me. No need to spend a ton of time writing a big, ugly and finnicky C/C++ app- WinCE has a lot of good scripting languages available, including Ruby, Perl, Python, Dialect [2], Scheme, Lisp, BASIC, and many others.

[1] The Zaurus has some problems with the bt hardware available- maybe the new SL-6000 series would be good... but then again, just because the Zaurus comes with Bluetooth it doesn't mean it works, at least with Sharp at the helm of such a device. But there's a good chance it does.

[2] Dialect is my personal fave, a prototype-based OOPL. Kind of a cross between NewtonScript (object model) and Python (syntax) with really good support for dealing with the underlying WinCE or regular Windows OS.

I'm currently about to extend DistrIT to make a system so that researchers can book CPU time from all the unused cycles of my Department's PCs. Using Java would make it secure and transparent for windows and linux users..

Hiya, this would be great. I'm currently about to extend DistrIT to make a system so that researchers can book CPU time from all the unused cycles of my Department's PCs. It could also be extended quite easily to do what you're saying, and have a central server where you get credits for donating your CPU cycles and then you can upload your processing task and get other people in the pool to run it.

As founder of the Distributed Hardware Evolution Project which is written in Java, I'd like to remind you all that the Just-In-Time compiler coupled with the real time profiling and dynamic on-the-fly optimisation that goes on in the Server VM makes the difference between C and Java minimal for code which is in the critical region. This is specially the case for code which is executed over and over again, such as with these distributed processing projects. In fact the guys at Sun are doing such a good job at exploiting the ever more complex characteristics of different processors that Java code is expected to run faster than C in the future. Also, during the weeks that you would spend debugging and porting your C code, your Java code has gone miles ahead doing useful stuff! If you would like to start your own Java distributed processing project, DistrIT might help.

Is spamcopurl the one you're referring to?

doesn't realise that if there was an OSS GUI kit (like Qt) then there would be OSS Windows development

Well how this:
The Visual Component Framework
This is being developed as a cross platform framework (very siilar in features to Qt), but it is begin done on Win32 first, and then ported to OSX. And it's OSS, in that it's a BSD license.

This could be worth a look.

Or, you could, you know, just use gaim.

You may want to take a look at iRate. Not all are necessarily public domain, but all are freely distributed by their authors.

Instead of VMWare consider User Mode Linux. It is free. And it permits you to run many virtual servers per host server. e.g. you should be able to run 16-30 virtual servers per 3Ghz Intel proc. Just make sure you have enough memory (4GB is handy).

With Copy on Write file systems you can prep up your testing environment. Snapshot it. Run your tests. Then nuke the resulting file systems and start again. Being able to start a test run with the whole file system in the state it was in when you started (without having to roll back individual files and databases) is very convenient.

- UML-based VPS Hosting

> ...or at least make a Linux client

Many people would not like the idea of only being able to use a single binary-only client. If they built "google IM" on an existing protocol such as IRC or Jabber, then people would be much more likely to use it. Releasing protocol specifications in the case of a new protocol would also be a good reason for many people to start liking it.

> ...manage to get your friends off MSN...

That's what IRC is good for! Give them a nice client like X-Chat, irssi, or maybe even gaim, and there'll be no reason to use MSN/AIM/Yahoo IM.

If Eiffel were indeed to be used for a project such as Gnome, such a tool could greatly reduce the amount of work needed to access all of the existing Gnome libraries, which are AFAIK all in written in C.

EWG even comes with GTK 2.x bindings contained as an example.

PS: The above is a shameless plug, I am the main developer of EWG (;

If Eiffel were indeed to be used for a project such as Gnome, such a tool could greatly reduce the amount of work needed to access all of the existing Gnome libraries, which are AFAIK all in written in C.

EWG even comes with GTK 2.x bindings contained as an example.

PS: The above is a shameless plug, I am the main developer of EWG (;

If Eiffel were indeed to be used for a project such as Gnome, such a tool could greatly reduce the amount of work needed to access all of the existing Gnome libraries, which are AFAIK all in written in C.

EWG even comes with GTK 2.x bindings contained as an example.

PS: The above is a shameless plug, I am the main developer of EWG (;

click here

Anyway, I don't have enough time recently to continue the development at a higher pace...

Please help with the development!

That's great! Mind if I include it in Vigor?

url is http://xpy.sf.net

The DC may have had the proprietary GD-ROM, but it still can run code unmodded off of a CD-R. See LinuxDC for /.'s favorite way of proving we control the hardware.

...right here. And here, too.

And lots of other folks contribute too. Good times!

Open source, and very flexible, what more it even supports https and you can actully see the https traffic. It can be scripted and automated to run on a cluster for stress testing your web application. Provides CVS results and also graphs

My only gripe are , no proper support for SSL client authentication via digital certificates, and sometimes complex URL created via Javascripts can be a problem in SSL.

Sorry for the shameless plug but I find ipaudit and ipstrings useful. Available from sourceforge.

http://ettercap.sf.net

Salting the message with random words thwarted Bayesian filtering.

John.

Actually, no. Perhaps your mom would do it, but no one I know would. It pisses me off because I hate MP3 (aside from the patent issues, it sucks when compared with Vorbis). Winamp has had support for Vorbis for many years now (Hell, I remember it having Vorbis support in the default install when I last used Windows...three and a half years ago) but the Windows Media Player has pretty much killed Winamp. People are lazy and refuse to install Winamp even though most of them are on broadband and it would take a grand total of two minutes of their time.

I convinced the guy who runs hxcmp3.com to enable Vorbis support in the software the site uses. My former band put all of our music on the site as Vorbis. We had a respectable ranking in the download listings, but I recieved a number of complaints about not being able to play the songs. I put a blurb about installing Winamp, but then I got complaints about it requiring too much effort to listen to the songs.

The Mac is better off; the QT Components for the Mac are easy to install and work right away. For a while after the release of QuickTime 6 they were broken, but now they work again. After being installed, everything which makes use of QuickTime on the Mac or Windows gains support for Vorbis. This is more useful on the Mac than on Windows since pretty much everything used QuickTime.

Now, if Ogg Vorbis had a DirectShow filter, the situation would be different. Simply link to a quick 30 second DS filter or QT component download and even Windows Media Player or QuickTime could play Ogg Vorbis. I don't use Windows, but there has to be someone who would be willing to write the needed code (unless it has already been done).

I wonder if Real Player has support for Vorbis? After all the hubbub about the Helix "Open Source" stuff it would be a shame if it didn't.

it's nothing but a publicity stunt, well, maybe with an additional "we want in" on the free development thing.

best option is for anyone who cares about OSS in a Free Software context to just leave well alone, we've already got NSIS. granted, MSI may be preferable to carting win32 executables around the web, from a security point of view, but, that said, couldn't msi become the next format of choice for email worms?

Not really. They'd probably use a reputation-based system like Razors' Truth Evaluation System. All that would happen is this:

1. Spammers sign up a new account and subscribe to mailing lists.
2. Spammers mark these ligitimate emails as "spam" in an attempt to poison the spam detection system.
3. Regular users notice this and mark it as non-spam.
4. The spammers' already-low (since they're new) trust level goes down so far that their future markings are ignored.

Spammers could abuse this by automatically signing up lots of new accounts. Perhaps new accounts could start out with zero trust, or maybe even a negative number. Then people would have to earn trust (by correctly marking any spam that gets through) before their marks are even used by the system. It would be tricky to manage and find a balance. Spammers are a determined bunch, but so are users. There's always a certain subset of users who are willing to be a little more vigilant in order to keep the spammers in line and help everyone else. Gmail is bound to have a huge number of users, so it should work out fairly well. Vigilant users + bayesian filter (with huge database) = almost perfect spam filter.

psDoom
Another FPS tied close to the OS. Always seemed pretty risky to me, but fun no less.

I've got an '03 Murano that I'm winding up to hack. Got the stock GPS and the SAT-ready Bose. Nissan won't sell you a satellite cable for the '03s but there are ways to get them. OTOH, this place is about to release a device that fakes out the radio to accept aux audio in via the unused SAT radio port. The radio controls (next/prev channel, next/prev preset group, presets 1-6) are all passed through their adapter to accessories, and text data is returned to the head unit for display as if it were RDS text. My current idea is to run CAJUN as the jukebox since I'll be able to use the RDS text area to navigate the jukebox menus and browse the music collection. I'd like something no bigger than the new low-profile Linksys routers, with just power, data, audio, a PCMCIA slot, and an internal laptop drive bay. Any suggestions?

Efforts are also underway to document the pinouts of the RGB display so that hopefully an mp3car-like device could share the entire display with all the stock gear. Until then, the 1x20 text line will have to do. Finally, it would also be nice if I could eventually get NMEA GPS **in** since ham radio uses a protocol to place icons on GPS-based maps showing hams' current locations and those of important events. I'd like to have icons automatically appear on my map to indicate the locations of car accidents. That function currently works with Garmin units, but I seriously doubt it will ever work with my Zenrin unit.

Non-hams can try it out with a police scanner tuned to 144.390. If you hear data, you can decode it and display live position data yourself. Linux has had soundcard radio modems for years.

Our boss says we *have* to have generics, so Macs and their 1.4.x JVM are right out for development.

I'd just like to point out that you can still target pre-1.5 JVMs (i.e. 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4) while still developing using the new 1.5 Java language.

You can use my free, open-source, tool, Retroweaver (which has "blessings" from Sun's compiler team), or you can pay money for CodeGuide.

so you have working flash in mozilla right? and photoshop without mac-on-linux? what about shadows, transparency, and vector scaling all real time? can you stream wmv, rm, and mov all from your web browser flawlessly? do you have video/voice conferencing in gaim?

I don't need those things.

Linux on my iBook is faster and does what I want.

I even get better screensavers. :)

So I use Linux.

I own a Zaurus SL-5500: the "original" US market unit (as opposed to the original developer's unit, the SL-5000, which was basically the same thing with half the RAM). I'll say this: you can have it... when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Two reasons it rocks:

• The keyboard. The primary reason this is 10x more efficient than (most) palm devices: I can type very quickly on the build-in "hidden" keyboard. Yes, the Zaurus has something like PalmOS's Graffiti. In fact, the Z's recognizer is more sophisticated and accurate, and can learn any strokes you teach it. I still use the keyboard.
• Linux. No, I do not use my Z as a "hacking tool" or "geek toy" primarily. I've written a test app for it or so, but that's it. (Doing so is incredibly easy, actually, but I haven't had a lot of time to spend on it.) I bought my Zaurus as a PDA, and that's what I use it for. Since I use Linux exclusively on the desktop, having it on the PDA is extremely natural, not to mention making things extremely flexible. I find syncing silly. I prefer ssh, scp, or (with the newer ROM) smbclient (which is like a braindead ftp, but it works). If I needed syncing, I would use rsync. It just fits very naturally into my work environment.

Some people complain about the PIM apps; the quality varies. The Todo List and Address Book aren't great, but I don't use the former and the latter is sufficient. The Text Pad, however, is pretty handy, and Opera (which even renders slashdot well!) and Hancomsheet (a fully-blown spreadsheet!) are killer apps for me.

The only reason I don't upgrade to a CL-760 is the fact I can't justify the cost: my Z works great as-is. With the work on OpenZaurus and Opie, the PIM issues are being solved, and I have little chance of being left with a "dead" platform.

The notion of templating in PHP (or any web platform) is described by Martin Fowler in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture as the Template View.

Implementation of the Template View is examined in some detail at http://wact.sf.net/index.php/TemplateView, which begins looking at "Why use templates" then examines different styles of templating, in terms of their markup and the API they provide to populate the template with data. The purpose is to lay this discussion to rest once and for all.

Where PHP's concerned, the real question is why has everyone (and their dog) written their own template engine? In an ad hoc survey we counted over 80 public domain template enignes "out there"

What's even more puzzling is why 90% of them all look the same with markup like;

...and a pinhole API like;

My guess at the reason why is public here

As to what template engines in PHP are actually worth using, there are only two IMO;

The first is PHP itself - use some self discipline and keep the pages where code gets mixed with HTML to the most basic PHP syntax - just the flow control statements like if/else, while and foreach.

The second is any which can offer templating capabilities similar to Java's JSTL or ASP.NET. Which is where WACT comes in. Check the examples to get the idea.

With the Xbox, there are several completely legitimate uses for a modchip: running Linux (cheap webserver), or playing media files on a TV. The major problem? End users cannot use these applications without a software modification or modchip.

Even though the applications might not be designed to increase piracy, one thing that Microsoft can and will "kick" about is the modified BIOS that modchips or exploits use. It's their intellectual property, and modifying it (like the EvoX team does) or reverse engineering it could be considered piracy. The only legal BIOS out there is Cromwell, which the Xbox-Linux team uses to load Linux. Most chips now come pre-loaded with Cromwell, which can flash the modchip with a more useful bios (think gray-market there.)

Initially, Microsoft's attach rate - the amount of games they would need to sell to become profitable on each console - was nine in-house titles per machine. I'm not sure of the exact figure today, though, with the recent price drop and all.

In any event, if you have an Xbox and don't care about Xbox Live, there are software exploits you can use to perform the same features as a modchip would have. Xbox-Scene has pretty much anything a new modded Xbox user would want.

You can run GNOME (and KDE too, if you wish) with Mac OS X already with fink, if you wish. I don't think they've upgraded to 2.6 just yet but 2.4 is there and with no doubt, soon they'll finish packages for 2.6. Apple's X11 server has a full screen mode where you can start a GNOME session without interference with OS X session and you can switch back and forth between the two desktops. So grab fink, switch to unstable tree and run sudo fink install gnome. It'll take some time because it compiles from the source though.

spidergraph (it plugs into Mozilla)

We use this "community of communities" idea in our P2P file-sharing program, in case you're interested: U-P2P