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Quake Live *is* Q3 for free, with the only modifications being some advertising (the banners on the walls, etc). Supposedly it is compatible with existing Q3 games, but since I'm not in the beta and I don't have Q3A currently installed, I can't check that personally.

If you want a free Q3 shooter, check out OpenArena or Warsow (but with a funky S symbol that I can't be bothered to look up right now). Both are based on Q3's engine, but are totally free.

Also, id typically doesn't release its games free of charge, but releases their source code once the engine isn't worth the license cost. The gameplay, albeit simple, is pretty long-lasting stuff (go replay the first DOOM game, it's el cheapo on Steam and the full WAD can be dropped into any DOOM engine mod, like ZDoom or Doomsday) so the games have a long tail, but they give back where people can still enjoy it.

PS: Some of the graphical additions made to the engines are insane. Just look at Tenebrae (http://tenebrae.sf.net/) and DarkPlaces (http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces), both working off the Quake 1 source code.

It's more to do with the country/region you're trying to look for a job in. Here in India, freelancing, internship, FOSS work does nothing to impress most employers. Quote one manager: "It cannot be counted as valid experience since I'm sure you must not have handled major responsibilities as you would now in a full time job". Yeah, single-handedly migrating applications from Oracle to PostgreSQL and deploying them into production in 2 weeks is not a job requiring responsibility.

I show off my FOSS (ayttm, antidialer) work more prominently than my day job experience, partly because I feel it's more important to me and partly because I want to be sought by employers who understand the relevance of FOSS contributions. But since FOSS contribution has not caught on as much as other parts of the world, most managers dismiss them as "college projects".

It's more to do with the country/region you're trying to look for a job in. Here in India, freelancing, internship, FOSS work does nothing to impress most employers. Quote one manager: "It cannot be counted as valid experience since I'm sure you must not have handled major responsibilities as you would now in a full time job". Yeah, single-handedly migrating applications from Oracle to PostgreSQL and deploying them into production in 2 weeks is not a job requiring responsibility.

I show off my FOSS (ayttm, antidialer) work more prominently than my day job experience, partly because I feel it's more important to me and partly because I want to be sought by employers who understand the relevance of FOSS contributions. But since FOSS contribution has not caught on as much as other parts of the world, most managers dismiss them as "college projects".

I've been working on my open source project for three years and that doesn't help me a bit when looking for a job in Dublin (Ireland, not Ohio). Basically there's a very few jobs out there in which you can program in C or anything vaguely signal processing-related and they all want you to have at least three years of commercial experience, don't care if you've got the snazziest open source project out there.

And I've been looking for a job for over 5 months now, and mainly in tech support and system administration because really, no one wants to hire me for a coding job.

You can tout that as "the right way", but there's still no reason this has to be a technical-design issue rather than a process-design issue -- and while my background is as an OSS groupie, I've been the OSS groupie at enough proprietary shops (ie. the party responsible for dealing with upstream on projects used as underlying infrastructure for actually running the proprietary software we built) that I can say with a fair bit of confidence that the approach you're espousing just isn't all that popular in The Real World.

Isolate your queries into a specific set of packages and require DBA review before changes to those packages can be promoted to the production branch; there are plenty of ways to keep developers from messing up production by writing bad queries less heavy-handed than the strict access-control approach given, and you should have a revision control infrastructure enforcing code review anyhow.

Re "lack of a real report developing environment" -- DataVision? Agata Report?

but with newer rechargeable batteries, the voltage doesn't drop until it's completely dead, so you can't easily guess how long it will take.

It really is possible to gain some information from the voltage, but it is not as linear as with alkaline batteries: First the voltage declines very slowly during discharge, and then there is the sharp drop. So it is harder, but not impossible.

The only way to do it would be to have the device keep a history of how long it is able to work before the battery dies completely and statistically predict future performance. As if they are going to waste time doing that!

With "more intelligent" batteries they continuously measure and add the discharge and charge currents to estimate the remaining capacity.

Still this isn't too accurate either as the batteries are not 100% efficient and they do wear out over time.

But you can get your accurate statistics you were talking about using ibam on your smart phone or laptop.

Probably the same thing that any former windows user would freak out about. I just did it for the first time in Ubuntu on my old laptop. Look at all the processes... they all must be using memory and CPU or something!!

fprintf@fprintf-laptop:~$ ps -axv
Warning: bad ps syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'? See http://procps.sf.net/faq.html
PID TTY STAT TIME MAJFL TRS DRS RSS %MEM COMMAND
1 ? Ss 0:02 34 84 2759 1688 0.1 /sbin/init
2 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [kthreadd]
3 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [ksoftirqd/0]
4 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [watchdog/0]
5 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [events/0]
6 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [khelper]
40 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [kblockd/0]
43 ? S 0:03 0 0 0 0 0.0 [kacpid]
44 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [kacpi_notify]
126 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [kseriod]
157 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [pdflush]
158 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [pdflush]
159 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [kswapd0]
198 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [aio/0]
1258 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [ksnapd]
1511 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [ksuspend_usbd]
1513 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [khubd]
1657 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [ata/0]
1659 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [ata_aux]
1673 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [scsi_eh_0]
1677 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [scsi_eh_1]
2550 ? S 0:01 0 0 0 0 0.0 [kjournald]
2776 ? Ss 0:00 0 63 2452 1060 0.1 /sbin/udevd --daemon
3096 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [pccardd]
3106 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [kpsmoused]
3113 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [pccardd]
3172 ? S 0:00 0 0 0 0 0.0 [irda_sir_wq]
4146 ? Ss 0:00 0 328 2111 540 0.0 dhclient3 -e IF_METRIC=
4641 tty4 Ss+ 0:00 0 12 1703 508 0.0 /sbin/getty 38400 tty4
4642 tty5 Ss+ 0:00 0 12 1703 512 0.0 /sbin/getty 38400 tty5
4646 tty2 Ss+ 0:00 0 12 1703 508 0.0 /sbin/getty 38400 tty2
4647 tty3 Ss+ 0:00 0 12 1703 508 0.0 /sbin/getty 38400 tty3
4649 tty6 Ss+ 0:00 0 12 1703 504 0.0 /sbin/getty 38400 tty6
4824 ? Ss 0:00 0 17 2438 1368 0.1 /usr/sbin/acpid -c /etc
4858 ? Ss 0:00 0 25 1910 684 0.0 /sbin/syslogd -u syslog
4914 ? S 0:00 0 45 1826 540 0.0 /bin/dd bs 1 if /proc/k
4916 ? Ss 0:00 0 19 3264 2164 0.2 /sbin/klogd -P /var/run
4938 ? Ss 0:04 0 307 2588 1360 0.1 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --
4954 ? Ss 0:00 0 293 4402 1984 0.1 /usr/sbin

First, let me give the disclaimer: I'm a PHP programmer.

If you let the kid program in PHP, or some other web-related language, be sure to teach him that mixing HTML in with the code is bad. It's okay to start out with, for cutting his teeth or whatever, but make sure he knows not to keep doing it. Otherwise, we'll have another code monkey that writes nigh-unreadable code... and might think it's actually good.

Object-oriented code is very important. Structure is more important. If you're going the way of PHP and building dynamic webpages or whatever use (here comes the shameless plug) a templating system/framework.

I don't know about your son, but I for one was so excited about programming that I didn't need much of a teacher. If you find the right instrument to get him excited about programming, he'll come to you with questions or figure out how to answer his own questions and lead his own learning path. Of course I'm sure he would still appreciate some ideas and guidance from time to time. Personally, I enjoy game programming. There are free game programming environments on Microsoft's web site if you're not too heavily anti-MS. The modern environments are, I suspect, much more entertaining to use for a beginner than the environment you're used to using. To get started, head to their "explore by intrest" page.

Also, I am working on a more visual (less coding) game development environment (Scrolling Game Development Kit 2), and trying to make it a bit more portable (it might work in Linux someday since I am almost done converting it from DirectX to the OpenGL-based OpenTK library). I think game development is a very rewarding way to learn programming.

This project also uses honeypots - not Windows machines at all. Here's a comment by the blog author:

Yonah, if you read the blog posting things should be more clear: "For example, we can use low-interaction honeypot such as nepenthes or amun that emulate common network-based vulnerabilities and deploy them at different locations."

Thus we did not use native machines, but low-interaction honeypots that emulate different kinds of exploits. You can find more information about these tools at http://nepenthes.mwcollect.org/ and http://amunhoney.sf.net/ - hope this helps to understand the results a bit better.

It's not clear exactly which version of Windows they are emulating, but this later quote makes it clear that he's not talking about Vista or XP SP2:

Furthermore, I think that Microsoft does take security seriously in 2008: A Vista machine would presumably survive without any problems and also XP SP3 would survive for a long time. Remember: These statistics are for old exploits against unpatched systems (emulated by honeypots).

This means that you can't even buy a version of the software that's being tested. This is a fairly salient point, but salient points don't make for good Slashdot stories.

For those who like to test newer bleeding edge software : WinPooch software can launch a scan when ever an executable is opened - it's almost as good as an on demand scanner.

Scanning when an executable (or other file) is opened is the worst type of real-time scanning, and what makes people complain about anti-virus software slowing down their machine.

The system I have to use at work has on-open scanning and does a full scan in the background every time someone logs in or the virus definition file is updated, both of which tend to happen when I'm most interested in getting the machine to do something quickly.

For the Windows boxes I use at home, I have the A/V software set to scan only on write or modify, and exclude certain files that get written to a lot but are very unlikely to carry an infection (e.g., log files). Using this setup, files are generally only scanned a few times (depending on how the download and install system uses temporary space), but the system is still just as protected.

This wouldn't work if you don't really have control over the system, and someone evil came in and turned off the A/V and then loaded a virus. Just in case, though, I have scheduled full drive scans run weekly during low use hours.

While all other /.ers are complaining that ClamWin is useless I want to bring some points :
- ClamWin has a built-in plug-in to scan incoming mail in outlook.
- ClamWin is easy to call from scripts and is a nice thing to add to the commands that are launched by your favourite bit-torrent client once a file is completed (I use this on my linux based torrent downloading/file server machine)
- ClamWin has plug-ins for FireFox : SafeDownload, Download Scan, Download Statusbar all let you launch the scanner of your choosing once a download finishes. ClamWin Antivirus Glue is another solution, but one has to manually update the minimal supported version (the plugin is set to support up to 1.5 although it works with more modern versions).

So, although ClamWin isn't continuously scanning in background, it can cover most of the usual entry points. (Although I don't know about plugins for Thunderbird and Microsoft file server).

For those who like to test newer bleeding edge software : WinPooch software can launch a scan when ever an executable is opened - it's almost as good as an on demand scanner.

Actually, they're forcing windows users to upgrade.. It has nothing to do with blocking alternative clients.

In other news, GnomeICU still works and pidgin has just made a new release with sends a newer version number.

How about DejaVu? I especially love the fixed width and use it for my terminal (urxvt), gvim, and the fixed width font in my browser (so I'm looking at it right now).

You can get a bunch of firewire to ide bridge boards, and run scsi over firewire.
Keep in mind this will be noticeably slower than native ide once you get more than a certain number of drives on a single bus, but for some applications, fast disk access isn't as important.

Technically speaking, you can use USB for this too, however there are many more downsides.
Many times slower than firewire, due to the method usb uses to communicate bidirectionally.
Its not that much cheaper, and also you cant use nearly as many drives per bus.

As an example, try http://www.fwdepot.com/
Their prices are a bit high i admit, but you can build a shopping list there and look around for best price.

4 BUS firewire cards. Note that a 4 -port- card is not at all the same. That will be one bus, with a 4 port hub built in. The less drives on each bus, and the more buses you have, the more bandwidth is available to each disk, and the speed up is exponential.

One bridge board per hard drive, a few hubs and some cabling, and spread them out over your few spare pcs.

Then run something like http://evms.sf.net/ to cluster the machines together and create one giant pool of storage space out of all the drives over all the machines.

It's probably as cheap as possible for getting use out of them storage wise. Any other 'better' solution will cost a lot more too.

Of course, useful for storage and just plain useful are two different metrics.

A lot of others already mentioned donating them.
Just remember to hook 4 up at a time to a spare pc and run a good HD wipe app like http://dban.sf.net/

But there are many options to get rid of them to others with.
Charity donations for a tax write off, local community projects in need of hardware, friends, family, stocking stuffer for the staff, make a craigslist post and offer them for free (or next to), buyer comes to get it or pays shipping, do the ebay dance, etc etc

You can get a bunch of firewire to ide bridge boards, and run scsi over firewire.
Keep in mind this will be noticeably slower than native ide once you get more than a certain number of drives on a single bus, but for some applications, fast disk access isn't as important.

Technically speaking, you can use USB for this too, however there are many more downsides.
Many times slower than firewire, due to the method usb uses to communicate bidirectionally.
Its not that much cheaper, and also you cant use nearly as many drives per bus.

As an example, try http://www.fwdepot.com/
Their prices are a bit high i admit, but you can build a shopping list there and look around for best price.

4 BUS firewire cards. Note that a 4 -port- card is not at all the same. That will be one bus, with a 4 port hub built in. The less drives on each bus, and the more buses you have, the more bandwidth is available to each disk, and the speed up is exponential.

One bridge board per hard drive, a few hubs and some cabling, and spread them out over your few spare pcs.

Then run something like http://evms.sf.net/ to cluster the machines together and create one giant pool of storage space out of all the drives over all the machines.

It's probably as cheap as possible for getting use out of them storage wise. Any other 'better' solution will cost a lot more too.

Of course, useful for storage and just plain useful are two different metrics.

A lot of others already mentioned donating them.
Just remember to hook 4 up at a time to a spare pc and run a good HD wipe app like http://dban.sf.net/

But there are many options to get rid of them to others with.
Charity donations for a tax write off, local community projects in need of hardware, friends, family, stocking stuffer for the staff, make a craigslist post and offer them for free (or next to), buyer comes to get it or pays shipping, do the ebay dance, etc etc

You know, I can write software for my Palm OS device without using another computer, or even having hotsynced it ever.

Pippy is Python for Palm OS, and I think there's some BASIC implementations or something out there...

AMSN is quite good, and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Considering what a piece of shit MS Messenger for Mac is, it's a breath of fresh air. Only downside is it looks quite clunky and doesn't really fit in with most any desktop environment.

See here.

I can't believe that anybody would have the audacity to pirate music from an online music service! What has our society come to? ;)

You're wrong. Most people are. That's because they don't know about the awesomeness that is eclim. It's a nifty little plugin that keeps a headless Eclipse instance running and exports its features to vim. So you can have automatic code highlighting, manage your classpath efficiently, have your get/setters done automatically, auto-completion, auto-whatnot.

It's great! Give it a try. I would never use Eclipse itself, but I wouldn't want to miss eclim...

Red Hat is making strides with adopting data-at-rest encryption. RHEL 5.2 now includes eCryptfs as a technology preview.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.2/html/Release_Notes/RELEASE-NOTES-U2-x86-en.html
http://ecryptfs.sf.net/

Grr... some shameless link! Should have checked it: datadraw

When I worked on the DARPA COUGAAR distributed agent project they used lots of open source code and had no problems with donating code back. The whole PMD source code analysis tool started there and has lived on long after the sponsoring program ended... good stuff.

What started as an April Fool joke by Google for 2008 called Project Virgle is now a real and genuine effort by an increasing number of people to create ideas and ways in which humankind can live sustainably in space using free and open source technology. This project is a place for all space enthusiasts to cooperate on simulations of space settlements. Rather than argue whether L5 or Mars or the asteroids or the Moon or the rings of Saturn should be humankind's first space settlement, we could be asking what is common between those efforts so that that groundwork can be shared.

The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products. OSCOMAK stands for "OSCOMAK Semantic Community On Manufactured Artifacts and Know-how".

I can't stand how plotting is implemented in Octave.

I see. Plotting is supposedly more Matlab-like in recent incarnations of Octave since the Handle Graphics frontend was implemented, but I'm guessing you're saying that you can't stand Gnuplot. There has been talk of moving to other plotting backends instead of Gnuplot, and there's some serious work being done on that, but it hasn't been merged with the main Octave branch yet (but work on that is underway too).

Matter of fact, I'm currently debugging a segfault in 64 bit Octaviz, but it's starting to look likely that the segfault is in VTK itself.

Amstrad did make some IBM PC compatibles, but that'd be too easy - IIRC, they used standard (well, as standard as you can call it back then) 360 kiB 5.25" floppies, too.

And, all VMware does is virtualization (not emulation) of an x86 PC.

This guy needs to find a working Amstrad that can read his disks, and then use it to create disk images. I don't know if there's a utility to automatically do that for the Amstrads, though. (For Apple IIs, it's stupid easy to make disk images, thanks to ADTPro and cheap serial cables.)

Did they cheat and use this?
 
I kid. But gojo is hella fun. The main programmer is working on porting it to the wii and has support for the wiiboard written (doubt that's in the main trunk though).

I don't know if this will help you (I haven't yet gotten the chance to install Cygwin on my Windows network) but there is a command line app that will change resolution. I'm not sure if you can call it from a ssh shell or not. I use it in a login (batch) script for a lab to always ensure that the screen is a certain resolution when the user starts their machine.

It's called QRes, and it's BSD licensed. Maybe it can help you out: http://qres.sf.net/

There's a setup file which produces some GUI app I've never used, and then a qres32.dll and qres.exe, if I'm not mistaken.

I'd be interested in hearing more of what you're doing, as I've been beginning to work along those same lines (NIX-ifying my WinBoxen) at my work. Drop me a line at billysanders at gmail.

Bill

Somewhat similar and GPL:
Botsnscouts is a Java version of Roborally (though without option cards).

But use the CVS version, it's way better than the ancient release.

from my point of view "multi-core" programming is just "SMP" programming - the programmer doesn't care where the cores are distributed on which chips.

there are two interrelated parts to designing languages for SMP scalability in my opinion: designing the programming interface (the syntax - the concept of how the programmer works with the language) and making the right implementation in the compiler or virtual machine to achieve SMP scalability, i.e. maintaining maximum efficiency of usage of each core while providing maximum flexibility in manipulating data.

The first part is more art and the second more technical; both make up the overall language solution.

I've designed the qore programming language for SMP scalability, however using a more traditional approach to threading - as opposed to interesting techniques such as those taken by Erlang or Scala

Basically in qore there are a lot of optimizations aimed at reducing the amount of cache invalidations while still providing as much shared state as possible between threads. It's basically a dynamically-typed language where global variables and objects are shared between all threads and local variables are thread-specific. For such nice and easy-to-use (i.e. thread-safe) access to data it has very good performance, even on single-threaded code (particularly upcoming version in svn trunk which has a completely re-written type system and some massive new optimizations).

While the art of design of the programming language in this case is not as exotic or interesting as scala or erlang, for example, the more traditional approach and the fact that the entire language was designed to be thread-safe and scalable on SMP machines can serve to make it easier for some programmers to write multi-threaded code.

Qore supports deadlock detection and will throw exceptions on outright threading errors as well to make multi-threaded programming a little easier to work with in comparison to some other languages.

Qore supports a pretty unique feature set, in that it's designed to support embedding (and arbitrarily restricting) code, interfacing, and SMP scalability in a dynamically-typed language.

It also supports native XML and JSON de/serialization, powerful and very easy-to-use database drivers (including a DatasourcePool class that offers transparent datasource pooling on a per-thread basis), perl5 regular expressions, and a lot more.

the new version (coming "real soon now" :-) ) in svn trunk has a qt4 module (just starting working on the opengl support :-) ) and a documented (with doxygen) and stable API.

Anyway, if anyone's interested in checking it out, the homepage is:
http://qoretechnologies.com/qore

and the project is also hosted on sourceforge:
http://sf.net/projects/qore

-David

I couldn't agree more! Much of the worst code I've ever had to deal with is C++ code written by smart guys who don't know what parts of C++ to use. How about mixing double inheritance from template classes, with smart pointers and garbage collection, when all you're writing is quicksort? Smart guys can take a 100 line problem and turn it into a 10,000 line C++ solution.

I focus instead on restricting programmers to the tools they need, so they focus their creativity on algorithms instead of coding methodology. I've even codified it all, as an extension to C, rather than C++. Works great for team programming. I had a guy last week write two IC placers: simulated annealing, and quadratic placement, in 5600 lines of hand written code, debugged and working. He did it in 6 days while supporting a difficult client, without working weekends or evenings. I'd estimate his productivity at 10X to 100X higher than average.

Instead of using a top-down model (ads), why not instead use Ripple, the money's equivalent to Wikipedia?
http://ripple.sf.net/
https://ripplepay.com/

That's because it's meant to be sourceforge.net, not .com.

It's an SMTP stress tester; here's a working link.

> I used to get a lot of traffic from SSH brute force attacks

Yup. One of the first bits I install on a new server is DenyHosts; "service denyhosts start" and an hour later there are a half dozen IPs in /etc/hosts.deny. Good times.

Qt4? Supports X11, Windows and OS X quite nicely from what I've heard.

Qt4 is nice but seems overkill for a lot of embedded systems. I'd pick Turbo Vision instead. Runs on Linux console, X11, ncurses, Windows, and DOS.

Since you are, in essence, modeling your process, might I suggest that you use a Unified Modeling Language tool? You may find the sequence and activity diagramming very useful as well as state, and class diagrams. The upshot is that given sufficient completeness, accuracy and rigor, you might be able to reuse any resulting models for developing applications tools. If you are using Linux, I recommend a free tool called Umbrello. It's optimized for the KDE Gnu/Linux desktop, but works just as well for me under GNOME. See http://uml.sf.net/

The version on SourceForge is developed from Frankel's original sources. It's also pretty moribund; mainly it's waiting for someone to come pick it up and continue development. (It has a few rough edges, and hasn't been worked on in about two years.) If you know anyone who'd like everlasting fame and glory, they'd be much appreciated--some of us are still happily using WASTE.

An excellent game in development inspired by the classic X-Com series.

UFO:AI

Runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and others.

I'm the author of LiarLiar, an open source Voice Stress detector. Over the years, I've had several offers from various individuals and companies to further develop or improve upon the software. If you develop software that has enough demand, you may be able to offer support services for your software. Don't expect to get rich, or even be able to make a living for that matter.

The most important thing to keep in mind is, make sure you have a backup source of income. Either a job or something else, as it is unlikely that you will be able to make enough supporting an open source project, unless it becomes very popular.

Sounds just like tumbler.

Your UDP idea is implemented by tumbler.

Your passphrase to determine the ports is pretty much what tumbler does.

Real hackers don't care.

Xine can play it (as can anything that can use Xine as a backend, i.e. Totem, Kaffiene). There's also Nosefart. However my Xine-fu is not strong enough to surmise if there's an easy way to convert it such as foobar2000 has.

I run a Debian box with Samba on a computer

But that's not something that I can suggest to my friends and family

The video thingie was mentioned for Uitzending Gemist I really hope BBC's Dirac gets momentum ASAP to replace WMV entirely. The current Dirac performance has been increased by the Schrodinger project. Now is it an open standard... nope, but it could be soon.

Well, I can tell you from personal experience that if you have reasonably common hardware (and Apple hardware is still not quite 'reasonably common', despite using Intel chips) Ubuntu is an OS that 'just works'.

Yes, you sometimes have to work around things on exotic hardware, very new hardware, or if you're trying to do something very specific that is outside the mainstream. In order to get a system that 'just works', you have to buy hardware that's known to work well on Linux. That's it. Stick with hardware that's been around a bit or has vendor support (like Nvidia graphics cards). Get an Epson or HP printer (and install Stylus Toolbox if you have an Epson printer). Use the well-supported Connectix Webcams. Get a scanner that's known to work with SANE. You get the idea. If you follow these guidelines, you will find that Ubuntu 'just works' every time. Or, if you're not quite so ambitious, go out and buy a machine that has Ubuntu pre-installed. Dell sells them.

Unfortunately, people don't realize this and then dismiss integration issues as Linux being 'too immmature.' That's crap. If all your hardware is known to work well under Linux, you won't run into these integration issues.

When Google provides a Linux filesystem (either native or via FUSE), people can use eCryptfs to prevent Google from reading the contents of their files. eCryptfs stacks on top of other filesystems and encrypts the data.