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try imgseek

try imgseek:

imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.

Brazilian /.ers correct me if I am wrong. But Ive noticed that most of brazilian banks (at least Itau, BB, Banespa) already run some version of Windows (2000, 98, 95) on their ATMs.

Last month when I went to an ATM to get some cash (Itau), Ive got a popup about a service failure, and I could press a button on screen to reboot the machine. I could see a PIII rebooting and Windows 2000 loading.

About two years ago a weirder thing happended I went to Banespa Bank (which machines used to have complete keyboards like normal computers) and as I inserted my ATM card the program crashed, giving me access to a DOS prompt!!! I could browse some directories, but didnt risk to load any program...

Now I wonder: "These are the guys that are suposed to take care of my money in security. Sure...)

---

my home

And sold, what? Four or five of them?

Acorn (a British company) was huge in the UK - particularily in schools.

The Acorn OS, RISC OS, inspired the Free Software ROX Desktop (among many other things).

Well, you just need to be anonymous while transferring the file.

Kopete also now uses the newest MSN protocol.

Is it perhaps time for a code rewrite in Sendmail, or maybe a quiet, dignified retirement?

You'd think that it would be easy to fix this at the language level. It can't be that hard to create a string library that automatically ignores everything past the end of the string.

This is Royal's second attempt at a Linux PDA. But then again, I suppose a lot of companies promised a Linux PDA and didn't follow through.

Their first attempt had the regular specs- 206 MHz StrongARM, 32-64 MB of RAM, etc etc. One difference is that they were going to use the PIXIL set of apps on top of MicroWindows. There was just a story yesterday about PIXIL going GPL- MicroWindows already was open source.

Anywho, I imagine these events are related- PIXIL being GPL'd because there isn't much interest. Qt/Embedded is very far from perfect, making a pretty crappy platform for PDAs- but it supports very easy porting from Qt-based desktop apps. MicroWindows isn't any better though, as far as a being a very good platform for pen-driven devices. Why is it that these open source guys don't get that? So many of us are spewing "use the right tool for the job!" so often, why not put that phrase to practical application?

Qt/E is a desktop-ish windowing system shrunk down. Folks say this about WindowsCE, but that really hasn't been very true for a while, since WinCE v 2.11. When will the various PDA Linux projects learn the lesson that Microsoft did a long time ago? Apple managed not to make this blunder in the NewtonOS, and the PalmOS did right to borrow a good many things from the Newton.

Oh well, there is always Dynapad and PicoGUI!

This is Royal's second attempt at a Linux PDA. But then again, I suppose a lot of companies promised a Linux PDA and didn't follow through.

Their first attempt had the regular specs- 206 MHz StrongARM, 32-64 MB of RAM, etc etc. One difference is that they were going to use the PIXIL set of apps on top of MicroWindows. There was just a story yesterday about PIXIL going GPL- MicroWindows already was open source.

Anywho, I imagine these events are related- PIXIL being GPL'd because there isn't much interest. Qt/Embedded is very far from perfect, making a pretty crappy platform for PDAs- but it supports very easy porting from Qt-based desktop apps. MicroWindows isn't any better though, as far as a being a very good platform for pen-driven devices. Why is it that these open source guys don't get that? So many of us are spewing "use the right tool for the job!" so often, why not put that phrase to practical application?

Qt/E is a desktop-ish windowing system shrunk down. Folks say this about WindowsCE, but that really hasn't been very true for a while, since WinCE v 2.11. When will the various PDA Linux projects learn the lesson that Microsoft did a long time ago? Apple managed not to make this blunder in the NewtonOS, and the PalmOS did right to borrow a good many things from the Newton.

Oh well, there is always Dynapad and PicoGUI!

I know this didn't make it to the front page, but is there really this little interest in embedded Linux, or non-X11 GUI systems?

I for one can't say I've ever really been too excited about MicroWindows or this PIXIL system built on top of it. We've not seen any PDAs that use it, although the Royal Linux PDA was supposed to use PIXIL/MW, it never saw the light of day.

X11 is entrenched. There have been a number of free alternatives for a long time:PicoGUI, MicroWindows (w/ NanoX [X11 API emulation] or PIXIL apps), Qt/Embedded, DirectFB w/ GTK+, Squeak (and on top of it, Dynapad), W Window System, Berlin/Fresco Window System, MGR and others. Many of these have been around for 10 years or more.

Yet, what does almost everyone use on Linux or Unix? X. Relative to the X11 install base, there is a miniscule minority of folks using Qt/Embedded + Qtopia on their PDAs, but even so it still a crappy solution when you consider how poorly Qt/E is suited to PDAs.

About as many Zaurus users are using Squeak as a windowing system. Perhaps more using Squeak, not sure. They may not use it as a X11 replacement, but they're using it all the same.

PicoGUI is the bomb. Although, it sounds like it may be going dormant for a while. One of the most promising of non-X11 windowing systems out there, but still no one uses it.

When will we have a project like this that really goes somewhere? Anyone have any bets?

First of all -- what's the deal with this whole "WARMUPS" thing? This is just the most explicit way possible of training the JIT mechanisms without measuring its overhead. That might be fine if you believe that the overhead asymptotically costs nothing, however, I don't know what evidence there is of this. The test should use other mechanisms other than this explicit mechanism to allow the language itself to demonstrate that the overhead is of low cost.

The way this test is set up, the JIT people could spend hours or days optimizing the code without it showing up in the tests. This is the wrong approach and will do nothing other than to encourage the JIT developers to cheat in a way such as this just to try to win these benchmarks.

Ok as to the specific tests:

1. FloatInteger conversion on x86 are notoriously slow and CPU micro-architecturally dependent. It also depends on your rounding standard -- the C standard dictates a rounding mode that forces the x86s into their slowest mode. However using the new "Prescott New Instructions", Intel has found a way around this issue that should eventually show up in the Intel C/C++ compiler.

This does not demonstrate anything about a language other than to ask the question of whether or not the overhead outside of the fi rises to the level of not overshadowing the slowness of the conversion itself.

(That said, obviously Intel's compiler knows something here that the other guys don't -- notice how it *RAPES* the competition.)

2. Integer to string conversion is just a question of the quality of the library implementation. A naive implement will just use divides in the inner loop, instead of one of the numerous "constant divide" tricks. Also, string to integer will use multiplies and still just be a limited to the quality of implementation as its most major factor determining performance.

3. The Pi calculation via iteration has two integer->floating point conversions and a divide in the inner loop. Again, this will make it limited to CPU speed, not language speed.

4. The Calculation of Pi via recursion is still dominated by the integer divide calculation. It will be CPU limited not language limited.

5. The Sieve of Erastothenes (sp?) is a fair test. However, if SLOTS is initialized to millions, and the comparable C implementation uses true bits, instead of integers, then I think the C implementation should beat the pants off of C#, Java, or anything else.

6. The string concatenation test, of course, is going to severely ding C for its pathetic string library implemenation (strcat, has an implicit strlen calculation in it, thus making it dramatically slower than it needs to be.) Using something like bstrlib would negate the advantage of C#, Java, or any other language.

7. The string comparison with switch is a fair test, and gives each language the opportunity to use whatever high level "insight" that the compiler is capable of delivering on. It should be noted that a sufficiently powerful C compiler should be capable of killing its competition on this test, however, I don't believe any C compiler currently in existence is capable of demonstrating this for this case. I.e., this *could* be a legitimate case to demonstrate that C# or Java's high level abstractions give it an advantage over where the state of the art is in C compilers today.

8. Of course the tokenization is another serious ding on the rather pathetic implementation of the C library. None of strtok, strspn, etc are up to the task of doing serious high performance string tokenization. If you use an alternative library (such as bstrlib or even just PCRE) you would find that C would be impossible to beat.

-----

Ok, while the results here are interesting, I don't think there were enough tests here to truly test the language, especially in more real world (and less laboratory-like) conditions. Please refer to The Great Win32 Computer Language Shootout for a more serious set of tests.

First of all -- what's the deal with this whole "WARMUPS" thing? This is just the most explicit way possible of training the JIT mechanisms without measuring its overhead. That might be fine if you believe that the overhead asymptotically costs nothing, however, I don't know what evidence there is of this. The test should use other mechanisms other than this explicit mechanism to allow the language itself to demonstrate that the overhead is of low cost.

The way this test is set up, the JIT people could spend hours or days optimizing the code without it showing up in the tests. This is the wrong approach and will do nothing other than to encourage the JIT developers to cheat in a way such as this just to try to win these benchmarks.

Ok as to the specific tests:

1. FloatInteger conversion on x86 are notoriously slow and CPU micro-architecturally dependent. It also depends on your rounding standard -- the C standard dictates a rounding mode that forces the x86s into their slowest mode. However using the new "Prescott New Instructions", Intel has found a way around this issue that should eventually show up in the Intel C/C++ compiler.

This does not demonstrate anything about a language other than to ask the question of whether or not the overhead outside of the fi rises to the level of not overshadowing the slowness of the conversion itself.

(That said, obviously Intel's compiler knows something here that the other guys don't -- notice how it *RAPES* the competition.)

2. Integer to string conversion is just a question of the quality of the library implementation. A naive implement will just use divides in the inner loop, instead of one of the numerous "constant divide" tricks. Also, string to integer will use multiplies and still just be a limited to the quality of implementation as its most major factor determining performance.

3. The Pi calculation via iteration has two integer->floating point conversions and a divide in the inner loop. Again, this will make it limited to CPU speed, not language speed.

4. The Calculation of Pi via recursion is still dominated by the integer divide calculation. It will be CPU limited not language limited.

5. The Sieve of Erastothenes (sp?) is a fair test. However, if SLOTS is initialized to millions, and the comparable C implementation uses true bits, instead of integers, then I think the C implementation should beat the pants off of C#, Java, or anything else.

6. The string concatenation test, of course, is going to severely ding C for its pathetic string library implemenation (strcat, has an implicit strlen calculation in it, thus making it dramatically slower than it needs to be.) Using something like bstrlib would negate the advantage of C#, Java, or any other language.

7. The string comparison with switch is a fair test, and gives each language the opportunity to use whatever high level "insight" that the compiler is capable of delivering on. It should be noted that a sufficiently powerful C compiler should be capable of killing its competition on this test, however, I don't believe any C compiler currently in existence is capable of demonstrating this for this case. I.e., this *could* be a legitimate case to demonstrate that C# or Java's high level abstractions give it an advantage over where the state of the art is in C compilers today.

8. Of course the tokenization is another serious ding on the rather pathetic implementation of the C library. None of strtok, strspn, etc are up to the task of doing serious high performance string tokenization. If you use an alternative library (such as bstrlib or even just PCRE) you would find that C would be impossible to beat.

-----

Ok, while the results here are interesting, I don't think there were enough tests here to truly test the language, especially in more real world (and less laboratory-like) conditions. Please refer to The Great Win32 Computer Language Shootout for a more serious set of tests.

If I wasn't allowed to use linux at work, a lot of things wound't be possible. For example transparent access of p2p clients via httppc, online games and news reading, all of that isn't possible from windows stations at work here. At the moment I have even developed a way to access computers at work through firewall and check whether my gentoo needs a nightly update.

Some people know how to use linux in ways other than work (no, I had a choice to use something else, but liunx desktop is by far superior to any alternatives), I am very unsure if all of that could be possible if my workstation used windows.

P2P is not only about sharing music and video. There's for example all the work on distributed hashtables (Can, Chord, Pastry...) or distributed processing (SETI@Home and others).

But even with regular file-sharing you could do much more if you could search and publish files other than MP3s. Chemists or biologists could share melocule or gene descriptions, programmers could share design patterns, without depending on a central database that they do not control... But for this to work, you need a mechanism to provide (explicitly or not) metadata about the documents, because file names won't be enough.

If you're interested, check out the project I am working on: it is called U-P2P [sourceforge.net], and it allows the explicit description of documents, as well as the description of the specialized file-sharing community itself. We also published a paper at the FREENIX track of USENIX'03 this year, it should be available on their web site. If not, drop me a message and I'll send it to you.

I think I'm a borderline case. I'm certainly not envolved with the core technologies, but I have written a decent free game (copter-commander), and I do publish the odd HOWTO and whatnot.

LZIP solved all of my bandwidth problems. The amount of compression it achieves is incredible!

It also made Slashdot far more interesting to read AND stopped my PC showing p0rn at inconvenient times!!

I have a project in which I am trying to completely generate a MUD and then run a massive simulation to have a dynamic world.

It isn't about whether or not the output is "as good as" what a human can do. It's about the fact that games and art in general are patterns of symbols, and using computers to record and playback symbols and patterns that people create isn't very interesting to me. It's not that I think taking pictures or recording music or writing a story is bad, it's just that computers can do so much more than record/playback, and I want to see what they can do. It's much more interesting to try to teach the computer to generate those symbols and patterns. And I'm back in school studying AI now. :)

I think the main issue with randomly generated content is that people don't take it far enough. It's hard to create systems that will generate content, so I think people give up. The other issue is that once people understand the underlying pattern for how the content was formed, the value of the content is reduced to that pattern, so it has to be so complex that people can't figure out how it was made, or at least so they can't be sure how it was made. I am an optimist and I think it will eventually get good.

• Fully written in Smalltalk, extensions in C if needed
• The entire environment is object oriented, from arithmatic, to the windowing system, to high-level APIs
• Central object database for data storage
• End-user programmability with low temporal, resource, and emotional overhead- no additional hardware required
• Integrated scripting system which applies to all applications without investing a lot of time in explicit support (as is the case with PalmOS, WinCE and Linux PDAs)
• A really cool GUI toolkit well suited to writing flexible PDA applications; widgets and GUI objects are directly manipulatable
• Easy and simple data manipulation and inter-application data exchange facilities

Second, I wasn't a part per se of the "iPAQ initiative" at UMD. I was a sophmore the year they started required incoming freshment in the CS, IS&T and ECE programs to lease one. That went on for three years; they "initiative" was dismantled and dumped this summer.

However, being a pretty vocal opponent of the initiative and generally interested in (mis)use of technology in education and in PDAs in general, I talked to a lot of people, students and professors, about how they were being used, how effective they were, etc.

From my research, the iPAQs were used mostly for:

1. Scheduling, etc. I've not met a single person that got a PDA as a part of this program that actually took class notes on it. I did take my class notes on an iPAQ 3150 for a while though, before going back to my Newton. (and, again, I may be switching back to the Newton for notes- the C760 sucks for taking notes).

2. An app in embedded Visual Basic was written by a couple students hired by the CS department for use by students and their advisors to tell them what classes they had left to take to finish their major. Handy I imagine, but never got used all that much, and there have been web tools which do this for a while.

3. Aside this, the iPAQs didn't go very used. I know of no classes to which they added something that really made the iPAQs worth it.

4. A handful of students actually used their iPAQs, although mostly for games and web browsing sites like Slashdot during class.

5. I've not met one other person in real life who actually hacks on their PDA. I know a handful of people on IRC which do, and about a dozen who hack Smalltalk on their PDAs. Part of the problem is what language people use; doing real C/C++ on a PDA is pretty much impossible for now, unless you've got swap/tmp space on a 2 GB PCMCIA hard drive or via NFS. Languages like Squeak Smalltalk, Perl/Tk, or Pocket Scheme make good environments for PDA hacking, whereas C/C++ or Java are limited by their resource use.

6. In addition to students, a lot of faculty and staff got an iPAQ when this initiative started. I'm not sure if they had to pay for it themselves out of pocket, or if it came as a gift from the dept, encouragement to get them to use them in their classes. Anyway, besides two exceptions (but there are more I imagine), the iPAQs simply sit on a lot of staff and faculty desks now. I could name a dozen UMD employees who got an iPAQ with this program and just have it sitting on their computer, charging, but never used; or in a box, opened and played with but that's it. Really annoyed me for a while, especially before I had a bigger/better/faster PDA than the iPAQ 3650.

It may sound like I'm being overly negative, but I interviewed via email and face-to-face a lot

To add another, which is a program that actually finds legally free music to match your tastes once it has learnt them: iRATE

It's indeed a shame that SkyOS is closed source. This is the kind of project that would have hundreds of developers within weeks of it being GPL'd. I doubt that just one individual, working part time for six years (since 1997), could support USB and write a complete kernel and GUI without using the source code of others. The EULA posted in another comment seems to be an indirect admission that the kernel even includes Linux source code. We need someone to do a binary analysis of SkyOS to determine if any Linux kernel code has been borrowed illegally.

Since the CD is only $10, I would've bought it too, if I could read the kernel code and modify it under the GPL. I doubt it would be possible to get a wrapper for binary only drivers working without running the entire kernel, as these frequently use non-recommended access points into the kernel (modifying the system call table or something like that), but open source drivers could easily be ported, and a basic compatibility layer created to make it easier for nVidia and ATI to port their drivers.

Honestly, I don't think that an operating system has any business being closed source. It just makes much more sense for the core of a system to be open. I'm not opposed to using commercial applications on a free OS, but I want to be able to see and modify the core of my system (and yes, I do read and modify; I write my own drivers too). Operating systems are just better when they're open.

I will not use SkyOS until the possibility of GPL code copying is cleared up. Another benefit of OSS: infringements are easily identified and repaired once the complaining party reveals proof of the infringing code.

I call bullshit. You need to go RTFWebsite

ESR has already stated how he feels about being the guidon holder for open source.

1. Take my job, please.

2. Understand my job, please.

Further, if you can find someone who will do all of that, and perhaps more, you need to send him an e-mail, because he wants to know about it. Why not use this as a starting point when you're looking.

As for what ESR has done for the Open Source Community-at-large, ponder this, batman: You need the idealists, the pragmatists, and yes, even the more wild. Why? Because the community they're speaking in the name of, and the communities they're speaking to are just as diverse. It will be these men, and the relevant foundations that write the amici curiae in support of Linux, the GPL, or Open Source in general, when the time is necessary.

When was the last time you said thanks?

Lunix Next Generation - it seems there's an Apple // port in the works... I wouldn't run it on anything with less than 64K RAM, though. The Apple 1 has 8K RAM max.

While nobody's been brazen enough to claim a GPL'd work is their's after being caught,

It should be noted that our web page is being updated, and some of the links seem to be going to place holders. Sorry about that.

I too am a poor college student. However, I'm a poor college student with a cool self-run research project that happened to get the attention of a one of the coolest people in CS today... As a result, I was donated a C760 as encourageent that my project continue. The website is crappy and out of date, but a new release will be coming very soon The C760 is an awesome platform for Dynapad, my project- a new PDA operating environment/system largely in the design spirit of the NewtonOS.

The C760 is $800, at least from Dynamism. That is an assload of dough and more than my iBook is worth. The C760, though, has become my primary computer when at home. I use it for prorgamming, IRC, telnet/ssh/email, and web browsing. I wish the screen was physically larger, but I'm working on a solution to that. But even though I use it so much, it's still a ton of money...

Also, you can buy a C700 in good condition on eBay for $400, and a new C700 for $500 or less. You can get a C750 for around $630 if you order from the right place and get in on a group buy. Still a lot of money, especially considering what Sharp left out.

$xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/ibm-linux-p rodigy.asf

That worked for me. If you don't have Xine you can download it here

Compare this to Windows Media Player, which charges additional fees to rip to MP3.

That's because MP3 is patented, and the company that controls the patent rights refuses to license encoders royalty-free. Windows users do have CDex, which does encode to Ogg.

I've used ffmpeg so I can watch sports events at work. I record them at home and stream at realtime to my work machine over http.

Just noticed their page is closed due to the patent thing. Try here

I am using a new tool called MailManager, see sourceforge . Over the last month I received over 6000 emails, half of them curtesy of SoBig and Friends. The MailManager tool allows me to share my MailBox on the Web with collegues, who will process mail while I am out.

I have started using popfile (also on sourceforge) to classify my my mail before I look at it. Thus viruses, web-site logs, bounced emails, out of office replies etc are marked as 'spam' (MailManagers term, no offence intended to virus writers). Spam is automatically deleted after a week days (long enough for me to look at the subjects incase a real message is wrongly classified).

The result of this pair of products are....

• I can now go on holidays as my collegues will process my mail
• We all know what was processed
• My mail is prioritised before I read it

I am using a new tool called MailManager, see sourceforge . Over the last month I received over 6000 emails, half of them curtesy of SoBig and Friends. The MailManager tool allows me to share my MailBox on the Web with collegues, who will process mail while I am out.

I have started using popfile (also on sourceforge) to classify my my mail before I look at it. Thus viruses, web-site logs, bounced emails, out of office replies etc are marked as 'spam' (MailManagers term, no offence intended to virus writers). Spam is automatically deleted after a week days (long enough for me to look at the subjects incase a real message is wrongly classified).

The result of this pair of products are....

• I can now go on holidays as my collegues will process my mail
• We all know what was processed
• My mail is prioritised before I read it

for i in `seq 10`; do dd if=/dev/random of=./my.mp3; done;
or wipe

I haven't worked with a Z/Linux VM before. However, I have used User Mode Linux to create a dozen or so virtual servers per host server. And I'd imagine that the benefits offered by UML would also apply to Z/Linux VMs.

For example, with UML you're able to get much better resource utilisation. e.g. most of the time the machine is idle. When one of the UML servers need the host server's resources, they're there (CPU, network, disk IO, etc). That means you can have multiple UML servers bursting up to the performance potential of the host server. Certainly a better resource utilisation than having several host servers running mostly idle.

Another benefit of virtual machines are their logical separation from the host server. Each virtual server has their own users (including root), applications, file systems, IP address, etc. That means that if security is compromised on one, the others are unaffected. Ditto resources can be allocated to each virtual server according to need. And any mis-configuration on one doesn't affect the other. This compares to running multiple applications on the same server for different purposes (e.g. running HR and Account systems on one server, if email goes down them both systems are affected. In a virtual server setup, only one of the other would be affected.

So... Thumbs up to server virtualization software in general. Particular kudos to UML. And good luck finding out about Z/Linux!

- P
RimuHosting.com - Linux VPS Hosting

Actually you can just try to figure out what's going on with 2003 QQ47 using the ORSA software. It is not a simple computation, but you can try anyway. --Lino

Gnumeric seems to work ok on OSX. You need to install an X11 Server and Fink, and then, in a Terminal: sudo fink install gnumeric (and wait a long time) or sudo apt-get install gnumeric.

An Aqua or Carbon port would be cool though.

If more people used wxWindows, then (a) porting to Windows and Mac would be really easy, and (b) wxWindows would continue to improve as people contributed.

Gnumeric seems to work ok on OSX. You need to install an X11 Server and Fink, and then, in a Terminal: sudo fink install gnumeric (and wait a long time) or sudo apt-get install gnumeric.

An Aqua or Carbon port would be cool though.

If more people used wxWindows, then (a) porting to Windows and Mac would be really easy, and (b) wxWindows would continue to improve as people contributed.

I am the current primary developer for the BookEX project. You can find out more info at our main site.

I'll be the first to admit that the code is far from perfect (or even particularly good) but it works and I'm always looking for new developers (Perl or HTML design) if anyone is interested in helping improve the code. Also, I'm always more than happy to help out anyone interested in setting up such a site.

While you are at it, you might want to setup a Teacher Evaluation site as well.

--Stuart

(hi Robert).

Actually, I think you meant http://www.studentgov.com or more directly, http://olbe.studentgov.com.

That site is long over due for an upgrade and redesign. The updated version of the code running that site can be found: http://bookex.sf.net

For a good example of how the code can be easily customized, check out: http://www.epccemployees.com/

Yes, that's true. But Trillian is only a drop in the pool. MSN has no offerings for the GNU/Linux operating system, and the only *nix clients that I'm aware of that are worth their salt are all free (such as Gaim). Asking them for a cut of what they charge is certainly a problem (10% of 0 = 0), so Microsoft has to demand licensing fees.

I would suggest a boycott of the MSN network.

Under Gentoo doing something like "emerge genkernel kernel-2.6; genkernel" would suffice, AFAIK (don't use Gentoo). Makeing a shortcut-icon that does this after asking the root password is possible.

And in general, I do hope kautoconfigure get's some attention from developers (shameless plug).

You get into the projects in exactly the same way: start off doing some small useful things (docs, janitor work, UI design, whatever) and then sooner or later you'll inevitably find yourself maintaining a driver or whatever. Next thing you're making changes to sub system APIs, and you work from there.

There's no magic and there is no cabal.

If you're asking about specific organisations to help you on the way in, the other posters have already mentioned kernel janitors and kernel newbies, both of which are good.

I became a kernel hacker through a rather unusual route: my M.Sc. supervisor spotted missing functionality and suggested I had a crack at it.

xine is also protesting. patents are really bad for multimedia players - essientially xiph's ogg/theora/vorbis is the only really free multimedia format available. luckily they're doing a great job, however the world out there is using other, patented formats like mpeg most of the time.

We've got a choice.

CORBA for .NET

Effectively, this means that functional aspects of code cannot be copyrighted. So, the steps that are absolutely necessary to perform a task are not protected. I think that this would especially be the case when dealing with hardware interfaces.

Note that I am not a lawyer. I'm a software developer who is doing something similar to the process described in the article. However, I'm not just doing a translation from ASM to C. Such a translation would be useless anyway, since the driver is for Windows.

As far as I know, you would also have to use the same mp3 encoder as different encoders produce different results, therefore different files/md5sums. I'd also like to throw in flac as that uses a fingerprint, so even if the id3 tag changes, the hash doesn't.

Daddypants must have let this one get by.

Remember, this was brought to you by E-pants.

Sometimes my pants are on.

Sometimes my pants are off.

That's why I have E-pants.

Go install fink. =)

The other PC emulators are:

Bochs - Open source emulator with some nice features.

MS Virtual PC - Probably the best PC emulator on the Mac. Now owned by the evil Microsoft corporation.

I had the same problem (with ps but mostly with other commands). I download fink and I felt so much better... ;)

Within a few moments and quick commands, I had all the GNU tools installed and my $PATH changed to point to them first. Now, whenever I have serious work to do on a Unix system, I install them (if it makes sense for me to take the time and freedom to do so). Even on Windows cygwin allows you to use the tools you are used to (with all the same parameters, options, etc.) if they are needed. For that I thank the GNU project!

Being a good IBMer, here are a couple. :) But seriously, many people tend to miss IBM's publishing arm, and never even realize that all of their books are published as freely downloadable PDF's. Granted, there's an IBM slant to most of it, but there are some really good, get-to-the-good-stuff, hands-on tasty morsels in there. In fact, this book on AIX is currently $117 at Amazon. Take the PDF to OfficeMax and get a book bound with comb binding (so it opens flat) for 1/3rd the price, and you can put the CD you burned the PDF onto inside the back cover :)

If you [have|want] to manage large quantities of Linux servers, pay closer attention to the Linux on zSeries materials since its customary to run hundreds of virtual Linux servers at a time, and they still need to be managed. Same goes for HPC clusters. Since these books are written by different people, its neat to hear the tack they've each taken to managing large-scale communities. One book even touches on configuring a Linux virtual server on a zbox with LEAF to serve as a software firewall for the remaining machines.

You laugh!