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Agreed. You can also take a look at a couple of my projects - wvWare and AbiWord </shameless-plug>, KWord, or any one of a number of similar products.

[abiword on unix]
AbiWord --print=file.ps file.doc
ps2pdf file.ps

KOffice 1.3 has a similar --print command-line argument.

[abiword on win32 - follow the instructions in the parent post. it'll work for abi or any other win32 program too]

[wv anywhere]
wvPDF file.pdf file.doc

Both run well on Win32, OSX, Unix, QNX, and BeOS, which is a few more platforms than OO can currently boast. wvWare will even run on OS/390 and OS/2 with a little tweaking. Plus both can be run non-interactively from a command line or similar without a dedicated X connection, which is useful for server environments.

Most people don't know (or have forgotten) that OpenOffice isn't the only fee software office suite out there, nor is it necessarily the best one for all cases. It is a good one though, and do wish them continued success.

Dom

It's been done at least once. I'm looking forward to more hardware-based players since I don't like the battery-eating of software+ARM players.

Actually, it's the Vorbis audio codec. Both Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora use Ogg (not OGG, I might add) as their container format.

If that isn't complicated enough, FLAC is capable of being stuffed in an Ogg container, too. FLAC's native container, however, has better library support as of 1.1.0--so don't wait around for Ogg FLAC to become popular anytime soon.

I'd like to see a MythTV version of FreeVix. FreeVix is a 25 MB mini distro that runs FreeVo, which is a MythTV competitor. FreeVo has the same goals as MythTV but is nowhere near as full featured at present. The only difficult part of the idea is that Myth needs MySQL currently, but I wonder if that could be patched to use Berkley DB instead.

I've had good luck with Exodus. Maybe give that one a shot.

Exodus is my preferred Jabber client under Windows. It also supports HTTP Polling, which allows the client to connect through HTTP proxies. Very useful if you're behind a firewall!

GAIM [1] has (limited, I think) jabber support and is also available for Windows.
GAIM also has 'native' support for MSN and ICQ and is pretty stable.

[1] http://gaim.sf.net

If your ISP or job *ahem* doesn't provide you with access to an IMAP server, then you can use Fink to install a copy of UW-IMAPD, and just run that on localhost or somewhere on your home network -- sudo fink -y install uw-imapd

If you had other questions, I'm sure some sysadmin at work *ahem* would be willing to answer any questions... :-)

Well, some Jabber clients (such as Tkabber and gabber) will integrate with GPG, and the messages do balloon up.

At work I use Exodus to connect to jabber.org using SSL, which ensures that my messages aren't being read by my boss/the IT department/the organization's ISP. Once they hit jabber.org, however, anyone can read them. Still, it's better than nothing, and it works for any legacy IM system that I connect to (ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!).

I find gaim-encryption to be very well done. It works transparently, using variable key sizes, and uses a security model similar to that of ssh. Kirk

> 2. Yes, native methods have nothing to do with JVM
> security related to invalid bytecode.

Just to back up what Toby's saying here, native access is controlled by the secutity manager attached to the classloader. If the classloader doesn't allow it, there can be no native code. An example of this is Applets which implicitly prevent DLLs from being loaded.

> 4. I honestly don't remember how I came across
> BCEL - I knew of it, though, back when it was
> called JavaClass.

IIRC, it was one of the few successful projects produced by the Java Operating System project.

Of course, we all know that the major record labels aren't sweating about a few kids downloading some free music instead of paying for the pricefixed CD. They are really scared to death of artists realizing that they no longer need the services of the majors to earn a living. They see the impending end of their mass-distribution monopoly.

For music, the Internet is all about ease-of-mass-distribution! Every day, more people are overcoming the techsavvy hurdle. As more people become comfortable with the rip/mix/burn mantra, they won't think twice about forking $5 at an artist's website for an non-crippled MP3 or FLAC download of a whole album. They will download the files with the understanding that they can listen wherever, however and whenever. They can listen on their MP3 player of choice, or burn it to CD... the point is, the power is back in the hands of the artist and consumer.... but leaves old MCA to die a slow death. And they'll fight it to the very end, as their very existance depends on pushing digital rights management (DRM). Most artists don't want DRM, but the record labels are telling them they need it to hedge filesharing. Microsoft is pushing DRM because it will drum up good buisness for DRM tools.

I was actually screwing around toying with the idea of writing the PHB in java, and have it be readable, not necessarily executable.

Lol, sadly, I know all too well of PCGen and can't stand it. In fact, my friend and I started a project "currently in planning" that one day will be better than PCGen.

http://xrl.sf.net is the project but it's not much to look at.

After lurking on the pcgen-xml mailing list for a while, we decided to do our own thing because we didn't like the static direction pc-gen was moving towards, cause it'll almost always be locked into a d20 system.

Then again, since I don't think there's a high enough demand for something like that, we'll never get it done. It's more fun to play RPGs than to write impossible software for a few people who play RPGs.

Someone else already mentioned the MobiPocket Reader, which includes some phenomenal high-res fonts for the Clié. Baen Books has much of their catalogue available for download in the MobiPocket format, including their Baen Free Library. The Free Library contains dozens of books, many by established authors. That includes the first couple of books in the Honor Harrington series.

Beyond that, I like the Weasel Reader, an ebook reader dedicated to reading Project Gutenberg etexts.

Both MobiPocket Reader and Weasel Reader support the jogwheel, Memory Stick, and hi-res fonts on the Clié. Highly recommended.

PHPTAL --- ZPT's for PHP

SynCE

It's not quite done yet, and it'll never let you use Windows installers for programs, but it does help with synchronization, especially with Evolution using MultiSync.

-Erwos

Check out phplib. I used it a lot back in the days when I was a php monkey :) Really loved it. I fumbled a lot with the templates implementation, which I didn't really like, anyway, any sane person would use php's xslt functions for that now.

check out cups-mailto for that purpose. It's a backend that mails the printed output to the user requesting the job.

Or use cups-mailto to let CUPS mail the generated pdf file to the user.

If they try to go legal, they'll get trounced by Apple, disowned by computer users, and end up lie the legal version of Napster...forgotten.

There is another

There are several Java versions in the works. I run the JTorrent project off SourceForge. Please have a look. We're currently working out an issue with our file releases, so you can't download a package yet, but feel free to check out the code from CVS.

There are several ports to other languages underway, including my own work on libbt, a C-language implementation intended to be suitable for use as a library.

Mod me down as flamebait but, I dont know why people are wasting their valuable time hacking a desktop environment based on an image editor program. KDE is leaps and bounds ahead of GNOME in terms of usablility and performance. Take a look at Slicker for example, it beats the shit out of even WinXP in terms of usability & eye candy. Let us all join together and spend our valuable time making Linux ready for desktop.

I prefer using key and mouse bindings _I_ like, not the ones that the would-be-god-of-interaction who codes my window manager likes. Waimea is the best one I've found in this respect, and now, after the author has seemed to disappear, we have forked it, planning to add a mechanism to script it with any scripting language, to make it more hackable than any other wm. That's what's important to me, hackability. AFAIK EvilWM only lets you assign key bindings to control-alt combinations, and doesn't let you configure mouse bindings whatosever. I'll pass.

The advantage of this approach is that adding a new filesystem type implies modifying a user-space daemon, not the kernel. LUFS includes, besides sshfs ftpfs, gnomefs, and gnutellafs and a few others

Maybe I missed something, but what is boshs? Do you mean Bochs? Bochs is far to slow to get any serious work done I'm afraid. :-( Great for doing OS development tho. Especially when you can add debugging info to the "CPU" to find out why your #$%^ bootloader is triple-faulting. ;-)

Its lean, its mean and everything'll be fullscreen,..
Here is a screenshot taken from this editorial

let me put it to you this way, i don't even Own a mouse on this computer.

shortcuts for browsing
GNU/screen for copypasting

Granted, no speak man nor info == no wm for harry,

But i'll even recap the *entire* 00:05 of 'info ratpoison' in a 2 second blast:

think 'screen' but use ctrl+t instead of ctrl+a
so ctrl+t ? gets you, as expected, the help file,
and ctrl+t c a fresh xterm

Cheers!
Thijs

there's lineak however the year old verion i use (0.3.2) stops working not long after being loaded. 0.5 probably works a lot better.

Anyway, then in this weeks sourceforge.net newsletter we were introduced to a program called B.I.E. (http://sf.net/projects/bie). Anyway, this app was designed to do exactly what we needed in getting data out of systems, and putting data back into other systems. We've replaced nearly 30% of our custom scripts in only 3 days!!!

So to get to my point, I'm wondering if you could get a system like that for hardware. Some kind of mechanism that would allow you to abstractly control different types of hardware. My thought is that with all the linux kernel and driver projects there are out there, someone must have created a distro specifically for researchers like yourself.

Looks like somebody is working on it.

The Scrolling Game Development Kit recently released a new version and had a story on Slashdot.

but mandrake still rox.

Seems like the best solution is to use packet shaping. There are commercial products which will detect and shape down P2P programs. And recently someone (me and a few of my friends) came out with a patch for linux so it can do it too. Check out http://l7-filter.sf.net

Argh, don't bother using Kazaa Lite under wine on Linux. You don't have enough time or hair, believe me. Get giFT, toss in the FastTrack plugin, and you're all set. Gnutella, OpenFT, and FastTrack, all with one daemon.

Try Popfile

I also set up POPfile on my laptop a few weeks ago, with similar results. In addition, I've started using it to sort my personal e-mail into various inboxes in Outlook, some of which I allow myself to read at work (family correspondence), others of which I hold off on (such as solicited advertising from sites like amazon.com) until I'm on my home connection.

On a related topic. Does anyone know a good Open Source alternative to Outlook? I want it to have an e-mail client, address book, to-do and notes and sync with my palm pilot (I use Windows XP).

Every day... I keep wondering, why do we have to even *think* about SCO until they come forward? The age old saying, "don't feed the trolls", comes to mind...

But for a bit more informativeness, I don't hear about the few software releases that have strong Caldera/SCO bonds, even as a new release, or a revived tool from way back then: OpenSLP, CSCOPE (gee, cSCOpe, advogators will kill me) and something similar (not trivial) which eludes my mind just now...

It depends.

Do you want "high quality" or "decent use of space?" Ogg/Vorbis is definitely tuned for low bitrates, assuming you aren't too using too sensitive equipment, it's hard to make this audio format sound bad -- even at 45kbps it's listen-to-able, although it's not archive quality..

I don't like MP3 much, VBR in itself is a hack, as are a lot of the "standards" that the whole MP3 crowds seem to follow, but all in all, once you get at and above the 160kbps range, it starts sounding decent. At high bitrates, Vorbis starts losing its advantage, not because it sounds particularly bad at high bitrates, just that it doesn't really sound any better compared to

APE and such shouldn't really be compared to MP3 and Ogg/Vorbis, however, since they're really for two different groups of people -- MP3 and Vorbis are decidedly lossy, you can make files smaller, but at a loss of quality. APE and FLAC (my preference when it comes to these kinds of codecs) are both lossless, and while there are compression "levels" for both APE and FLAC, they only make size varients of a few Kb overall, and they're lossless quality levels.. it's just it will take longer to encode. (disclaimer: the statements I just made were made from my lazy experience with these two formats, using no double blind form of testing such as ABX to verify what I believe)

Such backup units do/did exist. You can make a backup of all your games and restore them also. ucon64 is the tool you need for such tasks.

FYI, you can find specifications of open EEG equipment at http://openeeg.sf.net/. I didn't actually try it out myself (yet), but it looks quite decent and they say it is working nicely According to the specs, they are using 9V battery source and the actual electrodes-related circuits are optoelectrically separated from the computer.

True about the lack of TI drivers. Of course its much more fun to buy one and then write the drivers yourself!... acx100.sf.net

here is the correct link

Why, oh why aren't they using DjVu for the digitized page images?

If you are using Redhat and love KDE, I would highly suggest checking out the KDE-Redhat project on SourceForge. Rex and his group have done an excellent job of building & optimizing the KDE packages for Redhat versions and, if you are using apt-rpm, it's fairly easy to keep up-to-date with their builds.

Cheers!

Darryl

I've heard complaints about and requests for "advanced" features, on the mailing lists, on IRC, and of course here. As far as the P2P protocol is concerned, I trust Bram's judgment. There are no plans to include any advanced features like upload bandwidth throttling. Instead, what I'm hoping will differentiate the Java port will be the GUI and ease-of-use, the ability of testers familiar with Java (leading to great security and QA), and code cleanliness.

If you're at all interested in seeing a (mostly) working Java implementation, and the only feature-for-feature 'official' version, check out JTorrent, and drop me a line. If you're curious about other language ports, or other ports with different goals, check out the "btports" Yahoo group. For general questions, or questions about the original Python, use the "bittorrent" Yahoo group, or go to #bittorrent on irc.freenode.net.

I've heard complaints about and requests for "advanced" features, on the mailing lists, on IRC, and of course here. As far as the P2P protocol is concerned, I trust Bram's judgment. There are no plans to include any advanced features like upload bandwidth throttling. Instead, what I'm hoping will differentiate the Java port will be the GUI and ease-of-use, the ability of testers familiar with Java (leading to great security and QA), and code cleanliness.

If you're at all interested in seeing a (mostly) working Java implementation, and the only feature-for-feature 'official' version, check out JTorrent, and drop me a line. If you're curious about other language ports, or other ports with different goals, check out the "btports" Yahoo group. For general questions, or questions about the original Python, use the "bittorrent" Yahoo group, or go to #bittorrent on irc.freenode.net.

Post the source code here and all "urban legends" about it will soon dissappear.

You might want to keep an eye on ipod Linux. It boots and can play OGG at about 80% realtime. When it's optimized and gets a decent GUI, it should be pretty sweet.

Another myth: KDE users are leeter than me. Every time I get shit for using Windows, it's from a fucking KDE user. At least when I use Lunix I use a real window manager.

Kylix is all well and good if you only need to compile code for the i386 architecture. If you need UltraSPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, M68k etc. you're up the creek. If you want a nice Free IDE you could try anjuta. It needs the GNOME libs though.