Slashdot Mirror

Use this encrypted Instant Messenger and you are done

http://retroshare.sf.net/

Age old AutoCAD user myself here. But I have to disagree, command line is not required if you have good menu accelerators. Smart menus keep most items in the left hand. Alt+F,S isn't really much more difficult than Ctrl+S to save. But neither is as hard as QSAVE now is it?

In my Cream interface for Vim, just about everything is handled this way. Usually, the only time you have to hop over to right hand keys is for the last item through the menu tree or for something rarely used.

The bottom line is that good interface must be designed, and that well-designed GUIs are easier to learn and faster to use than a command line, for both experienced users and newbies. (The AutoCAD command line is only fast because you can right-click to enter.)

I've been Googling around, and I've yet to find a convincing reason to use PulseAudio over jackd. Why reinvent the wheel? Jackd has network transparency (see NetJack). People say jackd is for professional audio, and PulseAudio is for desktop user. I don't see a reason why jackd cannot be made for desktop users. After all, CoreAudio framework on Mac OS X works for both desktop and professional audio. I've also used jackd just to listen to music or watch movies. What are the GNOME people thinking?

That's a good list you have there. The Battle For Wesnoth is verry good, and that is right next to the one I am about to introduce to whomever...

A good one that is better than Diablo-1 is The Mana World. No relentless gore and unsensable character in that title. It's opensource/GPL in C++. Has an average of 25 accounts actively in the server at any time of the solar day. Clean environment of people and quick server. Doesn't need system high requirements for 2D, but a openGL accelerator and modest resources (133MHz of free processor execution) would allow some neet grahics effects that don't interrupt or improve gameplay over 2D mode. Gets perceivably better with each version, and no gameplay screw-ups like how Blizzard has done.

The Mana World

Join as soon as possible while the Halloween mod is still active, collect 5 dark crystals from killing the flaming skulls, ask a cult member to summon the Pumpkin devil, and get some items.

That's a good list you have there. The Battle For Wesnoth is verry good, and that is right next to the one I am about to introduce to whomever...

A good one that is better than Diablo-1 is The Mana World. No relentless gore and unsensable character in that title. It's opensource/GPL in C++. Has an average of 25 accounts actively in the server at any time of the solar day. Clean environment of people and quick server. Doesn't need system high requirements for 2D, but a openGL accelerator and modest resources (133MHz of free processor execution) would allow some neet grahics effects that don't interrupt or improve gameplay over 2D mode. Gets perceivably better with each version, and no gameplay screw-ups like how Blizzard has done.

The Mana World

Join as soon as possible while the Halloween mod is still active, collect 5 dark crystals from killing the flaming skulls, ask a cult member to summon the Pumpkin devil, and get some items.

It sounds like you are re-implementing an non-anonymous Freenet.

...or you can imagine a situation where console still contain very weird innovations, but still provide a simple common layer.

Games are either manufacturer-exclusive and exploit all special bells-and-whistles (original new controller, clever usage of the steam coprocessors or whatever) or games target a special set of API and hardware capabilities that exist across all major player.

The concept is somewhat similar to what currently happens with some developing toolset that let developers cross compile software for several consoles (id software's next engine which works on PC, XBox 360 and Playstation with one single toolset is such an example).

The only difference is that current such tools are done by 3rd party, have to be acquired separately, and finally produce console-specific disc wich bundles game data with console-specific runtime layer, whereas EA's idea could be implemented if every console offered in it's firmware a "standarised environment".
It could be something similar to what smart phones (and to some extend, the interactive capabilities of high definition disc players are doing) are already doing : most of them have different and specific hardware and OS platform (Symbian, Linux, Windows CE, Palm OS, ...) but all have Java MIDP which can be targeted as a standard unified platform, it doesn't provide all the niceties of native binary but is the kind of "one target to rule them all" that developer are looking for.

In the console realm, an open-source stack based around Linux + SDL + OpenGL + some scripting language (like python's pygame. Or better Parrot Bytecode engine for more language flexibility) could provide such a unified target. Specially since some console already have linux (PS3, PS2) and other are getting it hacked in (Wii) or have already had (Xbox 360, DS, PSP (somewhat. An uCLinux proof-of-concept currently),XBox, GameCube, Dreamcast... )

Actually, in contrary of what they think, allowing linux on the consoles could somewhat drive piracy down. Currently both pirated games, linux and homebrew all share the same need to circumvent the cryptographic locks that exist inside consoles (either to crack the games, or just to be able to run their own non-signed code). So efforts are shared among all those groups.
If Linux gets an official support from companies, the linux community won't need modchips and such anymore, and in addition to commercial game developers looking for a standard platform, homebrewer will get a platform they can target too, without needing to circumvent cryptography. Thus less efforts go into the development of methods to circumvent the cryptographic lock around vendor specific platform for games.

The only draw back is that cross-platform developers targeting Linux for commercial games won't benefit any more from the copy protection provided by the cryptographic locks and will have to either invent other protections that will work on this standard platform (cue in StarFuck and all associated problems), count on log-ins for on-line games or accept risk and take into account the possibility of being easily copied.

There's an excelent GPL program for Palm OS: Palm Fiction. It doesn't need any conversion programs, it can read plain .txt, .html, .rtf files, also in .zip or .gz compression, straight from the memory card. I used it on m500, Tungsten T3, TX and now on Treo 650 and I'm glad I've found it. The UI is so much configurable, I sometimes consider it a drawback.

The only thing Palm Fiction lacks IMO is webpage and documentation in English ;)

Of course it doesn't read any proprietary, encrypted formats, but since I've got Baen free and commercial offerings, as well as MLDonkey I can't complain. I just feel sorry for the publishers that don't want to take my money and thank the authors for their hard work in such cases.

Robert

Having worked on development on robotic telescopes, both hardware and software, let me tell you that using Linux was not an easy choice. We had to narrow our search to vendors who explicitly support Linux, and even there, their support was flaky at best and we spent hours in troubleshooting the drivers before we got them to work. However, this exercise resulted in better support for Linux from the vendor, so it's a win-win situation. We opted for National Instruments for their excellent DAQ boards & LabView which are all supported under Linux.

For the control system, we used INDI, it's a powerful server/client control protocol that you can use to jump start your project within minutes. While it is geared toward astronomy, it can be used for any purpose.

You can try this: http://scan.sf.net/

I'm still convinced that it's possible to make a VM that appaears to software running within as real hardware.

To have a filesystem transparently encrypt individual files for you on Linux, use eCryptfs. It's now part of every major distro.

wget - grab url without any annoying save dialog boxes
elinks - text-based wysiwyg
calc - http://sf.net/projects/calc
vlc - cause it can play just about anything without concern on local OS dependencies
ImageMagic suite - these tools rock - most notably 'convert'
awk and sed - you'd be surprised how many times I've used awk and sed on a text/csv file in 5 seconds to do what someone else takes hours to do in a spreadsheet
find, grep, and xargs - with this trio, I can do in 1 minute what takes other people hours or days to do
scp - so much better than ftp for so many reasons
rsync - there are so many very expensive commerical data replication solutions that basically are just GUI wrappers around rsync
htop - I just like it. Fast, colorful, unbloated
tkdiff - one of the best graphical diff tools around. Small, simple, fast.
screen - take your console session with you
vncserver and vncclient - while I don't like their non-pam OS authenticaiton, they're great tools. Fast and lightweight
rdesktop
audacity
pidgin

Screw the enormous desktop environments. All you need to do is be able to click, drag, resize, minimize, hide, redisplay, and select running applications.

UWM takes the cake on full functionality, configurability, a little bit of window decoration, and written completely with standard Xlibs (so no extraneous junk), and the compiled binary, on Debian, is still only 92k.

If you want a little more eye-candy I used to suggest Enlightenment, but E17 is about as large as almost anything else. E16 is still rather light, weighing in at 660k (again, Debian Sid) and not having many external library requirements. That's a little bit dishonest, though, in that my system does include most of the glib/gtk and kdelibs which are necessary for various applications.

Anything which requires HAL/FAM/bonobo, however, stays the FSCK off my system.

I remember when one could go from a bare HD, through LFS, and on through BLFS, and a have a fully functioning system with X11/gtk/glib/multimedia/filesharing/etc in about 4 days on what was, at the time, semi-standard hardware (around 500 MHz CPU and 256 mb RAM). Now, to have a comparable modern day desktop Linux OS, it'll still take about 4 days of compiling--but with a 2 GHz CPU and 1 gb RAM.

Bloat-free software is a way of life... and the way to go.

RiscOS On X (ROX)

This gem has been around for awhile. It's somewhat "minimalistic": gtk, C, maybe libxml. No heavy component interface, large GNOME dependencies, or similar. It's blazing fast on both my desktop and my PDA. It's also blazing fast to use...faster than the commandline alone. Once you've assigned keys to its standard functions, you can navigate directories by clicking...or by hitting '/' and shell-style tab completion. You can select files by globs, regexps, or more complicated patterns, also at the press of a key. Then you can hit '!' and run a command on your selection. Drag and drop is prevalent and intuitive, but not forced or required. The mass rename dialog is awesome, and regexp-based, along with manual editing. Did I mention it was really fast? And when all the builtin functions aren't sufficient, you can hit 'x' and pop up a (user-specified) terminal in the cwd. Thus it works alongside the shell you love, instead of replacing it.

After all these years, there's still nothing as usable or functional... or fast.

I am (well, was, at least) an Erlang Programmer. I was toying around with Erlang for some small projects with distributed programming.

I've been looking forward to Joe's book for a long time, as he's one of the few big names in the Erlang community, and has done a lot of work (both code and, even more importantly, documentation) for the community -- first that jumps to mind is his important look at Yaws vs. apache.

There are serious problems with the Erlang language as a whole and the community, right now. The mailing lists are actually pretty good, but quite frankly, the documentation online is terrible and the Erlang interpreter is pretty rudimentary. Not to mention basic problems with the syntax and grammar of the Erlang language itself. When I was learning Erlang a few months back, I was pretty frustrated that about the only source of documentation was on erlang.org, and they.. weren't great. For instance, there needs to be a big warning right at the beginning explaining that atomic values always start with a lowercase letter and all other variables must begin with a capital letter. This must be a huge problem for other beginners (at least, I hope I assume I wasn't alone..) compounded by the unfriendliness of the error messages produced by the Erlang interpreter.

Now that I've switched over to doing as much as I can in Python, which has a great user community, wonderful docs, a healthy standard library, and a reasonably helpful interpreter.. I don't really worry about Erlang that much anymore. It would be wonderful if I could write, say, web crawlers (I work in web security) in Erlang. But the mysql support in Erlang looks alpha-quality at best, and AFAIK there's nothing even remotely similar to Python's urllib2 for basic web client functionality in Erlang.

I think it says a lot that so much attention is paid to a language that is so rough around the edges, unfriendly, and lacking in documentation. Even given all that.. the ease of use of the concurrency and message passing in Erlang is so fantastic that it almost makes up for the rough spots.

On a final note, I'd like to point out to anyone interested that I think there's a huge void out there for a language that's as easy to use and learn as Python, but with the concurrency and message passing in Erlang. It actually might not take that much work to build a network-transparent message passing interface as a Python module (I've looked into Pyro a bit.. it looks rather cumbersome and makes easy things too hard, correct me if I'm wrong). Also, modern languages need basic support for splitting up the workloads of map() or similar trivially parallelizable functions across multiple processors/cores (I know the Perl6 group was thinking about this.. not sure if this works in Parrot now or what). Basically, modern languages like Python/Perl/Ruby should really think more about making simple modules to mimic the message passing that Erlang has. Really, a little bit of code could go a long way. The Google team put together sawzall which looks kind of cool, on this note..

The problem with flash and great projects like gnash is that it will never be a full freely distributable implementation as long as we have draconian patent laws. Components such as flash video are patented. Likewise the silverlight won't be complete in a free distribution.

That's changing. The latest beta of the Flashplayer supports h.264 video with AAC audio in an mp4 container. Mozilla Tamarin is the VM introduced in Flashplayer 9 and targeted by everything ActionScript 3 (like Flash CS3 can and Flex 2 always does, as well as the to-be-Free Flex 3 SDK). It's much faster than the one in previous versions, so developers will use that one increasingly. For video content, publishers can choose between an open standard with free tools, or a proprietary expensive one, so what do you think will they do?
That's two major building blocks right there. The rest of the format is basically just tags that define, transform and place sprites. Gnash already does a good job at that. Some pieces in the Adobe Flashplayer's renderer are patented, but there are excellent libraries for that. Of course, the API would have to be implemented (the flash.* packages, mx.* builds on that and will be part of the Flex 3 SDK).
The SWF specification isn't the problem, there are some Free tools out there that already have very good support of SWF and related protocols. With the Flex 3 SDK, there will even be one from Adobe you can legally look at (IANAL).

You have to understand that Gnash tries to support existing content first. That is a big task, and I wish them well. But if you leave out legacy support and focus on what Adobe's current tools put out, it gets much easier. Grossly simplified, there's the VM, there are readers, renderers and codecs, add glue.

Find out all the things at take too many clicks

require editing text files

http://leaf.sf.net/ Bering uClibc. Although I'm thinking about porting the 2.6 kernel to it and seeing if that helps/hurts speeds.

http://flac.sf.net/

I started Project Dune in 2004 and rewrote a couple of things. It's Java + Hibernate + GWT at the moment. Timesheets are still in development, but the intention is to connect everything off the trouble tickets (issues) that you create in the system. http://www.sf.net/projects/pdune G>

And steal some decent fonts for Linux and make sure your favorite distro has 'em.

If you steal, your favorite distro won't include them or will remove them some day and you will be the one that violates the law.

Contribute to DejaVu project and add CJK symbols

Inserting such an object into someones brain I believe should only be done in extreme cases. I don't see why this can't be done with some embedded computing in a cap or hat with electrodes and a bio-feedback mechanism. Headphones with binaural beats and eyeglasses running alphawave patterns. Surely this neat device could prevent the need to insert a chip in many cases. Bio-feedback EEG is already being used for Epilepsy at www.adhd.com.au and there has been an open source eeg for years at http://openeeg.sf.net/ Quantative EEG (http://www.adhd.com.au/QEEG.htm) databases to give us the mean to write protocols for normalizing brain function.

Bayesian analysis (you could call it AI, so much as anything is AI)

• Messages classified: 100,895
• Classification errors: 272
• Accuracy: 99.73%

Let the user become the crawler- and do not eliminate the search giants (just don't rely on them completely). Already I sort of operate like a (slow) crawler with my queues of links to read, bookmarks (be weary- big load) and indexing those very interesting or important pages, sharing related tidbits, etc. Just feels like the natural extension, though I am sure that many people will want to stick with traditional GUIs and "back/forward" habits. There is also some interesting discussion in ATLAS-L re: future search infrastructures. So, in the spirit of promoting development in this area, linkage:

* Grub article (now defunct)- was distributed peer-to-peer crawler. (see also)
* Boitho, another distributed crawler
* YaCy- another peer-to-peer crawler
* How to build a web spider
* C++ web crawler lib
* LibWWW (perl)
* W3C's WebBot
* The Internet Archive's Heritrix crawler
* WebSPHINX- customizable crawler

Somehow, this is like an extension of surfraw. I imagine that soon enough we will start up an open source crawler-browsing hybrid software package, though have been surprised that nothing like it has popped up yet- it's (usually) the way of the programmer to make sure that he has the ability to do what the giants are doing. Maybe we have all been collectively blinded by graphical web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.) and "click-click-click" thinkware?

Using a different password for each site is the ultimate in security; however, without a password manager of some sort, it becomes too difficult to manage such a large list of passwords. Thankfully, OSS password managers such as Revelation and Figaro Password Manager exist! Personally, I use revelation; however, both are excellent pieces of software!

If you use Gnome, however, any Gnome program will access WebDAV for you without having to do anything particular, because of libgnome-vfs. Just browse to dav://somewhere.net/ in Nautilus (or davs:// for HTTPS). If your DAV server supports Content-Type properly, it'll open everything in the right program (if it doesn't support Content-Type, it may or may not open in the right program, but it doesn't necessarily get it wrong). I'd be surprised if KDE doesn't have something very much like it, but I don't know.

Btw., OSX has built in support for WebDAV without having to install anything. Just choose "connect to server" in Finder's menu and type in any DAV-compliant HTTP URL.

DAV client support in Windows sucks, though. I don't know -- surely Windows has to have some kind of VFS layer, so how comes Microsoft doesn't implement DAV using it instead of their current half-assed solution?

OpenOffice has DAV support for any platform, though.

If you don't trust adobe you could always install the open source Flash plugin swfdec. It's come on a lot recently and now plays most things. Hopefully the heavy pace of development will continue - I'm seeing about 5 commits per day adding new stuff on the mailing list.

ARSE?!? Time for me to start suing!

That experience isn't as easy to capture with PC games I may have played because ironically there's been less of an effort to preserve them. It's not hard to find MAME ROMs for every coin-op game ever made and even the old Apple, Commidore and Texas Instruments games (Parsec FTW!) are still available. But you're probably out of luck if you want to fire up an old Wing Commander, Inherit the Earth or Ultima game.

I seriously think that "Google Homepage" was much better.
What the hell does iGoogle even mean? I stopped using it the moment they changed the name, it bothered me that much. (the little i thingy is also why I have never bought anything from Apple that started with an i... I have a Mac Mini, though -- even though I despise the OS. Thank $genericReligiousOverlordHere for rEFIt)

I can, on the other hand, highly recommend Wicket, its what we used to build Thoof, and so-far its scaling very well indeed.

• is closed source software
• is widely deployed and tested on other platforms
• has a stable well documented API
• uses COM for communication
• has a large brand recognition and there will a demand for it
• calls analyzer plugins based on file extension
• has a limited, unexpandable list of categories for files
• identifies files by mtime + uri
• uses wchar_t internally
• is file based
• has a documented API for querying the search daemon ( I do not know which protocol )
• has no command-line tools

This means that just as the existing programs are starting to come to terms, Google comes and returns the chaos on the desktop search scene. While I like Google internet search, their desktop offering has me feeling eerie. I would prefer using Mono over Googles closed source program. But even better is the ultra-efficient Strigi which will be part of KDE4 and indexes streams instead of files.

There is an open source project to remake for newer platforms.

I believe that robots are here to help... to release people to do non-robotic tasks. For those worried about robots replacing humans here is an article that addresses those questions: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm If you want to contribute to this effort by coding open-source here are some links: http://miarn.sf.net/ and http://playerstage.sf.net./

I believe that robots are here to help... to release people to do non-robotic tasks. For those worried about robots replacing humans here is an article that addresses those questions: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm If you want to contribute to this effort by coding open-source here are some links: http://miarn.sf.net/ and http://playerstage.sf.net./

My master thesis finished this month is about component systems for mobile robotics and other domains, it's a called Experimental Robotics Framework (ERF), and is freely available at http://miarn.sf.net/. ERF makes it easy to setup experiments in robotics domains and even other domains by legoing (putting together) simple components to achieve lots of different experiments. It uses robotics sensors (+30) from Player/Stage/Gazebo and displays the experiments in 3d using opengl + fltk. Also it makes it trivial to interface with components via GUI (clicking in the world) or via text or speech ("robot go to"). The choice of foundation libraries makes it portable to any platform and the license is LGPL. Check-out the quality of the videos of ERF and those of Clarity... pretty much side by side no ?

As for the Clarity, it seems immature, i didn't even get it to install without modifying the provided configuration. Also it has that feeling of proprietary all over it. Just navigating the site is annoying with all those password pop-ups appearing. In ERF installation is with standard GNU autotools and rpms of more component kits are made available... total install commands needed: rpm.

BTW -- my application, Stylus Toolbox seems to be pretty accurate in reporting the % of ink, although it relies on information from the printer. Since I do tend to get a little extra ink in each cartridge (nowhere near the 20% suggested, maybe between 1 and 5%), I've thought about modifying the program to allow for a factoring of actual ink left. Unfortunately, once the printer decides there's no more ink left, there's nothing you can do short of refilling the cartridge, so I never saw the point.

Blatant plug: watch out for version 0.3.0, which adds a tray icon and corresponding popup menu. Coming soon.

...k-meleon

http://kmeleon.sf.net/

Now I wonder if they can/do tap into Skype... Fundamentally, this is akin to the DRM issue. Those that want to make calls and talk about anthrax will use modes of communication that aren't monitored and those who pay the penalty are Arab looking Indian dudes... *sigh*...

Skype is a closed network, with a secret protocol. Although the traffic is encrypted, there has been much speculation that backdoors may exist. Indeed, some have been found, although these are bugs and design flaws rather than law enforcement wiretaps. But there is no reason why official wiretaps could not be added at any time. As the source is not open for public review, and each client will execute digitally signed updates, your privacy could be compromised at any time without your knowledge. (Of course, this is also true of any update service that downloads binaries.)

Don't trust closed software with your secrets, whether commercial or personal. You can use a free software VOIP program like Wengo instead, and make it secure using an encrypted VPN (e.g. OpenVPN).

SC2k runs great in dosbox. and I've run the mac classic version under sheepshaver without any major trouble (enabling sound makes it dog slow).

MS Word the standard, but we had a site license for EndNote. Does LaTeX have a similar plugin or ability?

As another guy said, Bibtex is the Latex bibliography database. Although it is only a database file; I suggest JabRef as a really good reference database based on Bibtex, it can interact with Lyx, WinEDT and others (Too bad it does not interact with TecNixcenter).

porn behind a firewall? http://sf.net/projects/phproxy

*jedi hand wave* you didn't hear that from me

VMs exist because no one dared to a make a C++ like language that guarantees source-code level compatibility in all platforms and has garbage collection.

G3D http://g3d-cpp.sf.net/ is Open Source, provides pre-compiled binaries for Windows, OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD, and comes with support for ODE (physics), wxWidgets (GUI), FMod (sound). It has been used on commerical games and appeared in scientific (SIGGRAPH) papers. It supports importing from Blender through 3DS files and supports the latest shaders, with fallbacks for older cards that don't have them.

G3D is a "graphics" engine instead of a game engine because it provides the pieces you need to build your own engine in a few days. This gives you the flexibility to make something that isn't just another first-person shooter.

You didn't mention it in your post (I wonder why ?), but LiVES is intended to fill that gap. It's not quite there yet, but it's close (give it a few more months).

And lossless compression like flac makes even more sense.

Apparently (rumour alert), the newer Radeons are very similar, in terms of interface, to earlier ones. Porting the drivers over requires about a 100-line diff; most of the changes are register locations, the actual semantics are similar.