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Oberon-2 is a great language (though I'm not a fan of the Oberon OS) - it's low-level like C, but with safety, objects, and GC. It is, in my opinion, much better than Pascal or Modula (and I used to be a Pascal fan).

Anyway, quick links:
POW! - Oberon-2 IDE/Compiler for Windows.
OOC command-line compiler for Unix.
Oberon home page at ETH

Can't speak for Cobol, though. What school do you go to? I'm interested to know where they teach Oberon

-rob

Looks like a great system to implement the Chromium project on!

It's very sad that after 10 years, I can finally play the original Sam & Max: Hit the Road under Linux using an emulator that LucasArts doesn't approve of (ScummVM), yet now that they is releasing a new game and has the opportunity to support multiple platforms they're only offering it for Windows! *Sigh* I guess I'll just have to hope that someone at Icculus ports it, or WineX supports it...Does anybody know of a way to let LucasArts know that I'd like a Linux port?

Well, Microsoft copied theming with XP and the fruit company also has considerably more eyecandy than in the pre-X days which I'd argue is a result of the theming frenzy too.

What about grouping in the taskbar?

Not sure these are the innovations of the free software desktop but I only hear about how it's all just copying. Windows/MacOS still hasn't got virtual windows or as nearly as flexible toolbars to date.

What about Karamba or Slicker?

I've probably missed something since my XP use so far has been limited to about 5 minutes (and I'm quite proud of it ;)) and I'm not any more familiar with OS X either but I do know for a fact that KDE/GNOME aren't just copies of either.

there's Vigor, also, Bob

CLISP is a fairly well-established implementation but due to some reason I cannot fathom, the implementors choose not to be fully ANSI-compliant. You won't notice it at first, but if you get into advanced object-system hacking CLISP will become unsuitable. Also, it's a byte-code interpreter system. This severely affects performance (except in bignums, due to some numerical methods magic), but it does have a smaller memory footprint. And it's widely ported.

CMUCL does purport to be a complete ANSI-conforming implementation, and it has a high-performance native-code compiler. But it's not ported very much (some ports have gone unmaintained) and only to Unixy systems. The current maintainers are interested mostly in features and speed, whereas...

SBCL is a fork of CMUCL, with the goal of being more easily maintained, cleaner, and conforming. It's also more widely ported now, having resurrected some of the old CMUCL ports and added some new ones (someone is working on OS X now). SBCL has been adding features back that were dropped, sometimes improving, for example, kernel-threads recently (vs user-threads in CMUCL).

Lately they've been driving the development of each other, since many patches can be cross-ported easily. This is all the better for the users :-).

I use CMUCL for most of my work, which involves database-driven web-app development, and it works fine. Though I am thinking about switching to SBCL soon, with nice features like kernel-threads coming around. Well, presumably I would be able to use either. I use libraries like AllegroServe (HTTP server), UncommonSQL (RDBMS OO interface), and IMHO (web apps w/Apache).

Neither work on Windows (yet) so there you would need to look into Allegro, LispWorks, or Corman Lisp (which I forgot to list in the previous post). All these are native compilers that can produce Windows applications. There are no free compilers for Windows which produce native code, afaik. You can investigate GCL or ECLS, which compile to C and may work under mingw. The commercial compilers all have GUI toolkits or bindings to the Windows API. Allegro is probably out of your price range, LispWorks is ~$900 and Corman is ~$150. All have free personal editions to play with.

Why do I say Scheme isn't as practical? Well, most Scheme implementations aren't anywhere near the same quality as the CL ones (with a few notable exceptions) and they all have to implement incompatible supersets of the language (because R5RS defines approximately nothing). Personally I think the design of Scheme itself works against practical usage and implementation, but there are those who disagree. In universities they teach Scheme, but as I was saying, as an academic exercise and not something to be used in industry. Which is a real shame.

Anyway, if you want a learning environment, I recommend the LispWorks personal edition IDE (Linux, Windows, Unix, and soon OS X). This will get you started with a minimum of fuss. Later on, you can setup Emacs with the ILISP package and interface with your CL implementation; this is a popular way. Or you may find some other IDE. The minimum needed really is parenthesis-matching and auto-indentation. After that you might like interactive features such as shortcuts to compile code-fragments, documentation at a keystroke, easy access to a Lisp listener, inspector, debugger, etc.

There are many books, such as Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp, Peter Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming, online tutorial Successful Lisp, and sites such as CLiki with lots of pointers to resources.

CMUCL
SBCL
LispWorks
Corman Lisp

First off, his name is Clippy. Clippy is the DEVIL.

Second off, of course we have an answer to that. We've combined our most evil text editor (vi) with an annoying assistant... BEHOLD! VIGOR!

Yeah, it's evil. Yes. Evil. /me cries in the corner.

Hopefully GoboLinux and LinuxStep will join the the MHS standard so that this kind of improvement can start to spread to other distros.

http://mhs.sf.net

The goal of the MHS project is to define a Modern Hierarchy Standard for UNIX-like operating systems which will further enable them to evolve, innovate, grow, and compete with Windows and other modern OSes.
Specifically, MHS technology will provide the following benefits:
100% Application Directory Oriented
Internationalization of Directory Names
More Intuitive Directory Names
Fewer Root Directories
Support for Case-Insensitive File Systems
Full Coexistence with Legacy FHS
Increased System Flexibility
A new hierarchy will be a big enough change to make distributions switch to application directories.
Set of environmental variables pointing the location of major system directories.
Applications would no longer need to hard code directory names.
System level directories grouped together under a common directory. (/System)

Currently, the directories are expected to be moved to the following locations: /bin => /System/Commands /sbin => /System/Commands /boot => /System/Boot /dev => /System/Devices /etc => /System/Config /lib => /System/Libraries /proc => /System/Process /mnt => /Mount /opt => /Apps /tmp => /Temp /home => /Users /usr/bin => /System/Executables /usr => mostly placed under /System /var => mostly placed under /System

All paths will be lower-case on a case-sensitive file system. As shown otherwise.

Application developers and distribution makers will need to use the /Apps directory rather than cramming everything into /usr.

The autoconf family of tools will be patched to support the new hierarchy which will make most applications translate easily.

Although it can still be done, MHS will not support the same level of shareability (i.e. mounted over a network) as the legacy FHS standard.

FHS can be emulated via symlinks and MHS can be emulated on existing FHS systems. A kernel/file system hack of some kind may be done to have the legacy directories disappear in directory scans, to help improve user friendliness.

In addition to the standard, the project is developing a set of scripts that will setup the new hierarchy on existing FHS compatible systems.

The standard will not be finalized until a Linux distribution ships based upon it.

my favorite language (extension) for the vm has always been pizza. It gives you said generics, but also

• first-class functions and
• algebraic types (think functional pattern matching)

But to be honest: this seems to be a real great step for java. programmer with a certain need for aesthetics (and self regard) can now really use this language...

Is that all that's required? I tried replacing getopt include with unistd, among other things to try to get http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/id3v2/id3v2-0.1 .9.tar.gz to compile on OS X, and it still didn't. I don't have a Mac, this was on a friend's machine, so I don't have the error.

BTW, in order to get id3lib to compile (which id3v2 above depends on) I had to use these flags:

./configure CXX=g++2

Is that all that's required? I tried replacing getopt include with unistd, among other things to try to get http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/id3v2/id3v2-0.1 .9.tar.gz to compile on OS X, and it still didn't. I don't have a Mac, this was on a friend's machine, so I don't have the error.

BTW, in order to get id3lib to compile (which id3v2 above depends on) I had to use these flags:

./configure CXX=g++2

Well, if your a unix head, using a mac, and have been under a rock for a long time, here ya go


http://www.osxgnu.org/ Go here for packages to install.

http://fink.sf.net Wow, apt-get for os x

http://finkcommander.sf.net Wow, a gui for fink

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/x11for macosx.html An x11 server that uses quartz extreme (or whatever you want to call it)


There are many other things to use, too

Well, if your a unix head, using a mac, and have been under a rock for a long time, here ya go


http://www.osxgnu.org/ Go here for packages to install.

http://fink.sf.net Wow, apt-get for os x

http://finkcommander.sf.net Wow, a gui for fink

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/x11for macosx.html An x11 server that uses quartz extreme (or whatever you want to call it)


There are many other things to use, too

I have to firmly agree that the web of trust has been a failed experiment. For SSL, it only helps reinforce a top-down hierarchy. For PGP, the web of trust has really failed because it's used so little; it's usually so little work to verify that a certain key belongs to a certain UID, without relying on the trust network. This is sort of why I developed keystory, which looks at the signatures used in a mailing list archive, and gives a simple report of which keys a From address has used.

• 2x Athlon MP 2k+ (on Tyan Tiger MB)
• GeForce 2 with tv out (and 2 other vid cards)
• ATI TV Wonder
• ZapWay IR Receiver
• Sony el-cheapo multi function universal remote control
• Herman Miller Aeron
• Datahand chair mounted split keyboard
• SBLive 5.1
• MSB-Tech Link II DAC
• Good home stereo powering a set of Magnepan MGIIa's (quasi-planar speaker)
• and soon: a SXGA LCD Projector (NEC MT1030+)

• gentoo GNU/Linux
• ALSA audio drivers
• lirc
• mplayer
• xmms
• mldonkey, video store, cable for media acquisition

I hope to eventually suspend a THX acoustically transparant screen across the magnaplanars and use a LCD projector for a 6' x 5' HD image.

Overall the experience has been quite good, tho having it all setup on a workstation requires much maintenance to keep all the apps communicating... a dedicated shuttle box to feed the projector/DAC would be a little nicer, tho I'd still want a central media server. Wireless is not needed here, as the few cables (spdif/video/etc) pose only a problem to the vacuum cleaner. Of course, the setup costs as much as a nice used car (which I don't own) and I find myself dreaming of 6'x5' trees rendered in imax style 3d (cow's can fly in caves, but require awkward polarized glass or expensive eye surgery for 3d flight experience).

Andy
http://benow.ca

I think it needs more than that. Where my perspective is coming from, though, is getting work done within the confines of the current software industry.

Has this actually occurred in practice? I have yet to see it.

I've seen it in some systems, and I try to develop systems like that. However, it doesn't happen automatically, by any means. A big aspect is being sensible about choice of tools. E.g., the obvious one that most people know: avoid EJBs.

Similarly, most (insert API name) users are seriously tied to their (insert API name).

Yes, but there's a difference. If you imagine an ideal system, it would involve an application written in code which relies on an abstraction boundary that's very close to the needs of the application. Put simply, SQL does not provide such an abstraction - too low-level - whereas writing code that uses objects that are transparently persisted, can.

But using an object persistence mechanism, your code is going to be dependent on that mechanism, as you say. Given that, it's important to make sure that the API you depend on is at least to some extent, under your control. One way to do that is by using an open source framework. Yes, your code will become dependent on that framework, but you have more control over the code you're dependent on, and you won't be writing large amounts of code in a poorly-designed proprietary language over which you have no control whatsoever.

But they add literally millions of lines of code that is opaque to its users, tens of thousands of nuances, and hundreds of new things to learn. How can this be called progress, when complexity is actually going up rather than down?

That's where choice of tools comes in. Avoid overly complex systems, and use open source frameworks. Two systems that I've been working with are Resin (as the application server) and Hibernate, for transparent persistence. The codebases of both don't add up to a million lines, and both are well-conceived and well-written. Code doesn't have to be dependent on Resin unless you particularly want it to, because it's a standards-compliant Java application server - a commodity item, essentially. Code will certainly become dependent on a tool like Hibernate, though. So let's examine that.

Before I began using Hibernate, I worked on and used a number of home-grown persistence frameworks (developed by clients of mine, in some cases with my assistance) of varying degrees of sophistication. Why do companies develop such frameworks, since they're only going to suffer from the issues you mention, of complexity etc? The answer is that the need arises from the kind of code you end up writing without them - for example, you get repetition, which creates maintenance problems, and you want to factor that repetition out. So it's pretty natural for even many naive projects to end up with something that qualifies as a persistence framework, even if only an unsophisticated, simple one. These libraries tend to make life easier for the projects that rely on them, but they tended to be one-off efforts which had many shortcomings.

For companies using such frameworks, switching to a comprehensive open source solution is a no-brainer - it provides better functionality all around, has a larger developer base, and the source is still available for customization, tuning etc. if neccessary.

In this area, a big reason the problems you're concerned about exist is because we rely on databases which impose severe restrictions on the kind of code that can be run "within" the database, but running "outside" the database entails a huge semantic gap between the client language and the database. Middleware such as persistence mechanisms are a fix designed to bridge this gap. Do they add to total complexity? Sure. But they also reduce complexity in some important areas.

Besides, what's th

..

What's with the missing Post Anonymously checkbox???

I wonder if they're using Active Spam Killer:

http://a-s-k.sf.net/

You can control the lights at a party with a setup like this (yes, I've done it with relays) with this cool Open Source XMMS plugin: Palace. I'm working on a circuit that uses a 1-in-16 demux and 16 74ls373's on the 4 control pins to run 128 LED's (though I haven't had much time to spend on it).

Disclaimer: I wrote Palace. It used to be based on XPLSISNJASP (can't reach its project page anymore), but most or all of that old code has been ripped out and/or rewritten.

Paul Davis does this about once every six months... Consider his other dead-end project, Quasimodo, and things don't look too good.

Please don't take this troll into account. Ardour has been under development for around 3 years now. The story with Quasimodo is that the CSound community created a "standard" way to do most of what Quasimodo aimed at, so he abandoned the project. jack and ardour, however, are here to stay; not only thanks to Paul's hard work, but also because they have gained enough "critical mass" with the community.

Take a look at Project Colle.

I don't have any direct experience with JDO but it sounds similar. Project Colle (Colle-SQL) focuses on building, loading, indexing and accessing databases from an XML scheme.

Paul Davis does this about once every six months... Consider his other dead-end project, Quasimodo, and things don't look too good.

Ardour is just a sandbox for the Linux Audio Developer folks. The only chance Linux will get a usable/installable multi-track digital audio application (*with* MIDI sequencing) is if a commercial company becomes interested.

libavcodec is actually just as good as divx5, and certainly better than xvid. While it's true that it produces stuff that's compatible with divx decoders (theoretically all MPEG4s should be compatible with each other, but that's only the theory), it is certainly not subsumed by divx5. It also has many of the codec features of divx5 pro - e.g. B-frames, Trellis quantizer (which improves quality / reduces bitrate big time(tm))

Well, first, I apologize. I was in a very bad mood this morning. I was doing a little wifi-age this morning on my Z, and randomly I get a blank screen. Take out the card, and it goes back to normal. Somewhat normal. So I reboot. And all of my shit is gone. I have a backup, but from a week ago. This Zaurus- and from my talkingson in #zaurus and on the web, it sounds like the Zaurus is riddled with problems. It sucks. So much potential, but it just bums me out that it sucks so hard. I guess I'm still adjusting to the fact that I have to reset my Linux-based Zaurus at least twice as much as I've had to reset any WinCE- or NewtonOS-based PDA I've ever owned. :(

If it weren't for the fact that the 5x00 has a 100 MHz bus (!) and therefore runs my own OS/OE Dynapad faster, I would've eBayed this sucker and go back to using my Newton or maybe even the Dell Axim that I won. Maybe it was a sign...

That's what I did, sort of. I used Qt/Kde with the KHTMLPart to parse through the web interface for Ameritrade and get the quote information. I haven't worked on it for a while, but I got basic log-in/quote retrieval/buy/sell done, but there's no UI yet, it's currently being called via perl scripts to throw the data into a MySQL database for further analysis so I can tweak my strategy. It actually didn't take very long to write the KHTMLPart app to do the basics, only about a week or so, working an hour or two a day, and more on weekends. You can try using the embedded Mozilla to do it, but I found the KHTMLPart to be easier to work with.

Maybe if I get a decent UI (I would need some requirements/specs from a real trader though), I may start up a SourceForge project. A search on sf.net for stock trading yielded quite a few results, so maybe you could look there?

For someone who used to work for a digital music company, you seem surprisingly uninformed about how this product actually works.

The files that Apple is offering are bog-standard MPEG-4 Audio files. You can burn them to CD and play them on any machine which speaks the AAC codec. No, AAC is not yet as widely supported as MP3, but it's getting there: there are free-as-in-free implementations available. Winamp and XMMS will already both play AAC/MP4 files.

No, not too many DVD players will play them, but that has nothing to do with any DRM "padlock", it's just that not many players bundle the codec yet. Given the intense interest that every hardware manufacturer has evidenced in MPEG-4, that can safely be expected to change sooner rather than later.

Likewise, the files will play on any portable player that supports AAC decoding. That's not just the iPod and yes, you can get all-solid-stateplayers that support it. Today.

Would it have killed you to research this a little bit, rather than spouting a barely-concealed advertisement for your former employer's service?

My music server is a Linux box, though; I cannot use it to play DRM-encumbered music, because Apple has not chosen to make Linux software available for their protection scheme.

AAC isn't a DRM system -- it's just a fairly modern music encoding. Mplayer groks it. Use FAAC with it as per the mplayer codecs docs.

Frankly, I wish people would stop getting upset about folks not using mp3 (aside from those who spent a ton of money on those little low fidelity hardware players -- and even those folks knew that MP3 would be obsolete at some point). MP3 isn't bad, but neither is it up to snuff with AAC and ogg.

As for those who want losslessly compressed music...hell, we can't even convince people to give up lossy JPEG in favor of PNG and lossless JPEG. Music files are much larger -- it'll be years after lossy JPEG goes away that we move away from lossy sound compression.

Everyone here on slashdot either has an iPod or wants one. Yeah, even if it doesn't run Linux.

Oh, but it does.

(Incidentally, I think iPod Linux is about the dumbest thing I've ever seen. "We can play MP3s at 99% realtime and Oggs at 80% realtime! Whee! This is so much better than using it as just a music player like it was originally intended!")

There were a number of programs that came out which allowed you to use special formatting of 3.5 inch floppies to fit 1.7-2.2 Megabytes on them

Yeah, like

user@host# fdformat /dev/fd0u1920

Although the most I've ever used was a 1680k-formatted disk for LEAF

Thanks, I really appreciate the freenet link... When freenet works, it's SO much better. downloading now, hopefully it'll find the blocks too. :P

Also an edonkey link here.

Not my share, so no guarantees.

For *nix, there's at least Lmule and Mldonkey to get a hold of it.

Try Privoxy.

I can recommend them too :) For £15 / $26 per month we do a Linux Virtual Machine package based on User-mode Linux: you get 7.5GB bandwidth, 64MB of RAM for your machine and 3GB disc space for you to do what you want with. You get root access to your machine, out-of-band access to do your own reboots, machine reinstalls, bandwidth monitoring and setting up of watchdog services which can send messages to your mobile phone if something goes wrong with your server. We're also one of very few (the only?) ISP which gives back explicitly to the Free Software community: we give donations to Debian for every sign-up from a Debian-branded link to our site, and offer a 10% discount on our already low prices to contributors to Free Software.

Any questions, feel free to ask here or privately :)

If You want that, try Mnet (http://mnet.sourceforge.net/).

* Distributed files over several nodes
* Each block is encrypted on disk.
* Transfers between nodes are encrypted
* Swarm downloads
* Works on several platforms
* Freenet-like anonymity
* Open source (LGPL license)

New version will include bittorrent-like URI's to just paste into Your browser, but for now You have to use a web or python GUI.
FEC (Error correction) is also being worked on for the new version.

Do read some more about it on their webpage as I think it's a really interesting project.

No, I don't work for them. I just like the idea.

.haeger

A while back, I used to work on the linux port of a 2d game engine/ide called Sphere. It's GPL, and has a whole crapload of features. It was originally intended for an RPG, but the engine is quite open-ended. (Someone wrote a 3D demo in it, I've done some mockup sidescrolling engines in it, etc.) There are also others in a similar vein like VERGE and Ika. Ika recently got a linux port.

Spaghetti code can work better. Just look at the more successful Corewars programs, especially the evolved ones - they go and modify their code in mid-run, the result being much greater efficiency (and it's more compact, to protect against attacks (or mutations)).

Check it out

We're starting up a company called pdxcolo.net, which will provide true virtual machine hosting in the form of User-mode Linux. We're currently building up our infrastructure, and are currently seeking beta testers.

For $20/mo (post-beta), you'll get:

• Roughly 64MHz worth of an Athlon XP (peaking to a full 2x00+ proc if no one else is using it that instant)
• 64MB of RAM
• 2GB of disk space (OS is not counted against that)
• 10GB of transfer per month
• Install anything you want, you have true root on the box
• Choice of Debain stable, testing, or unstable, soon RedHat 9.0, Gentoo and others

Beta testers (of which there will be a limited number) will get the first two months of service at half price, or in effect the initial 1-month beta period for free. If you're interested, email beta@pdxcolo.net and we'll take the first N (probably 30) people.

If you don't get in on the beta, we'll send you email when we go live and give you first crack at new hardware as we install it. You'll get your machine fully activated and ready for you to log into and configure usually within 30 seconds, and you can install whatever you need to from our local distribution mirrors.

Will people please stop talking about Ogg as though it were an audio compression scheme. It is not - it is a wrapper format.

I don't care what kind of tests were done, but anything comparing Ogg to a lossy compression scheme is bound to be unfair, as the Ogg family includes a lossless encoding scheme. Not only does Ogg include FLAC and Vorbis, but it also includes Speex, targetted at voice, and Theora, a video codec.

So please, stop trying to compare Ogg to MP3. It's like comparing AVI or Quicktime to MP3.

So if someone wants to have say, a video blog, they shouldn't have to pay for the zillions of megabytes in bandwith

What?!? Of course they should. If someone wants to have a video blog they sure as hell are going to have to host it somehow. bandwidth doesn't grow on cat5 trees.

slashdotters obviously have no clue how bittorrent works and the actual details about what bandwidth it can actually partially recover. so i'll explain something to all of your deaf ears and eyes:

it is only going to be useful when the bandwidth load on the server is high due to sudden large instant demand (ie: slashdotting) for large objects (cd images, large distributions, hi-hi-red images, videos, etc). at that point many of the peers downloading will help save bandwidth by serving the portion they have already downloaded to others. but after the initial rush is off, not many seeds will be left as most people have downloaded it and bittorrent has been closed or exited on its own (nor should there be any) as the server has plenty of bandwidth to satisfy requests itself at that point. that's the servers job. to be the reliable source of content. bittorrent just helps lower the peaks during high load (peaks over short periods of time are often what server-colo sites charge for).

quit trying to use bittorrent as your sole hosting solution so that you never have to use any bandwidth. that's what MNet is for (distributed storage and hosting) or possibly freenet.

netBSD port status

netBSD port status

Answer to 2 specific questions:

• [quote]Is it a joint project by FreeBSD and Debian teams?[/quote]

  I do not know exactly, ... but it looks like soley by Debian Developer developing user land software using only netBSD kernel.

• [quote]The Debian is basing their efforts on the already established ports of various applications on *BSD. eg. see the following from Debian's NetBSD based distribuition's information pages.[/quote]

  I do not think this is true.

  From Why Debian GNU/NetBSD?:

  Why Debian GNU/NetBSD?

  • NetBSD runs on hardware unsupported by Linux. Porting Debian to the NetBSD kernel increases the number of platforms that can run a Debian-based operating system.
  • The Debian GNU/Hurd project demonstrates that Debian is not tied to one specific kernel. However, the Hurd kernel is still relatively immature - a Debian GNU/NetBSD system would be usable at a production level.
  • Lessons learned from the porting of Debian to NetBSD can be used in porting Debian to other kernels (such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD).
  • In contrast to projects like Fink or Debian GNU/w32, Debian GNU/NetBSD does not exist in order to provide extra software or a Unix-style environment to an existing OS (the *BSD ports trees are already comprehensive, and they unarguably provide a Unix-style environment). Instead, a user or administrator used to a more traditional Debian system should feel comfortable with a Debian GNU/NetBSD system immediately and competent in a relatively short period of time.
  • Not everybody likes the *BSD ports tree or the *BSD userland (this is a personal preference thing, rather than any sort of comment on quality). Linux distributions have been produced which provide *BSD style ports or a *BSD style userland for those who like the BSD user environment but also wish to use the Linux kernel - Debian GNU/NetBSD is the logical reverse of this, allowing people who like the GNU userland or a Linux-style packaging system to use the NetBSD kernel.
  • Because we can.

netBSD port status

netBSD port status

Answer to 2 specific questions:

• [quote]Is it a joint project by FreeBSD and Debian teams?[/quote]

  I do not know exactly, ... but it looks like soley by Debian Developer developing user land software using only netBSD kernel.

• [quote]The Debian is basing their efforts on the already established ports of various applications on *BSD. eg. see the following from Debian's NetBSD based distribuition's information pages.[/quote]

  I do not think this is true.

  From Why Debian GNU/NetBSD?:

  Why Debian GNU/NetBSD?

  • NetBSD runs on hardware unsupported by Linux. Porting Debian to the NetBSD kernel increases the number of platforms that can run a Debian-based operating system.
  • The Debian GNU/Hurd project demonstrates that Debian is not tied to one specific kernel. However, the Hurd kernel is still relatively immature - a Debian GNU/NetBSD system would be usable at a production level.
  • Lessons learned from the porting of Debian to NetBSD can be used in porting Debian to other kernels (such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD).
  • In contrast to projects like Fink or Debian GNU/w32, Debian GNU/NetBSD does not exist in order to provide extra software or a Unix-style environment to an existing OS (the *BSD ports trees are already comprehensive, and they unarguably provide a Unix-style environment). Instead, a user or administrator used to a more traditional Debian system should feel comfortable with a Debian GNU/NetBSD system immediately and competent in a relatively short period of time.
  • Not everybody likes the *BSD ports tree or the *BSD userland (this is a personal preference thing, rather than any sort of comment on quality). Linux distributions have been produced which provide *BSD style ports or a *BSD style userland for those who like the BSD user environment but also wish to use the Linux kernel - Debian GNU/NetBSD is the logical reverse of this, allowing people who like the GNU userland or a Linux-style packaging system to use the NetBSD kernel.
  • Because we can.

OpenBSD hasn't even moved to ELF format binaries yet. This means that development on binutils tools (such as ld, etc) has stalled - and as a result, certain applications (eg, avifile) simply won't compile under it.

I like that OpenBSD in that it has been ported to more platforms than FreeBSD, but the years-old binutils is incredibly annoying.

Excellent, a platform to power a robotic Vigor and take over the world! Bwahahaha!

Back in Feb, I tried installing a new RH8 box and tried using its Apache2, and tried installing a newer version. Things seemed to work "OK", but it seemed slower and PHP integration was not quite working. We use Gallery and it only worked about half the time. We reverted to 1.3.x and everything has been fine.

FYI, there is the OpenFT protocol supported by giFT It is completely decentralized, has meta-information, last time I was on it had consistently between 400 and 500 users.

It runs on Linux, windows, and probably most other *nix platforms.

Ian

New email registries will decrease spam? Set up by online marketers? No, sorry, I don't buy that at all. Remember what their interests are. The problem at hand is... most spammers don't care about creating inconveniences. They are like greedy undisciplined children, and won't stop spamming unless they are forced to (by law, vigilante retaliation, etc.)

To say something constructive now. There are two neat server side spam filtering projects I really like because neither uses IP-based blacklists (blacklists can bring a lot of collateral damage and require frequent judgement calls).

Spamprobe can be run from .procmailrc and uses a Bayesian scoring type of approach. It's a user-level solution which requires some training, but once it's accurate it's quite amazing. Currently it's missing only 3% of my incoming spam.

The Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse also runs server side and uses fuzzy checksums to identify mail that is being received by a suspiciously large number of mail hosts around the world. A brilliant idea which works better than you may think. I have never seen a false positive with this system, and it misses about 1/4 of incoming spam. Effectiveness will improve as more hosts join the distributed checksum system!

Or save yourself the trouble and install mplayerplug-in.

The trouble you're having syncing recurring events to your T68i doesn't really have anything to do with Bluetooth - it's simply because the T68i's calender doesn't support them. Using Multisync to sync your phone with Evolution shows up the same problem, regardless of whether you're using Bluetooth, IrDA or a cable to link your phone to your PC. Multisync can nicely create a bunch of individual appointments for each recurring event in order to fake the recurrance - I'm surprised iSync or whatever you're using on the Mac can't do this.

Hopefully newer generations of phones will have more complete calendars - at the moment, i'm fairly content with the partial support for recurrance on my Siemens S55. However, until the phones get there, there's not much point shootiing the messenger :)

Well, you need interest in a project as well. I had a scratch to be itched, but the union of the set "people who code" and "people who skydive" is very small. For some reason people aren't as interested in my project. I have #2, am lacking #1 and #3 for lack of interest from people also interested in the same. So I think that your theory about being able to find #1 and create #3 doesn't always work. :-)

Cheers,

Costyn.

DARPA is funding plenty of open source development - like PMD. Props to DARPA for the help!

Yours,

tom