Slashdot Mirror

It's very easy to install - the installer is to a lot of people the easiest to use (myself included).

I think most of the people who use or want to use Slackware is for the challenge - for the most part you generally have to edit config files yourself to administer it, or upgrade stuff. Compiling new packages yourself is done more often than using the package management system - it isn't anything like apt-get or rpm (though rpm is available and I've noticed quite a few package management tools around).

For me, it's what I've used since around 96/97 (and the red Infomagic distribution), and I'm comfortable with it :)

I have to toot on my own trumpet.

Check out kbugs.org. These are the smatch results from testing the 2.5.65 kernel. We found 1400 possible bugs in the 2.5.65 kernel but probably over half of those are false positives.

Smatch is an open source checker that finds similar sorts of problems to the Reasoning software. For example, both look for dereference bugs.

The bad news is that smatch is still in the pre-alpha stages and it only works on C for now. And also the kbugs.org site is crappy.

The cool thing about smatch is that you can write checks which are custom to your code. Mostly it is used for the kernel, but Michael Stefaniuc has used it for Wine specific bugs as well.

Both KGI and GGI are alive and kicking at the moment. KGI, the Kernel Graphics Interface is almost rewritten from scratch, and GGI the user level library is developping very well.

Please click the links for more info.

Just to go with my personal pet peeve, I have yet to ever encounter a good reason for an average OSX user to enable the root account, nevermind log in and noodle around as root. Not when sudo is available. And yet a large fraction of the tips given go something like:

1. turn on the root account, if you haven't already
2. log out and log back in again as root
3. run this command: $foo
4. log back in as yourself

1. run this command: sudo $foo

That common example comes up all the time, but you also see things like Perl code that doesn't do what it's supposed to, over-elaborate ways to get some Unix thing installed when you can gloss over most of that with Fink, etc.

I've still got the site bookmarked, and I visit it occasionally, but I've come to so distrust the quality of the advice given that I barely ever visit it anymore. There's still a lot of great stuff there, don't get me wrong, ut be sure to scrutinize what you read: there's often a better way to do things than what is suggested.

Picture a world where the global internet is the bottleneck.
Where file trading and network game playing at 50 Megabits both ways within your city is typical.
Picture a time when everyone with a computer has a small low power box on their roof to connect to this totally free network.
It's here, it's only 2 to 4 Mbps right now, but what the heck, you like new toys don't you?
It's called the Wireless Mesh. You can connect today!
MeshNet Project
Think locally and global data will find it's way to you.

Oops, messed up there... meant to include Crystal Space too.

Why pay for a 3d engine when you can get them for free?

I was recently trying to get M.U.L.E. to work on my Atari emulator

M.U.L.E. works without any problems on Atari800.

....here's a document:
<foo>
<bar>
baz
</bar>
</foo>

Here's the XPath expression to get all "bar" nodes:

/foo/bar

Nice and concise.

Over on the PMD project we're replacing many of our Java rules (find empty catch blocks, empty if statements, etc) with XPath expressions. For example, here's the XPath expression that finds empty if statements:

//IfStatement/Statement/Block[count(*) = 0]

Sweet, eh? Props to Dan Sheppard who came up with this excellent technique.

Tom

The most up to date version of the Java FEC library can be found here.

Sorry. Link was wrong. Try this.

I managed to get XML handling working fine using libxml++ for my project. It was easy, quick and painless, and that was with using source code examples aswell!

For it to have been any easier, it would have most likely required magic!

I was planning on making kits for this available if there's interest, but that's on hold until I finish a new design (thousands of LEDs, true color, USB).

There is hardware info, source code, and photos at the project web page.

"So how can Ogg Vorbis be supporting piracy, if none of the pirates are using Ogg Vorbis?"

Yeah. No piracy using Ogg Vorbis anywhere. Uh-huh.

Time for you to go and play with giFT, methinks. It's where mp3 is the minority.

Unhappy to see this, I guess.

That's why there are several different groups around dedicated to reverse engineering old games and rewriting them so people can actually -play- them... and usually on a stupid number of platforms, from PCs to Consoles and PDAs.

Not to mention places like VOGONs (Very Old Games On New Systems) which itself exists just to help people find ways to run said older games on newer OS's (mostly w2k mind you).

I just wish more companies would support efforts like this and release some source to older games OTHER than FPSes. I really appretiate the release of source from ID and everyone else, it's great learning material. But it would be nice if other genre developers also were intrested in preserving their 'art'.

ScummVM, my project, recently obtained the Beneath a Steel Sky source-code from the authors and we're now working off support for that. The difference in this case is that the engine -is- almost pure x86 assembly, so it would be rather a waste of time to GPL... for anything useful to be done, it would need to be mostly reverse engineered anyway. So this just makes it easier for us to do so dirty-room with commented assembly. Releasing it to a small dedicated group may be more appropriate in cases like this, to prevent splintering and stagnation, until the reimplementation is truely started.

Anyway.

- Ender
Boss Monkey: ScummVM
Founder: QuakeSrc

Standard Disclaimer: It's 8:45am, I havn't had any coffee yet. Any spelling or grammatical errors are henceforth claimed as artistic license. It's art, damn it!

when I rip my CDs to a lossless format, I'm using LAME --alt-preset standard MP3s...

I believe you meant to say lossy. A lossless format would be one such as APE from Monkey's audio, or FLAC. After decoding them you get the exact original back, right to the last bit.

But I'm sure you already knew that :-D

I've found running TikiWiki to be fantastic. Running under the usual LAMP system, it does much more than the atypical wiki; forums, trackers, faq's, dynamic content, image and file galleries, etc etc etc.

I've been using it for building a knowledge base, and all the extras have just been the icing on the cake. Two thumbs up.

in-depth technical presentations and demonstrations of many cutting edge Linux audio and MIDI applications.

(The domains are only shown in-line when they're part of the comments, not stories).

• With a high resolution display, you can barely see the pixel or two gap between the underscores. It just looks like one big long link.
• To find out what each link is for I need to mouse-over each one individually. But Slashdot doesn't even make of the TITLE attribute of A tags, so I need to look at some cryptic URL in the status bar to figure out where it will take me!
• The Related Links section is automatically generated from the links within a submission. But it's now rendered useless since it contains link titles such as 'many' and 'cutting'.

in-depth technical presentations and demonstrations of many cutting edge Linux audio and MIDI applications.

(The domains are only shown in-line when they're part of the comments, not stories).

• With a high resolution display, you can barely see the pixel or two gap between the underscores. It just looks like one big long link.
• To find out what each link is for I need to mouse-over each one individually. But Slashdot doesn't even make of the TITLE attribute of A tags, so I need to look at some cryptic URL in the status bar to figure out where it will take me!
• The Related Links section is automatically generated from the links within a submission. But it's now rendered useless since it contains link titles such as 'many' and 'cutting'.

The Sun JDK 1.3.1_07 for GNU/Linux/x86
runs fairly well on my OpenBSD boxen.

I use it only for the freenet
project, though as a high-volume server.
It's quite CPU and disc intensive.

When this FreeBSD-native port of Java hits stable and Freenet goes from 0.5.1-RC1 --> 0.5.1 I'm putting a node back on my FreeBSD box.

Think it's just for child porn and terrorists? Make it useful. Host your free software project on Freenet, tell the world about your hobby.

If you think having a node will use all availible bandwith, there are throttle options in the config file (but don't use them please unless you really need to :). Dedicate what space you have free for the benefit of the network.

Think it's slow? Encourage others to set up their own nodes.

It's 1st ammendment freedom of speech - don't let it dissapear! Read more at Kuro5hin.org

Well, I am the lead developer for a p2p program called Myster. Myster is a 1.1 compatable Java program. From my experience I'm not too surprised there are not more java based apps out there. here's why:

1 - The phrase "write once test everywhere" still applies to Java. Even if you are very competent and write your java app carefully you still need to test it on all platforms you intend to deploy your app on because there are many small differences. These small differences are created by platform specific bugs, VM version specific bugs and all the differences between different OSes and what users expect. So many bugs between versions..

2 - If you write an app on the mac, it will look odd on windows and vice versa. Windows and mac apps behave differently, they have different UI standards.. I mean even aqua and MacOS 9 have huge differences. In MacOS X, the preferences menu item is in a system menu. On eveyr other platform on earth it goes under the edit menu. On Windows all windows have their own menu bar, on mac systems the menu bar is global per program.

3 - You never have enough control over the rest of the system. Sure you can do most common UI tricks but if you want to access resource forks or the like, you need platform specific code.

4 - Deployment on windows really sucks.
-The java VM does not come pre-installed.. well, actually there is a java VM pre-installed but it's 1.1 only, and crap.
-There is no standard way of making a double clickable .exe java program (Or giving it an icon!)

All these things make it very difficult to make a professional looking / acting application. I think Myster is about as close as anyone has come to making a java app that looks like it's a native macOS X application... and it still bugs me that it's not perfect..

SPEED IN JAVA

First off, java is not slow because it is not native. Java is compiled from byte code to machine native code before it is run via a mechanism called the just in time compiler. in tests this JIT can get code to within a few % of of C/C++ code!

Java is not slow because of the garbage collector. Recently the garbage collector has gotten much better. It's now only a tiny fraction the a problem it once was.

Java is slow because

1) Swing is pretty damn slow (widgets do their own java based drawing) (usually awt is faster)
2) Java encourages a style of programming that is not conducive to speed.

On macOS X java is slow because many of the components do their own drawing and the type of drawing they do is hard to speed up *in Aqua/Quartz*. Also aqua is just slower than any other platform to begin with which means many programs don't bother to optimise many of their routines which work fine until thye are run on MacOS X. from what i've heard the java team is working on these problems. It's from their work that we now have quartz extreme so more power to them!

oddly enough Myster is more popular on the mac than the PC!.. Also it's extremely popular in japan thanks to its use of UTF strings. (all the ??? you see in myster are japaneese characters.)

As for beta testing Myster.. Sure, tester are good.. Coders are better, (Myster is open source too). we're also looking for volunteer translators and people to help with the internationalization / documentation effort. Oh and martketing people are welcome too. Oh and we're loking for new web hosting/email.. weee. Mail here to inquire. wow, that was a shameless plug :-)...

Well, I am the lead developer for a p2p program called Myster. Myster is a 1.1 compatable Java program. From my experience I'm not too surprised there are not more java based apps out there. here's why:

1 - The phrase "write once test everywhere" still applies to Java. Even if you are very competent and write your java app carefully you still need to test it on all platforms you intend to deploy your app on because there are many small differences. These small differences are created by platform specific bugs, VM version specific bugs and all the differences between different OSes and what users expect. So many bugs between versions..

2 - If you write an app on the mac, it will look odd on windows and vice versa. Windows and mac apps behave differently, they have different UI standards.. I mean even aqua and MacOS 9 have huge differences. In MacOS X, the preferences menu item is in a system menu. On eveyr other platform on earth it goes under the edit menu. On Windows all windows have their own menu bar, on mac systems the menu bar is global per program.

3 - You never have enough control over the rest of the system. Sure you can do most common UI tricks but if you want to access resource forks or the like, you need platform specific code.

4 - Deployment on windows really sucks.
-The java VM does not come pre-installed.. well, actually there is a java VM pre-installed but it's 1.1 only, and crap.
-There is no standard way of making a double clickable .exe java program (Or giving it an icon!)

All these things make it very difficult to make a professional looking / acting application. I think Myster is about as close as anyone has come to making a java app that looks like it's a native macOS X application... and it still bugs me that it's not perfect..

SPEED IN JAVA

First off, java is not slow because it is not native. Java is compiled from byte code to machine native code before it is run via a mechanism called the just in time compiler. in tests this JIT can get code to within a few % of of C/C++ code!

Java is not slow because of the garbage collector. Recently the garbage collector has gotten much better. It's now only a tiny fraction the a problem it once was.

Java is slow because

1) Swing is pretty damn slow (widgets do their own java based drawing) (usually awt is faster)
2) Java encourages a style of programming that is not conducive to speed.

On macOS X java is slow because many of the components do their own drawing and the type of drawing they do is hard to speed up *in Aqua/Quartz*. Also aqua is just slower than any other platform to begin with which means many programs don't bother to optimise many of their routines which work fine until thye are run on MacOS X. from what i've heard the java team is working on these problems. It's from their work that we now have quartz extreme so more power to them!

oddly enough Myster is more popular on the mac than the PC!.. Also it's extremely popular in japan thanks to its use of UTF strings. (all the ??? you see in myster are japaneese characters.)

As for beta testing Myster.. Sure, tester are good.. Coders are better, (Myster is open source too). we're also looking for volunteer translators and people to help with the internationalization / documentation effort. Oh and martketing people are welcome too. Oh and we're loking for new web hosting/email.. weee. Mail here to inquire. wow, that was a shameless plug :-)...

If all you want is the source, just grab it from SourceForge. We do recommend that people download either the binaries from ActiveState or Tclkit because that saves a configure/make/make-install cycle and you can be sure that someone's actually checked that the build went right. And the people involved in both are really nice anyway.

Actually, Galeon has exactly these features. Yuo can arrange the order of tabs within a window by dragging. You can drag tabs from a Galeon window to another or you can create a new window out of a tab by dragging the tab outside the window in which it currently is. No wonder Galeon has such advanced tab features since Galeon was the first browser to use tabs (if my memory serves correctly) so it kind of started this whole tab craze (on which we all depend nowadays :)

I know I did! I'm a filthy little pirate who's seen it thrice, and will see it once again at the theater, and again when it's finally on DVD.

• md5deep - Like GNU md5sum, but can work recursively, do matching, estimate remaining time, etc.
  
• foremost - Recover files based on their headers and footers
  

• md5deep - Like GNU md5sum, but can work recursively, do matching, estimate remaining time, etc.
  
• foremost - Recover files based on their headers and footers
  

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

first a.c. post
fuck karma whoring subscriber monkeys

Please compare and contrast the services your
company offers with those offered by Checker
or Smatch.
They seem pretty similar. In fact, do you
use Checker or Smatch internally? It would
seem logical.
- Dan Kegel (dank@kegel.com)

• Build is complicated.
  
• Some people were under the *wrong* impression that GNOME was slower than KDE. Later on, we benchmarked both, and noticed that GNOME is faster, and smaller than KDE (GNOME 2.2 vs KDE 3.1). So that is not really an issue, but a bad reputation we had from GNOME 1.4
  
• Integrated file manager/browser. This one is the only thing that people have repeatedly said they find confusing about GNOME.
  

Just make sure as much people in your neighborhood never see spam, and after a while spamming will not be as much as a problem as it is right now.

Informing the common computer users is the first step.

This thing has been around for awhile actually. It is licensed under the Intel Open Source License and you can download it (yes source) from here.

It is naive to think the cleaner API wins. Your argument closely parallels the Microsoft MFC vs. Borland OWL debate from years ago. OWL was a far better implementation, yet OWL's defeat was so complete most readers probably have no idea what it is.

Well, look no further than:

Multisync @ Sourceforge

Works great with my T68 and evolution.

Phil

Of course, unless you are a KDE fanboi who only ever uses KDE apps on a matter of principle, you might find LUFS more useful, as it allows you to mount remote systems via SSH directly into the filing system, making them seamlessly available to any app, regardless of whether it's linked against kde or not.

May I instead suggest Miranda for ICQ?

By default it's bare bones basic. You can add all the functionality you want with plugins. It's very stable (though some plugins can cause crashes)
Plugins are also available for AIM, Yahoo and MSN if you desire.
Win32 only though. But I find licq (the latest version) to be very stable for *nix.

Miranda:
http://miranda-icq.sf.net

Licq:
http://www.licq.org

I'm arioch, I'm one of those people who run the Doomworld site (2nd hit on google on a search for 'doom', just below id software itself). I'm also the one who did the IRC review of the WAD.

First of all, this is not just a Helm's Deep fortress recreation, it actually recreates the battle itself. Using features from the ZDoom source port, the various placed monsters and marines are scripted to take sides in the battle, and activate in waves in order to reduce the massive slowdown associated with running a thousand and a half AI checks at once.

Because this recreation requires various ZDoom-specific scripting features, no other source port can run this map, period. The latest ZDoomGL alpha can run the map much as it stands, but it cannot display the skybox (which is a feature that has yet to be placed in ZDoomGL) and it will have extreme difficulty rendering the faked (yet usable) 3D architecture of the fortress itself.

Various scripted events have been placed in the recreation, to coincide with the tide of the battle in the movie. A demon will run into the drain culvert and blow it up, as the player you will have the task of sounding the Horn of Helm Hammerhand to summon reinforcements during the final wave of demons, and near to the end Gandalf's rescue party will arrive at the crack of dawn.

This map is amazing in many ways, not the least of which that it runs on a game the core of which has survived since 1993, and it should not be belittled just because it does not run with fancy anisotropic texturing and 3D models.

Thank you for your attention.

The reason Kazaa doesn't work for everyone is because it's the last remaining closed P2P protocol.

There's one more left: WPNP (WinMX).
2.x has been disassembled, and a plugin for Lopster has been written.
But no one could use it more than a few weeks: Frontcode changed the WinMX auth routine in 3.x, which hasn't been disassembled until now.

There's even a sourceforge project (LinMX), which, of coure, hasn't released anything until now. Maybe some of the slashdot readers out there have the skills to help it out...

WinMX also doesn't run in WINE. For me personally, on the other hand, it doesn't matter, the OpenNap networks have far more TB out there than anything proprietary.

> Personally though, I find that none of the protocols
> can be truely useful until it is possible to search
> them all at once (or if people all chose to you the
> same one).

Sounds to me like you want giFT. It aims to have a single frontend that supports multiple protocols.

At the moment it only supports OpenFT (variation of the Fast Track protocol used by KaZaA).

Considering there's usually only about 450 people connected there's a large amount of content (about 4TB), and since it's only really easy to build on Linux at the moment most of the files are encoded by people who actually know what they are doing (large amount of high quality Ogg Vobis files for instance).

Just use something like FIRElite to boot into a linux off CD and then mount and modify the hard drive.
Easy. :)

<Flame on>

If you want to support XFree86, Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD, fuck nVidia.

Go and help our guys at DRI and Mesa* .

nVidia's bullshit is a one-time solution for linux. DRI/Mesa* are a platform linux will have a life time to build on.

Sunny Dubey

* Do not call Mesa MesaGL like everyone does (legal reasons).

<Flame on>

If you want to support XFree86, Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD, fuck nVidia.

Go and help our guys at DRI and Mesa* .

nVidia's bullshit is a one-time solution for linux. DRI/Mesa* are a platform linux will have a life time to build on.

Sunny Dubey

* Do not call Mesa MesaGL like everyone does (legal reasons).

What else do you need than just Rascal?? Actually that system is a front-end for c/c++ code, making flex, bison-parsers usable for the masses.. :)

The "maxima community," such as it is, exists on the maxima mailing list. Please follow the links from http://maxima.sf.net for list information, archives, etc.

www.google.com www.slashdot.org www.fark.com www.drudgereport.com www.regexp.org www.willworkforfood.org www.ryanflynn.com www.mp3.com www.sf.net www.perlmonks.org www.freshmeat.net

FYI: his scripts sucked, too. He'd make lots of dumb mistakes like assigning a variable called "retval" and then checking "ret"!!! Duh. gcc would have caught this immediately, so would "use strict".

There is no such thing as 'CD-quality' when dealing with a lossy encoder like mp3 or Ogg Vorbis. True CD quality can only be attained with a lossless encoder, like FLAC or Shorten.

If you think Ogg Vorbis sounds better than mp3 at comparable bitrate or lower, then it's safe to say that you consider Ogg Vorbis representative of "better audio," or better reproduction of sound. If you do find this to be true, then you're in good company; Large amounts of double-blind testing agrees with you.

Bitrate is never irrelevant. Bitrate multiplied by time equals size, and anyone who has ever filled a hard drive could probably tell you about how some things can look very large indeed from far away, but hit their limit of usefulness in a curiously small amount of time.

Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation

On the other hand it appears to operating faster even in X which says alot as it is an old Celeron 500 and was not real suited to running X. Not that I use X much. I use it mostly as a MySQL and Samba server for my home/office net.

Whoa.. what planet are you from? :) My main desktop is a dual Celery 500 (has been for about 3 years now). I have only one complaint about the speed, and that's G++ compiling (which is slow for everyone...). I use this for lots of C development work, Java, Mozilla, heavy mail usage, it's got a web server, MySQL instance... it's not a slow machine!

(Maybe if you put KDE/Gnome on it, but I use Golem instead. I wouldn't use KDE/Gnome if someone paid me to do so...)

Sadly, this machine feels at least 3-4 times faster than the Athlon XP 1900+ running XP across the room that work sent me. And that's after removing Explorer and replacing it with LiteStep. It's got one of those super-crappy Via chipsets though, so that's not really even the same universe ;)

I have a FreeBSD server running on a K62-266 w/64MB of RAM, and re-soldered motherboard traces for the HD (scratched 'em off during a case transplant one time). It is appropriately named "Dixie" for the Neuromancer fans out there. :) It runs Samba, NFS, MySQL, Apache+PHP, Squid, and djbdns in both cache and serve modes. Works great, less filling :)

I dunno. I know you weren't making a big point out of the celery thing, I just don't understand why people feel like hardware is useless if it's more than a GHz behind the fastest hardware.

Whew -- for a minute I thought this was an article referring to a bizarre fallout with PicoBSD. PicoBSD is a neat little FreeBSD-on-a-single-floppy distro. Kind of an equivalent to Linux's admirable Leaf Project.