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is free! There is no extra charge when you live in the dorms or a on campus fraternaty or sorority. This gives the students even less say on what the bandwidth can be used for.

I used to work directly under Brad Thomas and actually setup cricket to monitor the bandwidth on campus and as far as I know this is still working. The Packeteer software was added while I was working there while this new finger printing was added later. I know that the bandwidth from the dorms (as high as 50MB when unlimited) was killing voice and video trasmissions for remote schooling. Something definatly had to be done, they are not just evil.

Also I remember a couple of times where abuse@uwyo.edu would be hit by Sony records asking us to shutdown someones computer sharing illegal music on the net. Few switch commands later, *BAM*, the kid was disconnected until he removed the material. Kinda a fun job :). Kinda wish I was still there

Freenet's a beautiful thing but the encryption and such bring everything to a crawl, i.e. Cable connection->28.8k.

If you like freenet you should probably check out mnet HERE!

One type of check they did was for null dereferences. Here is a list of possible NULL dereferences for the 2.5.60 kernel.

This is from the Smatch project.

I've been playing with User-Mode Linux a bit recently; it's a port of Linux to run on Linux :-) (instead of running on real hardware, it does hardware-ish things via Linux syscalls). It runs as an unpriviledged user, but has its own internal users, permissions, even a root user.

merlyn% fink describe bochs
Reading package info...
Information about 2195 packages read in 10 seconds.

bochs-2.0-2: Cross platform IA-32 emulator
.
Web site: http://bochs.sourceforge.net
.
Maintainer: Sylvain Cuaz <zauc@users.sf.net>

This is a complete load of shite. A completely useless program, though of course it makes smart business sense - what's the most effective way to make people buy a product? Make their children want it. Microsoft wants to get into yet another market, and they're doing it by introducing a completely useless product. What's next, a little image of a paperclip that displays error messages in little speech bubbles and searches through help files? Oh, wait.

"...creates a peer-to-peer social group in which people can chat, share photos, listen to music and meet friends"

Most of my friends don't have 'net access at all, but I also know a bunch of people who I've only ever spoken with over the internet. In fact, there's only one person who I see on a regular basis and chat with over IM. But even if all my friends were geeks, I can do all those things already. I run an OpenBSD system, and a combination of Gaim, FTP, gtk-gnutella, and some webspace courtesy of Webslum, I can share music, share photographs, talk to people and meet other people. With my other friends, I share music via the ancient technique of "CD burning" and chat via "spoken word" and occasionally "telephone".

"The ability to form personal, ad hoc communities and perform shared tasks means this product will have a lot of appeal in the 13- to-24-year-old market"

I can do that already. It's called my "contact list".

"Another feature, known as Winks, lets one customer send animation to everyone in the group. "Winks is an activity where they can basically 'wink' at someone across the room, but (you) do it virtually--flirt with them," Savage said."

What the fuck? I can't even begin to make sense of this passage. Why on earth would I want to send something to every person I know at once? Especially not some kind of "animation". I have no desire to "flirt" to a bunch of people I can't see.

"Group members also can share photos and, more importantly, listen to music available in a common playlist."

Me too! I have several CD's copied off my friends, and they have more of mine. I've also put together a bunch of compilations from MP3's I've got off the internet (usually bands that are scared of releasing stuff in England or where there's just no hope of buying it out here in the countryside, and have been recomended to me by friends in other countries, or that I've recorded off late-night radio shows, or whatever). Friends of mine have copies of them. We listen to them in school, which would be kind of difficult if they were on my computer at home.

Over the internet, I don't need some special program to tell me what they're listening to - they can use an instant messanger to say to me "Today I am listening to Half Man Half Biscuit" and I can say "That's funny, so am I! Fred Titmus!", or whatever.

I could go on. This is essentially a completely useless program - especially to me, a person who lives in the middle of nowhere on a
There seem to be a bunch of pointless arbitrary limits. Why 10 people? While I can imagine it useful as a tool for bullying ("sorry, we'd love to speak to you, but we're up to our limit of ten people! Isn't life a bitch?"), is there a rational reason I can't have, say, 11 friends?

Why a playlist of 60 songs? I have three compilation CDR's with more than that on, and that's just scraping the surface of my music collection (and of course, ignoring the hundreds of pounds-worth of music I've paid for legally and my friends have also paid for legally).

You'd think I was some grumbling old man who remembers when music sharing was done by gathering around the gramophone, but I'm a 16-year old who uses the internet for many social purposes. And I, one of the so-called "NetGen" (okay, so probably the average "NetGen" person doesn't spend most of their free time coding computer games, but it's their definition, not mine) can recognise this for the pointless bullshit it is.

I've found the best places to look are on sites for RPG engines, like Verge. Generally there are links to sites with literally oodles of tile banks. You may also want to try DIV Arena and, of course, the Freecraft and FreeCiv projects, both of which offer free art assets.

Hope this helps. Oh, done a google for SpriteLib lately? Or Ari Feldman?

... and I'm spent.

Hello,
There is Freevo http://freevo.sf.net that has a better UI! Also, you can run it under X or Framebuffer or anything else SDL supports (like DXR3!)
As it uses the great MPlayer as the underlying player, it supports Mov, DivX, Mp3, Ogg, ... Almos every {video,music} format in the world. It also have a image browser and a cute TV Guide (now a Web version too!) and it plays Mame!
The time shifting is in the work.
Freevo: http://freevo.sf.net Mplayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu

There's already a gesture recognition program for Win32. Gesture
It's at an early stage at the moment, but shows potential.

When we put SpamAssassin into production, our organization decided to use it to mark email that tested postive for being in RBL. What ended up being discovered was that by not blocking RBL email, the mail server was getting swamped and back-logged. The logs showed that what normally pushed the mail servers into a snowball of back-log was not classic SPAM with a fraudulent from address but tons of email from "targetted opt-in email" systems such as vmadmin.com and MicroSoft's own Bcentral. Dealing with the latency caused by this required either getting budget approval for better email servers or blocking the targetted email. When communicating with these targetted opt-in email companies which claimed to be "different than SPAM", we found two things that remained consistent:

1) Despite charging the author of the email, they claimed that none of the charge should be passed on to the recieving company/organization since the user "opt-in"

2) The targetted e-mail company is not responsible for explaining from what IP address and when the e-mail account owner opt-in--even when presented with facts showing that the e-mail was sent to a fake/invalid e-mail account.

So, because we where not entitled to assistance in budgetting new hardware and because the companies could not provide an acceptable defination of "opt-in," our organization now explicidily rejects ALL SMTP RCPT from these companies. Oh... and the latency for processing incoming email has gone back to normal. :)

Also, you forgot the first and biggest site with MAGNET links. Still, an excellent tutorial, thanks for writing it!

Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?

What would be even nicer would be a totally GPL game based on the upcoming Tenebrae 2.0 engine.

TuneTagger is my own first attempt at this. The MB Tagger, the windows only version, has advanced by leaps and bounds and the server interface has changed to accomdate it. I haven't had the time to catch up, maybe this weekend.

At first I coded this in Python/GTK, but with the new server interface you don't need a web browser as much, so the rewrite will use Python/wxWindows which will run on W32/MacOSX/Linux.

Free free to help.

Course very few people make good sidescroller/jumpers in the era of the 3D console.

Join The L.O.S.E.R Project!

(Note: we're not dead, we're just in coma. Any new development would be enough to wake up the project. It's still on my TODO list, but I have to scratch a few other things off before I get back to it. Please contact the mailinglist if you're interested :-)

(imagine the arguments if AIM is the only one supported by a school, but a large percentage of kids use MSN...)

That's why we have wonderful clients like Gaim that understand all major (and some minor) IM systems in one client. The Windows port is in good shape, aside from some minor GTK weirdness. Although I realize it's not the major issue for your setup, "supporting one environment" and letting everyone eat their cake aren't mutually exclusive these days ...

Over on Fink's site they mention problems relating to some of the libraries that ship with the 0.1 version of Apple's X11 implementation. The download page only makes a non-specific reference to "bug fixes", and the Fink page doesn't say anything about the new release yet. Does anyone here know if the new release fixes the library issues?

I have Yellow Dog running on my 15" Powerbook, and it runs quite well. Bottom line is that I rarely use it, because OS X is a capable Unix and with Fink I don't really need to keep a second Unix around (even though I do). BTW the Powerbooks have a nifty graphical boot loader built in (I believe it's built in, could be a YD feature), so I just choose between the disk with the big X on it or the disk with the big penguin on it.

Here's a step-by-step walkthrough proving that a scumbag called Stephen Kapp wripped off some GPL'd code that I wrote.

You can see that the functionality is very similar, and that by using some simple tools to compare the binaries we can see they're the same on the inside. What we see here is mostly the names of functions which carry through from the source to the binary, to support debugging, run-time-linking, and similar things. The LKML post said that these strings were also found to be the same, and then Castle removed them, which is clearly evidence that they knew they'd been caught stealing.

Basically we're looking for patterns and similarities. Although somebody could (legally) write a program that had the same user interface, it's astronomically unlikely that they'd call their functions the same thing and have the exact same design.

Stephen Kapp crawled back under his rock once this was published. I expect Castle will do something similar: just continue to deny that it ever happened, but remove the code.

Similar things have happened to other major open-source projects. It hasn't been to court yet because, as far I know, every case has either been an honest misunderstanding, or an intentional violation but the perpetrator skulked away when challenged. I suppose in both cases it's not worth the FSF's time&money to take it further, but the drawback is that there's no clear example to others.

I really hope the FSF does help the copyright owners bring a lawsuit, it's time for a demonstration and I'd certainly throw in a hundred bucks to help fund it.

This isn't just a free software problem though: people who publish proprietary reusable code (development libraries, ...) have lots of trouble preventing copyright infringement. I don't think I've ever seen a Windows developer's machine that didn't have pirated, or at least unregistered-shareware, software.

By the way, the easiest way to defeat WWW::EuroTV is to simply change your formatting every few days. The author will go crazy trying to keep up. :)

gaim-e
http://gaim-e.sf.net

MSDN has a similar behavior. I don't give a shit about MSN, but I needed to download the DirectX 8.1 SDK (to use OGRE) the other, and it was hell. I fact, I needed to identify as Mozilla 5 to see more than a few unrelated links on this page (try it if you have Opera. Change your identifier and reload the page)

Now, where do I pick up encrypted AIM?

here or there.

If you're using Linux, try LUFS and forget about application level filesystems. If not using Linux, you should "lobby" ;) so your OS gets something like LUFS. MacOSX is also going the same way, I think. FS should be a low level things (kernel, kernel + libs, server in microkernels...), so all apps get it.

Ok, I'll bite.

# Financial software that has any compatibility with online banking

GnuCash 1.8

# Any kind of tax software

Do it online. 2 or 3 options there.

# Any kind of publishing/greeting card software (like you mentioned)

Agreed. This would be a good project for someone to take up. I bet some good KDE hackers could put one together in a few weeks. :)

# Any kind of "useful" office suite. By useful, I mean something that can be used anywhere by anybody. If I create an excel sheet or a powerpoint presentation, I can send that to anybody in the world and know that they can open it and read it

OpenOffice.org. And don't tell me it's not. And if for some reason it's not *yet*, it will be with 1.1 later this year.

# Any kind of children or educational software

There is some. Not a huge wealth of choices yet, but seriously, how much do they need? Isn't learning better done through books and toys anyway?

# Any kind of decent game that is has nothign to do with squashing Bill Gates while he is infecting computers with windows, or some freeking penguin on a skateboard. WineX doesn't count, too, because it rules out any of the latest games. A game console doesn't count, either. If I have all the hardware required to play games on my PC, why would I want to buy more hardware to play on a console just because I chose a crappy OS?

Bah. No one needs anything beyond TEG. :-) Actually there are plenty of decent games in Linux. You just have to be able to live without most of the big-money specific titles in the Windows world. Not that I care, I'm way too addicted to TEG!

# Antivirus/Security software

Huh? Linux has a fundamentally different architecture. Mail programs in Linux don't randomly execute every attachment they get. Distros ship with firewalls (which aren't even necessary if you don't run crap you don't need to run).

# Business/Accounting/Law software

There are choices out there for accounting, but granted, that category is well behind what is available for Windows. Fortunately, not everyone needs that stuff. Give it a couple years, it will come.

popfile

Silly tired me! :)

Does anybody know if MAS (or alternatively jack) can handle a driver for 3D audio rendering, not unlike DRI+Mesa in XF86?

I am a composer/musician using Linux for my needs and from what I've seen so far all of the aforementioned servers esd, asd, artsd etc. are rather rudimentary and incomplete. Furthermore they have monstrous latencies (which is a big problem for any kind of time-sensitive interactive music).

To this date the best audio server on Linux is JACK, but unfortunately just as any other of the current servers, it is still under development. Nonetheless, its advantages over the given bunch of audio servers is immeasurable:

1) absolutely the best latencies (including even other OS's) down to 2.5-3 milliseconds (you need to patch the kernel for low-latency operation though since the vanilla Linux kernel 2.4 and down has some big issues with the scheduler). All this is achievable even with the current version, even though it is under development.

2) integration where the signal could be routed not only to the dsp but also between the apps (so you could theoretically get the signal routed from xmms into your real-time sound processing app and then to the audio recorder and audio output).

3) Relatively easy to implement and allowing for practically unlimited number of connects

4) Relatively low overhead

Unfortunately, as I mentioned before it is still under development and has its own issues that need attention. Furthermore, apps need to be adapted to be compatible with this server (in another words this server is not trying to be compatible with older servers simply because they are inferior, dead-end kinds of implementations). That being said, it is still the best sound server around.

I would really like to see Linux community let the audio programmers/musicians to provide solution to this issue, because they are the ones who know the best how to create the best possible sound server that will suit their highly demanding needs and yet provide a great architecture for the rest of the casual users.

It is unfortunate though that instead of unifying our efforts everyone feels like they need to make a brand new implementation of the same idea instead of contributing to the projects that are already semi-mature and need further assistance in development. Because of this "so-called-diversity" we now have half-dozen sound servers out of which 90% blow chunks, while the other 10% have a great potential but are incomplete.

I'm a graphic designer who's done a lot of interface design, as well as being an avid follower of human-computer interface trends and issues.

You are a precious resource!

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how someone like myself would help contribute to an Open Source project? While I am not a programmer by any means, the interface is definitely somewhere that can use some help in all the Linux distros I've seen and used.

I'm an open-source author, and my experience says that some projects care about this kind of stuff and some don't. By and large I think you'll find that the software that is part of the major desktops (KDE and GNOME) is developed by people who are much more in tune with this kind of thing. They have a vision of a slick, easy-to-use, well-integrated desktop, and usability is important to them.

More independent apps can go either way: sometimes it will be a small group of developers and users who are happy with things the way they are and fairly resistant to usability improvements. Mplayer is a good example of this. They are most concerned with the raw power of the program, and don't care much that there is no GUI support worth mentioning, and they expect you to be compiling from source. If you ask questions they'll tell you "man mplayer, it's all in there." There's no point in approaching a project like this, they're just not concerned with UI or usability issues and your suggestions will fall on deaf ears.

Other times independent projects are concerned with usability, and the project I work on, Audacity, is one of them. UI issues are frequently discussed, mockups created and refined. We are receptive to UI suggestions.

So my advice would be to find a few applications that interest you that you think would be receptive to suggestions. Come up with a few ideas for improving these applications, and approach the developer list with them. Maybe create mockups of your ideas and link to them from your email. Gauge the response to determine whether you think you would work well the the developers or not, and if so you're started!

Also, being a Mac person, I don't really know which direction to turn in; i.e. does Gnome need help? Debian? etc. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hmm. Plain old non-developer users are most likely going to be using KDE and/or GNOME (and their associated applications), so Linux usability in general is most greatly increased when these applications become more usable. On the other hand, both of these projects already have a pretty good handle on usability, and have somewhat firm ideas about their plan for how they will achieve usability. So you would probably encounter more inertia approaching applications like this, and you would have to become more deeply involved to really be able to accomplish anything.

I'm just making this up, but probably the applications that could use the most help are KDE or GNOME applications that are farther from the core of these desktops. Don't look to Abiword, Galeon, Kword, or Konqueror. Look for lesser-known but promising applications that have a good technical basis (programmers who know what they are doing) but not much thought into the UI yet.

Another strategy is just to use Linux for a while and see what you are drawn to. If there's something that nags you about the interface to a program you use regularly, bring it up to the developers and propose a solution.

I hope you manage to find a project that can use you!

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?

I suggest you try out Sodipodi while it would be crazy to claim that it can do everything Illustrator can it is getting nice and usefull.

I certainly hope you realize that those are all screenshots of ReactOS running under Bochs running under Windows XP. Only the second image shows off the ReactOS GUI, which seems to be a WINE derivative.

Star Control 2 which is being ported to Linux (in fact, quite playable already) is based on the source of the 3DO version, not the x86 one. In fact I only heard of 3DO because of this...

.haeger

Don't forget Star Control 2!

While this comment has been addressed, I'd like to point out that you can get pretty decent output from the Gutenberg texts by importing them into LyX. With just a little bit of work (basically setting up the chapters), LyX will allow you to create good looking PDF, Postscript, HTML, etc, along with the LaTeX source. Combine this with rbmake and you can even read them, complete with hyperlinks, on your eBook (if you have one!)

The best and cheapest way to get existing books on the web is to scan them and compress the images. Compression technology for text images is so good (see DjVu), and storage so cheap nowadays that you are better off just distributing high resolution scans.

This is a much more efficient way to make books available on the web, much more efficient than having volunteers painstakingly transcribe the text or correcting OCR mistakes.

OCR can be used for indexing scanned documents, but there is no need to do manual correction. DjVu can compress 300dpi black and white pages of text to 5-25KB. That's less than most HTML pages, and the images look just like the original book.

The Million Book Project at the Internet Archive uses DjVu (as well as other formats).

The open source implementation of DjVu is available on sourceforge

But it will run on Bochs.

While it might be nice to do some awk'ing and sed'ing natively under Windows, you still can't do a whole lot of administration with it.

GNU versions of awk and sed are available for Windows at GnuWin32.sf.net.

Administration scripting under Windows must be done using COM objects from Windows Scripting Shell or an other COM-patible environmement.

Personally I like the Keramik window decorations, but I despise the widgets.

I use the KDE default widget set (HighColour Default I think it's called), Keramik for the window decorations, "Desert Red" for the colour scheme (I get so sick of blue or black-based schemes) and Noia for the icons. I'm not a big fan of transparency, but I have just a hint (96 or 98% opacity) for the menus -- what the hell, it's kind of neat and I have the processor power for it.

Screenshot is here. The IM app you see is Psi, the best damned Jabber IM I've run across. I'm not the author, but I have contributed a few patches to help the project.

Mono and Portable.NET really shine in allowing former Windows developers to get involved with Linux and still have a comfortable and semi-familiar place to start.

I don't see Mono or Portable.NET as cross-platform technologies (unless you mean cross-platform across Unices) because Mono and Portable.NET grew up on Unix and will be used here the most. Besides, Microsoft has simply created too many API's and hence the barrier to a *quality* cross-platform development environment is too great.

Rather, Mono and Portable.NET will be good for rapid prototyping and as a conversion tool for Windows Application developers. Is also important for providing an alternative when the great migration begins of Smart Clients begin from Windows to Linux.

As for the rest of the article: Yah, I'm sure the Microsoft developers who created .NET are enthusiastic about Mono, but the higher-ups (see: PHB's) have no love for Mono or Linux.

The developers of KDE have been discussing the subject of UI enhancements lately. This discussion was caused by the jumpstart of a project (slicker)) which tries to radically change the UI, which so many people are used to.

In time, I guess you will see less and less feature copying and more and more innovation. And if something innovative is good enough for mainstream, will it be accepted?

Actually I did an essay that showed that our minds were fundamentally superior to computers or any turing machine. You can check it out here if you're interested:
For
Against

Actually I did an essay that showed that our minds were fundamentally superior to computers or any turing machine. You can check it out here if you're interested:
For
Against

Not if you filter the mailing lists as well, like I do. I'm using a pretty standard SpamProbe setup, except I pass all my mail though it (including lkml and debian-devel).

Heh - well, there are 3 plugins available (that I know of anyway).

kino plus which currently has a beta pre-release here.

timfx is a nice collection of cleverly put together stuff by the original author of k-3d.

dvtitler provides some nice titling fx...

Hope that helps :-).

Uh, there is plenty of GPL code in Mac OS X. For example: bash, cvs, gcc, gdb, gprof, diffutils, and patchutils, just to name a few. Apple has, of course, submitted any changes to this code back to the FSF and any other applicable maintainers. They also have this thing called "Darwin" that allows you to download the open-source core of Mac OS X, which also includes lots of GPL code. However, there is also plenty of BSD code, like fileutils, top, and sysctl.

Finally, there is some proprietary code which you can purchase as an add-on to Darwin. It comes with an easy-to-use installer, a nice GUI, and support for actual commercial software that people use to make money!

Of course, if you truly must have your GNU add-ons, you can just install Fink, or, if cash is your problem, give GNU-Darwin a try.

I know, I know, I Have Been Trolled ;)

• giFT daemon
• giFT clients
• giFT FAQ

• giFT daemon
• giFT clients
• giFT FAQ

• giFT daemon
• giFT clients
• giFT FAQ

The Xine project is doing a lot of work in terms of becoming a multimedia framework, however you need to check out the Gstreamer project. It has support for a lot of video formats, and can be used with a command line or gui. Gnome 2.2 will start to use this(released on Jan. 29th), for it's audio, and video needs.

Like Gnome in general, you can code Gstreamer based programs in different languages, including GTK# and even though it was origionally intended for the Gnome desktop, the main libraries aren't gui-lib specific, so you can write KDE based programs with it too(yes, there's an Arts interface in there)