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I use the GPL on my projects. However, the GPL is not intended to benefit everyone equally. It is intented to give an edge to free software developers. I believe this is a good thing for developers and companies to do of their own free will. I do not, however, think that it is right for our government to exclude proprietary software developers from public works.

The following is a quote from "Why you shouldn't use the Library GPL for your next library":

Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it.

Again, let me stress that I use the GPL, I like the GPL, I think more developers should use the GPL. But our government should not provide preferential treatment for one group of software developers over another. We don't like it when congress gives preferential treatment to Disney, and it is not appropriate for us to request preferential treatment over Adobe.

For a long time now, gnome has had the 'mini-commander' (now the 'command-line tool'). It sits on your panel, and if you type a command into it, it will execute that command. Extremely fast and easy--it almost completely replaces the menus for me.

Additionally, there is a "Run Program" option in Gnome2, and you can set up a simple script in Nautilus (see here) that allows you to type an arbitrary command into a dialog box and have it execute that on the files that were selected in Nautilus.

The Galeon page says that the Mozilla GTK2 interface is far from ready. However, there should be ways to enable AA fonts on older GTK, though it's quite unstable.

Check out the Flow Studio to Transmitter Link project. It is being developed by the Philadelphia Independent Media Center and Radio Volta who are using it to feed audio to WPEB 88.1FM, a low power station in West Philly.

They have used modems, 802.11b, and the Internet to do the actual link, I'm not sure what they are using right now.

I strongly suggest you get in touch with the Prometheus Radio Project. They work with the above groups on this project and they help out LPFM's with all aspects of their stations, from the FCC process, to transmitter tech, studio setup, community outreach. They travel around the country holding radio "barnraisings" with the new crop of LPFM licenses that have been granted, I've been to one and it was fabulous.

The K-Meleon browser for Windows is a Gecko-based browser that uses native Windows widgets and GUI elements.

It has not seen an official update in almost a year, however there has been a quietly released (as in, not even mentioned on the front page) beta build, which you can grab here.

It adds new things, including support for 'layers, which is basically the name they've given to tabs.

If you're interested with trying new browser and use Windows, you may want to give it a look.

-- Anonymous Hero

It isn't to hard to follow the given links and take a look at what is it about... anyways for the lazy Moonlight 3D is (as the last two letters from its name suggests) is a 3D modelling software.

If it isn't true, explain to me why what are free utilities for Windows machines are $20-$30 extortionware for the Mac.

Which utilities that don't already have equivalents in Fink (i.e. d*b**n gnu/mac os x) are you talking about?

Under the AFPL. You can download all the source code at sourceforge (http://www.sf.net/projects/winex/) via CVS. The only parts not released are the portions that you need ot read Copy-Protected CD's (with SafeDisk). But many games don't even require this.

So far we've completed converting 3 of our "books" from Script to DocBook. The largest book being over 175 chapters with about 600 pages. The most time consuming problem was the project requirements were that the DocBook version must look very similar to the Script version. We used the XSL stylesheets from docbook.sf.net and FOP.

Script is a formatting language (think RTF) and DocBook is a markup language. There was a lot of inconsistant formatting in the Script versions which decreased readablilty. The consistant formatting of correctly marked up DocBook is a very good thing.

I spent a lot of time customizing the XSLT stylesheets. XSLT has a nice mechanism that allows you to import and then overide parts of the imported stylesheets. This is real nice because we can upgrade the upstream style sheets without modifing our customizations. This isn't completely true if there are big structual changes to the upstream stylesheets but since our changes are in seperate files it's rather easy to refit our customizations.

We had two people working on this project. One customizing the stylesheets, me, and another who took the Script source and added DocBook tags. This worked quite well. We were commited to the project and were able to stick with it until completion. This worked very well.

I encouraged another department to give DocBook a try and this didn't work so well. They currently only publish their interal docs to HTML and their documentation source was written in HTML. For them the overhead of DocBook and their lack of desire for paper output made it not worth it for them.

Previously we could only print to paper. Now we have a single source to generate HTML, PDF, Paper (from pdf), and Windows Compiled HTML Help files (basicly HTML with extra meta info).

Some people seem to just not understand the advantages of marking up the structure of the document instead of the formatting. If you want to use DocBook because of the hype then odds are you'll piss people off in the short time, maybe long term too, by forcing it on them. If you and management understands the long term advantages of structed documentation then I really recomend DocBook.

We're working on it! And it will be good! Just wait a few months until our upcoming features is in place! Development is going very fast right now!

• Development: I do NewtonScript development directly on the Newon with or without a keyboard. For creating first class apps, just like you would with the desktop dev tools. You can even get a GUI builder. On WinCE machines, I worked on Dynapad- a full Smalltalk environment in 6 MB, including a full-blown IDE and a bunch of PDA applications all extensible and modifyable directly on the PDA itself. (in addition to the built-in WinCE apps!) Of course, this it what *I* do, but there are ways to program in Perl (with Tk!), BASIC (with GUI builders), PocketC, Java, Python, ISLISP, Scheme and many more- see the Dynapad link below for a list of self-hosted PDA coding environments.
• Communication:Email, IRC, web browsing, ssh/telnet. XML-RPC and SOAP clients for those like me who have various services for my own away-from-home use.
• PIM Stuff Assumed, of course. :) I take all of my college lecture notes using real HWR (not Graffiti). And the drawings within the notes. Unlike paper, I can easily distribute copies of the notes, index and search them. Great for studying on a test- when I'm wondering about something, I can just tap "Find-" no wasting time paging through textbooks and paper notes.

1. TWiki for a perl cgi-bin based wiki
   
2. phpwiki for a php based wiki
   
3. jspwiki
   
4. even palmWiki!
   

Be Inc is kind of dead... and the projects to create a free replacement for it kind of are too.
There is a GPL'ed OS alike BeOS (based on AtheOS) and aimed at the desktop called Syllable which is reasonably mature. If you're technically-minded and like(d) BeOS, then take a look.

You might want to take a look at irmp3, an open source mp3 jukebox for linux designed especially for use with infrared remotes. It meets your criteria 1-4 (.ogg support is brand new, some of 5-7 and the price is right.

Can anyone suggest some good chess strategy books?

"How to reassess your chess" by Jeremy Silman is probably the most-recommended chess strategy book, but it's not for beginners, more for somewhat advanced club players. A cheap, all-round good book to start with may be "The Mammoth Book of Chess", by Burgess and Nunn. Go to Amazon for reviews by people and sample pages, they're good for that sort of thing.

Of course there are always the game sites the offer chess online.

The best for Slashdot geeks should be FICS, at http://www.freechess.org, with its command line interface and geeky audience (usually 400+ players online). The best Linux client to play there is eboard.

Incidentally, SCID is a *great* GPL'ed chess database, originally for Linux but also ported to Windows, that makes Chessbase obsolete as far as I'm concerned.

Can anyone suggest some good chess strategy books?

"How to reassess your chess" by Jeremy Silman is probably the most-recommended chess strategy book, but it's not for beginners, more for somewhat advanced club players. A cheap, all-round good book to start with may be "The Mammoth Book of Chess", by Burgess and Nunn. Go to Amazon for reviews by people and sample pages, they're good for that sort of thing.

Of course there are always the game sites the offer chess online.

The best for Slashdot geeks should be FICS, at http://www.freechess.org, with its command line interface and geeky audience (usually 400+ players online). The best Linux client to play there is eboard.

Incidentally, SCID is a *great* GPL'ed chess database, originally for Linux but also ported to Windows, that makes Chessbase obsolete as far as I'm concerned.

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?

That's an excellent idea, and I was about to suggest the same thing. However, in this case I'd argue for Python. I'm not a huge Python junkie, and I actually use Perl for most things, but if you want it to be easy for non-hackers to script and extend you should choose a language with cleaner syntax. At the level you probably want, Python really will look like pseudocode. Perl just seems like a bad idea for this because the syntax is so. . . different. You really don't want people taking advantage of all the shortcuts it offers.

I'm suggesting this partly because there's a really excellent molecular graphics package out there called PyMOL. It's got an OpenGL core written in C, but the application itself is essentially one giant Python module, with higher-level commands and APIs written directly in Python. It also has a simplified command language- so you can extend it three different ways, and control it two different ways. Unfortunately the code is not very well documented and it's essentially a one-man job- rather difficult for me to contribute. However, the product creates beautiful images and the overall design concept is very sound. I know that several other similar programs use the same model, one using Tcl instead.

These aren't going to be directly useful for the task under discussion, but they are very similar- the more sophisticated molecular graphics programs really are like 3D modellers. It's be a good idea to check them out, since they're more accessible (i.e. open-source) and higher-quality than most regular 3D products. They're also all cross-platform.

yafc is a GPL'd kickass FTP client for console. Much better than ncftp imo. Supports sftp, and has then the exact same functionality as if you used "old-fashioned" ftp (tab-completion etc.).

Dunno if it's useful for your customers, though. :-)

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?

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?

Other concerns mentioned here involved the autodownloading of executables in BOINC. We're taking security very seriously in BOINC, and are using MD5 and 1024 bit RSA encryption to protect against malicious attacks, as well as other general design techniques. Finally, the issue of optimization. Since BOINC is open source, you can optimize it however you want, but there won't be much gain since BOINC itself does very little processing. As far as I know there's still no decision on whether to optimize the SETI@home science.

For more information, you can check out the BOINC source and BOINC documentation

Before you damn Nautilus to hell, try the version in Redhat 8.0 (i.e. the Gnome2 version). Nautilus was unusable in Gnome 1.4.x, but the 2.x versions are unbelievably faster. I used to always go to the nice speed of rox, but now I run nautilus most of the time....

Since it sounds like you already are receiving the documents electronically, you need a content management system. There are plenty out there, and it depends on the types of things you want to do. there's Stellent which is primarily a content management system for documents, but i dont know what sorts of Linux support they have. Also there's Interwoven which is a little more based on web deployment content management.

another poster has mentioned Lotus, but there is a product from IBM called IBM Content Manager that runs on DB2 and WebSphere (which both run on Linux) and gives you really powerful storage and delivery of your stored content.

Of course, you could always check SourceForge which shows at least a dozen projects with "Content Management" in their descriptions...

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?

Why? There's a fundamental issue at stake that Sun has partially solved, but not completely: What your application does should have nothing to do with how it does it.

For example, take the "bank account" app that I've seen used as a tutorial in many places. Customers can have one or more accounts, and they can perform operations on those accounts (deposit, withdraw, transfer). The code necessary for those operations is trivial. It's the support code that makes writing enterprise apps so difficult. At the minimum, you need:

• A database schema
• Code to read/write the DB in a transaction-safe manner
• Presentation code (webapp, could be something else)

You'll probably want to expose a few other interfaces, like an API for your app to be used on a message bus so other apps can access it.

It sucks to have to write all of that extra code. It gets even worse if you have to modify your app (add/delete fields, features, etc). Sun is slowly chipping away pieces of the problem (EJB sort-of makes persistence easy, unless you need stored procs, etc), but they haven't solved one of the big the underlying issues:

The application has data that can exist in multiple representations. Each representation requires work to make sure it's always in sync with the rest of the representations.

There's an easy way out - define your data, and let the computer generate the different representations for you. While you're at it, have the computer write the code that can convert data in one format to another format. This is obvious for things like going from one XML format to another, but not so obvious when trying to convert a web form into a java object, or a java object into a database record.

By defining your data and using code generators or other automation techniques (reflection) to create those different representations, you can slash maintenance costs, time to add new features, etc. Want to add a new field to an object? Update the canonical representation of the object, and presto, your entire app supports it, from the web UI down to the DB schema. Want to add a new data format? Write a generator for it, and all of your objects automatically support that new format.

The overhead is higher at first, but it pays off incredibly quickly. On my last project we saved many many man-years by doing this. Check out thesandbossproject for an LGPL set of tools to help out with this, based on the SAND architecture.

(Yes, I've glossed over about a zillion issues. It's not that I havent thought of them, it's that the problems are solvable. The main point is that your data representations should always be in sync with each other, without your lifting a finger. And no, UML doesn't quite get you there yet).

Check out the gatos project for support for you Ati Rage LT.

Works for me.

and so is the RIAA, it doesn't seem too wrong to explain a workaround. I've never tried it, but kazaa has the option of tunnelling through a SOCKS proxy in the Firewall tab of the settings. I assume that would bypass any filtering server. If it works, you are limited by the bandwith of the proxy. You could also consider using a different P2P client; such as overnet or giFT.

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?

For perhaps the most promising one in terms of fast file sharing, see OpenFT, by the giFT folks. Alternatively, if you're interested in a p2p network that protects your anonymity, privacy, &c. then Freenet is likely to be just the thing -- but it's not well-suited to file sharing (yet); indeed, sharing large media files isn't even really a part of its charter.

For perhaps the most promising one in terms of fast file sharing, see OpenFT, by the giFT folks. Alternatively, if you're interested in a p2p network that protects your anonymity, privacy, &c. then Freenet is likely to be just the thing -- but it's not well-suited to file sharing (yet); indeed, sharing large media files isn't even really a part of its charter.

These companies will end up destroying themselves.

Your point?

Bloodshed Dev-C++! It's the best free IDE for Windows that I know. Includes GCC 2.95.3.

FileZilla is an excellent FTP client.

What in the world are you talking about? What commercial product are you talking about? Who's this "random anonymous guy"? What source code access access problems are you referring to?

Gnucleus is noncommercial, primarily developed by John Marshall, and has it's source code available here. Either you are very confused or you're referring to all the other file-share options and am being very unclear.

What in the world are you talking about? What commercial product are you talking about? Who's this "random anonymous guy"? What source code access access problems are you referring to?

Gnucleus is noncommercial, primarily developed by John Marshall, and has it's source code available here. Either you are very confused or you're referring to all the other file-share options and am being very unclear.

What in the world are you talking about? What commercial product are you talking about? Who's this "random anonymous guy"? What source code access access problems are you referring to?

Gnucleus is noncommercial, primarily developed by John Marshall, and has it's source code available here. Either you are very confused or you're referring to all the other file-share options and am being very unclear.

Though putty is great & complete sometimes you only need a simple telnet client - use dtelnet for this task. It's just one small executable and worked very fine for me. Special extra: Proxy support (SOCKS & HTTP)

Fink. It's basically apt for os x, bringing most if not all the tools you commonly use on Linux to os x. I can literally use apt-get, which made my transition to os x that much easier as I previously used debian at home.

All of this for a very small download and an extremely easy install. I recommend you get the latest PHP from php.net as I found the original (PhpUniform) would GPF upon certain API calls.

Upsides:

• They get a free web environment that you can add all sorts of things to (e.g. your favourite Content Management System).
• They can show off the fact that they run a webserver on their Win95 box ;).

• Default startup is via a batch file (called from a Pif). The application stays minimized in the taskbar.
• Php might freeze/crash the machine sometimes (e.g. I used NukeOwl and attempted to view a zip file without the Winzip command line utility on the machine - WinMe froze, WinNT merely returned a blank result).
• The default install requires you to set aside the drive letter W: - this was frustrating to me because I used W: for a CD writer. I haven't hacked it so, but it's probably just a matter of changing the Start/Stop batch and pif files to use another drive letter.

Audacity is a GPL audio recoder / waveform editor for Windows/*Nix, which I found to be very easy to use, and in some respects superior to windows solutions, when I was doing some audio editing in Linux this summer. Check it out.

The Windows version is fine, but I couldn't get it to run on Linux (it just crashes the X server).

Armagetron is a great 3D version of tron! I love it! Slick graphics and awesome sound effects and gameplay. I recommend the latest beta version, since the stable one doesn't have a good AI.

virtual dub video editor

all the sysinternals programs useful system utilities

miranda icq clone

virtual dub video editor

all the sysinternals programs useful system utilities

miranda icq clone

K-Meleon is a nice little Win32 web browser that uses the Gecko rendering engine from the Mozilla project. Though still just a bit rough around the edges, it is an impressive piece of work; it is quite fast, and very customizable. The latest beta versions include tabbed browsing, a feature I can't live without. If they add URL autocomplete, the browser will be very suitable for day-to-day use.

The development team appears to be rather small, and they release infrequently. I recommend grabbing the last beta release, and not the last public release, which is old.

I believe that K-Meleon is released under the GPL.

Sure, my application, myldapklient, doesn't start with a K...

I'd rather see more effort here with Moz and other programs to provide this, though with much effort, than to keep on reinventing customization wheels that are inconsistant with the OS's customization.

I'd argue that native gecko-based browsers (such as K-Meleon on win32 and Galeon on GNOME) already fill the niche you discuss.

Being that the Netscape folks already have experience with the cross-platform app thing, I'm inclined to understand their decision to use XPI in their main tree, and leave the work of maintaining native ports to others -- maintaining separate ports is a lot of work, and Mozilla took a long time to take to release as it is. As long as other, native-consistant interfaces exist for those who want them, why does it matter that the packaged, official one is a bit discongruous?

> AFAIK Kmeleon hasn't been updated in a year.

Actually, new builds come out every few weeks. An official 0.7 (or 1.0) release is due out in a month or so. You can get the latest build from the following URL:

http://kmeleon.sf.net/files/beta/kmeleon065-beta.e xe

Keep in mind that the actual file represented by this URL may change everytime a new build comes out. I guess you have to check kmeleon-dev if you are interested in knowing when new builds come out :)

K-Meleon is still quite a bit lighter/quicker/smaller than Phoenix. The download file itself of Phoenix is almost as large as the full installation of K-Meleon.

perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

sequence, Inline automatically calls the compiler and linker for your C/etc code, and creates the right glue code between your Perl and C/etc code. For a simple example, see the C mailbox parser which comes with <shameless plug>grepmail</shameless plug>.

By the way, recent improvements to the Perl implementation mean that my Perl mailbox parser is now less than 5% slower than the C implementation. Just one data point for those of you who say Perl can't be fast. ;)

I agree. It seems pretty flawed. I'm sure the theory is the number of users rating it will overcome the RIAA's attempt to mark it bad. But, what if the RIAA is the first one to mark it bad? And what if they register 1000s of accounts? It seems to me the answer to this file trust problem is to assign a modified web of trust to people using PGP/GPG keys. Maybe someone will implement it in giFT...

Ian