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My own obviously make the "winner" pile. The rest I hear about through word of mouth.

I distinctly remember that the linux opensource nouveau driver has code to support all these features, that the code indicates that the hardware supports this since something like TNT cards, and that if nouveau does it the proprietary linux drivers probably do it since years.

Also the things "brand new" in Vista and "in no other OS" like running your game in a 3D window are sooo 2005 on linux (ever tried beryl or compiz as your window manager ?).

Haven't you heard of TrueCrypt yet?

So that raises a few questions:
1) Can reverse-engineering the file format give enough information to make a fully-featured flash decoder/player?
2) Will Adobe try to stop such reverse-engineering efforts?
3) Is it worth it to continue along the Flash route, or should supporters of Open Standards promote an alternate vector-based animation/movie format?

1) What is it you're missing? Google SWF spec and the first hit will be the specs without the restriction. It seems to be a copy of the original specs, though, so better stick with Alexis' reference. You could also read the sources of various tools, or the existing OS player. For the opcodes of the new VM, you could read the sources of a compiler or the VM itself.

2) Apparently they didn't. Neither did they try to stop the OS streaming server.

3) Both would make sense, depending on how you plan to use it. For the web, SWF will stay the king, IMHO. Users don't like installing additional plugins, but that wouldn't be a problem for standalone apps.
The bigger problem is content creation, both for a new format and for SWF. There are very good OS tools for making SWFs already, but they are focussed on programmers. If you want to write code and maybe include some assets like graphics and fonts that you then use with it, I'd say you're better off with the OS tools. But for graphical work like animations or layout, there isn't really a way around Adobe products for professional work (just that you can do animations and layout without them doesn't mean your designer will consider it an efficient, comfortable workflow, and he's right). This is where work needs to be done. Better SVG import for the tools, or direct SWF output for Inkspace or even a specialized app.

See my blog entry for other experiences made during the quest for a slim desktop, and what ups and downs I found beyond the "big" desktop environemnts. (Includes a screenshot of my desktop :-).

- Hubert

http://sf.net/projects/dapple/

Full disclosure, this is my project (and I'll admit, it's not that great, but it works pretty well on Linux with 95% of the features of the old DOS version...)

-uso.

If you enjoy using FireBug, it is likely you are not really productive...

Don't get me wrong, I think the tool is excellent, but do you really want to go bug chasing at this low level of abstraction ? You can easily waste hours debugging like this, figuring out what exactly happened (or didn't happen) ...

I think you are better off using a high level AJAX toolkit like echo2 or Wt instead, blame their developers for any JavaScript or other unexpected trouble, and let developers of these toolkits enjoy FireBug in ironing out these bugs.

Try unattended. Saved me from soul-eating Windows installations. Its a neat system, and free software too.

A successor to SQL - NewSQL: http://newsql.sf.net/

Addressing both issues:

1) Off-site backups - that's why you back up offsite! Set up a backups-server (it doesn't need to be fast, it will be I/O bound) with a pile of cheap, big, slow HDD. Set up as RAID 5 or RAID 1 - your preference.

Then use a tool like Backup Buddy or Backup PC to back up the files.

It's automatic. It's off-site. It works with good-sized data sets. (I'm managing just over a TB these days, a number that's growing fast. I'm able to do unattended offsite backups every 24 hours, and I have several months worth of backups on file that I can access instantly)

2) Rotating thru tapes - tools like Backup Buddy and/or BackupPC take care of that, too! Assume you have 200 GB of "Enterprise Data" to backup. So you get a TB or so in your backup array, (say, 4 350 GB disks, RAID 5) and use one of the above tools. You'll see months worth of backups out of that.

Without swapping tapes, hiring anybody to take them "off site" and for just a few hundred bucks in cheap, IDE disks. Can tape do that, too?

Text interfaces suck because sometimes my bakc^H^Hck key does not work or color is not available and I cannot use my mouse to go up or down and I cannot render some graphics to visualize things.

Or perhaps you meant to say badly-designed web interfaces suck and I should say badly-designed text interfaces suck ?

Seriously. Why should a web session necesarilly timeout if the user still has the page open ? What do you mean with non-interactivity ? And browser bugs and compatibility code has been taken care of, a hundreds of times, by numerous so-called frameworks.

You might want to update your head with new information: take a look at the Wt library (http://www.sf.net/) which handles all of your complaints.

Whether you use Unattended, RIS, or some other system for Windows deployment, one technique which you should absolutely avoid is disk imaging.

Also called "cloning", disk imaging means taking a snapshot of the hard drive of one machine and restoring it onto the hard drive of another. Microsoft provides tools like Sysprep and RIPrep to help you with this task, and it is a very popular way to deploy systems.

But it is usually a bad idea. Never mind that imaging provides poor support for non-uniform hardware; the big problem is that it creates a maintenance nightmare.

For example, suppose you have several system configurations, including salesperson laptops, developer workstations, automated build servers, and financial systems. In addition, suppose you are in the process of migrating your organization from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, so you need to be able to install both.

Even for this simple example, you will need to create and store eight different images, one for each combination of OS and application suite. To update a common application, you will have to modify and re-create all eight images. Add some diverse hardware like fancy laptops into the picture, and the nightmare becomes clear.

If you are cranking out thousands of identical workstations with completely identical hardware and software, imaging is a fine approach. But if your organization is like most, with heterogenous hardware and software, true unattended installation will give you better reliability and much easier maintenance.

Kernel Virtual Machine - http://kvm.sf.net/ It requires a processor with Intel's Vt or AMD's SVM technology (cpuflags will read vmx for VT or svm for AMD-V). The developers are looking for people to test optimizations that have just gone in. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.kvm.d evel/657/focus=662 It uses a slightly modified qemu.

I'm a luddite I admit, but what makes IM so great?
Instant gratification? Even e-mail is not as instantaneous as IMs are. Far less spam. Granted IM is getting spammed, but not at the rate that e-mail is.

There's no way to archive the messages is there?
GAIM

Is there a way to catalog the information into a searchable index?
See my previous answer. If you log, you can search those logs using GAIM. Not real hard. Tons of other programs offer this option as well.

How can you "forward" an im to another person or group of people? Can you thread the information into a cohesive timeline?
Logs have timestamps. Marvelous little thing that tells you the date and time a message was sent. Forwarding messages might be possible. Worst case you copy and paste. Most chat systems also offer chat room options. AOL IM offers you the ability to create a room and invite the people you want to it. This can be accomplished and logged with the above.

I definitely have uses for irc (which is kinda like im I guess) but if it were my sole means of electronic communication I wouldn't get anything done. What am I missing?
Obviously a lot. IM is coming into increasing usage. We have a Jabber server at work for all internal communications, it is used more than the e-mail system or the phones are. I actually have to get up from my desk once a day just to make sure that people are really in this place. I do not know how big it will be with inter-office communications, especially considering a lot of companies headed by older execs still don't use e-mail well. (Trust me, plenty of offices are still sending TONS of paper memos.)

• DUI - GTK+ bindings
• DWT - Port of the Standard Widget Toolkit

I don't get it - Intel has a well-supported, open-source project that they've sponsored for their chipsets - when I recently bought a Dell laptop, I purposefully bought it with the Intel 3945d chipset, and used the RPMs found at their SourceForge project site to get it working on Fedora Core 6.

Why aren't they getting credit for this?

I should have put more emphasis on top-tier. All the top-tier vendors sell Linux workstations, and the hardware in their mid-range consumer boxes is generally similar or identical to what they put in the low-end engineering workstations. They actually have engineering relationships with Linux vendors and employ developers to fix up the drivers if they have problems.

Outside of the top-tier OEMs that actually sell boxes with Linux preloaded, all bets are off.

A few months ago, I bought a new box, from parts. I thought I knew what I was doing. I inadvertently bought an Asus M2V board with an Attansic L1 gigabit chip on it. One thing led to another, and now I'm spending a lot of time fixing the vendor driver for upstream submission. It's certainly educational, but I wouldn't recommend it for newbies.

I don't question that you can do a better job of finding compatible parts than an OEM that doesn't care about Linux (and most of them don't), but I know a lot of Linux professionals like myself who have made similar mistakes, so I don't want to lead a newbie down that path.

So, to clarify my earlier recommendation, buy from a company that sells Linux, even if you're going to be buying a Windows box to dual-boot. The odds are much better that way that stuff will work with Linux, especially if you're not entirely sure what to be looking for otherwise.

In Linux, you *have* to have a Start menu (or some analog). You can't just have an Applications folder, or any other automatically-updated application browser like you can in OS X.

Umm... Perhaps if you're running Gnome or KDE, but that's no fault of the kernel. (Remember: Mac OS X is on top of a unix-like underpinning, so whatever it can do, Linux, in principle, can too.)

For instance, I use a ROX desktop on a single-user box. When I find a new ROX program, I save it to ~/apps/(location)/ folder, and then I run it. If I don't like it, I right click and choose delete. (If I do like it, I change its ownership so that I can't accidentally modify it/nothing else can, either, but that's probably paranoid.) My ~/apps folder is always up-to-date.

There's also GNUStep, which I had a play with yesterday. It seems to be less flexible WRT where programs are saved (I tried to move GNUMail.app to ~/apps/Network/GNUMail, and it didn't work), but the /usr/lib/GNUStep/System/Applications folder is always an up-to-date list.

This is the case because both ROX and GNUstep use something like AppDirs, where the whole program is stored under a single folder, and the UI makes it look like you click the folder to run the program.

Now, it's unfortunate that neither the ROX Desktop nor GNUStep are self-contained environments, so if you want an office suite you have to look elsewhere, so in practice it's difficult to have an auto-updated folder, and I've manually copied a few .desktop files like sol.desktop to ~/apps/Games/Solitare, but in principle it's entirely possible.

I guess around the time someone cares. You seem to care, why don't you do it? Or pay someone to do it? I use dosbox to run Syndicate to test if I'm doing the right thing in FreeSynd and it works good enough for me. It works good enough for a lot of people, that's why it doesn't get much improvement.

I think you're describing something between CORBA and CMIP.

SOAP was simpler to setup (no broker and associated config), easier to grasp publication of servants, and the data packet can be debugged on-the-wire, so you can code-test-debug until it goes. CORBA is a binary format that is more optimal on the wire, but harder to debug. There's Other Issues, but These issues are Mine.

Even thought I can sit in my figurative armchair and say "seen it before", in truth these concepts co back and forth (or iterative cycles, take yer pick) and feed off each other to evolve. Maybe Son-of-CORBA is on our horizon: a better, leaner, easier RPC.

Critical Mass: The perl/python/php/ruby/etc/etc extensions didn't come for CORBA quickly enough :)

For me, there's the SOAP-to-CORBA bridge. Maybe someday I'll have time to hack on that a bit :)

CMIP-to-SOAP-to-CORBA bridge? That would be fun. More hack, less Slashdot. Don't need to find a hidden cache of German tanks to realize even that might be a bridge too far...

Just to add to your list: anoNet

Unlike the others you listed, anoNet is a full IP network built using standard OSS tools (OpenVPN and Quagga being the heart of the network).

It is far from a perfect at giving absolute anonymity at the software level, it requires you to use some common sense. On the plus side, *you* get to decide who you trust and how much you trust them. Like TOR, the more people that are a part of anoNet, the more anonymous the network becomes. Think of the network in terms of old school BBSs.

If you are looking to join a network and just find loads of warez/porn/etc. anoNet is probably not for you. There is nothing to stop someone from hosting a warez site, and inside the network you are pretty darn safe. The reason you won't just find a huge stash is the fact that the network was built by people that believe in their privacy / right to free speech above all else. We are a bunch of network admins / Unix admins / programmers. Obviously we have no reason to pirate software since *nix is our OS of choice.

anoNet is what we call a Democratic Anarchy. There is a nice page on our wiki (inside the network) on what that means, but it is way too much to define here. Bottom line there is no kiddie porn, there will be no kiddie porn and don't bother connecting if you want to debate how not allowing kiddie porn is censorship. We picked a line, that line was kiddie porn and we stick to it.

Windows users are more than welcome. Because there is no BGP implementation for Windows, Windows users can't "natively" be routers, they can get a static IP (or a whole subnet) however. We have a coLinux image that can get you up and running if you really wanted to be a router.

Lastly, we are willing to help you learn. I can't express that enough. If you want to learn about networking or any other aspect of the network, we are all willing to help if you are genuinely interested. If you just want to setup a node and be a part of the network, that is fine also.

Anyway, hope this post tickled the imaginations of at least a few people. If you decide to connect, use a pseudonym that you have never used anywhere else.

I've been using PHP and Perl server-side and, reluctantly, JavaScript client-side for years before I actually bothered learning JavaScript. When I finally did, I discovered a language which was similar to PHP and Perl in that it supported most, if not all of their language constructs and which in many ways was more elegant (IMHO). So my dream was to use JavaScript both server- and clientside. That can be done in .net/mono, I guess, but I prefer the lightweight nature of PHP, Perl, Python etc. So I started http://www.sf.net/projects/jsext - check it out! The plan is to support C libraries (done on Linux, Windows version under construction) and Python modules (not done). There are other, similar projects, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-side_JavaScrip t

Good for you. FrostWire is definitely the way to go. Way to encourage the children!

I had the same problems, so now I run two machines. One with windows, and one with Ubuntu. They share a k/b and mouse via Synergy, http://synergy2.sf.net/

Linux is not for gaming, if you absolutely insist on running WINDOWS games on LINUX, I suggest Cedega http://www.transgaming.com/

Try XMMS, if you don't like it or the plugins it supports there are over a dozen other programs out there for playing music etc. Or worst case you can post a bounty for the feature you want and pay a few bucks to have it developed.

There are cheap, linux compatible wireless cards. $33 - http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=20711&v pn=PC54G3&manufacture=MSI/MicroStar

I've found that if I do my office etc on the Linux box, and my gaming on the windows box, life is good :>

The $40,000 price quoted in the article seems really inaccurate for a Pioneer 3 DX, even with optional accessories it's much less. That robot is not really a "home robot" anyway. The same manufacturer -- not Microsoft btw! -- also makes a smaller less expensive (and less capable) robot that might be more affordable for hobbyists, as well as some big expensive commercial/industrial stuff. Plus their software (some of it is GPL) is included, and the robots also work with Player (all GPL).

What you outlined is a pretty good list of potential issues, but any security conscious programmer should be checking for these anyways. I only seriously started programming in PHP last year, but I believe I've gotten up to speed pretty quickly. I started my own open source project (http://phptodo.sf.net/) and I've been endeavoring to improve it since.

Yes, input validation is a difficult task, but I think it's just as difficult in other languages as well. And as for inconsistencies in the API, who really trusts that all functions act alike anyways? At the very least, you write the code the way you think it will work, then test the hell out of it. If you find something not acting right, you investigate. I always have the PHP manual handy when I'm coding. The tidbits of info in the comments alone are extremely valuable.

I've become a big fan of PHP because of the speed in which I can build a simple application and the ease of putting it up on the web. That's not to say that I don't deal with the security side, but for internal applications I will put together a quick system to "get by" until I can improve it. The initial "out the door" bit is important when we're dealing with short deadlines.. :)

Overall I'm pretty impressed with PHP. I'm still coding in the 4.x world, but even without the advanced OOP features I'm still having fun. :)

• magic_quotes: This adds slashes to all input so that you don't have to sanitize it before it gets inserted into SQL. The problem is that developers write their code with magic_quotes on, but don't realize that it's often turned off elsewhere, which leads to gaping holes.
• register_globals: Variables can be placed directly into the global namespace. If you don't explicitly set all variables before using them anything can be injected into them, which brings me on to:
• Only critical errors are reported: If you use a variable which isn't set it'll just return null, with no error (unless you specifically turn up the error_reporting level). This means that someone who isn't familiar with the problem won't know that a variable in their script can be written to by anyone until it's being exploited, functions which you would expect to return an error and halt the script if they fail can carry on without giving any indication of failure.
• fopen_urls: By default you can include scripts hosted on other websites! This often makes remote PHP execution, which would otherwise require eval(), much easier.
  Who would have thought "<?php include($var.'/include.php'); ?>" will run any PHP on any server, anyhere? (The attack in the article above leveraged entry using this, coupled with register_globals.)
• Inconsistencies: What one function does can never be applied to what another function does; you can never assume anything with the PHP library and always have to keep a browser window with the PHP manual handy. Using a function without carefully reading up what it does, even when it's very similar to another function you're familiar with, is asking for trouble in PHP.
  The same goes for just about everything; are you checking whether some input equals some harmless number before passing it on to a SQL query or the browser? Don't forget that (5 == "5 UNION SELECT secret FROM ..."), null == 0 == "" == false, "a" == 4 == true; generally you just have to be on your toes.
• Input checking is difficult: Do you want htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() ? Have you remembered to strip_slashes() if magic_quotes is on? Remember the user can input arrays too, are you checking that the input isn't an array? Have you remembered to escape queries with mysql_real_escape_string() ? mysql_escape_string() doesn't account for the character set being used, and so isn't good enough, trying to escape input for yourself is also dangerous. What about null bytes? Remember that the user can input binary data; PHP allows null bytes, and will add a slash to them, but when you send a string with null bytes to some functions, but not others, the null bytes will be silently dropped leaving only slashes.
  To check input in PHP you have to be absolutely rigorous and take no half measures, people who aren't aware of the dangers don't stand a chance.

Here is another script for slipstreaming updates into an ISO:

http://smithii.com/slipstream_xpsp2

I use it for my unattended share. Works great.

First there was KVM switches and then there was the Java KVM (kilobyte VM).

Now there's the linux KVM which has nothing to do with either those or the Kernel VM rewrites of the linux past.

Leave that acronym alone !

I never understood why I couldn't get a fast terminal prompt and have the remainder of the daemons start up in the background, all reniced to low priority during the initialization process, or maybe slowly started up to avoid disk contention. I personally amortize the bootup time by buying a bunch of ram, and dd'ing all the files in /usr/bin, /usr/lib/*.so, /lib/*.so, /etc and maybe /usr/share/apps, depending on how much ram I have. This pulls everything into the buffer cache and improves KDE startup significantly.

I'm sure I could optimize this by running some kind of kernel auditor that tracked every file that was run (executable) or loaded (.so), wrote out a list at shutdown, and reused that list to precache on reboot.

A few interesting links: http://kerneltrap.org/node/2157 , http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0609 .2/2180/boot_linux_faster.pdf , http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bo otsystem/deliverable3.html , http://preload.sf.net/ , http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper-backports/admin/ readahead .

The window manager showed in Jurrasic Park is actually real, it's fsn. There's a linux port, fsv at sourceforge. As you'll notice, the view does make it possible to tell that you're in a *nix enviornment.

Source. Listed under "Contributors": Microsoft (Funding, Architectural & Technical Guidance and Project co-ordination.

I wrote my own greylister (<plug>Spey</plug>) and it works really well. (I will also point out that people who complain about it making email too slow have a major education problem --- email doesn't guarantee anything about delivery times. If they rely on the email being delivered within a certain amount of time, then they'll be screwed when that doesn't happen for completely legitimate reasons. But anyway.)

So far I've only had one false positive: Yahoo Groups. They have this brain-damaged system which probes to see if an email address is valid when you subscribe to a mailing list. Unfortunately, the probe mechanism, which is a bad idea at the best of times, is broken and doesn't retry after getting a 451 Try Again Later. This violates the RFC, of course. I've tried to complain, and find myself unable to contact an actual human. Whitelisting *@returns.groups.yahoo.com fixes this.

Starting at 128-CBR, it got more difficult to hear the difference. At CBR/192 or VBR/medium, I could rarely distinguish MP3 from FLAC, although sometimes the high-hat cymbals sounded like they lost a little bit of brilliance.

The Verdict: Vorbis is good, really good. But MP3's produced by Lame at VBR/Medium to VBR/High are also really, really good, maybe even better.

Although there are players out there that can handle Vorbis, there are many more that don't.

Ahem, http://flac.sf.net/

A used for Magnatune downloads (among others), and supported by decent media player software and a handful of MP3 players

You should check out the Buoy project http://buoy.sf.net/, it aims to be the 10% of Swing that you need 90% of the time. Its got a great event model as well.

Treacherous Computing is hardware that is meant to allow person X to set their hardware up to refuse to run (or not cage) software that is not digitally signed by them. As you can imagine, this COULD be extremely valuable for security. HOWEVER, the collection of companies making up the Trusted Computing Group (most of the tech companies) decided that the capability to TRUST should be reserved for them.

This is fundamentally false. There is a core of truth to it, but the details are all wrong.

You can run ANYTHING you want on a "trusted (treacherous, whatever) computer". The TCG does not reserve anything to themselves. In the TC world, everyone is equal. No one is more equal than anyone else.

What TC does is to allow you to prove to a third party that you are running certain software. This is the "remote attestation" that everyone is so exercised about. It doesn't mean you can only run signed software, or that only the TCG decides what software is trusted. What it does mean is that someone can refuse to talk to you if you are not running software they like. But this means anyone. It's not just the TCG and it's not just big companies. You could refuse to talk to another system in a P2P network if it is not running the right peer software. TC can enforce this. There have been papers written on how this could actually HELP pirates to keep their networks secret from authorities. And of course it can also be used for DRM - Apple could refuse to talk to you unless you are running the official iTunes client.

I wish critics of TC would stick to the facts and stop introducing bogus arguments. RMS tries to claim that a TC is no longer a general purpose computer. This is completely false. You can run anything on a TC. The remote attestation feature may allow third parties to refuse to talk to you. That doesn't change the fact that you can still run whatever you want.

People should criticize TC in terms of what it really does, instead of making up a bunch of BS about how you won't be able to run software unless someone else approves it.

It's also false that TC will defeat Linux. In fact most of the work towards TC today is happening on Linux and Xen. See http://trousers.sf.net/ for example. Linux is distributed today with TPM drivers. Trusted Grub will measure your kernel into the TPM so it can report what has booted. Xen has full TPM virtualization support. In contrast Microsoft is doing almost nothing with the TPM.

Please, let's try to keep our facts straight. There are legitimate criticisms of TC but much of what is out there is BS. Critics seem to love to throw out a mixture of truth and falsehoods, doing whatever they can to make the technology look bad. If we stick to the facts we can have a more reasoned and informative discussion.

Fluxbox is enormous compared to the sheer genius and simplicity of UWM/UDE.

If people want eye candy inside of a wm which is still sane and doesn't attempt to take over your system why aren't more people looking at Enlightenment?

... are very interesting. A part of it [highearthorbit.com]: "The details are fairly light, but it seems as though NASA is building a VR game on space exploration (remember Microsoft's Space Simulator [planetmic.com], or the free and open-source Orbiter [ucl.ac.uk]?). I wonder why NASA is rebuilding their own engine rather then picking up and using existing simulators (like Open-SESSAME [sf.net]) on top of the Unreal graphics/physics engine."

I was at sc06 last week. I am working (as a research assistant) at that National Center for Datamining, University of Illinois at Chicago. We won this bandwidth challenge by transmittting data using the UDT protocol. The results are here https://scinet.supercomp.org/2006/bwc/ (click on the NCDM link).

runs from a cd in ram and is just Mozilla, not much else.
ByzantineOS on Sourceforge
works with most computers with a lan connection.

Easy cross-platform development can be learned at wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). If you are serious and considers to sell your software anytimes in the future, there's no better choice.

If you know that one of the top inhibitors of Linux desktop adoption is applications (see http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005. pdf), you would wish that more developers would follow wyoGuide.

O. Wyss

If you'd like to track the (global) location and the time of the Mars rovers, or the time for any location on Mars, you can do so on your Palm Pilot with MarsClock, written 100% (coded, compiled, debuged) on my Palm with OnBoardC.

How about because the differences are difficult to hide.

That's not true, it's quite easy if one knows how. Just visit wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) and learn how an application gets a fitting native look ("Look ...) while still providing the same functionality (... & Feel") on each platform. wyoGuide follows the simple principle: "Look == native, Feel == genereal".

O. Wyss

GUIs (there isn't really a standard; perhaps wxWidgets?)

I made the mistake of choosing GTK+ for my application. Only after a while did I realize that GTK+ doesn't run natively on OSX. If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably choose Qt.

If you're using Java, Swing is usually a pretty safe bet

Playing Megamek.

There needs to be some sort of OSS equivalent to Visual Basic (what I mean by that is ease of developing GUI applications).

You should check out Gambas. It is a BASIC implementation with visual capabilities. It does not aim to clone VB, however, so there are many major differences, but it is the same concept.

(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Gambas. I am just a fan.)

DOSBox or VMWare Player + FreeDOS.

Really, though, who still uses dos apps?

Win32 compatibility is decent with Wine, though it has to be the most user hostile piece of software I deal with. Crossover Office is worth the money if you need to run Windows apps.

I'd really like to use MySQL as a backend storage...

Bit of a plug, but I have a project called Fruity Banking. It's python/cgi and has a web interface that looks and works like GNUcash. It can use sqlite, postgresql or mysql for the backend and it's endlessly scriptable (samples are included for scripting direct debits, etc.). I wrote it for the same reasons as you stated; because I wanted to access my accounts from anywhere and have the backend scriptable and generally muckable about with.

On the downside, it only really does account management (because that was all I needed) and simple account reports. It doesn't integrate with banking services (because I don't need it), but it would be very easy to script and extend to add these facilities.

i once wrote a numerical simulator of weakly coupled harmonic oscillators. i started out writing it in python. when it got to the point that the simulations took days, i re-wrote it in c++. upon running it the first time, it exited within one second. i was a bit unsettled, that it did not complain about a segmentation fault or some other error condition, which i had expected for a first run. turns out it ran correctly. a relative speedup of about 10000. so yes, python is slow. and yes, you are right, the ability to re-write performance-critical parts in C/C++ is a great boon to python (though it's possible in most other languages as well).

on the other hand, i discovered that numerical code written in java can approach the speed of C/C++. the added bonus here (if you come from python-land, and using jython is an acceptable choice for you), is that you can call the time-intensive routines in a safe language, and without having to write any glue code. in the absence of other constraints, i would recommend that combo, if you want to script in python, but need performance in a cpu-bound environment.