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Domain: sf.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to sf.net.
Comments · 3,385
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Re:Bought my microsoft. *sigh*
Actually, it can. Check out http://exult.sf.net/index.php
AC -
Re:Stone Age
IIRC that was the reason why there is no full GNOME in Slackware.
Actually, GNOME was dropped in Slackware because it was taking up so much of Patrick's time that the system as a whole was suffering -- it had nothing to do with X.org 6.9, which by the way didn't even exist at the time. In addition, there were already two whole communities of developers (perhaps three? gware, dropline, and freerock) putting time and effort into making their own GNOME distributions specifically for Slackware. But don't take my word for it...read all about his decision from http://lwn.net/Articles/129282/:
New Entry: gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and
New Entry: distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's
New Entry: been under consideration for more than four years. There are already good
New Entry: projects in place to provide Slackware GNOME for those who want it, and
New Entry: these are more complete than what Slackware has shipped in the past. So, if
New Entry: you're looking for GNOME for Slackware -current, I would recommend looking at
New Entry: these two projects for well-built packages that follow a policy of minimal
New Entry: interference with the base Slackware system:
New Entry:
New Entry: http://gsb.sf.net/
New Entry: http://gware.sf.net/
New Entry:
New Entry: There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to
New Entry: their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the
New Entry: entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same sort
New Entry: of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's _your_
New Entry: system, so I will also mention their project:
New Entry:
New Entry: http://www.dropline.net/gnome/
New Entry:
New Entry: Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME
New Entry: itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond
New Entry: the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent
New Entry: desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to ship
New Entry: every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the
New Entry: "stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a
New Entry: team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well
New Entry: documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of both
New Entry: Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options
New Entry: available for it.
New Entry:
New Entry: Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work. Enjoy. -
Re:Stone Age
IIRC that was the reason why there is no full GNOME in Slackware.
Actually, GNOME was dropped in Slackware because it was taking up so much of Patrick's time that the system as a whole was suffering -- it had nothing to do with X.org 6.9, which by the way didn't even exist at the time. In addition, there were already two whole communities of developers (perhaps three? gware, dropline, and freerock) putting time and effort into making their own GNOME distributions specifically for Slackware. But don't take my word for it...read all about his decision from http://lwn.net/Articles/129282/:
New Entry: gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and
New Entry: distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's
New Entry: been under consideration for more than four years. There are already good
New Entry: projects in place to provide Slackware GNOME for those who want it, and
New Entry: these are more complete than what Slackware has shipped in the past. So, if
New Entry: you're looking for GNOME for Slackware -current, I would recommend looking at
New Entry: these two projects for well-built packages that follow a policy of minimal
New Entry: interference with the base Slackware system:
New Entry:
New Entry: http://gsb.sf.net/
New Entry: http://gware.sf.net/
New Entry:
New Entry: There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to
New Entry: their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the
New Entry: entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same sort
New Entry: of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's _your_
New Entry: system, so I will also mention their project:
New Entry:
New Entry: http://www.dropline.net/gnome/
New Entry:
New Entry: Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME
New Entry: itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond
New Entry: the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent
New Entry: desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to ship
New Entry: every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the
New Entry: "stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a
New Entry: team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well
New Entry: documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of both
New Entry: Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options
New Entry: available for it.
New Entry:
New Entry: Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work. Enjoy. -
Re:The Next Big Thing
And imagine that, they've done it. (Well, except for the Voodoo. But I bet that would happen eventually.)
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Re:One Way
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Re:once an essential application?
The only Norton product I like is Ghost.
Give ntfsclone a try. Here's a good tutorial on using it.
It's easily scriptable, and is great in conjuction with ms-sys. If you spend a few minutes customizing something like RIP you can have the restore completely automated.
As a plus, everything's GPL'd. No licesence fees.
IMHO, Unattended + WPKG is still the best option, though... -
Re:once an essential application?
The only Norton product I like is Ghost.
Give ntfsclone a try. Here's a good tutorial on using it.
It's easily scriptable, and is great in conjuction with ms-sys. If you spend a few minutes customizing something like RIP you can have the restore completely automated.
As a plus, everything's GPL'd. No licesence fees.
IMHO, Unattended + WPKG is still the best option, though... -
Not enough *good* software for Linux
...I have mod points (same here)... still. Part of the problem is a lot of software, but very little *good* software
I'll one-up you. The major problem isn't there little good software, but very few good software engineers.
I wouldn't say it's the fault of the developers, it's just many don't know how to write good SW. Yet even that isn't their fault because they never were taught how to write good SW since even teachers and professors mostly don't know.
Writing good SW is quite simple all you have to do is follow some good guidelines, the tricky part is what or where are these guidelines. A few years ago when I started writing OSS I was faced with exactly this question and couldn't find any. So I decided to create my own guidelines : wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). Sure they might not be as good as they should be but so far they have suited me quite well.
O. Wyss -
Efficiently developing OSS for Linux and Windows
However, that's going to require OSS to start thinking about polish - making applications that Grandma can use. It's not impossible, but a lot of OSS projects need to concentrate on making applications that work well and look decent on Windows - even if we don't particularly care for the platform or the company that makes it.
I've said it numerous times the way to develop OSS is to do it cross-platform. Audacity is a superb sample how it can be done. Yet many other OSS don't follow its path most probably because they don't know how. Especially for helping developing cross-platform OSS I've created wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/).
There are two ways to make OSS more useful, one way is to look at the guidelines in text form and implement them as much as possible. This can be done with any framework and in any language, there's no restriction albeit the improvements will be limited to Linux. When true cross-platform functionality is needed there's IMO no way than to switch to wxWidgets and use the code samples of the wyoGuide guidelines as well.
IMO it's very important for the Linux desktop that free applications also can be tried on Windows. Only then users can get familiar with OSS and possibly switch to Linux later on.
O. Wyss
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Re:QA at Ubuntu?
Yeah, I remember trying Ubuntu myself, after hearing all the hype – at the time my entire home network was wireless, so as a result it was completely useless on my system. Couldn't find any wireless packages for it anywhere, tried Debian's but – oh, that's right, it's not binary-compatible because Ubuntu uses a different version of the kernel and GCC! Not to mention, it was unusably slow...
Anyway, Ubuntu trolling aside, I think the reason there's no real wireless support is because they won't put in programs like NdisWrapper, which is often the fastest and easiest way to get wireless running on Linux. And why don't they include NdisWrapper? Their free software guidelines don't allow it; it doesn't matter how convenient it may be for the end-user, if it's patented, involves binary blobs, or anything else that would restrict its freedom, it can't go in. That's the same reason you can't get MP3, DVD, or Flash support out of the box; first is patented, second requires "illegal" decryption software, and third is proprietary software.
Just to put things into perspective – I've been maintaining my own distribution a while now, and personally I'm taking a more pragmatic approach to the whole thing... the way I see it, I'd much rather a system that's ready to go out of the box than one that's basically assembled by idealistic purists. I can understand why the whole freedom thing's important and all, but a lot of the reason I like Linux in the first place is because you get so much ready to go "out of the box," and when everyday things like Flash and MP3 aren't available, that's really defeating the whole purpose. So MP3 – yep. Flash – yep. And wireless – one of the first things I did was make sure NdisWrapper was included, because otherwise all my NETGEAR adapters would go to waste, and I'd much rather use what I have than go all out and replace them with more "free" ones just because my favorite distribution refused to include a perfectly good driver all because of "freedom". (And yes, I am working on the ATI and nVidia drivers...)
But anyway, to get back on topic: Long story short, as far as I know, the whole wireless thing has nothing to do with Q&A, it's entirely because of their free software guidelines. So either go with their rules, or make up your own – you have the freedom to choose. Use it wisely. -
Re:Reluctantly, I find myself agreeingSF has problems. i had to stay with Tigris or start project on the Berlios instead of SF. But overall SF is not bad. In many respects it is quite good.
CVS story is ugly. I discovered that the links from the WEB site larytet.sf.net do not work 2 or 3 weeks after it happened. They could keep the links working. It is not a technical nightmare to keep old links from breaking or at least redirect them
I miss good built in forum support. Their PHP could run on better servers.
Indeed servers are down too often for any popular project, but my project is not that important and popular. I do not need 100% up time.
Their support was so far good and quick, typically in less than 24 hours i get helpful response
Overall i would give to SF 7 from 10
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Re:skype-rec
I don't know how high quality this is going to be for you, but it may be a start. http://sf.net/projects/skype-rec/ It will record the calls for you, and can then convert them to mp3 or anything else sox can handle.
It actually uses sox for mixing both ends of the conversation into one wav file, and then uses lame or oggenc to convert to the final result (or, you can not encode it at all, and leave it as a mixed wav). You can give it arbitrary options to lame or oggenc. -
skype-rec
I don't know how high quality this is going to be for you, but it may be a start. http://sf.net/projects/skype-rec/ It will record the calls for you, and can then convert them to mp3 or anything else sox can handle.
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It's not the best in the world but .....
It's not the best in the world but I still enjoy tinkering with http://wsframework.sf.net./ The theme is BAD but I'm working on it!
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Re:sales "closely track Billboard"
> Your plug-fu is strong, master, you must teach me.
Practice, young Jedi, practice -
Re:Article is stupid
The article is wrong about the flexibility of answer files and streamlined installations only applying to windows itself and not applications. We use http://unattended.sf.net/ and it works very well. 20 minutes later windows is install, updated, and all our standard packages installed including MS Office. In my opinion this beats the heck out of imaging XP using Ghost in terms of flexibility. We just boot into our installer image using PXE; no disks required at all. Ironically unattended uses a linux boot image with dosemu to bootstrap the Windows installer. Very slick. Unfortunately it looks like this whole process may have to be scrapped with Vista, sadly. We'll likely avoid vista for at least a full year after it is released, to give us time to integrate it properly into our operation (our servers are and will remain Linux based--can't wait to try Samba 4). The article is right about one thing, though. Setting up unattended installations is tedius.
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More on testing SD flash memory
There are a lot of different aspects to testing nand flash performance. The burst speed of a 25MHz 4-bit bus (used in original SD) would be about 12.5Mbytes/sec. But data is not written immediately to flash, but stored in a buffer. An often quoted read/write speed of 9Mbyte/sec likely involves writes to consecutively addressed blocks and the SD memory block management system has a ready supply of erased blocks. Put a filesystem on top of the NAND memory block management system, and things get more complex. Fragmentation is going to be a problem here eventually as well. Did this test do any long term testing? Another factor (for PC testing) is the SD interface. Is this over USB or and SD slot such as those found in a laptop. The peak rate may be 60Mbyte/sec, but add protocol overhead, and again, random access times can be heavily affected. I went through this a little while ago and wrote a test program which measures peak USB flash memory performance 'under' the filesystem to as to try to attain the quoted peak speeds. I have write and read results for plain blue Sandisk (5 and 8 MByte/sec) and Lexar (5 and 4 MByte/sec) at http://s3u.sf.net/
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Use ITPP C++ library which maps perfetly to matlab
Drop matlab. Use http://itpp.sf.net/ and stay out of gsl, it's way too complicated to do simple things like matrix operations. For plotting there are great tools for python.
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adzapper Squid redirector
I'm not sure what a better argument in favor of encouraging ISPs to set up web proxies for customers running adzapper than this (unless we're talking dialup, in which *not* downloading ads really saves on time).
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Not necessary hassle
I'm curious what people who've gone the DIY route are using to ease the management hassle that I could easily see a SAN becoming if it's OS is just straight Linux.
Done the DIY route.
1. I use LVM2 to manage the discs and ReiserFS partition. No need to create new mount points for disc (no new "/data2" directory to add to all configuration), just add more storage space to the LVM pool and grow the partition (which can be done while system is live with ReiserFS). More space will automatically be available in the directory exported with other service.
2. Have SMB configured so that unix system accounts and passwords are used (by default on recent installations). Once SMB is up and running, no more needs to fiddle the configuration. When new user must be added, just add him in the system and the user will be both available to Samba and SFTP/SSH. I rarely make new directories and configure them with every service, instead I create subdirectories inside the already exported one and rely on linux file access control mecanism.
3. Most distro provide nice GUI (or, enable you to install an additionnal software package like WebMin, GParted, etc...) to make above configuration painless.
4. Added benefits of using LVM2 (with or without addition of software RAID) is that data is automagically accessible when plugged in any other linux box (even when using external USB2 or 1394 cases). Useful if server craps, or when new bigger drives are installed and data must be copied from older disks (over network, old disk plugged in some other machine). When a hardware RAID controller craps, one must plug the disk in the exact same model, otherwise they aren't accessible.
5. Old desktop motherboard also have hardware monitoring/sensing, additionnal grunt power to run P2P clients like mldonkey or to run SETI@Home when idle, can run a virus scanner, etc... and general purpose distros have easy-to-configure package for those features, which may not be available on all XScale-based dedicated box (although the box from TFA *did* have SMART, could be used as a print server, etc...)
Curent system is a P2B motherboard with a Coppermine Celeron @1.1Ghz and 768MB (thanks to this guide for tips about CPU upgrade, and this other for RAM upgrade), 2x Seagate 300GB discs, for data and swap, compactflash with IDE adapter for booting or FreeDOS for flashing bios. Realtek 1Gigabit NIC (a little bit overkill given the bus speed). Bigwater SE for cooling. Took me 2 evenings after work to set-it up completly (actually, checking the watercooling kit against leakage and downloading the
In addition to serving files over Samba/NFS/SFTP/HTTP, it runs mldonkey, BOINC, lm_sensors, smartmontools & hddtemp, clamav, rkhunter & chkrootkit, auto-downloads updates with cron-apt and also has some package installed that make nice e-mail reports of everything.
It doesn't make coffee yet. -
Re:right...
"The Mac platform in general has very little activity on the 'free software' side"?
Here's a list just of free Mac apps on my system, not including the ones that came with it:
Camino.app,
Firefox.app,
Opera.app,
Shiira.app,
Mini vMac.app,
Nestopia.app,
SNES9x.app,
Freecell.app,
Jin.app,
n_v14.app,
Neave Space Invaders.app,
Quinn.app,
Celestia.app,
Google Earth.app,
Aurora.app,
beaTunes.app,
CocoaJT.app,
Google Video Player.app,
MacMP3Gain.app,
MPlayer OSX.app,
NicePlayer.app,
Ollie's iPod Extractor.app,
PandoraMan.app,
RealPlayer.app,
Remote Remote.app,
VLC.app,
Adium.app,
Azureus.app,
Compress.app,
EasyDMG.app,
StuffIt Expander.app,
Untar.app,
Eavesdrop.app,
FrostWire.app,
JBidWatcher.app,
QuickTerm.app,
Remove Duplicates.app,
Skype.app,
XNap 3.0-pre1.app,
Adobe Reader 7.0.8.app,
Formulate.app,
LiquidCD.app,
PDFLab.app,
TextWrangler.app,
Applejack DesInstaller3.app,
FinkCommander.app,
iLikeYouMore.app,
MassReplaceIt.app,
Preferential Treatment.app,
Temperature Monitor.app
one that works with DVDs, another one that works with DVD drives, and one that sounds like something you might buy when you were hungry for corn flakesThat's not to mention the numerous command-line and x-window programs which are free to download, all of the programs which have been ported to run on Fink, and hundreds or thousands of free programs you can find from sites like macupdate.com and versiontracker.com.
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Re:Too bad these WERE reported to mickeysoft
Having reported problems to microsoft and worked with people who do, I can say that Microsofts response to security issues is prompt DEPENDING ON THE PRODUCT. For excel and exchange the issues were fixed quickly and quietly. I don't know about other products and haven't delt with them. Obviously if you look at my website and the Projects I am involved in you will see why I have reported things for these products.
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Re:Solution?
We can't blame Average Joe. If they (and their ISPs!) didn't hear about Jabber, it is somehow Jabber's fault.
I really wonder if all ISPs know about Jabber.
I wonder why Jabber community doesn't work with Tipic corp. (http://www.tipic.com ) to implement video/audio chat to jabber? Because they are closed source? Well, their server and client are closed source but they are using open standards.
Look what it says:
Tipic Voip/audio implementation is based on the following Open Source projects:
- http://iaxclient.sf.net/ Basic VOIP stack. Tipic added video, wideband audio and support for echo cancellation.
- http://www.speex.org/ Default audio Codec. Tipic sponsored the echo cancellation improvements.
- http://www.theora.org/ Default Video Codec.
- http://www.libsdl.org/ Video visualizzation in TipicIM.
So, they managed to make a open standards based video chat. Problem is, the geek community sees videochat as "lame". Well, average people LOVE it.
I wonder how many people congratulated them for implementing such a thing on Jabber?
I bet that Average Joe would use Jabber if it performs much better on video chat. That is the "geek vs average user" thing hurting open standards as usual.
Who used Mozilla while it was a total geek thing? How many average, non techie people use Firefox because it performs better and promises more security than IE?
Remember people blamed average Joe not using Mozilla giant instead of IE. Who's fault was that than?
Look to another example. Gizmo project is completely open source, not coded by guys who coded Kazaa and completely open standards based. It has many non techie, non geek users. Do you think they are impressed by GPL, RMS and open standards? No, Gizmo sounds better than Skype, that is all -
802.1x or NAC
The ultimate solution is 802.1x. Unfortunately, that essentially ties one mac per port (the first MAC to associate authenticates the port) for Cisco. Nortel can do multiple MACs per port while authenticating each one. You can also go with a VLAN switching solution like Cisco's Secure Access, Bradford's Campus Manager, etc. Those run $100k+ per 10,000 ports. There are FOSS alternatives as well like NetPass
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good grief... desktop choice
Why do you think you need the latest/greatest KDE/GNOME to replace Win98? The machine is still Win98-era, so that's about the best you should be able to expect from it and get decent performance. Choose a lesser desktop...you can probably find one that still has feature-parity to Win98 by looking through Windowmaker, XFCE, Equinox, Blackbox, IceWM, etc. - and you'll get decent performance.
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good grief... desktop choice
Why do you think you need the latest/greatest KDE/GNOME to replace Win98? The machine is still Win98-era, so that's about the best you should be able to expect from it and get decent performance. Choose a lesser desktop...you can probably find one that still has feature-parity to Win98 by looking through Windowmaker, XFCE, Equinox, Blackbox, IceWM, etc. - and you'll get decent performance.
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Re:Moneydance
There are plenty of good free personal finance apps for Linux without having to buy a licence for a proprietary java application.
I personally use FruityBanking, although I'm a little biased since I wrote it. It's modelled on GnuCash, but with a web interface, and written in Python so everyone can play and it's flexible, open, easy to build on and compatible with SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
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cr.yp.to
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Just tell me one thing
I'm an open-source developer (Ultima Linux, PyWord – just to name a few. And yet I'm living on the east coast of the U.S. In fact, so's Red Hat. Not to mention Slackware, now in Minnesota, or even MySQL, who's all the way over in Sweden. I've also noticed a lot of my users tend to be from European countries – Germany, France, Sweden, England, Ireland... and that's only counting a small handful. Oh, and Linus himself is in Portland, Oregon, which is a bit closer but still not in the valley. So unless I'm missing the point entirely, I'd have to say the article must be completely wrong...
DISCLAIMER: I will admit I haven't read the article yet, so I probably am missing the point, but may as well post anyway, since this is Slashdot -
What about...
User-mode Linux? I've never used Xen in my life – never had any reason for it, and honestly it looks like too much effort for what I'd need it for – but I use user-mode Linux literally every day. Not only is it hosting my Web site (which is actually the reason I've gotten addicted to it), but I've also been using it for software development right on my own machine – since the only machine I have that's suitable for intensive dev stuff is my AMD64, I've set the thing up to run the '64 version natively, and then most of the 32-bit work is done on user-mode. And the nice thing is, it doesn't require any changes to the host kernel, and except for a few special tools for networking, etc., everything you need is right in the kernel source itself.
While I'm on the topic, it's not exactly a virtualization program, but QEMU is also very handy; I tend to use it quite a bit for torture testing new releases, and it's also useful if a certain program won't compile on the user-mode installation because it needs low-level kernel stuff, full POSIX threads support, etc. Even without the KQEMU module it's still faster than the Duron-700/256MB I'd been using before, and considerably more convenient as well.
Anyway, just thought I'd point out that there are other technologies, and other applications as well – servers aren't the only things which benefit from this stuff! -
Code reviews
I was kind of suprised to see the recommendation for formal code reviews. In my experience those end up either as "hurt feelings" slugfests or, just as ineffectively, full of "you should put a space after this brace" comments. I feel that pair programming is more effective way of getting multiple eyes on the code, spreading knowledge around, training the new guys, and all that good stuff.
And of course there's always static analysis to catch any problems that do manage to sneak in there... -
PHP may have its faults, but I enjoy using it
I don't know, PHP may have its faults, but I enjoy working with it:
http://wsframework.sf.net/ -
FindBugs is awesome
As the lead guy on a "competing" static analysis framework - PMD - I can say that FindBugs is definitely a great piece of work. It catches all sorts of complicated problems with concurrency, does forwards/backwards data flow analysis, etc, etc. It's pretty sweet. Dr Pugh, who runs the project at the University of Maryland, did a JavaPosse interview that's some more good info on the project and where it's going.
Of course, if you really want to do source code analysis (vs bytecode analysis, which is what FindBugs does), then go for PMD, and [plug] get the book! [/plug] -
Tuxshop
http://tuxshop.sf.net/ Uses QT libs to provide MySQL/SQLite backends. There's also a commercial version with support http://www.shcircuit.com/~ross/
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Studying robotics does not require a robot(s)
Actually studying A.I. does not need a robot so badly. I normally use a combination of player and the provided simulators, stage and gazebo for A.I. http://playerstage.sf.net/ . Stage is good for studying group behaviour(agents) and gazebo is 3d with physics which make it great for more precise robotics.
For robot vision like tasks i suggest aquiring a fisheye camera, sticking it to some mobile platform - a chair with wheels in the worst case - for avoiding shake and wandering with it around, recording a movie to interpret it later with computer vision + A.I.
Also checkout my project http://miarn.sf.net/ to see my recent research in robotics, the world best GUI for mobile robots.
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Studying robotics does not require a robot(s)
Actually studying A.I. does not need a robot so badly. I normally use a combination of player and the provided simulators, stage and gazebo for A.I. http://playerstage.sf.net/ . Stage is good for studying group behaviour(agents) and gazebo is 3d with physics which make it great for more precise robotics.
For robot vision like tasks i suggest aquiring a fisheye camera, sticking it to some mobile platform - a chair with wheels in the worst case - for avoiding shake and wandering with it around, recording a movie to interpret it later with computer vision + A.I.
Also checkout my project http://miarn.sf.net/ to see my recent research in robotics, the world best GUI for mobile robots.
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Re:OSS, Free or a Few Dollars?Totally agree, with what you say.
BTW is possible to search in Source Forge, where you can filter your search as web, or whateveryouwant. But in the parent post you can see the best choices.
Most importantly, change the system based on feedback from the workers.
This is the most important thing you say, because the developers tend to think like "ohh what an amazing app we develop" and then the user doesnt have the little button that does "ping" (As the "machine that does ping") where he wants, and... as a developer maybe its a little difficult to understand some of them, but is mandatory to know that "before we start the development", we must take (at least) 1 month (after we "finish" the app) to add all the changes they need. -
Freenet is really made for this...
...and you'll find all sorts of interesting stuff there, if you look. It might take a few hours for a new Freenet node to get integrated into the network, at which point response time will improve. Don't ever expect it to have fast interactive-surfing response times, though. Get used to opening a bunch of links in new tabs, and coming back to check them in a few minutes.
Freenet's currently got four "summer of code" projects under way, plus their full-time coder. I'm not sure I like the network changes in 0.7 but I'm trusting that the developers know the critical points better than I do.
The stuff you find on Freenet ranges from the obligatory porn and anarchy junk, to weird conspiracy theory stuff, fairly sane political expression, DeCSS and similar technical content, and lots of "flogs", the name of which is yours to absorb.
Frost is a Usenet-like messaging system that uses Freenet as its back-end message store. It also takes a while to get going; after starting your Frost instance you might want to come back in 20 minutes to get the updated boards list, add a bunch of new boards, and give it another 20 minutes to pull messages in those boards. Once your Frost is up and running, you'll start to appreciate what Freenet's really capable of. Search the available files, or participate in a few discussions. Realize that the message transport latency might be anywhere from a few minutes to many hours, so correspondence will be reminiscent of Fidonet speeds.
Seriously, you owe it to yourself to check this stuff out. Don't claim to know internet anonymity without giving Freenet a few days' effort. -
FOSS financial applications aren't used
IMO financial applications are the number one sample why the Linux desktop hasn't gotten more than a few percents market share. Can you really imagine an ordinary dentist ever use GnuCash on his Windows box? Or a carpenter, or a house wife? Can you really think that such people go out, buy or install Linux on their computers? No that won't happen, not until the art of writing FOSS has changed dramatically.
That said financial FOSS applications will only become possible when they are true cross-platform, when they are available on Windows and MacOS as well. Yet that's not sufficient, they also have to look native and they have to feel native on any platform. Else people, who use computer as tools and not as gadgets, won't use them.
Ordinary people don't look with the eyes of a fan, the look with the eyes of an annoyed worker who wants it task done as fast as possible. None of the so far mentioned applications look acceptable in their eyes. At the current state none written in Java or with GTK will satisfy these people. The only choice which produces acceptable results are using the commercial QT or the free wxWidgets toolkit. It may sound harsh but that's the case, just listen to the complains these people bring up against FOSS applications (or read http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005. pdf).
Yet looking acceptable is only one step towards broad acceptance, the other step is feel acceptable. Sorry, a FOSS application following the Gnome UI guidelines does not feel acceptable on Windows, MacOSX, KDE, etc. If you port a Gnome application to another platform you have to take care of all the little details which are different, which annoy users when the don't fit. These little details are listed in the only cross-platform guidelines wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/).
To summarize, to make a FOSS financial application successful you have to follow these simple steps:
- Design the application cross-platform, then you get enough market share.
- Write it with an acceptable look anywhere, use QT or wxWidgets.
- Care for acceptable feel anywhere, follow the cross-platform guidelines wyoGuide.
O. Wyss -
Re:If you care about performance...
it's actually very easy to get excellent performance out of java -- just use data structures as you would use them in C:
- use arrays, not array lists etc.
- avoid memory allocation
- avoid side effects (and make judicious use of the final qualifier)
- use public static methods (which the compiler is happy to inline)
i'm currently using java to do classical molecular dynamics simulation (and statistical analyses thereof: esra), and the speed (without any tweaking) is consistenly within a factor of two of what i would get with C/C++. this is certainly not so with python (which, for my numerical problems, turned out to be about four orders of magnitude slower).
YMMW, but mine is excellent
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JRat
JRat is open-source, and works anywhere using bytecode injection. It's the only serious solution for profiling applications running in production as it
A) doesn't require much overhead
B) doesn't require code changes
C) doesn't require some sort of front-end to monitor or use
D) doesn't have a rediculous cost per server
E) runs in your typical environment, not some magical profiling IDE option
We use this every day (via an ant task) to profile a Wall Street trading system that handles billions of dollars of transactions every week. Would you trust that to anything else?
Signing anon because my employment contract specifically prevents me from revealing this sort of thing -
Re:What gets me about it...
As I said earlier, it's kind of both a good and a bad thing that ReactOS exists. It's definitely not going to help get very much Linux software available, which probably isn't a good thing for people like us. But the point I was trying to make is that creating an alternative operating system compatible with existing software would at least be a bit more practical in the long run, if not very ideal, because the existing software applications could continue to run (eventually) without problems, and there wouldn't be any licensing stuff to muck around with.
That said, I think that there's actually quite a bit of good ReactOS could do as well. Because it's an open-source effort, once it's finally at a stable release, it might be possible to, say, mix and match ReactOS code with Linux, possibly even adding "native" support for Windows software and drivers into Linux – something far lower-level, more integrated, and more capable than, say, Wine or NdisWrapper would be able to do.
And honestly, there are still a lot of things Linux/UNIX will always be able to do better than any Windows-ish system, and a lot of die-hards who would never use anything else. So for all we know, things may just continue the way they are today: The proprietary software companies will still be there, but for those who want a choice, a better system, or a cute penguin mascot, there are alternatives. Only time will tell. -
Horrible
What kind of list is this? It mistakenly left PyScrabble (an awesome multi-player Scrabble game written in Python) off the list. How dare they!
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Re:So let me get this straight
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Check out eCryptfs
Check out eCryptfs, which has recently been accepted upstream into the
-mm Linux kernel:
http://ecryptfs.sf.net/
This encrypts on a per-file basis, so that you can grab and copy the
file from the lower filesystem (which can be pretty much anything --
ext3, jfs, reiserfs, nfs...) without even having to mess with all that
partitioning stuff.
It's a great cryptographic filesystem now with just passphrase
support. It looks like they're going to be done with the public key
subsystem (with pluggable PKI support) before too long. HMAC
(integrity verification) will come next, and then when they get into
the policy stuff, eCryptfs will go beyond any crypto filesystem that
anyone has ever written, Open Source or not.
Coincidentally, the header format is inspired by the OpenPGP
specification (RFC 2440). -
Re:This isn't too surprising
Don't delude yourself into thinking that users are going to fetch your ads and not just the content. ISPs deploying adzapper are on the rise, too. Lack of having a business model doesn't constitute a crisis on our part.
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Web advertising considered harmful
and this is a great example of why and how at work. As if you needed another reason to get your ISP to run a web proxy running adzapper or switch to one that does.
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email()
Probably a little late to actually be read by anyone, but I find that the script at http://poss.sf.net/email always manages to get my mail through the filter as it meets Microsoft's requirments to send the mail to Hotmail accounts by default, well, unless you are being blocked because the mail you send is actually very spam like... "8Uy \/i4gr4 |\|0w!!!"
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Re:Trial and error works.
I did. I created two Hotmail accounts for testing. I tried sending mails from PHP using the mail() function and through the PHPMailer library (http://phpmailer.sf.net/). I also tried sending mails through Thunderbird and through my hosting service's webmail interface. My messages always have been marked as spam.
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Re:It's not like that