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Before I switched to using LaTeX for everything, I used OOoLatex, which lets you use LaTeX for your equations and OOo for your layout.

Personally, I find LaTeX layout much easier to handle, so I do recommend switching entirely, but it is a matter of opinion.

I used to like Mutella but it's abandonware AFAIK (last release is dated August 2004). There's a deb package for the free version of LimeWire, or you could try gtk-gnutella, a very nice GTK client with a remote command-line interface so you can leave it running at home and control it via ssh from work (not that I would ever spend my employer's valuable time doing something like that).

Linux Games..

http://savage2.s2games.com/main.php
http://www.eve-online.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://www.flightgear.org/
http://www.freeciv.org/
http://www.sauerbraten.org/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://wz2100.net/
http://www.cubeengine.com/
http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wormux.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.ufoai.net/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://tremulous.net/
http://www.eternal-lands.com/
http://www.enemyterritory.com/

Perhaps you could stop with the "No games for Linux" BS already as you obviously have your head up your ass.

ASSP

30 minutes to install on an exchange server... filters out all the spam.

I run it on all my clients, and they average about 95% of all mail intercepted as spam with a zero false positive rate.
http://assp.sourceforge.net/

Just one line for you...

http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/

Just like Firebird when Borland/Inprise close sourced Interbase.

Borland may have added features since then (I haven't even looked), but Firebird is much more useable than Interbase even was.

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/firebird

People have said as a joke that OpenOffice.org or similar programs will take over once they have their own clippy, but may a true word is said in jest.

Wow, I am surprised that gnutella is still popular. I remember using gnut client in Linux many years ago (early 2000s).

For kicks, I installed Mutella in my Debian box since gnut is outdated and seems to be dead. Now, I seem to be missing servers to connect. What are good sources to get servers to connect to these days? I want to see how good of files to find...

"The Headline is Garbage"

Yes, and maybe the story is an advertisement. It would be much better if Slashdot editors provided a statement with every story that no one at their company took money to post the story.

I looked at the Limewire web site and saw what I think is an attempt at manipulation of people who don't have enough technical knowledge to evaluate the usefulness of their product.

Anyhow, the Azureus web site says it is "the most popular bittorrent client". Azureus is open source and free, and, in my experience, works just fine.

Something is fishy about Slashdot's Limewire story. Mmmm. Lime with fish. Except this is apparently rotten fish.

• Patent and royalty free (the BBC worked very hard at this)
• GPLv2, LGPL, MIT or MPL licensed reference implementation
• Finished: the bitstream has been frozen, etc. Integration with container formats isn't quite there though.
• Better than h.264

NIH, perhaps? Too many bored engineers?

Aren't you aware of the fact that open source is very version-shy, in general? And that a quality of an open source application is not correlated with its version number? I thought this was Slashdot where such things need not be explained.

That's their problem, not mine. If I see "0.46" in front of something, I think "buggy POS with no features." (1.0 also makes me think "buggy POS" with the difference that at least 1.0 has all the features implemented.) The version number system is quite well-established, if the Inkscape coders don't want to use it, then they can do that-- but they also can't complain when normal people like myself look at the version number and think "buggy POS."

Anything involving text? Of course vector, using GIMP/Photoshop for text is self-inflicted torture.

Photoshop stores text as vectors. (Photoshop also has enough vector features to do most, if not all, of the other items on your list-- perhaps a bit more awkwardly, but they can be done.) Doing it in GIMP, yes, is self-inflicted torture, but then again, so is using GIMP at all.

And this is sad. I know Photoshop came first and deeply entrenched itself into the brains of users. But come on people, it's time to give it a second thought. It's 21st century and vector editors have progressed far, far beyond what was available in the 90s.

So has Photoshop. It has a ton of vector features, you seem entirely ignorant of. I'm not saying that Photoshop is the end-all be-all of vector art, obviously Adobe wouldn't snipe sales from their own Illustrator, but it's not nearly as dire as you make it out to be.

It's curious that for your pick, you chose one of the things that is actually common to both Inkscape and GIMP - the file dialog provided by the GTK library! Of course Inkscape does not maliciously missort your files, it's just the default with the GTK version you were using. And I have just searched even deleted and closed bug reports and could not find yours. So, if it's still not fixed in 0.46, please go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape and report it.

Yes, Inkscape doesn't give crap about my bug and simply deletes it. (No doubt without fixing it first.) And it's my job to re-submit the bug? Screw that. What reason do I have to believe it would get fixed the second time? If they don't want my input, if they're just going to delete it without comment, they shouldn't ask for bug reports in the first place.

Whether or not you can find it, it was in there. I know, because I still have the URL it was located at on the craptactular SourceForge.net: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=604306&aid=1609779&group_id=93438 It says "Artifact: This Artifact Has Been Made Private. Only Group Members Can View Private ArtifactTypes" which I assume is a retarded SourceForge code for "this bug has been deleted."

From the email, I gather the buck was passed to the "GTK layer" and not by Inkscape itself. I guess it's ok to delete bugs when you pass the buck to some other open source project that also won't bother to fix it. Oh look, there's the link: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461 "Unconfirmed!"

For the record, I can't test whether it's fixed or not because I don't have a Mac anymore. (At least, not one I'm willing to install X11 on.)

P.S. To any open source developers reading this: If you want bug submissions, please do not use SourceForge.net. It would be hard to find worse bug tracking software.

Sounds to me like the problem is your window manager. MDI is effectively dead; it's window managers not applications that should be responsible for managing windows. If you're stuck on MS Windows try replacing the bloated default shell with something better and faster.

PS: It's always been done like this!

Likewise, Jetpack fuel is stored on the server. If it wasn't, it would have been hacked ten minutes after the game was released. In Quake style games, everything important is serverside.

o removed frame-rate dependence for building structures and jetpack usage.

If you cannot achieve standard 77 FPS, your physics will be a little different. You may notice that if you try playing with cl_physfps 30 (or cl_maxfps 30 when not using independent physics). Your jumps (and rocket-jumps) won't be that fast and high as with 77 FPS.

And even that subject is on the ropes. We've all heard about the JMRI case around here. The current (and currently under appeal) voice of the US District Court claims that breaches of the license sound in contract law, not copyright law. Hopefully the Appeals Court will remedy the District Court Judge's cranio-rectal inversion, but I'm not holding my breath.

http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/index.html/

Seems a little dumb to pay $20 to purge the account when you can easily use FetchYahoo! located at http://fetchyahoo.twizzler.org/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/fetchyahoo

-eg

LONDON (AP) -- Google Apps today announced its first big hit: an AsciiArt video streaming proxy aimed at struggling British ISPs.

Coded by a Melvin Haymeggle, a young college student, in a little under 18 hours, the proxy uses the open-source video player MPlayer, and the video display library aalib, to convert streaming video on-the-fly into ASCII art.

"At first it was just a joke between me and a few friends," said Haymeggle. "Me and my roommates used it to mess with people leaching our wireless to watch porn. But then Google App Engine was announced, and we figured it would be fun to write up some Python bindings for it."

The announcement comes at a perilous time for British ISPs, who have been struggling to come to terms with the increased demand for on-demand video as a result of BBC's iPlayer.

"We were shocked -- shocked! -- to realize that new Internet applications result in increased use of resources like bandwidth," said Charles Freskell, a spokesman for the British ISPs Association. "We were on the verge of sending a bill to the BBC when this proxy came along."

"Of course, we're still going to be monetizing content ruthlessly," he added quickly.

The application quickly and seamlessly converts the iPlayer's 1024x960, 24-bit colour, 30 frame-per-second video stream into an 80x25, 8-bit greyscale, 4 frame-per-second video stream. It is estimated that the proxy will save over 9 petabytes per furlong-fortnight.

Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman could not be reached for comment. "He's just mad that everyone has forgotten this was available in Emacs since 1997," said a source close to the open source figurehead.

I program mainly in Java since 1999. There's no excuse to _need_ tiny fonts to be able to read the source. In Java, C++, x86 Assembly, or even COBOL. Maybe if you had to program in Shakespeare, I could see the point. Otherwise, there's something awfully amiss with that code, if it's not (easily) comprehensible in a 25 row window.

Mind you, you can still have more rows than that just because you have an awful lot of screen estate, and there's no reason to go above an already easily readable font size anyway. But as a rule of thumb, if you find yourself going, "but with 25 rows I'd have to page down 4 times just to see where the loop ends" or worse "but I really need that 7 pixel font to read that source", then you have a pretty good case for refactoring.

I've just ordered an M-Audio Transit (mainly for my fista laptop with uber shite noisy headphone jacks). http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Transit-main.html
From what I can tell, the drivers upload a firmware to it everytime you plug it in (or power-on your pc). This here will do the job in linux, apparently. http://sourceforge.net/projects/usb-midi-fw/

that members of this site haven't started an open source project

You mean, like the Electronic Voting Machine Project and OpenSTV and the Voting Software Project and the Open Voting Consortium and Blue Screen Democracy and probably a dozen other projects?

One problem is that voting software/hardware has to be certified by the state. A ponderous, time-consuming, and expensive bureaucratic nightmare not particularly friendly to amateurs (or even corporations, unless there's a good prospect for vast sales).

that members of this site haven't started an open source project

You mean, like the Electronic Voting Machine Project and OpenSTV and the Voting Software Project and the Open Voting Consortium and Blue Screen Democracy and probably a dozen other projects?

One problem is that voting software/hardware has to be certified by the state. A ponderous, time-consuming, and expensive bureaucratic nightmare not particularly friendly to amateurs (or even corporations, unless there's a good prospect for vast sales).

that members of this site haven't started an open source project

You mean, like the Electronic Voting Machine Project and OpenSTV and the Voting Software Project and the Open Voting Consortium and Blue Screen Democracy and probably a dozen other projects?

One problem is that voting software/hardware has to be certified by the state. A ponderous, time-consuming, and expensive bureaucratic nightmare not particularly friendly to amateurs (or even corporations, unless there's a good prospect for vast sales).

that members of this site haven't started an open source project

You mean, like the Electronic Voting Machine Project and OpenSTV and the Voting Software Project and the Open Voting Consortium and Blue Screen Democracy and probably a dozen other projects?

One problem is that voting software/hardware has to be certified by the state. A ponderous, time-consuming, and expensive bureaucratic nightmare not particularly friendly to amateurs (or even corporations, unless there's a good prospect for vast sales).

I recently put a couple of my own projects that I've been hosting for years and years on Sourceforge. It's all still available at http://scarydevil.com/~peter/sw/ but I've moved the latest snapshots into CVS at Sourceforge.

http://plugdaemon.sourceforge.net/
http://amberlist.sourceforge.net/

I've also spent an awful lot of time lately on Speedtables.

http://speedtables.sourceforge.net/

I recently put a couple of my own projects that I've been hosting for years and years on Sourceforge. It's all still available at http://scarydevil.com/~peter/sw/ but I've moved the latest snapshots into CVS at Sourceforge.

http://plugdaemon.sourceforge.net/
http://amberlist.sourceforge.net/

I've also spent an awful lot of time lately on Speedtables.

http://speedtables.sourceforge.net/

I recently put a couple of my own projects that I've been hosting for years and years on Sourceforge. It's all still available at http://scarydevil.com/~peter/sw/ but I've moved the latest snapshots into CVS at Sourceforge.

http://plugdaemon.sourceforge.net/
http://amberlist.sourceforge.net/

I've also spent an awful lot of time lately on Speedtables.

http://speedtables.sourceforge.net/

An excellent free, gay man editor. You can find it here:

http://analtron.sourceforge.net/

It completely replaces WoMen for me. And unlike some other gaymen, it is a native Blackman ass that performs great.

White Willy

Well, if they'd just switch to using a hardened Linux configuration possibly on more standard hardware, rather than some obscure RISC chip (even apple stopped using RISC)

well, they could download anti-virus software, straight from a repository. anti-spyware? switch to firefox http://nixory.sourceforge.net/

Linux comes with firewall support built-in but you can get GUI tools to make firewall management more usable. The question is since Linux (even a hardened system) should have an intrusion detection system, are they going to nail you if you use Linux and don't run an IDS?

* In fact, virtualize the entire filesystem so a bad program can't screw up your install.

Partially implemented in Vista. Very nice to run legacy apps without admin privleges.

* Instead of babysitting the user with endless "Cancel Allow" dialogs, allow some programs (administrator-defined) to run as administrator (i.e. root) by adding a popup dialog to ask the password. Add the possibility of remembering the password FOR THIS SESSION ONLY.

Did you ever use Vista? I've been working on my Vista machine since this morning, and i didn't see a single UAC dialog. Things might be different if you're a developer, but in that case it might make sense to run your development apps under another user account.

Btw. UAC can be configured to prompt for user:password instead of Permit/Deny. That's what i did.

* Speaking of filesystems, add native compatibility for ext2,ext3,ext4 (is it out yet?), reiserfs, jfs, xfs, etc. We live in an open world. Add compatibility or die.

I don't see a reason for doing this. Cross file system support in the OSS world is pretty spotty too, and simply: there is no need for it. Dual boot is never done in the corporate world, no SOHO customer does it either, just a few enthusiasts.

* Make (or adopt) a decent partitioner that can resize partitions without requiring to buy third party products.

Implemented in Vista.

* Give up on the directx "intellectual property" stuff and release the code under a GPL-compatible license.

Where is the business reason for this?

* Modify the kernel so it can run in Xen without CPU-virtualization extensions.

Even Hyper-V and VS2005 need their extensions installed in order for virtualization to reach properly. Besides, Citrix and Microsoft have an agreement on virtualization support. Which will probably result in what you need.

* Release the specs for developers to be able to make and use their own window managers (i.e.KDE, GNOME, etc) work with Windows.

I think a lot of this stuff is hard-coded and not as flexible as X11. There are replacements shells available, but they're not exactly the same as a window manager:

http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/

* Get rid of all that Digital Rights Management crap and allow users to save videos and music in hi-res formats for backups. Windows media player shouldn't allow any copy-protection crap to execute and spy on them.

Quick question: If Microsoft removed all their DRM stuff from WMP now, how much more would they earn in 2008?

* Open-source network-based apps and provide official support a-la sourceforge for users to submit bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Microsoft offers official support for a fee, just like almost all linux distributors. Community support is available through http://forums.microsoft.com/ and a myriad of 3rd Party Websites.

* Don't sell 7 different versions of the OS. Make the management and administration parts available on the darn CD / DVD.

I'll agree on the 7 different version thing, but it doesn't really matter. As a business, you don't have much of a choice. It's either Business or Ultimate if you don't have volume licensing, or Enterprise if you do.

I don't understand what you mean with management and administration - it's all there on the CD, and the RSAT tools for Server 2003/2008 are available for download.

* Here's an idea: Make (or use) a "/home" partition so users can put their configuration and files in a directory of their own, so advanced users can either boot Windows or Linux and still have their important documents unmodified.

Yes, that's configurable. At least since Windows 2000.

* And please, for the love of everything good in the world, GET RID OF THAT ANTIPIRACY C

you're talking about true emulators, which some VMs actually are (e.g. ones that support endian or different CPUs). I actually wanted to avoid using the word VM in my post because it is a limited form of VM with pretty much only I/O emulation like MoL and not one with hardware emulation or special mode processing (though you're correct in that if they want to support some features like protected mode, they would need an exception), which is why I started by calling it a transparent emulator.

And speaking of endian-ness (which will not be the case here because we know the processor is Win-Tel), only a small subset of cases need special attention code-wise if your hardware ran the same assembly instruction set but in a different endian-ness (called bi-endian CPUs) - I/O (e.g. swapping during I/O) and the special case of some types of casting. This is not the case of most emulators that emulate other hardware - I would assume they store in the native endian-ness and bytecode interpret the other processor's assembly set.

Here's why you need a special handler for casting:

short one = 1;
char *cp = (char*)

if *cp is now 0, you are running on big endian hardware (or in big endian mode on bi-endian hardware) and if *cp is 0, you are running on little endian hardware. This is a common test for runtime endian-ness.

ODF Convertor, is an addin for Office. Microsoft is Funding, and providing documentation and help.
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/

It's already been ported to Win32. Granted, that's mostly for testing purposes and needs lots of work to be useful. But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it was ported to Windows 7.

The additional GPRs and XMM registers are not vendor-specific, as they are a natural part of the AMD64/EM64T platform, and Intel has adopted them as well, as they are a required part of the specification. These registers may speed up tight inner loops by allowing to keep more data a hand. Yes, I know that this is not going to help many applications, for example data structures with a large percentage of pointers/references (trees and graphs, for instance) might actually get slower on 64 bits due to the size increase and memory "speed" (unless you are using something like DataDraw), but expensive computations on packed homogeneous data can get much faster under right circumstances.

If you can generate tight inner code from a node tree, for example, even if the expression trees you can compile are very simple, things can get much faster, because less accesses even to cache equals more speed. You basically cannot saturate a modern PC CPU's execution units from memory today - if you're not running from registers and have to hit the memory to reach the big picture (pun intended :)) in order to just multiply and add some pixel values from several layers, you might be losing an order of magnitude of performance compared to the theoretical limit. If the operations are more complex, and you have dozens of layers and you are adding them and multiplying them and processing them all over the place, it is faster to keep the intermediate the values in registers even at the cost of having to generate some code. The other option is to spill the values into intermediate buffers and that is not a good thing for performance.

I do not think that the people at Adobe are dumb. VirtualDub uses this idea, and I think I read something about the Windows GUI kernel using such techniques as well. I fail to see why the leader in the market of graphics editors would avoid such opportunity.

There are lots of research labs working with low-cost multi-touch-sensitive tables. At this point, one can practically build such a table for a few hundred dollars (plus a computer).

I literally spent today demonstrating my lab's table. An early prototype is shown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doK66IYG0Ug, and instructions for building one are at http://open-ftir.sourceforge.net/. Unfortunately the pictures and video from today's open house are not up yet, but they should be shortly (search for "Equis lab").

There are also lots of free libraries for handling the input. Mine (EquisFTIR) happens to be Windows-only and aimed at Microsoft XNA developers. There are lots of portable ones, often built on Intel's OpenCV library: check out http://nuigroup.com/ for more information.

Couple the table with some object-recognition libraries, and you could probably build yourself a Surface-equivalent with a few hundred dollars and nothing but FOSS.

The part that I don't get is why the labels aren't offering to Apple, and thus Apple to its customers album discounts. Sell me an entire Regina Spektor album for the $6 or $7 and I'll gladly pay for it, instead of otherwise buying 4 tracks individually.

As an aside, I'd appreciate iTunes letting me easily select blocks of music I could keep in the same order, even when listening to randomized music.

I think these guys can help you out.

Um... Apple threatened legal action against the makers of the original Podcast aggregator (iPodder), and they had to change their name (to Juice Receiver). No, Podcasting is not just a hyperlink to an audio file, it refers to the distribution of audio & video by RSS. It's just a name. It didn't start with Apple, they were latecomers to the party, and it's not tied to the iPod, either.

I've been listening for 3+ years now, currently using PodcastReady and their cross-platform mypodder client, which runs directly off any device that looks like a disk, including most MP3 players. (iPod? What's an iPod?) These are some pretty broad sidelines there...

I know I posted roughly this comment in the last GSoC Slashdot announcement but I've been told the information is really useful and some people might have missed it.

On the note about how GSoC effects our project you should take a look at our web stats since we where announced as a GSoC mentor organisation. The increase has been massive!

Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.

The following game projects have been accepted,

• Battle for Wesnoth (ideas), a very cool tu rn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
• BZFlag (ideas), the cla ssic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
• Linden Lab (ideas), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
• ScummVM (ideas), an engine whic h lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
• Thousand Parsec (ideas), a framework fo r building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
• Tux4Kids (ideas), a group of mul ti-platform open source educational games for children.
• WorldForge (ideas), one of the ori ginal open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).

The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.

This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).

Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.

One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.

The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a

http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=wireshark&filename=wireshark-setup-1.0.0.exe&use_mirror=superb-west Takes you right to the DL. The project page has the older file (from what I can see).

It's GPLed! Just download the code at http://sourceforge.net/projects/txtmob/

Strange, their homepage links to this: http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=wireshark&filename=wireshark-setup-1.0.0.exe&use_mirror=superb-west but the SF page doesn't??

Why do I get the feeling this is a cruel April Fool's gag? I can't see 1.0 on the Sourceforge page, and the site was Slashdotted so I can't check that. Gah.

wireshark-setup-1.0.0.exe

The site is slow at the moment, if you want to download the thing, skip the chase and go straight to http://sourceforge.net/projects/wireshark/

The notion of trust is nothing new. The basic question comes down to this, do you trust the code (or coders for the code that) you are about to run or not? If you don't, then don't run the code. If you do, then go ahead and run the code.

That question may be easy to ask but not so easy to answer. Maybe you trust the organization but there could be inadvertent security vulnerabilities in the code. Or maybe you don't know much about the organization who authored or published the application. How do you decide whether or not to trust the application?

In theory, open source mitigates this trust issue because you can study the code yourself. In practice, it's not so easy. First of all, access to the source code is immaterial to people who are not coders themselves. Second, it would take a lot of time and mind to study the code for a large project. Sure, any competent programmer could study and verify for his or herself that my open source project can be trusted because it really isn't all that big. How can you be sure that Firefox doesn't have any malicious code in it?

One approach to this problem is to run programs in what is called a sandbox. What that means is that the program isn't written in what is called the native "machine" code. Rather, it is written in a code for a virtual machine. Every time that code makes an API call, the virtual machine checks to see if it is permitted from a security perspective. Applications that run in a sandbox don't get a lot of permissions. It is OK to run an application that you don't completely trust within the sandbox because the virtual machine is going to deny any requests that could compromise or take advantage of your system anyway.

That is why the complaint about ActiveX. Both ActiveX controls and Java applets run in a web browser. The Java applet has to run in the sandbox (unless it is signed but it is beyond the scope of this post to introduce PKI and X.509 certificates) but the ActiveX control never runs in a sandbox.

Later iterations of this sandbox concept allow the user more control over what the program can and cannot do. In .NET, this is called Code Access Security and in J2SE, this is called Java Security Policy. Before running an application, the user can specify what API calls that the application can and cannot call. The problem here is that this specification is not easy to tweak for mere mortals. When you just double click the application icon, you are running the application with whatever policy that the publishing company specified. So, you are back to trusting that company since there is nothing that keeps them from specifying a policy that is wide open.

I have no experience in AIR so I could not tell you whether or not that virtual machine implements any kind of policy control. Perhaps someone that is knowledgeable about AIR would care to clarify here?

SourceForge has a bunch of possibilities.

Look for something that interests you, then seek a couple of experienced programmers who can help you estimate the size of various candidate projects. It would be frustrating and generally unhelpful to take on something that requires a year's work as summer project.

There is a lot to be learned from bug squashing, so think about spending the summer doing that for some worthy project. At least 80% of what new programmers get paid for is debugging, and 80% of the remainder is rewriting. Going into a job interview with a list of credits for fixed bugs would put you far ahead of other wannabees who have focused their studies on the 4% of the time that they might get to actually write new code.

> What the community needs right now is a Python distro with enough of a
> numerics and graphics package rolled in to do 90 percent of what is in
> Matlab.

Good idea. This is what both Sage and the Enthought Python Distribution are
shooting for.

> (Are the Python people still hashing out that Numerics/Numpy divide?

No that is done. And the lead developer of Numpy -- Travis Oliphant --
now gets to work full time on Python scientific computing, as an
employee of Enthought.

> Is there an engineering graphics library that is Numerics/Numpy compatible?

There is Matplotlib for
matlab like numpy graphics, and Chaco for more dynamic 2d graphics. MayaVi and Sage both provide powerful 3d graphics.

There are *nixy xml manipulation tools like XMLStarlet. However, using XPath isn't quite a straightforward as grep. If you want to use traditional *nix tools on the text in an ODT (Open Document Text) document, the simplest approach is to export a plain text file from one of the several ODT editors like AbiWord, Google Docs, or of course, OpenOffice.

• http://olpcnews.com/content/localization/learning_language.html
• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WiXi

I've owned Creative sound cards for years. The only non-Creative sound card I bought was an Aztech sound Galaxy, some years ago; annoyingly it kept losing its config settings over a reboot. It's reasonably easy to verify that the Creative card you're going to buy works on Linux (I've never used Creative's drivers since every PC I've ever owned has run Linux). At the moment I'm using a Creative Labs SB Audigy. However, the machine it's in needs an upgrade (it only has 1GB of RAM, and I want to run virtualised instances of *BSD and other Unixes to make porting software easier).

What sound hardware should I buy for the new machine? My needs are fairly pedestrian apart from the fact that I would like to do high-quality LP transcription occasionally. I will probably also buy a very quiet machine as the upgrade in order to use it as a media PC (and hence need 7.1 support). Since audiophile audio quality and 7.1 are probably more or less incompatible I'm happy to buy two sound cards for the two different purposes, but which to buy?

I've been considering the M-Audio FastTrack Pro (the idea being that I use the device itself for the LP transcription and export SPDIF to an AV amp for the surround stuff). I've heard good things about M-Audio kit. However, it appears not to work with ALSA (yet, at least). What are my other choices?