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Have you ever tried K-Melon? The feature set is the same as good ol' Firefox 0.8 without so many bugs.

I've been using the dallas one-wire DS18S20 for temp measurement and a DS2760 A/D converter directly reading a thermocouple output, using fuse and owfs, which makes the whole measurement bus look like a typical unix file structure, and I'm having a fair bit of success with putting together scriptable closed-loop temp controllers (meaning I'm using both the serial port for reading all the sensors and the parallel port for running big power relays that switch the heater elements), but I'm always interested in hearing what other people are doing.

Maybe FireFox needs a "lite" version.

It already exists: K-Meleon

You can use PDFedit for editing.
Not perfect but often sufficient.

While it is strictly speaking the fault of the user that Blizzard is suffering damage, the root cause is the creator and vendor of the tool.

No, the root cause is the undelaying model of WoW: it is impossible to create content fast enough to keep people playing, so Blizzard keeps adding the modern equivalent of mazes in old adventure games, obstacles whose only purpose is to take time. This might not be fatal in itself - for example, mining for resources in Star Control 2 was exciting and fun - but Blizzard has failed utterly to make their speedbumps fun rather than just plain tedious. That is why this program exists: to fix a perceived problem in WoW.

The real-world WoW gold market, leveling services, and this program are all symptoms of Blizzards's failure, not its cause.

Besides, Blizzard isn't "suffering damage", they're at worst losing revenue due to users canceling their subscriptions. It is not illegal for a company to benefit at the expense of another company; and if it is, then the entire foundation of capitalism and market economy needs to be reviewed.

Yes, paying a transaction fee to give money to your friends seems quite silly, especially if they are right next to you. You could use a system like RipplePay, but (1) it is incomplete, and (2) it would need a rather nice cell phone/mobile internet interface to make it at the same level of convenience as cash.

Sadly, there's still the whole WordPress thing -- the darn program was never intended to work with anything other than MySQL at the back end. At one point there was an effort to "port" WordPress to PostgreSQL, but that fork has long since stagnated. And adding support for other databases is not on the WordPress team's short list.

I wouldn't know the actual numbers any better than the next guy, but it's clear that WordPress is one of the top reasons MySQL retains such a dominant market share in the Web segment. Until WordPress adds support for multiple back-ends, MySQL will always be, at minimum, just as entrenched a product as WordPress is.

I hope that Movable Type's recent open-sourcing will eventually help effect more widespread adoption of PostgreSQL. Unlike WordPress, MT was designed from the ground up with forward-thinking features like database abstraction; it currently supports the Berkeley Database format, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, and adding support for additional back-ends is relatively easy. Perhaps if Movable Type can chip away at WordPress's market share a bit, it will in turn help relax MySQL's stranglehold on the Web market.

Why remote into your company computer from home? That's just backwards. You should use SSH/VNC to remote into your home computer from work. Then you have access to your personal stuff at work without any personal stuff residing on your work computer or passing unencrypted through your IT department. If you're actually trying to work on stuff from home (they've got you by the balls don't they?) then use said USB drive to transfer whatever files you need back and forth (or send them over your SSH connection before you leave the office). I recommend Unison or perhaps GIT distributed version control to keep whatever project you're working on synchronized. You can even use edna to stream your home music collection to you (again, tunnel through SSH for secret listening). Worked great for me the last time I had a shitty office job.

http://sphere.sourceforge.net/flik/images/20080629.png

Ming 0.3.0-beta2 Release 2006-01-30

Regular expressions are easier than you think and once you get comfortable with them you will be wishing you hadn't done so sooner. In my opinion the difficult part of learning them is just getting used the strange mess of dots, pluses, brackets, backslashes, etc. and what they mean in different contexts. Unfortunately it is hard to walk away from an article or howto on regexes and actually remember the meaning of all the symbols. Regular expressions are deliberately terse and that makes them hard to read and understand by humans.

Therefore I think the best way to learn regular expressions is by example. I highly recommend this small interactive program which will walk you through building regular expressions for a few different languagues. When you think you need a regex for a program, just fire it up and answer the questions.

http://txt2regex.sourceforge.net/

After a while you won't need txt2regex for simple stuff because you will have hopefully just absorbed the syntax. Once you have mastered the basic regexes which txt2regex can generate you will be able to dive into more advanced topics like capturing groups.

That's kind of what I was thinking.

Pair up Google with something like Kodos and you are all set. I still struggle with them sometimes, but nothing like before I had the debugger.

"I wish someone made these mindmapping programs and made them more accessable to programs and programming."

Free Mind and Compendium Software visualization

What are they going to do, take a bunch of crap out?

It's funny you should mention that.

TCP/IP over firewire support? Gone.

APIs for useful Explorer customisation? Gone. (That extension, which I found infinitely useful, not only doesn't work but has no hope of ever working thanks to an API change).

I'm sure I would have found more stuff I liked that they took out, but at this point I formatted my laptop and installed XP SP2. I actually didn't mind the UAC and other stuff people complain about (and it all ran quite smoothly despite many people who would convince you otherwise - albeit this was on a pretty decked out laptop). Having said that, XP not only runs faster but actually has the features that I care about and which I've become quite accustomed to. What used to be "upgrade to the latest OS and take the bugs and performance hit to have the latest features" is now "downgrade to the previous OS which is more stable and performs better to keep the *cough* latest features (which are 3 years old)".

Like the OP, I'm a prospective college student looking for FOSS scholarships. The difference is that I've already released my code, see http://wubi-installer.org/ (collaborative effort, 500,000+ downloads), and http://lubi.sourceforge.net/ (individual effort, 100,000+ downloads). As for revision control, see http://code.launchpad.net/~gezakovacs/ (mostly shellscript+NSIS, but I've recently begun using Qt4 and C++).

So back on topic, what are the best sources for FOSS scholarships?

This sounds an awful lot like blades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_server Use something like open mosix: http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/ and make each blade a cluster node.....you now have your CPU/RAM on a card.

Things like this (somewhat smaller scale) already are (somewhat bigger scale) being done.

I'll do you one better: http://slashcode.cvs.sourceforge.net/slashcode/

Have you heard of Rodi? http://rodi.sourceforge.net/ It can transmit using UDP packets (difficult to throttle) uses encryption and can spoof the IP address of transmitted packets (weak pseudo-anonymity). Rateless codes are pointless in unicast TCP transmission. They only make sense if you are transmitting via UDP.

You should better go with a real statistical analysis package. Even for those kind of things in the long term it will be easier for you and they are more robust.

When I started my PhD I used Gnumeric for several statistical analysis however, after spending some time I had to learn to use a real statistical package. I went for R, which is very well known an accepted through the research community (mainly because it is the open version of S, and can be scrutinized). After using it for about six months I found it better to make even the most simple statistical analysis on it. Oh, and the charts really look professional. No matter what I did in Gnumeric (tried once in OpenOffice but its graphics capabilites simply suck \BBBbig Time), I could not obtain decent charts to add to a LaTex publication.

I would suggest rKward to use R. it is the best IDE (IMO, after trying several and trying and failing to setup several others).

One of the most important advantages of using a statistical package like R is that you can get it to output to standard output in a console. That way you can use whatever scripting language you know (I used GAWK, sed, and other bash niceties) to prepare your data to be included in whatever word processing/typsetting program you need. It really saves a lot of time.

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

Forking to the rescue! Here you go. Oxygenoffice has VBA support,as well as more templates,clip art,etc. Enjoy!

Parallel programming is going to be a HUGE deal in coming years, and current languages don't handle it well - threading is complicated and prone to errors, leading to product delays. Erlang... Unfortunately, the language also has a high barrier to entry as it is not Algol-based (like C, C++, Java, etc. are).

Most likely they should have written their own archive parsing libraries, rather than relying on the existing binaries for those formats.

As a footnote, there are no such buffer overrun vulnerabilities in my ARC program, which is now more than 22 years old.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/arc

Have a chip on your shoulder much? Most of what you're saying is simply incorrect. e.g. Java does not have half-a-dozen containers. Yes, the switch from the STL-inspired Vector to the more Java-ish ArrayList was annoying. Same with HashTable to HashMap. But beyond that, all those different containers you think you see are actually interfaces for wiring up complex functionality. Either that or completely different data structures with different performance characteristics. (Remember your CompSci courses?) The Java Collections package (which seems to be the only thing in Java you're remotely familiar with) provides enough functionality to write a complete database engine. Which, as a matter of fact, has been done quite a few times. (Sorry, ran out of words to link. Doh! Still more. Ah, to hell with it.)

The rest of the Java API is also not bloat. There are libraries for printing, crytography, sound, graphics, DOM, file I/O, text parsing, text formatting, text display, mathematics, directory interfaces (e.g. LDAP), distributed object systems, reflection, security, SQL database interface, logging, cross-platform preferences, regular expressions, ZIP/GZip support, accessibility, networking, the compiler, scripting engines, etc., etc., etc. Very little of the core API is redundant, with most of the (few!) redundancies being a result of the early days of Java before they moved away from the C++ style objects.

Nearly all of the post-1.0 APIs were done correctly the first time. Which means that the core Java API is actually quite slim for the amount of functionality it provides. And even then, there is a HUGE number of official expansion APIs for mail, multimedia codecs, network request/response handlers (e.g. servlets), 3D graphics, 3D sound, text-to-speech, speech recognition, telephony, SOAP, REST, USB, Bluetooth, scientific units, cross-platform desktop integration, Instant Messaging, P2P, and quite a bit more. And that's just the official JSR-approved expansions! The OSS and (bleh) commercial worlds are full of unofficial libraries to deal with nearly any problem you can come up with.

If you want bloat, stop looking at Java. Try compiling a few Linux apps sometime and tell me how many redundant libraries you come across. If you know what they all do (which is a miracle in of itself), compiling just ONE of those programs is enough to make a person blush with embarrassment. Not to mention that when a platform IS solidified (e.g. GNOME), it suffers from versionitis. (i.e. The constant need to upgrade your version of the libraries because this latest program no longer targets the version you just compiled. Or even worse, it requires a specific minor release, thus requiring you to have multiple minor releases of the library compiled and installed.) I won't even go into Microsoft's practice of inventing a new API for the same technology over, and over, and over again. (ODBC, DAO, ADO, JET, anyone?)

Now I happen to think that a lot of the choice that Linux offers is good. But don't point fingers at other platforms when there are more than enough examples of far worse situations close to home.

Have a chip on your shoulder much? Most of what you're saying is simply incorrect. e.g. Java does not have half-a-dozen containers. Yes, the switch from the STL-inspired Vector to the more Java-ish ArrayList was annoying. Same with HashTable to HashMap. But beyond that, all those different containers you think you see are actually interfaces for wiring up complex functionality. Either that or completely different data structures with different performance characteristics. (Remember your CompSci courses?) The Java Collections package (which seems to be the only thing in Java you're remotely familiar with) provides enough functionality to write a complete database engine. Which, as a matter of fact, has been done quite a few times. (Sorry, ran out of words to link. Doh! Still more. Ah, to hell with it.)

The rest of the Java API is also not bloat. There are libraries for printing, crytography, sound, graphics, DOM, file I/O, text parsing, text formatting, text display, mathematics, directory interfaces (e.g. LDAP), distributed object systems, reflection, security, SQL database interface, logging, cross-platform preferences, regular expressions, ZIP/GZip support, accessibility, networking, the compiler, scripting engines, etc., etc., etc. Very little of the core API is redundant, with most of the (few!) redundancies being a result of the early days of Java before they moved away from the C++ style objects.

Nearly all of the post-1.0 APIs were done correctly the first time. Which means that the core Java API is actually quite slim for the amount of functionality it provides. And even then, there is a HUGE number of official expansion APIs for mail, multimedia codecs, network request/response handlers (e.g. servlets), 3D graphics, 3D sound, text-to-speech, speech recognition, telephony, SOAP, REST, USB, Bluetooth, scientific units, cross-platform desktop integration, Instant Messaging, P2P, and quite a bit more. And that's just the official JSR-approved expansions! The OSS and (bleh) commercial worlds are full of unofficial libraries to deal with nearly any problem you can come up with.

If you want bloat, stop looking at Java. Try compiling a few Linux apps sometime and tell me how many redundant libraries you come across. If you know what they all do (which is a miracle in of itself), compiling just ONE of those programs is enough to make a person blush with embarrassment. Not to mention that when a platform IS solidified (e.g. GNOME), it suffers from versionitis. (i.e. The constant need to upgrade your version of the libraries because this latest program no longer targets the version you just compiled. Or even worse, it requires a specific minor release, thus requiring you to have multiple minor releases of the library compiled and installed.) I won't even go into Microsoft's practice of inventing a new API for the same technology over, and over, and over again. (ODBC, DAO, ADO, JET, anyone?)

Now I happen to think that a lot of the choice that Linux offers is good. But don't point fingers at other platforms when there are more than enough examples of far worse situations close to home.

Thinking FORTH is a great text on FORTH programming (and programming in general) and it's now available for free.

Or PATH. It's Brainfuck in 2D.

It's making a HA-UGE comeback (c# 3.0, closures in Java). Great place to start is Clojure.

Done.

I'm stoked that Sahana - a project to develop a FOSS web-based system for disaster management has been selected again for GSOC. Thanks Goggle!

If you're interested in working on a system that will help ease suffering and save lives during and after a disaster, then consider contributing to the Sahana project. It was started after the Boxing Day Tsunami struck Sri Lanka and it now into our fourth year, and I think third GSOC year.

Some areas we're focusing hard on this year are incorporating social networking for disaster response, and implementing a more comprehensive GIS. We would welcome other suggestions.

Sahana@GSOC, Sahana GSOC ideas. If you want to discuss it more, join up to the Sahana maindev list on sf.net.

If you want to contribute to an humanitarian project for a change, Sahana may be the project for you. Of course, we've got plenty of technical opportunities as well ;)

BRL-CAD is delighted to be participating in the Google Summer of Code this year for the first time. Be sure to check out our ideas list and either stop by the #brlcad IRC channel on Freenode or subscribe to our developer's mailing list to get involved early.

As many know, computer-aided design (CAD) is one of the areas most lacking attention in open source. BRL-CAD has a solid foundation and considerable 25-year development history with more than 450 person-years development effort invested yet we are still wholesomely lacking in the usability and user-interface department. Maybe some of you can help us fix that. We're interested in many other ideas as well. Hope to see you apply!

Slightly off topic, but I just found KiCad which I find miles ahead of either PCB or Eagle. The learning curve is a little steep (and the software was originally French, translated to English), but if you take a half hour and follow through a tutorial (I used http://www.kicadlib.org/Fichiers/KiCad_Tutorial.pdf which worked well for me), you can see how simple it really is.

I am in no way related to this project, but am just a very satisfied user.

The PCBs are pretty horrible, but not for those reasons.

Pads for through-hole IC and connectors have multiple places where a trace leaves the pad at a wrong angle, continues toward the nearest pad on the same connector, then turns away from it into direction where it was supposed to go in the first place. In addition to looking sloppy, this increases the probability of solder bridges and overheating, especially if the board is assembled manually or repaired. Many traces going to those pads look so sloppily drawn, I have no idea how to achieve such an effect with any modern PCB design software (and my idea of "modern" starts at http://pcb.sourceforge.net/ ).

Probably no chance anyone will see this, this late after the fact, but I work in a college Data Center in the security group. We had a DMCA violation notice sent against our honeypot. This is a machine that listens on a bunch of networks and records when others connect to it. That's it. It NEVER opens a connection on its own (not even sure the software is capable of opening a connection), only listens. They even named a specific song that our honeypot had supposedly been "sharing". Maybe all of the ISPs and other large networks should start a database of totally bogus DMCA notices. Seems like it could be useful in a defense.

I use linux because the software I use: emacs, LaTeX, gcc, is unavailable on Windows, at least without hacking or using some emulator that never quite works right

• "GNU Emacs for Win32."
• "MiKTeX is an up-to-date TeX implementation for the Windows operating system."
• "MinGW: A collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs."

also, wow, file management is a pain in the arse using a mouse

how do people manage without grep, sed and awk?

Anything else you wanted?

Google is hard:

Emacs for Win32: (http://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+win32)
Faq: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html
Download: ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/GNU/windows/emacs/ (The faq contains other links that may be faster for you)

LaTex for Win32: (http://www.google.com/search?q=latex+win32)
Faq/Download info: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~fittond/win32latex/win32latex.html

gcc for Win32 (MinGW for this particular answer, there is cygwin and such as well): (http://www.google.com/search?q=gcc+win32)
Info: http://www.mingw.org/

command line utils for Win32: (http://www.google.com/search?q=unix+utils+win32)
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
Includes:
bc, bison, bzip2, diffutils, fileutils, findutils, flex, gawk, grep, gsar110, gzip, indent, jwhois, less, m4, make, patch, recode, rman, sed, shellutils, tar, textutils, unrar, wget, which

To answer your question, my windows machine does just fine when I want to use the unix utilities that I love, not real sure why yours can't, other than googling is hard.

For the record, all of the above web pages were basically the first result from google, I guess I'm feeling Lucky today.

I think this kind of optimisation cleverly done with Ono plugin for Azureus bittorrent client. I also think it does even more.

Check details and remember it sends statistics (without private data, not torrent names etc) to the project domain. So, there is some FUD around.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=ono

Azureus and Ono, both are open source (including Azureus 3) and massively multiplatform thanks to Java.

The trouble with ipv6 is that ipv4 works so well for 90% of the population (in the same manner that 76% of statistics are made up on the spot) that nobody who doesn't really care about this won't put in an effort to make the switch. It looks like going 100% ipv6 is quite a few years off, foo.

To you average user there should be no effort, since it should just work. The problem is that there are still gaping holes that need to be resolved. For example no DHCPv6 client provided standard with MacOS X. Sure you can get wide-dhcpv6 and install it on your computer, but this considered to be in the realm of the experimenters.

We will get to the point where IPv6 is ready, but as the parent says most people aren't ready. You average Joe won't know that anything changed unless things break. Apple, Microsoft and Cisco still don't have IPv6 ready networks and the only people who do are just doing it for fun or out of curiosity.

This was already proposed by Bindal et al in ICDCS 2006 and evaluated in simulation by Aggarwal et al in SIGCOMM CCR (July 2007). Besides, there is already software out there for the Azureus BitTorrent client (called Ono) that does similar things without relying on the ISPs and without restricting what you download.

The NYTimes covers the development from the practical standpoint of Verizon's agreement with P2P company Pando Networks, which will be involved in distributing NBC television shows next month. So the network efficiencies will accrue to NBC's content, not to non-sanctioned P2P such as distributing open source software, free software, music, videos, and art in the public domain and licensed under creative commons, or to help distribute software updates for packages such as Azureus.

There, fixed that for you.

The article mentions the Global Telecommunications System (GTS) It would be cool to know
how they get their GTS data, probably use a satellite downlink. There is a GPL GTS switch that's developed for Debian:

http://metpx.sourceforge.net/

How about the HP printers that come with a piece of paper that states, "If you still have the Windows CD with Windows 95/98 drivers hang onto like it's Gold! We can't send you a replacement disk or allow you to download drivers from the HP website because Bill Gates won't let us." Of course they also have a link to the hplip propject on their website, just in case you use *nix.
If it hadn't been for the *nix link, I would have had to trash several machines just to print.

Sorry man, but TTG is half baked at best. The software is poorly designed, and there are Macrovision restrictions (whoops, you can't transfer that!)

I'd put up with two weeks to watch certain programs (and current Tivo service), but I've had more than one movie (on the premium movie channels) that wouldn't transfer all together. 2 weeks, maybe 1.

They have to fix TTG before it would be compelling:
-Less restrictive. No limits (other than a current Tivo subscription) for unflagged content, and a couple of weeks (at least) to watch Macrovision protected content with limited transfer.
-Non broken software. The TivoToGo software added two services (Beacon and another one) that produced endless errors. Reformatting didn't help, and it is kind of invasive.
-An easier way to transfer. Maybe Series 4 Tivos can have onboard front USB?

TivoToGo really, really, sucks. I have an 100MBit network and it takes 12 hours to transfer a one hour show. It needs to be faster.
When Tivo can fix TTG to be more compelling and less DRM encumbered, it will appeal to me.