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Download here (as the site seems down atm) by _bug_ · 2008-02-06 02:02 · Score: 3, Informative · on TrueCrypt 5.0 Released, Now Encrypts Entire Drive

http://sourceforge.net/projects/truecrypt/

Press release here.

We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released. Among the new features are the ability to encrypt a system partition or entire system drive (i.e. a drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication, pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100%, Mac OS X version, graphical interface for the Linux version, XTS mode, SHA-512, and more.

After four years of development, during which millions of people downloaded a copy of TrueCrypt, it is the only open-source disk encryption software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The newly implemented ability to encrypt system partitions and system drives provides the highest level of security and privacy, as all files, including any temporary files that Windows and applications create on system drives (typically, without the user's knowledge or consent), swap files, etc., are permanently encrypted. Large amounts of potentially sensitive data that Windows records, such as the names and locations of files opened by the user, applications that the user runs, etc., are always permanently encrypted as well. For more information, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history

Download here (as the site seems down atm) by _bug_ · 2008-02-06 02:02 · Score: 3, Informative · on TrueCrypt 5.0 Released, Now Encrypts Entire Drive

http://sourceforge.net/projects/truecrypt/

Press release here.

We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released. Among the new features are the ability to encrypt a system partition or entire system drive (i.e. a drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication, pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100%, Mac OS X version, graphical interface for the Linux version, XTS mode, SHA-512, and more.

After four years of development, during which millions of people downloaded a copy of TrueCrypt, it is the only open-source disk encryption software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The newly implemented ability to encrypt system partitions and system drives provides the highest level of security and privacy, as all files, including any temporary files that Windows and applications create on system drives (typically, without the user's knowledge or consent), swap files, etc., are permanently encrypted. Large amounts of potentially sensitive data that Windows records, such as the names and locations of files opened by the user, applications that the user runs, etc., are always permanently encrypted as well. For more information, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history

if truecrypt.org is still down by Anonymous Coward · 2008-02-06 01:58 · Score: -1 · on TrueCrypt 5.0 Released, Now Encrypts Entire Drive

http://sourceforge.net/projects/truecrypt/

Re:Interesting by chuckymonkey · 2008-02-05 18:52 · Score: 1 · on Toddlers May Learn Language By Data Mining

Heh, funny enough I'm about to start teaching her some basics in computer usage and programming since she has taken an interest in what "Daddy's doing on the computer". There's a great little tool for linux called Little Wizard that parents such as myself can use for that, it's really cool.

Ask them by kaszeta · 2008-02-05 16:31 · Score: 2, Informative · on Open Source Code In a Closed Source Company

Well, if you signed a contract[1] that says that even the stuff you wrote in your spare time is theirs, well, there's exactly one way forward....

You have to ask them for permission. But don't just ask, make a good case for it. Explain what the cost to them is (including lost opportunity cost, which sounds like nothing for this case). Explain the benefits (mostly soft and squishy stuff, like contributing to the community and giving your company a good name, etc). Really pitch it.

I know this works on occasion, since I've done this myself: asked for, and received permission, to release programs I've written both internally and for paying customers as free software (in the latter case, our agreement with the customer allows this). You can go download it yourself: JavaSock.

It was simply a matter of talking to our commercialization director, pointing out to him that realistically, we probably wouldn't make much revenue off of selling this code, but would make several people (including the client that paid for it) happy, and it might give us some good press in certain circles. They agreed, and we uploaded it to sourceforge.

But don't try to do an end-around. Many things can happen, and most of them aren't good.

I'm not being high and mighty here, my contract says the same. I don't mind, they compensate me well for it. If I didn't think this was a workable deal, well, I'd go find someplace else.

Re:Wireless by Anonymous Coward · 2008-02-05 08:55 · Score: 0, Redundant · on Fedora 9 "Sulphur" Alpha Released

I have had no problems with wireless using the ndiswrapper.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

The switch on the side of my laptop that turns it on and off has caused me more grief for a while than any driver issue. Some of us have wireless cards that have native Linux drivers, but Fedora lacks support for them. For example, my PowerBook has a broadcom. Ubuntu supports it with open drivers out of the box. OpenSUSE is the same way. My main desktop is supported by Madwifi. Fedora lacks support, though you can add it manually (pain in the ass). Ubuntu supports it out of the box, as does OpenSUSE. My ThinkPad has an Intel 3945. Fedora lacks support for it, but you can install it manually (pain in the ass). Ubuntu supports it out of the box, as does OpenSUSE.

Some of them can be supported via a third party repo (livna) that's incompatibility with the repos that have the software you actually want (rpmforge).

Would it kill them to have a unsupported repo that contains nothing but drivers? Ie, nVidia, wireless, and fully in sync with the constant kernel updates?

I don't feel like using a Windows driver on Linux when there is a Linux driver available.

Re:Wireless by 1_brown_mouse · 2008-02-05 08:17 · Score: 2, Informative · on Fedora 9 "Sulphur" Alpha Released

I have had no problems with wireless using the ndiswrapper.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

The switch on the side of my laptop that turns it on and off has caused me more grief for a while than any driver issue.

Re:Prior art? by C+R+Johnson · 2008-02-05 07:04 · Score: 1 · on EFF Attacks Online Gaming Patent

The game you are referring to may be xpilot

Originally released in 1991 xpilot is still developed and we still play.

-Cluster

Re:Will it be used? by rat7307 · 2008-02-04 23:56 · Score: 1 · on PostgreSQL 8.3 Released

http://benchw.sourceforge.net/benchw_results_open3.html I've been looking at benchmarks to decide the fate of a website I develop for. We are on Postgres8.1 right now, but I'm a MySQL fan....but I'm not finding compelling reasons to switch........ YMMV

What about the OTHER open source contributions? by allenw · 2008-02-04 16:46 · Score: 1 · on How Microsoft-Yahoo Will Affect Open Source

It is a bit disappointing and surprising to see that the author spent more time talking about Silverlight and moderation and other things when he could have written about the *other* open source things that Yahoo! either supports directly or where patches have been contributed. Where is the discussion about Hadoop, Pig, ZooKeeper, YUI, PHP, ... ? Do these not impact Linux users from his point of view?

Re:XMPP is a PITA by corerunner · 2008-02-04 16:25 · Score: 1 · on Is XMPP the 'Next Big Thing'

that's XMPPPy ;)

An open source model checker for Java by martinde · 2008-02-04 13:22 · Score: 4, Informative · on 2008 Turing Award Winners Announced

NASA released an open source model checker for Java called JPF. It's a JVM implemented in Java that can do model checking on "generic" Java apps, finding deadlocks and things like that.

Re:Bullshit FTA by Chris+Shannon · 2008-02-04 06:58 · Score: 1 · on Particle Swarm Optimization for Picture Analysis

CSI style surveillance camera enhancement is impossible, but you can get a surprising amount of additional detail out of a blurry photo with properly applied deconvolution. I agree. Check out the deconvolution examples using the Gimp Plug-in Refocus-it which is based on finding the minimum of the error function using Hopfield neural network, or Refocus which is based on a modified form of the Wiener filter, called the FIR (Finite Input Response) Wiener filter. Refocus is conveniently available as a Digikam plugin as well as a gimp plugin.
I've played with Refocus and have had some pretty good results with it, even better than unsharp mask, as the documentation states:

In practice I found that in virtually all cases the results of the FIR Wiener filter were at least as good as those of unsharp masking. The FIR Wiener filter is frequently better in restoring small details.

Unsharp masking is a high pass filter. Blurring, which is a convolution with a Gaussian, is multiplication with a DC centred Gaussian in the frequency domain, a low pass filter. Subtracting that from the original will give you the high frequency components. Unsharp masking adds more of those high frequency components back to the original. The thing about a blurred image is that the high frequencies of interest are by definition of "blurred", not present in the original, so unsharp masking can not restore them.

I've used Refocus for sharpening photographs of text for an OCR, but gocr mostly outputted garbage. I read the article with interest thinking that the fitness function of the particle swarm optimization for blurry scanned text could be the number of English words that are identified when the refocused image is run through an OCR.

Re:Bullshit FTA by Chris+Shannon · 2008-02-04 06:58 · Score: 1 · on Particle Swarm Optimization for Picture Analysis

CSI style surveillance camera enhancement is impossible, but you can get a surprising amount of additional detail out of a blurry photo with properly applied deconvolution. I agree. Check out the deconvolution examples using the Gimp Plug-in Refocus-it which is based on finding the minimum of the error function using Hopfield neural network, or Refocus which is based on a modified form of the Wiener filter, called the FIR (Finite Input Response) Wiener filter. Refocus is conveniently available as a Digikam plugin as well as a gimp plugin.
I've played with Refocus and have had some pretty good results with it, even better than unsharp mask, as the documentation states:

In practice I found that in virtually all cases the results of the FIR Wiener filter were at least as good as those of unsharp masking. The FIR Wiener filter is frequently better in restoring small details.

Unsharp masking is a high pass filter. Blurring, which is a convolution with a Gaussian, is multiplication with a DC centred Gaussian in the frequency domain, a low pass filter. Subtracting that from the original will give you the high frequency components. Unsharp masking adds more of those high frequency components back to the original. The thing about a blurred image is that the high frequencies of interest are by definition of "blurred", not present in the original, so unsharp masking can not restore them.

I've used Refocus for sharpening photographs of text for an OCR, but gocr mostly outputted garbage. I read the article with interest thinking that the fitness function of the particle swarm optimization for blurry scanned text could be the number of English words that are identified when the refocused image is run through an OCR.

Re:XMPP is a PITA by AceJohnny · 2008-02-04 06:21 · Score: 1 · on Is XMPP the 'Next Big Thing'

PyXMPP -- Python Jabber/XMPP implementation

How do you get javascript from that?!?!?! Woops, you're right. I misread /.'s domain shortcut, jajcus, for JSJaC.

Regarding doc, I'm didn't mean that you needed to read all the basics down to XML Namespaces or whatever, but I was surprised by your frustration with interacting with XMPP, and interpreted it as a lack of doc for semi-advanced topics. I couldn't believe that PyXMPP wouldn't provide even a basic tutorial on getting online and sending a message. Indeed, I haven't found anything after some quick googling.

As I said, there's a host of libraries for XMPP, and a popular alternative to PyXMPP is XMPPPy, which does provide examples. You could also use Twisted.Words, but Twisted's modules' docs have generally driven me insane.

If you wish to stick to PyXMPP, you could still have a look at tutorials for those other libraries, which will hopefully provide you with useful background. Good luck!

Re:XMPP is a PITA by Just+Some+Guy · 2008-02-04 04:20 · Score: 2, Informative · on Is XMPP the 'Next Big Thing'

We use jabber.py. It hasn't changed in years, but our needs are pretty simple and it meets all of them easily. For example

import jabber node = jabber.Message() node.setSubject('Getting hungry') node.setBody('Hi there. Lunch?') server = jabber.Client('ourserver.example.com') server.connect() server.auth('me', 'mypassword', 'Python Jabber client') for dest in recipients: node.setTo(dest); server.send(node) server.disconnect()

Honestly, I don't know how you could make that a whole lot simpler.

Options summary by PhilDin · 2008-02-04 00:00 · Score: 1 · on Desktop Environment for Proprietary Applications?

I think people are being a little harsh on the submitter, they may just not know. Here's a quick summary:

Qt: Until being bought out by Nokia, their core business was licensing Qt commercially so it would have been a sound enough bet for closed source development (a little expensive maybe). For open source, it's GPL so no issue there. At this stage though, I'd be a little nervous if I had bet the company on Qt.
GTK+: The toolkit that underlies Gnome is licensed under LGPL. This means it's permitted to create/distribute closed source apps which use GTK so the only question is whether you like the toolkit. GTK is written in C and not everyone like the approach that it has taken.
GTKMM is a C++ wrapper for GTK+, also licensed under LGPL so it's good for commercial and open source

Obviously, there's Java but that's a different day's flamewar. It would have been nice if Miguel had not diverted his considerable abilities into something which I think will end badly (mono) but the Gtk and Gnome projects continue without him so there's no danger of these becoming evolutionary dead-ends due to mono. There's also the Fox toolkit (http://www.fox-toolkit.org/) which is used in the amazing rezound (http://rezound.sourceforge.net/) and WxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/). Both of these support multiple platforms and are licensed under LGPL.

Multi-platform tagging software by ben+there... · 2008-02-01 17:04 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion For Yahoo

Anyone know of any user friendly, non-web, multi-platform tagging software? ACDSee is by far the most popular. Windows only. I could have sworn it ran on Mac. Guess not. Contrary to its "Pro" name, it does not deal very well with large numbers of images. It's also fairly easy to corrupt its internal FoxPro database.

iMatch is another Windows alternative, for the database-loving geeky types. Not very user friendly, but full-featured metadata capabilities. Again Windows only.

I haven't found one that meets my needs all that well with adequate performance and open-ness to the software and storage format, so I'm working on a Python/wxPython/Sqlite alternative to ACDSee. It will be cross-platform, Windows, Mac, and Linux. It currently has a fast image viewer, a Sqlite backend, and can import an ACD database, but I'm still working on some of the tagging, rating, and EXIF/IPTC features. It will be somewhat similar to ACDSee and Cornice (another wxPython app), but with tagging features intact, and imho a better looking, more native theme. It will likely be dual licensed. I'll probably have a beta within about a month.

So, long story short, there is no great cross-platform image tagging system right at this moment. ;-)

Re:Python takes a step backwards. by ben+there... · 2008-02-01 16:13 · Score: 1 · on Python 3.0 To Be Backwards Incompatible

Python could be a much higher performance language. Take a look at the Shed Skin implementation. One guy is trying to implement a hard-code compiler for Python that does type inference to determine types at compile time whenever possible. That yields a 10x-30x speedup. If you have rackmount servers running Python, that's a big win - one rack instead of ten. Or the more popular Psyco, a JIT C-compiler for Python, which boasts "2-100x speedups (typically 4x)", without modifying your code.

Python has some optimization gotchas that really should be fixed. The big problem is "undetectable dynamism", or "if the only tool you have is a dictionary, everything looks like a hash". Well, it sounds like that has issue has mostly been solved. PyPy uses "RPython", a restricted subset of CPython. It "compiles" Python code to C, LLVM, .Net CLI, and Java JVM. It might be interesting to note that the author of Pysco has joined the PyPy project and focused all his optimization efforts on that, as a more generalized implementation of Psyco's goals.

Re:Big and bulky by Rene+S.+Hollan · 2008-02-01 08:55 · Score: 3, Insightful · on February 2008 Hardware Roundup

Start with Damn Small Linux. CPU Mobo

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

Re:Big and bulky by Rene+S.+Hollan · 2008-02-01 08:55 · Score: 3, Insightful · on February 2008 Hardware Roundup

Start with Damn Small Linux. CPU Mobo

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

Re:Oh, no, Mr. Bill! Leave my Yahoo! Alone!! by protohiro1 · 2008-02-01 06:16 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion For Yahoo

YUI is open source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/yui/

Re:This is not bad at all by FreeGamer · 2008-02-01 04:22 · Score: 1 · on Drop-Catching Domains Is Big Business

There are different circumstances to take into account.

I work on an open source project Vexi. When we chose the name, we registered vexi.org and life was good for 2 years. Towards the end of the 2 years, the person who registered the domain name became difficult to contact and the domain expired. Some cyber squatting scum picked it up automatically and we had no chance to re-register it ourselves. Now the only recourse to get our domain back is to launch some kind of legal challenge, which we have neither the time nor resources to do plus we don't have a presence in the US where the offending squatter is.

In our case, the domain expiring was required, but we were not savvy enough to retain the domain and now it's in misuse.

Re:Dangerous Nonsense. (my story) by Anonymous Coward · 2008-01-31 17:38 · Score: 0 · on Four Indicted in Pirate Bay Case

If I demanded that someone buy my painting, but they cannot look at it, I would be given a very low value unless I had earned such high regards that people flocked for even a hair from my brush.

I am a software programmer and tried to sell some software I wrote (as source code) some time ago.

I provided a sample segment of the source code for free on the website I tried to sell it from to demonstrate the quality of the software package. I also provided a perfomance chart of sorts showing how fast the software was in action.

End result...no sales.

Not even at a price less than one-tenth what another competitor charged for his source code package which could do what mine did.

Conclusion: Shareware is dead....'Little guy' commercialware is dead.

The freeloaders and giant software companies have won the battle.... :P

Good luck with 'Open Source', http://www.sourceforge.net/ is clogged with it!

Linux appeared to be a 'fluke' that became a smashing success. More power to Linus and Co....

Oh well...back to writing software on demand for my current employer who appreciates my skills enough to pay for them so I don't have to break the law to make ends meet (Les Miserables, anyone?). Before you pass judgement, before my current job, I asked for a job at about 100 different places in the retail industry where I have past experience, got 4-5 interviews from the applications I filled out (much less than 100), and NO job offer to show for my efforts. My guess is that no one wants to hire an experienced, trustworthy person who needs little or no direct supervison to work for them....

Re:I dunno... by ianare · 2008-01-31 08:46 · Score: 1 · on DoJ Extends Microsoft Oversight for Two Years

notepad, wordpad - are you for real? Quite possibly the worst simple text editors. I suggest you try notepad++ (open source, windows only)
Calc - After using the calculator included with gnome, I have a deep hatred for this POS. No copy/paste, no way to see waht operations were entered, less functionality.
remote desktop - Not bad, though a little slow, even on Gb ethernet. I still like SSH better.
control panel - I actually like this one, I find it easier to use than the KDE 3.x clusterfuck of options (maybe 4 will fix this?), more organized than the gnome setup. Ubuntu tried doing something like it in early 7.10 beta (or alpha?) but decided to drop it. Shame.

Re:Original Cracked by kent.dickey · 2008-01-31 07:59 · Score: 1 · on The History of the Apple II as a Gaming Platform

My emulator, KEGS, gets most of the low-level disk details right. You can get it at http://kegs.sourceforge.net/. It's not that hard to do low-level disk timings. It's even easier to do straight bits from the drive, but I wrote KEGS for Pentium-class machines, so it worries about performance.

However, I would have needed to create a new disk-image format for KEGS to use (the .nib format is woefully inadequate), and I never bothered. So there's no easy way to get a low-level description of an Apple II disk into KEGS, other than .nib images, which can't encode many types of copy protection.

Re:The good old days by smokytgab · 2008-01-31 06:31 · Score: 3, Interesting · on The History of the Apple II as a Gaming Platform

I actually just finished getting a working one together and giving to my girlfriend and her suitemates. It defined a lot of elementary childrens' computer experiences and was actually my first computer as well. Even when I was looking up various information on how to get the various disk images onto 5 1/4 floppies (great program http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/), it amazed me how open and extendable the Apple ][ was. There are still small companies that make various expansion cards for things such as Ethernet and Serial connections. Not to mention the fact that the 6502 was the same processor used in the SNES, thereby creating a great platform for future game developers to start honing their skills.

Re:Microkernels are the future by AKAImBatman · 2008-01-31 06:04 · Score: 4, Informative · on The Great Microkernel Debate Continues

Depends. Ever hear of FUSE? It's been showing up in quite a few distros for the capabilities it buys by running outside of kernel space. It's become so important, that it has been ported to BSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X.

What does it do? Why, it's a monolithic driver that provides an interface to support userspace filesystem drivers. i.e. A microkernel in practice, if not in definition. Ergo, the grandparent's point about a slow migration.

We NEED a microkernel, not Linux... by serviscope_minor · 2008-01-31 05:50 · Score: 1 · on The Great Microkernel Debate Continues

We need a REAL microkernel. You know, a kernel which has userspace filesystems. Userspace graphics. Userspace USB drivers. All the messy bits of sound (like network transparency, mixing and resampling) in userspace.

Oh, wait.

For those of you who didn't get the joke, look up http://fuse.sourceforge.net/, http://libusb.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.x.org/ for starters.

We NEED a microkernel, not Linux... by serviscope_minor · 2008-01-31 05:50 · Score: 1 · on The Great Microkernel Debate Continues

We need a REAL microkernel. You know, a kernel which has userspace filesystems. Userspace graphics. Userspace USB drivers. All the messy bits of sound (like network transparency, mixing and resampling) in userspace.

Oh, wait.

For those of you who didn't get the joke, look up http://fuse.sourceforge.net/, http://libusb.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.x.org/ for starters.

Re:Design Philosophy by AlXtreme · 2008-01-31 05:18 · Score: 1 · on The Great Microkernel Debate Continues

But in the end, flexability was key, and you can see some of the microkernel design philosophies start to seep into the linux kernel. Take a look at kernel modules for example. The code is already being abstracted out, now if it just effectively was designed to run in userspace.

Userspace like with Filesystem in USErspace? Done!

I think it's a question of necessity. There are quite a few people working on writing all kinds of filesystems for Linux, so it's natural to try to make writing filesystems easier, if only for developing a prototype first.
There are far fewer people working on NIC or soundcard drivers (a few per chipset, perhaps), so the necessity to come up with a general interface for kernel modules in userspace is smaller.

Given time I don't have a doubt that a general xUSE-API or a Minix-style kernel-userspace message bus will be developed.

Re:bah by morgan_greywolf · 2008-01-31 03:49 · Score: 1 · on Time for a Vista Do-Over?

The same is true for any OS install that doesn't involve using the 'System Recovery Tool' that comes with the machine.

As for the wireless stuff, 9 times out of 10 the way to go is ndiswrapper. Installing ndiswrapper and getting it to work properly is a fairly straightforward process. If you follow the documentation, any self-respecting geek should be able to get it up and working correctly in less than an hour.

Re:Contributing is open source donation by Anonymous Coward · 2008-01-30 21:17 · Score: 0 · on French Police Ditching Windows for Linux

La Gendarmerie Nationale (french paramilitary police) contributes to several opensource projects. OcsInventory-NG is a well known example http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocsinventory (at least in France)

Re:No offence, by Machtyn · 2008-01-30 10:19 · Score: 1 · on A Mythbuster's Biggest Tech Headaches (and Solutions)

That is interesting they still haven't provided a decent text editor. But now, any PC I touch gets notepad++. I suppose Microsoft should just leave most utilities off of the OS and let us find F/LOSS (or a variant) or a commercial product to get everything they need. It is a difficult balance for a company most consider a monopoly to include just enough utilities to allow functionality, but not have these utilities be too feature-rich to be accused of monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. (Although, this didn't stop them from MSIE vs. Netscape or MSOffice vs. Wordperfect.)

Why not let the system do it? by martyb · 2008-01-30 05:38 · Score: 1 · on Best Practices For Process Documentation?

Preface: I got called away after I started this, this is quick and dirty, and I'm pressed for time, but it's my hope that it will act as a starting point for discussion. I'm sure there's many opportunities for optimizations and there are shortcomings.

How to come up with process documentation? For starters: have the processes document themselves; i.e., add a wrapper program around invocations of common applications which captures:

username
start date and time
application name (and the path to it)
application arguments (filenames and switches)
completion date and time

I'll assume you are working in a Microsoft Windows/XP shop. If you haven't already, get a copy of the GNU CoreUtils for Windows.

Set some global environment variables for each user and then code a simple batch program, logger.bat:

%CoreUtils%\date "+%%Y-%%m-%%d %%H:%%M:%%S %USERNAME% BEGIN: %*" >> %ProcLogFile% CALL %* %CoreUtils%\date "+%%Y-%%m-%%d %%H:%%M:%%S %USERNAME% FINISH: %*" >> %ProcLogFile%

That would produce data like:

2008-01-30 12:25:05 JSmith BEGIN: notepad foo.txt 2008-01-30 12:25:10 JSmith BEGIN: notepad bar.txt 2008-01-30 12:25:20 JSmith FINISH: notepad bar.txt 2008-01-30 12:30:05 JSmith FINISH: notepad foo.txt

Now, wherever a user ordinarily runs "foo", replace it with a call to "logger.bat foo %*" e.g. Update items in the start menu to invoke logger.bat with what you'd ordinarily run.

Crude? Yup! Sufficient? Nope! Maybe you have a better way to do it... Good! Maybe you'd prefer to do it in perl. Fine! What about phone calls? Well, can you extract logs from your PBX? Gather that data and merge it in, too!

Here's the important thing: It does not require any change in what the user does in the course of their day, it is easily extensible in that you can instrument other apps to log as you find them, and most importantly, you now have some data to start from! As you find gaps in the day's activities, instrument those, too. The good part is that it does not "cost" much in your time or the users and it will go a long way to getting started. Don't believe me? Try instrumenting what YOU do and see if you can find any patterns. Refactor it. Lather. Rinse. Repeat!

Now, using the data you've gathered, you can write filters to extract who touches a given file as it works its way through the system. Or, get a look at what applications somebody uses each day. Dependencies will reveal themselves.