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Being able to integrate with exchange would be MARVELOUS - if it were open. And by that i dont mean that Exchange should be open, but the communication with it. Take a look at things like:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openchange/

There have been MANY projects to try and pull apart that communications channel into a library that could be implemented anywhere and no one has managed it (yet). The original work (above) was about trying to make an exchange (server) replacement, but now its extending into implementing client connectivity. Hell, evolution only manages to do it by going thru the OWA (which is a hack at best). So everyone sitting there going "oh it should have exchange connectivity" paleeease write to MS and tell them they should open the protocols (personally, i think they should be forced to do this).. It would be fair to say that it would be nice if it had a real calendar/colab tool for the corporate environment, but if your using this at home you really REALLY need to get a more spontaneous life, seriously!.

New ideas are almost universally shot down until you have it implemented in a product you own. Usually, I find that smart people grip about the most obvious potential flaws without looking into proposed solutions. Even I tend to fall into that trap. Those of us accustomed to routinely proposing new ideas we just come up with have to have very thick skins.

As for specific answers: There's no assumption about everyone running the same version. Each file would have a SHA1 code used to locate it, and it would be downloadable from others who have it, regardless of what their system looks like. It would be a bit like the git version control system that way - content addressable, with a SHA1 representing the exact state of the root directory and it's sub-dirs. Local changes would override the defaults, so for example your computer would have the correct drivers installed locally. When you execute XEmacs the first time, essentially the package would be installed at that time, and browsing it's lisp libraries would only download the corresponding directory entries, not the files themselves. However, installing XEmacs would happen lightning-fast, as only a tiny fraction of XEmacs is actually used most of the time, thus reducing one of XEmac's biggest problems: a huge disk footprint. Same think with X11 and KDE. The files are all virtually there, but contents download when accessed. If a user selected KDE as his default, it would very quickly download, as only the new desktop files and executables would be accessed. Most of the bloat would never need to be download.

Also, this is just one use case. I've listed three others on the web site. For example, BitTorrent is great for sharing huge files, and enables small-fry outfits to distribute many gigabytes of data to the whole world, almost for free. However, it sucks for collections of small files that tend to update over time. So, NetFS could be used for pubishing video blogs, or other often-changing content large enough to be a problem for one guy to upload, but too small and/or changing too fast for BitTorrent. Sites like sourceforge.net and gutenberg.org also require dotated mirrors to function effectively, and NetFS could potentially eliminate that need, while saving them money and improving download speeds.

Anyway, as I said, new ideas are generally shat upon. The reaction of the BitTorrent forums to the friends-downloading algorithm was a good example... The forums seemed to feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with having friends who can help you download faster. However, if implemented, BitTorrent users would generally be far better off. Another example of mine is DataDraw a CASE tool for automating high performance in-memory persistent database creation. It's in use at the last four companies I've worked at, and those who've used it give it glowing recommendations. However, getting smart guys to use someone else's CASE tools requires a world-wide marketing effort, and even then you typically fail.

I guess it's kind of like Linux... great stuff, the best in the world. However, don't expect the world to stop using Windows any time soon, no matter how good Linux is. In general I try not to worry about the rest of the world and focus on my own needs. Linux is the best operating system ever created for my needs, by far. I take great joy in using it, and no longer care what Joe Sixpack uses to download his porn and play games. Same thing with DataDraw - I develop faster, more readable code in less time, and work more effectively with my co-workers. If 99.99% of the hackers out there want to continue writing crap in raw C, or even worse - C++, so be it. To properly enjoy open-source creation, you kinda have to stop worrying about your project's true potential in the world, and focus on your own needs.

New ideas are almost universally shot down until you have it implemented in a product you own. Usually, I find that smart people grip about the most obvious potential flaws without looking into proposed solutions. Even I tend to fall into that trap. Those of us accustomed to routinely proposing new ideas we just come up with have to have very thick skins.

As for specific answers: There's no assumption about everyone running the same version. Each file would have a SHA1 code used to locate it, and it would be downloadable from others who have it, regardless of what their system looks like. It would be a bit like the git version control system that way - content addressable, with a SHA1 representing the exact state of the root directory and it's sub-dirs. Local changes would override the defaults, so for example your computer would have the correct drivers installed locally. When you execute XEmacs the first time, essentially the package would be installed at that time, and browsing it's lisp libraries would only download the corresponding directory entries, not the files themselves. However, installing XEmacs would happen lightning-fast, as only a tiny fraction of XEmacs is actually used most of the time, thus reducing one of XEmac's biggest problems: a huge disk footprint. Same think with X11 and KDE. The files are all virtually there, but contents download when accessed. If a user selected KDE as his default, it would very quickly download, as only the new desktop files and executables would be accessed. Most of the bloat would never need to be download.

Also, this is just one use case. I've listed three others on the web site. For example, BitTorrent is great for sharing huge files, and enables small-fry outfits to distribute many gigabytes of data to the whole world, almost for free. However, it sucks for collections of small files that tend to update over time. So, NetFS could be used for pubishing video blogs, or other often-changing content large enough to be a problem for one guy to upload, but too small and/or changing too fast for BitTorrent. Sites like sourceforge.net and gutenberg.org also require dotated mirrors to function effectively, and NetFS could potentially eliminate that need, while saving them money and improving download speeds.

Anyway, as I said, new ideas are generally shat upon. The reaction of the BitTorrent forums to the friends-downloading algorithm was a good example... The forums seemed to feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with having friends who can help you download faster. However, if implemented, BitTorrent users would generally be far better off. Another example of mine is DataDraw a CASE tool for automating high performance in-memory persistent database creation. It's in use at the last four companies I've worked at, and those who've used it give it glowing recommendations. However, getting smart guys to use someone else's CASE tools requires a world-wide marketing effort, and even then you typically fail.

I guess it's kind of like Linux... great stuff, the best in the world. However, don't expect the world to stop using Windows any time soon, no matter how good Linux is. In general I try not to worry about the rest of the world and focus on my own needs. Linux is the best operating system ever created for my needs, by far. I take great joy in using it, and no longer care what Joe Sixpack uses to download his porn and play games. Same thing with DataDraw - I develop faster, more readable code in less time, and work more effectively with my co-workers. If 99.99% of the hackers out there want to continue writing crap in raw C, or even worse - C++, so be it. To properly enjoy open-source creation, you kinda have to stop worrying about your project's true potential in the world, and focus on your own needs.

New ideas are almost universally shot down until you have it implemented in a product you own. Usually, I find that smart people grip about the most obvious potential flaws without looking into proposed solutions. Even I tend to fall into that trap. Those of us accustomed to routinely proposing new ideas we just come up with have to have very thick skins.

As for specific answers: There's no assumption about everyone running the same version. Each file would have a SHA1 code used to locate it, and it would be downloadable from others who have it, regardless of what their system looks like. It would be a bit like the git version control system that way - content addressable, with a SHA1 representing the exact state of the root directory and it's sub-dirs. Local changes would override the defaults, so for example your computer would have the correct drivers installed locally. When you execute XEmacs the first time, essentially the package would be installed at that time, and browsing it's lisp libraries would only download the corresponding directory entries, not the files themselves. However, installing XEmacs would happen lightning-fast, as only a tiny fraction of XEmacs is actually used most of the time, thus reducing one of XEmac's biggest problems: a huge disk footprint. Same think with X11 and KDE. The files are all virtually there, but contents download when accessed. If a user selected KDE as his default, it would very quickly download, as only the new desktop files and executables would be accessed. Most of the bloat would never need to be download.

Also, this is just one use case. I've listed three others on the web site. For example, BitTorrent is great for sharing huge files, and enables small-fry outfits to distribute many gigabytes of data to the whole world, almost for free. However, it sucks for collections of small files that tend to update over time. So, NetFS could be used for pubishing video blogs, or other often-changing content large enough to be a problem for one guy to upload, but too small and/or changing too fast for BitTorrent. Sites like sourceforge.net and gutenberg.org also require dotated mirrors to function effectively, and NetFS could potentially eliminate that need, while saving them money and improving download speeds.

Anyway, as I said, new ideas are generally shat upon. The reaction of the BitTorrent forums to the friends-downloading algorithm was a good example... The forums seemed to feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with having friends who can help you download faster. However, if implemented, BitTorrent users would generally be far better off. Another example of mine is DataDraw a CASE tool for automating high performance in-memory persistent database creation. It's in use at the last four companies I've worked at, and those who've used it give it glowing recommendations. However, getting smart guys to use someone else's CASE tools requires a world-wide marketing effort, and even then you typically fail.

I guess it's kind of like Linux... great stuff, the best in the world. However, don't expect the world to stop using Windows any time soon, no matter how good Linux is. In general I try not to worry about the rest of the world and focus on my own needs. Linux is the best operating system ever created for my needs, by far. I take great joy in using it, and no longer care what Joe Sixpack uses to download his porn and play games. Same thing with DataDraw - I develop faster, more readable code in less time, and work more effectively with my co-workers. If 99.99% of the hackers out there want to continue writing crap in raw C, or even worse - C++, so be it. To properly enjoy open-source creation, you kinda have to stop worrying about your project's true potential in the world, and focus on your own needs.

Grr... forgot to test the link! Make that P2P file system. Damned slashdot no edit policy :-\

#1 Develop X86 versions of it to run on PC systems. Use UAE to run the older 68K Amiga software on it.

#2 Develop PPC versions of it for the Amiga PPC, PowerMac, and CHRP hardware sets so people with older systems can run it as well.

#3 Get better development tools for it. Developers want to be able to write with more than C++, Python, Free Pascal, AREXX and legacy AmigaDOS tools. Get Novell to port the Mono Development system to AmigaOS 5, get Delphi ported, get RealBASIC and TrueBASIC ported, get Ruby, Perl, Smalltalk, XBASIC, GCC, and Java ported as well.

#4 Get software developers to write AmigaOS 5 ports of their popular software. Get OpenOffice.Org, StarOffice, Quicken, Turbo Tax, Photoshop, Lotus Smartsuite, etc ported.

#5 Get Blizzard, and other game makers to write AmigaOS 5 versions of their popular games.

#6 Get the F/OSS projects ported to AmigaOS 5, like Firefox, Thunderbird, Eurdora, GNUCash, Apache, CVS, The Gimp, etc ported.

#7 Port WINE to the AmigaOS 5 X86 version, and have it built in. Also work on the OSFree project to give the ability to run OS/2 programs. Also work with the Haiku OS project to run BeOS applications on AmigaOS 5. This way you can run software written for Windows, OS/2, and BeOS on one OS, a feat never before done.

#8 Port NDIS Wrapper to use Windows drivers for AmigaOS 5, in case we cannot find any native Windows drivers. Also allow Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OSX drivers to work as well.

#9 Work in parallel with the Amiga Research OS that AmigaOS 3.5 was based on, so that they can give AROS AmigaOS 5.0 features.

#10 Get Virtual Machines ported to AmigaOS 5.0 like VMWare, Bochs, QEMU, Parallels, etc. Also get emulators ported like MAME, MESS, VICE, UAE, Stella, ZNES, SNES, Virtual Gameboy Advance, Basilisk II, VMac, ported to the Amiga OS 5 system.

Actually the are a couple of projects aiming to put the acornish gui on linux: ROX ROLF

You can do a lot with the .NET API. However, there are certain times P/Invokeing Win32 API calls are neccessary. For example I have to use these API calls to be able to create a dropdown list of only non-removeable drives. Another example is performing certain functions with JetSQL (MS Access) databases.

You can do a lot with the .NET API. However, there are certain times P/Invokeing Win32 API calls are neccessary. For example I have to use these API calls to be able to create a dropdown list of only non-removeable drives. Another example is performing certain functions with JetSQL (MS Access) databases.

Another POSper dev here :)

I'd definitely recommend the poster check us out (not that I'm biased or anything...). We have some pretty active development and a surprisingly strong community which are really the most two important ingredients for a project. As many others have said starting your own solution from scratch is not really a viable plan, it took a long time and a lot of coding to get POSper to the place it is now, your best bet really is to find an existing open source project and join that. I did some research before joining POSper and the only other open source POS system I found that wasn't dead was Librepos, the project that POSper forked. Librepos is a great project which has been used by a lot of businesses in production for a while, however for the reasons that we forked I think we're the better bet ;)

As to the people saying it's a bad business proposition I'd like to add that I believe that POS systems are unusually well suited to an open source business model. POS systems need to be highly customized to their situation, as well the end users often have poor technical skills (note this doesn't apply to the POSper community who has the technical skills to find our site, effectively test betas, and occasionally write patches!), as a result a small business with a local presence has a big advantage, which is why most systems are written by small businesses. The need for a local presence and personal contact has really prevented any one product from getting the users, or funding, to dominate the market.

Open source has a big advantage here, essentially the template is local companies providing support to local users, these companies don't necessarily contain any devs (though funding developers is useful for priority bugs fixes and new/custom features). The local companies have way less cost than proprietary competitors because they're only funding a subset of the development, and the developers are supported by a variety of local businesses along with whatever local customers they have. POSper is still approaching its first stable release so we haven't realized this situation on a large scale yet but I've personally been involved in the scenario I've just described so it's certainly doable.

p.s. Just thought I should note that I do have another /. account with a decent UID, I just figured I should have one under my real name for this :)

I started a POS software application for a local restaurant. The restaurant in question decided at the last minute they didn't want to bother with upgrading (from their handwritten system). As has been stated, its important to find a motivated admin for the project, one who will get with you to understand the requirements and will keep all of the other people on the project working towards a solution. By posting this here, I'm sure you will be inundated with offers to help -- I would be willing to give a hand but my skills are almost exclusively windows (as far as the front end GUI goes). http://sourceforge.net/projects/irms/ -- its all but dead now.

POSper

From what I know about Halo 3, the game is some type of prelude or beginning of some epic battle...then you have a game called Halo Wars coming along, which will be more of an RPG in the vein of MMORPG's rather than a shooter like the first 3 games have been.

What? Halo Wars will be a straight-up RTS, like Age of Empires (hey, it is Ensemble making it). It's not "Halo 4", because it's not following the Chief/Cortana/Arbiter/Flood storyline that was finished in Halo 4. Also, as I understand it, Halo Wars is supposed to be a prequel of sorts to Halo 1, being set earlier in the Human/Covenant war than Halo 1 itself. If there is a "Halo 4", it would have to be a new Chief/Cortana/Arbiter storyline, since Halo 3 closed up all of the hanging threads from the first trilogy.

Although, personally, I wouldn't mind them back treading a bit and remaking Marathon before officially or un-offically closing the door on development for Halo games. :D

I'd rather see Bungie make some new properties. Marathon still holds up decently well using Aleph One, and Marathon 2: Durandal has made it to XBLA. I'd love to see Marathon 1 and 3 on XBLA as well, but I don't really care for a remake of the original Marathon games in the Halo engine. It would be nice to see another trilogy set in the Marathon universe, but it would also be nice to see a second Chief/Cortana trilogy (not necessarily called Halo, as it wouldn't have to revolve around the Halo installations).

First off, you really need to check SourceForge.net or FreshMeat.net first. There there are plenty of POS software projects listed at both. Find one that looks like what you're wanting to do and hasn't run out of steam, and give it a shot in the arm with some cash. Maybe spread your cash around two or three of them.

That said, the question of how you start and attract talent to an open source project... I'm not professor on the history of open source, but the most successful projects I've seen are ones where a coder or small group of coders put out an alpha of their project and it was playing with the alpha and seeing the possibilities in it that got people excited enough to come on board and start pushing things forward.

So, if you're not happy with any of the POS projects you can find on SourceForge or FreshMeat, and since you clami to know "little to nothing about programming," I'd suggest going over to eLance or RentACoder and spend a good chunk of your seed money on getting an offshore firm to build your alpha for you. While they're coding their hearts out for you (they'll want 2-3 months to work on your contract), take that time to get to know the open source community and how people launch their open source projects.

Then, when your offshore coders come back to you with a decent alpha, pick an open source license (BSD, GPL v2, GPL v3, etc.), and use the knowledge you've picked up in the prior few months to get the word out and spread the code around. If you did your homweork well and spread the word well, that seed you planted may well sprout.

But remember this, a strong open source project needs a strong leader who can handle the big picture outlook, keep all the volunteers in line and focused on the goal, and drive the project forward. You're going to have to approach some strong personalities one-on-one and try to recruit that project leader. Without a strong leader, failure is a definite possibility.

Just my $0.02.

- Greg

Go here if you need this tools... at least it works on Mac.

Try Denyhosts. http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/

Most distros come with it available right in their package manager.

A WEEK?

I bought a CentOS dedicated server on an unmetered 100mbps line a few months ago. It was set up, and I was emailed the login info within the hour.

I logged in and grep'd /var/log/secure.log for 'failed'. There were already over THREE THOUSAND failed login attempts over SSH. Within the first HOUR.

http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/

Precisely! Computers, especially with the internet, are magnificent learning tools, but they are useless for formal education (except in computer-related fields, of course). The high school I went to mandated and budgeted that there would be at least three computers in every classroom. The result? Three perpetually dormant computers in every classroom.

That sounds more like a failure to develop a strategic plan than a failure of the technology. In my school district, we have one junior high with a better than 1:1 ratio PC/student. Every student is issued a Macbook at the beginning of the school year. The other junior high is using carts of laptops and is maintaining about a 3:1 ratio.

In both cases, the teachers were introduced to the technology slowly over a couple of years before the schools moved aggressively to their current configuration. The teachers had time to figure out how they could leverage the technology. Their lesson plans now incorporate desktop technology as a natural part of the toolset available to the kids. In the former case, kids turn in a majority of their homework electronically.

I've been a parent volunteer/observer for the senior high's tech committee for a couple of years now. The senior high staff (and the district staff, for that matter) has been watching the two junior highs to see what works and what doesn't. Based upon that experience, they have decided that their own staff is not quite ready to commit that heavily. However, they are eager to get them up to speed as quickly as possible.

Last year, they replaced some old teacher desktops with laptops so that all teachers would /finally/ be able to carry their computers with them from classroom to classroom. As part of the drive to get some of the more recalcitrant teachers learning new technology, the principal mandated that all assignments and grades would be updated online several times a week (if not daily).

The district technology office also expanded and cleaned up a website that had been written by a parent for the high school to cover all schools in the district. The website pulls info from the database that the teachers update so the kids (and more importantly, their parents) can track their daily progress. It's apparently a huge hit, as traffic to the website was up over 1,000% from the previous year. For example, I know my wife and I make our kids accountable to what's reported there.

Meanwhile, the tech committee is urging teachers to find new ways of leveraging the technology that they have. Some examples that I'm aware of:

1. The math department went out and bought a couple of smart boards and digital projectors last year for their AP classrooms. The teachers have been using them to get the kids to work problems on the smart board, then saving the results for later retrieval on the teacher's website.
2. Other teachers without smartboards but with digital projectors get the kids participating by passing around a wireless keyboard.
3. One math teacher did a short introduction of the history of mathematics by building a lesson plan based upon Google Earth.
4. In another example, one teacher is now using the shared carts of laptops that the Econ department has to do all tests for her class online. The kids get immediate feedback (which they love), and she has a reduced grading workload. Win/win, eh?
5. Other teachers are using the free material available from MIT and other schools to augment their lesson plans.
6. At the last meeting, I did a quick demo of Freemind and got a pretty positive reaction. Most (all?) of them are familiar with mind or concept mapping. (It was new to me up until several months ago.) The teachers immediately recognized that a tool like that could be leveraged as a visual aid to show relationships between topics as part of a lecture series. One teacher commented that some of the

I'm sure pretty much everybody who is running a Linux server (or any server as a matter of fact), especially with services like SSH enabled, is currently subject to brute force attacks.

When I looked at my auth log I noticed a huge amount of brute force attacks for all my servers, so I installed denyhosts, which seems to work fine.

I guess the problem is also that in many distributions SSH servers are configured to allow root logins, and if nobody looks at the log files these go totally unnoticed.

The http://dopewars.sourceforge.net/ (Afghani-fork) i18n team is working hard to ensure these laptops are put to a more profitable use such as learning about the world through play.

http://xrdp.sourceforge.net/

nuff said.

>>> They are watching those torrents very closely....

Then make sure you configure Azureus to use TOR.

Its dead slow, and the TOR community aren't big fans of you using p2p through TOR, and the movie will probably be out on the telly before you get it... but it is an option.. which should lower the chances of being busted.... or so I believe.

I'm biased because I'm one of the authors, but you may want to have a look at FlowDesigner and RobotFlow. It's a visual development for plugging blocks together and we've used it to control mobile robots and interface with sensors and actuators.

I'm biased because I'm one of the authors, but you may want to have a look at FlowDesigner and RobotFlow. It's a visual development for plugging blocks together and we've used it to control mobile robots and interface with sensors and actuators.

Although I don't use Windows (at all :-) ), Google found a download page here. Looks like there's a Win32 binary there.

Nope. I frequently did with GIMP selections, though.

I don't do that. I use Ctrl-X Ctrl-V, which cuts the selected pixels and pastes them to a new floating layer. I can do that without removing my hand from the mouse. Might not work so well if you're left-handed, although if you're left-handed it would probably make sense to remap important keystrokes like those to the right side of the keyboard. I also notice that it's not necessary to click to confirm the selection before cutting or copying it.

Evolving neural network for sailing project http://annevolve.sourceforge.net/

http://seashore.sourceforge.net/ might do what you want, but it`s not all of Gimp

Seashore is an open source image editor for Cocoa. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP's technology and uses the same native file format.

However, unlike the GIMP, Seashore only aims to serve the basic image editing needs of most computer users, not to provide a replacement for professional image editing products. Seashore was created by Mark Pazolli who, together with a handful of other developers and helpful users, still develops it to this day.

I suppose you can do it that way but the graphic artists I know tend to scan in their samples, vectorize them and go from there.

If you just want to stitch scans, there's Hugin.

Actually GIMP's support for raw files has improved dramatically in the last few years. Install the UFRaw plugin, which most Linux distros package up and which supports the D70 as well as many others.

Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice project.

ooo-build has long been much more than build fixes. For many years it has been the public face of the work Ximian and Novell have poured into the OpenOffice.org source base. It has a long history of features that Ximian/Novell have helped develop, including (but not limited to):

• OpenXML import/export support via odf-converter
• Kohei's solver optimization extension
• Native widget framework and GNOME integration (from back in 1.1.x)
• Visual Basic suport for Calc
• Alpha-blending and enhanced alpha blended icons
• A redesigned GNOME-like icon set
• Microsoft Works importer
• Evolution integration
• And more...

ooo-build is about functionality and features. Despite the name, it has never been about "build fixes" as indicated in the article. The additional functionality is so awesome that, at NeoOffice, we have been using ooo-build in NeoOffice since March and have been donating back bug fixes and Mac-specific support patches to the ooo-build project. Years ago the Ximian work on OOo 1.0.3 was so promising that I put together a Mac OS X port back in 2003 which folks used for a long time. OxygenOffice also is based off of the ooo-build project (although I do not know if the OOOP team coordinates with ooo-build).

The ooo-build team has done amazing work. It is sad to see their work go unrecognized by so many and be outright rejected or stalled by Sun. NeoOffice users have loved having the functionality ooo-build brings currently and continues to bring in the future, and much of the work pioneered by ooo-build is critical to maintaining the Mac platform as a viable office solution (read VBA). Sun's lack of acknowledgement and incorporation of ooo-build features does nothing but hurt users. Having received a "you're welcome to join us" response similar to Kohei, I am glad I do not consider myself part of OOo any longer. The freedom of forking has allowed NeoOffice to incorporate all good code without all of these politics and marketing games. Forking has allowed NeoOffice to deliver to Mac users the features they wanted yesterday regardless of where those features came from. Sun has a history of a "not invented here" syndrome at times when it comes to code within their "open" source projects.

I'm glad to see that ooo-build is getting some recognition. I hope more users start seeing some of the great functionality they can get today on Windows and Linux, and once again I thank ooo-build, Ximian, and Novell for their continued dedication to improving OOo.

ed

Answer: pidgin-encryption

It creates temporary sessions keys just like SSH. These keys are destroyed when the IM window is closed.

Just because you can't does not mean Linux can't.

VideoConference http://ekiga.org/

Edit Video http://www.kdenlive.org/

Make mp3s: Insert CD copy mp3 folder with kde.org or Create new with http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

play video games with http://www.winehq.org/ or http://www.transgaming.com/ or god forbid you play open source games designed for linux. Too many to list see here http://icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php for a start.

make a slideshow, Ever use http://picasa.google.com/linux/ or KDE creates them on the fly from directory of pictures. Not to mention openoffice Impress http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html

How about a couple of kernel devs drop off and help Linux go the last mile.

How about you let the kernel devs do what they do best, and acquaint yourself with a little thing I like to call Google http://www.google.com/webhp.

I can't deny that Lucene, Nutch, Solr and Hadoop are all useful. But boy, they take some real time to get to the point where your boss is all "sweet as a nut boys!". Personally, for medium sized document collections like this I simply use Google Desktop Search and turn it into a server using 2 things:

1) DNKA - it acts as a web server (search server) by interacting as a layer between Google Desktop Search (Enterprise) and user http://www.dnka.com/
2) Kongulo - it crawls websites and transmits the HTML documents it finds back into your new GDS+DNKA server http://goog-kongulo.sourceforge.net/

The cool thing about Kongulo is that it's written in python, so you can easily modify it to suit your needs more clearly, for example - a list of no follow sites/titles/URIs, or a meta-tag extraction component.

We have at least one index here available to about 1000 folks on one dual-core 2GB RAM Dell generic server that has now indexed over half a million documents, and it does not look like it's going to slow down any time soon. I find this a really useful solution, even though your meta-tags might be difficult to deal with it's worth a look IMHO.

Try OWL, it's a neat little project that looks like it can easily handle your requirements.

I'm writing an OpenSource J2ME application as an hobby (shameless plug: http://jbit.sourceforge.net/) and I don't think J2ME it's that complicated. Its basic API (MIDP1) is very simple. Its second incarnation (MIDP2) is also simple. There are a lot of optional APIs, but I believe you can write interesting applications without them. Sure, if you want to use GPS, you need to use a specialized API and not every phone will support it. I think it's fair.

But this IMHO is missing the point. Are there any other platforms besides J2ME? I'm sorry but I don't see that many SmartPhones around me (Italy). Most people I know think they are expensive and bulky. I have a friend who still has a Nokia 3310. Laugh as much as you like, but its display has better visibility under direct sunlight than most "Smart" phones I've seen.

Try Regain:

    http://regain.sourceforge.net/

You can stick your head in the sand and pretend it's not so, but even so, some hapless customer will save his latest contract draft in Word and email it to me for review - personally, I'd like to read it.

This argument cuts both ways and highlights the importance of open standards. I don't have windows at home, and my wife (definitely non techie - doesn't know the difference between a binary and its icon) doesn't want windows at home. Businesses that insist on communicating via windows specific technology get marked down.

Her indoors is currently doing an online course with a private company that specified that she submit all work in doc format - after she had signed up. She asked if pdf was okay and the instructor said yes. A while into the course, her instructor changed and the new one couldn't even figure out how to open a pdf. She insisted on word documents.

The ball and chain insisted on her money back if she couldn't submit in pdf, because nowhere in the advertising material or documentation did it mention having to buy software from a foreign monopoly to participate in the course until after the money was paid - my words, not hers.

Her instructor knows how to open a pdf now.

In my personal dealings with companies that want my business, I press save in open office and send the resulting file. If they can't read them, I ask them how they want them saved. I then usually save them as word documents and suggest they upgrade their office suite to one that can communicate with people who don't have word.

If MS just bit the bullet and adopted ODF, interoperability would be so good. I understand they want to monopolise the desktop, but seriously, at home, why the fuck should I pay a foriegn company for an operating system? I support the machines myself, it's not like it's a corporate environment where support contracts are important. I refuse to pay Microsoft for their crap, and I don't particularly see the need to spend the crap loads of unjustified markup on OSX (even higher and less justified in Australia then the rest of the world).

OOXML is not an implementable spec and ODF is so if businesses want to communicate with the widest possible range of customers, use a format accessible to everyone.

Send only ODF and include a link to a free ODF import/export plugin for word.

Can`t edit videos ? What do you think LiVES is ? A word processor ?

As someone who wrote exactly this kind of thing for Java, I can attest to the idea that it can be useful and not a security issue. The trick is to think of its uses in a completely different way than what we tend to associate with Excel. The way I use Bean Sheet (my programmer's spreadsheet) is in the following ways: - To hold and manipulate small amounts (usually sub-100,000 rows) of formatted and structured data. One thing I've never seen anybody do in Excel is script your own sorting algorithms for example. - To have a format compatible with a version control system so as to see diff's in simple, but formatted, lists of data. - A more visual way of modeling/testing/debugging API and components. - To allow programmatic access to the spreadsheets. This is what this guy was talking about as a good opportunity to seed quickly changing business rules into an otherwise static system. Suppose you have a piece of code that needs to perform some business-rules driven operations on a data set. You can encapsulate those business rules in such a spreadsheet containing no data, test it, and deploy it with your application. The app then loads the data into the spreadsheet (the spreadsheet might even contain information on where to put the data set into it, so the interaction can be quite generic) and the app then queries the spreadsheet's "result" cells. And since these kinds of spreadsheets can contain all manners of data types, integration can be really simple. Then, if need be, pop open the spreadsheet, tweak the business rules, and deploy it back into your app -- perfect component-oriented programming model implementation .

http://p2pbridge.sourceforge.net/chroot_ssh/

I in fact maintain a couple reports that do exactly this. It's not exactly real-time (the query takes 10 minutes to run), but generating a new set of charts is just a matter of hitting the "refresh query" button.

You want real-time reports on streamed data, something like MOODSS is probably the ticket.

That works if you have a copy of the application, su, some version of /etc/passwd, and all of the libraries needed by both programs inside the chroot area. To avoid that, you can use chroot_safe, which is a clever LD_PRELOAD hack to start the program, load all shared libraries, then do the chroot. For many programs, this is enough to make it work without copying anything into the chroot area. It's very handy; I use it for all sorts of things.

Also, companies which promise a linux client is "coming soon!" and then years later still haven't delivered a damn thing. (I'm looking at you ventrilo on both counts).

Have you tried Mumble/Murmur?

Hey!

Nobody has mentioned GemRB, a promising, but as yet unfinished Linux version of the infinity engine! Download it, try it out, and contribute. This is something that needs the same level of attention as Exult. The game isn't really playable yet, but you already see that the task is possible.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gemrb/

-V0 -h --vbr-new

--alt-preset extreme

> I don't know of any other download service that could top the Amazon MP3 store.

Any that sell FLAC for a start!

Most "smart" phones (and most phones in general) don't have support for syncing

You can already do this with a Symbian based phone (assuming your network operator hasn't blocked the port)

http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/

I believe your answer to number 3 is wrong according to MySQL AB (the corporation that owns the copyright of MySQL). They changed from the LGPL in version 2.x to GPL in version 3.x. See http://mmmysql.sourceforge.net/. I can't find the page right now, but at the time all this changed it was fairly clear that MySQL was tired of losing the licensing fees. Because the Connector was LGPL, you could embed MySQL in virtually any application and never need to purchase a license. The LGPL had little burden on a commercial use (essentially, ship the source, or offer a copy of the source to any one you shipped the connector to). The change to using the GPL should mean that your application should be bound by the GPL'ed. While your interpretation might be correct, the copyright holder disagrees with you. Even if your right, that could be very expensive.

As for 1, I'm not sure you can relicense it, I'd have to read the licenses closely, but you could release your stuff under GPLv3 and include any requirements the Apache license has (including the notice files, not removing the copyright notice, or the waivers of any warrantee). Effectively you can do what you want.

Kirby