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You may want to take a look at backuppc

Try PowerFolder (sf.net page)
It has active development.

Fight back - run Freenet.

anyone tried tsyncd?

A more user friendly way is to install something like nekjs.
If you need a new feature, just use the SourceForge service marketplace to find somebody to code it.

Disclaimer: I am involved and not innocent.

Elmar

A more user friendly way is to install something like nekjs.
If you need a new feature, just use the SourceForge service marketplace to find somebody to code it.

Disclaimer: I am involved and not innocent.

Elmar

Not that it matters, but since you asked...

Photoshop -> GIMP
Avid -> LIVES - Note: I am not a video editor and have no idea if this program is any good.
Quicken -> GNUCash, among others.

I guess what I'm saying is that, based on your definition of "silly", there's quite a bit of silliness going on in the world today. *grin*

Isn't that the job of the OS? If not, wouldn't dban, et al, take care of it?

On the first (a cheap Acer laptop) it complained about the wireless chip. No real options for the user, other than to get a new laptop. But it did work.

There's a solid collection of Mac+LaTeX info (including software, getting started, etc.) at:

http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/

I've not used OS X in years, really, but when I did I used TeXShop as my LaTeX front end and i-installer (which seems to be no more) for installing LaTeX itself. The i-installer page is still there, and there's some TeX info there:

http://ii2.sourceforge.net/tex-index.html

I can't emphasize enough how much better it is to use a system like (La)Tex or troff or docbook for writing papers than it is to use a word processor. (Though I've only really used the first two.) Separation of content and formatting (however imperfect the implementation is in LaTeX or troff) in a plain text file really is the way to go.

I quite agree. In fact I have been working in this area for the last 5 years, trying to get projects like LiVES, videojack, Weed/Livido and OMC off the ground. However, there is no funding for this to be found anywhere - I have applied to literally dozens of groups, including the FSF, google and other places, but nobody seems interested in free standards in multimedia.

Anyway, you can check out some of these projects:

http://lives.sourceforge.net/
http://www.piksel.org/videojack
http://livido.dyne.org/codedoc/
http://lives.cvs.sourceforge.net/lives/lives/weed- docs/
http://lives.cvs.sourceforge.net/lives/lives/OMC/l ives-OMC.txt

I quite agree. In fact I have been working in this area for the last 5 years, trying to get projects like LiVES, videojack, Weed/Livido and OMC off the ground. However, there is no funding for this to be found anywhere - I have applied to literally dozens of groups, including the FSF, google and other places, but nobody seems interested in free standards in multimedia.

Anyway, you can check out some of these projects:

http://lives.sourceforge.net/
http://www.piksel.org/videojack
http://livido.dyne.org/codedoc/
http://lives.cvs.sourceforge.net/lives/lives/weed- docs/
http://lives.cvs.sourceforge.net/lives/lives/OMC/l ives-OMC.txt

I quite agree. In fact I have been working in this area for the last 5 years, trying to get projects like LiVES, videojack, Weed/Livido and OMC off the ground. However, there is no funding for this to be found anywhere - I have applied to literally dozens of groups, including the FSF, google and other places, but nobody seems interested in free standards in multimedia.

Anyway, you can check out some of these projects:

http://lives.sourceforge.net/
http://www.piksel.org/videojack
http://livido.dyne.org/codedoc/
http://lives.cvs.sourceforge.net/lives/lives/weed- docs/
http://lives.cvs.sourceforge.net/lives/lives/OMC/l ives-OMC.txt

Well, LiVES is trying to be that video editor you dream of...

"... Sun doesn't use Java on a single one of their internal projects (it's banned by policy)."

I've heard that too, but I don't have a link. Can anyone help?

From a recent comment: My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sells are written in C#.

Examples of Java de-compilers:
Jad - the fast JAva Decompiler
DJ Java Decompiler
Jode
JReversePro
SourceTec Java Decompiler

I think Sun and Microsoft are far more destructive to the computer world than anyone has analyzed thoroughly. This XML thing is just one example.

"... Sun doesn't use Java on a single one of their internal projects (it's banned by policy)."

I've heard that too, but I don't have a link. Can anyone help?

From a recent comment: My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sells are written in C#.

Examples of Java de-compilers:
Jad - the fast JAva Decompiler
DJ Java Decompiler
Jode
JReversePro
SourceTec Java Decompiler

I think Sun and Microsoft are far more destructive to the computer world than anyone has analyzed thoroughly. This XML thing is just one example.

SIP, if I remember, requires so many open ports you may as well not try unless you're sitting on a real Internet IP address, with no firewall, at both ends.

I believe there's something else you can use instead, some Asterisk-specific but somewhat widely-supported protocol, a bit simpler, only requires one port. There's also Jabber/Gtalk -- I know Kopete supports that now, among other clients. I don't know exactly how the voice works, but it is nice to be able to have one or more central servers to connect to, so at least your endpoints can be behind whatever firewall/NAT people have set up.

But Skype is actually the technically best solution I've seen, and I wish there was an open source alternative, or an open spec. It actually uses some UDP tricks to allow you to open a connection directly between the two endpoints, requiring no bandwidth from Skype, even if both endpoints are firewalled and NAT'ed. It does require at least one publicly-accessible server, but only for the initialization.

Of course, for conferences, I'd have to recommend mumble, which looks to be intending to replace TeamSpeak and Ventrillo for voice chat in games.

I just want to say that in regard to Vim, there is an excellent manual accessible by entering ":help" (without the quotes) in Normal mode.

For help on substitution, enter ":help find-replace". The section on substitution can also be read online.

There is also a talk given by the author of Vim, called 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 available on Google Video.

Specifically, I'd like to see more mainstreaming of some of the features from mosix / openmosix. I played with mosix clusters (deployed from a master NFS server using debian's diskless-image package) quite a few years back, and I've been yearning to set up more.

Some of the features currently possible (or that I'd like to see):

And as a perfect example of this, take a look at MediaCoder http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/ which is a GUI front end to mencoder. The thing works well, but has a substantial learning curve - might as well learn the mencoder command.

This ruling seems inconsistent with the Sun case where anything denoted as a "condition" it was considered would be sufficient to cause the behaviour to fall outside the license.

Actually the defendants used the president set by Sun v. Microsoft to make their argument.

My rough transcript: link, line 11, page 7.

The Ninth Circuit has held that open source licensors such as Jacobsen waive their right to sure for copyright infringement and can only sue for breach of contract. Sun Microsystems, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 188F.3d 115, 112 (9th Cir 1999). In Sun Microsystems, Sun and Microsoft entered into a computer licensing agreement involving Java, a computer programming language developed by Sun. Id. At 1117. Sun granted Microsoft broad rights to use the language provided that Microsoft make available only products that are compatible with Sun standards. Id. At 118. Sun filed suit against Microsoft for copyright infringement alleging that Microsoft had exceeded the scope of the license by creating enhanced versions of Java that were fully operational only on Microsoft Systems. Id. The Ninth Circuit held that, before Sun cold avail itself of the benefits of copyright law, it must "definitively establish that the rights it claims were violated are copright, not contractual rights." Id. At 1112. This determination, according to the Ninth Circuit, hinges on the scope of the license agreement. Id. At 1121. "Generally, a copyright owner who grants a nonexclusive license to use his copyrighted material waives his right to sue the licensee for copyright infringement and can only sue for breach of contract." Id. (citing Graham v. James, 144 F.3d 229, 236 (2nd Cir. 1998)). In other words, to bring a copyright infringement claim, Jacobsen must establish that the defendants have violated at least one of the exclusive rights granted to copyright holders under 17 U.S.C. 106, and not a right conferred by the license or contract. Sun Microsystems at 1122; see also A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 10004, 1013 (9th Cir. 2001). Section 106 of the Copyright Act grants a copyright holder the exclusive right to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, distribute, display, and perform the copyrighted material. 17 U.S.C 106.

The argument gets more interesting from there, but my fingers are tired of transcribing.

is improve the kernel so that it can use Windows drivers as well as Linux drivers to solve the hardware incompatibility that Linux suffers from.

If I were to improve an application it would be WINE, adding in better DirectX support and more support for Windows games so we could convert the Gameheads from Windows to Linux with WINE, and it would affect the sales of Windows.

Linux lacks a DRM media player, right now Windows has the advantage with Internet movie rentals and other media files that can play on Windows, but not Linux. You would need a freeware media player that can handle the DRM of iTunes/Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Real Player. Of course it cannot be under the GPL, and it cannot be bundled with Linux, but it can be an optional download for Linux users who want to use it.

If I had millions to spend, I'd have Windows Game Developers develop popular games for Linux to prove that there can be a commercial games market. Get Blizzard, Electronic Arts, 2K, Activision, etc seed money to rewrite or port their popular games to Linux.

If I had millions more to spend, I'd have application companies develop software like Wordperfect Office, Lotus Smartsuite, Photoshop, Quark Express, Paintshop, and other popular applications to Linux. I'd also give Mozilla seed money to write open source versions of Word processors, Spreadsheets, Presentation Software, and other Office software for Linux and multiple platforms that can use the MS-Office file formats, as well as open source file formats. The Mozilla code has an HTML editor that can be the basis for a good Word processor. It can also be used to tweak it into a spreadsheet and presentation software.

If I had millions more to spend, I'd give money to the OSFree project to get OS/2 applications to run under Linux, the Haiku OS project to get BeOS applications to run under Linux, the Amiga Research OS project to get AmigaDOS/AmigaOS applications to run under Linux, and I would fund money into a project to make an application to translate OSX API calls to Linux ones, so Linux can run OSX applications. Then Linux would be able to run almost any software from almost any OS platform, and people won't be able to complain of a lack of applications for Linux.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=6241&package_id=112520 have fun ;-)

This and many other useful tactics can be implemented for free using ASSP - see http://assp.sourceforge.net/

Free software alternatives exist: a promising project is Soothsayer.

Soothsayer is an intelligent predictive text entry platform. Soothsayer exploits redundant information embedded in natural languages to generate predictions. Soothsayer's modular and pluggable architecture allows its language model to be extended and customized to utilize statistical, syntactic, and semantic information sources.

No need to buy their product, when there are free software alternatives: Soothsayer is an intelligent predictive text entry platform. Soothsayer exploits redundant information embedded in natural languages to generate predictions. Soothsayer's modular and pluggable architecture allows its language model to be extended and customized to utilize statistical, syntactic, and semantic information sources.

Absolutely. I've started to get into Java (initially because then I could write J2ME apps for my phone, and not have to learn Symbian (blearg) ), and I like it now. I can't see the point of using jsp and servlets - it takes me about 4 times as long as it would take me to use vi, and knock it up in PHP. (Perhaps I'm just not at the level at which the benefits make themselves apparent.)

But even some of the technical people I work with don't know if they want the JDK, or the JRE - and the popup (on Windows) nagging you to upgrade is annoying too.

It seems quite a fast language now - but people that tried it 5 years ago generally won't touch it any more. They (Sun) almost shot their foot completely off.

As an aside, are there any JNI (Java+C) experts here? (Ignore the mention of Jpcap)

Quote: "I don't think Java is a particularly big reason for people to like Sun, and tying your company's future to it seems ill-advised."

Exactly. The name change is evidence that Sun has some very technically ignorant marketing people, apparently, or maybe just a very technically ignorant, but imperial, CEO.

My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sells are written in C#.

Examples of Java de-compilers:
Jad - the fast JAva Decompiler
DJ Java Decompiler
Jode
JReversePro
SourceTec Java Decompiler

From Wikipedia's Criticism of Java: "The look and feel of GUI applications written in Java using the Swing platform is often different from native applications." It seems to me that the average person's experience of Java is that programs written in it are slow and funky, not a good advertisement for a large company.

Eventually, Java will be completely open source. It is not now. Once it is open source, Sun loses control. Does Sun want to lose control of a symbol it is using for its company?

Java is an Indonesian island of 124 million, the most populous island in the world and one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. There have been political problems there in the past. If there are problems there in the future, the word Java will be in the news. More than 90 percent of Javanese are Muslims. Does Sun intend to involve the company with the uncertain future of a Muslim island?

I will now quote someone who considers himself an authority, the CEO of Sun: "Granted, lots of folks on Wall Street know SUNW, given its status as among the most highly traded stocks in the world (the SUNW symbol shows up daily in the listings of most highly traded securities)." -- From the August 23, 2007 badly formatted article linked by Slashdot, Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, written by Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz.

Mr. Swartz, are you an imperial CEO like Gerald Levin of AOL Time Warner? (Time Warner's merging itself into AOL is considered the worst business decision of all time. The company immediately lost $88 Billion.) Mr. Levin called himself an "imperial CEO", meaning that he made decisions without consulting other people.

Mr. Swartz, if you don't have enough technical knowledge even to format your own web page, are you technically knowledgeable enough to run Sun? From the biography on Sun's web site: "Schwartz received degrees in economics and mathematics from Wesleyan University."

I don't believe it will actually happen, but if it does, by changing away from the strong brand of SUNW, known for serious servers, to a brand largely outside its control, Sun will weaken its position in the marketplace, in my opinion.

I don't think it is wise for technically knowledgeable people to work for companies managed by people with little or no technical knowledge. When technically ignorant managers try to run technically-oriented companies, a lot of unpredictable, weird things happen. Why take the risk?

Quote: "I don't think Java is a particularly big reason for people to like Sun, and tying your company's future to it seems ill-advised."

Exactly. The name change is evidence that Sun has some very technically ignorant marketing people, apparently, or maybe just a very technically ignorant, but imperial, CEO.

My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sells are written in C#.

Examples of Java de-compilers:
Jad - the fast JAva Decompiler
DJ Java Decompiler
Jode
JReversePro
SourceTec Java Decompiler

From Wikipedia's Criticism of Java: "The look and feel of GUI applications written in Java using the Swing platform is often different from native applications." It seems to me that the average person's experience of Java is that programs written in it are slow and funky, not a good advertisement for a large company.

Eventually, Java will be completely open source. It is not now. Once it is open source, Sun loses control. Does Sun want to lose control of a symbol it is using for its company?

Java is an Indonesian island of 124 million, the most populous island in the world and one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. There have been political problems there in the past. If there are problems there in the future, the word Java will be in the news. More than 90 percent of Javanese are Muslims. Does Sun intend to involve the company with the uncertain future of a Muslim island?

I will now quote someone who considers himself an authority, the CEO of Sun: "Granted, lots of folks on Wall Street know SUNW, given its status as among the most highly traded stocks in the world (the SUNW symbol shows up daily in the listings of most highly traded securities)." -- From the August 23, 2007 badly formatted article linked by Slashdot, Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, written by Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz.

Mr. Swartz, are you an imperial CEO like Gerald Levin of AOL Time Warner? (Time Warner's merging itself into AOL is considered the worst business decision of all time. The company immediately lost $88 Billion.) Mr. Levin called himself an "imperial CEO", meaning that he made decisions without consulting other people.

Mr. Swartz, if you don't have enough technical knowledge even to format your own web page, are you technically knowledgeable enough to run Sun? From the biography on Sun's web site: "Schwartz received degrees in economics and mathematics from Wesleyan University."

I don't believe it will actually happen, but if it does, by changing away from the strong brand of SUNW, known for serious servers, to a brand largely outside its control, Sun will weaken its position in the marketplace, in my opinion.

I don't think it is wise for technically knowledgeable people to work for companies managed by people with little or no technical knowledge. When technically ignorant managers try to run technically-oriented companies, a lot of unpredictable, weird things happen. Why take the risk?

Galleon is supposed to be able to do the same thing on anything that can run Java, but I've never tried the video viewing as my TiVo is on a Wireless B network, and streaming any video to or from it is basically impossible on that setup.

I can confirm the MP3 streaming works from a computer to a TiVo.

Try downloading just about any binary installer of free software on Windows, and you'll be asked to agree to the license before you install it. For example, the GTK+ library, available here, is LGPL licensed. But if you don't click "I agree" to agree to the LGPL, no install. That looks to me like a requirement for use, even though the LGPL doesn't apply to use.

I think the silly MS license has the same sort of logical error in it. It has boilerplate language that says it applies to use, but it places no restrictions on use. If it's not free, then GTK+ is not free.

I think there are probably better ways of doing this. There are emulators that can read the audio data, and so it would be simpler to just store a digital copy of the data...

There are also methods for transferring files over audio connections between vintage and modern hardware. ADTPro works with the cassette ports in an Apple IIe, II+, or II. I remember reading recently about something with similar capabilities for the TI-99/4A, but I don't recall the name offhand. (Some quick looking-around turned up Tape994a and CS1er.)

A few emulators can read from WAV files of the tapes. MP3 should be okay bandwidth-wise, but the psycho-acoustic model throws away information humans can't hear, and I don't know if that is a problem for some data encodings.

With most computers writing to tape at somewhere between 600 and 2400 bps, I'd think that lossless compression would be able to shrink the file size significantly without running the risk of garbling the data.

espeak might be a good option for a text to speech program. It's available from http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ and is also in the Ubuntu repositories. Apart from producing good quality speech with unmodified English text, it's also easy to use: Just type espeak "Whatever you want to say goes here" in the terminal.

It'll also take text files as input so you could produce a range of scripts with phrases in and then your Gran can just cursor up and down the command line history to pick a phrase. I wish her well btw.

P.S., You might want to change the default (male) voice!

traffic shaping is tough to fight with, but not impossible. DNS or ICMP tunneling can make the shaper work harder.

check this out http://larytet.sourceforge.net/howto.shtml

3 pages down look for "Ellacoya promise that the shaper is statefull is true..."

Sic spamdot on 'em. http://sourceforge.net/projects/spamdot/

"text document branch"? Sounds like rubbish to me.

Have another article on it if you want - http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126331-page,1/ar ticle.html?tk=nl_dnxnws - no mention of partial implementations there, or otherwise there's always the good old community to help out - http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter

Also, as it turns out the UI for Office 2007 isn't so bad after all - http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=201800612&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News
Think logically for one second....Microsoft have in fairness spent a fair few billion on this new interface. That's more effort and investment than OO will ever get, ever, so the chances are it is going to be easier for users.

I have about 5kg worth of Mac disks with everything from various OS versions, apps, games, and tons of HyperCard stacks ... and vanishingly little of it is still readable. Floppies degrade over time.

3.5" floppies (especially the cheap ones of the past few years) tend to degrade pretty badly. My experience with 5.25" floppies, OTOH, hasn't been nearly as bad. Last time I checked, the boot floppies that came with my IIe back in the day still work, and they're about 22 years old now.

At some point, I still need to image all of my floppies just in case something does happen to them. I hooked the GS's hard drive up to a Linux box at home a couple or three weeks ago to image that...boots up in KEGS in a split-second, too. I'll need to do some 6502 assembly for a project I'm working on. With the assembler running in KEGS, the board-design software running natively, and the EPROM burner running in a WinXP VM under VMware, that's one machine doing the work of three.

Now bring back hypercard, apple! That was so much fun, I programmed graphical interfaces with it when I was 10!

Hopefully I can knock one of those right off your list. I use this to do the "Text to Columns" feature that OO doesn't come with stock.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=87718&package_id=104183

OpenOffice does have VBA support, but it doesn't work for everything. Most sane scripts should run... anything an Excel "Wizzard" did probably is going to have a problem, though. There's a bunch of info on the OO site about what parts of the language they do support, and what's planned. Info on that at: http://vba.openoffice.org/

Hey everyone.. I work on the JBossTools and RHDS Team and just wanted to give some community-level info about our project.

Red Hat Developer Studio is our commercial offering of the JBossTools open source project (formerly known as JBossIDE), which has a vibrant community of users and contributors. You can check out our project(s) at the following URLs:

JBossTools main page: http://jboss.org/tools
JBossTools blog: http://jbosstools.blogspot.com/
JBossTools 2.0.0.beta3: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=22866&package_id=242269&release_id=531957
RHDS 1.0.0.beta1 (based on JBossTools 2.0.0.beta3): http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/index.html

Feel free to drop by #jbosstools on freenode, we'd love to hear from you!

There are several IDEs for linux, my favorites: boa-constructor, glade.

Everyone who wants to have Ghosting ability, check out Partimage Is Not Ghost . This is a very good piece of software that creates hdd backups reliably (in my usage) of ntfs, fat, and any *nix formats. It boots from a cd and runs on linux.

Another favored find I have made recently is XOSL . Yes, I know, it is old, but it is still good.

The latest announcement from Plex86 is dated 2003-12-19, asking for donations to help start the project up again. You must be using the same definition of "alive and well" as people used in the Terri Schiavo kerfuffle a few years back...

Yeah, NOBODY uses unencrypted FTP anymore... *sigh*

-John Mark

This already exists :)

psdoom: http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/