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Although a supporter of encryption, I fit mostly in the "dropped the ball" category. I do not use e-mail encryption in part because I do all of my e-mail through the GMail web client and I do not know of any way to use encryption with that. Hints welcome; nothing like digital signatures at the end of e-mails to get friends to ask about encryption. Yes, I know I could use Thunderbird (err... Icedove ;) and POP/SMTP access, but I actually use GMail's labels and find Thunderbird a greatly inferior client compared to GMail.

I have tried to get my friends to use encryption for IM (gaim-encryption or gaim-otr; now pidgin-) with very limited success. Although, I have gotten people to switch to Gaim/Pidgin due to considering it a superior program, they mostly think it is a waste of effort to setup encryption. A few times a have looked around for a good essays or set of essays on why encryption is good idea even when one has nothing to hide, but I have not found anything.

Also, unfortunately, there are no IM encryption protocols with web of trust support that I know of. I believe the long-dead gaim-e project used GPG keys. The pidgin-encryption project suggests this is by design.

As for encouraging the use of web of trust, I wondering if key signatures could possibly be made easier to remember by a natural language encoding. That is, use the signature as a random seed for generating (grammatical) nonsense that some people may find easier to remember (and therefore share) than a string of hex digits.

Also, among the apps allowed by a large WoT are self-signed HTTPS keys, so it would not cost extra to encrypt your website, although there may be processing power issues there as well.

Although a supporter of encryption, I fit mostly in the "dropped the ball" category. I do not use e-mail encryption in part because I do all of my e-mail through the GMail web client and I do not know of any way to use encryption with that. Hints welcome; nothing like digital signatures at the end of e-mails to get friends to ask about encryption. Yes, I know I could use Thunderbird (err... Icedove ;) and POP/SMTP access, but I actually use GMail's labels and find Thunderbird a greatly inferior client compared to GMail.

I have tried to get my friends to use encryption for IM (gaim-encryption or gaim-otr; now pidgin-) with very limited success. Although, I have gotten people to switch to Gaim/Pidgin due to considering it a superior program, they mostly think it is a waste of effort to setup encryption. A few times a have looked around for a good essays or set of essays on why encryption is good idea even when one has nothing to hide, but I have not found anything.

Also, unfortunately, there are no IM encryption protocols with web of trust support that I know of. I believe the long-dead gaim-e project used GPG keys. The pidgin-encryption project suggests this is by design.

As for encouraging the use of web of trust, I wondering if key signatures could possibly be made easier to remember by a natural language encoding. That is, use the signature as a random seed for generating (grammatical) nonsense that some people may find easier to remember (and therefore share) than a string of hex digits.

Also, among the apps allowed by a large WoT are self-signed HTTPS keys, so it would not cost extra to encrypt your website, although there may be processing power issues there as well.

Anyone worth their salt uses private proxies now. Either get a collocated machine at an ISP anywhere in the world or more simply, buy a webhosting package anywhere in the world that supports PHP (most do) and then install one of the many PHP proxies (such as this one) and you are set.

A webhosting package is the best way to go as you can get those monthly and thus you can switch IPs/locals quite rapidly (or have many on the go at a cost of less than $10/month each), where as a collocated machine is much more costly and more time consuming to setup.

One of the individuals that first perfected this technique was a Wall Street message board addict Gary Weiss who brought the technique to Wikipedia a couple years ago. It's fairly common knowledge within some communities (such as WikipediaReview.com) and is understood as the preferred way to get around Wikipedia administrator hassles.

The thing is, a portable version of wikipedia has been already developed:
http://encyclopodia.sourceforge.net/en/index.html

for the iPod; also the Encyclopodia Ebook format (basically an indexed b2zipped articles or blocks), is far better suited for portable devices.
Now if any PSP/DS/Palm developer is reading this...

Good thinking. I was just wondering the same thing about my PalmOS PDA. It has plenty of storage available. I wonder if the existing Python port would be sufficiently powerful to run this.

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

It has support specifically for laptops.

Once a day, it runs a backup of my laptop and everything on my machine comes to a grinding halt for five to ten minutes.

A solution is not a solution if it doesn't get used. We have only 5 guys with laptops, but some are smart enough that they can cause trouble. I was using a network backup to tape drive, but these guys could go into their Windows task manager and kill the process, 'cause they didn't like the way the backups bogged down their performance. Since I had a solution in place, my ass was covered, and they were on the hook for any problems if we didn't have a current backup. Still, a laptop loss or hard disk failure will cause me a lot of headaches, whether or not it's my fault.

So the second option I implemented was external hard drives for all laptop users. They can back up their own stuff, whenever is convenient for them. Yet they are kinda lazy and very busy with other stuff, so I've been hearing rumors that some laptops are only getting backed up once a week. Or worse. With the external drives in the users hands, I can't keep any track of what is going on. Once again, my ass is covered, but a disaster will still be a headache for me.

What my guys need is something with logs that I can see, and will back up their laptops to a server, but will give them some scheduling control so as not to interfere with their work. The compromise we are working towards is some file synchronization software. Something that has scheduling capability, but can also be initiated by the user. When they are VPN'ed in, or in the office and connected to the network, and they are going to lunch or heading to a meeting, they can click an icon on the desktop to set off the file transfer. I can see a log on the server and know who hasn't been backing up in a while, and send a reminder email, or even automate the email reminders.

This idea is promising, but I'm wondering what new problem will crop up with it. I'm looking at Vice Versa and SyncBac , for the software, which both have nice features. I'm going to check out BackupPC after seeing it mentioned in this thread.

You might want to check out anacron: http://anacron.sourceforge.net/. It was written for exactly the case you're describing.

I've never personally tried it, but BackupPC looks like it might be able to do the job. AdminsParadise offers the ability to get this set up and running quickly, and it appears to be rather pain free. Oh, and did I mention that BackupPC is licensed under the GPL?

Do any of you have any experience with this setup? If so, how well does it work?

I've been using backuppc for probably 3 years now. We use it mainly for our desktops, but it'll grab the laptops as long as they show up on the network for a couple hours a day. It uses single instance storage and compression to save space. Highly configurable. It actually backs up our entire network. Windows machines using smbclient, unix machines via ssh/rsync, allows users to retrieve their own files. The down side is, its not really meant for larger installations I don't think, as all the configuration information information is stored in plain text files, but it can be configured to deal with any machine in a range and stuff.

Now that I sound like a salesman, I'll go away.

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

BackupPC keeps track of a device's ping history. If the device only comes in during the day, after a couple of days the system will start backing it up as soon as it connects to the network.

I use it to back up the LAN, portables, and PCs connecting via VPN -- given that it can back up via RSYNC, SSH and SAMBA, pretty much anything with a HD connected to the network gets put into the system.

The backups are also mirrored for off-site storage so there's always an in-house revision system and an emergency remote restore point. The system works well, and for small businesses can easily store 1.5TB of data on a single 250MB HDD (make sure to mirror).

I have been using BackupPC for some time now with great results. Despite its name, the software is quite powerful and easily fits borderline enterprise requirements. It'll function with most platforms out there, and has some nifty options for laptop users - meaning the intermittently connected machines.

I have also used Symantec's BackupExec with the Desktop and Laptop Option (DLO) with mixed results. It fits the bill if you're running a homogeneous network.

I wish you good luck. Having fully backed up laptop machines is A Good Thing in my book. I often find disks in portables to be more error prone than stationary machines', though this is probably caused by the wear and tear of a mobile PC.

One program that was created using Common Lisp is Maxima.

OxygenOffice Professional (was: OpenOffice.org Premium) is an enhanced version of OpenOffice.org what is a multi-platform office productivity suite. OxygenOffice Professional contains more extras like templates, cliparts, samples, fonts and VBA support.

Sure do!

I have the same laptop and everything (except for the modem..) worked on the first install of Edgy, and and upgrade to feisty. The wireless just worked, then used EasyUbuntu http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/to get the better ATI drivers among other things. I was able to get WPA working great with Wicd http://wicd.sourceforge.net/. I don't do anything fancy though.

For instance, you can't download just a subset of a torrent.

It is going to take a long time before web developers can take advantages of these tags. We need the browsers to start using it which may take a while. Firefox may jump on first then maybe Safari and others IE will probably take 2-3 more years until it supports HTML 5.

Firefox and Safari have already implemented a lot of this stuff, and some of it is supported in IE already too (even if only by hacks). A good example is the 'canvas' tag. It was implemented in safari before the working group even started, and was implemented by firefox quite soon after it was added to the working draft of the standard. Scripts are available that implement it for IE as well. Other things are standardisations of what were previously IE-proprietary extensions (e.g. the 'contenteditable' system), so are already fully supported by IE, and will likely be available in firefox & safari soon.

From the article itself, it appears that, since acquiring uTorrent, a closed-source C++ BitTorrent client for Windows, Bittorrent, inc. has decided to keep it closed source, and also to make it the new "mainline" BitTorrent. The old "mainline" client, which is open-source, written in Python (with wx for the graphics) and is generally cross-platform, last I checked, will continue to be maintained as a "reference implementation", but might not always track the latest protocol updates to uTorrent. Full documentation on the protocol will apparently come with an "SDK license", which they claim is "easy to get".

Well, first of all they ARE doing a few things that contradict the spirit of free software. Their main client app will be closed source, and although the reference implementation will apparently continue to be free, protocol docs require you to acquire a special license. A few years ago, these moves would have tightened Bittorrent inc's grip on the world of bt clients in general.

Now, however, the landscape is different. I can't produce statistics for all torrent users in general, but when I take a look at my peers in my preferred client, KTorrent, there seems to be a near dead-heat for most popular client between uTorrent and Azureus (also open source), with certain alternative clients like Transmission, Bitrocket, and KTorrent making frequent appearances, as well (and all 3 of those examples? also open source). Although uTorrent certainly remains a big player, it doesn't confer upon BitTorrent, inc. the ability to dictate major compatibility-breaking protocol changes by fiat. The fact that the main implementation of BT was open source to start basically stops things from being ruined by more restrictive licensing now.

Irrlicht does both

It is much better to light a candle than damn the darkness.

DOSBox

Yeah. The Dark Mod (for Doom 3) is nice, but they're only remaking Thief 1. What about Thief 2? What about Calendra's Cistern? What about T2X? They'll never get remade.

  Let's hope some more good programmers show up to help out the two guys currently working on the OpenDarkEngine. It looks like the best way out for Thief (and System Shock 2) fans -- an open source Ogre-based engine that can run all the original levels, and the fan missions, eventually with shaders and dynamic lighting and improved physics, on any operating system.
  Oh yeah, link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opde
  It says they're in "planning" stages, but really it's more like early alpha. The code's able to load levels and display them, but that's about all.

Appleseed is a distributed, open source social networking software I've been working on.

I've been working on a project called Appleseed for a couple years now. It's pretty far along, the distributed aspects are all functioning and only require optimization at this point, but it's still not quite out of beta yet.

As a proof of concept for distributed social networking, it works. Whether it's appleseed or something else, the idea of walled gardens such as MySpace or Facebook will seem as ridiculous as isolated services like Compuserve or Prodigy were.

* First they came for the MSN users and I did not speak out because I was not an MSN user.

* Then they came for the AIM users and I did not speak out because I was not an AIM user.

* Then they came for the Yahoo! users and I did not speak out because I was not a Yahoo! user.

* Then they came for us, the Jabber users, and ... actually they couldn't do fucking anything to Jabber. ;-)

As a side note, the server can't read/block your IMs if they are encrypted. Why aren't you securing your communications in the first place? Pidgin Encryption -> http://pidgin-encrypt.sourceforge.net/

Pidgin
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/
(formerly Gaim), see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)
works fine with MSN.

Only issues are security, (passwords stoed in plaintext - as with most other IM apps) and peer to peer file not working yet via MSN, (goes via servers so is slower). Neither are major hinderances.

I don't know about Ubuntu, but Kubuntu and Mandriva detect unpartitioned space on your HD and offer to automatically create the partition layout there. So the easy way is to shrink the Windows partition beforehand (using the GPartEd live cd for example) or have a second empty HD and just accept the partitioning defaults.

Yeah, completely LAME.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fedorafrog/

Freespire is the closest you're likely to find I think.

I've never used it because I've read reviews that mention it being stripped to become user-friendly, removing functionality in the process. Now they have signed a patent deal with M$ also, and I'm not sure if I like that. However, it legally contains a lot of proprietary codecs and drivers, and is working with the other patent-deal distros and Microsoft to create an open source odf-ooxml converter.

http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/

MS funded it, its up on sf.net
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/

Sun has one as well, but it doesnt work with 2007.

This article should not have the Linux Tux logo. Tux only came much later. I suggest an egg or something.

The logo prior to Tux (maybe not "official" but community-driven) was Virtual Beer ...

If you're in Europe, http://www.linuxbierwanderung.org/ still has a beer-related annual event to attend (covered on slashdot earlier)

I think it's pretty clear that it's only the pace at which hardware has advanced in the last decade or so that has allowed Linux to continue monolithically.

I have used Linux for many years. I have tried out KDE from the very early versions of KDE/QT. However, the only thing that has always sent me back to Gnome in a day or two has been how farking ugly/blocky the QT widgets and toolkit, etc can be!

Oh dear. The look is dependant on the theme being used. Don't like it blocky? Choose a different theme! Just like GTK isn't ugly even though it appears so in these screenshots. There are obviously good and bad themes for both toolkits.

Oh, and why do the fonts in KDE look like blocky crap, however look so much smoother in Gnome on the same system with the same fonts?

Because Gnome uses 96DPI for all fonts, while KDE uses whatever value X11 gives it for the DPI. Due to lots of broken systems, this value is sometimes wrong. If you think it is wrong, go into the Control Center, click on Appearance -> Fonts, and choose 96DPI from the combo box and restart KDE.

Please be aware its not the fonts what matter or important regarding this font licensing agreement between Microsoft and Apple. It is three patents held by Apple. For more info regarding these patents please read: http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html

It doesn't matter whether you have best of best fonts, to display or print clearly you need a license from Apple which they don't give it to others. This font licensing agreement means, you give me fonts, I give you license for three (3) patents.

Fonts on Microsoft Windows is clear because Microsoft is licensed to implement methods covered by these patents. If Apple, remove the license given to Microsoft, fonts display or print by Microsoft Windows is just blur, not suitable to read. Why not suitable to read is? if you read blur fonts (either on screen or paper) you get eye ache, if you continue to read, in the long run you may damage your vision.

So, how about others? Linux, FreeBSD and all other BSDs, etc. etc.

Because of the patent litigation, other operating system developers do not implement the methods covered by the above patents. Therefore, by default, their font display is blur. So, you call other operating systems are not good. What the other operating system developers do is, they pass to the end user to violate above patents if they want clear display. That is, provided you know how to do it. If don't know how to do it, just continue read blur fonts.

We all know reading blur fonts are harmful. We should not forget, specially, millions of kids & students use open source operating systems. Under the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, millions of such laptops are now under production, to be stuff with Linux operating system. So they all are forced to read blur fonts and potentially damage the vision of these kids in the long run.

By right, by realising the public harm caused by above patents, Apple should withdraw or abandon or put them to public domain and let anybody implements these patents. Sun will rise from other side of world if Apple do it. So we cannot day dream for that.

If you are a individual or an institution based in US, and willing to do a public good, please do seriously consider to sue Apple and explain in the court the public harm caused by above patents and ask the court to advice the US Patent Office to cancel or revoke those patents. (This author reside outside of US)

I'm going to risk inserting some signal into a Slashdot discussion. Please don't hate me. ;)

The fonts are freely available and distributable within the limits that they are not altered or charged for.

Here's the EULA
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/eula. htm
Here's the FAQ
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/faq/faq8.htm
Here's the fonts
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=34153
Here's the Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_We b

You may now return to bitching about how Verdana or CSS or Microsoft raped your childhood.

I have used Linux for many years. I have tried out KDE from the very early versions of KDE/QT. However, the only thing that has always sent me back to Gnome in a day or two has been how farking ugly/blocky the QT widgets and toolkit, etc can be!
Seriously, I never understood how people could like KDE/QT. It has always just been too farking blocky for me. Gnome is so much smoother as far as the GUI drawing goes. Look at some of the screenshots I posted. The corners that are supposed to be "rounded" don't even come close. Oh, and why do the fonts in KDE look like blocky crap, however look so much smoother in Gnome on the same system with the same fonts? Seriously, I log into KDE on a system and look at the fonts and they look like blocky crap. Log out, log in to Gnome and I have very nice AA fonts. Yes, I set up KDE to do AA fonts, etc. I have been using Linux since the early days when Linux GUI was _really_ butt ugly, so I know what I am doing.

Any way, I really am not trolling here, I am just wondering why QT has never hired one graphics designer that could smooth things out so everything is not such a blocking mess. I would love to use QT since it works on Linux, Max and MS Windows. However, on Mac and Linux it looks like total crap. Anyway, I went to OS X since I didn't want to look at an ugly GUI desktop at home. At work I don't have a choice, but at home I do, so I replaced two laptops and two desktops with Intel-Based Macs and have been a happy camper. I _really_ wanted to just find a Linux that looked halfway-decent (Gnome for me) ___and___ supported the hardware I needed.

Oh, by the way, I think Gnome since 2.x as looked pretty nice. Nice rounded corners, softness, etc. I Just never understood why KDE/QT always felt like this big blocky GUI to me. Oh well, "To Each His Own".

On the UTF-8 support topic, this post from May 2006 on the slash dev mailing list (link here, but scrambled by sourceforge), the maintainer of Solidot successfully modified slash to support Chinese characters. Maybe the dev team could reuse their patches? Does it works? Yes, here's the proof.

Get one - it's worth it.

Yeah, I know, who cares? Well, a few of us do/did... MD was a good technology for its time, but crippled by DRM and other restrictions.

ODF definitely has a future. The question isn't about that, it's about when ODF will come the mainstream choice in A) corporate environment and B) in home environment.

For me as software developer one thing hindering ODF adaptation is that there isn't or at least I don't know any APIs that allow me easily create ODF documents. As in example our application can export data to Excel in it's native format. We achieve this by using the excellent Java Excel API. We would add ODF support straight away if there would be same kind of API to create ODS documents. Also as ODS is open and not closed as Excel, there would be probably better support allowing full generation of a documents, i.e. generation of charts, this in fact would lead to a situation where we could add more "intelligence" to generated documents and benefit our users via added automation.

PS. I there is already an working API to generate ODF documents, then please reply and post link a to it.

PS2. Yes, I could also myself look onto ODF format specification and create my own code to generate documents, but as generating ODF documents at least in this time doesn't bring bacon home, and isn't even in the area of my expertise I just would like a ready to use code for it.

But if the Apple gets rotten and starts coming out with inferior products

Some that come to mind - iPhoto (Wastes a lot of disk space no cleanup options)

live.linuX-gamers.net is a Linux live-dvd distribution: "boot 'n play" http://live.linux-gamers.net/

One of My Favorites, AdvanceCD is a bootable live CD, DVD and USB disk of a minimal Linux distribution containing the AdvanceMAME emulator.

You can boot it in any PC and play the contained games without any installation. The default distribution contains the arcade games Gridlee, Poly Play and Robby Roto and it uses only 20 Mbyte leaving the whole disk for your roms. http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/cd-readme.html

Games Knoppix
Review http://www.linux.com/articles/113906
Download http://www.games-knoppix.org/

http://gamer-linux.pappapc.com/

and on and on and on. You have heard of Google, yeah?