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The day you can show us you've done MORE, BETTER, & EARLIER than I have? THEN, you can talk (instead of copying others' work in Open SORES, which we ALL know you scumbags do, & "pass it off" as YOURS - pitiful & disgusting):

----

Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61

(&, for work done for EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com on PAID CONTRACT (writing portions of their SuperCache program increasing its performance by up to 40% via my work) albeit, for their SuperDisk & HOW TO APPLY IT, took them to a finalist position @ MS Tech Ed, two years in a row 2000-2002, in its HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement).

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, 1997, "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue page 210, #1/first entry in fact (my work is there)

PC-WELT FEB 1998 - page 84, again, my work is featured there

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 - page 92, insert section, MUST HAVE WARES, my work is again, there

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - page 83, again, my work is featured there

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - page 100, my work is there

GERMAN PC BOOK, Data Becker publisher "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000, where my work is contained in it

HOT SHAREWARE Numero 46 issue, pg. 54 (PC ware mag from Spain), 2001 my work is there, first one featured, yet again!

Also, a British PC Mag in 2002 for many utilities I wrote, saw it @ BORDERS BOOKS but didn't buy it... by that point, I had moved onto other areas in this field besides coding only...

Being paid for an article that made me money over @ PCPitstop in 2008 for writing up a guide that has people showing NO VIRUSES/SPYWARES & other screwups, via following its point, such as THRONKA sees here -> http://www.xtremepccentral.com...

It's also been myself helping out the folks at the UltraDefrag64 project (a 64-bit defragger for Windows), in showing them code for how to do Process Priority Control @ the GUI usermode/ring 3/rpl 3 level in their program (good one too), & being credited for it by their lead dev & his team... see here -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge... or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker...

Which ended up fixing a "bug" for them later, here -> http://sourceforge.net/p/ultra...

APK

P.S.=> Thus, YOU can answer me a question libelous bigmouth:

How'd "eating your words" taste? See here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... were they flavorful (lol) seasoned with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + YOUR FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH you bigmouth libelous Open SORES bullshitter?

... apk

Many of the posts so far direct the original poster to dedicated firewall appliances or distributions. If I read the summary correctly, the OP is simply looking for a good GUI to manipulate the firewall rules built into the kernel of all modern Linux distributions.

I can't vouch for any of them, but GUI frontends include guardog, lokkit, firestarter, and probably others. They are all in various states of development and maintenance.

Part of what the user wants to do (firewall per app) wasn't possible in the past with iptables (per-gid blocking was easy), but I believe it's now possible. A primitive daemon, called Leopard Flower, seems to offer this functionality: http://leopardflower.sourcefor...

From what I can see, the most promising, integrated, easy-to-use firewalling GUI software going forward is Fedora's firewalld and it's accompanying GUI. I know firewalld is available on Ubuntu (and its command-line interface). I'm not sure about the GUI part. Perhaps someone familiar wit Ubuntu can comment. Here's an article on installing it in Mint, so I assume it's similar in Ubuntu: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2013...

From what I can see, firewalld and firewall-config hit the sweet spot for most desktop users. I'd never use it on my router, but for a desktop, it works pretty well and is under active development. I imagine it will sport per-application feature soon, if it doesn't already.

If it looks terrible then change it. All I usually do is change everything over to oxygen, but thats just the way I like it......IMO it wasn't really usable until about 4.6 or so but that was a problem the distros/me caused by using a desktop that wasn't ready for what we wanted to use it for. It was my choice to install it. I could have just stuck with KDE 3. If I want to go back I still can in fact.

Try using a media player like SMPlayer for your copying to /tmp woes. That has worked for me. Kaffiene has never appealed. VLC I like, but SMPlayer just seems to be better for me.

Unsure about the kde.org comment. If I want to look at other desktops I go menu/Configure_Desktop/Workspace_Appearance/Desktop_Theme and then click on Get_New_Themes.

As for updating the codebase. Well, if they didn't do that then our desktops would still look like this. Which is fine but I prefer this.

As for usability. I use it every day and I am not a linux guru.

For playback on the BFT, I've got a few options. I can use the PS3 (ideal -- the scaler is awesome), the Xbox 360 (meh), a modified Wii (has other issues), an old laptop with a barely-supported video card (similar issues to the Wii), or a Krell DVD-Standard (only issue is lack of HDMI/DVI output, and physical wear and tear on an $8,000.00 device).

For Cinavia-tainted backups (which both the PS3 and 360 puke on), I've found that the best option (as in: the option with the least fuckery) for me is to use AVStoDVD (free, OSS, zero bullshit, technical enough for tweak-mongers, always works, fairly fast, awesome output) to burn a proper DVD and play it on the Krell.

Yeah, it's 480p. But it's a beautiful 480p, devoid of meaningful artifacts. Playback, once the media is on a DVD, is simple: Select appropriate inputs, insert DVD, adjust volume, do nothing else, and enjoy the film.

I could do the same with any cheap bog-standard pre-Cinavia DVD player, but my bog-standrard DVD player just happens to be a ridiculously-expensive Krell.

And so I guess this is my point: Cheap DVD players really are -cheap-, easily-replaced, and essentially universal. My backup will play nicely in anything from the Krell to a Chrysler minivan: I can lend it to others and as long as their player is not infected with Cinavia, they'll have zero issues playing it. And DVD+/-R media is cheap/fast enough that that it is both disposable and versatile (unlike thumbdrives, or Internet connectivity).

It doesn't take a Raspberry Pi and fuckery to play this stuff: All it takes is $20 and a trip to the dollar store or pawn shop.

(And data loss? Don't scratch the disc, and be sure to store it in the dark. Done. Really.)

"My Name is Ozymandias: King of Kings - Look upon my works, ye mighty, & DESPAIR..."

----

Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61

(&, for work done for EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com on PAID CONTRACT (writing portions of their SuperCache program increasing its performance by up to 40% via my work) albeit, for their SuperDisk & HOW TO APPLY IT, took them to a finalist position @ MS Tech Ed, two years in a row 2000-2002, in its HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement).

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, 1997, "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue page 210, #1/first entry in fact (my work is there)

PC-WELT FEB 1998 - page 84, again, my work is featured there

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 - page 92, insert section, MUST HAVE WARES, my work is again, there

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - page 83, again, my work is featured there

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - page 100, my work is there

GERMAN PC BOOK, Data Becker publisher "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000, where my work is contained in it

HOT SHAREWARE Numero 46 issue, pg. 54 (PC ware mag from Spain), 2001 my work is there, first one featured, yet again!

Also, a British PC Mag in 2002 for many utilities I wrote, saw it @ BORDERS BOOKS but didn't buy it... by that point, I had moved onto other areas in this field besides coding only...

Being paid for an article that made me money over @ PCPitstop in 2008 for writing up a guide that has people showing NO VIRUSES/SPYWARES & other screwups, via following its point, such as THRONKA sees here -> http://www.xtremepccentral.com...

It's also been myself helping out the folks at the UltraDefrag64 project (a 64-bit defragger for Windows), in showing them code for how to do Process Priority Control @ the GUI usermode/ring 3/rpl 3 level in their program (good one too), & being credited for it by their lead dev & his team... see here -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge... or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker...

----

What do I have to say about that much above? I can't say it any better, than this was stated already (from the greatest book of all time, the "tech manual for life" imo):

"But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." - Corinthians Chapter 15, Verse 10

(And, because I got LUCKY to have been exposed to some really GREAT classmates, professors, & colleagues on the job over time as well)

---

* Show us you've done MORE, BETTER, & EARLIER than that you trolling little ac worm...

(Bottom-Line, boy: You haven't HEARD enough, or been around long enough apparently, to have heard of me (& you certainly haven't shown me YOU have done better)).

APK

P.S.=> My guess, & I'd bet I am 100% correct as usual (I always have been when I do this since 2005 here no less)... apk

"My Name is Ozymandias: King of Kings - Look upon my works, ye mighty, & DESPAIR..."

----

Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61

(&, for work done for EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com on PAID CONTRACT (writing portions of their SuperCache program increasing its performance by up to 40% via my work) albeit, for their SuperDisk & HOW TO APPLY IT, took them to a finalist position @ MS Tech Ed, two years in a row 2000-2002, in its HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement).

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, 1997, "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue page 210, #1/first entry in fact (my work is there)

PC-WELT FEB 1998 - page 84, again, my work is featured there

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 - page 92, insert section, MUST HAVE WARES, my work is again, there

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - page 83, again, my work is featured there

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - page 100, my work is there

GERMAN PC BOOK, Data Becker publisher "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000, where my work is contained in it

HOT SHAREWARE Numero 46 issue, pg. 54 (PC ware mag from Spain), 2001 my work is there, first one featured, yet again!

Also, a British PC Mag in 2002 for many utilities I wrote, saw it @ BORDERS BOOKS but didn't buy it... by that point, I had moved onto other areas in this field besides coding only...

Being paid for an article that made me money over @ PCPitstop in 2008 for writing up a guide that has people showing NO VIRUSES/SPYWARES & other screwups, via following its point, such as THRONKA sees here -> http://www.xtremepccentral.com...

It's also been myself helping out the folks at the UltraDefrag64 project (a 64-bit defragger for Windows), in showing them code for how to do Process Priority Control @ the GUI usermode/ring 3/rpl 3 level in their program (good one too), & being credited for it by their lead dev & his team... see here -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge... or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker...

----

What do I have to say about that much above? I can't say it any better, than this was stated already (from the greatest book of all time, the "tech manual for life" imo):

"But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." - Corinthians Chapter 15, Verse 10

(And, because I got LUCKY to have been exposed to some really GREAT classmates, professors, & colleagues on the job over time as well)

---

* Show us you've done MORE, BETTER, & EARLIER than that you trolling little ac worm...

(Bottom-Line, boy: You haven't HEARD enough, or been around long enough apparently, to have heard of me (& you certainly haven't shown me YOU have done better)).

APK

P.S.=> My guess, & I'd bet I am 100% correct as usual (I always have been when I do this since 2005 here no less)... apk

Waze is based on existing GPL projects. The client was (at least initially) based on RoadMap (GPLv??). An old link with further details for Hebrew readers (can't say how Google Translate would work out) can be found here.

Even without the source you could do a symbol scan of the app executable looking for unique method names in some target code.

There are some quite interesting observations. The libwaze.so shipped in the APK contains a lot of symbols starting with "navigate_" such as "navigate_main_get_distance_str". Such a function also exists in the GPLed version, casting some doubts about the proprietary version being a complete rewrite. Looking at the machine code should make it possible to check whether they are really identical or not, but I'll leave that to the ARM experts. Even if they're identical, this code appears to have been written by one of the Waze founders although the file carries the statement "This file is part of RoadMap.", which is GPLed software written mostly by non-Waza people. So the interesting question seems to be whether these function contained in the proprietary Waza app are a derivative work of the GPLed RoadMap.

I think the point Tarruda's making very effectively is that refactoring can be unnecessarily difficult if your codebase has too much technical debt, too little mechanism for contributing, that this is a barrier to entry, and that at a certain point breaking things and then fixing the important bits while improving the underlying organization, is necessary to maintain forward progress.

Time will tell. The original vi was written by Bill Joy, and is still available as traditional vi. Bram's reimplementation took over because it was more freely available and more feature rich. If Tarruda proves to be a good BDFL, this might be the moment we look back on as the third big fork of vi.

There are two elephants in the room when it comes to vim that really need to be addressed:

1. Its pattern or "regular expression" support. I'm talking about things like :%s/// for matching/replacing but it can be used in other places. I'll refer folks to the docs, which they should read (or if you just want to skim, go to the vim wiki link):

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pattern.html
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_27.html
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Search_patterns

Take a very, very close look at how parenthesis work under the section called Magic. It's completely inverted compared to every other expression/RE, even base system regex.

Any vim user who has been using this functionality knows how painful it is; it can literally take you 20 full minutes to come up with a vim :%s line that does what you need, and most of the time the user ends up just shelling out to the CLI and using sed or perl or whatever else to do the replacement because of vim's awful pattern syntax.

"21st century" (I hate this term) vim should just use PCRE and be done with it. I'm a KISS principle minimalist and don't like the idea of tying vim to another 3rd-party library, but I think this would be acceptable given PCRE's prevalence.

2. Bram's absolutely horrible laziness when it comes to making actual releases. For those who don't follow vim regularly, you probably don't know of this problem, but its existed for years. Basically someone submits a patch to Bram, he approves it, and the patch gets made and dumped as a single patch/diff file in the patches directory:

ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/

Take 2-3 minutes of your time and go to that directory and look around. For starters, look at the 7.3 directory and how many patches there were between 7.3 and 7.4. The answer? 1314 patches. Yes, over THIRTEEN HUNDRED patches before 7.4 was made. Now look at the 7.4 directory (7.4 is the current release of vim); there are already 211 patches.

The problem is that Bram lets things sit in this condition for ages -- often YEARS -- before making a release. He needs to make releases more often. And in case you think I'm whining, I'm not: even Bram himself has admitted that "there's too many patches between releases":

http://www.vim.org/news/news.php

Quote:

Work on Vim 7.4 has started

[2013-05-17] 7.3 has more than 950 patches, that's too many!

There's hilarity in the fact that he admitted this in May 2013, but didn't do anything about it for another 3 months (vim 7.4 came out August 2013), during which time nearly 400 patches were submit/accepted.

Yet this problem continues on and on (cue Journey's Don't Stop Believing). The only person to blame for it is Bram. He should make an effort to actually roll a new release when he reaches an arbitrary number of patches -- say, 100 or 150. 1300+ is literally insane, because by the time someone upgrades from 7.3 to 7.4, and finds something broken, there are _1300+ patches_ to go through to figure out the regression. It's not manageable, and I'm sure he knows it. So he should step up to the plate and stop playing with drills.

There are two elephants in the room when it comes to vim that really need to be addressed:

1. Its pattern or "regular expression" support. I'm talking about things like :%s/// for matching/replacing but it can be used in other places. I'll refer folks to the docs, which they should read (or if you just want to skim, go to the vim wiki link):

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pattern.html
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_27.html
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Search_patterns

Take a very, very close look at how parenthesis work under the section called Magic. It's completely inverted compared to every other expression/RE, even base system regex.

Any vim user who has been using this functionality knows how painful it is; it can literally take you 20 full minutes to come up with a vim :%s line that does what you need, and most of the time the user ends up just shelling out to the CLI and using sed or perl or whatever else to do the replacement because of vim's awful pattern syntax.

"21st century" (I hate this term) vim should just use PCRE and be done with it. I'm a KISS principle minimalist and don't like the idea of tying vim to another 3rd-party library, but I think this would be acceptable given PCRE's prevalence.

2. Bram's absolutely horrible laziness when it comes to making actual releases. For those who don't follow vim regularly, you probably don't know of this problem, but its existed for years. Basically someone submits a patch to Bram, he approves it, and the patch gets made and dumped as a single patch/diff file in the patches directory:

ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/

Take 2-3 minutes of your time and go to that directory and look around. For starters, look at the 7.3 directory and how many patches there were between 7.3 and 7.4. The answer? 1314 patches. Yes, over THIRTEEN HUNDRED patches before 7.4 was made. Now look at the 7.4 directory (7.4 is the current release of vim); there are already 211 patches.

The problem is that Bram lets things sit in this condition for ages -- often YEARS -- before making a release. He needs to make releases more often. And in case you think I'm whining, I'm not: even Bram himself has admitted that "there's too many patches between releases":

http://www.vim.org/news/news.php

Quote:

Work on Vim 7.4 has started

[2013-05-17] 7.3 has more than 950 patches, that's too many!

There's hilarity in the fact that he admitted this in May 2013, but didn't do anything about it for another 3 months (vim 7.4 came out August 2013), during which time nearly 400 patches were submit/accepted.

Yet this problem continues on and on (cue Journey's Don't Stop Believing). The only person to blame for it is Bram. He should make an effort to actually roll a new release when he reaches an arbitrary number of patches -- say, 100 or 150. 1300+ is literally insane, because by the time someone upgrades from 7.3 to 7.4, and finds something broken, there are _1300+ patches_ to go through to figure out the regression. It's not manageable, and I'm sure he knows it. So he should step up to the plate and stop playing with drills.

Well the great thing about today is you don't HAVE to take Moz's shit, you DO have plenty of choices.

I use Comodo Dragon and Pale Moon, but if you don't like those there is Comodo IceDragon, Waterfox, SWIron, hell if you don't want to use anything Chromium or Gecko based there is QTWeb which is webkit and QT. Cross platform and works pretty nice IMHO, works great from a flash too. And if your machine is needing an ultra light browser or which will run on really old Windows versions there is always Kmeleon which by following their docs and adding a couple of files can run on Win98 if you need it to and which flies on anything newer.

So as you can see you DO have more choices, hell I left off plenty of others like Safari and Opera and Chrome but I figured it would be better to list some you may not have tried. Give 'em a go, I bet you'll find one you like. Oh and FYI but nearly all the above? MUCH more conservative when it comes to UI changes. I've been on Dragon since V4 (currently on V31) and the only UI change of note was moving the option button from the right edge to the left. Oh and the reason I use Pale Moon over ICeDragon? I like its UI better and the way its built with the browser targeted at newer CPU features. Nice thing about choice, I can go for the browser with the little things I like..

There is also a Wayland distro called Rebecca Black OS. Although when I tested it last time, it was super glitchy and crashed all the time. It has been recently updated so it might be worth another shot.

Anyway, great to see the Wayland stuff rolling in.

Such as https://www.bitbucket.com/ which has an interestingly different business model. Github represents, in technology, a great step forward from the older https://sourceforge.net/. But this sounds like they have some serious employee relationship and morale problems to deal with.

I've been a member since 2000-01-06 17:58:21: http://sourceforge.net/u/paulf...

Even if I'm mostly using GitHub for new stuff... It was a real encouragement and inspiration back then. It is like when someone turns on a light bulb in the middle of the night in a kitchen desperate for a drink of water and the light bulb is so bright you can't even look at it but lets you find the sink, and then when the (open source) sun comes up in the morning, you almost forget the lightbulb is still on compared to the sun. Thanks for turning on that lightbulb when we needed it most.

And SourceForge is still a great site for putting up demos of FOSS code that need to run CGI.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/tr...

I guess if I had a question it would be, what do you think about Rick Webb's (another venture capitalist) article suggesting we're in the nascent stages of transforming to a post-scarcity economy (expanding the gift, planned, and subsistence aspects instead of purely emphasizing exchange)?
http://entertainment.slashdot....

I've been a member since 2000-01-06 17:58:21: http://sourceforge.net/u/paulf...

Even if I'm mostly using GitHub for new stuff... It was a real encouragement and inspiration back then. It is like when someone turns on a light bulb in the middle of the night in a kitchen desperate for a drink of water and the light bulb is so bright you can't even look at it but lets you find the sink, and then when the (open source) sun comes up in the morning, you almost forget the lightbulb is still on compared to the sun. Thanks for turning on that lightbulb when we needed it most.

And SourceForge is still a great site for putting up demos of FOSS code that need to run CGI.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/tr...

I guess if I had a question it would be, what do you think about Rick Webb's (another venture capitalist) article suggesting we're in the nascent stages of transforming to a post-scarcity economy (expanding the gift, planned, and subsistence aspects instead of purely emphasizing exchange)?
http://entertainment.slashdot....

Two tools that I use regularly to check Java artifacts: FindBugs: http://findbugs.sourceforge.ne... OWASP Dependency Check: https://www.owasp.org/index.ph...

I believe one of the goals of the AROS project is to have a drop-in replacement for workbench/kickstart ROMs for m68k systems. So you could use their ROM on UAE and have a compatible system built entirely from open-source software. If that's your thing...

Tcsh, nvi, slrn, irssi, mutt, fetchmail, bogofilter, esmtp, moc, ctwm, VLC.

Software I can't live with, so I remove if present: sendmail, Vim, any desktop environment and its associated garbage.

Depending on the distro, some things I really need might already be there. So installing or checking if it is installed are the same to me. I often have no idea if it is default or my selection.

The first I will always install or at least check is mc
Espercially for a new install, I think it is easier then using cd, ls and what not as I will be going around a lot and copy files from other places.
vim will be already installed and so will be others, like bash, apt or yast or other software to install.

On the GUI I will always go for XFCE and add the plugins.
I use the NVidea drivers on my 4 screens that run not in xinerama.

Then mplayer and a gui for it. Last in the top of things I will check or install is yad as I have several scripts that depend on it.

I will then copy my scripts and run them one by one to see what is missing.

I have not used Agent Ransack.... the free version does not look to search inside Office files.http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/features ...

I am curious have you compared Agent Ransack to either DocFetcher or Regain?
DocFetcher -- Open Source desktop search application: It allows you search the contents of documents on your computer (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://docfetcher.sourceforge....

Regain -- Search engine similar to web search engines like Google, with the difference that you don't search the web, but inside your own files and documents (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://regain.sourceforge.net/

I have not used Agent Ransack.... the free version does not look to search inside Office files.http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/features ...

I am curious have you compared Agent Ransack to either DocFetcher or Regain?
DocFetcher -- Open Source desktop search application: It allows you search the contents of documents on your computer (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://docfetcher.sourceforge....

Regain -- Search engine similar to web search engines like Google, with the difference that you don't search the web, but inside your own files and documents (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://regain.sourceforge.net/

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish.

* 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/

* CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n...

* Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n...

* IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/

Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/

* KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/

* LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/

* Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/

* SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co...

* UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg...

* VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, oen source, Linux/Mac/Windows)
http://www.videolan.org/

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish.

* 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/

* CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n...

* Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n...

* IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/

Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/

* KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/

* LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/

* Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/

* SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co...

* UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg...

* VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, oen source, Linux/Mac/Windows)
http://www.videolan.org/

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish.

* 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/

* CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n...

* Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n...

* IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/

Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/

* KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/

* LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/

* Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/

* SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co...

* UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg...

* VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, oen source, Linux/Mac/Windows)
http://www.videolan.org/

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish. There are few others, but some are more as needed special use cases. * 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/ * CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n... * Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n... * IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/ Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/ * KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/ * LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/ * Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/ * SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co... * UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg... * VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats ) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.videolan.org/

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish. There are few others, but some are more as needed special use cases. * 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/ * CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n... * Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n... * IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/ Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/ * KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/ * LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/ * Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/ * SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co... * UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg... * VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats ) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.videolan.org/

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish. There are few others, but some are more as needed special use cases. * 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/ * CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n... * Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n... * IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/ Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/ * KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/ * LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/ * Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/ * SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co... * UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg... * VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats ) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.videolan.org/

I know of some places where farms and ranches represent the populated areas... and the rest of the area is genuine wilderness complete with bears, mountain lions, and wolves (not to mention deer, chipmunks, and other not so aggressive wildlife). On the other hand, there are some occasional hikers who get lost where setting up a cell tower in a box would be useful if only as a search & rescue operation (so different search parties can communicate with each other & the base with simply ordinary cell phones). There is also a local Boy Scout camp that I'd love to set one of these devices up at for emergency communications and troop to troop communications.

I can imagine some applications that major carriers simply wouldn't care for because there isn't any profit to be made in such an activity, but none the less would be very useful. Reading up on what and where these OpenBTS guys have already established transmitters (including one on the island of Niue that is permanent) shows at least some of the range that these systems could be established.

This is just a basic "How-to use Netflow on OpenBSD". Nothing more.

IMHO, Netflow is interesting ONLY if you have no other way to gather info from hardware routers/switches. It's the only protocol likely to be supported.

If, however, you can just mirror a port you're interested in (eg. the uplink), as you already would be doing with an IDS and similar, you don't need to bother with Netflow. Instead, you can get all the info you could want, with trivial ease, just by installing and running BandwidthD-2.x: http://bandwidthd.sourceforge....

Anybody can set it up in 15 minutes, and immediately get a user-friendly web page with all the throughput and billing info you'd want, at any resolution you like. If you need in-depth detail, you just need to dive into querying the database directly.

I'm anxiously awaiting software-defined networking taking over, and freeing us from all the horrible limitations and lock-in of expensive network gear. Until then, do everything you can with a computer, and traffic monitoring is absolutely one of those.

I'm doing that, but "somebody else" in my city happens not to be in the video game industry. I'd first have to fund a relocation to Austin, Texas, or another city with a video game industry, and that's the point where other Slashdot users usually stop being willing to help me.

Well, I can't say much about your personal situation. Just like the usual Ask Slashdot articles, I (and most slashdot users) focus on generalities. That and I don't think many of us have day jobs as financial/life planners.

Remember the question was how to build a fanbase. Well, consider that you can get fans while you're still working on your day job. Thanks to the Internet, you can contribute to projects online. Including free and open source projects. I know XCOM for example has several free and open source clones.

Of course that assumes your day job doesn't consume all your energy and time. That may be yet another intermediate step: if you current job really drains you, find another job that gives you the free time to develop your gaming passion on the side. Again, not a professional life coach. Anonymous Coward's Advice is not for everyone. Consult your doctor before use.

After MDY v. Blizzard?

After CS, DOTA/LOL, DayZ? I say sure, why not? Not all mods are equal (IIRC, Glider is more a bot than a mod)

And remember again, if it's about building a fanbase, being sued may in fact be a boon, as you'll become "that famous guy who wrote the cool mod but got totally reamed by evil EVIL Activision-Blizzard"

I assume I'd get around the $239.88 per year Adobe tax with FlashDevelop and the Flex SDK. (Source: Google flash games without flash)

That falls under the "pay out of your own pocket" thing. Before you can get somebody (fans) to pay and cover your expenses, you'll have to pay yourself.

Though I suppose you could use a free language/framework and release it into the wild. Some people do do that. See open source games above. They're much easier to pirate too, and piracy is basically free advertising for you. If you're cleaver, you can even make your game give a special message just to pirates (what was that game that did that? Game Dev Simulator or something?)

A problem with mobile games is that iOS and Android devices don't ship with a directional control.

Again, if it's about building a fanbase, it's about getting your name out there, not the type of game you use to get your name out there. That mobile game about that flappish birdish thing, which didn't use console style controls, succeeded attracting a following to its developer, and then some.

If you can walk and chew gum at the same time (console controls, gain a following, pay the license fee to flash/Apple/whoever, move out of Austin, learn to play guitar, get that root canal you've been holding off, etc.), great. If you can't, well, you gotta prioritize

[link] Has some relevant information.

Thanks for the link. I find it especially interesting how careful you need to be to not risk getting robbed. See this email on the bitcoin dev list for some details. Among other things, it permeates that the problems that bit MtGox haven't been solved conclusively.

Clearly, the average person on the street should stay clear of things like bitcoin, because you really have to understand the protocol and know exactly what you are doing. The folks at MtGox surely spent some thought on this, and now look at this fuckup. They are in huge trouble right now.

If I were to fund the continued development of one Linux-based video authoring/editing tool it would be Cinelerra. Between that and Avidemux, all my video editing needs are completely met.

Err... What about Kdenlive? Worked pretty well last time I checked...

Last month, at ShmooCon a talk was given about spatial analysis of malware samples. The technique is borrowed directly from bioinformatics. This is a great example of techniques from Biology being used effectively in the IT security realm.

I hope that the researcher involved in naming organisms based on hash algorithms chooses context triggered piecewise hashes (CTPH) AKA fuzzy hashing or a similarity hash algorithm rather than an algorithm like SHA512. Google's simhash or at least the ideas of this type of algorithm would lend itself much better to the naming of organisms.

FYI: a FOSS implementation of fussy hashing is called ssdeep. The project site is here. This is an implementation that is widely used in open source malware analysis tools like Cuckoo Sandbox.

If I were to fund the continued development of one Linux-based video authoring/editing tool it would be Cinelerra. Between that and Avidemux, all my video editing needs are completely met.

UZI: UNIX Z-80 IMPLEMENTATION

UZI is an implementation of the Unix kernel written for a Z-80 based computer. It implements almost all of the functionality of the 7th Edition Unix kernel. UZI was written to run on one specific collection of custom-built hardware, but since it can easily have device drivers added to it, and it does not use any memory management hardware, it should be possible to port it to numerous computers that current use the CP/M operating system. The source code is written mostly in C, and was compiled with The Code Works' Q/C compiler. UZI's code was written from scratch, and contains no AT&T code, so it is not subject to any of AT&T's copyright or licensing restrictions. Numerous 7th Edition programs have been ported to UZI with little or no difficulty, including the complete Bourne shell, ed, sed, dc, cpp, etc.

UZI180 - Unix Z80 Implementation for the Z-180 (UZI180)

Charles Simonyi, one of the creators of Microsoft Word, went on a crusade to enable "intentional programming", which is to programming what the WYSIWYG word processor was to LaTeX. You can see what he does here. This is a VERY hard problem to solve. Simonyi is a good programmer, has tons of money, yet this is not a battle that he has clearly won yet.

I once received a phone call at work from a Forbes journalist, saying that Simonyi had described my own pet project, XL (http://xlr.sf.net), and the associated "Concept Programming" ideas as one of the only competitors to Intentional Programming. That was interesting, because it shows that Simonyi had "groked" what I wanted to do, despite the total lack of polish of this little project. (As an aside, if you are curious, you can see XL in action in Taodyne's software to create interactive 3D documents)

But what Simonyi saw (I believe) is that the general questioning was similar. How do we transform ideas into code. For Simonyi, this can be done with graphical tools. For XL, this can be done with simple transformations on text (more precisely, on a Lisp-like parse tree generated from the text). For example, with XL, you can implement the "if-then-else" concept using the "->" (transforms into) operator as follows:

if true then X else Y -> X
if false then X else Y -> Y

With this approach, it is possible to use nice notations for arbitrary concepts. In Taodyne's products, for example, a slide is described by something like:

slide "Hello world",
        * "This is a bullet point"
        * "This is another one"

This pseudo-markup language is then rewritten recursively until we reach "primitive" operations, e.g. 3D graphics rendering or basic computations.

XL is based on text because a) it's easier to do than Simonyi's approach, and b) I think it is generally easier to read and write "globally". If you have a "picture" in a document, of course showing the picture tells you more than just its name. But knowing that there is a picture in a document is easy with something like image "Woman.jpg" or (in HTML) a img tag.

As the experience with HTML or Postscript demonstrated, text or graphical does not matter much anyway. It's possible to have a text-based representation of the code that most people manipulate graphically and never need to be aware of. You can generate your HTML with Word, never need to know anything about it. It's likely the same thing is slowly happening with code as well: IDEs tend to give you more and more meta-data which is "behind" the text and helps you navigate it or code faster.

Just like running native Windows code requires an NT kernel? Syscall translation is entirely possible. Heck, even the NT kernel doesn't "natively" run Win32 code; it gets translated into NT syscalls first. It's not only possible to write a "reverse Wine" for Linux programs, it's even been done (or at least started before!

http://lbw.sourceforge.net/ (Effectively dead now, with the POSIX subsystem being discontinued, but it could be revived if MS gave a damn).

There is a build of Pale Moon for Linux that I've been trying out for a while... it seems to work.

osFree (http://www.osfree.org/) was having a god moment some years ago, but sadly we lack developers to continue the project.

What I think that it will be interesting is trying to clone the close source components that runs on top of OS/2 Warp like WPS, SOM and PM.
- Presentation Manager - http://www.osfree.org/
- SOM - https://sourceforge.net/projec...
- WPS - XWorkplace and other OSS WPS classes

I think we should focus first in only one component that can run over OS/2 Warp 4.5x or eCS to later continue and gain momentum for the rest.

To reiterate the point, the obvious truth is that the beta will be "ready" when people chose it over classic slashdot.

But that's not ever going to happen. The thing is, beta's design goals - add bling, to put it bluntly - are in direct conflict with how people use Slashdot: mass conversation. You can't add whitespace or eye candy without forcing out information.

Also, to be honest, the "bling" on beta is pretty awful too.

So, no matter how much time they spend improving beta, it'll make Slashdot less usable when the switch occurs. The question that remains is whether the reduction on usability and resulting user exodus will be enough to kill the site? Network effect makes Slashdot less useful with every user who seeks greener pastures, and at some point this vicious circle passes the point of no return. Of course Slashdot could well be headed to that direction anyway, with beta as a panicky attempt to save it.

What this really shows is that there is a desperate need for a P2P forum software, which would allow Internet communities independence from any corporate or other hosting entity. Something like Frost, but refined to actual usability.

Repeating my comment (slightly edited) now that you're logged in:
Well, I'm seeing Slashdotters say back on Usenet, and it's definitely alive again (I started hanging out there again 3 days ago). With Slashdot admin censoring posts/sigs about any form of protest, and boycott week coming, it'd be a good idea to have somewhere to meet while people feel motivated to bother going there, rather than wait for a full website to be built. (IÂhad suggested talk.general.specific in my earlier comment, but turns out there's still people meeting there...damn.)

Also, I found the Slashcode repository earlier thanks to someone pointing to the old FAQ -- here's the page for the last version, dated 2006. If someone with the knowledge/ability gets it going on a site, I think more than enough Slashdotters would contribute to pay the bills if needed.

Adding: What the fuck?! Between the comment IÂleft 10 minutes ago and now, the comment-posting box changed to look like a screwy hybrid of Classic & Beta (complete with the text box being 1/4 normal size), and as far as IÂcan tell, I'm still in Classic mode! What the hell, are they screwing with Classic now, too?

Adding #2: OK, some of my spaces are now inexplicably coming up as garbage characters as if I used Unicode... IÂgive up, this *really* makes no sense!

Well, I'm seeing Slashdotters say they're returning to Usenet, and it's definitely alive again (I started hanging out there again 3 days ago). With Slashdot admin censoring posts/sigs about any form of protest, and boycott week coming, it'd be a good idea to have somewhere pre-made to meet while everyone's still bothering, rather than wait for a full website to be built. Looking at the different group names, I think that "talk.general.specific" describes Slashdot quite well. ;)

Also, I found the Slashcode repository earlier thanks to someone pointing to the old FAQ -- here's the page for the last version, dated 2006. If someone with the knowledge/ability gets it going on a site, I think more than enough Slashdotters would contribute to pay the bills.

My comments to the Diaspora list: https://groups.google.com/foru...

A video I put together a couple years ago for a Kickstarter project, but did not proceed with, thinking Kickstarter is not a great match for funding open source software (as opposed to projects where people get something tangible -- although I liked your user ID suggestion):
http://twirlip.com/

Work I've done towards those ideas there:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://sourceforge.net/project...

Anyway, I'd like to see the Slashdot community (and the world) move towards a more distributed model of knowledge sharing instead of towards just another website. Essentially, it would be a model where users posted content to shared archives (like in response to a discussion topic). The archives would be RESTful systems that mostly just accepted and served content files and perhaps provided some indexing. All the presentation would be done in the web browser via JavaScript-powered tools (now that you can compile C to JavaScript and run it fast, anything is possible in the browser). The content objects could be tagged in such a way that further posts could reference the previous posts moderate them up and down, or refine them into new posts, or link concept maps or hierarchies to ideas in specific posts. In some ways similar to Slashdot, the application used to read the content could check digital signatures for content (done using public key cryptography) to calculate valid mod point usage and to give priority to posts from "friends" or others who were deemed by the user (or other trusted users) to be non-trolls. Copyright licensing for posts (such as Creative Commons) could be specified in digital form. Still lots of things to be worked out for a fully distributed system. In the end, a specific community might still have some central database of users and karma and public keys hosted by some community-approved group organized by some official non-profit constitution, but at least the content would be replicated everywhere and available for local processing in creative ways. That distributed nature would reduce the risk of all the content being lost in another "Iron Mountain"-like scenario.

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot