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Yes, I can see how much they dislike Adium.

How strange. You can certainly choose to add OpenXML to Word. Golly customers do have a choice. And the fact that you're arguing choice against a bill which arguably takes choice (of file format) away is somewhat amusing.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _name=e61d333f0604281734i6681290cif9c6adecbdcedc0b %40mail.gmail.com

(2006-04-29) "The current status is that our lawyers have requested that AOL come up with a list of everything they might object to us doing, with the goal of settling the issue out-of-court, where we'd change our name in exchange for getting a carte blanche on reverse engineering their protocol and enabling people to connect without using their software."

I don't have enought time to read the rest, and other messages, however.

It seems the Pidgin/Gaim donation policy has been updated as well.

On the old web site they explicitly refused donations (Can I give you money/hardware/other expensive things ... ? No. We're completely fool-hardy and won't accept any gratuities with no strings attached for just being good guys.).

In the same area on the new web site this has disappeared.

So, does Pidgin now accept donations?

About two and a half years ago (back when I used Windows for gaming instead of Wine), I used Gaim. The only problem was that it would always use up >50% of my processor. I posted a bug for it here. Keep in mind this was two and a half years ago, specifically 12/25/04.

Six months ago I received an e-mail that there was a reply to this bug I had posted (at that time) two years ago. I read it and, much to my surprise, they tell me that I should upgrade to the newest Gaim. Although I had stopped using Gaim two weeks after posting that, that was when I lost my respect for them. I had respected them for trying, but when they posted, two years later, telling me that I was supposed to upgrade... I laughed.

Read here.

possible new logos can be found here. :> http://gaim.sourceforge.net/sean/2ndReview.pdf

From what I read it's just a name change. AOL prevented the development team (kinda) from releasing anything but betas. You can get more information on what's been going on on the main GAIM Sourceforge page.

If you look on the Gaim (Pidgin) homepage http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ the name originally was 'GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger' as it was originally just used for AIM. Due to a dispute with AOL in this early stage of the projects life it was renamed to Gaim.

Many years ago when this project was first started, it was called "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger." AOL naturally complained, and Mark Spencer changed the name to "Gaim." AOL was appeased, and no one really ever heard of it because there were very few users back then.

A few years later AOL trademarked "AIM," and started referring to their IM services using that name. They complained. The issue was brought up on Slashdot, and the Gaim developers at the time got some legal support. That legal support advised that the ongoing discussions with AOL be kept confidential until fully settled, and so it remained. The public thought the issue had gone away then. It sorta did, in that AOL stopped responding to Gaim's legal support for a while.

Our legal support has changed several times, and each group of lawyers have recommended silence & secrecy. Around the time of Gaim's first 2.0.0 beta, AOL came back into our lives in a very strong way, this time threatening to sue Sean.

This represents a clear pattern. AOL received more pushback than they expected, and would sort of let things stand for a while. Then they would threaten a different Gaim developer. Each time a new Gaim developer was threatened, we had to look at new legal support, to prevent a conflict of interest.

This process could not go on forever. As a result we ended up forming the Instant Messaging Freedom Corporation, and making it legally responsible for Gaim. We also had our new legal support work to create a real settlement with AOL that would get this issue dismissed from our lives forever.

Getting a settlement with AOL has taken FAR FAR longer than we would have ever guessed. On legal advice, we have refrained from any non-beta release during this process as a show of good faith, and to keep AOL from giving up on it. Again, on legal advice, we have also kept this information closely controlled.

At long last, I am pleased to announce that we have a signed settlement and can release our new version. There is one catch however: we have had to change the project's name.

After a long, and unfortunately secret debate (as we could not say why we were looking at a name change, we ended up just doing this ourselves), we settled on the name "Pidgin" for gaim itself, "libpurple" for libgaim (which, as of 2.0.0 beta6, exists), and "Finch" for gaim-text. Yes, the spelling of "Pidgin" is intentional, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin.

Since so much is changing between the name and the nature of the 2.0.0 release itself, we decided to go ahead with something we have talked about doing for a while now. We have set up our own server, kindly donated by DVLabs. As a result our new home will be www.pidgin.im and developer.pidgin.im We, at least for now, will still be using SF's mirroring system for releases. However, the bug tracking will no longer be on SF, and we will be migrating the mailing lists at some point soon. Also, we have chosen to go with monotone for our revision control, rather than the SF cvs or svn.

In the last week or so, an upgrade to SF's infrastructure caused an old version of the gaim-cabal list to become briefly public. It has always been our intention to end-of-life this list and make its archives public once the settlement was signed. Fortunately, the legal process has concluded, allowing us to make a formal announcement now, instead of months from now.

I, and all of pidgin's development team have deeply hated the need to keep some portion of our work, decision making and discussion secret for a time. I sincerely apologize that as a result of this need, you all have had no chance to help us with it, and to provide feedback.

Now that the settlement is signed, we hope to have the final Pidgin 2.0.0 release late this week or early next.

We are going to release it with a 2.0.0 version number, and an API compatibility layer for plugin authors. The project has not changed; this is our 2.0.0 release, not some new program that requires new version numbering.

Hmm, my CPU usage is hovering around 1.5%. Sounds like you could use NoScript, Adblock, Adblock Filterset.G Updater, and Flashblock. If that sounds like bloat to you, you can lower your CPU usage to ~0 with Lynx, w3m, or Links. If that's still too much overhead for you, give LineMode a try.

Hmm, my CPU usage is hovering around 1.5%. Sounds like you could use NoScript, Adblock, Adblock Filterset.G Updater, and Flashblock. If that sounds like bloat to you, you can lower your CPU usage to ~0 with Lynx, w3m, or Links. If that's still too much overhead for you, give LineMode a try.

I have at least three kernel modules working on this system which were not part of the original source tree.

That's not my point. My point is that it's usually very difficult to use drivers that aren't part of the tree. For example, I've yet to get the vmware guest system drivers working without hacking the code (because of changes in some structs and functions in kernel in version 2.6.19, IIRC).

I also was never able to get the some Atmel WLAN drivers working in 2.6 because they're now unmaintained, and the 2.6 kernel has changed to much.

Also, I relied on Win4Lin 9x for a while to run Windows 98 on my Linux box. This required that I compile some kernel modules. However, Win4Lin as dropped support for the "9x" version, and so I can no longer make Win4Lin work on my modern systems because of the unstable nature of the Linux kernel (only on 2.4 and on <2.6.9)

advisory: http://www.determina.com/security.research/vulnera bilities/ani-header.html
proof of concept source code: http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/3651
third party patch source code: http://aircash.sourceforge.net/zerodaypatches.html
information from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin /MS07-017.mspx

There's also the zlib/libpng-licensed Irrlicht, which is my graphics engine of choice.

Then there's Lightfeather, which I'm less keen on.

As far as OSS physics engines go, I only know of ODE, but as far as I know it's rigid body only, so I doubt you could get it to do any aerodynamics. There are plenty of examples/tutorials of people integrating it with all of these graphics engines.

http://slashdot.org/ for obvious reasons ;)
http://engadget.com/ for all latest gadget news
http://gizmodo.com/ for all latest gadget news again
http://wired.com/ for amazing stuff happening lately
http://thinkgeek.com/ for all the geek toys released newly
http://sourceforge.net/ for the best open source project statuses

With multiple monitors, software can be manipulated easily to take up exactly half of the display... I don't believe achieving this is easy with a single large display.

It's easy in Windows. And it works with more than two apps (though more than 4 gets crowded)
1) bring one of your desired apps to the foreground
2) while pressing the 'control' key, click on the taskbar button(s) of the other app(s) you want to see
3) right-click and choose 'tile vertically' or 'tile horizontally'
3) note that with 4 apps, you'll get a grid no matter which you choose (IIRC; don't have a Windows box handy.)

Back (somewhat) on topic, I find people are pretty evenly split as to whether they prefer one large monitor or two small ones. I hate working on multiple displays; a friend of mine loves it. He loves the distinct workspaces; I hate the gap.

Maximizing one app per window works well, but so many other things don't work, or don't work well. You only get one taskbar. On Macs, you only get one menubar and one dock. Potential weird behavior if you have them stacked top-bottom (like when you've got a laptop on a desk in front of a raised monitor) especially on Macs, where you can now drag things through and past the dock and menubar. Sometimes weird things happen, like dialogs and warnings appearing on the wrong screen. On Macs, which don't have a 'containing' window for apps, it might be unpredictable where a new window/document will appear in response to file -> new. God only knows how virtual desktops will behave. Etc etc etc. If I can afford it, I prefer one large display--none of these quirks apply.

My favorite solution of all? Two computers, two identical monitors, and Synergy.

and that source is... ?

The advantage to ALAC is that it has a nice transport - mp4 (m4a)

can you please describe how m4a is a nicer transport? anyway, FLAC can be encapsulated in m4a the same way ALAC is so it's a moot point.

and nice encoder (iTunes)

no one can add support for a codec to itunes except apple. if you would like FLAC support in itunes please tell them

Performance is neck-and-neck, otherwise.

I ask yet again, please provide some evidence for that claim. it is totally counterintuitive once you understand the design of both codecs, that FLAC's much lower decode complexity by nature will translate more easily into a faster decoder implementation, which is corroborated by the evidence I gave.

Source simplicity, which matters none to real people, is much in ALAC's favor. FLAC looks an awful lot like other Xiph products' source - very busy, and very little whitespace (i=1+23|more; all over the place), and SOOOOO many files, even if it compiles to a rather small 40 KB (decoder only)... ALAC's source, ala Hammertime(ton), is a stroll in the park (easy) compared to FLAC's busy downtown streets and back alleyways (forever lost).

I don't see what that has to do with anything, but your "ALAC source" by Hammerton is based on reverse engineering and only supports a subset of ALAC. a FLAC decoder which only supported such a subset of FLAC would be drastically shorter.

Relatively, no one uses either, but more no ones use FLAC.

please provide some evidence for that claim. lossless is a niche, yes, but among that niche FLAC is much more popular. this is also intuitive since FLAC has been around longer, is supported in many more devices and software, has more features, is non-proprietary, is faster, and compresses more. but in any case here is some evidence:
2007 HA poll
2006 HA poll

If space permits, you could use Synergy to control both computers from a single mouse/keyboard.

You setup the screens side by side, just like a dual monitor setup, but each is connected to his own computer. Install Synergy on each computer (OSS, there are Win, Mac, Unix versions). The computer with the keyboard/mouse you're using is the server, the other the client. You have then to inform Synergy of the relative positions of diplays.

When you move the mouse pointer from your PC to the client's screen, Synergy switches it from local control on the server, to remote control on the client.

Of course, you can't drag windows between screens, but the clipboard is shared.

I've heard of a C compiler written in BASH. The capacity of a programming language to suck depends significantly on the intended application. AREXX would probably work quite well to write a Linuxfromscratch, Amigafromscratch, or AROSfromscratch installer.

Amiga's mascots have alwasy been sooooooooooo s3xy. =D

I use two screens (2 PCs, 1 keyboard+mouse connected by IP and a brilliant small free program called Synergy http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ ). The ability to have what you want instantly visible is brilliant. (Also this set up allows me to twiddl client and server at the same time from the same keyboard.) FWIW I try to have one sort of thing on one screen and other stuff on the other in the hope that switching is minimised and that one is used for reference while hacking on the other.

Here is the put-down for an inevitable whinge by some droid:
[Droid] : "We can't let you have that! What if everyone wanted it?"
[You] : "Then I'd be silly not to have it also."

Having said it is spurious to argue from the general to the specific, doing it the other way round isn't. So if you get the slightest whiff of grief you point out that many of your colleagues would also benefit from this productivity aid, list them and also ask if "programmer productivity is important to the company".

The larger discussion is one about bandwidth. It is the bandwidth from the computer to the user that ultimately matters to being productive. More screen realestate (larger monitors and more of them), fast accurate mice, touch typing, and special input devices are all part of increasing this bandwidth. Other areas include speed of the computer (needs to be responsive), and design of the application and windowing system.

The design of the windowing system is incredibly important, and the place where Linux really shines. MS Windows/Office have things in the system that slows the user down: Delays and slow animation when opening menus, delays after opening up applications, non-resizable windows, lack of good virtual desktops, no resistance when moving windows, and lack of focus follows mouse. While on this topic, it is depressing to see KDE and GNOME heading in this direction. Linux diversity helps me solve this problem. Thank you Enlightenment.

For the record, my work setup consists of 2 24" flat screens 1920x1200 connected to a Linux box using e17 and an additional 24" monitor connected to a MS Windows machine that uses synergy to make the entire display feel like a single computer. Each linux monitor is also using 5 virtual desktops.

At my previous job I was also using 2 monitors, which definitely made me more productive as I could more easily compare information on different screens.

At my current job I only have 1 monitor and it took me a while to get used to it again. I would ask for a second screen but I already know the answer... "No, because otherwise everyone would want a second screen."

While on my departement, everyone would be better of with having a second screen, the average amount of windows open at the same time is at least 10. It would definitely increase productivity but explaining this to management who at most have their e-mail and text processor open is a lost cause I fear. Well, at least at home I have 2 screens to enjoy.

Also, on a related note, I found synergy to be an amazing tool when using multiple computers at the same time. It allows you to share the same mouse and keyboard between multiple computers by sending the signal over the network and it behaves just as if you had multiple screens on 1 computer (move between screens by going to the side of the screen). I haven't used it for a while though because I didn't have to work on multiple computers at the same time. But if you are, definitely check it out!

Whilst not answering the question, I have a 6 monitor setup across 3 machines (all based on various nVidia and Radeon cards). I use synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/) to keep the clutter off my desk (only one keyboard and mouse now) and it works well.

Now all I'm doing is waiting to convert psDooM to be more like the BOFH Doom: (http://www.nyms.de/bofh1998eng.html/ Search for: The head's mid-life crisis)

I bought a TV card specifically to do this but never used it because this has worked so well:

I play the tape on a good VCR. The video and stereo audio output are hooked up to a Sony Digital Handycam (it's a DCR-TRV350). And the camcorder Firewire cable is connected to the PC.

This lets the Camcorder do all the heavy lifting. It outputs standard digital video which I capture with kino. I also use kino to do the clean-up, capture a frame (as a jpeg) and export some sound to use as the title screen for what will be the final DVD. The sound gets exported as a .wav which I convert to mp2 with ffmpeg.

Still with kino, I break up the video into chunks (about 4-6 minutes each) for chapters so I can skip through the DVD when it done. I then export the video in DVD format, telling kino to split chapters into seperate files (this makes chapter creation automatic in the next step).

I then use 'Q' DVD-Author to build the DVD filesystem. Although 'Q' DVD-Author can create the DVD automatically (calling dvdauthor), I prefer to tweak the dvdauthor.xml file to do some fun menu things and run dvdauthor manually.

I check my DVD (while still a directory on my hard disc) with totem, or mplayer. Finally I write it out using growisofs from the dvd+rw-tools project.

All this is running on a Debian system that is several years old. Nothing fancy or top-of-the-line here.

That's pretty much it. Been working great for me.

As for that TV card? Well, I watch TV with it - it's hooked up to my cable.

I bought a TV card specifically to do this but never used it because this has worked so well:

I play the tape on a good VCR. The video and stereo audio output are hooked up to a Sony Digital Handycam (it's a DCR-TRV350). And the camcorder Firewire cable is connected to the PC.

This lets the Camcorder do all the heavy lifting. It outputs standard digital video which I capture with kino. I also use kino to do the clean-up, capture a frame (as a jpeg) and export some sound to use as the title screen for what will be the final DVD. The sound gets exported as a .wav which I convert to mp2 with ffmpeg.

Still with kino, I break up the video into chunks (about 4-6 minutes each) for chapters so I can skip through the DVD when it done. I then export the video in DVD format, telling kino to split chapters into seperate files (this makes chapter creation automatic in the next step).

I then use 'Q' DVD-Author to build the DVD filesystem. Although 'Q' DVD-Author can create the DVD automatically (calling dvdauthor), I prefer to tweak the dvdauthor.xml file to do some fun menu things and run dvdauthor manually.

I check my DVD (while still a directory on my hard disc) with totem, or mplayer. Finally I write it out using growisofs from the dvd+rw-tools project.

All this is running on a Debian system that is several years old. Nothing fancy or top-of-the-line here.

That's pretty much it. Been working great for me.

As for that TV card? Well, I watch TV with it - it's hooked up to my cable.

Sure. The first thing I tried worked perfectly; that was a free program called Hyper-engine AV.

I bought the DAC-100, and the day it arrived, I downloaded Hyper engine AV. I plugged in the firewire cable between the DAC-100 and the Mac, plugged the SVideo cable between the deck and the DAC-100, pressed play on the deck and record in Hyperengine AV and had no problems. Soon, I ran into an older tape of one of my students that wasn't recording (digitally) well, or playing back well, so I dragged a TBC out of our video lab and put that in line, and got that recorded without any further problems. There was no software configuration involved, no drivers, no etc. It just worked. You can also use various s/w to put PIP into the Mac from the DAC-100 / firewire combo; the Mac knows about incoming video on firewire and there is just no trick to it at all - 2 seconds after you hook up, you're watching video on your Mac in a window. You can also plug in a DV camera with a firewire port directly - nothing to that, either. It just works.

At the time, my machine was a 1.42 GHz single PPC CPU Mac Mini. Today, you get a dual-core Intel mini with about 5x the horsepower for the same price (I suggest you go for 2 gigs of RAM if you get a mini for video work, btw), and my PPC unit never had any trouble at all with handling or recording the signal. However, some tasks - such as encoding the signal into some particular digital file format - are definitely CPU power related. More power means faster encoding. Apple's got a decent range of CPU capacities, from the mini to the recent and expensive 8-core 3-GHz machine (a little under five grand, configured with 8 cores and four gigs, wifi and bluetooth.) I don't know if the multiple cores are used in encoding at this point, but I will know soon. I'll be ordering one of the 8-core machines in the next 90 days or so, and that machine will be my desktop machine.

As multiple cores are fairly new tech, it may well be that only one will be used. But I expect that to change in the near term; video encoding would lend itself very well (on a per-scanline or per frame group basis) to multiple core approaches. And of course there is plenty of other software out there. I didn't explore any more because my needs were met first time out - but I've noticed program after program that provide various interesting combinations of video processing for the Mac. Some free, some not.

And somehow, I can never survive the explosion when I kill the big Boss named '1:init'...

that's not true, aside from compressing more, FLAC decodes significantly faster than ALAC. see http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

You don't? Hell I use psDooM on all my production systems. I like to let my processes sort out their own issues, who needs nice anyways? And boy, with this kind of user interface, I deal with hackers by "iddqd" "idkfa" and then pull out the BFG. Problem solved.

(Screenshots for those who don't remember psDooM: http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

You don't? Hell I use psDooM on all my production systems. I like to let my processes sort out their own issues, who needs nice anyways? And boy, with this kind of user interface, I deal with hackers by "iddqd" "idkfa" and then pull out the BFG. Problem solved.

(Screenshots for those who don't remember psDooM: http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

You can't burn a bootable ISO... http://instlux.sourceforge.net/ might work. Then you'll have Linux (Ubuntu or SUSE), from which you can burn an XP cd. And it won't cost you the CD.

A superintelligent AI Mind needs a traveling data center a lot more than Microsoft does.

Robot artificial intelligence could travel the country with all human knowledge at its disposal -- inside the reefer truck.

Itinerant Minds want to know -- how much will one of these unnukeable furtive fortresses cost?

On Linux, once Ubuntu is installed, apt-get install gnome-backgrounds, set GNOME-curves, adjust the theme to match the curves, adjust some of the applets for the panel, and done. Fifteen Minutes (maby a little less).

At work, I have to use Windows on my second desktop which is controlled by the Ubuntu box via x2vnc. I gave up on making Explorer usable once I discovered bblean. Once installed, I grab http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/, adjust a couple of settings, install a couple of extentions for bblean, make bblean the default shell, drag over GNOME-curves and set it as background, adjust the panel a bit, install Firefox, iTunes, and Cygwin. Probably half a day in total. Once bblean is installed I can get to work of course, but the system is hardly optimal until all my apps are installed.

• Perform an inventory of the hardware in the machine. Note especially the vendor and model number of the major components. You'll need this later.
• Establish partitions on the boot drive (only if I'm dual-booting Linux or BeOS or something).
• Yank network cable.
• Install Windows from installation media. This takes a ridiculous amount of time, considering that most of the work is (should be) simply copying files. Reboot.
• Install Service Pack 2, which I conveniently have on a separate CD I burned. Reboot.
• Crank up Windows firewall to highest setting, or moral equivalent thereof (I'm behind a NAT router, so that works).
• Visit Windows Update, and download all security and bug fixes. Duration depends on connection speed, but it can easily consume an hour. Reboot.
• Using the hardware inventory you prepared earlier: for $item in $inventory ; do
  • Visit hardware vendor's site.
  • Locate, download, and install latest device driver(s) for $item.
  • Reboot.
• done

At this point, you have a usable machine. If it's my machine (and even if it isn't my machine), I usually install the following software:

• Firefox
• Vim
• VirtuaWin
• TreeSize
• PuTTY
• WinSCP
• TweakUI

Schwab

Searching a bit further, I found KDEnlive http://kdenlive.sourceforge.net/. Albeit still in developement, it is very intuitive and far more powerful than kino. It is based on the open source MLT framework, which was funded by video industry. I'm pretty sure the project developers would accept donation in order to extend existing capabilities. But most of the time, they're doing it for free. If you want to give it a try, make sure you're using the forthcoming version 0.5 with up-to-date libraries in order to enjoy the latest improvements.

http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/
I've used this for some basic tape transfer. It was messy, but I think that was due to the TV card I was using. I think if I had a better quality TV card and a nice fast hard drive, I could have gotten a very nice picture indeed.

The denoising part is probably going to require some serious ASICs if you want a clean copy.

Good luck!

To convert .pst for linux, try this: http://outport.sourceforge.net/ (sourceforge.net)

I will probably change my project Janimationshop's licenses from LGPL to GPLv3

Go and read through http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/ and especially its manual that comes with the tarball on https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou p_id=92412&package_id=97753 .

You will absorb a different way of approaching a presentation, even if you won't use that LaTeX package to create slides.
But typing some by hand might make you a skilled craftsman of that trade...

And for the speaking part, join http://www.toastmasters.org/ !

Go and read through http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/ and especially its manual that comes with the tarball on https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou p_id=92412&package_id=97753 .

You will absorb a different way of approaching a presentation, even if you won't use that LaTeX package to create slides.
But typing some by hand might make you a skilled craftsman of that trade...

And for the speaking part, join http://www.toastmasters.org/ !

I myself continue making presentations with the most difficult but most thought-out of tools, LaTeX, which is actually a mathematical book publishing tool.

Prosper has all the glitz you need anyway.

It's only one extra coordinate pair, and they're much more descriptive. You also don't have to store a zoom level, as you can calculate it with getBoundsZoomLevel. As used by wikimapia and photolibrary.

Running TV adverts... bad idea. Producing a show/film about it... better idea. It seems to have marginally worked for Al Gore. His "climate change" agenda is starting to pick up... and he has started this website to gather a grass-roots movement.

In addition to "Incovenient Truth", there is "Loose Change" which discusses the 9/11 attacks.

On the other hand... if you really want to see transparent voting become a reality, head over to the Electronic Voting Machine project which is sponsored by the Open Voting Consortium and contribute.

Note: I am not affiliated with the Open Voting Consortium, and simply searched for "open source voting machine" in Google to give you an idea. I have no idea if they have a grounded ideology towards implementing transparent voting, but they are hosted on SourceForge... so that gives them a bit of street cred.

There is already an experimental search module that does what you describe - though it searched images in your hard drive only. I remeber seeing it advertised in /. a couple of years ago. Its accuracy leave something to be desired but it worked as proof of concept. The program was open source, I'm sure it'll still be available at freshmeat. Look for image galleries software, you'll find it there (I think it was either KMRML or imgSeek). Now it even has a web version.

The Dreamcast does support CD-ROMs. This is allegedly one of the reasons that it failed; too much piracy. And there is a freely available devkit: KallistiOS

Java does too http://lejos.sourceforge.net/

I don't think there are python or ruby ports though, possibly because these devices are very limited.

I mean this one ...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribesw

No matter what format you choose create error correction data.

It sounds like you leave your computer on all the time, and use it for a variety of tasks, and you are looking for a machine that can do all of that while being easy on the electric bill. This hard to do, as things like high powered CPU's, high end video cards, and lots of storage tend to not be low power. I suggest you get two computers. Get a low power machine, either an old laptop or a P3 and offload all the tasks like the FTP server and the bittorrent duties to this machine, and leave it on 24/7. Old laptops work great for this, as they are built for low power and have a built in UPS. P3 systems also work well, many ex-corporate P3 class systems are quiet, low power, easy to work on, and dirt cheap. Then you get a high power machine, and only have it powered up when you need it. You can have the two computers set up next to each other, and use Synergy to run your IM/IRC on the 24/7 computer while doing whatever on the high end machine at the same time.

If you still must have it all in one desktop machine, one way to cut the power usage if you like lots of storage is to try to only have 1 HDD in the computer, and put the rest on USB/Firewire harddrives which you can then shut off when you don't need them.