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The Player/Stage project works along these lines and is fairly widely used.

http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/

http://rars.sourceforge.net/
Anyone have first-hand experience of how that is coming along? Can you program these with neural nets also, or still "just" hand-coded? (My own experience is nigh on a decade old.)

...that learning assembly will teach you is that a libc is really a convenience, rather than a necessity. If you know what you're doing you can accomplish pretty much anything either via system calls directly to the kernel, or by writing your own asm functions for various things (print, etc) and then simply calling *them* via includes. If you end up writing your own asm includes for things you'll still get some bloat, but I can guarantee you that it will be an order of magnitude less than using glibc. There are times when that can be valuable...like if you're needing a system which will fit on a floppy or usb stick, or for an older system with less ram etc.

I strongly recommend checking out asmutils if you want examples of asm programs that actually do something useful. Some of these (such as ls and the basic httpd) are less than 1k in size.

You might also be interested in Menuet, which is an entire (small) OS including GUI written completely in either 32 or 64 bit asm.

I prefer to have a standard media player in Windows, and I don't want to download it additionally.

I dunno, but, one thing I DO fear from reading this...is the demise of the CD itself.
Until we have another way to get music in a lossless format...I really don't want them to stop pressing CD's.

It's been about 8 months since I gave up on inkjet as a technology. We'd been through about 6 printers over the past 6 years, some lasting longer than others, and would usually get one that was cheap-ish, but inevitably they would clog. Why? Because we didn't print every day. The last one was actually 2 printers as Canon replaced it for free. But if you went more than 2 weeks without printing anything, you were headed to clogsville.

That's been my experience with an Epson Stylus Photo R200. I had long avoided Epsons because of bad experience keeping the demo printers in good working order back when I wore the blue shirt, but they're the only game in town for printing on CDs and DVDs (unless you want to spend $300+, or are OK with the monochrome thermal-transfer disc printers from Casio). I've had to send mine away for service once so far, and even after 3-4 cleaning cycles, there are some nozzles that still won't clear. Printing discs in best-quality mode minimizes the appearance of problems, so that's what I usually end up doing.

OTOH, I have an HP DeskJet 450wbt that is still running on its original color cartridge (I think I've had to replace the black cartridge once after it ran out) after about a year and a half. It gets used twice a year at homebrew competitions, and sporadically in between. The last time I used it, I didn't even need to run the cleaning cycle first; it spit out a flawless test page right off the bat, after having sat idle for 3-4 months. It definitely cost more than most inkjet printers (being a portable printer with a battery and Bluetooth for 100% wireless operation will do that, but you could save ~$100 by leaving those off), but it's been one of the better inkjet printers I've bought. It works like a champ with Linux, too, over both Bluetooth and USB, and HPLIP reads ink level and battery charge when connected over USB.

So it seems like it ought to be possible to 'recontainerize' a Divx .divx or .avi into an .mp4 file without decompressing and recompressing it, thus avoiding loss.

Get mencoder for demuxing from avi, MP4Box for muxing into mp4 and optionally AtomicParsley for metadata. Windows binaries: [1] [2] [3]

On Linux install the packages MPlayer and gpac.

Sample code

mencoder -ovc copy -nosound -of rawvideo -o "temp.264" "the.avi"
mencoder -ovc frameno -oac copy -of rawaudio -o "temp.aac" "the.avi"
MP4Box -fps $fps -add "temp.264"#video -add "temp.aac"#audio -new "the.mp4"
atomicparsley "the.mp4" --stik "Music Video" -W

You can find out the framerate (frames per second) of the avi with ffmpeg [4].

ffmpeg -i "the.avi" nul 2>&1

Look for the line with fps in it.

RTFM of the parsley to see what sort of metadata you can add.

Now mod me up, bitches.

Beats of Rage uses copyrighted assets, I think. But OpenBOR, a fork, can use custom game packs and there are plenty of cool third party games for it. Super Mario War also uses copyrighted assets, circa Super Mario Brothers.

Quake can use third party assets like OpenQuartz or the official shareware data from id. Transport Tycoon Deluxe requires the original data files, which I happen to be lucky enough to own, but would download if not.

I would like to note that OpenTTD and SMW are two excellent examples of SDL portability, both running on many open and closed platforms.

As to dumping your own SNES roms... good luck with that.

Or you could, you know, just use LiVES and create H264 files for free.

Third, WHATVER MIGHT happen in the future between Microsoft and the OSS movement, the odds of Microsoft being able to seriously damage the spread of Linux, let alone OSS in general, is virtually nil.

Precisely correct. Anyone with a brain knows that Microsoft are not going to exist for more than another 15 years, tops. Why?

1. No concrete long-term strategy after Windows NT 4, and no substantially new products since then. Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 are all incremental upgrades to NT 4. Vista is Microsoft's last release, and everyone knows it. After this, all they've got left is consumer inertia based on their *existing* software. They've hit a technological brick wall. Gates has said that Microsoft could run for years without making a single sale...but not many years. We may just get to see that claim verified.

2. Rabid (even fanatical in some places) consumer hatred of the company. You don't have people hating you the way people hate Microsoft and survive with it for long, especially when that is coupled with the above. Microsoft doing an IBM and surviving while becoming less important is not going to happen, simply because of the number of people who feel a passionate need to completely destroy the company. Machiavelli wrote about it...once you're hated as widely and with the degree of intensity that Steve Ballmer is, the show is over. People will band together and do whatever they have to in order to get rid of you...they will move heaven and earth to do it. If the first problem was all Microsoft had to worry about, it wouldn't be insurmountable...they could do what Apple did with OSX and probably survive. But when you've got this much ill will *on top of* needing to completely re-invent yourself, forget it.

The only reason why Stallman still thinks Microsoft are a genuine threat to anybody but themselves is because he has started to believe his own fearmongering.

Fourth, if Stallman and crew take the GNU utilities out of action because of GPLv3, the OSS community will simply reinvent them - or better ones - which is long overdue in many cases.

In the case of virtually all other elements of the POSIX toolchain, we have substitutes ready and waiting. The one area however where Stallman still has us over a barrel however just happens to also be the most important one:- GCC. When I pointed this out a week or so ago, someone gave me a link to something in progress, but what was linked to still uses GCC in part. Of the very few other remaining possibilities, neither TenDRA or ACK are technologically current, (with the latter's obsolescence being measured in *decades*) and the Intel C Compiler is not open source.

We *need* an alternative to GCC. If I had one, barring translation problems, I could put together a completely non-GNU/FSF toolchain in probably a week and a half or so, as could many other people. *All* of the other pieces are there. The problem is, we don't have an alternative to GCC, and it's far too complex a piece of software for most of us to apparently even know where to begin to write one.

If there is anyone reading this who *does* have even a vague idea of how to begin this, please seriously consider it...because you could provide exactly the kind of miracle that right now, a lot of us need.

Third, WHATVER MIGHT happen in the future between Microsoft and the OSS movement, the odds of Microsoft being able to seriously damage the spread of Linux, let alone OSS in general, is virtually nil.

Precisely correct. Anyone with a brain knows that Microsoft are not going to exist for more than another 15 years, tops. Why?

1. No concrete long-term strategy after Windows NT 4, and no substantially new products since then. Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 are all incremental upgrades to NT 4. Vista is Microsoft's last release, and everyone knows it. After this, all they've got left is consumer inertia based on their *existing* software. They've hit a technological brick wall. Gates has said that Microsoft could run for years without making a single sale...but not many years. We may just get to see that claim verified.

2. Rabid (even fanatical in some places) consumer hatred of the company. You don't have people hating you the way people hate Microsoft and survive with it for long, especially when that is coupled with the above. Microsoft doing an IBM and surviving while becoming less important is not going to happen, simply because of the number of people who feel a passionate need to completely destroy the company. Machiavelli wrote about it...once you're hated as widely and with the degree of intensity that Steve Ballmer is, the show is over. People will band together and do whatever they have to in order to get rid of you...they will move heaven and earth to do it. If the first problem was all Microsoft had to worry about, it wouldn't be insurmountable...they could do what Apple did with OSX and probably survive. But when you've got this much ill will *on top of* needing to completely re-invent yourself, forget it.

The only reason why Stallman still thinks Microsoft are a genuine threat to anybody but themselves is because he has started to believe his own fearmongering.

Fourth, if Stallman and crew take the GNU utilities out of action because of GPLv3, the OSS community will simply reinvent them - or better ones - which is long overdue in many cases.

In the case of virtually all other elements of the POSIX toolchain, we have substitutes ready and waiting. The one area however where Stallman still has us over a barrel however just happens to also be the most important one:- GCC. When I pointed this out a week or so ago, someone gave me a link to something in progress, but what was linked to still uses GCC in part. Of the very few other remaining possibilities, neither TenDRA or ACK are technologically current, (with the latter's obsolescence being measured in *decades*) and the Intel C Compiler is not open source.

We *need* an alternative to GCC. If I had one, barring translation problems, I could put together a completely non-GNU/FSF toolchain in probably a week and a half or so, as could many other people. *All* of the other pieces are there. The problem is, we don't have an alternative to GCC, and it's far too complex a piece of software for most of us to apparently even know where to begin to write one.

If there is anyone reading this who *does* have even a vague idea of how to begin this, please seriously consider it...because you could provide exactly the kind of miracle that right now, a lot of us need.

Have experience with the Harbor Project xBase compiler?

You mean like the equivalent of "tabbed" desktops? One for my video encoding folders and related apps, one for the video game I'm playing and its forums/cheat sites, one for my music directory and winamp? That does sound kind of cool.

It's very cool. In fact it's too cool, once you get used to it you can never go back. Fortunately you can replace window's desktop with a real window manager. Add in Cygwin in a Terminator window and it's almost tolerable.

Is there an actuall graphics card out there that IS capable of doing the eyecandy stuff, it don't have to do games, that is fully opensource with absolutely no binary bits.

I used to think matrox cards were the way to go but even they have a binary HAL bit that you need if you want the more advanced features needed for xgl and the likes.

check it out, esp tiger which screams on AMD 64:
http://md5deep.sourceforge.net/

cd orig_toplvl_dir
md5deep -rl . > /tmp/orig.md5s
cd copy_toplvl_dir
md5deep -x /tmp/orig.md5s -rl .

If you don't necessarily need plausible deniability, and if you're looking for per-file encryption with just as much transparency and a lot more flexibility, check out eCryptfs. It can be used directly on top of your existing mounted filesystem in Linux. eCryptfs has been in the mainline Linux kernel since 2.6.19. Here is a section in the eCryptfs FAQ that compares and contrasts block device encryption with stacked filesystem encryption:

http://ecryptfs.sourceforge.net/ecryptfs-faq.html# compare

Took less than 15 mins to setup the whole thing at the first try and you get to understand the whole thing better.

PS: if you are using kernel 2.16, you dont need to follow the steps in section 4.1 and 4.2.

Enjoy Linux!!

What's wrong with loop-aes http://loop-aes.sourceforge.net/ and why the heck does somebody needs a GUI to mount a volume??? There's fstab for that.

Parchive says that error correction is free, if at the cost of a little space.

http://parchive.sourceforge.net/

I use it extensively when I'm mailing physical media. I'd call it an ideal solution if the parity files didn't take amazingly long to generate. Generating 25% parity files to fill a DVD-5 takes about an hour on my current system. Burning said disc takes less than 10 minutes. :(

If ReactOS is almost a Windows clone, but a sub-par one, this begs the question of why do we need ReactOS anyway? Well, to find the answer I went straight to the source reactos.org, but apparently they haven't figured out the answer yet either.

Application Compatibility - Wine can never offer as much compatibility as ReactOS. Since ReactOS actually shares Wine's code base, it is highly unlikely that ReactOS will have significantly better compatibility than Wine.

Speed - Wine, since it is an emulator, can never be as fast as ReactOS, a dedicated OS. This is usually advanced without any sort of benchmarks or other proof to back it up. First, Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is just an implementation of the win32 api. There is no technical reason why Wine couldn't be as fast as other "native" Linux APIs, such as QT or Gtk+. Furthermore, there have long been reports of Windows programs running faster on Wine than native Windows.

Driver Compatibility - ReactOS can use native Windows drivers. Projects like NdisWrapper have shown that it is possible to use Windows drivers on Linux too, if enough people are interested. Of course, Linux already has drivers available for a great deal of hardware. There is also the huge issue of using binary drivers in an open source kernel. It still hasn't been settled whether or not this is ultimately a good or bad thing. However, it is generally accepted that open source drivers are much better than binary, and ReactOS would provide absolutely no motivation for hardware vendors to ever open their drivers, or even to target ReactOS as a platform.

User Interface Familiarity - Windows users would feel right at home, with virtually no learning curve. This ignores the fact that anyone who has been through Win 3.1 -> Win 9x -> Win XP -> Vista will know that Window's interface is anything but consistent, things move around and change quite a bit between major releases. Also, if one desired you could rework something like KDE to be VERY similar to Windows, I believe that there are already distro's who try to do this (such as Linspire). There are still differences, but not really significantly more than between Win 98 & XP.

Don't get me wrong, I think ReactOS is a pretty cool project, and it would be kind of neat to have an open source Windows clone, however as I said I can't really find much practical reason for it beyond the coolness factor. It seems like one would be better off just integrating Wine into Linux better. Please feel free to enlighten me. ;)

Sisyphean task for a large government agency or library,

A much better benchmark is:
http://tvmet.sourceforge.net/benchmark.html

tvmet looks like a good library for small scale matrix operations and altas looks amazing at huge stuff...

This very much could be a step in the direction they already took.

Doesn't have to be. Actually, this idea has already been done, and done beautifully. It was called OEOne Homebase Desktop. It was a complete desktop environment built on XUL, and incidentally "XUL desktop environment" is the appropriate name for something like this. "Mozilla" is either the foundation or the former browser suite built on XUL. XUL is the platform.

So, you can see what the OEOne desktop looked like if you search Google images for oeone or oeone homebase. It was a fully integrated environment, which means mail, calendar, contacts, browser, text processor, image album, music and video player, basically everything you'd need for your basic office/home desktop.

OEOne still appears in the Mozilla Hall of Fame as such, even though they renamed themselves Axentra.com at some point. The Homebase desktop still appears in their press releases up to 2002, then it was released as open source as the Penzilla Desktop and abandoned as far as OEOne was concerned. But while it ran it also sponsored a few other developments, such as AbiMoz, which integrates AbiWord inside Mozilla.

Homebase wasn't a "traditional", "generic" desktop, but more of a specialized environment, aimed specifically at office productivity and entertainment. It had a "home page" which aggregated news, weather, contacts, new mail and whatnot. It would have been ideal for PDA's. I never understood why it was so poorly publicized and why it seems to have missed so many trains.

Byzantine has been doing this for the last few years. Not bad to use. Surprisingly, even though it uses mozilla as a desktop it has much less memory usage than almost all other distros. And opening a browser is always instant on since it's already in memory. http://byzgl.sourceforge.net/old-index.html http://byzgl.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_P age

Byzantine has been doing this for the last few years. Not bad to use. Surprisingly, even though it uses mozilla as a desktop it has much less memory usage than almost all other distros. And opening a browser is always instant on since it's already in memory. http://byzgl.sourceforge.net/old-index.html http://byzgl.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_P age

You mean like Vigor?

Robin - Remote Operating System Built in Netscape
Created By: Randall Knutson
Version: 0.02

Note the version number, and I don't think it is actively developed, but Robin appears to be someone's pet project that runs a remote desktop written in XUL/HTML/JS/CSS.

I've worked a lot with XUL, but am starting to think that perhaps GWT is a more sensible approach to developing web apps. To present a web front end, XUL on it's own doesn't cut it, as the masses do not run a Mozilla browser, but maintaining XUL + HTML versions side by side means twice as much work.

OEOne
http://www.ofb.biz/article.pl?sid=93
and the fork Penzilla
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pendesktop/

http://byzgl.sourceforge.net/old-index.html

ByzantineOS is a software Internet Appliance with a home entertainment bias. It is based on a networked Linux distribution/bootable system with Mozilla providing access to a range of services and applications.

See my linked lists of triads:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/pointrel/
    http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/
SourceForge downloads going back to at least 2001:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
My own work on it goes back about thirty years.

You can think of a triad a like a relationship for an object A with an attribute B and a value C.

One of the reasons I first decided to put it on SourceForge was in case someone later tried to patent the idea. Glad I did.

Essentially, and while there are variants of this, for speedy lookup of triads, I have data items which link via extra pointers. So, for example, for the triad A, B, C, there is the record structure:

Triad# A B C PreviousA PreviousB PreviousC LastA LastB LastC

To, if you have a triad number, you can fetch the last user of that triad, and then work back from there to find all the triads which contain that object in the A, B, or C slot. These links are all built or updated as new triads are added.

I have other variants of this as well -- quads where the first item represents a "space" of triads (though you can easily generalize this to arbitrary length tuples). And most recently where each object reference is two parts defining a Unicode name for a space and a binary string of data to be interpreted in the context of the standard for that space. This is a little like RDF and namespaces.

See my linked lists of triads:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/pointrel/
    http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/
SourceForge downloads going back to at least 2001:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
My own work on it goes back about thirty years.

You can think of a triad a like a relationship for an object A with an attribute B and a value C.

One of the reasons I first decided to put it on SourceForge was in case someone later tried to patent the idea. Glad I did.

Essentially, and while there are variants of this, for speedy lookup of triads, I have data items which link via extra pointers. So, for example, for the triad A, B, C, there is the record structure:

Triad# A B C PreviousA PreviousB PreviousC LastA LastB LastC

To, if you have a triad number, you can fetch the last user of that triad, and then work back from there to find all the triads which contain that object in the A, B, or C slot. These links are all built or updated as new triads are added.

I have other variants of this as well -- quads where the first item represents a "space" of triads (though you can easily generalize this to arbitrary length tuples). And most recently where each object reference is two parts defining a Unicode name for a space and a binary string of data to be interpreted in the context of the standard for that space. This is a little like RDF and namespaces.

I found the adaptor I was using uses a Marvel chipset.. Hmm, I guess I give that adaptor to my Wife so she can upgrade from b to g while I look for something compatible.

I have a PCMCIA wireless card with a Marvel chipset and it works fine with NDISWrapper

My experience is that if it works with that, it's pretty easy to set up.
HTH

Triple linked list? how about binary trees?, one pointer for left node, one for right node and one for parent, sounds similar?, well SUE ME:

http://odkit.sourceforge.net/

I have similar stuff on my project, including doubly linked list, there, be happy.

A decentralized social network would be nifty, but OpenID definitely isn't one.

I'm working on it... and the plan is to use OpenID for authentication.

Build your own eeg machine, or buy a kit, and use open source software with it. Help the project out: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/.

And I run blackbox on my windows machine. Though, I can do have other options, too, such as Xoblite (a blackbox fork), LiteStep, or Aston, which I find consumes even less memory (abouy 3-4 mb worth), while giving me fancy plugins, transparency, and all that fun stuff. Hell, even GNUstep/Etoile does windows. And I'm pretty sure I've seen WindowMaker ports, as well.

Oh, yes, and you can also strip down windows by either hacking up the registry, or using fancy third-party Frontends. I recall sliming 9x to a 45mb install, and XP to about 1-200mb, by stripping out unecessary components and services (e.g. Outlook, Mediaplayer, explorer, etc). I haven't tried Vista as of yet, nor do I intend to in the near future, but I know that many of the alternate WMs havebeen ported.

Really, I'm trying hard, but I can't quite seem to get your point. Windows has had the option to swap outthe default explorer shell in favour of another, since NT4, and the process is painless. So, with that in mind, if your criticism is a fair one, would it not be just as fair to argue that Ubuntu is bloated because it installs Gnome by default?

Of course it isn't, you can't, however, have it both ways.

FWI: I'm not fanboying, but I do use a Windows desktop alongside my Unix boxen boxen, and I realise that each has their strengths and weaknesses, each their uses, and not one is unilaterally "better" than the other in all respects.

Oh, and see the comparison.

'nuf said. (It's really the only conceivable choice. Supremely well specified (thus being the only lossless open codec which has hardware support), and gives between 30-70% compression, depending on type of music.)

The Free Lossless Audio Codec sounds perfect for you.

(all answers below are quoted from wikipedia's FLAC page).

Important factors would be true losslessness,

A digital recording (such as a CD) encoded to FLAC maintains the quality of the audio perfectly.

filesize (smaller than PCM WAV would be nice),

Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced in size 40 to 50 percent.

embedded metadata (ID3v2-like),

with support for tagging, cover art and fast seeking.

existence of automated ripper software,

Yup, lots.

and (to a lesser extent) an open-source implementation of such software.

See above.

Widespread playback implementation of the lossless codec is not an issue for me

Well, bad luck, you're going to get it anyway :-) Both hardware and software support.

Also, consider SHN, (although it seems superceded). I'll also mentiuon wave pack - because it uses an interesting approach (splitting the file into a small lossy standalone & a lost bits diff). don't bother with Apple's lossless format - it's going nowhere.

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

Well, having had my computer taken by the cops as "evidence", I've learned several important lessons:

1) The cops have _no_ sense of humor. Thanks to Fark, I had This, and This in my cache. Apparently, I'm now into terrorism and child trafficing.
 
2) EFS doesn't help. Microsoft's Encrypting File System doesn't encrypt anything that can't be broken in seconds with the password (and usually minutes/hours without).
 
So, especially for farkers, get TrueCrypt. It's free, and open-source. Then, get TCTEMP. It makes it so your temporary files encrypted with a random key. Restart, and they all go "poof". Then get TCGina. You get to encrypt your home directory (and history, documents, etc.) - it automatically mounts it when you login.
 
Use AES/SHA-1 as your encryption scheme, and pick a good password. If you're _really_ paranoid, grab Shred Agent (wipes files you delete automatically), and Distrust (a firefox addon that automatically deletes your history and cache for you). Nobody is _ever_ going to be recovering your data (even you, if you forget your password).

If you are looking for a quick, easy, fool-proof way to wipe your hard drive so _nobody_ will _ever_ recover _anything_ from it, make yourself a DBAN disk. Easy to use, and it gets the job done right.

We keep absolutely no records of *who* went anywhere. All we do is use a stats program to look at referrers (or in apache-speak referers) for search engine terms (SEO stuff) and we look at destinations. On the internet there is really no real guarantee of anonymity, however we do all that is realistically possible to protect the identity of our users. Logs are destroyed nightly. Can I guarantee you are anonymous? I would be a fool to say yes. The stats program we use for the site (awstats) runs every few minutes. Once it has run, the old logs are no longer needed. The *only* way a user would ever show up in these stats is if that "user" requested thousands of pages per day. I have not seen even the most myspace hungry user do that.

The reason we look at destinations is so that we can pin-point abuses of the system. If every law-enforcement agency on the planet were to raid my offices, the *very best* I could offer them (after a court review) would be the logs that are currently on the servers. Thank you for the question :)

With the release of GNOME 2.18, it appears there has been a change in the playing field. In order to be considered to a full fledged modern OS, a Three-Dee Chess program must be included with every new operating system. The Release of Mac OS X seems to have started this trend. Microsoft soon followed suit with Windows Vista. Now there is Gnome. Will KDE be pulled into this madness, or will it fall behind into oblivion?!

Apple Chess

Windows Chess

GNOME Chess

Feel free to flog me now.

Linux isn't a magic security wand. Its just that its been audited by more people that microsoft ever can be. It has a proven (by external audits, funded by the office of homeland security) to have far fewer software flaws then comparable commercial software (by a factor of about 8:1). To say 'oh its too expensive' is just BS. That argument fell flat several years ago. Its just bullshit! There is a one time migration cost. The one time cost is recovered in less than 1 year. After that, 2/3 of the cost is saved every year after the one-time expense (every year). So there are two options to the 'sticking with microsoft' story: He's either an idiot, or he's paid-off (possibly both). There is no equivalent to security enhanced Linux in the world of microsoft, neither is there an equivalent to Fort Knox for Linux ...note that one of the sponsors is the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command San Diego!

I wrote some convenient bash shell scripts for my linux machine, and I run streamripper instances at bootup. On my fairly slow home connection, I accumulate around a few gigs of new music daily from the several electronica shoutcast streams I "listen" to.

What's great is that it is entirely legal, and the network gods only see a connection from a shoutcast client, so they don't care. Its only 128, but its a great deal for what has become 150 gigabytes of trance and ambient electronica. I have been listening to this stuff maybe 6 hours a day, and I have yet to assign names to all these songs. I rarely even encounter the same song very often, so it never gets old for me.

I'm not sure if other genres are represented as much in the shoutcast scene, but it may be worth a look.