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Does it print correctly on Windows?

If so, I suggest filing a bug report with HP; they have semi-official Linux support, and the issue is most likely in HPLIP, the HP Printing stack for Linux.

It's not the easiest way to get support for someone who is unfamiliar with mailing lists, but they do have HP personnel here: http://hplip.sourceforge.net/mailing_lists.html

Assuming this is a software problem, it would be nice if you could report it, so that someone from HP can fix it. This will probably take less effort for you than upgrading your distro, or, perhaps, they'll tell you, "Fixed in version XX, avaliable on YY distro."

If you choose not to subscribe to the mailing list I might suggest a) being very polite ;-) and b) requesting replies to e-mail you in addition to the list.

Why not just get PHProxy (http://whitefyre.com/poxy/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/poxy/) and run your own proxy server on your own site? Password protect the directory, and nobody else gets to use it (unless you give them the login). Only you see the logs. All traffic looks like it's coming to/from your site. Not completely anonymous (as others here have noted, traffic is still cleartext and can be traced) but it is a surefire way around most corporate firewalls, as long as you don't mind a few frustrations (like incomplete support for flash, etc.). I've been very happy with it, and it's saved me quite a bit of frustration. I'm sure there are other similar products that would work just as well, but I like the open source nature of this one.

HP Printers and scanners are among the best supported.

See http://hplip.sourceforge.net/ though most if not all major distributions bundle hplip, Ubuntu installs it by default I know.

I will admit the drivers HP provides may not cover all models but they're pretty danged close. My HP PSC has worked flawlessly with Linux since I bought it.

Microsoft ALREADY added ODF support. Microsoft provides technical and architectural guidance, and pays for that project. I'm all for bashing MS where it's due, but try not to bash them on topics where you're wrong.

Oh, give me a break. M$'s behavior is right on track with previous behavior and may even surpass it in some ways. All of it's silly, because they could have simply used the freely available and better format and everyone would have been happy. No, not them, they have to use their own which was "created for a different purpose." Oh yeah, I'd almost like to know what that purpose is outside of typesetting text, spreadsheets and presentations.

Once upon a time they "supported" Word Perfect too. Word Perfect did a much better job. M$ document conversion was all one way, but at least they did it. This time they are simply "supporting" other people's efforts to help them out.

With ODF specifications already published and in use, M$ could just code it themselves and have already included it in Office 2007. KDE put it into kword, kformula and other programs months ago and made it their default format. But noooo, M$ users are going to have to write and download the converter themselves, nice. It's also nice of them to release it under a "very liberal BSD-like license" so they can suck it up later and lock everyone else out.

I also noticed the noise about the Novel version that does similar for MSOfficeXML. Again, a stunning underachievement for the world's richest software company.

Thanks for pointing to the Source Forge Page. The list of ODF features not available in MSOfficeXML is amazing. The M$ format, despite it's 6000 pages of specs, is feature poor. I'll bet M$ did not know they would be paying for that kind of advertisement.

Throw in the pile of patent uncertainty M$ is waving around, and MSOfficeXML is something I don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole. If their goofey new format takes off, they are going to be hammering everyone else with those patents. Hopefully, people are just going to use Google Office or download Open Office instead of paying $400 for the next roach motel for their work.

One M$ Wag claimed "the format wars are over," before they have user one. I'll believe that when the secret format has gone unused and is long forgotten. With patents to back it, this format war is the nastiest yet. For them to win, everyone else must lose.

Get a bluescreen, film yourself and enter openmortal http://openmortal.sourceforge.net/ OK it's 2D and singleplayer, but it's still really cool.

http://sisal.sourceforge.net/

Parallelism is hard. Trying to slap a layer of automatic parallelism on a existing non-parallel language is unlikely to achieve a lot. It may help in some specific instances, but to get really good speedup you need to provide extra information. This is the OpenMP model. A language like Sisal provides the compiler even more information about parallel operation, and can intrinsically get better results.

I have a related problem that I've been trying to understand and cope with. One day while searching for information to further my OSS project TabletMagic I discovered a discussion board where someone had simply modified an older version of my driver to work on TabletPC computers, and he was claiming that he'd "started from scratch" in creating it. I downloaded the binary and examined it, and it was clearly built from a modified version of my source code. It even had my name and original copyright message in it, and printed these to Terminal when started.

So I challenged this person's disingenuous claim that he'd created it "from scratch" and asked him to make his source code available, as he should do under the GPL.

Instead he pretended to be indignant, continued to insist he'd "started over," and removed (!) the binary he'd posted (you know, because of his overwhelming indignation). Rather than let him conceal the binary under dispute I reposted it, which caused him to feign even more indignation and call me names. There was some back-and-forth in which I continued to press him for an admission, and in which he continued to stick to his position, and to insult and ridicule me.

After a few exchanges he posted a new build of the driver with various strings hastily replaced. For example, he replaced the word "Magic" with the string "Khash" (same number of letters... odd since he has the source code) and replaced the copyright message with one of his own (again, same number of letters), and he replaced the CVS-generated "Revision" number with a value (0.31) that CVS could never produce. Anyhow, I kept giving him rope, and he kept hanging himself with it.

Eventually, I softened my stance and let things lie, and just asked him to share with me either source code or information to help me get my driver working on TabletPC. He didn't provide either one, and instead he deleted all his posts (smart, because they were very embarrassing) and went on to work on other Hackintosh driver issues. Fortunately, I had been saving his posts all along with the hope of writing an article about "FOSS usurpation" on my website.

I'm happy to say I did manage to get TabletMagic working on TabletPC systems, but even now I could still use some of this madman's insights into ISD-V4 digitizers. Despite his lack of character, this guy is no dummy.

What still astounds me is the striking similarity between this person and other hackers who have done this sort of thing in the past. You might remember a few years ago a hacker had modified a bunch of Mac shareware binaries and was distributing them under different titles, and more recently "CherryOS" was found to be a rip-off of PearPC. What's striking is that whenever these guys are challenged they display very characteristic behavior, producing indecipherable denials that border on the insane, and insulting those who challenge them. In the end they always end up making themselves look bad, and they always give themselves away by the illogic of their denials and their exaggerated bluster.

Now in my case I was lucky. This person had modified my code for use on an unsupported platform and as far as I know he was not planning to sell his work. And when I think about it, it doesn't seem he could do much harm to my project. Nevertheless, it alerted me to one of the more annoying aspects of FOSS software, and my powerlessness against it. To his credit, he did push me to add TabletPC support to my driver which otherwise I might not have done so soon. But overall this experience has been very unpleasant.

Is there really anything an OSS developer can do to combat this kind of annoyance? Are there any smart tools out there for comparing binaries to see if they come from similar source codes? Does the Free Software Foundation or Sourceforge have any kind of policy or resource to help poor saps like me? And in the end, what does it all mean?

Drivers. How well does WINE load that WinXP dll/ocx driver for your WiFi card? Display driver? etc.

Performance. Compatibility layer on top of another OS is never going to be as fast.

Interface. Everything is in the same place. If you know how to use Windows, running apps, and changing settings in ReactOS is very, very similar. No matter how similar KDE may look to Windows, it doesn't work anything like it.

Filesystems. Most systems may have FAT32 compatibility, but if you start using it for heavy tasks, the limitations and incompatibilities really come to the surface.

I have used this one in the past:

http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/wlynx/lynx_w32.2.8.2r el.1.zip
from this page:
http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm

No Cygwin libraries required. It worked fine for me, though it has not been updated in some time. I doubt you need to worry much about vulnerabilities in a text browser, especially if you only use it to examine your own pages. If you simply intend to scrape text from other people's web pages using a windows box, might I recommend using the QueryTables.Add method in an Excel macro, which has worked fine for scraping sites for me in the past and allows for relatively easy manipulation of the results.

Alternative Lynx windows binaries are posted here. The current release will compile with Borland C or Visual C++ 6 (with some tweaks), though I imagine it would take some major edits to get it to compile properly with the newer Visual C++ compilers.

Though for the command line usage you desire, Netcat would probably get the job done with a little fiddling. The official page is here, though the latest source release is no newer than Vulnwatch's WinNT binary.

Another alternative is simply to turn off images, javascript, java and css in Firefox, though I don't think there is any command line option for non interactive operation, but scripting acquisition of text from it wouldn't be that hard to do.

But being a GnuWin32 guy then a scripted combination of Wget and Sed or Gawk might be the best solution for you.

You could also just write a PHP or Perl script to do the job just fine, which might be the most sensible approach.

Anyway, the version of Lynx I mentioned above worked fine for me and did not result in any attacks, though I have only visited totally legit sites with it.

I have used this one in the past:

http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/wlynx/lynx_w32.2.8.2r el.1.zip
from this page:
http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm

No Cygwin libraries required. It worked fine for me, though it has not been updated in some time. I doubt you need to worry much about vulnerabilities in a text browser, especially if you only use it to examine your own pages. If you simply intend to scrape text from other people's web pages using a windows box, might I recommend using the QueryTables.Add method in an Excel macro, which has worked fine for scraping sites for me in the past and allows for relatively easy manipulation of the results.

Alternative Lynx windows binaries are posted here. The current release will compile with Borland C or Visual C++ 6 (with some tweaks), though I imagine it would take some major edits to get it to compile properly with the newer Visual C++ compilers.

Though for the command line usage you desire, Netcat would probably get the job done with a little fiddling. The official page is here, though the latest source release is no newer than Vulnwatch's WinNT binary.

Another alternative is simply to turn off images, javascript, java and css in Firefox, though I don't think there is any command line option for non interactive operation, but scripting acquisition of text from it wouldn't be that hard to do.

But being a GnuWin32 guy then a scripted combination of Wget and Sed or Gawk might be the best solution for you.

You could also just write a PHP or Perl script to do the job just fine, which might be the most sensible approach.

Anyway, the version of Lynx I mentioned above worked fine for me and did not result in any attacks, though I have only visited totally legit sites with it.

I have used this one in the past:

http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/wlynx/lynx_w32.2.8.2r el.1.zip
from this page:
http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm

No Cygwin libraries required. It worked fine for me, though it has not been updated in some time. I doubt you need to worry much about vulnerabilities in a text browser, especially if you only use it to examine your own pages. If you simply intend to scrape text from other people's web pages using a windows box, might I recommend using the QueryTables.Add method in an Excel macro, which has worked fine for scraping sites for me in the past and allows for relatively easy manipulation of the results.

Alternative Lynx windows binaries are posted here. The current release will compile with Borland C or Visual C++ 6 (with some tweaks), though I imagine it would take some major edits to get it to compile properly with the newer Visual C++ compilers.

Though for the command line usage you desire, Netcat would probably get the job done with a little fiddling. The official page is here, though the latest source release is no newer than Vulnwatch's WinNT binary.

Another alternative is simply to turn off images, javascript, java and css in Firefox, though I don't think there is any command line option for non interactive operation, but scripting acquisition of text from it wouldn't be that hard to do.

But being a GnuWin32 guy then a scripted combination of Wget and Sed or Gawk might be the best solution for you.

You could also just write a PHP or Perl script to do the job just fine, which might be the most sensible approach.

Anyway, the version of Lynx I mentioned above worked fine for me and did not result in any attacks, though I have only visited totally legit sites with it.

I have used this one in the past:

http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/wlynx/lynx_w32.2.8.2r el.1.zip
from this page:
http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm

No Cygwin libraries required. It worked fine for me, though it has not been updated in some time. I doubt you need to worry much about vulnerabilities in a text browser, especially if you only use it to examine your own pages. If you simply intend to scrape text from other people's web pages using a windows box, might I recommend using the QueryTables.Add method in an Excel macro, which has worked fine for scraping sites for me in the past and allows for relatively easy manipulation of the results.

Alternative Lynx windows binaries are posted here. The current release will compile with Borland C or Visual C++ 6 (with some tweaks), though I imagine it would take some major edits to get it to compile properly with the newer Visual C++ compilers.

Though for the command line usage you desire, Netcat would probably get the job done with a little fiddling. The official page is here, though the latest source release is no newer than Vulnwatch's WinNT binary.

Another alternative is simply to turn off images, javascript, java and css in Firefox, though I don't think there is any command line option for non interactive operation, but scripting acquisition of text from it wouldn't be that hard to do.

But being a GnuWin32 guy then a scripted combination of Wget and Sed or Gawk might be the best solution for you.

You could also just write a PHP or Perl script to do the job just fine, which might be the most sensible approach.

Anyway, the version of Lynx I mentioned above worked fine for me and did not result in any attacks, though I have only visited totally legit sites with it.

I have used this one in the past:

http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/wlynx/lynx_w32.2.8.2r el.1.zip
from this page:
http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm

No Cygwin libraries required. It worked fine for me, though it has not been updated in some time. I doubt you need to worry much about vulnerabilities in a text browser, especially if you only use it to examine your own pages. If you simply intend to scrape text from other people's web pages using a windows box, might I recommend using the QueryTables.Add method in an Excel macro, which has worked fine for scraping sites for me in the past and allows for relatively easy manipulation of the results.

Alternative Lynx windows binaries are posted here. The current release will compile with Borland C or Visual C++ 6 (with some tweaks), though I imagine it would take some major edits to get it to compile properly with the newer Visual C++ compilers.

Though for the command line usage you desire, Netcat would probably get the job done with a little fiddling. The official page is here, though the latest source release is no newer than Vulnwatch's WinNT binary.

Another alternative is simply to turn off images, javascript, java and css in Firefox, though I don't think there is any command line option for non interactive operation, but scripting acquisition of text from it wouldn't be that hard to do.

But being a GnuWin32 guy then a scripted combination of Wget and Sed or Gawk might be the best solution for you.

You could also just write a PHP or Perl script to do the job just fine, which might be the most sensible approach.

Anyway, the version of Lynx I mentioned above worked fine for me and did not result in any attacks, though I have only visited totally legit sites with it.

Well if the binaries installed from gentoo livecd is not enourgh for you, you may be interested in those gentoo-based distributions:
sabayonlinux: http://www.sabayonlinux.org/
BinToo: http://bintoo.sourceforge.net/
vidalinux: http://vidalinux.com/

Does anybody have a good free gui text editor for the mac?

http://smultron.sourceforge.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NdisWrapper
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

It's already been done, for wifi drivers. For the devices it does work with, it works fairly well.

Nowadays, they have put more then one sim on a cpu.

--
Open Second Life Cross Compiler

I think it matters a lot when you got your money on it. What open sourced Sim project do you trust to handle all your $$$$ transactions?

Most of the data is routed to the main servers. We could modify the client so it internetworks more, like with bittorrent file sharing for virtual objects. They've already started to do that with voice, as that feature's bandwidth doesn't go to the main servers. Lot's more can be done. It is just which software you trust.

There is this project - the Open Second Life Cross Compiler project.

1. Installing a dozen operating systems is a lot of work. It was nice to be able to take advantage of work someone else has already done.
2. If you use continuous integration tools like buildbot to test after every checkin, it's best to leave the systems running all the time. I don't have enough RAM to have a dozen operating systems running on my machine at once. VMware at least has some ability to be started and stopped programmatically, but that's more work and is obviously slower.
3. Virtualization tools don't target other architectures, and emulation tools (like QEMU) are generally slow. Not everything is x86.

I used to use SourceForge's Compile Farm (in addition to HP's Test Drive) to test sigsafe. I need to write assembly for the cross-product of supported processors and operating systems. Without the ability to log in, compile, run my automated tests, and use a debugger, I can't support a platform. This decision means I'll have to drop sparc support. It's a shame - I learned a lot from writing assembly for these different platforms.

For others moving from Linux to Mac OS X, like I did (for my laptop at least, my server & mythtv boxes are still Linux), iTerm is the first thing to install. Mac OS X has a terminal program, but it's weak at best. iTerm is a good terminal program, with multiple tabs and cutomizable display settings.

http://iterm.sourceforge.net/

Windows Vista deserves the Final solution:

Format C:

or better yet:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Linked version with condensed summary. I wanted to find out more about some of them. Others may benefit too.

Ecto a blogging client (but the site seems to be down: try this for more info). Shareware, $17.95.
Transmit an FTP client. Shareware, $17.95
Sync Services -- comes with 10.4
BBedit text/html editor. $125, but worth it.
Missing Synch for Windows Mobile - synchronize with PDA/smartphones. $49.95/$39.95
OmniGraffle - diagramming / flowchart program. $79.95 / $149.95
ConceptDraw - another diagramming / flowchart program. $299
IChat AV - built-in to 10.4
AppleScript, Scriptdebugger - also built-in. No link. I'm getting lazy.
Microsoft Entourage -- part of MS Office.
Sketchfigher 4000 Alpha -- a game from the great Ambrosia Software. $19.00
TypeIt4Me - keyboard macro expander. $27
NetworkLocation - automatically trigger configuration changes depending upon where you are on the network (e.g., at home, work, etc.). $15
Apple Remote Desktop 3 - control / configure Mac systems remotely. $499 / $299 (unlimited / 10 systems)
MacLinkPlus - file conversion software (e.g., from WordPerfect documents to/from Word, and many others). $79
Parallels Desktop for Mac - virtualization software (e.g., run Win XP simultaneously with OS X). $79.
Remote Desktop Connection - connect remotely to a Windows desktop. FREE
Snap X Pro - screen / movie capture. $29
Boot Camp - dual boot Windows. I'm lazy.
PDF - Portable Document Format from Adobe? What?
Lingon - tool for making launchd scripts for 10.4.
Workgroup Manager - manage local systems - part of 10.4 Server.

---
Okay, a mildly interesting list. Here's a few more suggestions:

Cyberduck - FTP and SFTP client. Donationware.
VLC - cross-platform video viewer / transcoder.
Blender 3D - cross-platform 3D modelling / rendering.
Bookends - excellent bibliography software. $99
Celestia - cross-platform real-time 3D astronomy simulator.
Plot - a, uh, plotting / graphing program.
proFit - another plotting / graphing program, non-free. $95
WordService - adds a bunch of text reformatting tools to the Services menu, making them accessible in any program. The same page has a bunch of other useful and free services.

The original article lists PDF, but no tools. While its true OS X native support makes PDF pretty easy to use, there's still some tasks that are awkward and some useful tools out there to do t

I don't know. But here's an email app on SourceForge written in Java that claims it can import from PST files.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/dmailer

I'm sure code can be swiped somehow.

I have used this program for 3 years for state & federal returns with no problems:

http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

I use the windows version, but there is a linux one as well.

OpenTaxSolver (OTS) is a free program for calculating Tax Form entries and tax-owed or refund-due, such as Federal or State personal income taxes. Two optional graphical front-ends exist, OTS_GUI and OTS_tclgui-0.0. TaxSolver has been updated for the most recent 2006 tax-year for: US 1040 and Schedules A, B, C, & D, and State-Taxes for California, North Carolina, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and New York. Similar coverage was attained for 2006 as in previous years, except the Canadian and Ontario forms have not yet been updated.

"The learning curve and disparity of Linux distributions is too high for easy general office use." Has this person ever used Linux?

Have you ever tried to get Rosegarden to work on Linux? It's easy to install and runs great... until you try to make it actually play music.

Of course this is not Rosegarden's fault. (It is a great program, btw.) The problem is the dismal state of sound support on Linux.

Soundcards are generally well supported... to the extent that you can play bitstream audio. But try to do anything a little more advanced, like installing a soundfont, using a MIDI device, or even just playing a MIDI file, and you'll probably end up having to spend an afternoon compiling patched kernels and googling for essential but otherwise undocumented information that was posted to some obscure mailing list in 2002.

You must have missed the multiple DOWNLOAD links on their site that point to sourceforge. When you download it, you are downloading the source code, which you are also free to re-distribute.

If thats not open source, I'm not sure what is.

I was in a similar situation a few years back. I needed a small XML parser for our Java application. The main contenders at the time were kXML and TinyXML. Well, that URL about tells the story. Short story shorter, kXML was BSD but still too big, TinyXML was small but GPL, so I ended up writing my own. Today, kXML is still going. It's not the big projects that are hurt from a restrictive license, but the small ones.

(What is this word: I have no idea.

No FOSS tool that I know of limits what you can do with its output.

One category of programs that may cause such issues are lexical and syntactical analyzers (also known as lexer and parser generators), since they often include parts of themselves in their output.

Got any examples?

The most common lex and yacc tools distributed with Linux are Flex and Bison - or at least they were when last I had occasion to use such things. It's not true in either of those cases.

Flex, if you look at its sourceforge page is distributed under the BSD licence. So there are no problems with flex.

Bison is more problematical, since it's released under the full GPL. The problem is acknowledged by the FSF

Some programs copy parts of themselves into the output for technical reasons--for example, Bison copies a standard parser program into its output file. In such cases, the copied text in the output is covered by the same license that covers it in the source code. Meanwhile, the part of the output which is derived from the program's input inherits the copyright status of the input.

However the same FAQ entry continues:

As it happens, Bison can also be used to develop non-free programs. This is because we decided to explicitly permit the use of the Bison standard parser program in Bison output files without restriction.

So Bison isn't a threat either.

Which tools were you thinking of, specifically? I'm sure the authors of such tools don't intend to lay traps for proprietary developers, and I expect they'd be happy to make the relevant changes if it meant wider use of their tools.

Failing that, it would be a worthwhile exercise to publicise any such tools that are incompatible with proprietary development processes. As opposed to just going "Open Source! Be Very Afraid!" which doesn't seem to contribute anything of value to the debate

For the latest versions of ffdshow use ffdshow Tryouts instead.

The original developer(s) of ffdshow let it pretty much die and now clsid and xxl are working on adding new patches and abilities.

Website is here: http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/

For the latest versions of ffdshow use ffdshow Tryouts instead.

The original developer(s) of ffdshow let it pretty much die and now clsid and xxl are working on adding new patches and abilities.

Website is here: http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/

I know someone's going to mod me as a troll...

Look, I know many people here might not like what he says... Some of his points are justified, even if you don't agree with them. For example, there are 7 different Linux builds of GAIM for various distros. Also, the moderation of this article (when browsing at 5) demonstrates that saying anything critical of Linux causes a barrage of flames.

We're not as big as some enterprise customers, but we do have a 5 TB FreeBSD server which uses samba to both run our domain of analysis workstations and serve up all of that data. Someone else mentioned OpenLDAP frustrations (with which I somewhat agree). However, IDEALX's smbldap does warrant a shoutout for making things easier for so long.

ogg theora video of the same.

I'm not a coder, I'm a scientist. Sometimes I have to code. Getting the tools to do so is many times easier (faster, cheaper, less confusion, etc.) for me on Linux than on Windows. A colleague recently suggested I try quantlib. He also mentioned that they require Boost which can be a real pain in the ass to get compiled and installed on an XP machine. I went home and installed both of these libraries in 10s of seconds with Synaptic.

So for me, Linux is very "pro-developer".

There's a better quality video (i.e. a non-YouTube one) available at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fornix/linuxbios. ogg

IPPlan is what we use. It is by far not perfect, and we have basically switched to doing most modifications directly into the (Postgres) database. IPPlan was developed for MySQL, so it doesn't use the IP address features of Postgres. We have added a few stored procedures which keep an extra column in ip4r format, for easier manipulation by other tools.

Why IPPlan? Because the other free alternatives are even worse.

I like Cheops-ng, though I'm not sure if that's exactly what you're looking for. Also, I wouldn't run it during peak business hours -- don't wanna clog those tubes ;)

This question has come up once or twice before.

The usual suspects for answers to this question are as follows:

NorthStar, which is quite feature rich. "NorthStar is a system to help track and allocate blocks in an IP Network"

IPplan which is another open source product.

And PHPip

If you want to go commercial VitalQIP Enterprise could suit your needs quite well.

Berny

Hello 30 seconds on google:

http://iptrack.sourceforge.net/

See:
    http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-educatio n-technology-has-failed.html
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.html

"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.

Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change...

So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

As a current employee, I would like to point out that a few years back HP even opened up the tool that they use to install and manage patches/updates those linux desktops...

http://linuxcoe.sourceforge.net/

Posting as AC as it's been so long since I posted anything here that I can't remember my login.

This $89 (or $52 intro price) TrueDisc sounds rather similar to the open source dvdisaster. It builds Reed-Solomon error correction data from CD or DVD iso images, which can be either augmented to the image and burned on the same disc, or stored separately. It's somewhat similar to par2/quickpar, but dvdisaster is more specialized for CDs and DVDs.

Ahh your error was not segmenting your data more efficiently. Par2 works much, much better with smaller chunks of data. If you have segmented your data into 50MB chunks such as with WinRAR you could have saved yourself hours of time by simply repairing each chunk that was corrupt/missing. I have done a 25% repair on a 10GB archives split into 100MB chunks on my 2 year old P4 in about 30 minutes. Have a read on how to utilize Par2 properly, it is an excellent tool.

I also suggest you look into par2cmdline from http://parchive.sourceforge.net/ as it is a great way to automate recovery with shell/batch scripts.

I've got Celestia

Sure it's possible, and I've done some of the work. It's on svn at Sourceforge, and I'm open to suggestions on what other tools would be useful to migrate from BSD.

-uso.

As much as I like the idea of protective clauses in the GPL3 license, I have a feeling that the people inclined to make trouble for free software with patent cases are unlikely to be in a position where the GPL would stop them. They will be competing with GPL software, not using it - being forbidden to use it won't stop them at all.

The conflict is fundamental - patents stop people from doing things with software, and open source programmers want to do those things. The law is a tool towards those ends, which both sides will employ. The stark fact seems to be that the law supports patents, and so does the political establishment and commercial support which funds said establishment.

There are two things stopping a WW3 style patent nuke war, as far as I can tell - one is the MAD assurances provided by the larger open source companies and/or supporters, and the other is the cost/benefit analysis of launching an attack on an open source author/project is not so good. Attacking the project means lots of legal fees if the case is fought, very bad press among the tech community, and the distinct chance the software you are attacking will be reborn, rewritten, or even replaced by something better as thousands of irate geeks seek a technical solution to the legal action. If by some chance the patent being used has covered all possible useful methods of doing something, the community simply waits until it expires and THEN proceeds. Yes 20 years is a long time, but it is not forever. The GIF patents eventually expired, and I would be very surprised if the cost/benefit analysis of those patents was a net plus. Apple has not gone after the freetype project, for example (although they did contact them).

However, these mechanisms cannot be entirely relied upon. JMRI is certainly an example: http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/index.html So long as patents can be filed on software, there is the potential for a slaugher among free projects. I can't think of any license change JMRI might have made that would avoid their current situation. Patents will always pose a serious threat to free sofware, as the representative of commerical control interests. Indeed, I would expect that if patents are abolished some other method would be found, but at least it would be more difficult.

I use Compendium and Freemind as part of the software development process.

there are several that do, check out http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware

There is a very similar OSS research project called Ferret by a prof at UMD. I used to be IT support for an institution he is a member of. (Institute for Systems Research)

http://www.enre.umd.edu/faculty/cukier.htm

http://ferret.sourceforge.net/