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It exists: it's called LUnix, seems pretty interesting!

Vi looks like a typo, they meant Vista, I think.

(I'm not him although I know his work and his ex-supervisor)

Also consider CImage, by the same author. CImage is a C++ image processing template library (cue to how much C++ sucks compared to the language du jour and/or LISP/Python/Haskell/OCaml, etc ;-)

Concerning the inpainting algorithms that many here find impressive, there has been lots of work in this area. One of the seminal works is the paper at ICCV'99 by Efros and Leung. Many CS people will love that one since it is a fairly straightforward extention of the 1948 Markov model proposed by Shannon himself for the automated production of pseudo-english text (i.e. texts that look and sound english but really aren't). The Practice of Programming book by Kernighan and Pike makes use of that algorithm to compare various languages in a fun way.

The Tschumperlé algorithm works on different principles and is much faster, but their particular Markov model shows the impainting problem is not that difficult in practice.

You can get a Unix/Linux a-like for the C64. :)

> OpenOffice.org users get interopability with MS Office.

The problem is, this translator is "lossy", meaning that any translation will lose information *both ways*:
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/features.html

Also, being a translator instead of an exporter means that a double save will have to happen which has it's own set of issues.

> Win-win.

Actually, it's win-lose since it's the appearance of openness without actual openness, so MS Office devotes will be able to claim that no change in status quo is required (after all competition exists so there's no vendor lockin) but no-one will trust ODF translations into OOXML since they will look bad. Another side effect is that people will move away from DOC which has better support universally (through years of reverse engineering) in favour of OOXML (which has poorer universal support) since "XML is the future". Not good.

But if you're going to support OOXML in OpenOffice despite this last comment, a better approach would be an OOXML *exporter*. The key difference between an exporter and a translator is that an exporter has access to a lot more information about the document (the internal application representation of document) and so the exporter can be more accurate than the translator (which could in theory rebuild those data structures, but in practice won't unless OpenOffice and MS Office are refactored so that the creation of the internal data structures from the file system is available through a library) and an exporter will be faster (no double-save, no external tool, no recreation of even minimal internal data structures).

I'm surprised that Novell wants to kill Microsoft.

So what is needed is Evolution for Windows eh? Kind of like this? I don't have Windows around anywhere to try it out, but it looks like it runs fine. I expect it still has a few kinks to be worked out, but it is certainly up and running, so not only is a port in progress, it looks like it is even usable already.

So what is needed is Evolution for Windows eh? Kind of like this? I don't have Windows around anywhere to try it out, but it looks like it runs fine. I expect it still has a few kinks to be worked out, but it is certainly up and running, so not only is a port in progress, it looks like it is even usable already.

When actually downloading a file Kazaa makes an HTTP connection to the IP addresses given back by a search, and the form is something like:

GET /.hash=fdcfab053f15c7e94a34927d959aa6dc HTTP/1.0

Depending on the software they are using, they may get back 100 IPs that the search identifies have the specific file. Then they may try to download it with kazaa and assume every one of those IPs actually had the file without tracking whether the connection to any particular IP succeeded and actually sent back data. If this is the case, then her getting some kazaa user's former IP address would identify her as sharing the file.

In other words, they need to show that:

        A) the search results were current, so the IP address in question was not put into the kazaa network before she acquired it (if not they she may not have 'offered the files for distribution').

        B) data was actually transfered from her IP address while it was assigned to her computer... this is important because they may claim the IP was in the search results, then they 'downloaded the file' from it even though what actually happened was that they clicked 'download' and kazaa went to her IP and her computer said 'wtf are you talking about' and then kazaa proceeded to download the file from the other search result IPs.

Another thing though, lots of dhcp will give you the same IP address for a long time between actually having the lease (weeks, months). It usually happens if there are fewer MACs that the DHCP address range. For instance at the last mile if there are 50 customers in a neighborhood and the last router can assign 250 addresses then their dynamic IP will almost always be the same. If you can show that her DHCP was heavily used it would help bolster a case of getting somebody else's IP.

Also other software could have been used besides kazaa... there are several programs that connect to that network. There's giFT for instance... what does it do for the IP address in the data packet?

Disclosure: I'm the Retroweaver author.

The article seems to miss all of the features that Retroweaver has added over the past year. I think the author may not have been paying attention to the active releases on-going with Retroweaver. For example, Retroweaver supports every feature that the author purports is specific to Retrotranslator.

I have been spending less of my personal time on Retroweaver over the past year, but Xavier Le Vourch has been doing an excellent job improving Retroweaver over that period.

I have been meaning to try out Linux for years, but never ventured. Thanks to reading /. (can't remember how long; should be 3+ years) I finally decided to take the plunge two weeks ago.

I chose openSUSE, simply because it got some Press(Read: Novell).

I have XP on Toshiba Laptop and wanted to have a dual boot on it.

I used GParted for partition, though openSUSE came with partition manager. GParted was very easy and "Windows like"

The installation went smooth and openSUSE recognized all hardware. I chose GNome as the desktop, simply because Firefox came with it.

I played around and customized to my liking. Opened the Terminal and played with the vi editor. It seems like vi skills are etched in memory(I used to program in C years ago).

I hit the road block with wireless network. The installer recognized Intel 3945 wireless card, but would not connect.

Doing a Google search(are you happy now Google lawyers?), I found I am not alone. I tried ALL solutions offered on various forums.

1. Using Intel's Linux driver - This required a kernel version of 2.6.8 or greater. openSUSE 10.2's kernel is 2.6.16 or something. It is only sensible to use the native driver right? I hit the wall again and again.

2. ndiswrapper - Grudgingly I tried this as a last resort. Same result.

Time spent: Few weekday evenings and a weekend (to the dismay of spouse)

I absolutely love the shiny OS. Unfortunately I can not use it without an wireless internet connection.

So it sits there unused.(I changed the default OS to Windows in GRUB).

there was a time when I lived as an agnostic. (15 years) During that time, I had seen NO evidence of God, and I'd given up on faith. But when I finally saw the light, there was no turning back. During that first 15 years, it was empirical science and philosophy that kept me as an agnostic. Since I saw the light, however, no amount of empirical, scientific or psychological speculation could diminish my faith.

SWILL is great for adding an interface to legacy code, because its impact on the application can be minimal. I wouldn't recommend its use if your GUI requirements are above what can be implemented in a dozen web pages.

Does GotMail still work? If so, use that. Just make sure to cron it so it runs in the background and you're not having to constantly wait for the process to complete.

There's always Magnatune; they offer FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, VBR MP3, AAC, and even 128k MP3 (gratis) for all their albums. Hell, if you like Metallica, even they offer FLAC and MP3 recordings of their concerts. More sites that sell or offer FLACs are listed on FLAC's website.

I wrote this years ago (requires trunk Gecko, e.g. Firefox 3 or SeaMonkey 1.5)... somebody else also did a much better looking one years ago here. Granted, neither have very useful APIs...

When I was trying the Vista RC, it told me that my drive was close to failing. ... About the only feature that impressed me in Vista, sadly.

Slightly off-topic, but if you haven't checked the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) info provided by your drive to see if it is having errors, you probably should. You can download smartmontools, which works on Linux/Unix and Windows. Your Linux distro may have it included, but may not have the daemon running to automatically monitor the drive (smartd).

To view the SMART info for drive /dev/sda do:
smartctl -a /dev/sda
To do a full disk read check (can take hours) do:
smartctl -t long /dev/sda

Sadly, I just found read errors on a 375-hour-old drive (manufacturer's software claimed that repair succeeded). Fortunately, they were on the Windows partition :-)

... doesn't have a single decent image-browser ...

Gwenview, Picasa...

... dc++ client ...

Is in production. Check the CVS for latest builds.

... office suite ...

I really don't understand why you included this. OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord; all more than comparable to MS Word.

... Not to mention decent looking fonts ...

In Debian based distros, sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts. Rather simple. Other distros have packages of their own.

In short, I'm under the impression that you haven't really tried to use a modern Linux distro for more than the five minutes it took you to stereotype it, say, "This sucks because it's not what I'm used to!", and go back to Windows.

Heh, not really; Opteron 185, 2GB. The pattern was a set of highly repetitive smaller CA's (not unlike this); hash based algorithms are *really* good at accelerating "big" CA's like this.

I fly gliders and have a data logger connected to a Garmin 12XL GPS to record track, speed and height. This allows me to fly cross country and use the trace from the logger to confirm that I have achieved the flight I declared before setting off. An additional component used by many pilots is an iPaq or equivalent loaded with airspace files and waypoints. This guides them around the planned course, and also gives optimum speed to fly information - useful while gliding to get the best performance out of the glider under varying conditions. It also warns of impending aprspace infringement. I would think ipod could be used instead of an iPAQ, but it would require some work to be able to access the different parts of the program through the buttons. If you want to see the type of application for iPAQs, have a look at xcsoar - http://www.xcsoar.sourceforge.net/ for an open source example.

Using Golly and a perfectly reasonable desktop computer, I just loaded a ~128k-sq grid with a starting population of roughly 100 million and ran it for 700 million iterations inside about half a minute, so I'm going to bet: pretty big.

Current versions of the Linux kernel have a key retention feature. For PKCS#11, there is openCryptoki.

I've worked IT at a Big-10 research library the past 7 years and GPL'd SourceForge project: http://libdata.sourceforge.net/. There's an excellent web site, dedicated to evangelizing open source software in libraries: http://oss4lib.org/. One progressive company that jumps to my mind in particular has bridged the open source paradigm with the basic necessity of earning an income. My hat goes off to these guys hailing from Denmark: http://www.indexdata.dk/.

That said, libraries exist mainly as government-funded entities here in the US. And, when you think about it, government agencies by-and-large don't actually produce things themselves -- they primarily exist as subsidizing entities: they have a mission and a budget, and "contract out" to the private sector, whether it's building spaceships, tanks, spying on would-be terrorists (or you and me), or stocking libraries.

One of many problems that libraries are encountering, I think, is that open source technologies -- and information outlets -- sort of violate the long-standing tradition of government=subsidizer. There have been some attempts (R-Santorum, as I recall) who tried to limit NOAA from offering any weather service that competed with the private sector (Google the specifics). I wonder if there's some political pushing that wants to prevent libraries from treading on their vendors' bandwagons also. This is very problematic, since we're in a post-industrial era, and practically any service you offer potentially treads on someone else's interest in offering the same service -- but with a price tag.

I'm now middle-age, and worked in public libraries 11 years before my current gig at a large university. I've seen (and assisted) libraries go from card catalog to fully automated, to (slowly but surely) private database subsidizers. It's the Y and Z generations that will need to really hammer this one out. Your chief challenge will be to change the nonsense model that requires tax/tuition-funded faculty to publish in closed venues, relinquish many of their rights, and the citizens/students are forced to buy back the same rights. It's dead model. The etymology of "publish" means "to make public". Today's dynamic is quite the reverse, sort of the anti-publishing industry, setting up protected access barriers more so than conquering them. Ponder this carefully.

The other thing to keep in mind is that academic is "one of the last great medieval institutions" as an IT consultant I once worked with at the University termed it. I worry that they are antagonistic toward sources like the Wikipedia for all the wrong reasons. If you think about it carefully, professors grade papers based on (a) the accuracy of the information the student presents and (b) how well the student properly cited his/her sources. If the information was correct, why should it matter whether it was his astrophysicist neighbor (personal communications are citable sources), textbook A, research paper B, a ridiculously expensive database that the university had to subscribe to, or some free source of information?

I think I know the answer, but simply knowing it won't help matters at all. It'll entail a change of guard -- so it's up to the under-40 crowd to figure this one out, and when they become the next generation of library managers, university administrators, and IT directors suggesting that libraries might become Wikipedia mirrors (hint, hint) and contributors, things may then begin to iron out on their own. :-)

Although I don't use the GIMP either, because it lacks a lot of features that I need and use (adjustment layers and layer styles are important, as well as a few other things) there is a plugin for RAW support based on dcRaw called "UFRaw". http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/ I've only used the standalone version, but it reads my files just fine, I assume that the GIMP plugin would be just as useful.

There's also a very cheap, multiplatform image editor out there that may someday be a competitor to photoshop for people with alternative OS choices. It's called Pixel Image Editor and you can get a trial here: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12 I haven't personally paid for it, because when I used it under linux a few things were very buggy and crashed the app, but if the author keeps plugging away at it, it may be exactly what linux needs to be taken seriously. Unfortunately it isn't open source, but the author has expressed the possibility of it being open sourced in the future...

You can use the XBMC MythTV python scripts here.... http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmcmythtv/ Basically you just put it in your scripts directory on your XMBC installation. There is a setup screen and you can have it access your files through Samba. It is okay for watching recorded programs. It asks if you want to skip commercials but it never works for me. Watching live TV doesn't work that well either. But for accessing your recordings, it works just fine.

This should bring in some big bucks for certain projects at least...

He liked the NICE language the best.

Hmmm, I wonder if it could be useful for teaching robotics on Lejos http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ ?

just now awakening from a year-long hiatus is the program iRATE radio http://irate.sourceforge.net/ proving that I'm incredibly lazy I will rip this from their page "iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people's to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music." basically use it for a few days and you'll soon have many gigabytes of new music available for your pleasure, the quality ranges from impressively crappy to I wish they played this on my radio.

http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#music

not quite (well, not unless you get yourself a hosting account with ssh access and run rsync yourself), but there is mozy.com which is very similar (if you do go mozy, please use my referral link). It's a backup service really but it sends changes over the net periodically, and has a web interface to restore files. Everything is encrypted and you can specify your own key.

If you do go the rsync-yourself route, try BackupPC which is a web frontend to a rsync server, you can get your files from it over the web too then.

If you can't get away with installing Cygwin at work, try GNU utilities for Win32

Just unzip them into the path and off you go.

also, that problem with search for text in file is a BUG

If you want a working version of their GUI search, try Agent Ransack

which is a more tricky - but still not impossible. Just de branded my P990i - took me half an hour and cost 6,--.

The point is that branding is done on the firmware level - that is: the carrier supplies a specially modified operating system for your phone. With that they can switch on and off almost any feature they like.

But this also means that every operating system update need to be re branded by the carrier. I suggest you have a look here: http://uiq3.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/CDA/P99 0i. Of course SEUS (Sony Ericsson Update Service) will check you Phone (by that magic CDA number) and only offer updates which have been authorised by by your carrier.

Most branded P990i are now two or more versions behind the current release. For Joe Average this might be Ok - But Bill Poweruser might not like that. Note that nowadays even for (smart)phones version 1 of the operating system almost unusable. See http://my-symbian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28242.

Martin

Ogg is Xiph.org foundation's streaming container format. Vorbis is Xiph.org foundation's lossy audio codec. FLAC is Xiph.org foundation's lossless audio codec. Everyone's clear now :)

And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win.

Why is it always Ogg Vorbis? What about FLAC?

That is the magic of Macs (and for the most part, any well-setup unix machine), you launch an app, and don't care about anything else. If the user doesn't have to think about the operating system, they will percieve it as "easy to use" (as long as it does everything they want it to).

Windows on the other hand, has pop-up "helper" ballons, a tray full of things that want to tell you every little thing going on. And now with Vista, UAC.

For example, one of my favourite programs at the moment is conky. But I would never bombard the standard user with that kind of information (they don't want it, and it'd probably scare the hell out of them).

All and all, I'd sum it up by saying that people don't want their computers to get in the way of their work.

Neither does programming in search of the almighty Benjamins and/or fame ("Registered Projects: 142,309 Registered Users: 1,521,643").

One day when I bored and feeling adventurous I might play with the SEEM editor and see what else I can do.

It might also be worth mentioning that the middle Ultima games can be played in modernised forms: for Ultima IV there's xu4, which is simply a better-looking (and sounding) version of the original, and is also cross-platform; and Ultima V has been recreated as Lazarus, as a mod for Dungeon Siege 1.

Yeah, I remember spending weeks on Sentinel Worlds back in my grade school days.

As for Elite type games, be sure to check out Oolite (which is a faithful remake of Elite, with a lot of optional add-ons for extra ships, missions, etc.) and Vega Strike , which is a modern Elite-style game. VS is an awesome game (once you upgrade the tugboat you start off in) although I always thought the universe's backstory felt like it was written by a Libertarian slashdot troll. (See the way-cool net/brain-interface techno-utopia guys who are in conflict with teh dumb space Socialists who don't realize how dumb socialism is, especially in teh space!)

How exactly can they deliberately make it not work when it's open source and on SourceForge? If it is deliberately made to not work, someone will fork and fix it. It's just not in their best interests. In fact, Microsoft has a few projects on SourceForge (such as Wix for Windows Installer)

... http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ ?? It's already out there for a while now!!

With the release of this plugin, Sun delivers a real punch to Microsoft's testes.

They need to realize what Sun and Microsoft are actually bringing to the table. Sun is bringing openness, compatibility, and portability.

Microsoft is for what benefits themselves.

I wasn't talking about the one released by Sun. I'm talking about the Clever Age one the GGP linked to. AFAIK, it contains no OOo code.

Microsoft themselves are supporting an opensource ODF convertor and exporter for Office -

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/

Well, yes, just in time for those who do not want to upgrade Office :-).
  Those who have 2007 already had ODF converter.

http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html