Slashdot Mirror

(spoilers)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slylandro

For those who don't remember the reference. And if you haven't played it, you should just bypass the link entirely for this one:

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

Play the full game for free, legally.

If you have a grasp of the basic concepts (which should come first), but can't do some nifty stuff like making 3D like drawings by hand without serious difficulty (not everyone has drawing skills), then perhaps having some 3D software would be useful. Of course these are an entirely different beast than PhotoShop or Illustrator. Once learned, you may find that they can be quite valuable for making various graphic elements from scratch. However, this doesn't mean you shouldn't learn GIMP or PhotoShop, as 2D graphics software is quite necessary for doing any postwork manipulation of rendered output.

I'll post some that I know of, since they might be handy:
Wings3D, a fairly straight forward polygon 3D modeler.
Blender, an all around 3D modeler, rendering, and animation program.
Arbaro, a Java based tree generator. (Might be handy. Who knows?)
Makehuman, so you can have 3d people if you need 'em.

If you have a grasp of the basic concepts (which should come first), but can't do some nifty stuff like making 3D like drawings by hand without serious difficulty (not everyone has drawing skills), then perhaps having some 3D software would be useful. Of course these are an entirely different beast than PhotoShop or Illustrator. Once learned, you may find that they can be quite valuable for making various graphic elements from scratch. However, this doesn't mean you shouldn't learn GIMP or PhotoShop, as 2D graphics software is quite necessary for doing any postwork manipulation of rendered output.

I'll post some that I know of, since they might be handy:
Wings3D, a fairly straight forward polygon 3D modeler.
Blender, an all around 3D modeler, rendering, and animation program.
Arbaro, a Java based tree generator. (Might be handy. Who knows?)
Makehuman, so you can have 3d people if you need 'em.

Use Azureus or utorrent and it doesn't matter that the tracker is down. They both use a DHT (distributed hashtable) that enables peers to find each other without the aid of a centralised tracker. It works surprisingly well, too.

An SCIII from Toys for Bob (or whatever they would name it) is high on my list, even after all these years...

Right! Star Control II is the best game. Ever.

In the case you are not yet familiar with the game, get it from here. It is called "The Ur-Quan Masters" because Accolade owns the original title, otherwise it is the same game (or the 3DO version, if you prefer it).

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/

In theory Elite 4 is under development now with David Braben, however the bottom line © 2000,2001 Frontier Developments Ltd. All Rights Reserved has me a little worried.

The main page says Latest news update: 8th June 2006 which is a little better but it looks like it's died in dev. No news on it for years. I think to get your Elite fix the closest game is probably Vegastrike (at least IMHO). Yeah I know we can do OOLite but I like buying new ships!

First we'll toss in one some people will kick and scream about: Graphic Design. Yes, I know all about the Gimp.

I disagree.

Not about the GIMP; for production work on raster images it doesn't make sense to leave the known comforts of PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro for a FOSS equivalent that might do the job as well, but offers no significant improvements. Yet tomorrow's graphics designers are currently on student budgets and are learning The GIMP because of that— something that should be making Adobe nervous about tomorrow's profits.

But Blender and POV-Ray are major presences in animation and ray tracing work: many of the younger people working in the field cut their teeth on these, and still use them for exploring some concepts. Inkscape has compatibility benefits over Illustrator and is beginning to attract commercial use for that reason, even though it is a long way from its v1.0. Scribus is poised to shoulder its way into first tier desk top publishing.

FOSS has become majorily important in the graphics sector.

I don't know anything about audio mixers. Maybe the value of 1 kazillion is closer to 10 than to 8. Maybe FOSS products like Audacity are making significant inroads among the independent bands. I've no idea.

I know nothing about games, either. I know a lot of tomorrow's animators and game designers are developing their techniques with Blender and POV-Ray— I expect that they will continue to use these to some degree when they get paying jobs.

This is great news!

I run the VirtuaWin site (http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/) which, since I began tracking web stats last Sept., shows Firefox visitors (by unique IP) at +60%. It's probably that high because it's a power user type app (virtual desktops for Windows), but it's still encouraging to see.

EP

Assuming "modern" means 2003 or later, DOSBox should help you out (for both Tyrian and Tyrian 2000, which is still a DOS program despite its Windows installer!).

In fact, it's quite hard to find DOS games that don't run on DOSBox.

Yessir. I've just spent the last few days making stupid geeky Star Control icons and trying to remember the locations of all the rainbow worlds. Thank $deity for UQM. Anyway, go sign the petition for a real SCIII if you haven't already.

Another greatly desired sequel would be Full Throttle II. It keeps getting brought back to life, then canned again. LucasArts made some awesome, fantastic games. Great to see a Sam & Max comeback, but there's plenty more juice to milk out of their old titles.

Please add davfs2 to your goal. It would be so nice to have a DAV implementation on Windows that doesn't suck. W2k was fine, but I've had nothing but problems with XP when any authentication is enabled. It also fails to work when using TLS/SSL (W2K also).

Thanks and good luck.

I usually recommend ext2 on external disks that are to be used seamlessly between windows/linux/mac environments. Works like a charm! Ref. http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ http://www.fs-driver.org/

FUSE is a general Filesystem-in-userspace driver, supporting a long list of filesystems.

So with FUSE ported, Windows users can also enjoy in-filesystem versioning, seamless ssh integration, RAR files as folders and so on.

Can anone point out what 'FUSE' is?---I know i am lazy, no need to state the obvious.

Joost is based on Mozilla's XUL Runner framework .

Dirk-Willem van Gulik from Apache the Foundation is the CTO .

Some of the Open source tech used

Apache, Cocoon, Dojo, Jena, Mozilla, RDF, SVG, XML, XUL

http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
http://ant.apache.org/
http://wicket.sourceforge.net/
http://lucene.apache.org/

Joost is based on Mozilla's XUL Runner framework .

Dirk-Willem van Gulik from Apache the Foundation is the CTO .

Some of the Open source tech used

Apache, Cocoon, Dojo, Jena, Mozilla, RDF, SVG, XML, XUL

http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
http://ant.apache.org/
http://wicket.sourceforge.net/
http://lucene.apache.org/

Perhaps not quite ready for prime time, but http://freebios.sourceforge.net/ is a nice way to solve this problem. Then if VT doesn't work, you can fix it yourself.

Tenebrae Quake http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/ has this problem. Bodies (or at least some) become immovable, but indestructible. Makes for an annoyance more than a "feature." Still, it is a wonderful mod of Quake and has me playing the game nightly.

So many good memories of the David Crane Ghostbusters game from the 80s...

What you're looking for is Alliance. Similar idea as Tubes but a good implementation. A cross-platform, open source, decentralized f2f network with file swarming capability. http://sourceforge.net/projects/alliancep2p

Browse with Links! The only Way To Be Sure! (TM)

Well, there are still people who ride horses, so you could also say that cars haven't superseded horses, right? BTW, the all-capital spelling is definitely out these days, according to the latest standards, the language is now called "Fortran".

there are still issues in C that prevent C code from being as heavily optimized as FORTRAN

There are some C compilers that do not generate code that is as optimized as the best Fortran compilers. Also, a mediocre programmer can create a C program that doesn't optimize very well. After all, C is an extremely flexible language that will let you do almost anything you want. But I don't know of any issues that will not let a program written by a competent programmer in C be as optimized as the best Fortran program.

Having said all that, I must admit that I still use Fortran to some extent. For instance, I use LAPACK, in the FORTRAN-77 version. But it's compiled in my machine using the ATLAS optimizer, which is a C program that creates a version of LAPACK that's optimized for the machine you are using. You see, to get the ultimate performance they had to use C...

Pointer aliasing, it's true, could create problems for optimization in some cases, but that could be circumvented by specific "#pragma" declarations, as I mentioned in my GP post. But the most efficient optimizations, such as using SSE2 in Pentium CPUs or the equivalent instructions in AMD machines, go way beyond what can be used by simple syntax manipulations.

To use the full power of things like vector-like CPU operations you need to use an algorithm suited for the purpose. There is no language or compiler that will change a poorly designed program into a good one. Using the right algorithm is the first step in optimizing, I know of no compiler that will analyze a program and decide, "hmmm, this is actually a Fourier transform, let's use an FFT instead".

Personally I care more about other people being able to benefit from my code than preventing corporations from using it for profit.

The problem comes when a company claims "ownership" of your code and then determines who benefits and under what contitions. That's what happens when you don't worry enough to make things right.

A great example of such a theft is Macsyma(tediously detailed article that's nice but misses the point), the grand-daddy of Maple, MathCAD, Mathematica and many other symbolic algebra systems. It was developed, largely at public expense by people who expected the public to be able to have it. Instead, the results were "commercialized" in the 80's. A single copy of the original code(much better history, as you would expect from a free software project) survived thanks to the efforts of Bill Schelter, a GNU Common Lisp author and one of the first to port GCC to i386. Schelter managed to convince the DOE to let him legally distribute that code ... 20 years after it had been stolen from the public. Since then, development has been speedy and it will not be long before the quality matches or exceeds current commercial packages. The next time you spend a hundred bucks on one of it's commercial derivatives, remember that you might have had a free version a decade ago.

So, before you freely give your life's effort to others, you might consider what they will really do to other people with it and chose an explicit license that suits your real tastes. The GPL is the most common choice made and there's a reason for that. The same old assholes are up to new tricks, like "trusted computing" that are designed to lock everyone but themselves out of the market. In the future, if they have their way, you will not be able to run your code on commercial hardware. Is that the kind of thing you want to support in any way?

Give ELKS a try:

http://elks.sourceforge.net/

I know I'd cut them some slac if they sold some flac tracs (http://flac.sourceforge.net/)

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

I love my Series 60 phones specifically because of the 3rd-party stuff you can install. From an app that shows my friends' birthdays in order of who's next to a C64 emulator, the range of software means that if I suddenly feel like doing something new with my phone, someone's probably already written an app for it. Remember when that morse coder beat the fastest SMS dude? A couple of days later someone had a prototype morse code input program for the Series 60s. Sure, some programs (like the drivers for my bluetooth laser keyboard) are a train wreck and cause system errors, but blocking everyone just cause some people can't code is, for want of a better cliche, cutting off your nose to spite your face.

To produce such a powerful platform, then lock the world's innovators out of it is, frankly, a show-stopper for a lot of people who are actually interested in a phone that does more than just make and take calls.

And since no one bothered to ever create a decent usable conventional IMAP/POP client for the BlackBerry, all I had to do was download the freely available SDK and write one =)

(What they do offer is good E-Mail integration if you run the BB enterprise server, or piss poor integration for the rest of us, that doesn't seem piss poor until you actually use it.)

SELECT * FROM myData WHERE CONTAINS (column, 'FORMSOF (INFLECTIONAL, ?)')

>>> srs = SRS.new(secret='boo')
>>> srs.sign('user@example.com')
'SRS0=dqj5=GU==user@ example.com'
>>> srs.reverse('SRS0=dqj5=GU==user@example.com')
'us er@example.com'
>>> srs.reverse('SRS0=fake=GU==user@example.com')
Tra ceback (most recent call last):
...
AssertionError: Invalid hash

Detecting the bogus bounces in mutt is less than optimal - because you have already received the SPAM. By checking in the MTA, you reject the bounce before SMTP DATA.

Now if I can just figure out how to get both cores working (I tried installing the linux-686 package but it didn't help, maybe I need to remove some other package) I'll be in there.

Look for a package containing the abbreviation SMP, that matches your CPU architecture (k7 for AMD Athlon, k8 for AMD Athon64, i686 for Intel) . Granted, I never tried on a Dual Core system, but I know it works on a real SMP machine. That should do the trick... It's bit annyoing though. FreeBSD 6.1 doesn't flinch and detects two cpus at once.

If you want to check if two cpus are detected do the following at the command line: "grep 'processor' /proc/cpuinfo". If the output is:

processor : 0
processor : 1

You have a working SMP system.

I always kill the recovery partitions after backing them up with g4l

CRM is when Outlook and Exchange alone aren't good enough. CRM software is a combination of an address book, calendar, and record keeping system. Basically, it lets you record all the information about every customer or potential customer you interact with, and it will then record every email, phone call, sale (won or lost), purchases, customer interests, etc. It then lets you manipulate all that data in your standard SQL munging, data mining ways. It can also include trouble ticket systems.

CRM is specifically targeted at sales & marketing (who primarily interact with customers). ERP/ERM software (Enterprise Resource Planning/Management) also can include vendor (purchasing) information, project management, time sheets, document libraries, customer service, financial accounting, etc.

Considering the number of FLOSS ERP and CRM products, I'm surprised more people don't know about it.

I've heard good things said about http://unattended.sourceforge.net/, by an admin friend who used it a couple of times to maintain a 50+ PC shop with 4 different builds. Not sure what your scale is though!

"What if they can't afford a decent studio, or don't have the discipline to do enough takes until the sound is right, or the drummer sucks? Good production has turned a lot of bad music into good. An artist can be incredibly gifted musically but that doesn't mean they know the best way to record their music, or the point where a guitar solo stretches from cool to self indulgent wankery."

Record you music in Ardour:

http://ardour.org/

Release the project file with a copyleft license. Say Creative Commons BY-SA for argument.

If the guitar track is bad, someone else can add a better one. Someone else can add some reverb on the backing vocals. Others can try different mixdowns. Still other can master with something like Jamin.

http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html

I have a feeling you might get a few gems in with all the junk.

Anyone who wants can burn CDs of such songs and flog them on the street or in their shops. Any band that wants can perform them.

all the best,

drew

It's slow mostly because it takes a noticeable time to start processes, and this bothers me, as it's something I do a lot. Also, the GUI takes up so much memory that there is less of it left to get work done with. Once this gets up to the point where it starts swapping a lot, obviously productivity is out of the window.

It's a hassle, because, although a lot of open source software technically works on it, not all of it is readily available. At least at the time I still used it (the situation may have improved since), there were fink, darwinports, and pkgsrc, each supporting some packages but not everything I wanted (pkgsrc worked best for me, but didn't provide binaries for OS X). Having to use different package managers and having to compile things from source are terrible time wasters. The software that Apple ships is either different from what I'm used to from other *nix systems, or it's the same software, but often an older version, which caused further problems.

Also keeping the software up to date is a nightmare when some of it is integrated with Apple's updater (which keeps pushing "updates" for software I don't have or want), some of it is integrated with some open-source package manager (fink and friends), some of it comes with custom updaters, and some of it doesn't have any update mechanism at all.

The final straw was that Tiger broke the ext2 driver, meaning the end of sharing files between OS X and Linux. Yes, Linux supports HFS+, but the interaction between the Linux HFS+ driver and Apple's fsck has given me...bad results in the past, so I'm not going there again.

Of course, none of this means that OS X doesn't look gorgeous and isn't a great OS if you just want to use the great software that Apple ships with it, and maybe a handful of third-party apps. However, for a command-line junkie like me, GNU/Linux beats OS X hands down.

Not yet, but it was announced (or at least according to slashdot, it was announced, heh) that the next version will supposedly include KDE for windows. It's NOT there yet, AFAIK. As far as I know the only way to get KDE on windows is to use an X server and cygwin. Of course, cygwin's X server is free, has a relatively small memory footprint, and I've found it to be quite good. YMMV. You can also run GNOME this way. I don't know why you'd be upset you have to use X - it integrates pretty well, even with clipboard support.

The Linux console in framebuffer mode is pretty cool. A lot of Gentoo users typically have it loaded so as to use the spiffy bootsplash system, and the graphics consoles are wonderful.

If you are into text console stuff, there is Twin - Textmode window environment which is surprisingly neat. It can run bash boxes in a ncurses based environment. Gentoo had it in portage and it compiled easily for me. A bit rough around the edges, but cool.

Also, I just have to plug Turbo Vision for POSIX which is that classic Borland library used for the great DOS apps of yore. I've been tinkering with it on Gentoo amd64 and even submitted a patch for the terminal class upstream. (Yes, I managed to compile it with debugging symbols, and trace down a segfault using gdb). I'd love to see Turbo Vision get a little luvin' so that it can run Bash boxes like Twin can, for no real reason other that its just such a darned nifty (and fast) environment.

And back to the framebuffer graphics consoles themselves. I believe you can write SDL apps that use the framebuffer. There was a FBUI project going, but I think it's dead.

There is a manual in OpenOffice format (yeah, I really AM a PITA). It was benchmarked heavily in the late 90's, internally at an EDA company before deciding to use the integer-based object references. All programs (including a placer and a router) sped up, and the range was from 10% to 20%, depending on the tool. The average was about 15%. Improvements were more pronounced in tools with larger amounts of data, which we felt was due to cache effects. It would be nice to redo the benchmarks, with open-source programs, but it takes a TON of work. You basically have to take a program that is already well optimized by hand, and convert it to use data in a DataDraw database rather than custom C structures. However, the trend has been that cache effects have become even more important, so I expect the benchmarks to be even better next time.

This is likely to boost QEMU's popularity, the virtualizer accelerated by KVM. An interesting coïncidence is that I released the very first version of Qemudo on Jan 4th while being totally unaware of the existence of KVM. Then three days later the KVM project released their first version too, and I read about it on this kerneltrap article.

I am thrilled at the idea of using KVM + QEMU + Qemudo together. To put it simply, and to quote my README, Qemudo is "a Web interface to QEMU offering a way for users to access and control multiple virtual machines running on one or more remote physical machines." Qemudo makes use of two important features in QEMU: native support of VNC, and copy-on-write disk images for instantaneous VM creation. If you are interested go check out the website (and download the tarball which contains more detailled doc). </shameless-plug>

I'm not sure in general, but I've been happily using 2.6.19 for a while with no issues.

As for kvm, I downloaded it about a week ago and manually built and installed it (on 2.6.19), and I've had no trouble with it at all. It was very easy to build and install following the instructions, and creating images and installing a new os on them is trivial. I set up a couple of images for experimenting with ubuntu and fedora (my main os is gentoo), and I set up another image on which I installed Plan 9, just to play around with that a little.

That links is broken. Is actually http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/ but thanks SmilingDog. Checking it out now. Looks interesting.

Looks interesting, will check it out. Working URL for the lazy: http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/

Or Theora (video) + Vorbis (audio) in OGG (container). All unencumbered and open. Investigate 'ffmpeg2theora' for a one-liner to convert any reasonably open video to the much more open combination mentioned. The codecs are very good in compression and quality. Any platform which can run VLC or MPlayer can handle this combination, but admittedly mobile phones are pressed for processing speed. Media Player Classic (http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/) is another fine choice if you're stuck in Windows and want a decent, sane media player.

You ask some good questions, especially considering that my original post smelled of flaimbait.

I have a mind, I've heard of Ada, and I've read about it, but I've never touched an Ada compiler.

You may touch an Ada compiler for free 8^) since Ada is an official member of gcc. It is therefore available for any platform for which gcc is available. You may download from gcc.gnu.org or better (pre-compiled) from libre2.adacore. It is called GNAT and is written in Ada (at least the front end is.)

So, where is it written that all software must be written in C or C++? Its not, but TONS of software and especially existing libraries are written in C/C++.

Can Ada be used for Linux kernel modules or Windows device drivers?

Absolutely.

I know C and possibly C++ can be used. Does Ada have hooks to common libraries like SSL and zlib?

As another poster commented, it is trivial (really) to make Ada bindings to C libraries. The "connection" is an official part of the Ada language specification. I did this recently for a plotting library written in C called PLplot plplot.sourceforge.net. I was just learning Ada and knew even less C. Most of my effort was involved in learning enough C to get the job done. I have posted information about these bindings at http://homepage.mac.com/oscarruitt/plplotinada/plp lot_ada.html. Note that this software is not yet released and is still under review by the PLplot folks; the usual disclaimers about suitability and nonliabiity apply.

How proven is the Ada compiler for Solaris, Linux, Windows, and AIX?

I'm not sure what you mean by "proven," but Ada is surely as proven as C and C++ is for these platforms. Ada can do anything that C and C++ can, as far as I know. Ada compilers typically undergo a notoriously stringent testing suite. When you fly on modern commercial jet aircraft, you're flying Ada. Post your question to comp.lang.ada and you'll get answers from actual Ada experts.

I've got years of experience with C/C++, zero with Ada, if you really want that code to be written yesterday, how long will it take me to be as proficient in Ada as I am in C/C++?

Tough question. Again, others with more experience in all of these languages can answer better. I'll answer this way at the risk of sounding prejudiced: You can become proficient in the subset of Ada that "covers" C and C++ in less time than it took you to learn them. Also, once you achieve some level of proficiency in Ada, it is commonly reported that development time is less than for C/C++. And Ada is said to excel in long-term maintenance of large projects.

Personally, I (like everyone else) have looked time and time again at getting serious with C. (I first learned to program in 1973 and have used many languages.) Maybe I'm lucky, but I've always had the final choice in what languages I use. I am a big proponent of knowing several languages and choosing the best one(s) for the job. Not only has C struck me as being inappropriate for every programming task that I have had with respect to reliability, it has also struck me to be hard to learn and even harder to read. Ada, on the other hand, has a clean, consistent syntax and of course is designed from the ground up to be safe.

I ask people all the time why the still use Windows just like you are asking about why people still use C or C++. The difference in my question is that there is a clear migration from Windows via virtualization and/or using alternatives to Windows specific solutions. The fact of the matter is that change takes time and effort, and people are fundamentally lazy and comfortable with what they are already familiar with. Couple that with ignorance of there being a better way, and your stuck with the lowest common denomina

But all that being said, Ada isn't trying to compete with C or C++, instead it works with them while still being an innovator in areas like concurrent programming. Although I would certainly say that Ada does everything these languages do better, the bottom line is there's a lot of C/C++ code out there (not to mention Fortran and COBOL in their respective domains) that Ada has built in interfaces too making it a very realistic and practical language. Good luck!

http://outguard.sourceforge.net/index.html

Can the open source community do a better Trek game?
Nah, probably not.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=deta il&aid=1609779&group_id=93438&atid=604306

Ahh, the old case-sensitive sort. I've never quite understood the point of doing it that way really, even given case-sensitive filenames. It is the "normal" X behaviour, though KDE does offer the option of insensitive sorting.

Could you post a report at the Inkscape bug tracker here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=604306&group_ id=93438&func=browse , reply with more details, or pop into #inkscape on Freenode and bring this up, if you see this problem in current builds? Thanks.

I always felt like NetHack was sort of a virtual community. There were many denizens who weren't really people, but rather trolls and monsters and whatnot, but in a rudimentary sort of way it seems to fit the criteria for a virtual world. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nethack/