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Star Control 2 in Super Melee mode. It's basically a 1-on-1 space combat arcade game, but it has a lot of depth. There are 25 very different and unique ships to choose between and they all have advantages and disadvantages; some are slow, others are fast. Some rely on raw firepower while others rely on strange innovative devices like tractor beams. Before the game starts each player chooses ships for his fleet and that makes it suitable for tournament play among friends.

You can get the GPL port here (GPL). Oh, and when you're tired of blasting your friends out of the sky, the single player game itself is probably one of the best ever made.

I'm sold on SMART. It's saved my bacon in a major way at least twice. I use it on my SuSE boxes and my WinXP machines. I have the schedule set up to run self-tests everynight and a long test every weekend, which causes almost no impact on the drive while the test is running. The testing algorythm is built into the drive, it runs on the drive, and doesn't consume memory or CPU on the host machine. Watch the logs carefully for relocated sectors and other tell-tales, like lengthening seek times. http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ It works.

Awstats seems to be the modern usual answer (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/), used and recommended by many admins and groups (in my case EGEE, European Science Grid intiative http://www.eu-egee.org/) but for traditionalists with no eye-candy desires, there is a copy of Webalizer (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/) lurking on most servers and almost all destribution package repositories. It's worth looking at the wikipedia page for specials, extended verions and general info on web server statistics and analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webalizer.

Particularly, Stone Steps Webalizer is an interesting version of feature-full and candy-enabled version: http://www.stonesteps.ca/projects/webalizer/. Others can be easily found on Freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=webalizer&section=p rojects (i.e. Webalizer Extended with included Geolizer and extensive 404 analysis support, http://www.patrickfrei.ch/webalizer/ and AwFull with usability, CSS and geo-ip features, http://www.stedee.id.au/awffull etc.).

Others can be found on Freshmeat (117 hits at this time http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=web&trove_cat_id=24 5&section=trove_cat) and Wikipedia (very short and poor stub of a list that you might want to improve after your extensive testing :-) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_web_ana lytics_software.

There is also Sherlog, an Apache Log Analyser, specialized in user experinece tracking more than statistcs - an interesting complimentary tool (http://sherlog.europeanservers.net/.

Anybody know of any usefull tools to completely wipe the contents of a drive?

I use Boot and Nuke. It does the job pretty well and it's open source.

I'd choose awstats. It's fast, very easy to use, looks pretty, and best of all ... it's free to use on Windows as well as Linux. Here is their main page on sourceforge, which also includes a nice little demo.

Anybody know of any usefull [sic] tools to completely wipe the contents of a drive?

Darik's Boot and Nuke (aka DBAN) available at Sourceforge. It has various settings depending on how paranoid you need to be and how much time you want to take.

http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html

I accidentally posted my comment (meant to click preview) without inserting my formatting tags. Please disregard and read this instead. Sorry!! -- Paul

This may go against the grain here, but I replace my desktop drive about every 12-18 months. As I see it, here are the benefits of doing so:

+1) The drive still has decent resale value at that point, particularly if you sell on a computer forum and not on ebay. This helps reduce the cost of the hard drive update.

+2) Drive capacities are increasing quickly while costs continue to decline. This reduces the cost of the upgrade.

+3) Replacing before the warranty period is up means that the likelihood of experiencing a hard drive failure is low.

+4) While WinXP is a lot better than Win9x, it still doesn't hurt to do a fresh reinstall every 12-18 months. A hard disk replacement is the perfect timing for this.

Of course, there are some valid counter-arguments to these points:

-1) Security. (i.e., somebody could recover your private data.) I run Darik's Boot 'n' Nuke a few times, so I'm not terribly concerned about this. After running such a program, the odds of somebody successfully recovering data on a home budget are pretty low.

-2) You may be replacing too often. Well, I can't do much about that. But good drives don't cost much more than $100-$150 these days. A little peace of mind is worth something, and the regular size/speed upgrades are a nice bonus.

-3) This is no substitute for backups. I completely agree, and make backups of my most critical data to remote servers.

-4) Perhaps this isn't necessary. Perhaps not, but a fresh format is a helpful after 18 months.

Any way around it, I acknowledge that this strategy is a bit more expensive than may be necessary, but it has served me well in the past six years +. I've only had one drive fail in the past, back when I let my drives go well beyond the warranty period. Of course, that drive was a total loss, with no recovery of value to apply to the new drive, and there were some non-recoverable files. In my opinion, preventing problems before they occur is preferable, and getting speed and capacity boosts are just icing on the cake. -- Paul

I replace them only when they fail or if I need more space. Seriously, hard drives are getting cheaper every day. Why buy ahead if you don't need to? My home server's system drive is a 13GB Maxtor that I bought in 1998. I have Debian and swap installed on it. I keep all of my data on six 200GB drives with software RAID5. Sure, the 13 gig could die at any moment so I keep backups and run smartmontools to help warn me if it's about to die. But if it's not broke, don't fix it.

Don't forget to use OTR for your GAIM sessions...

Hey, it works for De Beers...

... I still will never understand ...

If you previously would never understand, doesn't that already say that, forever, you would not understand?

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu for a roommate. I left her Windows partition just so she can video-chat with her MSN buddies.

So she actually needs a Windows license ($$$) only because MS did not open it's protocols.

I don't believe the EU has something agains Microsoft; I think that now, for example, linux is by far enough developed that closed standards become a real issue for many people that might switch. I think it's about fair competition.

You might not agree, but do you understand now?

... I still will never understand ...

If you previously would never understand, doesn't that already say that, forever, you would not understand?

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu for a roommate. I left her Windows partition just so she can video-chat with her MSN buddies.

So she actually needs a Windows license ($$$) only because MS did not open it's protocols.

I don't believe the EU has something agains Microsoft; I think that now, for example, linux is by far enough developed that closed standards become a real issue for many people that might switch. I think it's about fair competition.

You might not agree, but do you understand now?

... By a late gentleman who went by the name of Douglas Adams. The software, Anthem, in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, used a company's stock as input data instead of server logs, but the idea was still there. I wonder if his writing influenced the author of this tool.

I can't help but wonder if the music generated by this software isn't going to sound like, in Mr. Adams own words, "a short burst of the most hideous cacophony in G minor" -- to say nothing of what it must sound like to listen to hours of this stuff if 30 seconds is pure hell.

I would personally prefer to use Boodler for such purposes; instead of music you can use any waveforms you like. You program the software to do whatever you want, whether it's write music or (more likely) generate an environmental audioscape similar to what peep does, only much more sophisticated and flexible since you can program whatever events you want and send them to Boodler, which can be set to listen to a socket or port for commands.

With it you really get to kill demon processes. In 3D. With a plasma rifle.

http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

LinuxBIOS supports several different types of payloads: Linux, Open Firmware, Etherboot, etc. If you are using a Linux kernel payload, then you probably don't want to be upgrading it often. In that case, you can set up the first kernel to kexec a second kernel (before kexec, there was a patch called the two kernel monte).

AMD64's 64-bit mode is definitely supported.

It's not trivial (yet) to boot a version of MS Windows with LinuxBIOS, but using Linux as a BIOS can give all sorts of benefits. One very interesting capability for people running beowulf clusters is that you can boot over any network device that Linux supports (e.g. Myrinet or Infiniband). That may not mean anything to a regular home user, but the point is that you have a whole lot more flexibility in what you can do. Even if you don't want to make it boot your home system over your wireless LAN, it does increase your freedom and it prevents people from nibbling away at the freedom you already have.

I would say freedom from future DRM really is the biggest incentive for trying out LinuxBIOS at home. You can avoid Intel's EFI standard (they're pushing for it to be on all desktops and servers), which will enable companies to inflict DRM on you. Linus has made some very good points about why EFI is not good. One way to look at EFI is that it is basically an OS, and not a very good one.

There are several white papers and tutorials that do a good job of explaining how LinuxBIOS works. Look at the LinuxBIOS documentation section.

Why must the file formats be secret?

Why would I care about the BIOS? For all intents and purpose it just the first stage bootstrap system for the hardware. As long as it does this quickly and simply who cares who or how its written?

They are still widely in use, but if you are up-to-date in Java web application technologies, you are probably aware that JSP is dead. This is not a troll. JSP is rapidly being pushed out by alternatives like Facelets (which is used to define JavaServer Faces views), Tapestry, and Wicket. All of these are XML, disallow any logic in the view (thus encouraging proper MVC), and do not require a mountain of boilerplate code to extend. Why anyone would use JSP these days is totally beyond my understanding. Confusing and hard to maintain, JSP is rapidly diminishing and releasing a new library targeting it is like announcing some great new technology for Windows 95.

what about netcat: http://netcat.sourceforge.net/

Finally, there is a Python script. At first glance, it looks slightly better. It uses what appears to be the Python equivalent of HTML::Parse to get links. But a closer look reveals that, to find links, it just gets the first attribute of any a tag and uses that as the link. Never mind if the 1st attribute doesn't happen to be "href".

What bugs me the most about this article is that the author keeps using the most generic libraries he can find instead of something written for this exact task. He should have used WWW:Mechanize for Perl or mechanize for Python. I'm sure there's something like this for Ruby, too.

• Don't forget to check and respect robots.txt. Python has a module that helps you parse that file
  
• Samie and its Python port Pamie are your friends. You can automate IE so your script is treated as an human and not discriminated as a robot.
  
• I use such beasts to do one-click time reporting at work and one-click cartoon collecting in my favorite newspaper.
  
• And once I even repeatedly voted on an online poll and changed the course of history.
  
• Ah, yes, TFA was about building a spider on Linux. I didn't check if my one-click IE scripts work on IE/Wine/Linux.
  
• If I write an one-click script for online shopping, does it infringe the infamous Amazon patent?
  
• When will Firefox's automation capabilities match those of IE?
  

• Don't forget to check and respect robots.txt. Python has a module that helps you parse that file
  
• Samie and its Python port Pamie are your friends. You can automate IE so your script is treated as an human and not discriminated as a robot.
  
• I use such beasts to do one-click time reporting at work and one-click cartoon collecting in my favorite newspaper.
  
• And once I even repeatedly voted on an online poll and changed the course of history.
  
• Ah, yes, TFA was about building a spider on Linux. I didn't check if my one-click IE scripts work on IE/Wine/Linux.
  
• If I write an one-click script for online shopping, does it infringe the infamous Amazon patent?
  
• When will Firefox's automation capabilities match those of IE?
  

First, thanks for all the moral and financial support. It's really appreciated.

I'd also like to clarify a couple of points.

I'm working with an attorney, Victoria Hall of Rockville, MD, on this. I'm not a lawyer, and have only a civilian's idea of intellectual property law, so I'm not certain how all this is going to go. But I am absolutely, 100% determined to do whatever I legally can to ensure that Katzer's behavior is not allowed to continue. Originally this was about the damage he was doing to my fellow hobbyists in the model railroad community, but now it's about protecting the rights of open source groups. I simply cannot allow him to succeed in destroying this open-source project, or other people will adopt his tactics.

About anti-SLAPP: I think it is important to point out that Katzer KNEW that the Department of Energy wasn't involved in the JMRI model-railroad project, but he lied in declaration and stated otherwise. Because of the way anti-SLAPP works, the Court had to accept that as fact, and that's the reason Katzer and Russell prevailed. If Katzer had told the truth, none of this would have happened. We left off certain state law claims from the Amended Complaint out of concern that Katzer would again lie his way to another anti-SLAPP award. I paid his legal fees because the Court ordered me to do so, but we intend to seek the return of that money once we show that Katzer lied in his declaration. And we intend to seek criminal charges against Katzer.

For those of you who are lawyers, have lawyers, or are with open source interest groups, we would welcome you to file an amicus brief in support of copyright and license protection for open source groups. Some groups are considering filing amicus briefs, and others are taking a pass during this round.The next hearing is December 15th. For more information, please contact Victoria Hall at victoria@vkhall-law.com.

For those of you in the San Francisco area, it would be great if you could come out and attend the hearing to respectfully support open-source software. The hearing will be held at 9AM in Judge Jeffrey S. White's courtroom, Courtroom 2 on the 17th floor of the Federal Court Building, 450 Golden Gate Ave., San Francisco.

For those of you who'd like to hear more as future events unfold, please subscribe to the "jmri-legal-announce" mailing list on SourceForge. This will carry short announcements occasionally as news happens; there won't be a lot of traffic. It's not a list for discussion and strategizing; for various reasons, we can't do that on a public list.

Thanks again for the support,

Bob

All I know is I wish I could view youtube clips on my TV without any file conversion(making it look worse), or hooking up my ipod, etc.

The determination in the Sun Vs MS case wasn't that Sun didn't have a copyright case because of the contract -- but rather that the judge didn't distinguish that MS was violating copyright (as opposed to contract) before (s)he issued an injunction under the (far more lax) rules of copyright infringement.

The GPL, on the other hand, simply says that I only have the permission to distribute MySQL if I'm following the terms of the license. Thus, if I'm not following the rules of the GPL, my only defense is that I'm not violating copyright. i.e. a GPL case is solely a copyright case, with the defendant having only two credible defenses:

1. I'm not distributing your software (and thus not violating copyright), or
2. I'm following the GPL, so you're estopped from suing me.

From http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/docket/100.pdf (PDF warning; see page 13):

Defendants seek to dismiss the Copyright act claim on the basis that the right to bring a copyright infringement claim has been waived since Jaconsen granted the general public a nonexclusive license to reproduce, copy, and distribute the open source software.

They certainly don't assert that copyright doesn't apply for Free Software or Open Source. This same exact argument could be used on a shrinkwrap EULA "violation."

I guess it does raise a technical issue, though. When a creator and a user don't actually meet, sign contracts, etc -- when licensing gets implied -- how do you decide it if actually happened?

For example, with either a Microsoft EULA, or GPLed Linux, or whatever, at some point a user may decide to do something that is not Fair Use under copyright. Maybe they want to modify the software and sell 10 copies to someone else (in the case of GPL) or maybe they want to .. uh .. actually I can't think of any rights that MS EULAs grant, but let's ass/u/me that there's some sort of reason a person might want to agree to it. (?!)

When the user goes ahead and does the licensed copyright violation (e.g. selling 10 copies of Linux), it is argued that either they have violated copyright, or they have agreed to the license. Now let's say they are also doing something that is not permitted by the license (such as selling copies of Linux w/out offering the source). So now, they're either violating copyright, or they're violating the license. How do you know which one they did? Just like Microsoft's relationship with their users, you don't have any evidence that they ever accepted the license.

If they sue you for copyright violation, just say you accepted the license -- and then they need to sue you for breach of contract instead. If they sue you for breach of contract, say you didn't accept the license, and then they'll have to sue for you copyright violation instead.

Without evidence of what happened, you make 'em sue you twice. Of course, the second time (assuming they have any lawyer-money left), they've got you.

IANAL

The guts of the claim seems to be that the rights granted by copyright are:
Section 106 of the Copyright Act grants a copyright holder the ex exclusive right to reproduce, prepar clusive prepare derivative works of, distribute, display, and perform the copyrighted material.
And that the particular opensource licence grants non exclusive rights to do these provided that certian conditions are obeyed.
They then cite Sun vs Microsoft (the Java case) precedent where the judge ruled that copyright claims can only cover the rights granted by copyright and that the other restrictions are a matter of contract law. Based on this they argue that the claim of copyright violation should be thrown out.

Now IANAL but based on the precedent they seem to have a valid point, however as far as I can see there is nothing here to stop it being relodged as a contract claim.
Here's the docs it starts on page 13

"Generally, a copyright owner who grants a nonexclusive license to use his copyrighted material
waives his right to sue the licensee for copyright infringement and can only sue for breach of
contract." Id. (citing Graham v. James, 144 F.3d 229, 236 (2nd Cir. 1998)).

I remember this story when it first came into public light. Given the volume of documentation available via JMRI, additionally via groklaw, and elsewhere, I'll avoid going into specifics, but it was and remains quite clear that JMRI's copyright was being flagrantly infringed by an aggressive and offensive party.

Please read the brief summary of legal proceedings available here on their site.

As you'll see, they're not exactly doing too well. This is unfortunate and greatly diminishes my confidence in the American legal system.

I remember this story when it first came into public light. Given the volume of documentation available via JMRI, additionally via groklaw, and elsewhere, I'll avoid going into specifics, but it was and remains quite clear that JMRI's copyright was being flagrantly infringed by an aggressive and offensive party.

Please read the brief summary of legal proceedings available here on their site.

As you'll see, they're not exactly doing too well. This is unfortunate and greatly diminishes my confidence in the American legal system.

``Also though it is slightly off-topic I also think that Java under GPL would not benefit as much because the model of contribution is really not as easily understood as the OS world.''

With all the complaints about the Java community process being slow and bureaucratic, and the free Java implementations lagging behind in features, I think having a good, open source Java implementation is a Good Thing in it's own right.

Also, I don't know what you mean by the model of contribution for Java not being as easily understood as the OS world. It's not like there aren't any successful open source programming language implementations yet.

He is absolutely right in saying that there is a major conflict of interest between the content providers and the technology companies. Both are led by large corporations, and both serve "the public" to different extents (content producers and consumers). He is also right in pointing out that fair use is necessary for all, acknowledging that "so much of what we create is built on the art that came before".

He also makes a couple of interesting points: first, that downloading is illegal and immoral (the opposite view being an "extremist position"); and second that the new fair use will stop artists from producing content because there would be no economic advantage. And IMHO both of these points are flawed and misleading.

For the first one, there is no mention of what makes it an extremist view (other than his obvious agenda), and the opposite view is just as extreme. Downloading is not illegal everywhere, and it certainly is not immoral - there is no morality on the reordering of a bunch of 0 and 1s on magnetic storage. Nothing was lost on the other side.

But the second one is more interesting. It is simply not true that artists will stop producing content if people are free to use the technology as they see fit. This is already happening, and the attempts to outlaw it is a proof of that. But the impact won't necessarily be worse than today if allowed to happen.

I think that these are hiding another, deeper, threat for content companies: the fact that technology companies serve both consumers and content creators, and it scares the crap out of them because of the implications.

In other words, technology massively lowers the barriers of entry for new artists. Massive distribution technologies allow users to bypass the traditional and oligarchic "means of production". Cheaper equipment means more talented people can reach the eyes and ears of listeners, which will cause money to be distributed more broadly, and more fairly - at the expense of the traditional players of the content industry. An example of this is how, given a specific content, some illegal copies manage to release something of a better quality (no ads, multiple subtitles in different languages, better size/quality ratio, etc).

Content industries have a history of perverting technology for their own economic ends. DVD zoning is an example of this. I can understand the marketing drives to do it - artificial market segmentation, and so on. But in a increasingly global world they become as annoying as they are obsolete.

So yes, the technology companies have a lot to profit from this. But guess what - their best economic interest is to allow the people (artist and consumers) to be able to do more with their gear, not less. So if I have to choose my side, I'll go with the technology companies, not with the people who would like to "license" things to a given item of hardware and still charge as much as possible.

Some people are getting it... these guys are trying to offer a free HD TV show on the net. In other areas such as gaming, there are many examples of freely available software, which are free yet fun to play. This is the future, IMHO, and is arriving sooner or later. Yes, in part, I like it because I get a free ride, but that's because I'm given one by people who have the means of doing so. And those means are given by technology.

He is absolutely right in saying that there is a major conflict of interest between the content providers and the technology companies. Both are led by large corporations, and both serve "the public" to different extents (content producers and consumers). He is also right in pointing out that fair use is necessary for all, acknowledging that "so much of what we create is built on the art that came before".

He also makes a couple of interesting points: first, that downloading is illegal and immoral (the opposite view being an "extremist position"); and second that the new fair use will stop artists from producing content because there would be no economic advantage. And IMHO both of these points are flawed and misleading.

For the first one, there is no mention of what makes it an extremist view (other than his obvious agenda), and the opposite view is just as extreme. Downloading is not illegal everywhere, and it certainly is not immoral - there is no morality on the reordering of a bunch of 0 and 1s on magnetic storage. Nothing was lost on the other side.

But the second one is more interesting. It is simply not true that artists will stop producing content if people are free to use the technology as they see fit. This is already happening, and the attempts to outlaw it is a proof of that. But the impact won't necessarily be worse than today if allowed to happen.

I think that these are hiding another, deeper, threat for content companies: the fact that technology companies serve both consumers and content creators, and it scares the crap out of them because of the implications.

In other words, technology massively lowers the barriers of entry for new artists. Massive distribution technologies allow users to bypass the traditional and oligarchic "means of production". Cheaper equipment means more talented people can reach the eyes and ears of listeners, which will cause money to be distributed more broadly, and more fairly - at the expense of the traditional players of the content industry. An example of this is how, given a specific content, some illegal copies manage to release something of a better quality (no ads, multiple subtitles in different languages, better size/quality ratio, etc).

Content industries have a history of perverting technology for their own economic ends. DVD zoning is an example of this. I can understand the marketing drives to do it - artificial market segmentation, and so on. But in a increasingly global world they become as annoying as they are obsolete.

So yes, the technology companies have a lot to profit from this. But guess what - their best economic interest is to allow the people (artist and consumers) to be able to do more with their gear, not less. So if I have to choose my side, I'll go with the technology companies, not with the people who would like to "license" things to a given item of hardware and still charge as much as possible.

Some people are getting it... these guys are trying to offer a free HD TV show on the net. In other areas such as gaming, there are many examples of freely available software, which are free yet fun to play. This is the future, IMHO, and is arriving sooner or later. Yes, in part, I like it because I get a free ride, but that's because I'm given one by people who have the means of doing so. And those means are given by technology.

Does gnu/hero reimplement this closed source application?

http://stella.sourceforge.net/game-images/hero.png

I don't think that that's the reason; you can have all the fancy graphics in a python client.

I suspect that brand awareness in the biggest factor, and simply that it works well enough (it doesn't crash too often). Programmers are lazy because Intel and AMD are happy to fix their "goes like a snail" bug for them!

For me, personally, all that apparently remains are ATI drivers and Flash Player.

The JabRef program is extremely useful - http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

Others that spring readily to mind are Jedit - http://jedit.sourceforge.net/ and Jmol - http://jmol.sourceforge.net/ (I usually prefer the application version to the applet version).

There's also Jaxodraw (for Feynman diagrams) http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net/

I guess it depends on what you are doing, but there are indeed very useful Java programs out there.

The JabRef program is extremely useful - http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

Others that spring readily to mind are Jedit - http://jedit.sourceforge.net/ and Jmol - http://jmol.sourceforge.net/ (I usually prefer the application version to the applet version).

There's also Jaxodraw (for Feynman diagrams) http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net/

I guess it depends on what you are doing, but there are indeed very useful Java programs out there.

The JabRef program is extremely useful - http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

Others that spring readily to mind are Jedit - http://jedit.sourceforge.net/ and Jmol - http://jmol.sourceforge.net/ (I usually prefer the application version to the applet version).

There's also Jaxodraw (for Feynman diagrams) http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net/

I guess it depends on what you are doing, but there are indeed very useful Java programs out there.

The JabRef program is extremely useful - http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

Others that spring readily to mind are Jedit - http://jedit.sourceforge.net/ and Jmol - http://jmol.sourceforge.net/ (I usually prefer the application version to the applet version).

There's also Jaxodraw (for Feynman diagrams) http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net/

I guess it depends on what you are doing, but there are indeed very useful Java programs out there.

here is the mirrordot version of the page
http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/638353b3594393aa2 44f2f6aff54e05e/index.html

and here is the download area on sourceforge (if you want to install it)

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=9028

You mean this?

Not showing changes to the source code? That only happens if a company like say Microsoft uses BSD licensed code in their system. I think GPL zealots forget companies misuse GPL licensed code in their products. Some have been caught.

If you think all BSD licensed code is hidden, please visit http://cvsweb.freebsd.org/ or http://www.midnightbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi or any other BSD project and look for "web" or "cvsweb" on their websites. You can look at the code right now. This doesn't just apply to operating systems. My blogging website code is under BSD license (although the windows client is GPL), http://justjournal.cvs.sourceforge.net/justjournal /src/

If you were referring to the idea that the GPL is better as companies can't use the code in private products, consider that they can break the license and do that anyway. They might get caught, but not always. The code has protections under the law, but it is not safe or FREE by any means. Its merely free.

Erm. I think it's spelled correctly.

May I direct you to http://links.sourceforge.net/ ?

There's also a links2 that has a graphical mode. I don't have a link nor do I know if searchmash works in it.

Or he could spell it "Links" as in the text-mode browser.

1. Windows can't show me the source code so that I can decide for myself, or choose who will decide for me, if the OS is secure and respective of my privacy.

2. Windows can't allow me to use the system without having to agree to rediculous EULAs that can be changed at a whim by another party.

3. Windows can't promise me that if a particular version or interface I rely on becomes unsupported, that I can maintain it myself, or hire someone to maintain it for me.

4. Generaly speaking, windows apps do not store their data in open formats that allow me to easily migrate between similar applications, or expand my use of that data to new applications not envisioned by the original author. It's almost unfair to call this a limitation of Windows, but it really is part of the culture Microsoft has built around it.

5. Windows does not have a decent interface for user-space virtual file systems. There are some really useful tricks you can do with virtual filesystems. (This may have changed with Vista. Don't know / Don't care.)

6. Windows has poor support for hardlinks, and only (kind of) supports softlinks for directories. I have several braindead applications that choose to store data in "c:\Program Files". I store most of my data on my linux file server that is backed up nightly, and would love to move this data over and softlink it back to make the application happy, but I can't. Instead I have to backup several workstations that I would otherwise be able to ignore. (Again, this may have changed in Vista)

You guys forget the massive small business segment. This will be one of the last adopters. There's very little usable small-business software that works on Linux (basic accounting package, anyone? how about point of sale?).

I'm not saying that I don't agree the docs could be better. But that's nothing new for 99% of all projects, especially opensource, imho. Some of what's in /docs is seemingly ~4 years old. As far as slashcode goes, there've been many people who've complained the docs aren't great.

However, that you _can_ follow the INSTALL instructions and have a working slashcode system, you can't knock that. I guess when you ask "that's the best you can say?" I don't see anything wrong with that.

"lack of a full releass" kills the entire point of Slashdot users working on the Slashcode

Yes, it surely does. And the upgrade process from 2.2.6 to current is well, abysmal. It's do able with some effort (following the documentation), more so obviously if you don't know the project well. The lack of a "slashupgrade.pl" that site admins can run is a turnoff for many people still running 2.2.6. The lack of a current release just plain puts people off from even attempting to run the latest. And even if you are the running the latest, or somewhat the latest, you have to apply updates - by hand. There's no stock-included upgrade tool to go from T_2_5_0_128 to T_2_5_0_133.

Slashdot's complaining programmer user community is a huge pool.

Slashdot's surely is huge. Slashcode's, I don't agree with you there. Just look at the activity (or lackthereof) on the listserves. Slashdot and Slashcode are two different things. Which is kind of sad, because you'd think with the pool of talent Slashdot itself attracts there'd be many more people trying to help with Slashcode.

If the Slashdot org encouraged us with better docs, not just silence or the arch, obnoxious attitude you just displayed, more of use would join the team to produce a better Slashcode.

Obnoxious? ha.

The 'silence' is what's frustrating for me. Not knowing where the code is heading is aggravating at times.

And if you think that none of the many programmer users would have noticed the index datatype change in one scope but not the necessary one in another, you don't even understand Slashdot.

Well, no one noticed there could be a problem with that index in the stock code, obviously. The schema for comments wasn't changed for how long? The code's out there, been out in the open source land for years now. There's nothing stopping anyone from grabbing it an analyzing it. I still doubt that any "normal traffic" site would have noticed this limitation. Should someone have caught it? Sure. But most sites don't have the traffic slashdot has, so about the only site that'd ever run into this limitation with the slashcode code is Slashdot itself.

In fact, you've just shown you don't understand how OSS projects work

Oh? Please explain.

though you apparently understand how the OSS code works in this one

I think so, yes, at times, anyway.

Exactly my point. No wonder the Slashcode project is so unpopular, and therefore irrelevant. Which you seem more than happy about - defensive of, even. Congratulations.

Defensive? No. If my comment came off that way, that wasn't my reply's intent.

However, frustrated, yes. Frustrated that people pop into a project, claim "this sucks" but don't give any concrete examples where it sucks. Or, better yet, how about some constructive criticism and pointed suggestions such that if someone were to spend their own time helping trying to help with what's pointed out, the project *could be improved*.