Slashdot Mirror

Others have mentioned Puerto Rico, and The Settlers of Catan, which are awesome games, but I always find myself coming back to the old school wargaming goodness of Titan which, even though it is an elimination game with a completely different style and feel as all of the newer, more slickly designed games that are all the rage now, nothing beats throwing a fistfull of dice around to really get the blood pumping. It even has a free java implementation.

I haven't used it, but http://mvpmc.sourceforge.net/ looks very interesting & it supports ogg.

...here

Microsoft has Adobe very firmly in it's sight. It is bringing out technology to compete with Adobe. XAML is Microsoft's silver bullet for Flash. Vista and all future releases of Windows will include support for XAML, support for legacy window systems will be facilitated via service packs.

XAML will have all the features of Flash, including tools for graphical designers plus the power and ease of development of Visual Studio .NET.

If this doesn't bite hard into Adobe's market over the next 2-3 years I would be very surprised. I think Adobe is currently riding at it's peak right now, I see only a downhill path for them from here.

You might want to try SETEDIT or RHIDE. SETEDIT is an editor and RHIDE is an IDE, both written using the Turbo Vision toolkit.

I've been using the Outlook 2003 remote calendars plugin which is effective in allowing you to share your calendar on Outlook with Thunderbird / Evolution etc.

Have you tried using DOSBox? It's designed for that sort of thing. What it is, is an x86 emulator with a working DOS implementation. It works very well, and as I'm writing this message, I'm playing Wing Commander on it!

It's cross platform and open source too, which is always a plus.

Here's a link to the DOSBox site: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

No, not entirely. It's the PC gaming business that they say is suffering, not PC gaming. There are plenty of games that are free from the onset that are fun. http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/
http://www.frozen-bubble.org/
http://asteroids3d.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lynn
http://toppler.sourceforge.net/
http://blockattack.sourceforge.net/
http://source.bungie.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.realtech-vr.com/nogravity/
http://www.classicgaming.com/worminator/
http://www.nexuiz.com/
http://www.armagetronad.net/
http://www.meatfighter.com/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://wesnoth.org/
http://cubeengine.com/

No, not entirely. It's the PC gaming business that they say is suffering, not PC gaming. There are plenty of games that are free from the onset that are fun. http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/
http://www.frozen-bubble.org/
http://asteroids3d.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lynn
http://toppler.sourceforge.net/
http://blockattack.sourceforge.net/
http://source.bungie.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.realtech-vr.com/nogravity/
http://www.classicgaming.com/worminator/
http://www.nexuiz.com/
http://www.armagetronad.net/
http://www.meatfighter.com/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://wesnoth.org/
http://cubeengine.com/

No, not entirely. It's the PC gaming business that they say is suffering, not PC gaming. There are plenty of games that are free from the onset that are fun. http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/
http://www.frozen-bubble.org/
http://asteroids3d.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lynn
http://toppler.sourceforge.net/
http://blockattack.sourceforge.net/
http://source.bungie.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.realtech-vr.com/nogravity/
http://www.classicgaming.com/worminator/
http://www.nexuiz.com/
http://www.armagetronad.net/
http://www.meatfighter.com/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://wesnoth.org/
http://cubeengine.com/

No, not entirely. It's the PC gaming business that they say is suffering, not PC gaming. There are plenty of games that are free from the onset that are fun. http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/
http://www.frozen-bubble.org/
http://asteroids3d.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lynn
http://toppler.sourceforge.net/
http://blockattack.sourceforge.net/
http://source.bungie.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.realtech-vr.com/nogravity/
http://www.classicgaming.com/worminator/
http://www.nexuiz.com/
http://www.armagetronad.net/
http://www.meatfighter.com/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://wesnoth.org/
http://cubeengine.com/

No, not entirely. It's the PC gaming business that they say is suffering, not PC gaming. There are plenty of games that are free from the onset that are fun. http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/
http://www.frozen-bubble.org/
http://asteroids3d.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lynn
http://toppler.sourceforge.net/
http://blockattack.sourceforge.net/
http://source.bungie.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.realtech-vr.com/nogravity/
http://www.classicgaming.com/worminator/
http://www.nexuiz.com/
http://www.armagetronad.net/
http://www.meatfighter.com/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://wesnoth.org/
http://cubeengine.com/

http://rubycocoa.cvs.sourceforge.net/rubycocoa/src /ChangeLog?revision=1.255.2.38&view=markup

Read the email addresses, and note that Laurent Sansonetti is one of the five RubyCocoa developers (lrz).

I guess you'll be wanting to apologise to the previous poster.

Personally my problem is with the new codecs you speak of. I hate needing to open Quicktime to play a video because Quicktime sucks on Windows. Worse yet is anything that needs something like Nero ShowTime to play because the program's UI blows.

If aqua is ever opensourced you can bet within 24 hours there would be 5 projects on sourceforge to port the gui to Linux and OpenDarwin. Then you would no longer need to have a mac to run macosx or a macosx like environment.

And I refer you to Baghira.

Have a look at the screenshots - mouse hover over the paw for the full menu.

It's a theme for KDE that allows you to make KDE look exactly like the Mac OS X desktop, including tips on how to use KDE's features to "rename" Konqueror as Safari, have the same sorts of drop shadows and alpha-channel transparency on windows, links to dock-like devices, change the window focus behaviour to that of OS X, and so on.

Let me introduce you to one more IE commercial site....

ADP is another IE only site (to actually do anything). I had one client looking at them for a time clock program. BUT, it was IE only. They asked me about it. I told them it would be a great idea to give everyone easy access to IE again (they use Firefox and Mozilla). It would keep me busy cleaning up the malware, and they would have fun with pop-ups all the time. Oh, and you might want to have a few extra workstations on hand for when I have to wipe and re-install to minimize downtime. $$$ for me!!! (I'm part time hourly).

They wound up telling ADP to shove it and I set up PHP timeclock which they've been using happily for several months now. Even recommended it to another sister company.

MS started in this route after their black eye from the 3rd party Ajax .Net and Anthem .Net. Developers started asking about "AJAX" support really late in the .Net v2.0 (Visual Studio 2005) pre-release cycle. Afaik Atlas will probably be one of the primary forms of AJAX-style web development (partial to atlas, and some roll my own), along with Ruby On Rails.

I don't necessarily think it will be the best solution. The yahoo tools are really more D/HTML client-side tools, and not sure where they fit into this perse, since you still need client/server communication. I would love to see Anthem's API model used within toolkits for other languages/platforms.

There are also toolkits and JavaScript apps that combine W3C standards with AJAX, letting you write a lot of the dynamic page stuff in a declarative fashion, using just markup (XHTML+XForms; I was an editor of the XForms 1.0 recommendation, but new revisions have come out; see http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms).

The FormFaces OSS product is an entire XForms implementation done in JavaScript, running in the browser. You write your page in HTML with XForms markup, and FormFaces does the "HiJax" thing of re-writing it for you. You never need to use XmlHttpRequest, and you can interact with regular servers, RESTful services, etc., all via XML.

Another product that does this, in a slightly different way, is AjaxForms. I just found out about it, but it looks pretty good. AjaxForms uses some server-side components to do the translation from strict XHTML+XForms markup into Ajax (HTML4+JavaScript), but they claim it can work in PHP and Tomcat servers. Again, FOSS, and available at http://ajaxforms.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

I recently implemented dynamic forms for weblogs and wikis, and did it using Chiba, another FOSS product, that like AjaxForms does its conversion on the server, using Tomcat as a container.

The Orbeon folks have a nice blog that shows how to use XForms (their implementation, the Mozilla extension, or any of the other above toolkits) to accomplish typical dynamic page tasks such as listing countries and ISO codes, or resizing flickr (also via formsplayer.

There are also toolkits and JavaScript apps that combine W3C standards with AJAX, letting you write a lot of the dynamic page stuff in a declarative fashion, using just markup (XHTML+XForms; I was an editor of the XForms 1.0 recommendation, but new revisions have come out; see http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms).

The FormFaces OSS product is an entire XForms implementation done in JavaScript, running in the browser. You write your page in HTML with XForms markup, and FormFaces does the "HiJax" thing of re-writing it for you. You never need to use XmlHttpRequest, and you can interact with regular servers, RESTful services, etc., all via XML.

Another product that does this, in a slightly different way, is AjaxForms. I just found out about it, but it looks pretty good. AjaxForms uses some server-side components to do the translation from strict XHTML+XForms markup into Ajax (HTML4+JavaScript), but they claim it can work in PHP and Tomcat servers. Again, FOSS, and available at http://ajaxforms.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

I recently implemented dynamic forms for weblogs and wikis, and did it using Chiba, another FOSS product, that like AjaxForms does its conversion on the server, using Tomcat as a container.

The Orbeon folks have a nice blog that shows how to use XForms (their implementation, the Mozilla extension, or any of the other above toolkits) to accomplish typical dynamic page tasks such as listing countries and ISO codes, or resizing flickr (also via formsplayer.

I used to use PFM before that. It looks like somebody is trying to keep it alive here.
http://p-f-m.sourceforge.net/

I had forgot about XTG for windows (I don't think it had the CLI), but now I remembere what a dog it was. Most of us just got the DOS version working on windows and stayed with the 8.3 file naming for a few years. It had some great viewers. It even had an AutoCAD one. Ztree can use external viewers.

I never tried NC though some said it was better than XTG.

We use Mozilla Sunbird and a WebDAV server here. It isn't perfect, but it is a good enough calendaring application. Lightning integrates this with Thunderbird.

Evolution, a decent Outlook alternative from Novell, has been ported.

Aethera seems stalled, but includes native windows ports of KOrganizer.

Finally, there are some versions of Kontact which can run under Cygwin.

Java devs should also check out AjaxAnywhere for pretty much effortless JSP (and also JSF) AJAXification.

"..Sarissa is an ECMAScript library acting as a cross-browser wrapper for native XML APIs. It offers various XML related goodies like Document instantiation, XML loading from URLs or strings, XSLT transformations, XPath queries etc and comes especially handy for people doing what is lately known as "AJAX" development.

Supported browsers are Mozilla - Firefox and family, Internet Explorer with MSXML3.0 and up, Konqueror (KDE 3.3+ for sure), Safari and Opera. Konq, Safari and Opera offer no XSLT/XPath scripting support AFAIK... "

http://sarissa.sourceforge.net/doc/overview-summar y.html

DWR is awesome, I truly like it.

But, if you are really a Java web developer, I have what may be an even better suggestion:

http://javawebparts.sourceforge.net/

Take a look at the AjaxParts Taglib (hit the javadocs link and you'll find it in the ajaxparts package). This is a completely codeless approach to AJAX. Configure all your AJAX events in an XML file, what you want to be sent to the server and what to do when the response comes back, drop some tags in your JSP, and your good to go. There is an introductory article here:

http://www.omnytex.com/articles

I won't claim its the best (although I certainly have a bias!), but it's worth looking at if your working in Java technologies.

Somebody IS making that move, maybe it's just not so popular
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

What you're describing is basically a blacklist of all the ways that JavaScript could make its way into HTML. Blacklisting is a very poor security method, because it makes you chase your tail indefinitely, including more and more badware into your list with no end in sight. It didn't work for antiviruses and antispyware and it's not going to work here, although there are people crazy enough to try. If anything, this is treating the symptoms, not what the GP proposed.

Furthermore, your approach relies on a pretty wild presumption: that the source is properly structured HTML. If HTML was properly structured they wouldn't have had to invent XHTML instead. Plus, today's browsers will try to interpret both XHTML and HTML even if they're not structured properly, so invalid [X]HTML still becomes a JavaScript carrier and your blacklist enterprise is doomed to a neverending journey of catching all the possible ways of abusing this markup. Good luck with that.

For what it's worth, there is already a very good implementation of this idea, called Kses. It's a very thorough filtering library, it's being used internally by WordPress, and still hasn't stopped recent versions of WordPress 2.x from suffering from this kind of security vulnerability.

By contrast, consider the whitelist approach proposed by strip_tags + BBcode. You use strip_tags and thus you wipe clean every trace of JS exploit attempt. Then you interpret BBcode in a controlled manner, a markup which has no way of being interpreted in "creative" ways should it escape as is into a browser. And you're done.

That is what I call secure and simple. Simple is good, because it's not complex. The more complex the solution, the more chance for mistakes which allow for security holes.

Lilina might well be what you're looking for to aggregate those blogs...

Be warned: Anonet isn't anonymous at all. I spent a few minutes poking around on the network, and was able to collect a few public IPs quite easily.

For the interested, the Anonymous Coward's IP address used to connect to the laughably anonymous "Anonet" is 69.115.226.166.

Anonet has serious issues which need to be worked out before one takes the parent's advice to trust their job to it. Anonet is nothing but shamanistic security, the computers still are connected to the public Internet and it is very easy to tie them to an Anonet IP.

For example, the user on Anonet at 1.255.4.24 is running a public PHPMyAdmin install ( http://user24.client.ano/phpmyadmin/ ). This is probably firewalled on the public Internet, but the VPN method used by Anonet opens your computer up to all sorts of nasty firewall transversals until you take the time to secure it with iptables or similar.

If you care about security or anonymity, steer clear from this network. Join some place with real security such as Freenet.

Furthermore, if you need to tunnel through a firewall that requires windows authentication, you can use http://ntlmaps.sourceforge.net/ to act as the proxy for that. You may also have to tunnel over port 443 (SSL) instead of 80, since some proxys will only allow encrypted traffic over that port. That is where it is nice to be able to use something like OpenBSD's pf at the other end to redirect traffic from ie. 443->22. Then it is just a matter of setting up the local/remote port tunneling in your ssh client.
If you want to get really fancy, you can even access your home PC through SMB using port-forwarding and a loopback device (on windows) using http://www.bitvise.com/file-sharing.html (I even set up my home printer so that I can print directly to it from apps at work)
I find I can also stream music reliably over my 64kB upload over ssh using Shoutcast and transcoding to AAC plus (with 48kbps sounding great). Then you can use VideoLan or Winamp, or there is even a Mediaplayer plugin for listening.
Just make sure you're absolutely honest about what you're doing, if you're doing it at work. Getting caught out on something like this would be deadly.
I make sure to mention very matter-of-factly to my bosses what I'm up to, and would back off if anybody even looked at me funny over it.

Lots of good feedback already (no pun intended), but in addition to phase cancellation or documenting the noise with a db meter, you could also record it. Grab a copy of http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ to visually show what's going on, and if you're still not believed, pitch-shift it down an octave or two and play it back. I guarantee they can hear 4,250Hz (I still can and I turned it off 30 seconds ago. Doh!). If you simply can't get anyone to believe it's bothering you, plan-b is to disable it. Before you get a BB gun involved though, I'd try to just cut the power or turn it off. As has already been said, if he can't hear it on - he can't hear it off. I have a similar (but tougher I think) issue that I might need to officially ask Slashdot - about light pollution. My yard would be a near perfect place to see astronomical events if it weren't for my neighbor's bazillion-watt mercury vapor light. He's already said he won't turn it off, and he's literally the stereotypical "pissed-off old guy with a shotgun" that lives next door. If you tripped and fell into his yard from mine, he'd be in the backyard with a gun yelling at you (he always yells as he's deaf, but wants to make sure you hear him). I'll admit that I haven't looked into his or my legal rights regarding the subject, but this thing is bright enough that everyone in the fam' that has a bedroom on that side of the house has to close their (room-darkening) blinds at night to get any sleep. I know the bulbs for the thing cost a fortune, but I haven't been pissed off enough yet to shoot the thing out. Oh - he also burns his garbage. A wonderful aroma with the windows open on a warm summer's day. I won't go into that one.

and if you hire good people, then you don't need to worry about what they commit. An occasional check should be enough to make sure you haven't accidentally hired a loser.

This is still a commonly held belief, but it's just not true.

Allow me to quote from a 2004 OOPSLA paper: "we have found that even well tested code written by experts contains a surprising number of obvious bugs." (Link to entire paper is here.)

Even very good programmers make mistakes sometimes, and some of them are simple enough to be found by tools like FindBugs. Some of these have managed to slip through multiple human code reviews.

[Disclaimer: I work for the Findbugs Project.]

and if you hire good people, then you don't need to worry about what they commit. An occasional check should be enough to make sure you haven't accidentally hired a loser.

This is still a commonly held belief, but it's just not true.

Allow me to quote from a 2004 OOPSLA paper: "we have found that even well tested code written by experts contains a surprising number of obvious bugs." (Link to entire paper is here.)

Even very good programmers make mistakes sometimes, and some of them are simple enough to be found by tools like FindBugs. Some of these have managed to slip through multiple human code reviews.

[Disclaimer: I work for the Findbugs Project.]

Quibbling over formatting is silly. White space formatting doesn't affect functionality of the code at all.

fyi, FindBugs doesn't look at the source code at all, only at the compiled bytecode.

One good mechanism for getting the XML and asynchronous features but without hand coding JavaScript is to use any of the various XForms implementations. XForms is a W3C standard that defines a mostly script-free way of doing much of stuff people want out of Ajax, and it's done in a declarative way that's friendly to accessibility agents, and easier to deploy onto other devices. I was an editor of the XForms 1.0 recommendation, but new revisions have come out; see http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms

The FormFaces OSS product is an entire XForms implementation done in JavaScript, running in the browser. You write your page in HTML with XForms markup, and FormFaces does the "HiJax" thing of re-writing it for you. You never need to use XmlHttpRequest, and you can interact with regular servers, RESTful services, etc., all via XML.

Another product that does this, in a slightly different way, is AjaxForms. I just found out about it, but it looks pretty good. AjaxForms uses some server-side components to do the translation from strict XHTML+XForms markup into Ajax (HTML4+JavaScript), but they claim it can work in PHP and Tomcat servers. Again, FOSS, and available at http://ajaxforms.sourceforge.net/

I recently implemented dynamic forms for weblogs and wikis, and did it using Chiba, another FOSS product, that like AjaxForms does its conversion on the server, using Tomcat as a container.

Another important option is the work that the Mozilla Foundation and IBM are doing to make a native implementation of XForms as an XPI for Firefox and Mozilla. See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/ -- they're now in version 0.6, with 1.0 targeting full XForms 1.0 compliance. Like all other Mozilla extensions, it's a 1-click install, and I think it's about 200KB, so it's not very big, and I hope it gets added to the default build after it reaches 1.0. (It's presently built with the nightlies.)

There are a number of other implementations, including browser plugins (FormsPlayer for IE), native implementations for embedded devices such as cellphones and kiosks (PicoForms, SolidForms, and entire server-side systems using XForms, such as Orbeon Ops, so I see an increasingly bright future for using XForms to build dynamic HTML interfaces on top of XML web services and deploy them across a range of devices.

One good mechanism for getting the XML and asynchronous features but without hand coding JavaScript is to use any of the various XForms implementations. XForms is a W3C standard that defines a mostly script-free way of doing much of stuff people want out of Ajax, and it's done in a declarative way that's friendly to accessibility agents, and easier to deploy onto other devices. I was an editor of the XForms 1.0 recommendation, but new revisions have come out; see http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms

The FormFaces OSS product is an entire XForms implementation done in JavaScript, running in the browser. You write your page in HTML with XForms markup, and FormFaces does the "HiJax" thing of re-writing it for you. You never need to use XmlHttpRequest, and you can interact with regular servers, RESTful services, etc., all via XML.

Another product that does this, in a slightly different way, is AjaxForms. I just found out about it, but it looks pretty good. AjaxForms uses some server-side components to do the translation from strict XHTML+XForms markup into Ajax (HTML4+JavaScript), but they claim it can work in PHP and Tomcat servers. Again, FOSS, and available at http://ajaxforms.sourceforge.net/

I recently implemented dynamic forms for weblogs and wikis, and did it using Chiba, another FOSS product, that like AjaxForms does its conversion on the server, using Tomcat as a container.

Another important option is the work that the Mozilla Foundation and IBM are doing to make a native implementation of XForms as an XPI for Firefox and Mozilla. See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/ -- they're now in version 0.6, with 1.0 targeting full XForms 1.0 compliance. Like all other Mozilla extensions, it's a 1-click install, and I think it's about 200KB, so it's not very big, and I hope it gets added to the default build after it reaches 1.0. (It's presently built with the nightlies.)

There are a number of other implementations, including browser plugins (FormsPlayer for IE), native implementations for embedded devices such as cellphones and kiosks (PicoForms, SolidForms, and entire server-side systems using XForms, such as Orbeon Ops, so I see an increasingly bright future for using XForms to build dynamic HTML interfaces on top of XML web services and deploy them across a range of devices.

One good mechanism for getting the XML and asynchronous features but without hand coding JavaScript is to use any of the various XForms implementations. XForms is a W3C standard that defines a mostly script-free way of doing much of stuff people want out of Ajax, and it's done in a declarative way that's friendly to accessibility agents, and easier to deploy onto other devices. I was an editor of the XForms 1.0 recommendation, but new revisions have come out; see http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms

The FormFaces OSS product is an entire XForms implementation done in JavaScript, running in the browser. You write your page in HTML with XForms markup, and FormFaces does the "HiJax" thing of re-writing it for you. You never need to use XmlHttpRequest, and you can interact with regular servers, RESTful services, etc., all via XML.

Another product that does this, in a slightly different way, is AjaxForms. I just found out about it, but it looks pretty good. AjaxForms uses some server-side components to do the translation from strict XHTML+XForms markup into Ajax (HTML4+JavaScript), but they claim it can work in PHP and Tomcat servers. Again, FOSS, and available at http://ajaxforms.sourceforge.net/

I recently implemented dynamic forms for weblogs and wikis, and did it using Chiba, another FOSS product, that like AjaxForms does its conversion on the server, using Tomcat as a container.

Another important option is the work that the Mozilla Foundation and IBM are doing to make a native implementation of XForms as an XPI for Firefox and Mozilla. See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/ -- they're now in version 0.6, with 1.0 targeting full XForms 1.0 compliance. Like all other Mozilla extensions, it's a 1-click install, and I think it's about 200KB, so it's not very big, and I hope it gets added to the default build after it reaches 1.0. (It's presently built with the nightlies.)

There are a number of other implementations, including browser plugins (FormsPlayer for IE), native implementations for embedded devices such as cellphones and kiosks (PicoForms, SolidForms, and entire server-side systems using XForms, such as Orbeon Ops, so I see an increasingly bright future for using XForms to build dynamic HTML interfaces on top of XML web services and deploy them across a range of devices.

I use SysInternals' PsExec [sysinternals.com] to run certain programs as a limited user while I am logged in as an admin. For example, all my firefox shortcuts look like this: psexec -l -d "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe".

Just run them in an emulator.

The article is very verbose. It has some value, I suppose - it helped me to decide I didn't want to buy the book. There are more concise introductions to Ajax here and here

There is also an interesting library of Javascript/ECMAscript functions to perform common Ajax chores here

These tools are very limited in their scope - FindBugs is a very useful and powerful tool for locating bugs or potential bugs in Java code, and I've used it to find some potentially serious bugs in large, relatively mature pieces of code before now. Using it to help find potential failures in newly modified pieces of code seems like a good idea.

If you've got a reasonably recent JVM installed you can run CPD via Java Web Start here.

There are some examples of CPD output there too - like the duplicate code chunks that it found in the JDK source code and in the Apache httpd source code.

For much more on CPD, see chapter 5!

Good reason to look more at the 2605n then. The HPLIP drivers support that one:
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/supported_devices/col or_laser.html

* I had a very small problem getting it to work the first time, but that problem has been fixed since then.

While the concepts of OSS and GPLv2 are great and worthwhile and make me supportive in general, in actual usage there isn't anything that comes close to being a "killer app".

For me, that has been amaroK and GNU screen. (I'm easily impressed.)

My perception (which I am sure a few people are about to tell me is wholly wrong) is that there isn't any exciting development in the end user application space. Where is the application that beats the pants off of Final Cut Pro, or even iMovie?

I've heard LIVES and Cinelerra are quite good (though I couldn't get Cinelerra working at all). But I recently discovered Kdenlive, which seems nearly feature-complete. (Its media import library seems to be missing a few things, but that's ok, it's not version 1 yet.) They're probably not iMovie, but they're the best NLV editors I know of.

I'm not seeing it yet. I think that someday I will, but not yet. In some ways, this parallels the situation with PC Gamers not interested in moving to OS X. Where are the compelling games? If they come out for OS X at all, it's usually months after the PC release (with some exceptions). The difference is that I think it's likelier that I'll eventually come across an application that eventually overcomes my resistance to Linux. Someday Torvalds will replace Jobs as my deity. =)

Yeah, and unfortunately, we have to depend on Wine and Cedega for our gaming fix most of the time. (Although things like Tuxracer, Chromium, or even Singularity can be a good distraction.)

I'm not saying that it will be easy for such a project to materialize and mature. It's going to mean an awfully lot of hard work, probably without the same opportunities for financial rewards.

Chances are, what you want is under development now. You'll just have to dig for it and help them out.

Maybe I'm wrong to be looking for a desktop application to win me over. Maybe it won't be that sort of beast. Aside from desktop usage, I use Google constantly throughout the day, not to mention many other linux based sites and services. In that loose sense, perhaps I am already a linux user and those "boring" pieces of software you use underly my everyday experience.

Then maybe, you're ready to make the move now. It wasn't until I dropped Windows entirely for 3 months that I realized nothing truthfully was holding me back. Yeah, I kinda miss playing Tron 2.0 and Final Fantasy XI.... Even Homeworld. But I could easily leave those behind for Linux. I actually can't think of anything on Windows I need any more. Even at work, where I use Windows, the first things I installed were Cygwin and GVim.

While the concepts of OSS and GPLv2 are great and worthwhile and make me supportive in general, in actual usage there isn't anything that comes close to being a "killer app".

For me, that has been amaroK and GNU screen. (I'm easily impressed.)

My perception (which I am sure a few people are about to tell me is wholly wrong) is that there isn't any exciting development in the end user application space. Where is the application that beats the pants off of Final Cut Pro, or even iMovie?

I've heard LIVES and Cinelerra are quite good (though I couldn't get Cinelerra working at all). But I recently discovered Kdenlive, which seems nearly feature-complete. (Its media import library seems to be missing a few things, but that's ok, it's not version 1 yet.) They're probably not iMovie, but they're the best NLV editors I know of.

I'm not seeing it yet. I think that someday I will, but not yet. In some ways, this parallels the situation with PC Gamers not interested in moving to OS X. Where are the compelling games? If they come out for OS X at all, it's usually months after the PC release (with some exceptions). The difference is that I think it's likelier that I'll eventually come across an application that eventually overcomes my resistance to Linux. Someday Torvalds will replace Jobs as my deity. =)

Yeah, and unfortunately, we have to depend on Wine and Cedega for our gaming fix most of the time. (Although things like Tuxracer, Chromium, or even Singularity can be a good distraction.)

I'm not saying that it will be easy for such a project to materialize and mature. It's going to mean an awfully lot of hard work, probably without the same opportunities for financial rewards.

Chances are, what you want is under development now. You'll just have to dig for it and help them out.

Maybe I'm wrong to be looking for a desktop application to win me over. Maybe it won't be that sort of beast. Aside from desktop usage, I use Google constantly throughout the day, not to mention many other linux based sites and services. In that loose sense, perhaps I am already a linux user and those "boring" pieces of software you use underly my everyday experience.

Then maybe, you're ready to make the move now. It wasn't until I dropped Windows entirely for 3 months that I realized nothing truthfully was holding me back. Yeah, I kinda miss playing Tron 2.0 and Final Fantasy XI.... Even Homeworld. But I could easily leave those behind for Linux. I actually can't think of anything on Windows I need any more. Even at work, where I use Windows, the first things I installed were Cygwin and GVim.

"Oh my god! You saw that new app they released on Linux? I can't wait for it to be ported to Windows!"?

This was actually true a few months ago. Then someone released a semi-working build of Evolution for Windows. (I have a copy) I'm going to wait until a good stable build is released before I start replacing outlook on my customer's machines. The ones that need it now, have been switched to Thunderbird.

http://evolution-win32.sourceforge.net/download.ph p
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,3902039 6,39202478,00.htm

Outlook? There's Evolution or kontact

Viruses? what's that?
Oh well, if you're worried about email viruses, you can always check out ClamAV

ActiveX controls that install software without you knowing is the last thing you have to worry about linux.

Popup blocker? It comes with Mozilla Firefox

Firewall? It's called Netfilter but if you find it too hard to configure, there are tools available, like Shorewall

And finally, there's a large choice of IM Clients on linux, like aMSN and Gaim that support animated emoticons and toaster popups (I haven't got the slightest idea about what the blue tray guy is)

Anyways, if you don't like any of these, you can always check out your distribution's package database for other other software.

Outlook? There's Evolution or kontact

Viruses? what's that?
Oh well, if you're worried about email viruses, you can always check out ClamAV

ActiveX controls that install software without you knowing is the last thing you have to worry about linux.

Popup blocker? It comes with Mozilla Firefox

Firewall? It's called Netfilter but if you find it too hard to configure, there are tools available, like Shorewall

And finally, there's a large choice of IM Clients on linux, like aMSN and Gaim that support animated emoticons and toaster popups (I haven't got the slightest idea about what the blue tray guy is)

Anyways, if you don't like any of these, you can always check out your distribution's package database for other other software.

I haven't tried it but have heard good things about WebHuddle, which is actually aimed for business meetings (you can even show slides, although for a whiteboard just leave a blank slide and scribble on that). Being aimed at a non-geek audience, setup is intended to be a no-brainer.

Yeah, that's true. Furthermore, not to burst anyone's bubble, but it's not really innovating when the system has been publicized since '03 or '04. Linux is most often a place for open-source reincarnations, and much less often a place where new ideas are born. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, it's just not what many OSS-pushers want. On the other hand, there are notable exceptions to this.

You can't fix bugs. You can't modify it. Usually, you can't even learn much about how it really works. When new versions come out (breaking something you care about), you usually can't get the old version anymore. Worst of all, if you depend upon it, the company who owns the code can someday decide it's no longer profitable and stop maintaining it, and sooner or later it won't work together with other things you use or a security problem will be exposed and you'll be forced to migrate to something else. That sucks. It really sucks.

Why would any "open source" developer want to contribute to that?

Other than GETTING PAID REAL MONEY, there's really no reason.

Certainly just making proprietary apps offered for sale on linux-based machines, to remain proprietary yet be available for linux users to purchase isn't a compelling reason to do all that work (for free).

For example, SDCC is a GPL'd project where I've many small contributions. Sure, it doesn't generate code as effient at Keil's $2000 compiler. But it's getting better all the time. If Keil were to call me and ask for my help to port their proprietary compiler to Linux, what would I say? Probably just "no", unless they were going to GPL it all. Truthfully, there's some amount of money I'd accept to do it, though probably more than they'd be willing to pay. They could just pay their own people (or hire more).

If proprietary software vendors want their code ported, and to remain proprietary, they're going to have to pay. They're not going to get free hand-outs from "open source" developers. There's no free lunch. Sure, they might like getting free work. To think (as your comment seems to presume) "well, you do all that work on GPL'd code for free, why not contribute to for-profit code?" Certainly to simply "promote linux adoption" isn't a compelling reason.

For those motivated by pragmatic concerns, who cares. Just reboot, or run vmware, or whatever works. For those motivated by idealogy, suggesting they contribute to proprietary software in order to contribute to popularity of other free software is completely backwards.