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You're right...there's too much emphasis on making things practical. It _is_ university after all. If you want something practical then go to college. If you're in a pure math program are you going to complain that it's not practical? In my first year of CS we already had robots. It was named Karel and it taught us all about objects...it didn't have to fetch me my morning newspaper.

I sure hope they'll do a Mac beta. YIM's Mac client is WAY behind the Windows one, lacking both stability and features. And neither GAIM nor Trillian is available for the Mac. (Fire worked pretty well for me until my copy died in some unrecoverable way.)

Try this out and please stop trolling.

A client to communicate with them all. And it's free for almost any operating system.

First airports, then entire cities. Who thinks that perhaps we're going to be at this stage before too long?

If you're going to be serving more than a few connections at a time, it's easy for threads to eat monstrous amounts of resources. It's better if you can handle network connections via a single thread.

I disagree. While using a single thread per connection is definately a retarded way to go, making I/O operations asynchronous and handling callbacks via a thread pool is definately the fastest and most efficient way to build a scalable daemon today. And once you get used to the idea, it is even much easier than using select()/poll()-based approaches. (disclaimer: I have no experience doing this in Linux)

If anyone is interested I have been slowly piecing together a library to make this easier for Windows developers.

With these tools, I have never found any need for Ruby, with or without Rails. I tried it and the first thing I noticed was ugliest quirk they stole from FORTRAN-77: the "end" statement. All the editors I use have a syntax enhancement mode that shows which brace pairs with the one where the cursor is. Why, oh why, throw away that very useful feature? What, exactly, did the Ruby creators think they would gain with that? This very small detail shows that the whole language isn't as well thought out as its fans claim, so I guess I got prejudiced against Ruby from the very beginning. When you code for a living, when the lines of code you wrote in your decades of work start to get into the millions, you will know how these apparently small details add up in the end. I need my language to work together with my editor, not fight against it.

Ruby fans remind me of Lisp fans. Very vocal, always ready to present their arguments, concede no points, admit no failures. But one gets the impression that they are mostly academics, people who do not code for a living. If you have to solve a real life problem instead of a textbook example there are more practical languages to work with.

Oh, sure, Ruby is very flexible, very adaptable, but in professional work one needs the efficiency of specialization. I use PHP for web access to databases, Perl for small scripts that handle text files, C++ with Qt for GUI work, Python for prototypes and C for deliverable number crunching applications. For professional work one needs professional tools, swiss army knives are for boy scouts.

I love this software, but the Linux client really is neglected. The documentation for Linux is not really there. There is no decent configuration tool for Linux. There are many bugs. For example, if you do any port forwarding, you must edit some nat.conf file. And if you reconfigure anything after that with vmware-config.pl, it completely wipes out all your changes to nat.conf without warning. I spent so much time dealing with these types of bugs while testing the beta, I should have simply purchased another solution.

I haven't noticed any significant difference in functionality on either vmware workstation on windows vs. linux or vmware server on windows vs. linux.

Also I haven't found much reason to set up a vmnet for NAT. What I typically do is set up a bridged vmnet for each physical NIC and then a couple of host only networks.

The key is to set up a vm like ipcop to do your NATing and routing between your physical networks and host only networks. Put three virtual NICs in the ipcop vm, one on a bridge for the red "WAN" interface, one on a host-only for the green "LAN" interface, and one host-only for the orange "DMZ" interface. You can easily set up all your routing rules using ipcop's web interface.
If you add cop plus to ipcop you can even do web content filtering with dansguardian and squidguard. It has a pretty small footprint and is a nice addition to a home server.

BTW, there is one application of a NAT vmnet that I could see as kind of a cool thing: Using vmware player on an autorun cd to have a vm run in NATed mode without having to install the vmware player on the host

Exult was a good example of "procedural" "growth" of a game.

Ultima VII was a 2D RPG. Yet, all objects in the game world have height. One guy at Exult hacked up a version of Exult that runs Ultima VII in 3D mode - basically, mapping all 2D tiles around cubes as described by their dimensions and height data.

The results were quite interesting (buildings looked kind of good, creatures and many plants and natural formations not so good, so they are being replaced by 3D models).

But it is a good example and exercise in extracting more detail from the game than the original developers intended or envisioned.

I'm torn. I want to flame you and be helpful at the same time. :-) I'll stick with being helpful.

You can get rid of most of the need for your KVM by installing installing synergy on your systems. You'll be able to control both without switching with your KVM. It's very easy to install, and ridiculously cool. You'll want to keep your KVM in case something goes wrong or you don't have the synergy "server" machine up all the time, but I use this setup at work without problem 99% of the time. And if you have another $800 to blow on a Mini to run Linux, it'll work with that, too.

You might want to try K-Meleon or Opera.

It is called GNAT: The GNU NYU Ada 9X Translator. "GNAT is a free, high-quality, complete compiler for Ada95, integrated into the GCC compiler system." Note that "The work was co-sponsored by ARPA and the Ada Joint Program Office." Also look at GNADE, the GNU Ada Database Environment.

>The Spellbound extension already does this for Firefox.

Well, did it move or something?

http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/

This hasn't worked with current versions of Firefox for awhile, and I really miss it :(

You might be interested in http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/ then, since it's basically a lightweight version of mozilla/firefox. "K-Meleon is designed to be a browser only with a minimal interface that emphasizes speed and utility. It is not a suite and so does not include features like an e-mail client and web page editor that can bloat and slow it down. The K-Meleon developers will consider enhancements that improve the performance and usefulness of the browser."

For windows, I use py2exe and have a custom script that makes an innosetup install file. If you are interested, I can dig up this script for you (I think it should actually be a distutils setup, that would be nice) however, they are trivial to make.

For OSX I use BundleBuilder which generates mac bundles and is really, really nice especially since OSX comes with python pre-installed. I even use this script to create non-python bundles.

For linux I use PyInstalelr and tarballs :) There is really no good consistent linux installer, but I have had some success with PyInstaller.

Yup, although not sure if these will help with distributing to MacOS users...

pyInstaller (http://pyinstaller.hpcf.upr.edu/)
py2exe (http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/py2exe/)
InnoSteup (http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php) ...and just to continue with the PythonCard propaganda, see also this page:

http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/standalone.html

and here, just to ensure that my web server gets the full benefit of the slashdot effect:

http://www.linux2000.com/pm.html

I use mplayer-plugin on my nix box. Don't think they have a windows port though.

This is pretty normal for any brand-new laptop though. It looks as if all the hard stuff works - once the basic system, display and mouse are working, the rest are just devices.

In fact, it's quite probable that some of these devices will already work with the right driver revisions - linux support is actually quite good for most Intel wifi devices:
http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/
and many fingerprint scanners:
http://www.upek.com/support/dl_linux_bsp.asp

I have both of these working fine in Ubuntu 6.06 on a ThinkPad X60 - I'm not sure if the fingerprint scanner is the same, but it's meant to be the same as what's on the Sony sz-140 series.

- Korny

OK, well, Hotmail blows. But that just means they are doing it wrong. (Plus, the conspiracy theorist in me says they don't want to filter spam.)

They aren't just doing pattern matching; it's more sophisticated than that. It is also adaptive. As Paul Graham said, you can defeat spammers this way because they rely on their message. Email clients can do whitelisting techniques to reduce or eliminate false negatives as well as other things. This can all be done behind the scenes, with user interaction limited to the initial training of spam and the discovery of false positives. We have the technology! No, filtering hasn't been defeated nearly as far as I can see.

It works for my mother and all of her employees perfectly. A few questions: How are you training your Thunderbird install? What do you mean "contaminated?" And why the hell would you *delete* filtered spam immediately? The idea is to save that spam for a while (30 days is good) in a "Trash" or "Recycle Bin"(patent pending) just in case one gets through. Someone notifies you that you aren't responding, you dig it up, classify it, and your filter gets better. But if you spend long enough with a spam filter, filtering it correctly, you will generally not get false negatives.

There is a price to smart filtering: you have to spend time with it to train it correctly. If you train it wrong, you've got a huge problem on your hands. I've said it elsewhere in the comments: look at CRM114 to see how good this kind of filtering has become, and how quickly you don't have to worry about it. But I personally have never lost an important, critical email with Thunderbird or Gmail. Neither have I heard a single complaint about spam from any Gmail user.

I do however, agree with you that ISPs should not be filtering your spam for you. That just gets annoying. But rejecting spam from IP addresses is an idea that can only go so far: like you said, spammers have huge swaths of IP addresses, sometimes ones that are used by legit emailers. IPv6 is coming, which means even more IP addresses for you to block. Personally, I think client-side filtering is quickly becoming the superior spam solution - look at that "SPAM solution checklist" that someone else posted.

Personally, it's been a long time since I worried about spam.

You might want to take a look at pyFLTK, based on the excellent FLTK (Fast Light Toolkit). FLTK's got very good OpenGL support, and from the pyFLTK Examples page it looks as though pyFLTK supports it as well.

You might want to take a look at pyFLTK, based on the excellent FLTK (Fast Light Toolkit). FLTK's got very good OpenGL support, and from the pyFLTK Examples page it looks as though pyFLTK supports it as well.

I'm seriously sick of people abusing biological methodolgies. People seem very attracted to ideas simply because they are grounded in "how nature works" and ignore the mathematical benefits or weaknesses. Now this idea pretty much just sounds like statistical rules based on a corpus - pretty much how every successful solution out there now works. This solution simply prunes rules that aren't being used, but there are better ways to get a smaller spam detection database. Have you seen the stuff the CRM114 people are doing? This is nothing new.

Read your Russell and Norvig, people. Airplane research didn't get off the ground (ugh) until we stopped trying to mimic birds and study physical principles of flight.

I just want to say that I agree about PythonCard. It is very easy to use and it rivals VB or Delphi in making it easy to draw a simple GUI front end for data entry and such, and yet it is a simple tool with almost no learning curve. I don't know if it would work for every imaginable application, but for most applications it is a real joy to use. PythonCard can be found at http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/

Wax is a user-friendly layer on top of wxPython. It allows for easier GUI programming in a more "Pythonic" way. It runs on all platforms that support wxPython. It can be found aand downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/waxgui

Only works if you want to run Linux as your main OS. For someone like me who uses OS X as their main OS on a PPC machine, there seem to be no virtualization options. I would love to run Linux as a guest OS, but I have been searching and searching and have found nothing. Q will allow you to run a 2.4.x kernel only, and Mac-on-Mac is very alpha software.

Here is the download link:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gnucash/gnucash -2.0.0.tar.gz

Even though gnucash.org is being crushed by Slashdot, the release is still available at SourceForge.

http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-home.html

While the GnuCash.org site remains a steaming radioactive crater, you can at least download the sources from SourceForge.net.

I've been evaluating OSS solution and I found this one pretty interesting. Polished and yet, powerful.

http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/

I'll certainly give a try to Gnucash 2.0 anyway.

Well, I would definetely recommend trying FindBugs. It's easy to use, requires no extra constructs in your code (because it's a bytecode analyzer) and takes relatively little time to run. You don't even have to install it, it can run as a JNLP from the project homepage :) It's well worth a go, I don't claim to be a great java coder by any means but it's found several potentially fatal (possible NPE etc) bugs in my code that the compiler missed and I probably wouldn't have found until they happened otherwise.

Also it suggests performance optimisations, most of these should be fairly obvious to experienced coders (Vector vs ArrayList, String concatenation in a loop etc) but some of them are more obscure.

NOTE: This was also posted to Operawatch. I will probably also email it to Opera.

I am the author of a script that makes websites out of Project Gutenberg etexts (or virtually any text file that is similarly formatted), and I have been using Opera for years. Recently, my use of Opera has been confined to mobile devices. Opera is certainly the best browser for mobile devices I have ever used, and I have used a fair amount, including PocketIE, Netfront, and various other proprietary browsers.

My Feature Request

In testing these books in mobile devices and on the desktop, both I and my friends have been repeatedly frustrated by the granularity of bookmarking. While it is easy to create identifiable links to any paragraph in a given chapter or book, it is impossible to bookmark those paragraphs. I would like an item added to the right click menu that allows bookmarking for paragraphs or other text marked with the <a name=""> tag.

Such a tag would allow people to instantly return to the last paragraph they were reading when they turned the browser off. This sort of addition would not be difficult to code but would allow people to read longer webpages and books on their desktops or mobile devices. HTML ebooks would create a much greater demand for your webbrowser, and as everything is going mobile, increase the demand for your browser on multiple platforms.

A Fantastical Feature Request

Further, while I am asking for features, I might as well add a more difficult one. There is a program called Dr. Eye (Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2, Screenshot 3) for Windows the functionality of which would be extremely useful in a browser or desktop environment. Really, I would like to see such a thing added to Gnome and/or KDE, but having such functionality in a webbrowser would cover 90% of the uses for such a program. The way the program works is that it uses popup help messages to display dictionary definitions of words one is reading (the pointer is not visible because Windows makes taking good screenshots difficult -- among other things it makes difficult). This program was written for Chinese speakers, and it is really incredible. It displays Chinese definitions for any English word or phrase moused over or English definitions for any Chinese word or phrase moused over while it is running.

However, the possibility of doing something like this in a browser or OS environment where most commonly spoken languages are accessible makes the learning value nearly unlimited. Almost all desktop environments have dictionary systems included. As is obvious, this would make multiple languages readable to many more people than was before possible. Considering the fact that Opera is in the business of making reading easier and more enjoyable for people, this sort of system is desirable for both Opera and its users.

NOTE: This was also posted to Operawatch. I will probably also email it to Opera.

I am the author of a script that makes websites out of Project Gutenberg etexts (or virtually any text file that is similarly formatted), and I have been using Opera for years. Recently, my use of Opera has been confined to mobile devices. Opera is certainly the best browser for mobile devices I have ever used, and I have used a fair amount, including PocketIE, Netfront, and various other proprietary browsers.

My Feature Request

In testing these books in mobile devices and on the desktop, both I and my friends have been repeatedly frustrated by the granularity of bookmarking. While it is easy to create identifiable links to any paragraph in a given chapter or book, it is impossible to bookmark those paragraphs. I would like an item added to the right click menu that allows bookmarking for paragraphs or other text marked with the <a name=""> tag.

Such a tag would allow people to instantly return to the last paragraph they were reading when they turned the browser off. This sort of addition would not be difficult to code but would allow people to read longer webpages and books on their desktops or mobile devices. HTML ebooks would create a much greater demand for your webbrowser, and as everything is going mobile, increase the demand for your browser on multiple platforms.

A Fantastical Feature Request

Further, while I am asking for features, I might as well add a more difficult one. There is a program called Dr. Eye (Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2, Screenshot 3) for Windows the functionality of which would be extremely useful in a browser or desktop environment. Really, I would like to see such a thing added to Gnome and/or KDE, but having such functionality in a webbrowser would cover 90% of the uses for such a program. The way the program works is that it uses popup help messages to display dictionary definitions of words one is reading (the pointer is not visible because Windows makes taking good screenshots difficult -- among other things it makes difficult). This program was written for Chinese speakers, and it is really incredible. It displays Chinese definitions for any English word or phrase moused over or English definitions for any Chinese word or phrase moused over while it is running.

However, the possibility of doing something like this in a browser or OS environment where most commonly spoken languages are accessible makes the learning value nearly unlimited. Almost all desktop environments have dictionary systems included. As is obvious, this would make multiple languages readable to many more people than was before possible. Considering the fact that Opera is in the business of making reading easier and more enjoyable for people, this sort of system is desirable for both Opera and its users.

NOTE: This was also posted to Operawatch. I will probably also email it to Opera.

I am the author of a script that makes websites out of Project Gutenberg etexts (or virtually any text file that is similarly formatted), and I have been using Opera for years. Recently, my use of Opera has been confined to mobile devices. Opera is certainly the best browser for mobile devices I have ever used, and I have used a fair amount, including PocketIE, Netfront, and various other proprietary browsers.

My Feature Request

In testing these books in mobile devices and on the desktop, both I and my friends have been repeatedly frustrated by the granularity of bookmarking. While it is easy to create identifiable links to any paragraph in a given chapter or book, it is impossible to bookmark those paragraphs. I would like an item added to the right click menu that allows bookmarking for paragraphs or other text marked with the <a name=""> tag.

Such a tag would allow people to instantly return to the last paragraph they were reading when they turned the browser off. This sort of addition would not be difficult to code but would allow people to read longer webpages and books on their desktops or mobile devices. HTML ebooks would create a much greater demand for your webbrowser, and as everything is going mobile, increase the demand for your browser on multiple platforms.

A Fantastical Feature Request

Further, while I am asking for features, I might as well add a more difficult one. There is a program called Dr. Eye (Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2, Screenshot 3) for Windows the functionality of which would be extremely useful in a browser or desktop environment. Really, I would like to see such a thing added to Gnome and/or KDE, but having such functionality in a webbrowser would cover 90% of the uses for such a program. The way the program works is that it uses popup help messages to display dictionary definitions of words one is reading (the pointer is not visible because Windows makes taking good screenshots difficult -- among other things it makes difficult). This program was written for Chinese speakers, and it is really incredible. It displays Chinese definitions for any English word or phrase moused over or English definitions for any Chinese word or phrase moused over while it is running.

However, the possibility of doing something like this in a browser or OS environment where most commonly spoken languages are accessible makes the learning value nearly unlimited. Almost all desktop environments have dictionary systems included. As is obvious, this would make multiple languages readable to many more people than was before possible. Considering the fact that Opera is in the business of making reading easier and more enjoyable for people, this sort of system is desirable for both Opera and its users.

NOTE: This was also posted to Operawatch. I will probably also email it to Opera.

I am the author of a script that makes websites out of Project Gutenberg etexts (or virtually any text file that is similarly formatted), and I have been using Opera for years. Recently, my use of Opera has been confined to mobile devices. Opera is certainly the best browser for mobile devices I have ever used, and I have used a fair amount, including PocketIE, Netfront, and various other proprietary browsers.

My Feature Request

In testing these books in mobile devices and on the desktop, both I and my friends have been repeatedly frustrated by the granularity of bookmarking. While it is easy to create identifiable links to any paragraph in a given chapter or book, it is impossible to bookmark those paragraphs. I would like an item added to the right click menu that allows bookmarking for paragraphs or other text marked with the <a name=""> tag.

Such a tag would allow people to instantly return to the last paragraph they were reading when they turned the browser off. This sort of addition would not be difficult to code but would allow people to read longer webpages and books on their desktops or mobile devices. HTML ebooks would create a much greater demand for your webbrowser, and as everything is going mobile, increase the demand for your browser on multiple platforms.

A Fantastical Feature Request

Further, while I am asking for features, I might as well add a more difficult one. There is a program called Dr. Eye (Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2, Screenshot 3) for Windows the functionality of which would be extremely useful in a browser or desktop environment. Really, I would like to see such a thing added to Gnome and/or KDE, but having such functionality in a webbrowser would cover 90% of the uses for such a program. The way the program works is that it uses popup help messages to display dictionary definitions of words one is reading (the pointer is not visible because Windows makes taking good screenshots difficult -- among other things it makes difficult). This program was written for Chinese speakers, and it is really incredible. It displays Chinese definitions for any English word or phrase moused over or English definitions for any Chinese word or phrase moused over while it is running.

However, the possibility of doing something like this in a browser or OS environment where most commonly spoken languages are accessible makes the learning value nearly unlimited. Almost all desktop environments have dictionary systems included. As is obvious, this would make multiple languages readable to many more people than was before possible. Considering the fact that Opera is in the business of making reading easier and more enjoyable for people, this sort of system is desirable for both Opera and its users.

If you use IMAP, Mahogany is great, and cross-platform via wxWidgets. I think it was written by one of the people who wrote the IMAP protocol, too.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mahogany

Btw, to the GP, I haven't used it, but I've heard good things about YASQL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/yasql/

Thanks for that. You might want to check out Tora: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tora/. Good project, a linux Toad-like app. Works well with Xforwarding.

Btw, to the GP, I haven't used it, but I've heard good things about YASQL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/yasql/

Thanks for that. You might want to check out Tora: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tora/. Good project, a linux Toad-like app. Works well with Xforwarding.

"sqlplus? Get with the times: use Toad or SQL Developer."

Neither of which are command line. Due to the firewall at work, I *cannot* connect to the production databases from programs running on my desktop. I need command line. Especially when connecting from home via SSH.

SQL Developer is still buggy in various ways. It's only better than sqlplus if you prefer GUIs to command line. Otherwise, it has about the same goofiness.

Toad is Windows only.

I've seen readline wrappers for sqlplus. My biggest gripe is that it doesn't seem to be possible to configure sqlplus to auto-rollback on exit (at least not without explicitly telling it to do so every time that you run it). Why is that important? Make a mistake; recognize it; hit Ctrl+C; go "Oh, crap;" you've just committed your mistake. This is the reverse of the behavior of Ctrl+C elsewhere. sqlplus should support the normal behavior and require explicit commit.

Btw, to the GP, I haven't used it, but I've heard good things about YASQL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/yasql/

It pays to think outside the box, even if that box isn't particularly big to begin with.

You forgot to mention Unicode support, internationalization and decent documentation that are expected even in the smallest projects.

That's why I prefer Python, myself ;)

It's not difficult to see idiotic over-generalizations around like "RoR is better than the whole Java", or "Java is dead". Sorry, but Ruby isn't better than Java, not today.

Gah! You decry over-generalisations, then make one of your own!

I have some experience with scripting languages and would like to protest against the notion that "less lines of code = better". So did the Perl developers always get it right? Taking every possible shortcut in order to make the code smaller?

To an extent, you're correct. A one line hack in Perl is often not maintainable in the future.

But you're only addressing part of what I wrote. I said, "You can often do more in a shorter space of time, and in a smaller amount of code". Both parts of the sentence are important. Code in Ruby is not concise in the same way a one liner of Perl is concise. For instance:

class Folder < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_tree
    has_many :files
end

The above code is concise, yet understandable. You can see that this is an ActiveRecord called Folder, which acts as a tree, and that each Folder has many files.

Incidentally, this concise readbility is made possible only through Ruby's support of mutable classes. The two functions, acts_as_tree and has_many, alter the class that they exist in. Incidentally, because Java cannot easily alter class behaviour, so this technique is beyond Java's capabilities. This means that often, Ruby can be more readable than the equivalent Java code.

The most absurd things I have heard lately from such people is "deprecate final" or "everything should be open because the developer knows what he is doing" or some other security stupidity.

This is largely unrelated to Ruby, as Ruby supports class permissions. However, I disagree with you about this. If a developer wishes to shoot his foot off, let him. So long as you make it clear in your documentation that overloading this particular function is not something that should be done, there's no need to go any further. A stupid developer will always find ways to break things; there's no point in nannying the programmer.

We don't need only a "featureset", we need to the complete package (language, tools, IDE, libraries, technologies), and Java does it. Java is not good because "it's the best language with the best features" but because it provides a good balance of good stuff in ALL THOSE AREAS.

A good balance? I don't understand your argument. Okay, sure, if you had a choice of one language, and one language only, to use for every project from now 'till doomsday, then Java might be your man. But individually, some programming projects are rather specific. You don't need a "good balance" of features and libraries; you need the features and libraries that are best for that particular job. Sometimes Java will fulfil that need best, and sometimes other languages will.

You said it yourself: 'Java is not good because "it's the best language with the best features"'. Follow that chain of logic forward and you'll come to the conclusion that Java is not the best language for every possible problem. Nor, for that matter, is Ruby, or Python, or Scheme, or Haskell, or whatever else you might happen to come across. Your choice of language should be dictated by the problem you face.

Also, if you're so stuck on libraries, then a JVM-based language such as Nice might be just up your street.

"It's way too early to say whether the company would pursue licenses and litigation from its competitors," Friendster President Kent Lindstrom told RedHerring.com. "We'll do what we can to protect our intellectual property."

Though the Friendster patent could be challenged in either the patent system or the courts, opponents would face an uphill battle.

If foo and bar are a collection of libraries and binaries, then this is a solved problem. http://modules.sourceforge.net/ it really sounds like you are maintaing two OS images because you can't set LD_LIBRARY_PATH :) -s

I believe that the main CPU/memory hog is the XUL user interface layer in Firefox and Mozilla.

The K-Meleon browser http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/, is built on the same rendering engine as Firefox and Mozilla, but uses a native Windows user interface. It runs very lean and fast, quite usable on a Pentium 133 with Win98 Lite and 72MB of RAM. Firefox can barely be started on such a machine.

And it's quite interesting, there's a few good looking ones which I've played a few times. But it's all come back to gameplay and I'm afraid that the gawky looking Block Attack has taken waaay too much of my time lately. Only after completing all of the stage levels could I stop playing it to any serious degree.

The graphics however, are obviously created by a programmer...

I have seen several dissing these new story+commentary summaries, but I have to say I like them a lot.

I don't always get to read every last story on Slashdot (like some of the complainers, I suspect) and I even less often get to read a decent chunk of the comments. Having EDITORS filter through all that and pick out the gems saves me a lot of time and (hopefully) features the best of Slashdot.

One personal note on the topic of malware.

Personally, I've only ever been bitten by a hack on my Debian GNU/Linux server. Never had an OS X virus (on either my Powerbook G4, wife's iBook G3, or my new MacBook. Also never had a Windows virus, but I stopped using Windows completely in early 2000. (It's now back on my MacBook and scares me to death.)

Admittedly, the server hack was my fault. I think it was an ssh dictionary attack that I wasn't watching for with fail2ban or another monitoring/blocking service and I probably didn't have good passwords on that machine at that time, but nonetheless it illustrates that everyone's experience with malware is different. I happen to only have had trouble on arguably the most secure OS of the bunch--and then it was the result of poor user management of the system (due to inexperience). I think that's probably the sum of it in most cases: you can't account for what an inexperienced user may expose themselves to on ANY OS.

One could in theory write a ruby language bytecode compiler/interpreter for Java and use it there.

And the rest : http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php

I like the Doomsday engine, and it apparently works with shareware WADs as well as the official Doom 1 & 2, Heretic and Hexen ones (but I just use Doom 1 and 2). It's homepage is doomsdayhq.com but other than it's forums it doesn't seem to be updated often. You may just want to go to the sourceforge page http://sourceforge.net/projects/deng. I can't wait for an Ubuntu Dapper repository to be set up, as it's Breezy packages don't work with Dapper, and when compiling the source myself I can't get any of the fancy extra models and graphics installed that the packages did for me in Breezy and Debian :-(

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=82471

I couldn't get it to work; maybe somebody else can. Seems a bit iffy about card detection; it kept thinking my nVidia Geforce 6600GT was an ATI Radeon 9600.

Also, I think somebody needs to have a little talk with them about what "open source" means. Unless Bush and Evanescence are really big fans of their work, I don't think they have permission to be including their songs along with their tech demos...