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You've got it backwards. AGS is gratis (free as in beer), not libre (free as in speech).

By the way, there are also Free implementations of AGI and SCI available, as well as a development studio for making SCI games.

Why wouldn't it be? JIT compilation is merely a rather advanced kind of interpreter. AFAIK Python already has one (even though dev on it has more or less stopped) and PyPy will supposedly include one out of the box, and I think Matz would like Ruby2 to have a JIT compiler.

It's not a True Scripting Language if there's a just-in-time compiler involved, now is it?

I agree about Leisure suit Larry not being funny.
Sure as a 13 year old kid I also found the Leisure suit Larry series interesting, but it sure wasn't the humor that attracted me back then.

Now I was thinking Day of the Tentacle and The Ur-Quan Masters (aka. Star Control 2) was never than the Monkey Island games, but I guess that is because I never played the never version of the Monkey Island series (which is just sad actually ... but these games came out after I totally stopped playing computer games as I was not able to control it and computer games had become an addiction to me, uqm was a fall back that showed me that I am still not able to control this addiction)

What about Turck MMCache?

Ah, I see:

eAccelerator was born in December 2004 as a fork of the Turck MMCache project. Turck MMCache was created by Dmitry Stogov and much of the eAccelerator code is still based on his work.

But it would've been nice to see a comparision between MMCache and eAccelerator as well.

What about Turck MMCache?

The question isn't "Can it run my games", but "Is there a value to installing Vista that will make my games run better"?

But you're forgetting the very valid question of "Will my games still work when Vista is finally foisted upon me?"

I have a Situation in my recent memory. We used to have this silly, awful, yet popular platform for games called MS-DOS. Then Microsoft absolutely brutally killed its support, when they grew tired of people asking "how the hell do I run Ultima VII?". Then there was a loooooong break for playing MS-DOS games, until finally the folks came up with a little thingy called DOSBox, and >1GHz machines got common enough to run all Pentium-era games.

If Vista breaks old games, that brief period of dark ages may become pretty darn long... until, sometime in 2010s, WINE will finally catch up with Microsoft's API shenanigans and you're again able to run those good old Windows games.

Though I'm not particularly worried - Win32 game APIs probably aren't fluctuating that much, after all, to paraphrase certain failed prediction, "every API worth inventing has already been invented". Though regrettably there have been mysterious game breakages when running games that depend on proto-ancient DX versions...

I've been looking at FreeNAS, but have been reluctant to try it because it seems to lack support for expandable volumes (ala EVMS). So if you fill up your hard disk you can't just expand the storage onto a second disk; instead, you copy the first disk over to a second, bigger disk, put the second disk into service in place of the first disk, then throw the first disk out. Rinse, lather and repeat every time you fill up a disk.

Am I missing something? If FreeNAS doesn't have this capability, are there any other dedicated NAS distributions that do include, e.g., EVMS?

I prefer DesktopBSD to PC-BSD as DesktopBSD uses ports, whereas PC-BSD seems rather fond of these PBI things, which seem to emulate the worst Windows has to offer (a solution such as this would have been a bit more bearable if they wanted to get away from the orthodox package management system.) That being said, I do with DesktopBSD would move on to FreeBSD 6 instead of 5.5.

Slashdot harder and harder to read in browsers like Links

don't you mean lynx?

Nope. I dropped lynx years ago. Links is a completely different text-based browser that shows things like tables and frames in a proper way, which makes some attempt to match text colors, and which (in some variants) also has a GUI display so images and other things are present just like they are in the Big Boys.

Here's an example of www.osnews.com being viewed by Links via PuTTY on a SunOS server:

    http://www.visi.com/~rsteiner/links.gif

and the main project site is here:

    http://links.sourceforge.net/

I've personally used Links under OS/2, Linux, and Solaris with some regularity, and also on BeOS from time to time. It's a really nice browser for what it does. Except on Slashdot.

Related to that, I would love to see a version of Slashdot for mobile web devices. I have a PSP, and I often check out news web sites on it. There is a way to turn on low bandwidth & simple design (thanks, Rob!) but I'd like to have a way to turn off the sidebar. I don't mind downloading the sidebar html if there is a stylesheet that turns off the sidebar when viewing on a mobile web device.

Does Slashdot plan to make a simplified stylesheet so the front page is rendered entirely across the viewing area? I don't even care if the next-level pages are mobile-enabled, just the front page so I can check out the headlines and summaries. To see what I mean, compare FreeDOS web site with the low bandwidth version. It's so much easier to read the low bandwidth version on a PSP browser.

Related to that, I would love to see a version of Slashdot for mobile web devices. I have a PSP, and I often check out news web sites on it. There is a way to turn on low bandwidth & simple design (thanks, Rob!) but I'd like to have a way to turn off the sidebar. I don't mind downloading the sidebar html if there is a stylesheet that turns off the sidebar when viewing on a mobile web device.

Does Slashdot plan to make a simplified stylesheet so the front page is rendered entirely across the viewing area? I don't even care if the next-level pages are mobile-enabled, just the front page so I can check out the headlines and summaries. To see what I mean, compare FreeDOS web site with the low bandwidth version. It's so much easier to read the low bandwidth version on a PSP browser.

I have setup a Linux server to server to both Mac and PC clients on the same volumes/shares using AFP with the Netatalk package, and SMB with Samba. Netatalk, in its new incarnations is by far the best non-apple AFP server available. It works seamlessly with modern OSX clients (10.3 and 10.4), supporting precomposed UTF-8 charactersets, long file names (most commercial NAS devices still only support the ancient appletalk implementation with 32 MacRoman charactersets and glacial unreliable performance) and even Bonjour/Zeroconf support.

Netatalk works surprisingly well with modern Samba versions (post 3.0) that support UTF-8 (and now even includes a netatalk module to ease compatibility), and both samba and netatalk hide one another's specific data from the other so that resource forks are kept and if the mswindows option is enabled in netatalk, the worst character problems (?\ etc in filenames) are safe.

What I would really love to see is a system that reliably combines these, PLUS NFS for Linux shares. The FreeNAS looks good, but seesm to be a bit on the young side without decent Mac support, and god knows there are enough Mac using companies that don't want to have to fork over money for XServes.

Irrlicht is pretty nice too. It comes with binaries, and there are lots of support forums for it too ;) Its released under a zlib-ish license too which makes it even better

... you should consider to improve/finish an existing game.

IMHO, the cooperation between game developers is less effective than the cooperation between other developers. Additionally there is a non-OSS scene which trys to develop games. I have seen a lot of (non commercial) game projects which try to stay proprietory (and stall with good intermediate results without releasing the source).

Writing games is not my main focus, but as a side effect (writing test programs) I have created some games: Panic, Shisen, Memory, Tetris, Sudoku, Startrek, Hamurabi, Wumpus and more.

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/seed7

... you should consider to improve/finish an existing game.

IMHO, the cooperation between game developers is less effective than the cooperation between other developers. Additionally there is a non-OSS scene which trys to develop games. I have seen a lot of (non commercial) game projects which try to stay proprietory (and stall with good intermediate results without releasing the source).

Writing games is not my main focus, but as a side effect (writing test programs) I have created some games: Panic, Shisen, Memory, Tetris, Sudoku, Startrek, Hamurabi, Wumpus and more.

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/seed7

Making a game open source brings more fame to it as more people enjoy mods on your game and your good heart for allowing it to happen, which brings fame to your company.

Name at least one example of something like that ever happening...

If your game depends on a load of exotic libraries, then you should jolly well provide them in their correct versions below the game itself on the downloads page.

XPilotNG (5 stars on Tux games)

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=13411&package_id=15770

Works on just about everything , but there are packages for Linux / Windows and Mac OSX.

On the topic of game development and OpenGL, can anyone recommend any books/websites/resources good for building OpenGL rendering engines from scratch?

I've recently took an intro course to GL and for a project written an MD3 (quake3 mesh animated model) renderer in Qt (bindings are easy and well documented with "Qt Assistant"). I've wanted to increase my knowledge of GL over the summer by building a relatively primitive rendering engine in C++, and perhaps evolving it over the course of the next few years. I'm considering starting with an importer for Quake3 maps (BSP trees). Ultimately I'd like to build something similar to (of course I'm sure much less advanced) that of the Irrlicht engine.

I've read through the Red Book and have already bought the Superbible. Has anyone any other resources which might help me design and build such a system?

Sounds like you're in the same boat as me. Raw (Super CCD Raw is almost universally unsupported) is preceisely the reason I use GIMP! UFRaw (a GIMP plugin) includes live histograms and many, many options. There are other plugins and maybe some built-in support for Raw, but my Fujifilm S5200 is unsupported by all the others I've looked at. (Photoshop CS2 didn't even support Fujifilm S5200/S5600 last time I checked. Picasa's Support page states specifically that it doesn't support S5200!)

SourceForge page for Linux:
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Install.html

For OS X, this guy built an installer for use with GIMPshop (a commercial version of GIMP, without the X11, haven't tried it yet) but I used it on the PowerPC version of regular "GIMP for Mac" and it works great!
http://collectivity.goof.com/articles/2006/03/18/u fraw-gimpshop-app-plugin

Hope that helps.

on this page here they almost compare to a program called libgpufft (which is an open source BSD version of the same library here ) I wonder how they do compared to the BSD licensed version---

Internet censorship can be countered using technical means. The technical community should get together to make this happen, but does not do this. Instead there are petitions and bickering, and complaining about standards protocols in which to implement things, and usual off-topic anti-U.S. ranting by various Euro-weenies.

Want to get people in China and other countries onto the Internet? Quit bickering and support FreeNet http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ or ThruView http://www.thruview.com/.

I use bogofilter and it works very well once a database has been built up. The problem I have at the moment is that somebody is sending spam with one of my domains in the From: field.

If I am lucky it will be a former client of mine who uses notoriously rooted windows boxes in their office. Eventually they will stop working and my problems will be solved. Until then I have to deal with the bounces.

Give me a moment, and I'm sure I'll think of one.

Abuse has been automating spam submission to the proper autorities for a few years now. I am sure that, if necessary, it would be possible to add Spamcop to the list of recipients.

(a) lend themselves extremely well to optimisation

(b) lend themselves extremely well to incorporation in subroutine libraries

(c) tend to isolate the most compute-intensive low-level operations used in scientific computation

SGEMM

If you read the article, you will find (among others) a reference to a operation called "SGEMM". This stands for Single precision General Matrix Multiplication. This is the sort of routines that make up the BLAS library (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) (see e.g. http://www.netlib.org/blas/). High performance computation typically starts with creating optimised implementation of the BLAS routines (if necessary handcoded at assembler level), sparse-matrix equivalents of them, Fast Fourier routines, and the LAPACK library.

ATLAS

There is a general movement away from optimised assembly language coding for the BLAS, as embodied in the ATLAS software package (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software; see e.g. http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/). The ATLAS package provides the BLAS routines but produces fairly optimal code on any machine using nothing but ordinary compilers. How? If you run a makefile for the ATLAS package, it may take about 12 hours (depending on your computer of course; this is a typical number for a PC) or so to compile. In this time the makefile will simply run through multiple switches and for the BLAS routines and run testsuites for all its routines for varying problem sizes. And then it picks the best possible combination of switches for each routine and each problem size for the machine architecture on which it's being run. In particular it takes account of the size of caches. That's why it produces much faster subroutine libraries than those produced by simply compiling e.g. the BLAS routines with an -O3 optimisation switch thrown in.

Specially tuned versus automatic?: MATLAB

The question is of course: who wins? Specially tuned code or automatic optimisation? This can be illustrated with the example of the well-known MATLAB package. Perhaps you have used MATLAB on PC's, and wondered why its matrix and vector operations are so fast? That's because for Intel and AMD processors it uses a specially (vendor-optimised) subroutine library (see http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/tech doc/rn/r14sp1_v7_0_1_math.html) For SUN machines, it uses SUN's optimised subroutine library. For other processors (for which there are no optimised libraries) Matlab uses the ATLAS routines. Despite the great progress and portability that the ATLAS library provides, carefully optimised libraries can still beat it (see the Intel Math Kernel Library at http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/ eng/266858.htm)

Summary

In summary:

-large tracts of Scientific computation depend on optimised subroutine libraries

-hand-crafted assembly-language optimisation can still outperform machine-optimised code.

Therefore the objections that the hand-crafted routines described in the article distort the comparison or are not representative of real-world performance are invalid.

However ... it's so expensive and difficult that you only ever want to do it if you absolutely must. For scientific computation this typically means that you only consider handcrafting "inner loop primitives" such as the BLAS routines, FFT's, SPARSEPACK routines etc. for this treatment, and that you just don't attempt to do that yourself.

There's plenty of open-source 3d modeling software, and I bet there's plenty of open-source software for any other need a small business might have. Maybe you don't like that software as much as the software that costs money, but that doesn't mean you can just download proprietary software without paying the asking price. Software companies don't owe you their software. There's plenty of software being offered for free, why don't you use that instead of the software that isn't?

Before all else, learn Literature Programming, in the style invented by Don Knuth.

We use nuweb---it works with any language.

It's the one thing that made me install the adblock extension. I don't care if you're tracking me. I do care if you're ruining my browsing experience.

Ditto... For me it wasn't so much the delay, as it was the fact that if you selectively allow the slashdot authentication cookies, then block their urchin cookies, it forcably logs you out on all following pages... Most annoying for my slashdot browsing experience... (Yes, I did just say that my slashdot addiction made me block google analytics.)

Interestingly, though, some sites (sourceforge, for example) appear to have started hosting their urchin.js file locally... I don't know what effect that has on the system...

True AI has got to be the Mother of all Strangest Gadgets of the Future.

The AI Mind User Manual reads like an out-of-this-world visitation document from an alien civilization of long ago and far away.

A Joint Stewardship of Earth is coming between puny human minds and AI Super-Intelligence.

The Singularity Timetable predicts a Technological Singularity only six years away from now, in 2012. Gentlemen, start your AI Engines.

True AI has got to be the Mother of all Strangest Gadgets of the Future.

The AI Mind User Manual reads like an out-of-this-world visitation document from an alien civilization of long ago and far away.

A Joint Stewardship of Earth is coming between puny human minds and AI Super-Intelligence.

The Singularity Timetable predicts a Technological Singularity only six years away from now, in 2012. Gentlemen, start your AI Engines.

I'm a big fan of AWStats. It primarily gets its stats from parsing your access_log, but it also includes a javascript portion you can elect to use if you're interested in collecting more detailed information about your visitors (screen resolution, flash versions, etc.).

One caveat, though, if you choose to implement AWStats is that you should keep it in an access-restricted area of your webserver. There have are some pretty nasty vulnerabilities in AWStats. As long as you keep it secured, you should be fine, though.

What I decided on was http://awstats.sourceforge.net/. It's got a pretty impressive feature list, and I like the look, and the sheer volume of data it can collect.

As someone who setup awstats for a high-traffic site last year, let me warn you -- beyond the available options, it ain't customizable. At all. The html generation is embedded in bits and pieces throughout their perl code. Some of the nastiest, speghettiest mess I've ever seen. They don't even use stylesheets for proper styling. If it does exactly what you want, then fine. But be forewarned: if your needs ever change, don't expect awstats to change with them.

I just went through this process for my employer. While I like Google Analytics (and currently use it for my personal web pages), it's a bit more focused on e-commerce than I need - although that may be good for you.

What I decided on was http://awstats.sourceforge.net/. It's got a pretty impressive feature list, and I like the look, and the sheer volume of data it can collect.

One caveat - the current version (6.5) has a command-injection vulnerability when run in cgi mode (as opposed to statically-created pages), so watch where & how you install it.

Or, if you want to optimize a whole directory of PNGs from the command line, you can use the open source pngcrush. I have used it a lot, so I can vouch that it works.

I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it yet (I'll give it a more thorough examination after I get back from class this evening) but after having played around with it for maybe half an hour, here are my impressions, the good and bad.
First all all, the application is pretty. I know a lot of people don't care about eyecandy, but the user interface is definitely slick. It did a good job of finding all of the images scattered throughout my disks. The program started out pretty snappy, but it did eventually start to crawl. I'm not sure if this was a bug or just because I have a lot of images and this machine could use more ram. I did find it somewhat irritating that my only options when first starting up were between "search only the desktop" and "search everything". It would be nice to have an option to search, just my home directory. As it is I ended up with quite a few directories containing things like the brushes for GIMP and images for various games. It seems to be fairly trivial to tell it to remove certain directories from the index, so it's not a big deal, but it is a small quirk that is slightly irksome. There is a bug in the way it handles PNG images with transparency, but it is pre-beta (which actually means beta in google-speak) software.
Until now, I've pretty much used either digiKam or the image view in Konquror to view images. Picsa is nice in that it automatically looks through the whole disk instead of just in my Pictures folder, but digiKam feels a bit cleaner. I haven't had much of a chance to play with Picsa yet, but I have a feeling it won't be as integrated into the rest of my desktop either (for example, with digiKam I can view an album, and then drag an image from the album onto someone from my buddy list in Gaim to send them that image.).
Picsa does seem to offer more editing options than digiKam for tweaking photos, and while it seems to work fairly well, I still prefer my own solution for very basic photo adjustments (which you can find here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jphototweek/) although having it integrated into the program is nice.
It does have the polish I associate with google as well. When I saw that it used Wine I was reserved to the fact that I would end up spending several hours hacking a version of wine to run it, the fact that it was as easy as installing a single RPM and everything "just works" was nice.
I'll try to play around with it more tonight, and I may post back with a more complete comparison with existing Linux solutions and a review of the program.

Nobody still remembers http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/ ? Considering the timing of Nokia's release of that port (in October 19th, 2004) it shouldn't come as big surprise that it's related to N770. KHTML (Gtk+ WebCore) and Mozilla (Minimo) both run on the N770 platform (Or used to, at any rate) so there's nothing much ironic or unthinkable about it. The Handhelds.org GPE platform, which is very similiar to N770, additionally features Dillo as very lightweight browser.

Personally I prefer Mozilla over KHTML; measuring browser performance is no simple task, but FireFox has moved long ways from the earlier Mozilla browsers that gave it image as slow-moving dinosaur. With the fully customizable XML based UI the desktop-browser still is lot more resource-hungry on the desktop than it needs to be on embedded platform; with an equivalent UI the Mozilla engine is very competitive.

Another summmer of work on BPG - "An OpenPGP Privacy Toolkit for NetBSD" would have been nice. BPG is a BSD licensed implementation of the OpenPGP standard. In this time of global surveillance this project makes a lot of sense. We do have GPG, but choice is good in security applications.

Of course I'm to lame to look up if the same project can be accepted twice :-). BPG was in last years batch of NetBSD Summer of Code projects.

I'd rather they just list tel:// URLs in messages and webpages where appropriate, but integration is a good thing. I haven't signed up for Skype because, between Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ and my cell phone, there are already too many ways to contact me instantly. Besides, I just use gaim for 90% of my IMing anyway...

Yes, as well as the open source software: http://drm.sourceforge.net/

The quality of AM/MW wasn't really the point, though. The point was the seriously limited bandwidth in that range, and the large ammount of power and large antenna needed to broadcasting. That makes MW completely useless for 2-way communications (fire/police/ambulance), and too expensive for niche broadcasters.

That is mostly what BerkeleyDB is.

As for handheld scaners, I put tiny tcl http://tinytcl.sourceforge.net/ on mine. I am sure calling ndbm would be easy. execpt the handheld was a DOS_5. I don't have the time to go find all the junk like 'C' compilers for that. The next version of the scanned will run Linux and all will be well.

There was a quote that used to float around the Internet back in the "old days" (the mid 90's) that the Internet could never be controlled beacuse "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Great quote. Used to be true. Isn't true anymore. The Internet has effectively been controlled.

How? The same say we've always been controlled. Fear. Fear of being caught saying something unpopular. The anonymity to say things we're afraid to, or can't, say in public - that anonymity that was once the hallmark of the Internet's freedom - is gone. The Internet isn't even remotely anonymous. There are some attempts to reintroduce anonymity to the Internet, but there are depressingly few people supporting them - and depressingly even more actively campaigning against them.

Why not? Fear. Fear of terrorists. Fear of pedophiles. Fear of libel. Fear of piracy. Irrational fears of things that don't go away when your anonymity does... but depressingly scary enough to enough people to coerce the majority of the population into giving up - handing over - the anonymity that finally allowed us to speak frankly and for the first time in the history of the human race, tell the unadulterated, pure, non-watered-down truth about everything - the anonymity we'd never had before, and that we'll likely never have again. It was great while it lasted.

More immediately useful, there are optimizers for jpeg and png that can make the image take less space, with no loss of quality. There's jpegtran -opt for jpeg images. Most digital cameras create jpegs that are around 3% larger than what jpegtran's optimizing can achieve. For png, there's PNGOUT, OptiPNG, and pngrewrite and PNGcrush. Most web sites do not use optimized images.

There's also compression programs such as StuffIt that claim they can losslessly compress jpeg images up to 30%. So there's plenty of room to wring more out of the existing formats.

If you click the 'I agree' it takes you to download some file that ends in ".DOC" - since I couldnt find any specifications for *that* file, I wasnt able to read them.

OSS isn't immune to this. If the maintainers of a program stop maintaining it then it can also become unusable. Look at all the unmantained device drivers in the Linux Kernel that are causing issues.
And yes there are alternatives to Sun's Java
http://viva.sourceforge.net/runtime.html is a list of free Java run times.
If Sun dropped off the face of the earth and Java was still important you can bet someone would help the OSS version catch up.
Not saying it doesn't matter at all. Just that to the vast majority of users it doesn't matter.

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!