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Also, completely different concept.

Spore isn't exciting to me just because it looks like it'll be a really cool game. It's exciting because the ideas behind it could infuse some new life into the industry as a whole. The idea of giving players very simple, intuitive tools with which to create content, to actual make that content creation part of the game itself (as opposed to something you do externally with modding software) is promising.

Also, nice as the quasi-online element of Spore sounds to be, I long to see how this concept might be applied to more traditional online games, such as MMOs. With just a bit of extension, I could see the technologies being created/exploited in Spore applied to an online version of Starflight or The Ur-Quan Masters, but with even larger slices of the galaxy and more detailed planet surfaces, life forms, etc. and alien ships that you encounter are not pre-scripted encounters with NPCs (or at least, not all of them) but interactions with other players. Or your more traditional fantasy MMORPG, where instead of fighting the same re-textured orcs and rats for six months, each new area you explore features completely new monsters.

Best of all if they could combine these technologies (easy to use tools for developers and/or players to create stuff, procedural generation to breathe life into these creations and to populate vast landscapes very quickly), with other features and technologies that have been growing in popularity and maturity over the past couple years, such as realistic physics, destructible environments and more robust AI. This could open the door for a persistent world that is truly mutable, where players are free to create, destroy and explore an almost unimaginably vast world. It could be the ultimate sandbox experience that could combine aspects of various beloved genres as well (FPS, RPG, whatever).

If Spore itself doesn't qualify as something awesomely different from everything that has come before, then at least it could be a big step towards a game or games that do qualify as such.

Some very simple samples but with understandable code, just go to

http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree1.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree2.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree3.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree4.html

try them out and view the source. For more info go to http://dojotoolkit.org/

O. Wyss

Some very simple samples but with understandable code, just go to

http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree1.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree2.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree3.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree4.html

try them out and view the source. For more info go to http://dojotoolkit.org/

O. Wyss

Some very simple samples but with understandable code, just go to

http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree1.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree2.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree3.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree4.html

try them out and view the source. For more info go to http://dojotoolkit.org/

O. Wyss

Some very simple samples but with understandable code, just go to

http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree1.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree2.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree3.html
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/test/tree4.html

try them out and view the source. For more info go to http://dojotoolkit.org/

O. Wyss

There are freely scripts available that automate the trash generation. In fact SF.net hosts more than a few, but seems unable to recognize what they are.

This exchange from me to them is 3 or 4 months old, but is still interesting:

"Hi Sourceforge Admins,

The code in the following project:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rssgm

is code used for 'synthetic' site generation. It is code that uses spiders to grab specified subject matter off the web and automatically constructs a 'fake' site comprised entirely of fragments of legitimate sites. Google spiders the fake site, sees the apparently legitimate information and adds the site to the Google index. Unfortunately the users searching for information then get fooled into going to a site that has nothing but clickthrough ads. It has no content to speak of.

I quote RSSGM's website:

(http://rssgm.com/content/view/19/9)

"WARNINGS:

Incorrect use of these scripts could get your website banned in the Search Engines.

It is your responsibility to ensure that you have the relevant permissions for anything you intend to display with these scripts.

The creators of these scripts WILL NOT accept any responsibility for losses that occur through your use of these scripts."

>

My question is this: Why is a great organization like Sourceforge enabling trash such as this? These jokers are ruining the utility of the web. These guys only want to exploit the web in the worst way. Why is Sourceforge helping this happen? Is it Sourceforge's policy to support any project, regardless of the harm it represents?

If so, I know a couple of guys who'd like Sourceforge to host their rootkit toolkit. Where do they apply?

[signed here]

Sourceforge's response:

Greetings,

SourceForge.net will not sanction or host a project whose sole goal is harm. Accordingly, we wouldn't host a rootkit,etc. But, we do allow for the hosting of material that could be 'dual-use'.

One clear example is the project bo2k. It could be, and has been used, as a trojan to attain access to a Windows host. It is also a legitimate system administration tool. This is no different than a knife, which can be used to cook or do very bad things.

The script you are mentioning doesn't appear to cause much harm. Sure, it may dilute search engine results, but that's for the search engines to sort out. If this tool were solely existing to dilute the ranking of one particular blog or a set of them, then we'd have cause to believe its existence is purely nefarious. In this case, however, the project appears to have a valid technical purpose, even though it can be used in a sub-ideal manner, much alike the cooking knife.

Thank you,

{deleted name}
Senior Second Level Support Technician, SourceForge.net

A PHPNuke Implementation (Sourceforge.net) I'm currently developing something along those lines for PHPNuke. Check it out, it organizes by technician, priority, date, etc.. A few modifications might be possible that would allow NON-tech users to submit tickets, although they will be present in future versions... I'm currently looking for people to help with development, as well... any takers?

http://dcl.sourceforge.net/

It's the best, customizable, using MySQL. Our team LOVES DCL!

Besides, Audacity is a free download for the Mac, too.

Agreed, however: for somebody who wants to mess around with creating music, you can't beat GarageBand.

Here's another fun toy for special relativity http://lightspeed.sourceforge.net/.
It shows how an object's appearance changes when it travels near light speed.

There is an updated version created by IBM called Robocode, teaches Java and AI. Now released as Open Source.

If you are looking for something running on Windows, BugTrackerNet is a nice solution.

http://btnet.sourceforge.net/

This is a .NET web application, easy to setup and very user-friendly. There is also the usual support for mailed-in requests (POP listener), reports, flexible properties, and so on.

Have fun :).

you either need to use lossless compression, or a packing scheme such as shorten (.shn)

Just a nitpick: shorten is a lossless compression scheme. The tech behind it & FLAC are quite similar.

PHP Helpdesk
PHP Support Tickets
Trouble Ticket Express

I suspect you have a truemobile with the BCM4301 chipset? Bad news, sorry you got screwed with that:) Anyway, it appears ndiswrapper works with this assuming two things:

#1. You set post mode to thorough in the bios, otherwise modprobing the ndiswrapper causes freezes.
#2. Not using the dell supplied bcmwl5a.inf. Use the one from ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software3/COL3601/hb- 17787-3/SP23107.exe

If anything, I'd suggest the ndiswrapper wiki:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index .php/Ubuntu

Other than that, I don't have much advice, sorry.

Perl or python will work just fine as a basic replacement for those types of projects. If you don't like Python or Perl you also have Ruby and PHP to choose from. Under Linux I believe there is even a handy dandy version of basic that works just fine.
Yes you would have to learn a new language but that isn't all that hard. Once you learn one language learning a new one is pretty simple. Depending on how long it was since you used basic last it might not be much harder to learn Python than to remember Basic.

If you must have good old basic this might work for you. https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou p_id=49546

I found more links to basic stuff here http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/basic.shtm l

Front Row plays anything Quicktime can. And there are codec plugins for Quicktime on the PowerPC side to handle pretty much everything. Below is a list of codecs I used on my PowerPC Mac Mini to play back pretty much everything I had except an occasional Real Media file. Keep in mind these have to be coded specifically for Intel to work on the new Mini properly.

Divx 6: http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/download/
XVid delegate: http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~naegelic/download/
3vix: http://www.3ivx.com/download/macos.html
AC3/A52 decoder: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=83360
WMV Decoder for Quicktime: http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv.htm
Quicktime MPEG2 decoder, $20: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/

There are several free Linux software projects which might or might not what you are looking for. The first thing that comes to mind is something called ZoneMinder which, if I am not mistaken, is a Linux home security sytem which uses remote wireless Internet cameras.

Then there is also the well known Myth TV project which among other things is mainly used by people who bouild their own Personal Video Recorders(PVR). Myth TV supports both HDTV, NTFS and possbly also some other video broadcast standards.

A third possiblility that comes to mind is VLC which is a cross-platform media player and streaming server.

And then there are various other video related programs for Linux such as TvTime the televison application, or MPlayer the movie player. Concievably even something like the Ekiga (formerly known as GnomeNetMeeting) might be relevant. Ekiga supports Full-Screen Videoconferencing. Ekiga supports Video4Linux and Firewire Cameras Support through plugins.

Many Linux video projects seem to be built building block fashion, using other previously written free Linux software, as dependencies. In many cases there are also various other free video projects which are sometimes just user friendly front ends for other free video software. I could not even begin to list all of those free Linux software projects for video and other things.

By the way, Linux has never had virus problems but, even so, there are free anti-virus programs available for Linux. The one that I use is Clam Anti-virus. There are also several good free firewalls avilable for Linux which allow you to control which IP ports are open or closed. There is one other interesting video project which is interesting but, probably not what you are looking for is the free movie studio in a Linux box.

I hope that something that I mentioned might be usesful. You can then decide if Linux is really what you want or not. I personally like it anyway.

Anonym.OS is a Tor-based ISO Live-CD that uses OpenBSD. Not exactly a VMware appliance, but I use it in VMware and boot from the virtual CD-ROM.

http://theory.kaos.to/projects.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/anonym-os/

I've been using RoR for a couple of projects (small) the last few months. I've found it capable of running on OSX and M$ well enough. My research has shown the main difficulty for most is in deploying a production install cleanly. However, these problems are likely addressed (search on RoR production deploy for more info) in common deployment scenarios.

As for IDE's.... The "Ruby Development Tool" (RDT) for Eclipse has nice potential! It's home page is: http://rubyeclipse.sourceforge.net/. Naturally, it requires Eclipse.

HTH

I've recently started playing with RoR, and though my first choice platform for any programming project is usually Linux, I went with OS X instead.

Unlike Linux-Apache-Mysql-Php/Perl/Python which has the nice acronym LAMP. Linux-Apache-Mysql-Ruby has the rather unfortunate acronym LAMR (pronouced lamer).

I'll stick with developing RoR on OS X.

If you're interested in my lates RoR project, check out: OSWiki

OpenOffice Impress has a SWF export and http://openlaszlo.org/ is SWF based use your C skills to improve these (nether are at the level to write many games yet).

Or try:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/swfsource/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libswf/
http://sswf.sourceforge.net/

SWF may only be partially open (fully documented and encouraged to create application that write SWF, but forbiden to create competing players), but it is a lot more open then the rest of the PSP!

OpenOffice Impress has a SWF export and http://openlaszlo.org/ is SWF based use your C skills to improve these (nether are at the level to write many games yet).

Or try:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/swfsource/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libswf/
http://sswf.sourceforge.net/

SWF may only be partially open (fully documented and encouraged to create application that write SWF, but forbiden to create competing players), but it is a lot more open then the rest of the PSP!

OpenOffice Impress has a SWF export and http://openlaszlo.org/ is SWF based use your C skills to improve these (nether are at the level to write many games yet).

Or try:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/swfsource/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libswf/
http://sswf.sourceforge.net/

SWF may only be partially open (fully documented and encouraged to create application that write SWF, but forbiden to create competing players), but it is a lot more open then the rest of the PSP!

This is so untrue that it's not funny.

Most large F/OSS projets record and maintain Use cases. The prime examples are KDE and Gnome, but this is also true of the Gimp for example.

I'm a OSS developer of a small project with at most 100 active users, and I have a directory full of Use cases. I also have a long list of features my users have requested. I try to be polite and understanding but I also explain that I have a full time job and a family and this work cannot take priority.

Most OSS projects were developed for a limited set of users, most of whom are the very developers of the project. The resulting software is thus very specific to the needs of a tiny community.

I think my situation is fairly typical. Most real OSS developers are not out to impress anyone, let alone bully or ignore users. They are simply people wo developed a solution to their own problem and shared the result in the hope it would be useful.

Now the user community can be annoying at times, requesting totally unreasonable features, and expecting them to become available at their earliest convenience. When these are not met they are prone to calling developers "unprofessional". Personally I find this a little irritating.

We could move forward if those users who think up a great new feature for a particular piece of software would come up with their own professionnaly written "use case" and submit those to the developers. Users who wave their hands in the air and expect great new features to pop up are bound to be disappointed.

Best.

I just got done playing a session of [M-rated first-person shooter]. [Another M-rated first-person shooter] is nice.

What about E-rated games, and genres other than first-person shooters? Some families have school-age children who want to play computer games.

I play ET all the time.

I hope for your own sake that you don't mean this E.T. game through this emulator.

I'm not an expert, but I worked in a place that used to sell these Windozy systems. It made me cringe at the time and I'm not surprised to learn they are a virus magnet and easy to 0wn. I never learned to do the same things with free software, but I did learn a few things.

Camera control is usually silly. For the price of one tilt device, you can buy two or three normal cameras which provide better coverage.

If you have the time to roll your own system, look into xawtv and myth tv. The capture technology is well developed, so you should be able to capture streams and represent them with thumbnail images you serve on a page if you can't figure out how to transmit the moving pictures themselves.

If you don't need full motion, but can get away with 1/second frame grabs, you will spare yourself a lot of storage space and greatly simplify your task. Gcam is something that I've played with that works and is easy to customize. There are other projects around that look promising, such as webcam one, axis network one, or cam portal manager.

I realize you need full motion video for cameras monitoring stores during working hours and wish that I knew more. Motion picture media is one of those areas where fierce patent/greed issues abound. Good luck.

I'm not an expert, but I worked in a place that used to sell these Windozy systems. It made me cringe at the time and I'm not surprised to learn they are a virus magnet and easy to 0wn. I never learned to do the same things with free software, but I did learn a few things.

Camera control is usually silly. For the price of one tilt device, you can buy two or three normal cameras which provide better coverage.

If you have the time to roll your own system, look into xawtv and myth tv. The capture technology is well developed, so you should be able to capture streams and represent them with thumbnail images you serve on a page if you can't figure out how to transmit the moving pictures themselves.

If you don't need full motion, but can get away with 1/second frame grabs, you will spare yourself a lot of storage space and greatly simplify your task. Gcam is something that I've played with that works and is easy to customize. There are other projects around that look promising, such as webcam one, axis network one, or cam portal manager.

I realize you need full motion video for cameras monitoring stores during working hours and wish that I knew more. Motion picture media is one of those areas where fierce patent/greed issues abound. Good luck.

I'm not an expert, but I worked in a place that used to sell these Windozy systems. It made me cringe at the time and I'm not surprised to learn they are a virus magnet and easy to 0wn. I never learned to do the same things with free software, but I did learn a few things.

Camera control is usually silly. For the price of one tilt device, you can buy two or three normal cameras which provide better coverage.

If you have the time to roll your own system, look into xawtv and myth tv. The capture technology is well developed, so you should be able to capture streams and represent them with thumbnail images you serve on a page if you can't figure out how to transmit the moving pictures themselves.

If you don't need full motion, but can get away with 1/second frame grabs, you will spare yourself a lot of storage space and greatly simplify your task. Gcam is something that I've played with that works and is easy to customize. There are other projects around that look promising, such as webcam one, axis network one, or cam portal manager.

I realize you need full motion video for cameras monitoring stores during working hours and wish that I knew more. Motion picture media is one of those areas where fierce patent/greed issues abound. Good luck.

We geeks have a tendency to learn the definitions of things, and assume that other people have, too. Guess what? When a business owner says "I have a virus problem with these devices", chances are good that the business user has not, in fact, read geek references that clarify the virus vs. worm distinction. If you work with non-technical people, when one of them describes a problem, you have to assume that they are being imprecise (perhaps because they don't know correct terminology, perhaps because they don't even understand the technology or the problem.) The first step in troubleshooting is figuring out what the real problem is.

I have users who say "the email server is having problems" when the reality is that their dialup is down; they don't understand networking or email, so if they can't reach the mail server, they tell me what it means to them (ie. they can't reach their email.) "My VPN won't work" could mean that their DHCP is out. "My firewall rule doesn't work" could mean that they haven't actually asked for the firewall rule yet. After you've troubleshot enough user problems, you learn that you cannot take users' up-front complaints too literally.

So I would not be surprised to hear that the real problem here is network intrusions/worms rather than viruses.

The good news is that if the problem really is worms, the easiest solution is a host-based firewall that blocks access to all ports except the ones that are actually needed. The more recent Windows products come with one built in, and various free alternatives also exist. I'm coming to like wipfw; it's free, stateful, and unlike the Windows built-ins, you can allow some sources and deny others. wipfw might be a bit too new for production use, though; kerio (hit google) has reasonably nice server- and desktop- class firewalls that can also restrict access to known IPs.

i cant get wi-fi either. hp notebook.

Say hello to NDIS Wrapper ... :)

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

We've been using Trac for at least half a year at the office and it's simply great.

You can browse projects from a Subversion repository, syntax-hightlighted and everything. Keep track of tickets/milestones. And of course, you have the wiki.

Our setup uses SVNManager + Trac for everything related to source control/documentation.

I recently picked up a perfectly functional 486-dx 66mhz Cyrix clone cpu laptop (circa 1993 - made by AST - Canadian company which no longer exists) for $45 from my local Goodwill computer store. It came with 20 MB ram, a 500 MB hard drive, two pcmcia ports, and the usual mix of parallel, serial and keyboard ports. The LCD monitor on it works perfectly, all of the keyboard functions work, and it has a built-in trackball that also is in working order. The outer case is in nearly immaculate condition - only a few scratches here and there. The battery needs to be refurbished or replaced - that is true of any 13 year old laptop.

It was running DOS 4.1 when I got it (I assume this is what it was originally loaded with). I decided to improve its utility by loading Slackware 10.2 on it (You can see the full blown procedure I used here). I did not want to use the Zipslack install method (as mentioned in the article, you have some performance issues I could not afford on such old equipment). Without a CDROM, I would need to furthermore modify the installation process. I happen to have a Iomega parallel port zip drive, so I used the boot disk for the zipslack installation to access this drive. The boot disk assumes your root disk(s) will be on the parallel port device. The problem with that is that while the zipslack install disk can recognize and use the zip drive for installation, the regular installation root disks do not (have to talk to Patrick about that). Luckily, you can specify another mount location (just not the parallel port drive) - so I set aside a 100MB partition on the hard drive, and used that for the installation.

I booted the system from floppy using the zipslack root disk and the standard installation floppies. Then I mounted the parallel port zip drive, and partitioned, formated and mounted the 'source' partition on the hard drive. After that it was a simple matter to copy over the slackware packages I had earlier copied onto a zip disk from my workstation. Finally I kicked off the setup utility after partitioning the hard drive's remaining space. After that, the install was normal. Starting with a 350 MB root partition (used 50MB for swap, and the 100MB source) - I ended up with 25% free space (used about 225 MB for the packages I loaded). I was also able to free up the 100MB source partition afterwards - so I have a whopping 175MB to play with.

Note that I did not load all the packages available from the Slackware distro - most of the A and AP packages, the key network packages, and some development packages (python). So, no X-windows. However, I found an application called 'twin' (Textmode WINdow environment) that emulated an X server, providing multiple text-based windows that have all the usual controls (resizing, scrollbars, window shade, minimize etc). Twin runs very fast on the 486, and provides the multiple window capability (including copy/paste between windows) that you would need for most jobs. Twin is an older program - last updated in 2003, which I had to build on my workstation, then move over to the laptop via the zipdrive.

Without a graphics capability, most of the modern tools available in KDE or GNOME are out of reach - but that is okay. I use 'jed' editor (emulates emacs commands - but smaller footprint), and am writing my own tools in python - basically to capture thoughts, and provide automation for uploading my field-notes onto my server when connected to my home network (saving my pennies to get a pcmcia NIC soon).

Extending the life of the laptop was well worth the trouble. While it may not be cutting edge in terms of looks - for what I do it gets the job done.

Correction. There are eight versions of Vista including plain ol' Vista and Open Vista.

I run most of my stuff under Linux, so no .exe required...

On the other hand, gcj produces nice native executables. ;-) It doesn't support Swing (yet) but does support SWT.

I haven't looked at it in detail yet, but the JCVM project that was donated to Apache Harmony seems interesting as well.

You could always try this.

But I threw away all my 16-bit related motherboards and stuff at the end of last year, when I moved to my new home.

I suppose the referenced project is practically dead, due to such reasons as mine.

Only if they made the elementary mistake of making the gibberish packets a different size from the data packets. We await silent Tristero's second protocol revision. ;-)

Being that Linux is open source and this allows anyone to modify it to run on most any hardware..... Even Linus Himself created an Embedded Linux while working for Transmeta called Modori - http://midori.sourceforge.net/ ... and there is Damn Small Linux - http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ ....and BasLinux (Basic Linux)
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/baslinux/ (running it on a camera????)

So what is MS really saying?

Its called Libel. And its really more against the programmers than it is against any F/OSS project(s).
It is as well very arrogant, as it insinuates that only Microsoft or proprietary works developers are capable of programming.

Microsoft has been doing this illegal act for quite some time. When is it time to have a class action lawsuite against the jackass that coined the phrase "software pirates" when he called hobbist such, when these hobbist first discovered they can themselves create and fix software?

Need Legal representation for such a case? Where is the EFF? What about funding? Considering who would lose the case and pay the bill, don't we know that teh initial money can be raised (i.e. firefox raising of funds for advertising...)

So why is MS being allowed to continue this falseness, this libel it promotes???

Or Doesn't teh F/OSS communiyty understand that teh more people using F/OSS the more backing it will receive for development and hardware support....

It rocketh. Check out Activegrids IDE for the feeling: http://sourceforge.net/projects/activegrid

Well lemme throw my specs in (this is my office PC,my home machine is 3 orders of magnitude faster).

I'm running Mandriva on a Dell T-500. 128 Mb RAM, Katmai P-3 processor (500 MHz, 512 kb cache) & kernel's vm.swappiness is at 60. KDE 3.4 stable with most of the bells & whistles. May be able to upgrade the RAM soon. Right now, if I keep ooffice & firefox preloaded in memory (http://mozillaqs.sourceforge.net/#DOWNLOADS) & (http://segfaultskde.berlios.de/index.php?content= oooqs)

I see no noticeable loss in application perf, apart from the hopeless swapping (hopefully more RAM will take care of that).

Dunno much about my HDD, but I'd imagine it's rpm would be verylow (4200?).

The other problem is that xorg clocks up the cpu badly (almost at 100% all the time). I probably should switch to a low footprint distro like DSL or slackware or whatever, but dammit I want to make my box look cool and wipe the smug grins off of the faces of the windoze users in my office! Should I roll back to XFree86? Maybe I'll google sometime & see if there is any way to calm down the running X.

Although in beta, the pure java LGPL'd SwingWT http://swingwt.sourceforge.net/ attempts to replicate the Swing API (and it's huge) using SWT code. You distribute your platform specific swt library with your build, make sure it's in the searchable path (./binlib for example) and you're good to go. The AWT api is replicated as well.

Buoy is your friend. It's built on top of Swing, but it's actually sanely usable. I recommend it on the grounds that it is the only Java GUI toolkit I have ever used that did not leave me longing for the sweet embrace of death. Developing an application using Buoy is substantially less painful then stabbing yourself in the eye with a fork. In the world of Java GUI development, this is high praise indeed.

Seriously, though. If you are doing GUI work in Java, but your actual goal is to get something else done, and you would like the GUI toolkit to take less than 80% of your development effort, use Buoy. It's not "dumbed down"; it's just SANE.

See: http://pcb.sourceforge.net/
I've used it for some fairly complex multi-layer boards. I prefer to do the schematic on paper and manually route it, but autorouting is supported. One warning: some of the symbols are wrong. In particular, the (default) holes in the pads are too small for most resistors.

I'm guessing from the text of the article that this is a pay-per-song service rather than a subscription model, but it doesn't explicitly say.

Rocket scientist, eh? Golly gee, I suppose you're right; it might be hard to RENT oggs and flacs.

is this the only music service that can claim this kind of compatibility?

Hell no.

Artificial intelligence has already been solved here in the United States, while the rest of the world is caching up.

AI algorithms have been released into the public domain and have come to the attention of AI wannabes all over the world by means of U.S. search engines.

An American book about artificial intelligence gives away the bleeding-edge American AI secrets to the rest of the world.

Singularity Scams, alas, are also an American invention recently on the rise and seeking victims to defraud of their money by playing on fears of unfriendly AI taking over the world.

I'm involved with a project that is looking to develop an online community for technology oriented business customers.
Sell your idea to ebay, they might like you. (and the highest bidder wins!)


  If you could develop an online community to encourage collaboration and information sharing, what features would you want included?
That's easy, BitTorrent.


  How would you go about including features that are widely available in other places (weblogging, message boards, wiki) and generating buy-in from customers.
1) Visit homepages of said OSS
2) Get the sources
3) Right-Click Ctrl-V
4) Get headache integrating code from multiple projects^W4) Discover 'magical' missing libraries^W4) Consider rewriting everything with existing code as reference^W4) Give up^W4) ????
5) Profit!

And this is precisely why I asked about an open source replacement. It's one thing to pay for a product if you're going to use it to make money. It's a far different thing to expect to pay the same money for a product only to use it for hobby work.

I design gadgets for the Commodore 64/128, and a quick estimate shows that at the prices I've seen around the web in the last few days, I would spend more on the software alone than I would spend on making one production-ready unit of every board I've designed since I started fiddling with this stuff (that's only about 10 unique designs), and if I tried to sell, there's no way I'd ever break even. Several years ago there was a slim chance, but today, forget about it. Today, all of the stuff I write or design is free and open source, and stuff I have written in the past I have since declared free also (where the source code still exists). I think that fits anyone's definition of "giving back." I must stress - I do not program for Linux, just Commodore.

Oh, and to the other gentlemen who have mentioned auto-routing and other high-end features as being too much to ask of FOSS, let me see..

• PCB, the very PCB editor I started with years ago, is a nice board editor with autorouter (which I have yet to use) and some other nice features, but that's only half of the needed setup.
• KiCAD has a decent schematic editor, 3D viewer, and some other stuff, but it just has problems on my box (apparently poor integration, very slow board editor, crashy).
• gEDA attempts to integrate PCB with schematic capture and other tools, but it's buggy on my setup (missing config files in Ubuntu, schematic doesn't get translated over to the board properly, no component-onto-board auto-place function to go with the schematic capture)
• gschem2xpcb looks like it would fill in well to convert those gEDA/gSchem schematics over to PCB in a way similar to Eagle's autoplace feature, but this is just a stand-alone command-line program with only the one function, and the author seems have a major aversion to the GPL. *shrug*
• The GIMP of course has tons of features and a really nice UI, and in particular it has vector graphics capabilities and multiple layers, but of course it's not adapted for PCB/schematic work.
• Eagle, for this particular list, has wonderful parts libraries (for which utilities exist to convert these to other formats) and good integration between schematic and board, but it has some serious screen refresh bugs, plus the aforementioned 4x3 inch board size limit.

Along with these, every other open source program I've looked into has at least one of the features I need. I was just hoping for a program that combines all of these already-existing, already written features into one Eagle-killing FOSS program.

PCB has autoplace, autoroute, DRC, and trace optimizers. The latest version is on sourceforge: http://pcb.sourceforge.net/

At my company, we've had at least two virus infections before definitions were released. We worked through symptoms and used stuff like HijackThis! and Process Explorer to find out what was going on, plus a few of the PS Tools to get rid of it and Bart's PE to clean-room the system to remove persistent files. It took our virus vendor a week to come up with definitions, but a few others had them earlier and we could use their online or free versions to clean the systems.

Generally, when we get a suspicious file, it goes to VirusTotal first. If any of the 20-or-so listed AV vendors have a definition for the virus, you can usually find some information about it (at least a name) and from there figure out how to clean it. If nobody has a definition, next stop is Norman Sandbox to figure out what the beastie does, at least from a high-level point of view. If nothing else, it will probably give you a mutex that you can create to block execution/further infection, and sometimes it even gives you a clue as to what the virus would be or if it's a variant of something else. I found that we had a new variant of W32/Sality based on its mutex, which was one version number incremented from the info available online.

If there are no hits after that, there are some more things you can try, but they're mostly shots in the dark. Unless you can un-UPX the file and do some serious reverse-engineering on your own, you probably have to wait for a definition or post your symptoms in a newsgroup or forum and hope someone can help.

One good thing about VirusTotal is that it submits your sample to AV vendors (if you give it permission) so they are alerted and can start to develop definitions. It's difficult to find contact info for some vendors, but McAfee, ClamAV, CA and others have places you can submit a sample, you would do well to try them all if you have non-sensitive information in an infected file.