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I use BitlBee for talking to MSN/Yahoo!/AIM/ICQ/Jabber . Because BitlBee is a IRC to other chat networks gateway, it's possible to connect with an irc client for your mobile phone to some public server. I use jmIrc as IRC client. You only pay for GPRS or UMTS data. I bet this IM thingy will be more expensive.

for those who need maximum quality, forget compression and go pure .wav like I have. (only for those who have the space)

Or just use FLAC and get maximum quality plus decent compression.

AI Algorithm Steps describe how to create an artificial mind for robots.

Robot Artificial Intelligence is more powerful than slime cells.

Tour the AI Theory of Mind for a deeper understanding.

Ironically enough, I don't use OpenOffice on a day to day basis, but I keep it on my work PC for the sole purpose of converting things to PDF when I'm at work. (I used to use a little freeware printer driver for this, but unfortunately it's license agreement specifies that it's for noncommercial use only.)

Just use PDF Creator http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

• An Apple IIc with a Unidisk 3.5, a lead-acid external battery pack, and an LCD display.
• An Apple IIgs with 5 MB RAM and a 540 MB SCSI hard disk on a RamFast controller, 1.44MB floppy controller, Z80 CP/M card, and a stereo sound card. This one is fun because I have it hooked up via AppleTalk to a Shiva Fastpath 5, which allows the IIgs to talk to netatalk running on a Linux server.

Seriously, it's probably the simplest, cheapest route to go. You can get an XBOX for a hundred bucks. A modchip for another fifty. That's all you need. Download the latest version of XBOX Media Center (screen 1, screen 2, screen 3) and configure it for your network (a couple lines in an XML file).

It couldn't be easier.

This won't record video, which is the real reason for using MythTV, but if you just want to watch networked videos/listen to music/play old games (see also: MAMEox), this is the way to go. If you look carefull at those screenshots, you'll notice that XBMC integrates perfectly with IMDB (for reviews & details) and Amazon (album art, tracks, etc.)

Seriously, it's probably the simplest, cheapest route to go. You can get an XBOX for a hundred bucks. A modchip for another fifty. That's all you need. Download the latest version of XBOX Media Center (screen 1, screen 2, screen 3) and configure it for your network (a couple lines in an XML file).

It couldn't be easier.

This won't record video, which is the real reason for using MythTV, but if you just want to watch networked videos/listen to music/play old games (see also: MAMEox), this is the way to go. If you look carefull at those screenshots, you'll notice that XBMC integrates perfectly with IMDB (for reviews & details) and Amazon (album art, tracks, etc.)

Seriously, it's probably the simplest, cheapest route to go. You can get an XBOX for a hundred bucks. A modchip for another fifty. That's all you need. Download the latest version of XBOX Media Center (screen 1, screen 2, screen 3) and configure it for your network (a couple lines in an XML file).

It couldn't be easier.

This won't record video, which is the real reason for using MythTV, but if you just want to watch networked videos/listen to music/play old games (see also: MAMEox), this is the way to go. If you look carefull at those screenshots, you'll notice that XBMC integrates perfectly with IMDB (for reviews & details) and Amazon (album art, tracks, etc.)

Seriously, it's probably the simplest, cheapest route to go. You can get an XBOX for a hundred bucks. A modchip for another fifty. That's all you need. Download the latest version of XBOX Media Center (screen 1, screen 2, screen 3) and configure it for your network (a couple lines in an XML file).

It couldn't be easier.

This won't record video, which is the real reason for using MythTV, but if you just want to watch networked videos/listen to music/play old games (see also: MAMEox), this is the way to go. If you look carefull at those screenshots, you'll notice that XBMC integrates perfectly with IMDB (for reviews & details) and Amazon (album art, tracks, etc.)

You joke but here it is JOS. I think this is actually a midly interesting project - a whole OS (well most anyway) written in a very high level OO language.

I'm with you there...that game was incredible, but I never managed to finish it. :(

BTW, here's a little something for nostalgia's sake.

My absolute fav game, however, was Paradroid. Completely fscking brilliant.I highly recommend the port available on Sourceforge...extremely well done.

The way Viiv is described in the summary sounds like a modded xbox running XBMC. Go figure.

In other words, big blocks mean more wasted space in the last block of each file.

I did some Googling and apparently some work has already been done to get extents into ext3

deleting a 160GB hard disk image took minutes on ext3, but was instantaneous on NTFS).

xine plays 1080i on this platform with the 1.0 GHz CPU about 30% idle

If you use the VIA supplied driver (comes in binary and re-compilable versions), you'll get about ~25-30% usage on the (800MHz) SP8000E.

I have mythweb setup to run VeMP (VIA's enhanced mplayer) for playback, and never see dropped frames on any HD content.

It would be GREAT if VIA supported MythTV like they do the VeMP and ViaeXP players. I think this would really help them get those little motherboards to sell. (A native HDTV output would help as well.)

I think the main factor in getting a fanless system is the available convection airflow -- without that the system won't stay cool.

xine plays 1080i on this platform with the 1.0 GHz CPU about 30% idle

If you use the VIA supplied driver (comes in binary and re-compilable versions), you'll get about ~25-30% usage on the (800MHz) SP8000E.

I have mythweb setup to run VeMP (VIA's enhanced mplayer) for playback, and never see dropped frames on any HD content.

It would be GREAT if VIA supported MythTV like they do the VeMP and ViaeXP players. I think this would really help them get those little motherboards to sell. (A native HDTV output would help as well.)

I think the main factor in getting a fanless system is the available convection airflow -- without that the system won't stay cool.

Of course, you can share the recordings with Winblows boxes via Samba. There's even a script included to make human-friendly filenames for the shows.

There's also a shell extension that looks up filenames in the MythTV database and makes show metadata available to Explorer in the details view. It's part of DSMyth (which also includes DirectShow filters for the MPEG-4 recordings MythTV can create, but I don't use that part of it since all of my captures are MPEG-2).

You're looking for mosix, assuming you have an app that knows how to multithread. Those should at least get more common as we see more dual-cores, though.

I know the post was meant as a joke. :) But I really do think there would be some value in having a Windows mythfrontend available, if not a backend. Unfortunately, all that is available now is WinMyth. And that doesn't work in most cases.

Part of the problem IMHO, is the absolute lack of documentation for the MythTV protocol.

MythstreamTV allows you to stream recorded shows to Windows PCs.

It's not quite as good as watching it directly on your MythTV box but it's decent.

You can use a large block-size and greatly reduce the ammount of wasted space and overhead (which is rather small to begin with, actually). You've got to expect that kind of overhead from just about any filesystem, and something like journaling will only add more.

If you've got something else in mind, feel free to speak-up.

Using large blocks reduces block list overhead at the cost of internal fragmentation. In other words, big blocks mean more wasted space in the last block of each file.

A better approach would be to patch ext3 to store a list of contiguous extents instead of a list of blocks for each file. With the current file system, the block list might look like this:

1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

Whereas with an extent system (which both NTFS and HFS+ use, incidentally), all you have to store is this:

1-4, 10-20

I did some Googling and apparently some work has already been done to get extents into ext3, motivated by the desire to eliminate slow deletion (which I've noticed... deleting a 160GB hard disk image took minutes on ext3, but was instantaneous on NTFS).

AI Algorithms already exist to turn the Internet into a global thinking Artificial Intelligence.

There is no call for a complex filesystem just because you want to store large files. ext2 (and to some extent fat32) will do just fine

Beyond that, I'd say pretty much anything will work fine -- most of the optimizations found in filesystems are needed for lots of small files, not a few large files. For large files, the speeds they can be accessed by various filesystems are not likely to vary more than a few percent unless you let the files get fragmented (which probably isn't a big concern here.)

And you are right -- if something does go wrong, ext2 or ext3 will probably give you the most options for recovering it. NTFS probably has even more recovery options (and FAT even more, as mentioned), but I'm guessing the OS will be *nix. But really, if your goal is reliability, you don't want some esoteric filesystem that can recover from disk errors (because ultimately, none can, though I guess one could be designed to keep ECC codes on the same disk transparantly -- but I'm aware of no such filesystem existing) -- you want multiple copies of your data. Keeping 5-10% (or more) par2 files for your archive can help a lot in recovering it if your media goes partially bad, and having md5sums or CRC32s of all archived files can help determine if you did recover something accurately, but really there's little subsitute for multiple copies of important data in multiple geographical locations. (And no -- RAID is not a subsitute for backups, no matter how many mirrored drives you have. Not that I saw anybody suggest this yet, but it seems to always come up in response to questions like this, so consider this to be a premptive mention of that.)

SpamBayes is a free open-source plug-in for Outlook. It's tiny. No reboot. It gets things wrong a little for the first week or so as you start to train it, but it very rapidly gets much better. Just remember to occasionally check your Junk Mail and Junk Suspects folders for any proper mails that slipped through, and that you do have to cut it some slack while you're training it. After a few weeks, it's extremely accurate. Coupled with AVG Anti-Virus, and your Outlook experience gets rather better.

Recommended.

Aegilops

Still, most people in the 40s and 50s just don't have time for computer games. Between family, work, church/community and other activities (yardwork, household repairs, struggles to get to the gym, etc.), they typically don't have the amount of free time required by most modern computer games. I work out of a home office on a consulting basis, so unless I'm swamped by current engagements, I can easily block out several hours to spend on a game. However, there have been other times in my life when I've had a 'regular' job; during those times, I've gone months or years without playing a computer game for the reasons cited above.

Another downside for older gamers is that the 'costs' of spending lots of time on games are higher--e.g., it can interfere with work (and income), can cause serious marital problems, and so on. I know a man in his early 30s whose marriage is undergoing severe stress largely because of his obsession with HalfLife 2. In my own case, I have from time to time simply thrown away games because I felt I was wasting too much time playing them and not enough time on other projects (books, etc.).

My own preferences tend to be strategy/simulation games, including historical war games and large-scale strategy games (the Civ games and various space-based 4x [eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate] games). I tend to prefer turn-based games over real-time strategy (RTS) games, but have still spent time with the latter (e.g., LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth). I've played several RPGs (e.g., DungeonSiege, Neverwinter Nights, Freelancer) and even some MMORPGs (Earth and Beyond). While first-person shooter (FPS) games are not my first choice, I'll cheerfully play them if the subject matter is interesting; I've bought and played several of the Star Wars FPS games (Republic Commando, Battlefront I and II).

Were I to design for 'grey gamers', I would probably focus on the following:

• Design for short play cycles (30-60 minutes at a time); consider your competition to be an individual TV show.
• Provide easy exit from the game and easy re-entry.
• Emphasize analysis and thought over reflexes.
• Avoid fiendishly difficult puzzles or tasks; we just don't have the frackin' time.
• Allow saves (and restarts) at any point; same reason.
• Design for PCs, not for game consoles

Beyond that, I'd apply some of my own preferences on game design:

• Emphasize game design before eye candy.
• Avoid "railroad" games (i.e., the player is stuck on the rails and can't get off).
• Allow many paths and solutions, including ones you as the designer might not have thought of.
• Avoid arbitrary roadblocks and limits (usually put in to make the designer's job easier).

FWIW. ..bruce..

I get exactly the same sorts of spams on GMail. I also do my own filtering of the same feed with Bogofilter which has problems with the same emails. I don't think it's just a problem with GMail's filters.

I'm the author of XQuest. I've been tempted several times to do an up-to-date port, but (a) I've got a family and hence no time, and (b) the original was written in a mixture of Turbo Pascal and assembly language, so it would have to be more like a complete rewrite rather than a port. The source is available, so if anyone wants to port and/or rewrite it I'd be more than happy to let them do so under the GPL or similar.
It's probably worth mentioning that the original doesn't work under W2K or XP, but works fine in a DOS emulator (such as DosBox).

There's Dirac, of course.

Internet radio doesn't seem to be doing too badly to me. I just checked Shoutcast and there are well over 10,000 stations. There's aren't an excessive amount of ads either (at least on the stations I listen to). As for portability, what I do is usually just leave Streamripper on while I go to class, then fill my mp3 player up with the songs later. Probably isn't 100% legal, but it works and I personally don't find it unethical since it doesn't cut out the ads or anything.

Ultimately we would like WebKit to be nothing more than the embedding APIs for a given platform and infrastructure/glue code that is needed to tie into a specific platform. All of the remaining logic should move to WebCore.

I guess you're referring to the new laws concerning "VZWs/ASBLs" in Belgium here? I'm sure that GnuCash can be a solution! I'm a long time GnuCash user for my personal finances and live in Flanders.

I want to help you setting up GnuCash for your purposes, if you like. Can you point me to guidelines that you have to follow? An overview of account codes, how you have to report to the taxman, etc. I'll pass that on to the GnuCash team so others can benefit from it, too...

If you want to contact me in private, my e-mail address is my slashdot username, followed by @advalvas.be (I speak Dutch and English; my French is rather bad, I'm afraid).

By the way, if you're looking for Windows accounting software, you may also want to take a look at jGnash, GFP or EekBoek. The latter is Dutch software, and is suitable for European style bookkeeping... That's all I know about these tools, though.

I guess you're referring to the new laws concerning "VZWs/ASBLs" in Belgium here? I'm sure that GnuCash can be a solution! I'm a long time GnuCash user for my personal finances and live in Flanders.

I want to help you setting up GnuCash for your purposes, if you like. Can you point me to guidelines that you have to follow? An overview of account codes, how you have to report to the taxman, etc. I'll pass that on to the GnuCash team so others can benefit from it, too...

If you want to contact me in private, my e-mail address is my slashdot username, followed by @advalvas.be (I speak Dutch and English; my French is rather bad, I'm afraid).

By the way, if you're looking for Windows accounting software, you may also want to take a look at jGnash, GFP or EekBoek. The latter is Dutch software, and is suitable for European style bookkeeping... That's all I know about these tools, though.

Maybe Internet radio stations should openly tell people that streaming music can be legitimately recorded for personal use. Audacity (an open-source free sound editor), for instance, can record streamed music; in fact, it teaches you how to do it: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=recordi ng&i=streaming.

Radio music is about "surprises" -- it plays new music you wouldn't have the chance to hear about otherwise. Like the old cassette days when you simply pushed the record button and recorded a whole bunch of songs and later edited out the ones you don't like, you can do the same with streamed music from Internet radio stations.

a large amount of xbox360's non-game hype has been involving its windows media center connectivity etc. ps3 is going to let you store photos, music, tv shows etc on its massive hard drive! yay!
XBMC has that covered, and then some. if you want to browse the internet, just install xbox-linux and use firefox

one of nintendo's big pitches has been the ability to play all those old games without having to blow on the cartridges, jiggle the game, and hold the reset button down, you can easily find ports of all your favorite emulators for the xbox, so that's covered.

and all that's going to cost you is 150 for the old box, 20-30 for a modchip.

When will Dirac be ready?

We hope to get to beta by the end of 2005. This means fixing the bitstream spec and getting the code to conform to it.

X3 Switched several years ago after not wanting to deal with all the dependancies of GNUCash, esp. on Slackware when it didn't support GTK1.

KDE Cruft? That's alot easier to install kdelibs and then Kmymoney2 than all the junk with all the hoops you had to jump through for GNUCash.

For me Kmymoney2 has been a MUCH better application. If you don't want KDE libs, etc. there's always qhacc

Some information on Dirac can be found here and here (PDF warning).

I guess Dirac's time has come.

aristus,
I started looking at erlang in Fall 2004. Its my first serious try at functional programing so I consider my a newbie in functional idioms. However, erlang is not purely functional and is accessible to people with OO experience.
I was a lurker on the erlang-questions maillist for 6 months before making a final decision to start building my apps with erlang. The maillist community is very solid and should be considered a base for your ongoing adoption of erlang.
Here is the maillist and faq link:
http://www.erlang.org/faq.html
If you download any erlang install http://www.erlang.org/download.html, lots of docs are included. There are also some docs not included:
http://www.erlang.org/doc.html
I consider this doc a must read for anyone starting erlang:
http://www.erlang.org/download/erlang-book-part1.p df
The http://www.trapexit.org/ site is a very good portal for docs and the forums are a bi-directional link to the erlang-questions maillist.
The howtos are good to start with:
http://www.trapexit.org/docs/howto/
If you will develop anything requiring a web server, go directly to http://yaws.hyber.org./ Mostly good docs here. Yaws is the most excellent web server written in erlang.
jungerl is a repository of mostly small erlang libraries. Lots of good tools and example code in here:
http://jungerl.sourceforge.net/
ejabberd http://ejabberd.jabber.ru/, a jabber server in erlang, is an excellent example of how to put together a large distributed web based system in erlang.

nothing is perfect, but erlang's benefits to me far outway its rough edges...hopefully, you will experience the same.
good luck...

Apple has supported GIMP-print this way for a while now. Granted, they weren't giving them laptops. But, people working on GIMP-print got iMacs and were given special discounts on buying other macs for personal use.

It's a great model. Hopefully, they will continue to do it for years to come.

I've been using Gnucash for close to two years now. It was the final step to me ditching my Windows install, since I was using Quicken before.

Gnucash isn't perfect, but it's got everything I need to keep track of things. I do all my entry manually, although I have imported a few times just testing (I prefer my own formatting and such and don't care which gas station, etc., just that it was a gas station).

I figure if I'd been upgrading Quicken versions, I'd have spent at least $50. Plus, I would like be able to link to a Windows port on my Free GPL Programs page which I list all the apps I use that others should check out on Windows.

I decided to donate to the cause. Hopefully others who use Gnucash will consider tipping the developers. I'm sure even $5, especially if it's dozens of folks, will help motivate them.

I wish I had the time to bug-test v1.9, but I don't, so I'll tip a little more ;-)'

I've been using Gnucash for close to two years now. It was the final step to me ditching my Windows install, since I was using Quicken before.

Gnucash isn't perfect, but it's got everything I need to keep track of things. I do all my entry manually, although I have imported a few times just testing (I prefer my own formatting and such and don't care which gas station, etc., just that it was a gas station).

I figure if I'd been upgrading Quicken versions, I'd have spent at least $50. Plus, I would like be able to link to a Windows port on my Free GPL Programs page which I list all the apps I use that others should check out on Windows.

I decided to donate to the cause. Hopefully others who use Gnucash will consider tipping the developers. I'm sure even $5, especially if it's dozens of folks, will help motivate them.

I wish I had the time to bug-test v1.9, but I don't, so I'll tip a little more ;-)'

it's called find
And yes, there's a windows port

http://regain.sourceforge.net/

Ah darn, I didn't reply fast enough so now I might get flamed for a duplicate post. THEN, I go to the UltraVNC web site http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/index.html and see that you CAN do file transfers. Doh!
--
Now switching from VNC to UltraVNC.... Please hold while we make this adjustment....

Now, I have nothing bad to say about GnuCash. It's a good program and served me well when I used it. I only mention KMyMoney as an alternative worth considering.

My bad. gamma = dt/dtau, gamma beta = dx/dtau.

Someday we will have open source software to do analytic animations, and then quaternions may get the respect might deserve (I am an ultra-conservative fringe guy).

doug
http://quaternions.sourceforge.net/

The sever keeps logs that look something like this
127.0.0.1 - - [06/Feb/2006:12:43:14 -0500] "GET /LabMage.css HTTP/1.1" 304 -
127.0.0.1 - - [06/Feb/2006:12:43:12 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 49238
127.0.0.1 - - [06/Feb/2006:12:43:15 -0500] "GET /index.php?=PHPE9568F34-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF4 2 HTTP/1.1" 200 4644
127.0.0.1 - - [06/Feb/2006:12:43:16 -0500] "GET /index.php?=PHPE9568F35-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF4 2 HTTP/1.1" 200 2146
127.0.0.1 - - [06/Feb/2006:12:43:27 -0500] "POST /index.php HTTP/1.1" 200 9577
127.0.0.1 - - [06/Feb/2006:12:43:29 -0500] "GET /toolbars/LocalePressed.png HTTP/1.1" 404 283
which shows that Ip address 127.0.0.1, localhost, the time of access and the image LocalePressed.png wasn't found (I'll have to fix that).
anything more detailed you'd probably have to download and analyse slashcode, most of the good stuff is probably in the karma system which I understand isn't under the GPL

If you haven't seen this project, check out http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. These tools end up on every windows machine I use. Make sure to grab the updates. Especially helpful on windows are the pclip and gclip utilities. Copy any text to the windows clipboard and the pclip utility will output the clipboard contents to STDOUT while glcip will take STDIN and put it into the clipboard. It's very useful.

commercial site, open source site & sourceforge site

We are currently killing bugs in the OSS system, adding more app support and adding mutual authentication. Then we will make it less 'rpm-based' for other distros. feedback is very welcome. disclosure: i am with the company.

There's ClamWin (SourceForge page), although I'm unsure of its detection rates and how it compares to other free (but only as in beer) alternatives like AVG, Avast!, and AntiVir.