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The only MP3 player that I know of which will work with a non-FAT filesystem is the iPod, which on the Mac can be formatted as HFS/HFS+. Unfortunately, I don't think this is really going to help you as a Linux user, as you'll probably need a Mac to reinitialize/reformat the iPod to use HFS/HFS+, may need to install extra software to be able to

The iPod looks like any other usb-storage device to a Linux system. In order to switch the iPod to HFS+ using a Linux system, you will need to compile support into your Kernel for "Apple's Extended HFS File System" and "Macintosh partition map support" which is available in both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. You will also need HFSUtils which are installed with Slackware (I don't know about other distros).

mount HFS/HFS+ partitions under Linux, and will need to run iTunes through some sort of emulator to manage your music. Ick.

Or you could use one of the open source iPod applications such as gtkpod, gnupod, mypod, or one of many others. I've only used GTKPod which has worked great for me.

Why wait for xfs/reiser support? I needed a file system that could handle >4GB files and read/writable from Windows and Linux - I ended up installing Ext2FSD and it does the job nicely.

You know, a lot of Linux distros offer libwmf. Any word on potential fallout there?

[...] without needing some weird limiting technology to unlock the content.

I had a fairly simple idea for getting around the ereader (or indeed just about any other kind of) ebook encryption, using the analog hole:

Essentially, write a small script (using something like WinBatch on Windows) to automate paging through the book - with a nice clear large black font and white background - and take a screenshot for each page, saving as page001.bmp (or whatever). Then use an OCR program (eg. JOCR) to interpret the images into plain text.

Does the ECMA spec (and attached licence) say anything at all about patents?

Why, yes! It appears that any Microsoft patents covering ECMA parts of .NET are permissively licensed. This permissive license does not necessarily extend to System.Windows.Forms ("winforms"), but if the Mono developers discover essential patents that encumber winforms, they'll simply suggest that developers of free software switch to Gtk#.

"but it is as much a UNIX distribution as Windows 98 was a DOS version."

That's a poor compairison. You have a POSIX system under the hood in OS X. Not even close with Win98 or DOS. And you have access to a lot of FOSS tools with OSX. As mentioned, check out the developer's tools and X11 on the CD and install fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net./ You'll find many FOSS apps and tools ported to OS X.

That'd pretty spendy for a DVD. (Probably dual layer.) Anyhow, I would probably give them multiple dvds of different brands, and a couple dvds with the actual ISO's of the dvds on them. I would also include Par2 files for the ISO's so that if there is data loss, it can be reconstructed from the par2 files. This is a longer process, but it much more rendundant than a single dvd.

QuickPar - Par2 windows client
Main site for par/par2 files

I have not been following C# at all, but tell me: is this ability to query objects anything like the Query Object Framework?

I've never used the QOF to be honest, but I'm always trying to find a reason to :) Apparently Gnucash uses it for it's reporting engine. It effectively lets you write SQL-like queries and run them on your objects. For Gnucash at least, this means that an end user can create their entirely own reports by just writing the query for the report.

Be sure to understand that it does not use a SQL database for this. All of the classes inherit from a base QOF class and with a few lines of code, your class 'automatically' becomes queriable.

I think the whole concept is amazing and it astounds me that it seems to be only Gnucash that uses it...

So, back to my original question, I guess: is this C# feature the same concept? I'm assuming that it would probably be a bit tighter, maybe, without having to do those extra few lines of code?

Fitting that you would recommend FUD when your post is full of it.

phpBB has currently had 19 releases since it's initial March 3, 2002 release (ref). How the fuck you would construe this to every 3 or 4 days is beyond me. You know - if you don't care about factual accuracy (and you obviously don't, since your post doesn't contain any) why not deny the Holocaust, as well? Obviously that didn't happen, did it? Obviously, it's all an anti-semetic plot, isn't it? Fucker.

GUatu, the comic reader with the funny name, is what I use. Nice opengl-accelerated viewer. http://guatu.sourceforge.net/

My guess is that they use an "updated" mp3 decoder...this has been going on forever, at least 5 or 6 years. Check out this from the wayback machine.

Apple has specifically asked developers to not release builds with Intel code in them, until there is actual shipping Intel hardware.

Here's two! ;-)

Although I suppose they're both things more likely to be used by developers with the appropriate Intel development hardware to run them on - I guess Apple's edict is more of a strong guideline than a definitive rule. It would be silly to bloat downloads of consumer software and add confusion for 99.99+% of the market, anyway, I imagine.

Hauppage make this Windows only thing:

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/mediamvp_datasheet.h tm

but once you replace the OS with the Linux version:

http://mvpmc.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=main

it does fairly well as a MythTV front end. The Linux version is still in it's infancy so there are the normal teething problems (hangs, audio sync problems, etc.) but I've had one for about a month now and it does well enough for me.

The big wins are that it is absolutly silent (no fans at all) and it's about CAN$130 or the equivalent in US$

IMHO, C/C++ is far from dying. It's getting stronger than ever atleast in the realm of software engineering. I see it finding it's nitch closer to the hardware and in core of advanced software where speed and optimization is important.

Dunno what you mean by "advanced software", but C has its place when programming near hardware. C++ will hopefully die and take buffer overflows and memory leaks with it.

Like, you wouldn't write a 3D game engine in java, atleast not yet anyway.

Quake 2 remade in Java runs just fine. It does use LWJGL, since Java doesn't have native OpenGL bindings - but the engine itself is pure enough Java to go through the Sun's JDK compiler without warnings.

Of course, there's Java3D, but I don't know how much native code it has.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum is FreeCol, which has less features than the old DOS version but requires 256 MB RAM to run and takes second-long garbage collection pauses on a 1 GHZ Duron, and has severe bugs relating to Java memory model (it starts threads from object constructors; fixing this made the problem go away) that make it throw NullPointerExceptions and misbehave when run with the parallel garbage collector. I guess some people can program and some can't...

For comics:

http://comix.sourceforge.net/ (which I personally recommend)
http://icculus.org/6reader/ (haven't tried yet, but if it's hosted by icculus it's worth a shot)

I wouldn't say that the choices listed are necessarily bad, but I'd take ffmpeg over Xvid and what's Apache without a good OS to run it on? I don't see any Linux distribution (or the kernel for that matter), nor any mention of FreeBSD

• Wikipedia
  
• Firefox
  
• OpenOffice
  
• BitTorrent
  
• MediaWiki
  
• Xvid
  
• phpBB
  
• Outfoxed
  
• Dyne:bolic
  
• GIMP
  
• Apache
  
• SourceForge
  

Well, although its just a JRE, I find that Eclipse runs fine using the blackdown JRE. I haven't developed using the blackdown sdk, but I'd consider running eclipse just fine at least one point in favor of blackdown's usabiliy as a Java environment.

Secondly, Eclipse is more than a Java IDE. It has so many damn plugins it literally is a swiss army knife, albeit a bloated one. I personally use pydev for eclipse as my python editor.

Filezilla is one of the best applications I've used because it's a great, free FTP client.

I've heard that about Ubuntu. Another option to try may be Slackware. I've had zero trouble getting Slackware to work on any laptop on which I've installed it.

I know it's no Acer, but I'm writing this from a Toshiba Satellite A75-S2112 running Slackware 10.1. The only "special" thing I had to do was install the madwifi from source to get the on-board Atheros wireless to work. Other than that, with Slackware, everything worked right out of the gate on this laptop, and every other laptop I've tried.

My 2 cents.

You're better off with using nLite. This will strip down the install cd, then lets you create a new iso that you can burn to cd. I don't see a mention on the XPlite site of this capability. And, nLite is free whereas XPlite is paid software.
I've used nLite to strip XP sp2 to a 130MB iso and installed it on the laptop from work. It has 512 MB ram but I can run two virtual XP sessions with Virtual PC, have Firefox open with a dozen tabs, nvu, several rdp sessions, plenty of explorer windows, some other smaller utilities and the only time it slows down is when I haven't used it for hours and switch desktops with Virtual Dimension.

Run WindowMaker instead of KDE or Gnome. It'll work just fine, and likely better than Windows.

Actually, run something along the lines of Fvwm95 for comparison against Microsoft Windows95... with a similar menu and layout scheme, it'll run circles around it, and even give you 4 desktops.

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Wicket in this thread. It is a component-based framework in the same mold as Tapestry but is a lot easier to work with...

I had thought that maybe FFmpeg could encode WMA's (even an older version), but alas I was wrong. It seems we can only decode them. Oh well. If MS doesn't want everyone to be able to use their format then that's their concern. It does however reveal their motivation behind creating their own format and codecs...

You'll not soon find an open source GPS receiver with routing like TomTom. The routing databases sell for substantial amounts of money and even if you could buy them as a stand-alone product, they're in a proprietary undocumented format.

It's the easiest/most well written java web framework I've seen thus far. So much so in fact that I've started contributing to it in the 4.1 version. It also has many cool components ;) ( tacos )

"However, Tapestry applications are 100% container agnostic ... Tapestry doesn't care what servlet container it is used with and does not even require an EJB container."

Sorry for what must sound like a technical support question, but is it possible to run Tapestry in a lightweight HTTP server such as Simple? It uses the usual HttpRequest/HttpResponse API for dealing with requests and has a minimal footprint. Can I call something in the Tapestry API and pass it the request to render the page?

Or can anyone recommend any other lightweight Java HTML generation frameworks that don't require full-blown servlet containers such as Tomcat?

I'm more interested in hearing when they start packing full seasons of standard-definition content onto a single disc that they can sell for a reasonable price, instead of the >$100 prices that some sets have been going for. (I.e. $338 for CSI on Amazon)

With H.264 encoding allegedly taking up half the space of MPEG-4 ASP/DivX, which itself takes up roughly 1/7th the space of MPEG-2 DVDs (assuming a 650M CD DivX holds the 2hr content of a 4.5GB movie) -- that's 28 hrs of content on a 4.5G DVD, or 140 hrs of content on a 23GB BD disc!)

...and since this is Slashdot, I should mention that if you pick up a BluRay player or buy MPAA movies, you should take up Lessig's challenge and donate an equal amount of money to the EFF... </obYRO>

You mean "Sony v. Universal Studios"

Yes, thanx. That's the right title of the Betamax case. I wasn't paying attention and I wrote it wrong.

determine if there are substantial non-infringing uses

I'd like to quote the Supreme Court's exact rule: "it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses".

That is in fact a rather difficult test to fail. I am not aware of any product ever failing that test. The Supreme Court knew full well that it was a test that was almost impossible to fail, and they explained themselves quite well why they ruled that way. That an innocent inventor creating a new product for some legitimate purpose cannot be expected to have some crystal ball to know what percentage of users will use it in what way, and that he is not responsible for people who turn that product to some other illegal use. The basic principal that spoon inventors and spoon sellers are not responsible if people start using spoons to commit murder.

as we recently saw in the Grokster case, the key phrase is "non-infringing uses".

No, you are misstating the Grokster case. The Grokster result had absolutely nothing to do with non-infringing uses.

The Grokster case absolutely affirms the Betamax ruling that Grokster cannot be sued simply for making P2P software, even if that software is overwhelmingly used to infringe. That Betamax is an almost absolute shield against being sued for making and providing a product.

What Grokster says is that that does not prevent you from being sued for doing other things. Well duh, if you commit murder while selling VCRs, Betamax is obviously not a sheild against being held liable for that other illegal act.

Grokster did not lose for making and providing the P2P product that they did. That was perfectly legal.

What Grokster was held liable for was something completely separate. They were held liable for running advertizements essentially telling people to commit infringment. They would have been liable for that even if they had not been providing P2P software at all.

Grokster would have won had the P2P product been exactly the same, if only they didn't tell people they should use it to break the law.

I can sell spoons, but I am going to lose just like Grokster lost if I run ads saying that you should use my spoons to run around gouging random people's hearts out.

Spoons are legal and Grokster's P2P is legal. Telling someone to commit a crime is not.

As presented, there are very few non-infringing uses for the device qua file-sharing device since everyone involved in the sharing must have the copyright holder's permission to share the files.

Did you even read my whole post before jumping to post? How did you possible miss the part where I stated that I have an entire folder on my computer of public domain and Creative Commons music files, and that is is absolutely legal for anyone and everyone to distribute and redistribute those files as much as they like. iRate alone has probably close to a hundred thousand such songs that are perfectly legal to redistribute, and I am aware of many other sources for tons more music that is perfectly legal to redistribute.

You can even do an Advanced Google search restricted to Creative Commons works that are free to share. Doing a "free to share" search on the term MP3 gets over 3 million hits. The Creative Commons website has many links to sites with free to share content. And this website has a bazillion links to free music, many of which are explicitly free to redistribute.

-

For some reason the text doesn't render properly in kpdf under kubuntu. The offical Acrobat reader is so bloated, it's a pain to have to use it :(

But then why look at the real sky, when you can use Stellarium? The Stellarium User Guide contains a mini sky-guide for the Northern Hemisphere. Anyone in the South care to contribute one for your half of the night sky?

I personally like gFTP, but FZ 3 will have native Linux support. See development diary. Or perhaps you want some nightly builds?

Under Networking, how about FileZilla? It's an excellent FTP client. It'd be great if it were ported to Linux, then I could dump gFTP which doesn't do so well with queues and is a bit of a pain to use...

You missed some!

Network

putty for SSH (even commandline SCP which rules), wget for sucking down the web, opera if you don't like firefox, and some form of bittorrent client, like bitcomet.

Utilities

gvim, unxutils or in a pinch some downloads from the gnuwin32 tools, tools from SysInternals.

Multimedia

Don't forget Mediaplayer classic (MPC) which by happy coincedence is included in the k-lite mega codec pack (from codecpack.nl).

Security

grisoft AV, tools from SysInternals.

You missed some!

Network

putty for SSH (even commandline SCP which rules), wget for sucking down the web, opera if you don't like firefox, and some form of bittorrent client, like bitcomet.

Utilities

gvim, unxutils or in a pinch some downloads from the gnuwin32 tools, tools from SysInternals.

Multimedia

Don't forget Mediaplayer classic (MPC) which by happy coincedence is included in the k-lite mega codec pack (from codecpack.nl).

Security

grisoft AV, tools from SysInternals.

You missed some!

Network

putty for SSH (even commandline SCP which rules), wget for sucking down the web, opera if you don't like firefox, and some form of bittorrent client, like bitcomet.

Utilities

gvim, unxutils or in a pinch some downloads from the gnuwin32 tools, tools from SysInternals.

Multimedia

Don't forget Mediaplayer classic (MPC) which by happy coincedence is included in the k-lite mega codec pack (from codecpack.nl).

Security

grisoft AV, tools from SysInternals.

For their XP userbase, they should have included ClamWin instead.

But, ClamWin is unlikely to pay Google for distribution like Symantec.
Ditto with Spybot vis-a-vis LavaSoft.
Et PDFCreator v. Adobe.

For their XP userbase, they should have included ClamWin instead.

But, ClamWin is unlikely to pay Google for distribution like Symantec.
Ditto with Spybot vis-a-vis LavaSoft.
Et PDFCreator v. Adobe.

polliwog (http://polliwog.sourceforge.net/ will tell you exactly what EACH and EVERY visitor to your site did, i.e. what pages they visited. The server logs tell all!

Bragging rights?

Guess again.

Just because you think video cards are only for gaming doesn't make it so. There are people using video cards for scientific and medical visualization, and saving lives doing it.

I thought Tivo2Go was cool until I found this source forge project Galleon. It can do everything the Tivo2Go program can do and more. Which means it can transfer video to your PC, play mp3s, view photos from your PC!

One of the key features it has is the ability to put shows BACK on your Tivo. But that feature doesn't impress my friends as much as the email viewer, the movie listings, and the weather forecasts. I realize that MythTV has some of these features, but this improves the fun you can have with Tivo.

I am sure the slashdot crew could find even more interesting uses for this application (RSS feeds). And since the application supports plugins you can write you own Tivo apps.

I also appreciate that Tivo ALLOWS this kind of things on their box. They could be all "closed source" and shut programs like this down. They hold Tivo Developer Challenges to find more useful ways to use the Tivo. They know when people have hacked their Tivo and added a larger hard drive but choose not to shut them down.

I can't stress it enough. If you have Tivo, and you have a computer take a look at Galleon.

Does it run BrickOS?

Eclipse works very fine for Pythyon with the PyDev plugin.

Thanks for a thoughtful post.

And why are softwares so buggy and have such a lousy reputation anyway? Not to start a flamewar, but let's just list a few possible "reaons" here:

I think, to be honest, that it is a combination of a number of the factors you mention.

Why aren't schools teaching this methodoly thoroughly? Why aren't this toolset and programming language taught in school by default?

To do proper formal specification, one of the key parts of Praxis' Correct by Construction approach, does require a decent solid mathematical background. I think a lot of CS departments, facing students who want vocational training, struggle to demand the sort of mathematical requirements that are needed. As to SPARK - it is something that Praxis developed themselves, and it is proprietary (the toolset at least, the annotation language is well documented). You can pick up a book and learn the language, but the tools cost money if you want to use them commercially. On the other hand, the base specification language Praxis uses, Z, is entirely open, and there are a variety of freely available tools for it. There are also other specification langauges (I quite like CASL which has a number of useful extensions) that have freely available tools associated with them. There's also JML and ESC/Java2 which are freely available and seek to provide the same sort of functionality or Java that SPARK adds to Ada. There are places that teach JML, but they are still few and far between.

Programmers are asked to do the impossible.

I think this is a big part of it in some ways. Partly this is because, for a large number of software projects, the degree of exactness and quality just isn't required. I don't need a professional architect to help me build a doghouse in my backyard (though I'd certainly want one if I was building a skyscraper), and I don't need assurances of bug free software for a simple web front-end to a database. At the same time programmers are often unwilling to let customers know exactly what the limits are when developing software. To quote you: "If a customer dares to ask a civil engineer to add 2 more stories between the 3rd and 4th floor after the custom-built building is finished, guess what would the civil engineer say?"; if software engineers aren't prepared to stand up for quality and tell customers that somethings can't be done without sacrificing the quality of the product the problem will remain. In part I think this is due to the fact that software development is a young industry, and programmers are still of the mentality that they need to do everything they possibly can to please a customer. Partly it's because software projects are diverse (as are building projects!) and sometimes it's okay to make late changes; sometimes it's how things ought to be done - the key is to identify exactly what sort of project it is as early as you can. Are you building a treehouse for your kids, which doesn't require exactness and benefits from incremental design and feedback, or are you building a 4 story building where quality is important, and late changes will jepordise that?

Programmers are a bunch of bozos who know shit about proper engineering.

Sadly this is partly the case. There are an awful lot of cowboys out there when it comes to software engineering. There are, of course, a lot of fantastic programmers as well who are otherwise beset by some of the other points mentioned. There is, however, a remarkable degree of tolerance for cowboys, sloppiness and lack of quality in software engineering that you don't see in other engineering disciplines. Partly I thin

NQC is great, but for those Java enthusiasts out there, take a peek at a micro implementation of Java called LeJOS (http://lejos.sourceforge.net./ It's got a great set of APIs, including some nice implemenations of classic Robotics design patterns such as Behaviors, BehaviorListeners, Arbitrators, etc... Very versatile.

Open-source AYTTM already has a feature to translate your IMs via Babelfish. Gaim has a plugin for Babelfish translation as well.

And even with preview, I screw up "ayttm". Might as well include links too...

everybuddy WAS at everybuddy.com, but a quick look says it's been squatted.

AYTTM is at http://ayttm.sourceforge.net/

And the feature I miss most from them seems to be coming to gaim in 2.x (all conversations with one person in a single chat window, regardless of protocol)

I certainly have enough old code laying around to parse enough different config files. There are three advantages to XML. The first is that it is text-based, so you can write it from any programming language that can write text to files, or your favorite text editor. That doesn't set it apart from any other text file format. The second is that there are lots of libraries and tools for dealing with it in any programing language. You don't have to write, debug and maintain tools to parse it. The third is only an advantage if you use it right. That is, the tags and attributes document what your data is. If you do it wrong, your data can end up looking like sloppy ASN.1 littered with angle brackets.

Bluetooth mindstorm has been done before, even though not in the easiest way, in mobilerobotics :P

But almost http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc

Elite is mostly obsolete by now, anyway. Even as someone who does not insist on highly polished graphics, I find it no longer adequate. Apart from that, it has some cool features but also annoying bugs.

For newer versions of the Elite theme, consider the following:
-Freelancer
-X3 (beware of Starforce)
-Vega Strike http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/. This one is open source, and while it is still somewhat incomplete, I find it quite promising.