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Not every .NET library can be rewritten without patent licensing from Microsoft.

Yes they can if Microsoft has already granted a permissive patent license on the core components of the .NET framework, namely those which have been submitted to ECMA. If it turns out that System.Windows.Forms is encumbered, that just means that all new apps will be developed on Gtk# instead.

Because it wasn't done at the time XP was released (2001). Since it was released, they have, however, made it available as an optional component via Windows Update. They will of course be including it with every new operating system: the Compact Framework has already been included since Pocket PC 2003, it's in Server 2003 and it sure as hell will be in Vista.

As a developer of consumer software, I'm loath to burden my 6 MB download with the 20MB millstone of the .NET framework

Many of the smaller Java applications don't bundle the JVM either (although some include it as an option), and it's worked out just fine for them. If a user can download your software (if you're on a slow modem, 6MB is nothing to sneeze at), they sure as hell can download one (1) executable file and go through the painful process of double-clicking it to install the framework. I'm pretty sure if you can't walk your grandmother through that, you won't walk her through installing your software, either.

Absolutely. All I get concerned about is the idea that because some projects are far faster with Ruby alone or with Rails, then this is a general advantage that this sort of development technique will have over Java in all circumstances for all scales of project.

Ah, well, we're in agreement there! I'm a firm believer in using the right tool for the right job, and as you say, sometimes Ruby isn't the right tool for the job. Java does have some neat libraries and APIs, and alternative languages for the JVM like Nice, Groovy or Scala, can make one's life quite a bit simpler. You also get the performance advantage, which is always nice.

Where I am it is time to say Merry Christmas!

Here too. Merry Christmas! :)

I agree 100% with you. I use Ruby but I've often wondered why TCL isn't mentioned as frequently.

I think TCL is overlooked far too often. One reason might be the incorrect assumption that TCL/Tk products look rather awful compared to products written in other languages using other GUI toolkits.

While searching for GUI toolkits with a BSD/MIT license, I came across this and was pleasantly surprised by the screenshots.

http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/

...is a good guy to write this sort of thing since he's been programming Java for a long time and has also branched out into "dynamic Java" things like Groovy. He's done a bunch of stuff on dbUnit (including a dbUnit chapter in Java Testing Patterns), too. So he's had enough experience with Java to know what's what.

I'm probably biased, though, since Andy also wrote the CPD Ant task.

Mind.Forth artificial intelligence came of age in 2005.

Well I estimate it wouldn't take Google much longer than about 3 month to rip off their picture visualizing engine and integrate it into my cross-platform Earth mockup (see http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=ear th.html). Before you ask, no, I can't build this engine myself.

O. Wyss

[...] who in their right mind doesn't flag a warning for unbraced if? [...] But with python, it's literally impossible to compile time check for this error.

x = 2
if x == 1:
print "x == 1!"

...will result in an IndentationError exception in Python. Try it and see. The only way to have an empty (ie. no code) if-clause in Python is to use the (properly indented) keyword "pass". It's the same if you want to have an empty function or class body.

You may also find tools like PyChecker useful for more involved "compile" time checking.

Or Nant...

Our developers use VS.Net for local build and testing, then our daily build is run with a combination of FinalBuilder running nant scripts. Nant is a cake to configure.

I'd recommend a USB-2 tuner instead of PCI

Finding one that works right can be a bit of a challenge. Most of the USB video-capture devices I've run across deinterlace everything they capture, which makes it impossible to do inverse 3:2 pulldown before burning to DVD. Some of them are video-only, which leaves you capturing the audio with your soundcard. That can lead to nasty A/V sync problems unless you use something like Virtual VCR to correct for the sync problems.

So far, the only USB capture box I'd recommend (for whatever that's worth) is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVRUSB2. It's a bit more bulky than most (an issue if you plan to haul it around with your notebook), but it captures video and audio and compresses to MPEG-2. There's even a Linux driver for it. The capture hardware is the same as what you would get in their PCI MPEG-capture boards (like the WinTV-PVR150), which is pretty good.

colors = window.screen.colorDepth;
if (navigator.appName == "Netscape")
{
width = window.innerWidth;
height = window.innerHeight;
}
else
{
width = document.body.clientWidth;
height = document.body.clientHeight;
}
document.write ("<img style=display:none src=/cookies/?w=" +width blah blah);

That gets us a hit to a script which logs the sizes. Then you need to check out what your logs say with something like awstats or analog. We're more interested in sizes of browser windows than sizes of monitors, because we aren't the kind of thugs to go around resizing people's windows without asking them.

AI has been solved not only in theory but in software.

C:\Windows\Desktop\Mind.html is a Seed AI that will soon bring about not merely social change but social upheavals with the disruptive technology of runaway artificial intelligence.

AGI Radar presents the most promising groups and individuals pursuing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The AGI Mail List is where the greatest brains of social-change AGI spread the memetic pollen of Seed AI.

Mind.Forth is currently the most advanced open-source AI in the world.

You could look at pychecker; it will catch these kinds of problems.

http://pychecker.sourceforge.net/

So my general recommendation would be Gtk2-Perl (as a Rapid devel HLL/platform)
or C + glib + Gtk for those who don't really want lots of complex OO design
stuff and just want something like C. Plain old functions, nice datastructures.

I am not a IDE person. I use vim/make ect ...
Eclipse makes a perl IDE (I've never used it) and a C IDE ( ditto )

Gtk2-Perl is a nice easy way to write apps theat are graphical. gtk2-perl
The irc channel is helpful as well.

Especially is you know a little perl.
CPAN (a perl module archive) is amazing for providing "glue modules" to just about anything.
PAR lets you package the final result as a single file/executable as well if you are writing it for multiple systems or
more than yourself.

In General, Gtk2 is portable and a nice environment. If you do C development glib (a prereq for Gtk2) ..
C + Gtk + glib is a nice portable sane environment with all the basic advanced data structures a programmer
would need for real programs.

Garick

./configure; make >Log.make 2>&1;
grep warning Log.make | wc -l
            461
grep 'returned 1 exit status' Log.make | wc -l
            121

461 compile-time warnings (almost all pointer/integer size problems) and 121 fatal link errors does qualify as "disaster area" in my book.

I am *very* glad to hear that the build portability problems of 0.98 and 0.99 on x86_64 have now been addressed. I'm looking forward hugely to retrying with new sources.

The write once, run anywhere "Promise" is a big lie. Try to write a swing app and run it on windows, linux and OSX to see what i mean.

Azeurus
IntelliJ IDEA

And while not Swing-based... Eclipse??

It's not a big lie, but it's not perfect. And it's arguably more pervasive that other so-called "cross platform UI toolkits", which if you'll recall in the late 1990's, were pretty rare...

People you can donate to CrystalSpace if you want. I think they deserve it!!! If you have paypal you can use this linnk https://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id= 649. I believe there are also some other possibilities on the CS donation page

If you want an IDE for Ruby, I would recommend http://rubyeclipse.sourceforge.net/ for non-radrails programming or http://radrails.org/ for rails programming. Both are plugins to Eclipse and work pretty well. I probably don't hate Java as much as you, but Ruby definitely is a more powerful (as in language features) and concise than Java ever will be. To me, Sun had a chance to do something really interesting and productive during the Self days and they chose to dumb down C++. I'll just never be gung-ho about Java. But they do have some good tools...that's for sure. Ruby with a Smalltalk-like environment would be very powerful; and don't forget about the VM coming in Ruby 2.0 which should give it some more cred in the corporate environment.

It is true that as a scripting language Python is slower than (byte)compiled languages.

Python IS byte-compiled.

But it is slower by a constant factor. In other words people would say "Your Python solution is 4x slower than my Java solution!".

I'm not sure what the significance of this is. It is not possible to accurately predict the performance differential prior to actually trying it. Once you try something, you can see that it takes X times as long as something else, which means if you upgrade the hardware appropriately (CPU and/or memory bandwidth), your performance will increase accordingly. This is true of anything, including writing something in C and then rewriting it to go faster.

The point is that application that required C 15-20 years ago can probably be re-written in Python now.

That is rather understating the case. 20 years ago many of us were using 1 MHz 8-bit machines. Hardware is now commonly 2 GHz 64-bit machines. That's more than a 16,000-fold increase. Python is a lot better than 1/16000th the speed of C.

Depending on what you're doing, it can be nearly as fast as C, if you are using a standard module which is implemented in C. E.g. various forms of text processing and even image processing (PIL).

If you are using a lot of Python code instead, you might be 1/10th or 1/100th the speed of C. Then you use http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ If that's not fast enough, it often turns out that just re-writing a small part in C (the main bottleneck) can speed things up dramatically.

You also have to keep in mind that a multiple-factor is not the only important part. For example, if you have a 3D game engine that is controlled by Python and does its rendering in C, the Python framework might take 1 ms per frame whereas the C framework might only take 0.1 ms. Only 1/10th the speed, you think? Not at all, because your theoretical framerate (1,000 fps vs 10,000 fps) is not important when the actual rendering in C takes 30 ms either way. Total frametime is 31 ms vs 30.1 ms, which is 32.25 fps vs 33.22 fps, less than 1 FPS difference. Additionally, if your graphics card is the bottleneck, it won't matter as much that you're burning extra CPU on Python, because you're already sending the GPU about as much as it can handle.

Why oh why do people feel they need to say the same things everytime a discussion about Java starts up. Slow, memory hogging, swing sucks, etc, etc. These arguments simply are not true about modern JVM's

As for Swing's problems: not truly native look & feel (doesn't behave like other Windows/Mac apps),

I love to hear this argument. OK...can you show me what a native windows app should look like? Why don't we take a look at Microsoft Office. You will note that microsoft doesn't even use a consistent L&F between different versions of office. Please repeat after me...there is no such thing as a truly native look and feel. Apple now uses 4 different L&Fs for the applications they write. What is the native L&F on Linux (Motif, KDE, Gnome, etc...what theme?). Look, here's an article that discusses it: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10633 In Java, you can set the look and feel to be platform native. The problem is a lot of folks set there app to use the Java L&F (Metal) which does stand out and is down right butt-ugly. This is the developers choice, not a problem with Java.

terrible event model (bad queuing design - pretty much mandates a separate gui thread),

Can you explain to me what's wrong with Java's event queue? I do a great deal of swing programming and I find the event queue very simple to work with. Generally you can ignore it. If you have long running actions (such as long database transactions) you can fire them off in a seperate thread or use SwingWorker or Foxtrot http://foxtrot.sourceforge.net/docs/toc.php. If you don't understand the threading model, just say so, don't rag on it.

slow slow slow, memory hogging, even more increase in startup time.

Here's a few benchmarks:

• Since we're talking about Ruby..let's compare Ruby and Java -> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?te st=all&lang=javaclient&lang2=ruby..whoa Ruby got smoked!
• Let's look at a few numerical benchmarks: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602&page= 3. Java doesn't do to hot on the trig part here but on all other parts of the test it's comparible to C++.

I could go on, but for a serious GUI app (e.g. a desktop front-end to a web app) its performance is unacceptable and it is too buggy. In our testing, it was not very cross-platform either. We ended up having a fair amount of platform-specific code.

Them's fighting words!! ;-) Please oh please stop spreading such lies though. Look, I just wrote a database app that's used for annotating video data in real time. Not only is it plenty fast enough but it's cross-platform. There's no platform specific code in it what-so-ever.

p.s. Happy Holidays

2. Excel has a Text to Column Feature, I have never found in OO.org

You can get that here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=87718&package_id=104183

Nope. I won't agree to that, for one simple reason -- whitespace has meaning in Python.

A university cannot make a programming language choice that introduces unnecessary barriers to blind students. Python does so. Wow, thanks for that bit of news. I guess I will have to tell the blind guy at work he can't use Python.

I think we are coming from different backgrounds here - strongly-typed(Java,C#,Ada,etc) vs weakly-typed (many scripting languages, assembly, etc) languages...

Quite a few modern scriping languages, such as Python and Ruby, are strongly typed, just as Java and C# are. The difference between these is that Python and Ruby are dynamically typed, and Java and C# statically typed. This all said, I'm a professional Java developer with a couple of qualifications in C++ as well, so I do know a little about statically typed languages.

for example your code:

foobar = SomeCustomClassName()

is that a declaration or a reassignment? what object type is foobar? By declaring a variable, I am referring to declaring its type, which the above doesn't do, adding a 'var' in front doesnt remedy this. Declaring the variable type at compile time can drastically reduce the amount of runtime errors that occur, as they are caught at compile time instead.

The above is a valid compile time declaration. In answer to your question, the above is a declaration iff the variable 'foobar' has not been previously definied. As to working out what object type foobar is - that's the whole point of strong typing! The foobar variable is assigned the type that SomeCustomClassName() returns.

To give you an idea of what I mean, the code below would generate a type error at compile time:

foobar = SomeClass()

// foobar hasn't been defined before, so the above assignment
// is a declaration, not a reassignment. The type that SomeClass()
// returns is 'SomeClass', so foobar is assigned the type
// 'SomeClass'

foobar = AnotherClass()

// the above causes a compile time error, because foobar has
// already been defined as type 'SomeClass' by the previous line
// of code, and AnotherClass() returns type 'AnotherClass',
// which is not compatable with 'SomeClass'

If you're still not convinced, take a glance at the following code:

var foobar = new FooBar();

This is valid Nice code, a language that compiles into Java class files and is totally compatable with the JVM and Java library. If a small Open Source project can achieve this, there's no reason Sun cannot.

Python has moderately fast bytecode (google stuff could improve a lot here)

A very interesting project that aims to create a faster Python implementation is PyPy, funded by the EU, by google (with Summer of Code) and by a lot of programmers that donate their own time.

Even the Psyco guys say that the future is in PyPy!

performance is far behind java (which in turn is behind C/C++ of course), etc.

Have you ever heard of Psycho ? It's a Just-in-Time compiler (well, technically, it's a JIT specializer) for Python which speed up your programs significantly.

And all that you need to do is to add those lines to your program :

import psyco
psyco.full()

I don't understand why someone would wan to buy a program like l0pthcrack when there are better alternative for free... http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/ is free and uses rainbow table... you don't even need to generate the tables.. you can download them.. there is even a linux live cd so no need to install it or to have admin access... anyways l0pthcrack used to be the thing but now it's outdated..

How could someone who is so right about SWT (Swing, like democracy, isn't perfect but it is better than the alternatives) be so wrong about IDEs :-) Eclipse is free, cross-platform, and much better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

Now that's damning by faint praise. "Better than JBuilder"? Joy.

If you've never tried jEdit, perhaps you can see your way clear to forgiving me for avoiding such sharp sticks in the eye. If you can see past the stick, that is. :-)

I don't mind feauture bloat so much if it stays out of my way. But in Eclipse it doesn't--IMHO Eclipse lacks the "conceptual integrity" we've known is important since before Brooks gave it a name in "The Mythical Man-Month". "It's free" isn't a reason to turn a blind eye (maybe the one with the stick) to its flaws. Also, Eclipse *is* an SWT app, and inherits all *those* problems.

My own toolset is: jEdit for tactical use, with IntelliJ IDEA as a strategic WMD, suitable for surgical strikes on large legacy code bases while causing limited collateral damage. Add to this SQuirreL for mucking about in the DBMS. yEd is handy for diagramming things. All kinds of things.

In fact I usually keep a copy of jEdit running *alongside* IDEA to use as a lightweight file system browser, Beanshell framework, and GUI tool for the grepping of things ungrokable by IDEA. All these tools will run in any Java GUI environment without sweating how SWT will run on Platform X. And they're all free, (except for IDEA...if you're willing to run beta code, you can get that free too).

"Grepping the ungrokable"... I like the sound of that. :-)

As big a fan as I am of open source software, Eclipsoids drive me batty. Some software is worth buying if you have the cash available, and I think IDEA is a perfect example.

But the original poster specified "programming as a hobby", and jEdit should be perfect for that.

Gaim. Ubuntu. Merry Christmas!

The express editions seem a bit light, but do offer redistribution.

It's probably 'way out of price range', though the higher end editions offer a myiad of new and compelling features. You can basically have your own custom toolchain, complete with property sheets and full IDE integration for 'third party' tools, like using NASM/YASM/MASM for assembly. It's enough to (finally) be able to compile various open-source things with the IDE instead of depending on autotools and GCC. I could conceivably integrate 'open source' utilities into it completely, such as bison/flex, even such random things as a SNES C Cross-Compiler.

There are also rather nice setup project utilities, you can deploy a nice installer to anywhere which can 'net install' your program, in addition to any prerequisites and dependencies (like properly setting up C/C++ Runtimes and even MSI; or .NET Framework and ASP.NET if so inclined). Despite problems with the help system (via F1), it's a big 'happy' upgrade over VS2003.

As far as Linux codes, there's always KDevelop http://www.kdevelop.org/, and Anjuta http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/. While Microsoft Visual Studio makes a compelling case for use in general, there are quite a few non-Windows IDEs, though noone's forcing you to make Microsoft-specific code with MSVS, either. Personally I'm working on a few open source projects, and somewhat-targetting with a new C# application, will consider using GTK# http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/ instead of WinForms at some point (perhaps when underlying GTK+ bindings get a bit less fickle).

The express editions seem a bit light, but do offer redistribution.

It's probably 'way out of price range', though the higher end editions offer a myiad of new and compelling features. You can basically have your own custom toolchain, complete with property sheets and full IDE integration for 'third party' tools, like using NASM/YASM/MASM for assembly. It's enough to (finally) be able to compile various open-source things with the IDE instead of depending on autotools and GCC. I could conceivably integrate 'open source' utilities into it completely, such as bison/flex, even such random things as a SNES C Cross-Compiler.

There are also rather nice setup project utilities, you can deploy a nice installer to anywhere which can 'net install' your program, in addition to any prerequisites and dependencies (like properly setting up C/C++ Runtimes and even MSI; or .NET Framework and ASP.NET if so inclined). Despite problems with the help system (via F1), it's a big 'happy' upgrade over VS2003.

As far as Linux codes, there's always KDevelop http://www.kdevelop.org/, and Anjuta http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/. While Microsoft Visual Studio makes a compelling case for use in general, there are quite a few non-Windows IDEs, though noone's forcing you to make Microsoft-specific code with MSVS, either. Personally I'm working on a few open source projects, and somewhat-targetting with a new C# application, will consider using GTK# http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/ instead of WinForms at some point (perhaps when underlying GTK+ bindings get a bit less fickle).

web-calculus and the waterken server, Freenet, L4 microkernel, EROS microkernel (in fact, a great deal of computer science research is open source).

They generally just believe you if you say that the drive doesn't spin up at all.

I always keep this CD around as it can boot any of the HD diag programs without any silly floppies: http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/

Its more like Google Talk + AIM = GAIM

You can try ShedSkin http://shedskin.sourceforge.net/ Python->C++ compiler (currently alpha version).

BackupPC is a great FOSS solution for that. We use it for centralized backups.

Nethack was ported to the Psion Series 5/5MX a while back:
http://www.suttoncourtenay.org.uk/duncan/Nethack.h tm

It runs on a pair of AA batteries for about 40 hours, as long as you don't use the backlight.

Another option might be to put Linux on it, and then build Nethack for Linux, although I never tried it myself: http://linux-7110.sourceforge.net/

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

For starters try Anjuta or KDevelop. Both of them are really complete IDEs.
If you really want to just have fun you should go with Ruby, it is designed 'to enhance the pleasure of programming' according to the author. But that doesn't mean it is not powerful, just look at rails. There are online books that will help you get started. There is also a nice channel on freenode, #ruby-lang, with really helpful folks.

If left to me I would say emacs, the learning curve is slightly steep, but there is nothing to beat the versatility.

I have been designing an open source project to help producers, authors, and screenplay writers with exactly this kind of difficult problem. It is a group screenplay writing system, in MySql and PHP. I'm also going to design a J2ME version of the program for cellphones so you can approve or reject ideas by phone. Would anyone here care to help me with the project? I've been designing and redesigning it for over a year and I'm just about to start coding. Its a group online word processing system, basically a blog in script format with some editing, approving, scheduling tools. https://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=138513

nat-traverse

Moreover, this technique looks like it should work with any kind of NAT, whether full-cone, restricted-cone, or symmetric. On the other hand, the "third-node" (mediator) technique will not work with symmetric NAT.

This new tunneling mode requires upgrading both the client and server. It should be possible to get more-or-less the same functionality using only client-side support: capture the packets sent to the tun interface, decode individual TCP streams (similar to slirp) and convert them to port forwarding requests compatible with old servers.

Wait wait wait, Google Talk + AIM = GAIM?

A) It's main function is playing music, and it does that great.
B) There's no reason for "convert" to be in quotation marks (Although it is stupid that it only plays one format).
C) You don't need Quicktime Pro (although it is a scam) to convert movies (I like ffmpeg myself).

Although these haven't really taken off on Linux yet, there are several "widget engines" (for lack of a better, encapsulating term) that have become quite popular over the past couple years. You mentioned a desire to do small, web-fetching things - that's what many Widgets end up being. On top of that, the logic is usually handled with readable scripting languages, there's usually no compilation required, and it's very easy to get nice-looking graphics up alongside the code.

I've recently started doing most of my personal development in the Yahoo! Widget Engine (formerly known as Konfabulator), which is available on both Windows and Mac. Here are a few of the Widget environments that I'm aware of...

• Yahoo! Widget Engine (Win + Mac) - JavaScript-based logic
• SuperKaramba (Linux KDE) - Python-based
• gDesklets (Linux Gnome) - Python-based
• Kapsules (Win) - Any Windows scripting language-based, including JScript, VBScript, JScript.NET, VB.NET, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby
• Dashboard (Mac) - HTML/JavaScript-based

A sends to B via C, fine. B is unaware of A, true. Watching the traffic at B will not incriminate A, also true. But it CANNOT incriminate C either, not by this train of thought. Basically MUTE is a network with encrypted, virtual addresses and encrypted searches that are seeded with their random values for the encryption algorithms at client runtime. Therefore, not only does B not know who A is, but A doesn't know who B is either. C, being simply an intermediary, could jump on or off of the network at any time, thereby causing re-routing through other nodes to get the content from point A to point B. So let's say C is simply downloading live performances - a well documented fair-use act. C happens to push some copyrighted content from A to B or vice versa while doing its own thing. 1) C cannot see the content going from A to B without decrypting the content, and C doesn't have the keys to do that since the transaction is A to B only. 2) no "spying" by a 3rd party would be able to incriminate any party because it doesn't have encryption keys to the content, and cannot determine exactly which addresses the content is going to or from without actively monitoring every single connection to any node from A, B, or C. (The virtual address for A, B, or C is dynamicly determined every time a connection is established I believe.) See MUTE's description on this topic here.

Now I will grant you that this type of network would only work well if used by a lot of users at once, to maximize node connections and re-routing over the network to make it nearly impossible for any outside entity to isolate any one node long enough to decrypt the virtual addresses and/or encrypted packets being sent over the network. OR an outside entity would somehow have to prove that a multitude of people are all engaging in illegal activity and go after the entire network all at once... again, a very nearly impossible feat with lots and lots of users.

MUTE is just not as simple as you made it out to be.

My goals are pretty simple: I want to write applications that have a great look & feel that will primarily be pulling information from the web (think weather & news), play with that information and present it in interesting ways. I'd like those applications to be usable on the Linux and perhaps Mac OS X platforms.


In that case I'd recommend something like python combined with some gui toolkit such as wxpython or pygtk.

...into the guts of the machine


Since you're on some unix-like system, you could do worse than plain C and a few books (C:ARM5 by Harbison & Steel and Advanced Programming in the Unix environment by Stevens spring to mind). Some asm knowledge might be useful too.

As for tools, frameworks etc. there is of course an unending list of those. For an IDE, a like emacs code browser.

From MUTE's homepage:
MUTE protects your privacy by avoiding direct connections with your sharing partners in the network. Most other file sharing programs use direct connections to download or upload, making your identity available to spies from the RIAA and other unscrupulous organizations.

[..]Gaim-vv devs were all ready to merge into CVS HEAD, but Sean Egan changed all the hooks for voice and video without any notice, all so google's voice chat could be integrated[..]

This is taken SO BADLY out of context, to the point it could be considered FUD. The entire story ran on OSNews and both parties made their position clear, in public. There are even links to the actual discussion on the dev list. Here's the original piece and Sean Egan's response.

I wonder what it would take to make people happy, short of a miracle. Here we have a guy who has working code for voice, and he's willing to commit it even though he's working for Google now (which, incidentally, I think says something about whether he's any good or not). And he's not some alien as he's made out to appear, he's been a part of the Gaim team for quite a while, even wrote a Gaim book.

So he does it, and we'll have voice in Gaim ASAP. He even did it in such a manner so the switch to GStreamer can still be made later when it matures. What else do you want?

Three of us. I tried playing X-COM again recently, but on these newfangled machines, the sound doesn't work and time flies much too fast (because the game clock is tied to the CPU speed, and today's CPUs are a good twenty times faster than what the designers envisioned). I found Dosbox a few days ago. It works great for the original Dark Forces (which also had several issues running natively); gonna try it with X-COM soon.

WebCollab works for me.

http://webcollab.sourceforge.net/