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I am glad to see comments about the Milky Way's beauty, which I only experienced once on an country road trip in college.

For slashdotters who haven't had the chance of running into it, here are a few minutes of timelapse clips of the Milky Way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Astrophotography posts on reddit may have more info if you're curious about implementation, and in my limited knowledge you'd need good DSLR lenses, software post-processing and rotation mounts to follow stars and planets well enough, capturing several seconds per "frame."

Anyway, parts of the video prior to that 3 minute timestamp aren't immune from a bit of obvious light pollution. Even that kind of star visibility would be desirable and impossible anywhere I have lived.

My neighborhood is in a major city and seems better than most nearby ones. That still amounts to very bright *gray* night sky backgrounds that obscure almost all the stars. There's virtually no visibility except for some tree-dominated spots like the front of my own block, and sometimes I need to look out of my peripheral vision to see any stars. It's worse after snow accumulates and the bright gray sky becomes an odd shade of pink for some reason.

Living here for 10 years, I had noticed for the latter half that I can barely follow the stars that used to be somewhat more visible, like the constellation of Orion. Now in my mid-thirties I have wondered whether the problem is my night vision degrading "naturally" (as happens with hearing) or of the pollution problem was supposed to be noticeable over one's lifetime (2% a year doesn't seem to matter).

One of my dreams is being in an area that is dark enough to watch the Milky Way with friends again. I don't own a car nor have any business near towns 2 hours away that would offer that chance. Here is a dynamic light pollution map that I found with a quick search - https://www.lightpollutionmap....

I somewhat satiate the physical problems for filling that thirst for astro-philia by using software. Before I knew of open source, I started with a demo of Starry Night (just found the current pro version is $150).

Now I use free multi-OS options like Stellarium for Windows and Linux. It is a looking glass to the sky, sensitive to your local latitude where you can remove the atmosphere or accelerate time or zoom into stars and planets).

Celestia allows traveling in space and time with nice planet models of the solar system and beyond. It was handy for roughly tracking the eclipse "shadow" above North America in real time at work. It can also show let you track the ISS. I have a blast when fixing perspectives to watch Earth from the ISS (I recall an earlier version back when MIR had stopped floating around), or using it to better understand retrograde loops in planet motions (http://www.nakedeyeplanets.com)/movements.htm) and syncing up with the pole and letting earth spin a time lapse to watch the polar shadow to grok the seasons without thinking of flashlights shining on basketballs.

Have fun!

Expensive solutions for simple financial data is just exploitation by less honest consulting companies. As you say, Excel/libreoffice Calc and others can LINK to a real database instead of keeping the raw numbers there. But it is also very easy these days to setup a MariaDB database and do a quick web. A few solutions can be found with just 5 minutes of looking:

http://www.vfront.org/demo.php
https://dadabik.com/ (not open source, paid solution)
https://formtools.org/
http://phpformgen.sourceforge....

There are others. The learning curve is much easier than it's ever been.

I like Blaze more than Launchy.

Here's some 10-year old software for your 10-year old hardware:

http://www.nongnu.org/streamtu...
http://streamripper.sourceforg...

So on my main server I would set up a streaming proxy, that would also save whatever content from internet radio streams I was listening to, and I'd point all of the other clients in the house to it so they'd all be playing the same thing as I walked from room to room. Usually there wasn't any noticeable lag between them, but different internet radio clients do buffer more than others... just not the ones I was using.

As for controlling the primary playlist, back then I just used ssh + screen back to the server since I was using the console streamtuner client, but nowadays you could probably set up VLC or Clementine to be the head node feeding your proxy channel, and both of those projects have good remote control apps.

See this for a squeezeboxserver that runs on a Raspberry Pi http://picoreplayer.sourceforg...

I can't find testers! :(
Please test my code, I need to find any bugs!

It's called "The New Castle"

you can get it for Dos, Mac, or Linux,
and the setup.exe will install a shortcut for Windows users, along with an uninstaller.
get it here: http://trek7.sourceforge.net/f...
Also, go to the main link and have fun with Trek7 - but don't report bugs for that one, I can't fix Fortran code :(
Still the BEST trek game ever made! and it's TEXT!

The OK button in Audacity's splash/About box used to say "Audacious!". Then someone found that too obscure and it became "OK... Audacious!" In the new version it's just "OK". OK... so not really Audacious indeed.

https://sourceforge.net/projec...

Simply use old version. Nothing new is so fantastic anyway. Firefox 44 is cool tbh.

In my case, $DAYJOB now uses gmail-hosted "G Suite" email, and has configured it to require either the web interface, or OAUTH2-based POP/IMAP/SMTP authentication. No app passwords or other options are available.

As mentioned by others, it generally seems really low security to trust your data to a server not directly under your control, regardless of whatever access controls it supposedly enforces.

It is debatable if all the extra hoops needed for OAUTH2 actually improve or degrade security, especially if you use a strong password (long randomly generated), protect it carefully (e.g. password manager), and also treat recovery questions the same way as the password (long randomly generated, stored securely).

To actually have usable, email, I wrote up some instructions, patches, and scripts to allow me to use any local email client while relaying through google with OAUTH2. In my case, I prefer mutt, but with this infrastructure, I could use any email client I wanted. Perhaps other people might find my instructions useful.

In my case, $DAYJOB now uses gmail-hosted "G Suite" email, and has configured it to require either the web interface, or OAUTH2-based POP/IMAP/SMTP authentication. No app passwords or other options are available.

As mentioned by others, it generally seems really low security to trust your data to a server not directly under your control, regardless of whatever access controls it supposedly enforces.

It is debatable if all the extra hoops needed for OAUTH2 actually improve or degrade security, especially if you use a strong password (long randomly generated), protect it carefully (e.g. password manager), and also treat recovery questions the same way as the password (long randomly generated, stored securely).

To actually have usable, email, I wrote up some instructions, patches, and scripts to allow me to use any local email client while relaying through google with OAUTH2. In my case, I prefer mutt, but with this infrastructure, I could use any email client I wanted. Perhaps other people might find my instructions useful.

https://systemd-free.org/

There's openRC if you really hate systemd that much. And I would just stick with XFCE and ALSA since that's all you need basically https://sourceforge.net/projec... here's a base installer if you think you have to install then remove systemd.

Then talk: You did more earlier & better than I? Prove it:

Windows NT Magazine April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" pg 61

(For SuperSpeed.com PAID CONTRACT (wrote SuperCache 40% performance boost) & SuperDisk finalist @ MS Tech Ed 2x in a row 2000-2002 HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement)

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-5 32/64-bit is hosted & RECOMMENDED by Malwarebytes http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

WINDOWS MAGAZINE 1997 "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue pg 210 #1 entry

PC-WELT FEB 1998 pg 84

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 pg 92 MUST HAVE WARE

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - pg 83

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - pg 100

GERMAN PC BOOK Data Becker "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000

HOT SHAREWARE #46 issue pg. 54 2001

Paid for article @ PCPitstop in 2008 http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...

UltraDefrag64 Process Priority Control credited by lead dev -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge... or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker...

APK

P.S.=> Fake name for a fake life = you... apk

Then talk: You did more earlier & better than I? Prove it:

Windows NT Magazine April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" pg 61

(For SuperSpeed.com PAID CONTRACT (wrote SuperCache 40% performance boost) & SuperDisk finalist @ MS Tech Ed 2x in a row 2000-2002 HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement)

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-5 32/64-bit is hosted & RECOMMENDED by Malwarebytes http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

WINDOWS MAGAZINE 1997 "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue pg 210 #1 entry

PC-WELT FEB 1998 pg 84

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 pg 92 MUST HAVE WARE

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - pg 83

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - pg 100

GERMAN PC BOOK Data Becker "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000

HOT SHAREWARE #46 issue pg. 54 2001

Paid for article @ PCPitstop in 2008 http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...

UltraDefrag64 Process Priority Control credited by lead dev -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge... or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker...

APK

P.S.=> Fake name for a fake life = you... apk

You did more earlier & better than I? Prove it:

Windows NT Magazine April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" pg 61

(For SuperSpeed.com PAID CONTRACT (wrote SuperCache 40% performance boost) & SuperDisk finalist @ MS Tech Ed 2x in a row 2000-2002 HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement)

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-5 32/64-bit is hosted & RECOMMENDED by Malwarebytes http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

WINDOWS MAGAZINE 1997 "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue pg 210 #1 entry

PC-WELT FEB 1998 pg 84

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 pg 92 MUST HAVE WARE

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - pg 83

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - pg 100

GERMAN PC BOOK Data Becker "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000

HOT SHAREWARE #46 issue pg. 54 2001

Paid for article @ PCPitstop in 2008 http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...

UltraDefrag64 Process Priority Control credited by lead dev -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge... or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker...

APK

P.S.=> Fake name for a fake life = you... apk

You did more earlier & better than I? Prove it:

Windows NT Magazine April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" pg 61

(For SuperSpeed.com PAID CONTRACT (wrote SuperCache 40% performance boost) & SuperDisk finalist @ MS Tech Ed 2x in a row 2000-2002 HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement)

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-5 32/64-bit is hosted & RECOMMENDED by Malwarebytes http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

WINDOWS MAGAZINE 1997 "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue pg 210 #1 entry

PC-WELT FEB 1998 pg 84

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 pg 92 MUST HAVE WARE

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - pg 83

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - pg 100

GERMAN PC BOOK Data Becker "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000

HOT SHAREWARE #46 issue pg. 54 2001

Paid for article @ PCPitstop in 2008 http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...

UltraDefrag64 Process Priority Control credited by lead dev -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge... or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker...

APK

P.S.=> Fake name for a fake life = you... apk

You did more earlier & better than I? Prove it:

Windows NT Magazine April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" pg 61

(For SuperSpeed.com PAID CONTRACT (wrote parts of SuperCache 40% performance boost) & SuperDisk finalist @ MS Tech Ed 2x in a row 2000-2002 HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement)

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-5 32/64-bit is hosted & RECOMMENDED by Mr. Steven Burn of Malwarebytes http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

WINDOWS MAGAZINE 1997 "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue pg 210 #1 entry

PC-WELT FEB 1998 pg 84

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 pg 92 MUST HAVE WARES

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - pg 83

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - pg 100

GERMAN PC BOOK Data Becker "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000

HOT SHAREWARE #46 issue pg. 54 (PC ware mag from Spain) 2001

Paid for article @ PCPitstop in 2008 http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...

UltraDefrag64 Process Priority Control credited by lead dev -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge... or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker...

APK

You did more earlier & better than I? Prove it:

Windows NT Magazine April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" pg 61

(For SuperSpeed.com PAID CONTRACT (wrote parts of SuperCache 40% performance boost) & SuperDisk finalist @ MS Tech Ed 2x in a row 2000-2002 HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement)

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-5 32/64-bit is hosted & RECOMMENDED by Mr. Steven Burn of Malwarebytes http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

WINDOWS MAGAZINE 1997 "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue pg 210 #1 entry

PC-WELT FEB 1998 pg 84

WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 pg 92 MUST HAVE WARES

PC-WELT FEB 1999 - pg 83

CHIP Magazine 7/99 - pg 100

GERMAN PC BOOK Data Becker "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000

HOT SHAREWARE #46 issue pg. 54 (PC ware mag from Spain) 2001

Paid for article @ PCPitstop in 2008 http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...

UltraDefrag64 Process Priority Control credited by lead dev -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge... or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker...

APK

Why do people keep calling these things "speakers"? It presumably has a speaker in it, but I don't call my car "engine" or "mirror". And, closer to home for most of us, I don't call my computer "CPU" or "hard drive".

I completely understand why Google, Amazon and Apple all want to misdirect as much attention as possible away from their motivation, but why do we go along with it? Why does a news site that claims to be "for nerds" go along with it?

And seriously, does no one remember Mister House?

Not really bad things, but there's several examples of him forcing people to do things, for example: http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.n....

No. He's not forcing anyone to do anything. International law in the form of the Berne convention is the only force at work.

In the situation at hand the solution is simple. Stop using other peoples' code! It's not yours to do with as you please. In this case the author himself agrees that readline is not an integral part of the programme and could be left out without any trouble.

But he doesn't want to, and that's why he decided that he'd rather relicense his own code than do without readline. As is his right.

The GPL is the most inspired and intelligent development in the area in the last century, and probably this too. There can be no freedom if slavery is allowed. Hence the system that puts limits on others attempts to limit your freedom are more free. Not less. Freedom doesn't mean freedom from necessary rules. An absence of rules is not freedom, that's anarchy.

In practice, that'll only happen once Cygwin/X is ported to WSL. (Xming was ten years out of date last I checked: 2007-11-02.)

Not really bad things, but there's several examples of him forcing people to do things, for example: http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL.

There's also the bit where he refuses to talk to anyone who doesn't give GNU first attribution when talking about Linux distros.

You can argue none of this is forcing, but any interaction with the man, whether using software assigned to the GNU/FSF or talking to him directly, occurs on his terms or not at all.

https://sourceforge.net/projec... Golly is an excellent resource for exploring the GoL. Download it, and go to patterns > hashlife > metapixel to find some implementations of GoL as calculated by GoL glider NAND gates and various derived structures. It's fascinating to watch unfold and frankly beyond my comprehension.

Here's a utility that creates a .vmdk descriptor file for a .img:

https://sourceforge.net/projec...

an iPod that libgpod won't communicate with (a generation that will not be reverse engineered).

Emphasis mine.

libgpod seems to be a dead project, last commit seems to be in 2014. Of course, there's only so much of: "You should just buy a device that supports linux." that a dev and their users can take before quitting.

Heck, most distros don't even have the last bugfix committed to the official repo that fixes the segfaulting issue when syncing iOS devices, because it never made it into an official release.

I hope the project gets picked up again though. It'd would be nice to be able to use newer iOS devices with linux.

Its fine for me (I actually prefer vim & gpg encrypted file), but non-computer geeks (eg every family member I have tried to get to use KeePass) hate having to:
* Stop what they are doing
* Open another program
* Type in an unlock password
* Search for the site they want,
* Copy the password
* Go back to the browser
* Paste the password
It takes more like 10-15 seconds for most people I've watched, and adding new passwords is takes longer.

You're doing it wrong. You need this and this. The first gives you automated recognition and entry of username and password into websites, as long as you populate the URL field in KeePass correctly (and it will help you do that). The second syncs to Google Drive, including upload, download, and download-merge-upload options.

Winamp - it really whips the llama's ass!

Not sure about everyone else but for me what replaced winamp was mpd with ncmpcpp on my desktop and laptop and Google Music on mobile. This let's me access my library either locally with mpd clients or remotely by pushing it all to Google Music and using their player.

I haven't really used winamp since the early to mid 2000s. That's when the iPod hit and then I used Songbird which USED to be able to sync media to your iPod. Then I jumped from that to Google Music around 2011 and mpd for local access at home. If Google decides to "pull a Reader" and discontinue Google Music I'd probably switch to Subsonic (good mobile apps) or Shoutcast or something.

It's not like there aren't even any free apps he could try...it took me longer to make the post than to find all of these.

It's not like there aren't even any free apps he could try...it took me longer to make the post than to find all of these.

Commenting here to undo a wrong moderation. Your post wasn't funny. It was informative to me. Come on, Slashdot, please fix this 10 year old bug!

No problem Curupira. At least it isn't deniers claiming I'm a troll! 8^)

And if you want to see something interesting, its when you see how many bees and bumblebees there are when you don't use that stuff. Especially with the bumbles, since they don't have as far a range and stick nearby with non-toxic plants and flowers.. We have a slew of them in our local yards.

Commenting here to undo a wrong moderation. Your post wasn't funny. It was informative to me. Come on, Slashdot, please fix this 10 year old bug!

Go and play "The Ur-Quan Masters" (a.k.a Star Control 2). http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ . Go, now!

Or, the high definition remake: https://sourceforge.net/projec... .

Why are you still reading this, and not downloading?!

Go and play "The Ur-Quan Masters" (a.k.a Star Control 2). http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ . Go, now!

Or, the high definition remake: https://sourceforge.net/projec... .

Why are you still reading this, and not downloading?!

Indeed. Honestly - I'd be more interested in an Amiga OS for something like a Raspberry Pi.

It's called AROS, and there is a Raspberry Pi port available.

This is really nothing more than a PR stunt. What the researchers did was take a sequencing data compression program fqzcomp written for the Sequence Squeeze competition and deliberately broke it so there was a buffer overrun. What's more is that they broke it in such a way that all DNA sequences would have made the program go wrong in some way, probably by crashing it.

All they demonstrated is that if you break a program then it is broken.

All DNA sequencing machines produce well formed data files as output so you cannot cause a buffer overrun just by adding your own special DNA variant sample. It would just be treated like any normal sample data. There are vulnerabilities in sequencing data processing program code but to exploit them you would have to alter the file themselves not the DNA samples going into the machine.

Even nedit still works well (if you do not fancy UTF-8, like slashdot) :-)

Underscores are not valid in domain names, including in DNS records, and if you don't believe me you can ask Paul Vixie. Here is your sign .

Which isn't the issue here, so why are you emphasizing it? The issue is that the Netflix chosen host name violates the DNS standard by having underscores in it.

I don't know who the AC person was that decided to go full on retard there is, but it's just simple misunderstanding on my part. You are correct in that hostnames cannot have underscore. I'll leave this here for all the other parts of DNS that do allow underscore. That said, my confusion was taking sub-domain and mixing it with hostname. Honest mistake on my part.

Another long-time Perl user here as well. Still use it predominantly for most things, else C. Tried Ruby at a job -- what an atrocity of a language (the next person who says "it's Perl but better" will get punched. No, it isn't Perl, it's awful. Even the regexes aren't compatible, particularly $ vs. \Z vs. \z). As for Python, my take on it is that it's still pretty blah as well but at least better than Ruby in many cases. I can't get over how major Python projects that interface with MySQL predominantly use this horrid thing (and I absolutely love this hilarity). Yeah... Python... I'll pass. I will say, however, I have little to no interest in Perl 6.

APK,

I looked at the UltraDefrag. Interesting. Why do you continue to use Defraggler?

Thanks for being more careful communicating. In the past it has been difficult to understand what you write.

You should check out AVIDemux if you haven't already - it can do various transforms on video. I don't know how complex your AviSynth scripts were, but something like changing resolution (or aspect ratio, or rotating, etc.) are simple enough that it can show you the output in real time before re-encoding the whole video.

What?

There's mpc-be.

MPC-BE is still under active development, you can see some minor updates from 15 hours ago (new version of libpng)
https://sourceforge.net/p/mpcb...

The Doom9 support thread is still active
https://forum.doom9.org/showth...

V0lt is still active on the MPC-BE support forum (need google translate unless you can read Russian):
http://mpc-be.org/forum/index....

#1 is not true. See https://sourceforge.net/projec... There's been a GPL Ada compiler for at least 30 years. The Ada Core product is open source, you pay for maintenance.

For #2, the debate in many respects boils down to "simple programs in complex language" or "complex programs in a simple language." But see http://www.adacore.com/sparkpr... (and there are free versions of that, too), for a subset of Ada specifically designed to support proof-of-correctness.

If you install an X server in Windows, yes, X11 works.

DUMA appears to be its current incarnation. Still more portable than valgrind, which has replaced it in most modern, fast-enough systems.

Agree with all the commentators that say that Uber and Lyft are not ride sharing, or in a wider context 'sharing', they are extractive. Worth reading a little McKenzie Wark on this subject too: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p... see the commentary on 'vectorialists'.

About ten years ago, I started in on this: https://sourceforge.net/projec... now rotting quietly away on sourceforge. One (of many) things that stopped me at the time was that Google Maps was the only source of geo-stuff, now there's Open Street Map. My idea was something that would be useful to what has now become the platform cooperative movement: https://platform.coop/, that would be genuine sharing, both the platform and the rides.

However my madness did not end there. In my mind, I looked forward to routing everything that moved around, a) dealing with half filled vans, lorries and cars, the whole lot b) creating public data that would be performative in that it would advocate for new routes where there was market failure, for example. I note that Amazon has started a project for transport consolidation: http://www.scdigest.com/firstt... so this idea is probably valid but the ownership isn't cooperative.

Ok, I'll end there. This isn't to self congratulate, it's just publication of an idea that I've nearly abandoned and someone younger might want to take up. If you do, give me a shout.

You mean WASTE, which got semi-forked over to here. Pass around the news, it could definitely use being revived but I've no idea how to do it aside from let people know it exists.

Interesting note: Its initial release in 2003 got reported here.

You mean WASTE, which got semi-forked over to here. Pass around the news, it could definitely use being revived but I've no idea how to do it aside from let people know it exists.

Interesting note: Its initial release in 2003 got reported here.

I have used various versions of the FWTK to isolate test networks. There is an independent version of the code here.

If you (can find and) use the old version, beware of the author's reflections on his code.

As this has long been abandonware, I'd say that all of this code should be running in a chroot() as nobody should you use it. Also note that you'll need the -m32 compiler flag (in addition to many other changes) to get a clean build.