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Python can't run untrusted code. There used to be a way of doing so, but it was shown to be fundamentally insecure and abandoned. Nobody has found it necessary enough to replace it with something more secure. A web browser called Grail was written in Python years ago that could run Python scripts, but obviously that's insecure too as it relied on the above mentioned functionality.

The CD side of the DualDisc's that I have purchase don't work very well. So I copied the music off of the DVD side onto a CD that I know plays in my car. Any sound / music non-linear editing suite worth it's salt can record from Wave. I used Audacity, because I had it, and it's easy, but there are various programs out there that do this. I know it's an extra step, but well worth it to make the headaches go away. Tried explaining to my wife why the disc wouldn't work and why we should return in, but it just turned out to be easier to copy it to something that does work.

there is an open source axis and allies game

http://sourceforge.net/projects/triplea

It is unclear what LAME is used for in the kit, but according to it's about page, Lame can also be used for decoding. In that sense, this usenet post by a first4internet employee shows that the company producing the rootkit at least has an MP3 player, which of course might be part of the Sony rootkit:

"I am currently writing an MP3 player with lots of bells and whistles including a wave editor, fades, reverbs etc. What I now need is to be able to protect the files it creates. I have already written the routine to convert the MP3 into a WMA file. Does someone have some simple C++ code which can write Microsofts DRM v1 properties that the user whishes to set (i.e. 3plays 4 copies etc) over the unprotected file to make it protected. There may be some cash on offer here if its easy to use! All I need is a procedure that performs this."

And if you're thinking you're safe for these kind of kits because you're on a mac, well, it might not be for long. Of course this is pure speculation, but at least one F4I employee is asking questions about mac programming issues...

Rip to FLAC once!
I've just started this with my CD collection. It doesn't compress nearly as well as mp3, but it's lossless, so you can take the flac files and re-encode them to whatever you want, without the need to mess around with the physical discs again.

You can already get 2:1 lossless compression. That's about three albums per gigabyte, or $0.15 worth of hard drive medium per album (at 200 GB for $90).

No, that is not what FUSE is for. Filesystems like ext2/3, XFS, JFS, Reiser, etc are on-disk fs's. There's really no point in putting them into usespace. You wouldn't really gain much, and you'd lose a lot of performance. FUSE is for high-level filesystems, like putting a fs in a database, or interfacing with WebDAV, FTP, Gmail, or Dallas 1-wire devices. There's no real need to put those sorts of fs's in kernel space. There'd be no performance increase since they're using network protocols or some other communication channel with high latency. And being in userspace, they can use handy third-party libraries instead of having to include even more code into (non-swaping) kernel memory. Some are even implemented in Perl or Python. FUSE isn't going to replace all those on-disk filesystems, but it will replace a few network filesystems (not NFS, more like WebDAV or even SMB/CIFS) and it will make it much easier to create trivial fs's. That's what FUSE is for.

Very neat, however, I prefer Donnrisk

Spellbound gives me a fighting chance of having decent spelling. The Web Developer Toolbar comes in handy when working with websites. When you're done adding all the extensions, don't forget the most important one, the kitchen sink.

http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/

Minimum system requirements:
386/25 MHZ, DOS 5.0, 4MB RAM, 25MB HD Space, VGA graphics card, Mouse, Soundcard (Ensoniq, Aria, Roland, SoundBlaster, Ultrasound).

Looks more like DOS than Windows to me. DOSBox may eventually (as in DNF eventually) have [decent] Windows support, but it's not there yet.

take it you have not been writing much C. Everything you describe above is possible.

Having written the only known copying & defragmented multithreaded garbage collector for C that's under 1500 lines of code which is faster than Java, I believe your statement is wrong.

Anyway, you can't do logical types in C. Can you say in C that a pointer is never null? or that a pointer takes only three possible values? or that an array takes size from a field in a lower address? or that a short can be an enumeration? can you do float enumerations in C? sets? recursive types? union types? uniqueness types?

The answer is simple: you can't.

I'm not really an audiphile, but I plan to get my wife an iPod for Christmas. I don't really like the proprietary format, but with audacity I should be able to convert anything to mp3, as this software has the ability to create an mp3 from anything playing on the soundcard. (I haven't done this yet, I was told about this functionality, so it's possibility not even available). I don't know if this would lose quality, but unless it's obvious, I don't really care. It may be a solution others are interested in looking into.

Others have mentioned burning to a CD and re-ripping, I didn't realize that would be an option, but it sounds like a good backup plan.

For instance, there is no Java JVM for a Palm.

There isn't? What will I do?

Dude. Java is everywhere. It's in tiny little cards and in the latest ARM processors. You can't run. You can't hide. Java will find your OS, and you will be assimilated. Submit to the collective!

For instance, there is no Java JVM for a Palm.

There isn't? What will I do?

Dude. Java is everywhere. It's in tiny little cards and in the latest ARM processors. You can't run. You can't hide. Java will find your OS, and you will be assimilated. Submit to the collective!

Their viewer application is irritatingly slow and strange to use.

PDFs rarely are editable

Every company I've ever been at has a version of Office lying around, but the fact that you can't really edit PDFs at most places becomes so frustrating that the format itself is irritating

OCR has taken leaps forward in recent years and I think that if Adobe wanted to, they could actually incorporate this type of thing into Acrobat

Yes, Microsoft, be *very* afraid of Qooxdoo!

I went to http://qooxdoo.sourceforge.net/ and got the following:

Warning: mysql_connect(): Host 'sc8-pr-web6-b.sourceforge.net' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server in /home/groups/q/qo/qooxdoo/htdocs/textpattern/lib/t xplib_db.php on line 26

Warning: mysql_get_server_info(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2) in /home/groups/q/qo/qooxdoo/htdocs/textpattern/lib/t xplib_db.php on line 27

Warning: mysql_get_server_info(): A link to the server could not be established in /home/groups/q/qo/qooxdoo/htdocs/textpattern/lib/t xplib_db.php on line 27

Warning: mysql_select_db(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2) in /home/groups/q/qo/qooxdoo/htdocs/textpattern/lib/t xplib_db.php on line 32

Warning: mysql_select_db(): A link to the server could not be established in /home/groups/q/qo/qooxdoo/htdocs/textpattern/lib/t xplib_db.php on line 32

Database unavailable.

All kidding aside, I'm sure it's just an unexpected /.'ing, and I've seen way more ASP failures on the net than PHP's, and the demo I did see looked really impressive, with lots of "how the heck did they do that?" factor to it (even worked under Opera). Very cool stuff.

That's not quite true, vertex buffer object and other performance patches aren't in wine cvs yet, I'm finishing off stabilizing Directx (including allowing DirectX 8 to use the improvements) over the next month or so, including Pixel Shaders 1.4.

After that I'm going to commit the performance patches that should bring wine to a comparable level to Cedega (some of the patches give a huge performance increase over Cedega).

There are still a lot of no DirectX related issues that need fixing in Wine so that games are playable.

IMO. Cedega aren't putting much effort into DirectX in Cedega, my patch from 2005-06-13 has many of the features Cedega are touting as new in their 5.0 release.

If you have seen QooxDoo then you probably thought the same thing I did when you saw it: "Microsoft should be freaking out about this!" Later when I learned that AJAX comes from discarded Microsoft Technology I realized that Microsoft had pulled a Xerox. Just as Xerox threw away the chance to be the leader of Desktop Software and gave away the GUI and Mouse... Microsoft handed Google a lead. The problem is, this is Microsoft not Xerox we're talking about. Will Google keep that lead?

Don't know if you're actually looking for a spell checker...but I use Spellbound, a Firefox extension, works great for me.

UQM is "The Ur-Quan Masters" and is a great clone of Star Control.

If you are using Firefox you can use Spellbound at http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/

Coincidently, it saved me from the same misspelling of speech earlier today.

I remember reading about progress with dx9 making it into wine. http://directxwine.sourceforge.net/

Did this ever make it into .9 beta? Kind of curious how the two compare now.

It's not "impossible" to debug binary software. [...] What they actually mean is, "I don't really want to" [...]

Even if it only makes their lives harder rather than impossible, that's good enough for me. If having source they can review and work with means they can spend more time on things that they think are important, that's a win.

A stable binary module interface would help open source developers too [...] Take for instance ZeroInstall.

That doesn't seem like a persuasive case to me. A full binary kernel API seems too low-level to solve those problems. I think the better approach is to create specific higher-level APIs that enable developers to work. In the case of ZeroInstall, I notice that a user-space filesystem adapter is now in the kernel.

I have carefully read what Linus and others wrote about practical impossibility
to implelement stable kernel ABI and sounds to me like nonsense - to the extent I'd
like to write a document which disproves their point.

If I ever do it, the document will be based on the ideas discussed in

debuggability of ALSA

thread I started. The thread started as

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _id=13588670

, an ABI proposal of mine is

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _id=13609229
.

The kernel developers' argument about different versions of compilers and
different ways they map data is nonsense because drivers should be statically
linked and not depend on any external library, they should be executable memory
image.

I have carefully read what Linus and others wrote about practical impossibility
to implelement stable kernel ABI and sounds to me like nonsense - to the extent I'd
like to write a document which disproves their point.

If I ever do it, the document will be based on the ideas discussed in

debuggability of ALSA

thread I started. The thread started as

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _id=13588670

, an ABI proposal of mine is

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg _id=13609229
.

The kernel developers' argument about different versions of compilers and
different ways they map data is nonsense because drivers should be statically
linked and not depend on any external library, they should be executable memory
image.

What about UDI? This has been around for a while and supports not just Linux but a variety of OSes.

Ever heard of NDISWRAPPER??

What many people don't realize is that a binary driver interface has already been developed, only without the central control or oversight needed to make sure it works well.

It's not only possible, it's not only inevitable, It's already happening!

I'd recommend putting together some kind of standardized binary driver interface, only put it in userland where it won't crash the O/S, and treat O/S crashes from buggy drivers as a bug, not the buggy driver.

I'd be happy to pay the performance price of usermode drivers if it meant I could *finally* use my small office inkjet printer/scanner on Linux.

Get on the Firebird train, toot toot!

http://firebird.sourceforge.net/

The xmlprc exploits were discovered in July and August of this year. There had been an earlier exploit in September 2001 which probably is what the worm from 2002 made use of.

http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/

(Note - some content cross posted from the recent MSSQL2005 posting I made)

I take issue with the number of tools.

Postgresql has a great variety of tools, both OSS and commercial that work great. I've been working on an updated list of all the tools. Here are a few of the most popular admin tools:

PGadminIII
http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/mana ger [sqlmanager.net]

DBvisualizer
http://www.minq.se/products/dbvis/ [www.minq.se]

EMS Postgresql Manager
http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/mana ger [sqlmanager.net]

PHPpgadmin
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phppgadmin [sourceforge.net]

Sybase Power Designer
http://www.sybase.com/products/enterprisemodeling/ powerdesigner [sybase.com]

ERWIN data modeller
http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/Product.asp?ID=260 [ca.com]

CASE Studio 2
http://www.casestudio.com/enu/default.aspx [casestudio.com]

Postgresql has a vibrant tool community. If you want more info on Postgresql tools see
http://techdocs.postgresql.org/v2/Guides/PostgreSQ L%20GUI%20Tools/document_view [postgresql.org]

Wooww... This looks more and more like Oracle version 7 released in the early 90's. Oracle has had 2PC (2 Phase Commit) for about 15 years now. Nice catchup

So has Firebird... See: http://firebird.sourceforge.net/index.php?op=guide &id=ib6_overview.

Should have linked to OpenFTS.sourceforge.net.

Oopsie.

there's also:
http://firebird.sourceforge.net/

Firebird is kind of a bastard step brother of PostgreSQL, since they share the common Ingres heritage... it's got foreign keys, triggers and stored procedures for far longer than MySQL, for instance. It's Borland Delphi's Interbase code gone open-source. However, it's a relative newcomer and most who care are Delphi developers.

Its license is neither BSD nor GNU, which i think also makes up for some caution people have against it.

Well there is also the Firebird Superserver. It's a released under a Mozilla license (not affiliated with the mozilla project, of course.) (and a couple other licenses also).

http://firebird.sourceforge.net/

So that's three open source SQL database systems; MySQL, Firebird, and PostgreSQL.

Here is a comparision between aviable open source relational databases.
http://www.geocities.com/mailsoftware42/db/ (it's a bit dated)

Here is the migration guide for MS-SQL to Firebird, in which I doubt your interested.
http://firebird.sourceforge.net/manual/migration-m ssql.html

Well there is also the Firebird Superserver. It's a released under a Mozilla license (not affiliated with the mozilla project, of course.) (and a couple other licenses also).

http://firebird.sourceforge.net/

So that's three open source SQL database systems; MySQL, Firebird, and PostgreSQL.

Here is a comparision between aviable open source relational databases.
http://www.geocities.com/mailsoftware42/db/ (it's a bit dated)

Here is the migration guide for MS-SQL to Firebird, in which I doubt your interested.
http://firebird.sourceforge.net/manual/migration-m ssql.html

But after hearing all the fan-boys on this and other sites, and doing a fair bit of research into Mac OSX, I figured it was time to try out a powerbook.

After a few months of using it exclusively, I can't stand working with Windows or even KDE/Gnome now. A stock OSX Tiger install is incredibly useful (Exposé, Spotlight, iLife, Dashboard, and all that BSD goodness through Terminal.app). But after installing a few amazing (and free) utilities, it's the closest to desktop utopia I've ever been:

• QuickSilver - The most useful app I've ever used - hard to describe, but think of it as a command-line interface to the GUI (some use it as just an application launcher, but it's so much more).
• Fink - A BSD Ports implementation for OSX - think of Debian and Gentoo meets OSX - thousands of F/OSS apps just a command away from installing
• XAMPP - Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl in a simple to install and run package.
• VLC - video watching without having to worry about installing dozens of codecs.

Never thought I'd say it, but I guess I'm one of the fan-boys now.

I still have a Windows box for gaming (although I have to admit there are far more games available for OSX than I imagined), and a few Linux boxes for serving, development, routing, etc. Although I now have all my development stuff running locally on my powerbook, so the linux boxes are less useful these days.

My message to people on the fence about switiching: give it a shot. It's not perfect, but it's leaps and bounds ahead of anything else.

Then there's always ELKS (also known as Linux-8086).

Try Urchin.

How about giFT and all it's myriad clients for pretty much every operating system....

No, a magnet link doesn't point to anything.

Magnet links are "an open URI-scheme and supporting practices/code for enabling seamless integration between websites and locally-running utilities, such as file-management tools." They are a URN rather than a URL in that it specifies what to search for rather than where to download from. See http://magnet-uri.sourceforge.net/ for more information and the spec.

A magnet link will never point to a torrent file, but it could specify a file hash for a torrent file that can be searched against.

This is a magnet link

It specifies what to search for. The href portion is "magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:YNCKHTQCWBTRNJIV4WNAE52SJUQCZ O5C". When clicked it will cause your P2P client to launch (if installed) and search for files whos SHA1 hash match the one provided.

This is a link to a torrent

It specifies a location to download the torrent from. The href portion is "http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/torrents/stentz-binar y-x86_64.torrent". When clicked it will either download the torrent file via http or launch your torrent client and connect to the tracker server.
 

This must be in satire, or ignorance.

Postgresql has a great variety of tools, both OSS and commercial that work great. I've been working on an updated list of all the tools. Here are a few of the most popular admin tools:

PGadminIII
http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/mana ger

DBvisualizer
http://www.minq.se/products/dbvis/

EMS Postgresql Manager
http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/mana ger

PHPpgadmin
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phppgadmin

Sybase Power Designer
http://www.sybase.com/products/enterprisemodeling/ powerdesigner

ERWIN data modeller
http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/Product.asp?ID=260

CASE Studio 2
http://www.casestudio.com/enu/default.aspx

Postgresql has a vibrant tool community. If you want more info on Postgresql tools see
http://techdocs.postgresql.org/v2/Guides/PostgreSQ L%20GUI%20Tools/document_view

"I don't believe there are any real (as in frequently used) legitimate reasons for P2P networks to exist other than to distribute material illegally. ... I'm not saying that it's not possible to use P2P networks for legit reasons, and I'm not saying that on occasion people do obtain legal materials from them."

I run a community gaming site that catalogs maps for First Person Shooters. With over 10 GB of maps and growing, P2P combined with magnet links is an incredibly valuable method of file distribution that doesn't require loads of cash, server cycles and bandwidth to operate and maintain. It boasts hundreds of downloads a week. I'd hardly call that "occassional."

Really though, it's not a good way for an author to market something (no tracking, no content control, no targeting, etc), and it's not a convenient way for the consumer to retrieve something (file descriptors can be poor, you get queued up, you have to share back to get good rates with some services, etc).

No tracking, content control and targeting? Not convenient? You have to share back to get good rates? File descriptions are poor?

Any qualified web admin can implement tracking on the web site that's listing the download whether it be magnet, torrent or otherwise. As well, some P2P apps provide limited download tracking. BitTorrent on it's own does not provide tracking either (you'd have to analyze torrent downloads in the server log files), so your point is kind of moot.

Not convenient? Ever heard of a magnet link? You put a link on your page. Clicking it launches the user's P2P app and starts the download. How is that not convenient? On a comparison to BitTorrent I'd say it's just as, if not more convenient (I don't have to delete old torrent files with magnet links). Compared to HTTP downloads, all P2P tech is obviously less convenient since you have to download P2P software.

Share back to get good rates? Funny... that's how BitTorrent works and a good number of other P2P networks don't.

The one giant exception here is Bittorrent ... encourages the distribution of *legitamate* content because it a) allows the author to create and maintain a torrent that isn't connected to some vast network of crap, b) torrents can be "distributed" via websites, which is where you want your consumer to be, c) the consumer gets faster downloads, d) the author pays for less bandwidth.

As I mentioned, magnet links eliminate the problems of the "vast network of crap." They contain a file hash similar to a torrent file and can contain one or more source seed server addresses. They can be put on a website just like any URL with the added benefit that they don't require you to have a one-to-one relationship of all your files to torrent files.

The fact that you even need to maintain and distribute torrent files is a pain. If I've got 4,000 files I want to distribute via BitTorrent, it requires that I maintain 4,000 torrent files. Granted, a software author may not have 4,000 files, but the requirement to maintain them still exists regardless.

The consumer only gets faster downloads with BitTorrent if they are able to get it configured and playing nice with their particular setup. Most, but not all, "average Joes" I've tried to sell BitTorrent on always complain about painful tweaking and crappy speeds because of it. This is primarily because BitTorrent requires you to upload back to the swarm, while others do not.

And a BitTorrent author only pays less for bandwidth if there are a large number of continually connected seeds and peers. If not, the

"I don't believe there are any real (as in frequently used) legitimate reasons for P2P networks to exist other than to distribute material illegally. ... I'm not saying that it's not possible to use P2P networks for legit reasons, and I'm not saying that on occasion people do obtain legal materials from them."

I run a community gaming site that catalogs maps for First Person Shooters. With over 10 GB of maps and growing, P2P combined with magnet links is an incredibly valuable method of file distribution that doesn't require loads of cash, server cycles and bandwidth to operate and maintain. It boasts hundreds of downloads a week. I'd hardly call that "occassional."

Really though, it's not a good way for an author to market something (no tracking, no content control, no targeting, etc), and it's not a convenient way for the consumer to retrieve something (file descriptors can be poor, you get queued up, you have to share back to get good rates with some services, etc).

No tracking, content control and targeting? Not convenient? You have to share back to get good rates? File descriptions are poor?

Any qualified web admin can implement tracking on the web site that's listing the download whether it be magnet, torrent or otherwise. As well, some P2P apps provide limited download tracking. BitTorrent on it's own does not provide tracking either (you'd have to analyze torrent downloads in the server log files), so your point is kind of moot.

Not convenient? Ever heard of a magnet link? You put a link on your page. Clicking it launches the user's P2P app and starts the download. How is that not convenient? On a comparison to BitTorrent I'd say it's just as, if not more convenient (I don't have to delete old torrent files with magnet links). Compared to HTTP downloads, all P2P tech is obviously less convenient since you have to download P2P software.

Share back to get good rates? Funny... that's how BitTorrent works and a good number of other P2P networks don't.

The one giant exception here is Bittorrent ... encourages the distribution of *legitamate* content because it a) allows the author to create and maintain a torrent that isn't connected to some vast network of crap, b) torrents can be "distributed" via websites, which is where you want your consumer to be, c) the consumer gets faster downloads, d) the author pays for less bandwidth.

As I mentioned, magnet links eliminate the problems of the "vast network of crap." They contain a file hash similar to a torrent file and can contain one or more source seed server addresses. They can be put on a website just like any URL with the added benefit that they don't require you to have a one-to-one relationship of all your files to torrent files.

The fact that you even need to maintain and distribute torrent files is a pain. If I've got 4,000 files I want to distribute via BitTorrent, it requires that I maintain 4,000 torrent files. Granted, a software author may not have 4,000 files, but the requirement to maintain them still exists regardless.

The consumer only gets faster downloads with BitTorrent if they are able to get it configured and playing nice with their particular setup. Most, but not all, "average Joes" I've tried to sell BitTorrent on always complain about painful tweaking and crappy speeds because of it. This is primarily because BitTorrent requires you to upload back to the swarm, while others do not.

And a BitTorrent author only pays less for bandwidth if there are a large number of continually connected seeds and peers. If not, the

Galleon already uses the Yahoo search API to show artist images, internet slideshows and upcoming events on Tivo: http://galleon.sourceforge.net/

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

I use and recommend rsnapshot for taking disk-to-disk backups of unix based servers and PCs. It has a *really* slick directory structure where each daily/weekly/monthly backup directory is a *full* snapshot - but by using hard links, it only saves the changed files multiple times. Also, because it uses rsync, it only copies changed files across the network, and can use ssh no problem.

It's downsides: it's basically just a wrapper for rsync. It requires a lot of babysitting (if your backups fail for some reason, it'll try to do full backups the next day possibly with disasterous consequences as it tries to jam hundreds of gig down your T1). Also, it has to log in as root on all of your boxes, so there are some very careful sercurity considerations.

But a box with a bunch of disks in it, put it off site, and whamo you have a complete backup solution.

For the windows users, I like backuppc. I have never actually used it, but it allows windows users to choose when their backups are taken, and allows them to recover files themselves through a web interface. It's big downside is the cryptic way it stores files internally, making it really hard to extract files without using the web interface.

Well... yes.

There is an educational language called 'LEAP' that implements a relational algebra type of language: LEAP Overview

I'm sure this will remove it.

Many of these features you mention are already available through Galleon http://galleon.sourceforge.net/ You can get RSS feeds, weather, see movie times at local theatres and stream your mp3's directly to your tivo. While this is not a tivo initiative it is easy to use and has many features that I'm sure tivo will directly incorporate in the near future.