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Presuming you mean MacOSX, then yes;
Check out aMule & MLDonkey. They're both quite popular and multi-platform.
There's also the offical client/version that is also supposed to work on OSX, but I haven't tried it myself.
Hope that's akin to what you were looking for.

No; the opposite of open is use-controlled.

So GPL'ed code isn't open?

Unfortunately, just like the SMB "standard," the Flash(tm) specification cannot be used to implement an open viewer.

That's true, it is a licensing restriction of that documentation, but there is a GPL Flash Player.

To me, the question comes down to: what's really important? Open specifications have been used and abused by Microsoft to bash competitors for time immemorial. (Microsoft sez: "We follow the open specification, but we've improved it!") The fact that Java was so open is what allowed Microsoft to kill it on the client-side. To me it's a question of abstract political what-ifs vs the practical reality of the issue.

Now if I could only merge gnome-terminal with nautilus...

Indeed. The best I've seen for this is Evidence the file manager for enlightenment. The downside is that it's still in development and doesn't necessarily do all the things you want in a GUI file manager. The upside is that it has a microshell built in, which lets you do things like select files (in the GUI) with a command line (using the usual wildcards and globbing) or execute command line on the GUI selection - just type what you want. It's a feature that I hope will prove popular and become available in the more mainstream file managers to.

Jedidiah.

My guess is that this is just the beginning of a wider restriction in licensing of closed-source software on open-source operating systems.

Slowly it won't just be "device-targetted versions" of the OS that aren't allowed, but any version of the OS that is not provided from an approved list of vendors (Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake) who have made it clear that their operating systems are not just tarballs of code (Debian) but rather are specifically designed for target platforms.

At the application level, this, and this are two possible answers, or at least workarounds. On the filesystem level, this could be a possible workaround as well.

I agree however that it would seem people have been caught with their pants down in regards to WinFS though. The usual sentiment about it among Linux peeps from what I've seen is that it either isn't doable, or that it is, but that it'd be horribly slow.

Methinks a change in attitude is called for, however. This could very well be Bill's answer to the One Ring if he gets it out, which is presumably why Microsoft are trying to get a working release ASAP. Forget the coder bias for a minute here, and think about what the implications of this could be from the perspective of ease-of-use...and then think about what a battle we'd have converting people to Linux if we still don't have it when Microsoft does.

Longhorn was intended to be a Linux killer...but of all the elements I've seen, WinFS is the only one which could truly cause us problems...Especially when you consider how difficult back-engineering compatibility with such an FS would probably be.

As I said, I'm aware WinFS hasn't been taken seriously around here so far...but somebody needs to start to.

Something even easier: just use Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/Audacity and set it to record, when any other app is playing sound. Voila!

http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/This is illegal then?

As i said lower, there ise GPLFlash, GPLed flash player which you can put into your toaster http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/

Hey, but what with GPLFlash (http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/)? After it's release we will not have to bother about some crappy EULA. GPLFlash aims full compatibility with Flash7 and because it's GPLed it could be used even in your toaster.

It's certainly not valid in the UK, since it would force you to sign away certain rights which the Law of the Land says you cannot sign away. These include the right not to be physically attacked {if you ask someone to punch you in the face, and they do so, they can still be prosecuted for assault}, the right to say no to sexual intercourse {If you do not want to have sex with your husband, but he tries it on anyway, he has committed rape}, and certain consumer protections.

All this, however, is certainly good ammo for this project.

Yeah. It seems it was too ambitious, I'd have settled for fixing and extending the old game (better AI, more interesting tech, better management etc.).

There's always freestars, but that doesn't seem to be moving very fast.

anti-Linux (MS ?) Shills are at it again, with their support to mod them up. The oldest occurrence of this post I can find is this one : http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=135647&cid =11333134 .

What's sad is that you see them coming from far far away, but the worst is that their arguments are always flawed.
So they play with emotional things, and don't even get that right (Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with > 1% marketshare, I suppose they meant < 1 % ...).
And then, say stupid things like :

Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".

Eliminating the context, and deliberately forgetting the part about the GUI, like Synaptic or Mandrake Update (which are available in the menu, with names like "Update your system" or "Add new applications").

But wait, they are even more stupid than that !!!! They have no shame. They even talk about the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and then, to illustrate that, ask How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?. Which of course, has nothing to do with Linux configuration issues, and everything to do with the Quake 3 editor not providing a convenient installation method. I don't know Quake 3 per se, so I can't verify what these unreliable sources say, but if these guy http://wcuniverse.sourceforge.net/ can provide an installation file for their Open Source game that works on any Linux thanks to the very old Loki installer, I think any proprietary company can do it too.

Oh but wait, I checked and Quake 3 actually comes with the same installer at least for the french version !!!!

But of course, this old troll had to detail all the installation instructions of the NVidia driver and whatnot for XFree, to sound complicated. Trolls these days ... I suppose this one will be resurrected often though. Reminds me of the good old days, when old trolls were reappearing even though the problems were fixed a long time ago.
Heck, today I just saw "X does not support PNP displays", "X is slow", "Linux has bad font support" ...

Fortunately, anti-Linux trolls do not include "Linux has no games" when they talk about difficulty of installing Quake 3 on it, thank god !

If you use Gaim (and several other clients, but that's the one I use) there's a very nice plugin called Off-the-Record Messaging that allows you to encrypt your communications, no matter which protocol you are using (MSN, Jabber, Yahoo... you name it).

Check out ELKS. It's a system based on Linux that runs on 16 bit PCs (including those based on the 8088).

Indeed, this is not the main Linux kernel, and the required changes will probably never be merged into the main tree, but it's at least theoretically possible to do so. The fact that this system is based on Linux is a testament to the flexibility Linux provides.

I'm not sure if ELKS is still being actively developed, but if you look at the main page, you'll see that it has been updated in 2003. This is long after Microsoft Windows abandoned stopped supporting the 8088 (that happened sometime in the mid-1980s IIRC).

Linux has also been known to run on watches, although it's entirely possible that current watches are much more computationally capable than 8088-based PCs.

Anyway, to make the point explicit: it's relatively easy to get Linux to work about pretty much any sort of computer. The most important reasons for this are:

1. It's open source, so if you have the skills and the tools, you can do it yourself. You are not dependent on somebody else to do it for you.

2. Linux has already been ported to a wide variety of hardware. Many assumptions about hardware working a certain way have been removed or put in architecture-dependent files.

3. Linux is based on a design (Unix) whose main innovation was portability, and the ability to run on low-spec hardware. Throughout Unix, the mantra has been Keep It Simple, Stupid. Also, the system is written in C, which was designed to abstract away from the differences in architecture.

4. Linux is less tied to a certain mode of interaction than other current operating systems. Whereas it's hard to imagine Windows without a GUI, Linux works fine with or without a GUI, with or without a keyboard, with or without a serial console, etc. etc. etc.

There is a snowball effect here; because of the easy access to the source (1), and the source being in a portable language (3), it's easy to compile Linux for a new device. In the porting process, assumptions about that hardware (2) and modes of interaction (4) will be isolated, making the code even easier to port to new architectures. This, in turn, leads Linux to compare favorable to competing OSes w.r.t. portability, increasing the chances that new devices will receive a Linux port. This reinforces 2, 3, and 4. Add to this the fact that the GPL requires sharing changes that you distribute, even 1 is reinforced, so there's a complete feedback loop.

Ahhh, another LaTeX* fan. How I appreciate thee...

(I think LaTeX generates much nicer documents than either OO Writer or Word because it balances line (and page, but that's much less important) breaks better and does proper spacing after periods.)

May I recommend that you look at LaTeX Beamer? It produces some very nice electronic slides (among the nicest I've seen I think), and can be nicely incorporated with text for handouts and stuff.

I know you said somewhere that you like white boards, but if you need or want to make an electronic presentation it's a viable option.

* I think the mountain range casing makes the name look absolutely stupid. I also think the ".org" on the end of OOo makes IT look really stupid.

VNC has a lot of variants out there. I actually deployed a version of UltraVNC ( http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/ ) that doesn't have a tray icon. It never popped anything up on connection. Used in combination with a nifty script that I found, called FastPush, I can install VNC remotely, have no icon and no notifications, and have it start and run as a service.

It's quite useful, as I don't have to install it on each machine, and I can just script install and pop up vncviewer when I need to remote connect to a machine.

I remember when backoriface came out. I thought it was really useful to those of us that wanted MS SMS style functions, but didn't want the price tag. Other tools came out that are much more useful, though, like the SysInternals tools and VNC.

People already answered with some apps. The idea is that Windows or DOS install a very simple boot loader in MBR that actually calls the boot loader of some tagged partition (the 'DOS-active' partition). This information should be difficult to find because it's not a Linux thing. Anyway, there's a linux software that creates such a boot sector: mbr. I couldn't find it anywhere but at debian.

Now for the 'get my disk space back' thing, this is both a not-so-easy thing and pretty much requested thing, that already has some interesting software

I've been using a Wacom Graphire for years with the Gimp. They work well. This is how hard it is to get a howto from a google search: http://www.google.com/search?q=gimp+wacom
At least for me, the above search yields http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/index.php/howto/ gimp
The XOrg X Server is shipped with a driver that Works For Me, but if you are unlucky, you might have to download a driver from the Linux Wacom project. They are cooperating closely with Wacom Technology Co. on these drivers and are doing really nice work.
Check it out at http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/

I've been using a Wacom Graphire for years with the Gimp. They work well. This is how hard it is to get a howto from a google search: http://www.google.com/search?q=gimp+wacom
At least for me, the above search yields http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/index.php/howto/ gimp
The XOrg X Server is shipped with a driver that Works For Me, but if you are unlucky, you might have to download a driver from the Linux Wacom project. They are cooperating closely with Wacom Technology Co. on these drivers and are doing really nice work.
Check it out at http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/

I use GAG: http://gag.sourceforge.net/

It's awesome

Anyone remember XOSL? I thought it was great.
Unfortunately the Open Source model didn't work
out so great for it:
http://xosl.sourceforge.net/manifesto.html
No longer active..

Mirror of the Original Site:
http://www2.arnes.si/~fkomar/xosl.org/

You mean without WinGrub? I use it with Windows XP/Fedora Core 4 and love it.

As for LILO...never tried it.

If you use i386, then ditch Lilo and GRUB, and use something that works out of the box : GAG

You can try GAG to see if it works with AMD64.

Just because, everyone else is doing it in their mundane way should stop anyone from being what they are. use NanoBlogger(http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net/ on your Unix System instead of blogger. That should do!

WsFtp (~40)
PhotoImpact(80)
Quicken (30)
Spybot - Detect and Destroy (free, donated $15)
MS Access - (300 ?, needed a DB program)
MS Visual Basic ($99, not full version which costs as much as $699 IIRC)
Tiny Firewall (was free when I used it, it seems to be $49 now)

Cost I had to pay: $550 (Not including donation)

You're not really comparing like for like though; let's go through that list again...

FileZilla
The GIMP
Grisbi Personal Finance Manager (Windows & Linux)
Ad Aware
AVG AntiVirus
Services for Unix(make, GCC, etc)
OpenOffice.org Base
Windows Firewall / ZoneAlarm Personal Edition

Total Cost: 0

I would also add that these are still high quality applications - not poor quality abandonware/freeware.

WsFtp (~40)
PhotoImpact(80)
Quicken (30)
Spybot - Detect and Destroy (free, donated $15)
MS Access - (300 ?, needed a DB program)
MS Visual Basic ($99, not full version which costs as much as $699 IIRC)
Tiny Firewall (was free when I used it, it seems to be $49 now)

Cost I had to pay: $550 (Not including donation)

You're not really comparing like for like though; let's go through that list again...

FileZilla
The GIMP
Grisbi Personal Finance Manager (Windows & Linux)
Ad Aware
AVG AntiVirus
Services for Unix(make, GCC, etc)
OpenOffice.org Base
Windows Firewall / ZoneAlarm Personal Edition

Total Cost: 0

I would also add that these are still high quality applications - not poor quality abandonware/freeware.

Well, imagine creating an application with nice 3D animation like that is a NO BRAINER. That's what Avalon + the new developer tools + .NET on Windows Vista will let you do, easier than a fart. Linux fan boys, enjoy your GCC.

Avalon? Avalon is supposed to be an XML descriptive language for GUI widgets, something like XUL or gladeXML. The only difference is that these tools exist right now while avalon is vaporware. So I'll go write a GUI in XML and finish it in a few minutes, while you still wait for avalon.

New developer tools? You really believe there are no developer tools on linux? Countless IDEs to choose from. From Anjuta to Kdevelop to Eclipse. Countless simple editors. Countless other tools like profilers, version control, etc etc. Detailed and thorough documentation on every tool you'll ever use. Please keep you uninformed opinions to yourself next time. Saves you the embarrassment.

.NET? .NET is BS. Read this very good article about .NET. It'll explain alot.
Now, If you're talking about managed programming languages like C# etc. there's mono. Pretty much everything .net has been transferred or will be soon, so your windows code will work on mono. Plus, mono has other extra subprojects you can use, not available on windows,

So yeah, you wait for your new tools MS fanboy, while we already have them.

[Context menu woes]

"I hope these usability guys flay the GIMP developers alive for that one alone..."

Heh, I feel your pain.

You will be glad to hear that since a year or two, in the Mac and Windows builds at least, the default setting is to have the menu bar in the image window be switched on.

Have a look at Nice: http://nice.sourceforge.net/

It's built compatible with the Java Virtual Machine, and can access all of Java, however, it's a vastly improved language. There's also an eclipse plug-in. I really like the improvements, and they can interoperate with any Java that my coworkers write.

For those of you using OS X that have an interest in GIMP, I ran across Seashore the other day while reading Drunkenblog. It's a major improvement over GIMP for OS X. Definitely something to keep your eye on.

You can write in lots of nice languages for it, wheras Java afaik only has Java and Ruby.

No offense, but I guess you don't know much. Here are just a few of the available languages for the JVM:

• Smalltalk
• Pascal
• Modula-2
• Oberon-2
• Lisp
• Schema
• Python
• Perl
• TCL
• Logo
• Prolog

You can write in lots of nice languages for it, wheras Java afaik only has Java and Ruby.

No offense, but I guess you don't know much. Here are just a few of the available languages for the JVM:

• Smalltalk
• Pascal
• Modula-2
• Oberon-2
• Lisp
• Schema
• Python
• Perl
• TCL
• Logo
• Prolog

By + + + J.C. Pizarro + + + ATH OK.

1) ACEGI - Aspect-orientaded-programming using a dependency injection model to replace or complement JAAS for authentication and authorization in an Application server independant way. A subproject of the Spring framework:

http://acegisecurity.sourceforge.net/docbook/acegi .html/

2) XML Encryption and XML Digital Signatures. Used in Web Service security or independently.

http://xml.apache.org/security/

http://ws.apache.org/wss4j/

3) Container managed security implemented in every servlet container on the market, including tomcat.

In short, I'd like to see a comparison of the features and availablity of what people actually use in their applications, rather than an entirely fudgable comparison of reported/unreported security flaws.

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -- Goethe"

iksrazal

Er, could anybuddy spare a few coins for Open Source Artificial Intelligence?

You don't even need to fund an unknown AI startup. Just hire some hotshot programmers and Steal.This.Idea!

It's all described in the scientific literature of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Be the first on your block to launch the Hard Takeoff of a Technological Singularity.

http://info.biosci.ohio-state.edu/network/etherape .png

http://etherape.sourceforge.net/images/v0.3.1.png

matrix screensaver! http://zmatrix.sourceforge.net/

Why are you creating MP3's on your MP3 player?
Do you like wasting your time? Your PC will make Mp3s much faster than any Mp3 player.
If you are getting DRM protected MP3s you're using crap software.

Please try this:
1) Download Lame (Linux) or Winlame
2) Rip CD Audio to Wav using Audiograbber or EAC
3) Create Mp3's using lame, like this (lame.exe --abr 256 filename.wav filename.mp3). You can also enter the --abr 256 in Audiograbbers MP3 tab so it will do all of this automatically, including assigning a full ID3 tag to all your new DRM, HQ Mp3s.

That's it!

Besides the confusing name, Lame IS and Mp3 encoder!

Why are you creating MP3's on your MP3 player?
Do you like wasting your time? Your PC will make Mp3s much faster than any Mp3 player.
If you are getting DRM protected MP3s you're using crap software.

Please try this:
1) Download Lame (Linux) or Winlame
2) Rip CD Audio to Wav using Audiograbber or EAC
3) Create Mp3's using lame, like this (lame.exe --abr 256 filename.wav filename.mp3). You can also enter the --abr 256 in Audiograbbers MP3 tab so it will do all of this automatically, including assigning a full ID3 tag to all your new DRM, HQ Mp3s.

That's it!

Besides the confusing name, Lame IS and Mp3 encoder!

If you loved Star Control 2, check out The Ur-Quan Masters.

I found backuppc to be an excellent tool for this.

I realize that's a joke, but I'm afraid that it doesn't quite work that way. Movie pirates often don't pirate things because they really want the individual thing, they pirate them because they can. It's a bit of a gmae to them. i.e. Who can end up with the most stuff. Perhaps the most indicitive signs of this game were the rooms in DirectConnect (since replaced with DC++) that required you to have 40 to 100 GIGS of data shared. If you failed their test, a bot would auto-kick you.

I wouldn't be surprised if many pirates never use/watch the stuff they get. It's all just a game. A scavanger hunt, if you will. Whoever gets the most stuff "wins". The funny part is that they may just "win" a call from the **AA or law enforcement. What a prize. :-/

It does not sound like you have had very much hands on experience with sonars within robotics. The current state of commercially available sonars (in the air) provides a single range measurement for a cone (usually ca. 30 degrees, but sometimes much smaller). This range measurement is *very* unreliable since it only gives the distance to one point (usually the closest) within this cone and only under the rights circumstances (depending on the material, the angle towards sonar etc.). The biggest problem with these sensors is the low angular resolution and unreliability. Nonetheless the state of the art in, for instance, map building manages to construct some surprisingly accurate maps, to navigate in indoor environments etc. To say that the data isn't _used_ well enough is not an accurate description of the problem. The problem rather lies in the sensors and in the signal processing (computing eg. range data). Oh, and also: if you are interested in robotics make sure to take a look at Player/Stage http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ which is an opensource implementation of drivers for various commercial robots as well as some controll functionalities, simulators etc.

future of cross-platform development

You know, after a while, ignorance isn't even amusing anymore. gcc, nasm, qt, gtk, wxwidgets, more, then even more perl, python, ruby, ... ... ...
 

Azureus is the only client to my knowledge that can do some of these (can maintain a list of completed torrents for seeding, automatically seeds up to a certain number of them based on demand, has a built-in tracker, etc.), but I'm not sure if that was what you were looking for.

Microsoft's implementation of multiple desktops is a joke. If you want multiple desktops on a windows machine, get virtuawin. It's still nowhere near to what you can do with FVWM or E17, and there seems to be no decent pager, but it actually works, and it makes the time I spend working on windows much less painful.

bcrypt and ccrypt. They're all you need. Windows, Linux, whatever. Open-source and very good ciphers.

bcrypt and ccrypt. They're all you need. Windows, Linux, whatever. Open-source and very good ciphers.

Check out regain: http://regain.sourceforge.net/index.php Works as a computer indexer using Lucene.. Seems to do better on search than MS stuff :) On a typical 2.97 GHZ system with 100 gig hd 70% full is about 6 hours to do first index.. It runs fine in backgroudn no noticeable slowing down of other apps while indexing.. It also come sin a server vesion as well for website searches to build search engines like google and yahoo :)