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Nice long rambling explanation there, but I can find used cd's for half the price of new. Used cd stores have overhead. I commonly find cds at CDBaby for $5-8 a pop. Certainly those guys have overhead and salaries to pay too. Downloads could certainly be cheaper. Of the 99 cents Apple charges at the iTMS, about 30 goes to the credit card processor, 10 goes to apple 10 goes to the artist and the other 50 goes to the record company, who by the way, have done squat diddly other than authorize Apple to sell the tune. (In contrast, unsigned Indies keep the lion's share of the 99 cents for their tracks.)

In short, I call bullshit. Explain it with gross/net margin, shipping, returns, price protection or whatever. We all know better. The prices 'the industry' charges are too high and the extra is going to the RIAA's Adolescents Litigation fund, the 'lobby congress for infinite copyrights' fund, the 'lobby congress for higher blank media levies' fund, and of course, payola.

Yet you sit there and tell me they aren't over charging even in the face of rock solid evidence to the contrary. Either you are badly misinformed or deliberately spreading lies. They are the thieves. They steal from me with blank CD levies. They steal from their customers with price fixing. They steal from the public domain with copyright extensions. I will never willingly give them another dime of my money. EVER.

Free & Legal Music
Boycott the RIAA
The shit list. Do no business with these labels.

but Apple's research appears to indicate that there more consumers like me than you.

CUSTOMERS

SALES TO END USERS ONLY
The iTunes Music Store sells products to end user customers only.

You will not find the word "consumer" anywhere in that agreement. The word consumer implies that I will somehow deplete my supply of music after it is purchased and therefore be compelled to buy more. Customers on the other hand have the prerogative to buy something else entirely or buy nothing at all. If you do not provide value to your customers, they will go elsewhere. The RIAA is simply witnessing that.

PHP does use a significant amount of RAM, but this is largely based upon what modules you are loading in. If you're writing basic SQL query pages with some crypto, then just load those modules. You'll still use some memory, but much less that loading GD every time, and not using it. You can also install the modules and call them only when you need them.

The Apache module does use a significant amount of RAM, but unlike standard CGI's, the processes are not dying and re-spawning, so the same process actually processes many pages before re-starting, so there is not a big problem except when you have scripts processing at the exact same time on the server. With CGI's, you get a lot more memory thrasshing. For Perl, Python, etc, there are apache modules that do the same kind of thing, but I have no experience with them.

Accelerators help you in that the process will complete quicker, thus there's less overlap of processing. A great free accelerator is eAccelerator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/eaccelerator/). Their main site appears to be down right this second, and it's flagged as 'beta', but I have been using it without any problems. Granted, we are pre-production, so I have not tested it under a lot of load. I put up a cop of their 'README' on my site at http://under-score.net/~brian/eaccelerator.README. txt

Yup, I know, the Flash player isn't open source. But there's an open source compiler, MTASC (*), and with ActionStep, there's a rapidly growing (BSD licensed!) open source component library.

All sorts of nifty open source things are happening with Flash these days; you can track that sort of thing on OSFlash.

(*) Written in Ocaml, how cool is that? (**)
(**) Very.

...is a spelling checker. There is a good one available for FireFox as a downloadable add-on extension...

For those that need a pointer in the right direction, it's call spellbound. Don't forget to add the dictionary(s) like it instructs or spellbound will silently fail to catch any mistakes.

You can already get this much, if you run JavaHMO on your computer instead of Tivo's default home media software. It also does weather and a lot of other cool stuff.

-Eric

Well this is off-topic, but I see many responses referring to Ultima Online, but Ultima was around LONG before that. These are some great games to get into if your're bored. Wikipedia has some history on the series. Here are some FOSS versions (although in most cases you still have to buy/own the original):

Ultima IV (freeware) with the XU4 engine.
Ultima VI with the Nuvie engine.
Ultima VII with the Exult engine.
Ultima VIII with the Pentagram engine.
Ultima Underworld with the UWADV engine.
Ultima Underworld II with the LOW engine.

Most of these, and the ones I didn't mention can be played with DOSBox. My favorites are Ultima V and Ultima VII. And for good measure here is a free game that doesn't have anything to do with any of this, but it still kicks ass, Star Control 2.

Well this is off-topic, but I see many responses referring to Ultima Online, but Ultima was around LONG before that. These are some great games to get into if your're bored. Wikipedia has some history on the series. Here are some FOSS versions (although in most cases you still have to buy/own the original):

Ultima IV (freeware) with the XU4 engine.
Ultima VI with the Nuvie engine.
Ultima VII with the Exult engine.
Ultima VIII with the Pentagram engine.
Ultima Underworld with the UWADV engine.
Ultima Underworld II with the LOW engine.

Most of these, and the ones I didn't mention can be played with DOSBox. My favorites are Ultima V and Ultima VII. And for good measure here is a free game that doesn't have anything to do with any of this, but it still kicks ass, Star Control 2.

Well this is off-topic, but I see many responses referring to Ultima Online, but Ultima was around LONG before that. These are some great games to get into if your're bored. Wikipedia has some history on the series. Here are some FOSS versions (although in most cases you still have to buy/own the original):

Ultima IV (freeware) with the XU4 engine.
Ultima VI with the Nuvie engine.
Ultima VII with the Exult engine.
Ultima VIII with the Pentagram engine.
Ultima Underworld with the UWADV engine.
Ultima Underworld II with the LOW engine.

Most of these, and the ones I didn't mention can be played with DOSBox. My favorites are Ultima V and Ultima VII. And for good measure here is a free game that doesn't have anything to do with any of this, but it still kicks ass, Star Control 2.

Well this is off-topic, but I see many responses referring to Ultima Online, but Ultima was around LONG before that. These are some great games to get into if your're bored. Wikipedia has some history on the series. Here are some FOSS versions (although in most cases you still have to buy/own the original):

Ultima IV (freeware) with the XU4 engine.
Ultima VI with the Nuvie engine.
Ultima VII with the Exult engine.
Ultima VIII with the Pentagram engine.
Ultima Underworld with the UWADV engine.
Ultima Underworld II with the LOW engine.

Most of these, and the ones I didn't mention can be played with DOSBox. My favorites are Ultima V and Ultima VII. And for good measure here is a free game that doesn't have anything to do with any of this, but it still kicks ass, Star Control 2.

Well this is off-topic, but I see many responses referring to Ultima Online, but Ultima was around LONG before that. These are some great games to get into if your're bored. Wikipedia has some history on the series. Here are some FOSS versions (although in most cases you still have to buy/own the original):

Ultima IV (freeware) with the XU4 engine.
Ultima VI with the Nuvie engine.
Ultima VII with the Exult engine.
Ultima VIII with the Pentagram engine.
Ultima Underworld with the UWADV engine.
Ultima Underworld II with the LOW engine.

Most of these, and the ones I didn't mention can be played with DOSBox. My favorites are Ultima V and Ultima VII. And for good measure here is a free game that doesn't have anything to do with any of this, but it still kicks ass, Star Control 2.

Well this is off-topic, but I see many responses referring to Ultima Online, but Ultima was around LONG before that. These are some great games to get into if your're bored. Wikipedia has some history on the series. Here are some FOSS versions (although in most cases you still have to buy/own the original):

Ultima IV (freeware) with the XU4 engine.
Ultima VI with the Nuvie engine.
Ultima VII with the Exult engine.
Ultima VIII with the Pentagram engine.
Ultima Underworld with the UWADV engine.
Ultima Underworld II with the LOW engine.

Most of these, and the ones I didn't mention can be played with DOSBox. My favorites are Ultima V and Ultima VII. And for good measure here is a free game that doesn't have anything to do with any of this, but it still kicks ass, Star Control 2.

Well this is off-topic, but I see many responses referring to Ultima Online, but Ultima was around LONG before that. These are some great games to get into if your're bored. Wikipedia has some history on the series. Here are some FOSS versions (although in most cases you still have to buy/own the original):

Ultima IV (freeware) with the XU4 engine.
Ultima VI with the Nuvie engine.
Ultima VII with the Exult engine.
Ultima VIII with the Pentagram engine.
Ultima Underworld with the UWADV engine.
Ultima Underworld II with the LOW engine.

Most of these, and the ones I didn't mention can be played with DOSBox. My favorites are Ultima V and Ultima VII. And for good measure here is a free game that doesn't have anything to do with any of this, but it still kicks ass, Star Control 2.

Done.

http://punjab.sourceforge.net/

It's Jabber/XMPP and it exposes XML-RPC, SOAP, HTTP-Binding and HTTP-Polling interfaces for all Jabber client functionality. That website I just mentioned has a "JWChat HOWTO". JWChat is like a Javascripty web-based Jabber client frontend which you can use as a frontend to the Punjab interface.

There is even an interactive demo on the website. Check it out!

macromedia doesn't release for linux

It runs fine on my GNU/Linux system though. The trouble with flash is that there was no free (as in freedom) flash plugin. However, I guess our friends at the FSF can point you to a project that is working on just that.

Are you saying that you read the logs directly/manually?

See AWStats

Yes, just use mod_gzip with apache.

Please note that I never claimed that Visual Studio.NET is free. It isn't.

However, the .NET SDK is entirely free. Please actually visit the link that I previosly posted, and you'll find that this is true.

Get DOSBox or dual boot with FreeDOS.

After searching all over for several weeks, I chose eGroupWare. Their "etemplates" framework settled the issue for me.

When I looked at the system tray, it was filled with 15+ icons. [...] So I got rid of them all. I got tired of keeping track of what program was calling home.

Flash is just a plugin. If you use FireFox, it's no different than installing an extension. It fast, small, and doesn't load any icons into your task tray.

The other problems you had could have been solved quite easily: Media Player Classic.

Looks just like a stripped-down version of Windows Media Player 6.4 (before skins and bloat). It's a 4 meg executable file (2 meg download compressed). Nothing else--no DLL's, no subdirectories... nada. It runs super-fast (faster than VLC, in my experience, and WAY faster than Windows Media Player). It uses the absolute minimum of system resources. With it (and the proper codecs... yes, you have to install the proper codecs), you can view Flash, Real Media, Quicktime, DivX, XViD, Matroska (MKV), MPEG-1 or -2, MP3, and DVD's. If you have a TV Tuner card installed, you can even use it to watch television. 4 meg file.

Oh, and no icon in the task tray.

(If you want the QT and RM codecs without having to install the whole bloatful program, click on the links I provided above).

Just expanding on your suggestion...

Perhaps he could use the OpenOffice API to automatically have a server-side instance of OpenOffice open submitted Word documents and save them as HTML. This should happen at the same time the user uploads the document - that way the user could preview the conversion to HTML, and if it was flawed, he could choose to publish the document as PDF.

OpenOffice API:
    http://api.openoffice.org/

Code snippet shows simplicity of converting OpenOffice Writer SXW document into PDF:
    http://codesnippets.services.openoffice.org/Writer /Writer.StoreWriterAsPDF.snip
Perhaps a few small changes here would get him what he wants.

Perl interface (ooolib):
    http://ooolib.sourceforge.net/doc/ooolib-0.1.5-doc .html#info
There are also Java code snippets. I think it would be possible to convert the OOBasic snippet above to either Java or Perl.

Look at Sarien, a sierra AGI interpreter. It plays the old classics (KQ 1-3, SQ, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, etc). It doesn't appear to be ported to ported to the PSP (yet), but it is available for the dreamcast.

Look at Sarien, a sierra AGI interpreter. It plays the old classics (KQ 1-3, SQ, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, etc). It doesn't appear to be ported to ported to the PSP (yet), but it is available for the dreamcast.

http://raop-play.sourceforge.net/ or http://nanocrew.net/?page_id=115

Is it going to get converted to Delphi?

Tivo has competition.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php? plugin=RSSImport

An RSS plugin to Azureus.

Everytime I had ideas to build a car PC (always lacked the funding) I always wanted to not just play movies, mp3s, wardrive, checkweather, browse the web, etc.; I also wanted to know what was going on with my car. Driving a 1993 DSM this is a fairly easy task since the car already outputs data from the computer in standard RS-232 format and at least a couple of dataloggers is readily available from sourceforge for DSMs. I would think this would be even easier to do for any car manufactured after 1995 (or was it 1996?) which support the very standard ODBII. I mean c'mon? Who doesn't want to see the exact statistics of their RPM, Knock, O2, air temperature, coolant temperature, etc. as a nice screensaver?

Everytime I had ideas to build a car PC (always lacked the funding) I always wanted to not just play movies, mp3s, wardrive, checkweather, browse the web, etc.; I also wanted to know what was going on with my car. Driving a 1993 DSM this is a fairly easy task since the car already outputs data from the computer in standard RS-232 format and at least a couple of dataloggers is readily available from sourceforge for DSMs. I would think this would be even easier to do for any car manufactured after 1995 (or was it 1996?) which support the very standard ODBII. I mean c'mon? Who doesn't want to see the exact statistics of their RPM, Knock, O2, air temperature, coolant temperature, etc. as a nice screensaver?

That would be sweet: http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/

Specifically designed for teaching programming. Although it's not a 'real' programming language as such, it might be well worth exploring.

http://gvr.sourceforge.net/

Or PL/I, of course. :-)

Cool - does this mean I can play Tux Racer in my car now?

You could give sphinx a try. I don't know how good it actually is (it didn't work so well with a headphone as the microphone and no vocabulary teaching).

There's also Freevo and Media Portal .

There's also Freevo and Media Portal .

I've so far failed to get any of the GUI toolkits to work with SBCL or CLISP under Gentoo.

Me neither. CLX, CLIM, cl-gtk, Lambda-gtk, cl-sdl - none of them worked properly for me. They installed perfectly because the Gentoo maintainer for dev-lisp really knows what he's doing, but I couldn't get any compiled or working.

It's been very disappointing because I'm really enjoying Lisp the language, having worked my way through Practical Common Lisp and now reading the classic PAIP which must be the finest book on programming I have ever read anywhere for any language. Lisp the language has unbelievable power but all the free implementations suffer from immature interfaces to the rest of the world. That's fine if you want to use Lisp as a "glorified Logo" as yet another frustrated person on the Web put it, but for writing GUI apps with SDL, I've now chosen Lush which is a Common Lisp-based variant with a plethora of add-on libraries that actually work out of the box.

I'll keep holding thumbs that CL attracts enough people to make it as trivial to extend as Python and Ruby are now. I just remembered, cl-ltk did work for me - check it out. Peter has also added support for the new Tile widgets which have themes and advanced widgets.

How about BasicJ? http://sourceforge.net/projects/basicj

Maybe parent assumed that everyone knew about this.

http://www.hyperspacehome.com/hyperwrt/index.php?p age=home-page
http://www.sveasoft.com/modules/phpBB2/
http://www.sveasoft.com/content/view/3/1/
http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/LinksysWr t54g
https://sourceforge.net/projects/wifi-box/

Not a complete list and some of the above may be a little dated but you can get an idea of the additional features that hackers have been able to squeeze into these devices.

I've been working on something similar: last Christmas, I picked up 3 Network Everywhere NWR04B wireless routers on sale -- $18 each! -- and have been trying ever since to duplicate this guy's success in getting uClinux (a version of Linux for CPUs with no MMU) running on the thing.

The guy who got it running originally hasn't responded to my emails, so it's a good thing he made his kernel tree available. Alsoplus, I think he used a JTAG adapter to load the image; since I wanted to make a firmware image that anyone could upload with the web interface, I had to reverse engineer the firmware checksum too. (Luckily it was a pretty simple checksum, or else I don't think I would've been able to do it...I'm really learning all this as I go along.)

In July I finally managed to get a kernel panic, am now trying to get BusyBox working on the thing. I keep getting these errors:

Unhandled fault: external abort on linefetch (D4) at 0x00000001
fault-common.c(97): start_code=0x740040, start_stack=0x71ffbc)

which, from what I have been able to Google, may be because of differing opinions (libc/uClibc vs. the kernel vs. the chip) about whether or not this thing has an FPU. If anyone's got any suggestions, please leave a note -- I need all the help I can get.

It's been an incredible learning experience -- I know more now about how the kernel interacts with CPUs, the filesystems, compilers and the bootloader than I ever had. (Still got tons to learn, mind you.) I'm looking forward to the day I can get a Beowulf cluster of these things going. :-)

Common Lisp has been attracting a lot of attention lately, compared to previous activity. Several of the Common Lisp projects funded were for the purpose of improving things like foreign function interfaces, and thus speed Lisp's popularity and utility even further.

There are a lot of applications written in Lisp that are special enough and powerful enough to justify lots of attention. For example:

ACL2 : http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/
This is a high powered proof assistant and IIRC was used by AMD to verify some parts of their chip design.

Maxima: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
This is a computer algebra system, with the ability to do things like symbolic integration. Not your run of the mill program, and very difficult to do except in a language like lisp or a similar language

Axiom: http://www.axiom-developer.org/
A second computer algebra system, with a slightly different approach than Maxima. Also extremely powerful, and is pushing the envelope of robust, literate program design for computational mathematics.

None of these has a pretty interface, granted (at least not one written in lisp) but these are not your everyday programs. Lisp is a real language in real, non-trivial use.

There are a variety of other projects being undertaken, check out http://common-lisp.net/ for many of them. And if you want to code lisp remember to explore SLIME+Emacs.

He's probably running FVWM-95.

I've never purchased a Mac because they simply don't have the software titles I'm interested in and Windows does. I mean sure, they've got great stuff, but they lack in GAMES, yes games

How would making Mac OS X available for all x86 machines improve this situation that keeps you from buying a Mac? Just because you have the same hardware arch as windows doesn't mean you can run windows apps.

Yes, there are software solutions to this problem, but they will work just as well on an Apple x86 as on a whitebox x86.

I prefer 'functional' languages over the 'dysfunctional' ones.

What I _want_ is a functional language that I can use to generate real-time code for an embedded dsp. What functional languages are options for me?

There's an interesting article that talks about PPL, which might be interesting, but since I'm entirely ignorant about embedded systems in general and embedded DSPs in particular, I don't know if this helps.

Two other languages that might interest you are:

• Stratego, and
• Q. Q is pretty nice. It is a losely typed, interpreted Haskell with strong support for A/V control (including DSPs). The author is a professor in the Music Information department of the University of Mainz in Germany, so the audio libraries are correspondingly rich. If you like Haskell but hate Haskell's IO, Q is for you. The only downside is that it is interpreted.

--- SER

BTW, you can already test using pearpc, http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/ to emulate a PowerPC platform. It's kind of fragile.

Umm... boot it into an emulator that has generic drivers?

After HPIJS 1.0.1 the driver uses a BSD license. HPIJS 1.0 and below uses a BSD type license with a "HP product only" clause.

After HPIJS 1.0.1 the driver uses a BSD license. HPIJS 1.0 and below uses a BSD type license with a "HP product only" clause.

> It's called leeching.

True! There's a tradeoff there though - how many folks will _not_ contribute since they want to stand clear of the GPL? I'd rather give those folks a safe way to contribute, and I've got zero interest in tracking down GPL violators.

And it seems to be working out well - check the contributors page. Most of the real interesting stuff in PMD has come from other folks... like the data flow analysis stuff, for example. I want to avoid any chance of scaring away those folks ...

Not that these stats are everything. Clearly, in the professional world, VB is more common / popular. Mostly, though, I want to keep up on my skills, and use a language that I'm able to find other people who know (more resources, people to hire or work with, etc.) I want to make sure that the libraries are there, and other resources (like books) are there.

Maybe I'll check into Ruby a little further. Ruby does have the "Ruby on Rails" momentum going for it. (Reminds me of when Java came out - and a lot of non-tech people heard about it from Sun's marketing. It got "popular" in part because it was a buzzword of the Internet. Perhaps Ruby on Rails will cause the same thing to happen for Ruby.

Pick up a cheap M100/Zire/TungstenE, whatever suits your fancy, then load it with DueYesterday from http://sourceforge.net/projects/nosleepsoftware/ It'll track classes, homework, papers, grades, etc for you. If you're going to take notes during class, pick up a folding keyboard for it.