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I've found that autotrace also works quite well and supports colour images.

I find http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ works very well for converting black and white bitmaps to SVG or other vector formats.

Me too. That's why I use spyce.

Whenever I see books like this, I always wonder why people do not use the dynlayer api. DynLayer Api at SourceForge This has been around for quite sometime. Handles drags, moves, events, layers, z index, etc. Everything. True, it is now a bit big, but do like I do and remove what you do not need and away you go. You can AJAX as a separate piece.

Browsers should be able to realize that since the url is the same, diff the previous stream, and the current one, and modify the current page inline.

As it stands now, web developers have to jump through a lot of hoops to get that sort of functionality. They shouldn't.

As long as you don't need to support 4-5 year old browsers, XMLHttp works fine. If you need to support 4-5 year old browsers, either force your users to upgrade (by not supporting them) or use old techniques like form posts and hidden variables or cookies.

but as a practice I'd be more inclined to have a few people invest time in developing components that the majority of people can use, rather than having lots of people trying to understand the complexities, and buggering it up.

Sarissa Oveview:

Sarissa is an ECMAScript library acting as a cross-browser wrapper for native XML APIs. It offers various XML related goodies like Document instantiation, XML loading from URLs or strings, XSLT transformations, XPath queries etc and comes especially handy for people doing what is lately known as "AJAX" development.

No, he's not . You're missing something fundamental (or just choosing not to care). There is no way, at all, to differentiate CP from anything else that might pass through freenet nodes. Or, put another way, anything that can be used to classify CP as un-free speech can be used to classify anything else as un-free speech. Until AI image-recognition algorithms become extremely sophisticated, we have to choose between: a) our benevolent government (as well as our employers, depending on what we say) deciding what sort of speech is acceptable or b) agreeing that everything is "free" and hope for the best. So, in answer to your question (which you probably weren't really asking), no, as much as they don't like it (and beleive me, they torture themselves over this issue on the freenet mailing lists - especially Matthew Toseland), this is not up for review because it's an undecidable problem.

Frankly I prefer a review system based on raw numbers such as how FreshMeat.net handles ratings. How many downloads does a project get? How many click-throughs does the website get? How often does the project release new versions? How have individuals rated the project? Even SourceForge's rating system is a useful tool. I don't want people to give me a lengthy book review. Just give ma thumbs up or down in mass and I'll take it from there.

when you don't have the abstraction offered by lazy lists/streams.

SERIES 2000 has been a free download for a long time now. Series was in CLTL2, f.f.s.

Haskell syntax is very minimal

Come off of it. It just plain isn't. Let's look at the spec, shall we? "Dear lord", he said with remembered horror, "Layout? Haskell syntax is FREAKING 2-DIMENSIONAL".

Now, maybe it's a good fit for your brain, it takes all sorts.

I don't want to extend Lisp, I want to write a program!

Writing idiomatic programs in lisp IS extending lisp. If you're not, you're doing it, well, not wrong as such, but rather suboptimally.

Sorry, Chinese dissidents -- I won't run a Freenet node. You're on your own because too many of my countrymen appear to be incapable of understanding that their right to "speak" freely brings with it a responsibility not to harm others - nor to be accessories after the fact of such harm - with their "speech". When you win your freedom, I hope you do a better job with it than we in the West did.

You know, I ran a Freenet node for several years, and only stopped a while ago (needed the computing resources for other things - I'll consider returning when the current rewrite is done). And in all that time, I've never, ever, not even once, seen a single instance of child porn in Freenet. Perhaps I've been just lucky, or perhaps its just that I haven't went looking for the stuff. But the nastiest thing I ever saw in Freenet was an ASCII art version of Goatse Man posted to a Frost board. I have, however, come accross multiple freesites (websites that have been inserted into Freenet and can be accessed through a web browser by pointing it to localhost:8888, which connects to a proxy server that retrieves the pages from the Freenet and offers them over http protocol) that would be sued out of the Net in good old America. Stuff about scientologists, for example - sorry, can't remember the URI (Freenets version of URL), I never was particularly interested of scientology).

Furthermore, I wonder about the parents claim that a significant amount ("stream of noise") of Freenet traffick is child pornography. The files in Freenet are identified by their SHA1 hashes (called "CHK keys"), and are encrypted with this key before being stored. Then the key is also encrypted before being stored. The requesting node will take the nonencrypted key provided by user, encrypt it with itself, and send a request for the resulting string. When it gets the data back, it decrypts it with the original, user-supplied key. This means that, in order to figure out file contents, even when said file is stored in your node, you need to know the original key. You cannot simply peek inside traffick going through your node, since it is encrypted and you don't have the decrypting key. You can only check against a given list of keys. But that would of course mean that you'd need to compile such a list first, by actively seeking out child pornography - which, because of Freenets cache mechanism, would make it cached in more nodes, increasing the likelihood that anyone else looking for it is able to retrieve it succesfully.

Based on the above, I have to conclude that the parent poster is either

1. a hypocritical pervert, who went looking for child porn and then posted his rant here afterwards or
2. a well-meaning fool who composed his list without realising that it would help the very thing he tried to work against or
3. a troll who talks out of his ass.

Take your pick.

Also, I must point out that Freenet protects the identities of both the inserter and retriever of data, so the parent has no way to know if this alleged child porn traffick is being generated by his countrymen or someone else. This strongly suggests option number three.

# The main function starts here

Actually, that would have been useful for me to have had in the Maxima code base (1970s and 1980s lisp code)

I'm just beginning to get the hang of lisp, and I had a heck of a time figuring out exactly how the darn thing got started. Anything would have been nice - I didn't know at the beginning that user::run kicked things off, for example (seasoned lisp coders feel free to laugh yourselves out of your chairs). I finally got some idea of the flow of things and charted it:
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/maximaflowtoplevel.p ng

Of course, all the cool and important stuff happens later on, but at least I know roughly how I get there now. Progress!

Essentially I wanted to know this because I was looking for ways to unravel how Maxima actually WORKS (comments were apparently considered a waste of space back in the day, or worse encouraged people to play with (and break) the code.) Now it's open source, and I would like to have the code in a readily understandable state (well, as much as possible - some math stuff is just hard to follow no matter how you comment it) but it's remarkably like redoing a decade old house that has fallen into disrepair. And with minimal to no comments, it's like working without blueprints - you have to poke and prod and hope things are relatively sturdy.

OK, it s not always possible and/or desirable. If it is not broken don't fix it. When I see comment in code because the developer don't understand what happening in 8 level deep statement or in the little function of 10000 lines of code, please fix the code.

there is basic rules to follow; not all exposed here it would be tooooo easy and me way too lazy :) :

• Think before coding
• good variable and function names
• short function is desirable
• don't do more than 4 level-deep statement
• use javadoc for describing function and their parameters
• Think before coding
• use metrics to analyze code
• use junit or other technique to have simple example of use of the code.
• Think about the children^W maintainer
• Think before coding (did I mention it?)

Comments are there to

• javadoc standard formal description for procedure paremeter,...
• tell Why not How
• explain code to avoid bugs in a library or third party code (if (UserAgent == NETSCAPE4) heightOfBox = heightOfBox * 10 /7) // to go around "feature" in netscape about the calculation of (...) see [browser bug workaround 3.2.5]
• place inside method that need to be implemented or overrided
• to explain very particular code for specific constraint like optimization or obscure technique but that need to be avoided and maybe the comment could be a reference to some more advance documentation

NB: I know javadoc, junit and metrics is for java but...

>So what will Linux do that Windows can't already do?
>Will it wash my car? Make a nice scrambled egg and
>bacon? Still has a web browser. Still has an email
>program. Still point and click.

It might not wash your car, but you *could* set up a home security/surveillance system with it if you got some cameras/sensors and wanted to. Also, there are a number of experimental robots in existence running Linux now, so if you were smart enough on the hardware end you very well possibly *could* build something that could wash a car...same for the egg and bacon. There's a HOWTO in existence for a Linux-powered coffee machine.

>Perhaps the decision makers of Linux should focus
>on newer ways of doing things.

You mean like this, this, this, or maybe this?

>So where is the free folks? Only a matter of time
>before licensing fees are added.

Been here recently?

Not to be antagonistic, but before forming an opinion, you might want to do some actual research to base it on first. This is one of the most ignorant comments I've seen for a long time.

Since this topic creeps up again, let me share what I wrote some time ago; I kept it hidden in the hope that it would mature, but it did not by itself ;-) Its fancy name is:
Tractatus Arcanae

I'm going to suggest a combination of measures to improve the stealth and integrity of peer-to-peer communication.

Preface:

The exchange of personal information and forbidden secrets is facing the nosyness of governments and intellectual property 0wners. Allow me to add a sidenote here:

I believe there is such a thing as intellectual property, but that it only exists as long as you actually keep the information secret.

Steps in securing a P2P network are already implemented by Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/).
The steps are encryption of traffic and obfuscating the origin of a file to the extent that the author of the file looses control over the file and stays anonymous, while the file is duplicated across the network in the cache of the nodes.

This leaves a bad feeling, because one might end up storing content that one does not condone, like bad pornography. Fortunately, a network such as Freenet has a property which puts the extra traffic and routing to good use:
Computation of network flow.

As Advogato explains (http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html), network flow has the property that in a network containing "good" information, say good music, and "bad information"(everything else..), the flow between the good part of the network and the bad part is restricted by the throughput rate of the "confused" notes, who don't know the difference between good and bad information.

This means that if the nodes, instead of keeping the information anonymous, instead specialize on knowing about and storing such information as is liked and considered good by the user, then nodes that "like each other" will automatically cluster. However, many P2P systems are very generous in giving away information, something that is very dangerous in a police state or when the traffic is otherwise under scrutinity. It does not help that traffic is encrypted since the source of the file, or at least the identity of the last one to pass the file is known. Therefore, restricting the flow of information only to between nodes that trust each other therefore is essential to the operation of a network that can hide the identity of at least some users of the network.

How is the trust relationship between nodes with good information established? This closes the circle with the aliens I mentioned in the beginning: if you trade information with them, you will initially have to consider them untrustworthy, and you will only want to give information if you get information back.

Therefore the mechanism to establish trust is not unlike a conversation: You talk with someone and when have something in common to talk about, like soccer or baseball, you will talk more with the person. In a peer-to-peer network, this can work by requesting a information(a file) from the unknown, and if you get back good information, which you can verify either because you have the file already, or because you got the hash from 3rd parties, then you add this node to the list of nodes that can be trusted and increase the trust rating. Initially, you will have to trade public information to determine common interests, information like a copy of a GPL licensed software, or a list of prime numbers(that is, if you talk to aliens). When exchanging new information, the quality of the information would have to be manually evaluated, just like two hackers who don't know each other will evaluate their knowledge for e-quality. Gradually, the trust level of the conversation between the nodes will rise and the the nodes will concentrate on handling traffic between trusted nodes.

I am aware that these methods require a lot of traffic for transferring some new information, but these are necessary

I have no doubt it will work, its just I can't get it to:/

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/.

First off , This is great that they have had the fore sight to include the drivers to read and write NTFS .It is also very nice that they have included code weavers cross over office.This is great for getting some people to switch to linux , shame they didn't include cedega as well , which could of really completed the package , though this is a business edition.

But credit where credit is due , the article summary makes it seem like Xandros was responsible for these things.http://www.codeweavers.com/ code weaver site , responsible of Crossover office and naturally a link to wine on which Cross over office is based http://www.winehq.com/.
A link to the linux NTFS project http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ (I assume this is the driver they are using , correct me if I'm wrong)
(Cross over office is a great product , It also has a rather pleasant installer in my experience.So you don't need to switch distros .)

http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/

http://members.lycos.co.uk/fangeles/gp32/cross/qte /gpqte1044.jpg
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fangeles/gp32/cross/qte /2/Image-01.jpg
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gp32linux
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showforum=35

Fortunately he was an honest man and didn't sell the list, rather he contacted the DoJ and DoJ contacted DISCO to help get their shit together. The instructor was making the point that when you surplus equipment that you really need to make sure that you wipe the drives and any other storage media. His bias was that the easiest way to do this was to physically remove and destroy the media because you could never really be sure if a wipe program had worked (well you could go over the drive to make sure that it had been erased, but who's going to do this?).

When I don't want to physically destroy a drive but want to make sure that it's gone I either wipe it with a low-level hardware format utility such as the one built into Adaptec SCSI cards, or I use a program such as autoclave by Josh Larios (which he isn't supporting any more outside of the University of Washington community) although now I guess I'll have to try the recommended replacement Darik's Boot and Nuke. A side benefit of programs such as this one is that they really exercise the Hell out of your disks, which is great to smoke out any potential failures.

Unless you know more about secure data deletion than Peter Gutmann you should use wipe for the job and not attempt to re-invent it. Wipe is open source and has been available for almost 10 years.

Unless you know more about secure data deletion than Peter Gutmann you should use wipe for the job and not attempt to re-invent it. Wipe is open source and has been available for almost 10 years.

There is an option to disable the desktop. http://gtweakui.sourceforge.net/ or gconf-editor can set it for you.

It seems like alot of people here have no idea how to erase a hard drive. If you are worried about your personal data being recovered, reformatting doesn't cut it.

A bit of info: when you delete a file from your computer, the file still remains on the hard drive. Your OS is simply deleting the reference to the file from the file table. Any amateur could easily recover the file, even after a FAT or NTFS formatting.

The simplest way is Darik's Boot and Nuke, aka DBAN. The name says it all. Boot up DBAN, and it will nuke every hard drive it sees.

There are other tools you can use, I am too lazy to look them up for you, but a quick search on sourceforge should yield you some file erasing tools. Many tools will offer you different levels of protection, all the way up to the standards that the Department of Defense uses.

Try Darik's-boot-and-nuke, pretty damn easy especially if you set it up to auto wipe things on boot. Last time I tried it there was next to no user intervention needed (And that was a while back). http://dban.sourceforge.net/

In any case, the point is it's still a (short) one-liner to clean the disks if you know the partition names. If those were Intel boxes, you could have booted off of Knoppix, and run the subject line. Even for RS/6000 boxes, it should be possible to find a Linux boot CD. That's really all you should need.

And various people have free disk-erase boot CDs/floppies. What more do you really want? Stick in floppy, boot, go for lunch. Job done.

I use Darik's Boot and Nuke
  It's free, and it works. There are several different types of disk wiping schemes.
He has both a floppy and an iso version. :-)

Mac OS X has a secure disk formatting tool (and secure empty trash) included. I think its based on this . Its very, very slow but it would seem that it's almost impossible to recover the data after it is used.

I use
  It's free, and it works. There are several different types of disk wiping schemes.
He has both a floppy and an iso version. :-)

o wait, this is the goverment, nevermind

about as well as they do with desktop products

Yeah, except that desktop systems aren't asked to suspend very often.

Suspend is broken in the ATI fglrx drivers, and has been for the eighteen months that I have owned my current laptop. For this reason I use the 2D drivers in the standard X.Org release, although I am hopeful that the r300 project is showing some real traction now.

Exactly!

If you feel you're one of the good guys, you should always oppose bad guys. And think real hard about what opposing means to you.

Big corporations use all kinds of techniques to limit their badness in the eyes of the public. You know these techniques but may not be completely concious of it because of social influences.

One of these techniques is spin (half-lies). Another is spreading the guilt out over as many people as possible. For example, the nazi death camp machine was kept running by thousands of normal people who all did a little evil thing. HOWEVER, the end result was millions of people tortured and executed.

Do you really think that today there aren't any evil people in the world? Of course people who think like Hitler or Stalin exist today, some of them are even in the news. We are the good guys and everyone agrees (even the bad guys will) that evil and evil people need to be surpressed as much as possible.

YOU are not a good guy if you see evil and don't do anything about it. If you see someone breaking the law then that's something for the police, depending if you agree with that law you should call the cops. On the other hand, police can't be everywhere and not all evil is covered by law. There are evil things people can do without breaking the law. That's where the good guys come in.

A comment here, a small decision there will make a difference in the amount of evil in your society. The problem is that the culture is somehow against good guys in the: "nobody likes a smartass" kind of way. There are ways around that. You can give signals to evil doers in ways that do come across. One of them is mixing the message with something exciting or interesting, like humour or music. Another way is to send your message with conviction, if you really believe what you say and say it in a certain way, that will spill over in to your voice and body language. Show some balls in other words but don't be emotional about it, saying it as "matter of fact" works for me.

The reasons I'm saying this, well Cisco is saying, we're only doing this little thing and recently they've tried to supress the information about a security vulnerability in their router OS. Just so they could sit on it so they could spend the least amount of money. The great thing is, one guy showed balls and told everyone they were in danger. He got sued and the FBI were sicced on him (probably as an between-the-lines threat) but he knew that in advance and he still did the right thing. In his presentation he even said something like: "this will get me sued and fired but I want people to know about this". You should hire this guy because he proved he can be trusted.

Now I want YOU to do something to send a message to the evil in people's minds. Even though the people in Cisco individually might not be such bad guys, together they did end up doing the wrong thing in at least two instances. There are other ways of getting a good router for your network aren't there? Other brands, other kinds of solutions than a big router box, things like Eddie.

I'm not asking you to become an activist or something but let's admin this organization called "society" in the best possible way, us smart and aware people know the right way, all we have to do now is act on it. Do a little small thing here and there and bring it in the right way. I made this post and I'm stopping here so I don't get get overwhelmed but I DID do something as the submitter and slashdot editor did their things. Good luck doing your thing and enjoy it when you've done it.

It seems odd to write a review of hardware for linux and only consider proprietary, binary-only drivers. The R300 project has progressed to the point that they now list what is left to do, and its shorter than the list of what is already done. Many games are playable, and it looks like they could use some testers who have a wider range of cards.

php can be cached into bytecode. very similar to jsp pages on a first run basis. there are a few op code caches available for php including one from zend (which costs money) and a few free ones such as mmcache (which we use at FotoFlix and it's great).

But for web development, Java is generally the right choice for the backend. Lots of competent people available who will require no learning curve.

I'll have to disagree somewhat with this. Firstly, I have to take issue with the premise that because a language is well known, you can hire more competant people. For a competant programmer, the time needed to learn a new language is negligible. A competant python programmer, for instance, will be a competant java programmer.

The other difficulty I have with Java is the syntax. Java is a low level language, and thus generally unsuitable for tasks where a high level language can be used. Java's use of primatives and its reduced syntax are perfect for applications such as J2ME, but on more advanced architectures, this low level behavior becomes more of a hinderance than a benefit.

The support tools available for java on the backend are also clearly the best right now, as you pointed out (hibernate etc.). The tools for working in java are also a step ahead of anything else right now (idea and even its slightly retarded younger brother eclipse are both way ahead of the tools for any other language).

Now this I happen to agree with. Java has a lot of good tools, and most are very robust. I wouldn't really class them as a step ahead, as RoR seems a more efficient development environment, but Hibernate and Java servlets seem pretty good for designing large, complex systems.

If you combined these tools with Nice, I'd agree further. Nice is a high-level programming language that compiles into native Java bytecode. With Nice, one gets all the benefits of the Java library, along with the advantage of working in a strongly typed, high-level language with similar capabilities to Ruby or Smalltalk.

That all said, for the majority of web applications, RoR seems the better choice.

You can run KDE on Windows already... okay, not quite what you had in mind, I suppose.

The daimonin web site is temporarily offline. But you can download the game client, server and map editor from the sourceforge project page

Well, i'm running SUSE 9.3 Pro (Retail), and MPlayer plays anything you can trow at it.

Compile MPlayer yourself if you want to get best results, if you don't want or care to compile download the following packages from:

http://packman.links2linux.de/?action=index
MPlayer
w32codecs
Lame
lzo

If compiling, don't forget to install gtk-devel package (Gtk1 not Gtk2), and configure with the following options: ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-gui --with-codecsdir=/usr/lib/win32

The download the All codecs package from MPlayer page, uncompress and copy them to /usr/lib/win32

Download the default skin from MPlayer page and uncompress it on /usr/share/mplayer/Skin

Run gmplayer and you have mplayer with GUI which will play practically anything. You can also download kplayer which is a KDE based GUI on top of MPlayer:

http://kplayer.sourceforge.net/

There, more than enough to get you going. One more thing, use the alsa plugin for sound.

There are two linux-distros for the Linksys WRT54G that are meant to help with setting up hotspots:

EWRT Linux http://www.portless.net/menu/ewrt/ and the hotspot-zone project http://sourceforge.net/projects/hotspot-zone/. Both use nocat as the captive portal, the later offers radius authentication patches for nocat.

My first try would be Win98SE and K-Meleon. I remember how slow even Win95 was on 8MB of memory, so maybe that's not an adequate option.

You could also try installing an extremely minimal version of either Linux or BSD, along with a stipped-down X and try to run Dillo or Links. The latter will do SSL and graphics if setup just right.

My first try would be Win98SE and K-Meleon. I remember how slow even Win95 was on 8MB of memory, so maybe that's not an adequate option.

You could also try installing an extremely minimal version of either Linux or BSD, along with a stipped-down X and try to run Dillo or Links. The latter will do SSL and graphics if setup just right.

I just wanted to get the word out with this somewhat OT post: I, too, had been frustrated with the steep learning curve of the GIMP just to get some simple stuff done. I found that Kolourpaint works well, and the moment you run it, you'll know how to use it the way you can use MS Paint for simple image editing, circling someone's face in a photo, drawing arrows to it and putting a text label, etc.

Best of all, they now have a version that is statically compiled, so that you don't need to worry about having KDE 3.3 or having the right libraries; just download the single file, decompress (no need to install) and run. You don't even need to be using the actual KDE environment if you have some of the basic libraries. From the web site: "The Generic Linux/x86 + KDE3 Binary needs no installation nor root - just decompress & run. It works on most GNU/Linux/x86 distributions released after August 2002. Specifically, it requires: Linux/x86, KDE 3.x, Qt 3 (>= 3.0.5) with threading, X, glibc 2.2, gcc 3.2 ABI."

The web site is here: http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/download.html

I think I'll just stick with Quake 1 and Tenebrae! Less money to spend! :D

or you can do it for free with ypops.

http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/

Did someone say Free Music?

• Artificial Genesis: Metamorphic(Dance Mix) -- Electronic/Techno
• T-Cells: Awful -- Metal
• UMB: In Your Head -- Alternative (Slow link, IUMA sucks...)
• Perfect Virus: This Day -- Industrial
• Third Degree: You Never Know Someone -- Punk Rock

All songs are RIAA free as far as I can tell. In short, I've already got the free music. The 'industry' hopes I haven't found it yet, so they'll trot out Shitney Beers or some other jailbait teen with more T&A than talent hoping I'll bite. The special interest groups can go f' themselves as far as I'm concerned. I don't buy, listen, or even want any of their crap, so they'd best keep their grubby hands out of my pockets.

1] the story kinda proves that.
2] a pearpc developer also found that M$ is *somewhat* restrictive when it comes to FOSS: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?threa d_id=7837169&forum_id=40270

We have fixed the browser refresh problem by creating a Model/View/Controller design pattern entirely on the client.
The Model is stored in XML inside a javascript class. When the user changes data on the client, the Model is updated, which sends events to our widgets which redraw themselves. No interaction with the server is required, and no complete rebuilding of the web page.
Demo appliation is at: http://bikemap.openearth.com.au:8080/mapbuilder/de mo/simple/

The project is at: http://mapbuilder.sourceforge.net/

We already had psDoom...

Do I hear psHalo??

Then again, there are also programs developed by closed-source companies that would never have been made as open source. Compare the quality of open-source versus proprietary games, for example. While open source games may work, they generally a few orders of magnitude more shallow than the proprietary equivalent. Open source efforts similar to commercial video games always start with big plans, and then slowly end up going nowhere.

On the other hand, more fundamental software like operating systems, web browsers, graphics libraries, etc. seem to work better if they're made by open source efforts. I'd say that there's not only a place for both open source and proprietary development models, but both are required for current software supply to continue for the future.