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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.

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.

I've sent this this URL to several "not very technical" people (a bunch of biologists), even sometimes forgetting to tell them that that they should install the GTK+2 package first, then "The GIMP for Windows" one. I doubt you'd think of yourself as "not very technical", but just in case you are, I'm pointing this out specifically for your benefit . The "not terribly technical" people that I forgot to mention this to, and that tried to install only "The Gimp for Windows" got a reletively nice dialog box telling them to go back and also install GTK+2, which 100% of them managed to do completely on their own!!! (and none of them complained about it being a "pain in ass")

I use the GIMP on Windows daily, and the install process has become a breeze since V2.2. Just install the GTK (the default settings are all reasonable) and then the GIMP (also with reasonable defaults).

Both are available at

http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

You're kidding, right?

Just run GTK installer and then Gimp installer. How could it be easier?

I could think that producing an audio book or two would be an excellent term project for high school or junior college level drama students. All you'd need is a comfortable, sound proof room, a good microphone (or two) connected to a computer, and a simple audio editor and a text to read. If the local library does not have an old public domain book, something can be printed out from Project Gutenberg.

September is still far enough away that an audio book project could be planned easily. There are far fewer technical distractions in producting audio than with video.

We can and we do. It's called XFCE.

Agreed. And Ion and a lot of other innovative window managers/desktop environments. What about Rox?

Plenty of new stuff, in any case compared with MS which has how many new concepts for window managing? 0? I thought so.

The key difference between traditional telephony and VoIP is the way the calls are handled across the network. Traditional POTS telephony uses circuit switched connections, meaning that an attacker needed physical access to some piece of copper along the called path to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. With IP communications it is possible for attackers to "touch" the path of the call from a remote location. http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/ Both methods are insecure and suffer from physical security issues. It's just that without proper network security the physical area of an IP network is easily extended and therefore susceptible to more attackers.

My two cents on this since I just converted the 17 disc Harry Potter to bookmarkable AAC. I used iTunes 4.9 to rip the CDs using the new Podcast "optimize for voice" preset. NOTE: Bigger files are supposed to be more skip prone and eat more battery life due to the way the hd & cache are handled so I kept my files to single chapters which were about 40 minutes each, encoded at 64kbps.

I used "Join Tracks" to gather each chapter into an individual file), but a few chapters were spread over 2 consecutive discs and I wanted to combine them, so I used mp4box (Windows, Linux, but not OS X) to losslessly concatenate the AAC files. I then manually used a hex editor to change the file type from "M4A " to "M4B " and changed the file extension from .m4a to .m4b and changed the genre from "Books & Spoken" to "Audiobook". (AFAIK the rename trick only works on Windows, while the hex editing also works on OS X) Created a Smart Playslist for the whole set of files and enjoyed.

A few more possibly useful links MarkAble (Windows only) is supposed to help automate the process I went through, but I'm not sure how it concatenates the files and wanted to learn, and the aforementioned Doug's Applescripts has Join Together (OS X only), but that requires QTPro and it is still not clear whether this is a lossless concatenation or not.

Try supermount. It works fairly well.

-- http://sourceforge.net/projects/im-snif/ -> Doesn't MSN rock? Pfft.. Try ettercap (http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/). No one is safe from those damn script kiddies with programs like this.

-- http://sourceforge.net/projects/im-snif/ -> Doesn't MSN rock? Pfft.. Try ettercap (http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/). No one is safe from those damn script kiddies with programs like this.

I'll probably be modded to hell itself for posting this on a KDE /. article, but:
if you are a Gnome kind of person, try GnomeBaker or Graveman for your cd/dvd burning needs.

Downloads are here

I had no problem installing Inkscape 0.41 on Fedora Core 2 using their i686 "static" RPM. However, with 0.42, the RPM is now linked against libgc.so.1, which is not shipped with Fedora Core (any release, 1 to 4). So I trundled off to Dag Wieers repository, downloaded the Fedora Core 2 libgc RPM, installed it and now I'm getting "undefined symbol: g_option_error_quark". Lovely stuff - looks like I'm going to have to compile from source <sigh>. I think the Inkscape folks need to rebuild their RPMs...

While I'm not aware of any open source 3D accelerated drivers for NVidia cards, there are the DRI drivers for Radeon cards 9200/9250 and under which are very good. I'm using them on my Radeon Mobility 7500 card and after enabling S3TC, speeds are very impressive, probably about equal to that of the Windows drivers. S3TC isn't enabled by default because of potential IP issues, but even without it, the drivers are still quite fast.

There currently is an active project to get the DRI drivers working on the R300 series of Radeons (ie, the rest of them), but I'm not aware of anyone who has tried them, and I don't have the hardware necessary to try them myself. The page itself strongly suggests that these drivers are not finished or stable at the moment however, so try at your own risk.

That'S so right. An extreme exampleof a 'less than 1.0' releases in my opinion is Wings3d. It's now for years 0.9X.

But, of course, it's the developers choice whenever to go 1.0.

Is Nokia likely to move off Symbian? Very unlikely from the sound of it. Then again Nokia has been interested in Linux, and given their work on, for instance, gtk-webcore perhaps we can see why: Symbian might be great for telephony, but much of the movement with cell-phones today is toward convergence devices that feature web browsers, MP3 players, vast amounts of PDA functions, cameras, etc. For such devices the greater flexiblity and more friendly development offered Linux might be considered valuable.

Which is to say, Symbian is probably here to stay, but Linux may become Nokias OS of choice for its more complex devices. There's plenty of room for both in what is a diverging market.

Jedidiah.

http://sealsystem.sourceforge.net/

Screenshots for command line apps tend not to be very revealing. Check out the can do page.

Yeah, but that's with that particular PC and laptop model. Abilities can vary wildly from one manufacturer and model to the next.

Indeed, but I wouldn't say that a setup menu and boot device selection are manufacturer specialties since the mid-90's at least. Things like network boot are also increasingly more common in newer (in scope of a few years) motherboards.

The logical way to go is indeed to make them standard, we're not really disagreeing here. I'm just more happy to see hardware vendors finally get closer to ditching useless, obsolete parts of the PC architecture.

And like you said, having the right boot disk matters for you.

Pretty much any Linux Live-CD, and UBCD (for more arcane tasks, like remaking a partition table you accidentally erased... d'oh!) are a good combination for me. The latter also comes in a form with an included live Linux boot option so there's only need for one emergency boot disk.

For me, I can put a hosed Mac into target mode and connect it as an external drive to any Mac with a FireWire port, to attempt to repair it and/or retrieve data.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but didn't you imply earlier that you don't need another Mac for troubleshooting?

Granted, I can't turn my PC into a NAS box with the press of a button, but I can count without hands the times I've really had to swap drives around to solve some problem. I've probably been lucky too, but are you sure you're not just making things needlessly difficult for yourself?

Why don't you submit a bug for that, and don't forget to attach one of the files that crash it.

Come On. If you get a crash, REPORT IT! Right here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=604306&group_ id=93438&func=browse And please note that we never have more than a few confirmed reproducible crash bugs in the tracker. (Currently just 2 I believe, and not fully reproducible at that.) We simply don't tolerate them. We, you know, fix them. Quickly and mercilessly. (Other types of bugs get fixed too, so don't worry).

I'm guessing some of the people you'll be talking to are spreadsheet junkies. Often such people have requirements that can't be met easily by a spreadsheet but would be easy to do in a script (eg: munging data from text files into CSV so they can get it into a spreadsheet).

My Sprog project is targetted at exactly that type of user, the project catch phrase is "Scripting for the GUI Guys". It's a friendly GUI environment in which a user can drag and drop reusable components to 'build' a script rather than 'write' a script.

This article gives some hint of what's possible (and has pictures too).

At this point, a GNOME desktop on Linux would be the best demo platform, but Windows support is coming.

People don't care until it affects them.

Give someone a peice of software like a spam filter and then after 30 days it stops working and they have to register - At this stage they care.

They buy it and then try to use it on there notebook as well but they can't - At this stage they care.

They tell there friend that they to can get rid of spam but they'll have to pay for it - At this stage they care.

They upgrade there email client and they have to upgrade the spam filter - At this stage they care.

They get a second account but to filter two accounts you need the "Pro" version - At this stage they care.

They decide to use it at work but the license is a non commercial license so they have to upgrade to the enterprise version - At this stage they care.

So while people don't care about the license in a static world, once things start to change they often do. When I tell someone that something is "Open Source" they know that they are able to do what ever they want with it even if they don't use the code.

An example. In the past there were about 5 different ftp clients that people I know use to use. You'd go to a friends place and they would all have a different client. No one would want to change because they'd haveto register again or figure out a new interface. Last year I changed to filezilla and over the last year almost every other FTP client has been replaced.

Why?

Well no one wanted to pay to upgrade there client so generally it was 1 or 2 versions behind the latest version (which had features they would have liked)and no one would change because if they changed they may as well have upgraded. By using filezilla which had most of the features they wanted (if a bit rough around the edges initally) and knowing that they wouldn't be stuck in the same position they were currently in they slowly changed but once a couple of them changed almost all the rest did straight away expect for a few that took longer.

They didn't care about the license but they did care about the freedom.
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

Will this contain support for Atmel and Prism built in or will we have to go and get Prism Drivers or Atmel Drivers? The only problem without having built-in support is that for the Atmel you have to patch the kernel(only 2.6 and greater) and recompile it(takes awhile on a 1.7Ghz). It would be major convience for built-in support for these commonly used chipsets. I hope that this new distribution includes full WiFi support.

"I for one would go out and finally buy an HD TV and subscribe to a channel that consisted solely of Earth views from an HD-capable camera placed in orbit permanently."

Would that look significantly different from an xplanet image kept updated with the latest cloud pictures?

And there's a link on the main page of the Intel EFI page.

The idea of the package was that you could emulate any computer (and multiple ones at the same time, from some of the hype) and typically faster than the equivalent machine of the day. Looking at the software, it was equivalent to Shapeshifter (aka SheepShaver, aka Basilisk II), which meant that it used the native CPU and took over the system ROM functions and replaced them with native ones. Very good performance. For the i586 module, from what I remember, it was a pure software emulation.

What about the hardware? It appeared that the hardware was simply responsible for holding the actual ROM chips of the Macintosh being emulated, an optional no-frills SCSI chip, some Mac serial ports and a few other sockets for random things (an audio digitizer, from the site linked, though apparently never implemented). Basically it was a hardware dongle for a pure software emulation solution, with the ability to hook up to an AppleTalk network.

If there WAS such a board, I never heard of it. I was a very active member of comp.sys.amiga.emulation back through most of the 90's, and if it did exist, it was probably mentioned on that newsgroup. Maybe I just forgot over time.

I wonder what the purpose of Virtual PC, Guest PC, bochs, etc., are for then?

Many people run Windows on Mac OS X today (under emulators), and it's absolutely horridly slow. You're telling me that people won't want to do this at the full native speed of the underlying hardware?

It won't be "on a few desktops belonging to sufficiently clever hackers" (in fact, that description more appropriately describes the number of people who will be running Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware); rather, it will be routinely done by tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. The same people who use products like Virtual PC today, with the exception that it will actually be usable. And since no emulation will be required, there will probably be even more virtual machine offerings, some perhaps even free and/or open source.

Further, Apple's #2 man (Phil Schiller) has said specifically that Apple won't do anything to stop people from running Windows on Intel-based Macs. And why would Microsoft's "lawyers" do anything? People are *already* running Windows on Macs in the form of Virtual PC, and on numerous x86 virtual machines (like vmware) on x86 hardware today. Why would this be any different?

Lastly, re: economic absurdity, I never said people would buy Macs specifically to run Windows. People will buy Macs to run Mac OS X. The fact that they'll ALSO run Windows (whether it's dual boot, in a VM, or both, it definitely will in some fashion) at full speed is just icing on the cake, and will encourage people to buy Macs who otherwise wanted to, but couldn't because they couldn't afford to run their necessary Windows software under emulation. For people who want to run all platforms in a supported configuration, it will be a dream machine. Linux variants WILL support Intel-based Macs. Mac OS X obviously will. And a commercially supported VM product is virtually guaranteed to run Windows (and other x86 OSes) in a supported VM environment on Mac OS X.

Apple will do NOTHING to stop people from running Windows on the machines. Perhaps they won't offer drivers and support for running Windows *directly* on the production hardware, but Windows WILL run in a VM environment, which is how 99% of people who'd want to run Windows on an Intel-based Mac would want to run it anyway, i.e., without the ridiculous need to reboot: they'd want to run it side-by-side with Mac OS X, seamlessly. And it WILL happen, and no one will stop it. In fact, it's a huge win for Apple.

MSN version works fine with my trusty K-Meleon http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/ but GoogleEarth just gives the top bar. M$ secretly supporting Windows only mozilla browser?

RTFA, Designer != Programmer, it takes quite a while to write a 2d scrolling game engine, but an hour or so to make a game with shoot-em-up construction kit. The z engine and the AIGused to create commercial adventure games like zork and leasure suit Larry. My sister has no problems writing adventure games when she was around ten years old using a simple point and click adventure game engine, so I'm sure budding game designer will have no problems either, the benefits of designing text or lo-fi games is that you are forced to concentrate on the story and interactivity and not on how pretty can I make the graphics.

Google did bring in some $90000 worth of support through their Summer of Code project.

Not to mention the remaining 1.91M they spent on other projects. FreeBSD just one of about 40 projects mentoring 400 students. The Nmap Security Scanner project is mentoring 10 of them, who have already produced great work! A list of their credentials and projects is available here. I'll give an update on their progress at my Defcon Presentation this Friday at 10AM.

Meanwhile, many of the other SoC mentors have posted details on the projects being worked on. For example,

• NetBSD
• Gaim
• Inksape
• MozDev
• WinLibre (with pics!).

Fat binaries aren't as useful as all that. They can only produce OSX 10.4+ code, due to differences in the GCC that was introduced in 10.4

Yes and no.

Fat binaries that are built using the PPC and Intel checkboxes are as you described above. However, you can *EASILY* build a PPC binary targeted as far back as 10.1, and an Intel binary targeted at 10.4u, and glue them into one fat binary. This doesn't make it take any longer than the build in system because you'll be building everything twice anyway. The other advantage is that you can also build just of of the two architectures for debugging and testing to make things go a little quicker.

See the Spychat 3.0.1 source code to see how i set up XCode to automate this:

It uses 3 build targets, one to build the binary only (I'm including the resources because it's faster for debugging) for PPC, one to build the binary only for X86, and a third one (which depends on the first two) to throw all the resources into a 3rd bundle, and use the lipo command line tool to glue them together into the 3rd bundle.

File not found.

But I figured out your link:

Linky!!!

Or you can type in http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

File not found.

But I figured out your link:

Linky!!!

Or you can type in http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Well, i read Last modified on 02/17/2005 and on the downloads page you can find the site on sf.net: http://oceanstore.sourceforge.net/

(even though the development doesnt seem so active)

You can kind of do this with Popfile an automatic email classifier. You can create mutiple categories of the kind of email you receive and train it to automatically classify them. It works pretty flawlessly after a few days of training.

That program can be beaten! Visicalc which ran under DOS 1.0 (in 1981) will still run under XP today. Try it: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm

To be fair I also tried a vi binary from Linux 0.12 (1992) - http://www.oldlinux.org/Linux.old/Linux-0.12/binar ies/usr.bin/
I had to install libtermcap-compat and lie about the terminal type, but it did work.

Sadly graphical programs under Linux don't fare as well. Taking the most active Linux/Windows program on SourceForge, Gaim, you can see how one set of binaries is sufficient for Windows (98/2K/XP/2003) while Linux needs different builds for every version of every distribution: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php

Not being in msi form hinders the corporate adoption of firefox greatly.

I dunno

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmltv

For more than just BBC.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmltv

Because dreams do come through.

That's a trademark, though. Anyone is still free to use :-(, as long as they don't promote a business with it.

If this patent gets accepted (which I'm quite positive it won't), nobody will be able to include that method of Emoticons in a program they make.

I believe the true goal of this is to stop programs such as Kopete, GAIM, etc. from implementing MSN chat (or, for the examples I've given, to remove it), as they would have to pay Microsoft.

I have used Clustal for multiple sequence alignments. There is a gui (ClustalX) and a scriptalbel command line version (ClustalW). Available for all platforms and source included with the download.

Also keep an eye on POY that does direct optimization on sequences. Also available for all platforms with BSD style licence.

For just viewing and manual editing of alignments there is BioEdit. Free, but not open source. Windows only.

For a general sequence assembly/analysis/kitchen sink approach try the Staden Project. Open source and available for Windows, Linux and OSX.

Hope this is useful. I have never worked with protein sequences, but I have done a lot of DNA sequenceing and alignment!

Secondly, translations? Database searches? Sounds like you're doing some very basic Bioinformatics work. Not to say that your research isn't meaningful, just that the problems you're approaching are easily solved by a computational biologist. For example, here's a snippet of Bioperl code that will read in a set of GenBank sequences, translate them and print the results to a new file:

my $seqin = Bio::SeqIO->new( -file => 'myseq.gbk', -format => 'genbank' );
my $seqout = Bio::SeqIO->new( -file => '>translated.gbk', -format => 'genbank' );
while ( my $seq = $seqin->next_seq ) {
$translated_seq = $seq->translate;
$seqout->write_seq( $translated_seq );
}


Seems pretty simple, right? There are similar, simple wrappers around BLAST, FASTA and some other common algorithms in computational biology. Check out the Beginners HOWTO on the Bioperl website, it explains Bioperl without requiring previous CS experience. I think it's a good intro, but I also wrote it so I'm slightly biased.

If programming is not your style, check out JEMBOSS. It's a Java-based GUI wrapper for EMBOSS.

Cheers and good luck.

It allows you to run various Linux software under OS X. Native. Just requires X11, but that's an install-time option which can be added later.

In addition to the above url, http://msi-repository.sourceforge.net/ has msis in multiple languages, including Russian and German.

In addition, any company doing enterprise rollouts will have somebody on staff who can create and modify msis for the enterprise. If the ones available on the net won't suffice, as the msi packager for some assistance or hire somebody.

Our solution:
We use a new symmetric key for each file. The symmetric key is stored in the encrypted file, encrypted using a public key. All you, as a backup client, have to do is to store that one private key in a safe place.

We went one step further. We use an encryption mechanism we developed to make sure the encryption works well with rsync.

Knowing the /. crowed, your next question is "do you expect me to trust an encryption method you developed?". Good question.

No, that's why we are still using AES, and have somewhat modified CBC. If you want to test what we've done, feel free to download the program. We've open sourced it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/rsyncrypto.

Shachar

Good stuff...