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Pick the hardward of choice for stability but a lot of processor is not required. To go with your helping of iptables a little product to make admin easy:

http://shorewall.sourceforge.net/

I use WIPFW on Windows machines, http://wipfw.sourceforge.net/
It allows me to re-run rules on a schedule for any IP changes that I may use for hosts. On Linux use IPTables.

fireHOL provides a very efficient and effective firewall, tuned specifically to your needs. Easy to read, easy to understand at a glimpse.

interface eth+ internet
protection all
server ssh accept with knock SSH
server http accept

IPCop combined with some modest hardware should take care of business. The DansGuardian add-on, Cop+ should handle your filtering needs as well...

If there were 10 equal games in town instead of one Linux would already be shining; as it is it has to be compatible with the platform that the overwhelming majority of software only runs on.

You mean, like this running on Linux, via emulation? :-)

(Sorry, had to get that one in...)

I have news for you: ALL batteries run out "after a certain amount of time."

oh, really?

"Like the rest of the family, iPod shuffle can operate as a USB mass storage device"

http://armagetron.sourceforge.net/

This is NOT informative.

VLC does NOT require external codec packs.

In fact even if you use a player that does, the only thing you need is the open source ffdshow, instead of one of those POS codec compilation packs. ffdshow is based on ffmpeg, which is ALREADY INCLUDED in VLC.

VLC plays whatever codecs ffmpeg supports.

http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php

On the homepage it says it is adding support, and or experimental support, and or full support has been added for:

Quicktime 7
x264.h
Alac

"(Jan 24, 2005) Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed the recent CVS addition of a VC-9 decoding implementation. It is still highly experimental but should eventually serve as a basis for decoding Microsoft VC-1/VC-9/WMV3/WMV9 video data." - http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php

For all the supported codecs either download, and build ffmpeg and run it with -formats or take a look at http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC1 6 It contains all the codecs.

VLC plays whatever codecs ffmpeg supports.

http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php

On the homepage it says it is adding support, and or experimental support, and or full support has been added for:

Quicktime 7
x264.h
Alac

"(Jan 24, 2005) Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed the recent CVS addition of a VC-9 decoding implementation. It is still highly experimental but should eventually serve as a basis for decoding Microsoft VC-1/VC-9/WMV3/WMV9 video data." - http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php

For all the supported codecs either download, and build ffmpeg and run it with -formats or take a look at http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC1 6 It contains all the codecs.

VLC plays whatever codecs ffmpeg supports.

http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php

On the homepage it says it is adding support, and or experimental support, and or full support has been added for:

Quicktime 7
x264.h
Alac

"(Jan 24, 2005) Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed the recent CVS addition of a VC-9 decoding implementation. It is still highly experimental but should eventually serve as a basis for decoding Microsoft VC-1/VC-9/WMV3/WMV9 video data." - http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php

For all the supported codecs either download, and build ffmpeg and run it with -formats or take a look at http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC1 6 It contains all the codecs.

Exactly, just like OOo and Azereus... they all pretty cleanly integrate into the OS, and users don't seem to have much problems installing it - so what's all the fuzz about ? You just need to make sure you have a good installer application, but hey, you should have that as a requirement anyway...

use ffdshow and stop worrying about if the pack has the latest codec, of if codec foo in that pack conflicts with bar you have installed and so forth and so on.

Use iRATE.

It's a program that has a collection of links to legal music to download; it starts off with a standard list of tracks, you can rate then, and then it tries to find tracks you might like by comparing your ratings to those of other users. So it's legal, based on what you like, and not recycled radio crap.

It's GPL and works on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Heck, it might even run on OpenBSD.

(Note: I am a huge fan of Linux, and I love to try new things. I have also had fairly good luck with Symantec - read below.)

USEZORZ AVG CUZ ITS FREE AND THAT MAKEZ IT G00D SINCE IT IS FREE IT MUST BE BETTERZORZ AND CAUSE IT'S TOTALLY NOT 0WN3D BY A BIG COMPANY IT MUST ROX0R

Right. Anyway, I work in the IT department at a moderately-sized institution, and I can tell you I've had my fair share of headaches with Symantec/Norton Corporate. We've been using it since before I even started coming here, and it's always caused problems - but it's never caused problems because of the program itself.

The problems that happen, including sluggishness, crashing, etc., happen because students (and even IT folks) don't FULLY uninstall old versions of ANY software. It's common knowledge that having more than one anti-virus package can cause quite a few problems - they don't play nicely.

Thankfully, since it's the summer, I've had time to pursue one of my favorite past-times - the pursuit of making things work more easily for the user. For the past two weeks, I've been developing an application that will remove all traces of ANY anti-virus software on your system - Norton, Symantec, McAfee, and even some of the Norton derivatives (SystemWorks, Internet Security).

I've been running tests and it seems that computers just don't like it with more than one virus program installed (fancy that!)...so this program cleans you up entirely, leaving you free to install whatever you want.

When I'm done with it (and clear it with Legal), I will post it on my website under GPL. Feel free to tinker with it - it's a mishmosh of batch files, registry entries, some creative grep and sed (thankfully they have it for windows!) and the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System.

In conclusion, I believe that fully removing all traces of any other virus software is not only smart, it's the only sure way to avoid problems.

uh, you mean like the popular ABC torrent client?

I've been addicted to Warlords 2 for about 12 years.

Gotta love DOSBox.

how about Ur-Quan Masters? It's a remake of the calssic Star Control II. It's known for it's great storyline and non-linear gameplay in single player mode, but the real fun is in super melee. The ship types are varied and easy to learn, so there's great replay value. Best of all, it's Free and free. Check it out at http://sc2.sourceforge.net/.

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/armagetronad/, altough I may be a little biased. LAN multiplayer, online, and local games.

You're paranoid, no doubt about it. A bit delusional as well. The BSD projects they are sponsoring don't need to be rewritten, but why would any of them be of use to Google for making money? I cannot see how most of them would.

Let's run down NetBSD's Summer of Code projects, shall we?

tmpffs' idea is a more efficient way to do memfs, or at least it is in theory; fewer copies, disable buffer cache and try to use as little memory as possible.

wcurses' wide-character support is useful for multiple languages that use characters that are outside the normal ascii character set. Pretty much anything that doesn't use Roman letters; Russian, Japanese, Korean, etc... So, if you're not a native English speaker this could be handy.

bpg's just like gnupgp, only BSD licensed. - This one may actually be useful, adding pgp to Gmail.

zeroconf would be a daemon that automatically assigns IPv4 link-level addresses and probably a Multicast DNS responder and a BSD-licensed Multicast DNS library.

regress is an automated testing the system.

userfs would probably be for allowing unprivileged users to manipulate parts of the filesystem.

ndis is an attempt at a standard nic api, developed by 3com and Microsoft, though Windows have their own "extended" versions.

hfs+ would be that filesystem Apple likes so much - the Hierarchical File System.

So, only one thing has really any use to Google and they don't even need to rewrite it. This is only out of the NetBSD projects, but I am sure the FreeBSD ones will be much more profitable.

Yes, and it will nicely break CoCreateInstance and over COM functions. RegisterTypelib performs a lookup of linked typelibs, this lookup uses CoCreateInstance to instantiate ITypeLib helper objects. So this method WILL fail for complex TLBs.

The only correct method I know is to extract registry keys which are modified by RegisterTypeLib, export them to .reg file, retarget it to point to HKCU\Software\Classes and use this .reg file instead of RegisterTypeLib. BTW, this approach is used in http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/ (see tallow.exe utility).

Try http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
I currently backup 43 machines on to one 300GB HDD (which is then backed up to tape, but you could raid disks if that was your final target).
I am storing ~1.3TB worth of backups in this thanks to the pooling of common files and compression.
BackupPC can use rsync over ssh to do it's backups so even a "full" backup is quick and has less load than our previous branded tape-based backup and I am more confident about the security of it too.

With blackout periods and the ability to ignore such periods when a machine has been off for too long, backups happen when is good for you and can ensure that you get a backup if a machine has been off (or off-network) for a while.

BackupPC has proved itself to be a lot more reliable and faster than the several commercial tape based systems I have tried. (Not to mention cheaper - and that's including the cost of a dedicated server to run it on!).

Well, I can tell you that it's not there for gaim:

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/summerofcode/

I guess they haven't heard of http://sourceforge.net/projects/wetdog/Wetdog

It's hard to hear about it when you've got your fingers in your ears, screaming,
"LALALALALALALAAAA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

Microsoft claims that I.E. 7 when integrated with Longhorn will allow for greater control over the browser with Group Policy in an Active Directory environment. This they claim will be something you cannot get with Firefox. I guess they haven't heard of http://sourceforge.net/projects/wetdog/Wetdog.

Whatever medium you choose, you could combine with a parity archive tool to recover from minor media errors.

Not to mention that some of my DV files are larger than even a dual-layer DVD, and it would be near impossible to automate backup to DVD.

My solution (linux-based) has been to buy external firewire drive enclosures, put IDE drives into them, and use the faubackup utility to mirror my files. faubackup uses an extensive system of hard links to perform backups at whatever time interval you desire without demanding huge amounts of space - old files that have not changed from the previous backups are stored as hard links and take up no further space (lots of inodes are required, however). In combination with 1 firewire drive (or set of drives) on-site, 1 off-site, rotated, seems sufficient for my purposes.
-Nathan Siemers

Is really Gaim a Gnome application? I can't see it mentioned here:

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/about.php

Why is that every GTK+ app is always counted as a Gnome app? It's an honest question :-)

You could probably get one of your old DOS WordPerfect versions to run just fine under emulation

Celestia rocks for all your astronomy needs, if you have a decent video card. Accept no substitutes.

Software encryption is slow. Plus it requires a whole PKI infrastructure for large sytem deployments. That can be a nightmare for military operations.

My cryptographic filesystem addresses this problem:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ecryptfs/

It's got a pluggable PKI interface to facilitate integration into enterprise environments. But if all you need is plain old passphrase-based protection, it provides that too. It has Trusted Platform Module support, and it will soon have GnuPG support.

It's currently in the "experimental" stage, and will be for the next couple of months (or over the next year, depending on how the Linux kernel community treats it :-), but it implements almost the entire UNIX filesystem semantics at this point and is pretty stable. Anyone who is interested in transparent cryptographic filesystems with strong key management and policy capabilities might want to keep an eye on this. And if you're in the mood for testing and/or contributing patches, please do. :-)

Other crypto filesystems for Linux that I recommend include dm-crypt (it comes w/ the 2.6 kernel), EncFS, and CFS. Google around.

That said, this self-destruct hard drive is a pretty good idea in some cases, for reasons stated elsewhere in this thread. It's hard to apply "rubber hose" cryptanalysis on the user when the media itself is irreparably damaged. The real trick is to get this technology ubiquitously deployed, so that the very fact that you are using it does not arouse suspicion. The next trick is to prevent "false positives." Try explaining to a CEO why his critical documents are toast because some $8-an-hour IT intern inadvertently caused his hard drive to disentegrate.

Should the price tag drop by an order of magnitude and the false positive stats be low enough, I might consider getting one of these drives. Until then, I think that financial markets, military units, and other such high-risk/high-value will find these drives to be a worthy investment. I'm largely concerned with addressing the problem of some random crooks stealing my equipment, so good old fashioned crypto w/ a decent key protection scheme will do well enough for me.

Why destroy when you can simply have everything be encrypted? It's cheaper too, in fact there are some free / open source on the fly encryption programs that can do large partitions:

• TrueCrypt
• CrossCrypt

Do any of the Linux distributions do encryption, of even full partition/harddrive encryption? That maybe ideal.

...whereas a lot of Windows admins I meet are "Next, OK, Apply, Cancel" kind of guys. Plus Windows is becoming more command line oriented (Thank God!).

I agree, I went from UNIX/LINUX only to woking with Windows servers as well and I must say I'm rather glad of it. Expanding into Windows has made me more employable and having started out in the UNIX world made me a better professional than I would have been if I had taken the Microsoft certification route and then moved into UNIX. Having worked mostly with Win 2003 rather than Win 2000 Server (thank god because the latter really sucks) I am constantly amazed by how the WinOnly admins worship the graphical tools. The first thing I did to my Win 2003 boxen was installing some of the Gnu tools and Gvim (hint: if you really want to have some fun introduce a freshly hatched MCSE to vim). Since then I have written several command line utilities in C#, which is not really all that hard if you know a little Java or C++, just to fill in some of the blanks in the Windows command line toolbox. I can now administrate those Win 2003 boxes completely from the command line which surprises many (though by no means all) Windows admins. The concept of solving time consumig tasks with custom scripts and programs seems to be alien to many Window guys whereas it is commonplace in the UNIX community.

This is a great idea! It's going to help technical application like RKWard (http://rkward.sourceforge.net/, a GUI for the R statistical language: http://r-project.org/), integrate informations from wikipedia. In the field of statistics, help is a big issue. It's quite difficult for F/OSS to compete with SAS or SPSS. KDE/Wikipedia is certainly the way to go to fill the gap.

Except Microsoft has already released code under open source licenses as part of their Shared Source Program

For example: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/

Yes, they would give back. Not Microsoft mind you, but many software producers. Here is a link to a few of them... http://www.sourceforge.net/

Thank god I use Links

For the record adzapper blocks google ads by default.

Knowit is one of those small, yet well designed and enormously useful applications- I've used it for taking notes on new subject matter. You can get it here. Once you have all your notes organized, it can export them to HTML.

Each of the established IMs have millions or tens of millions of subscribers

That's why GAIM is the answer. Everyone I've given it to loves it. GAIM is one of the most useful OSS apps available on Windows. It's handling of multiple IM protocols simultaneously easily trumps all other clients.

The best thing about Sonus is that you can control everything, including volume, from the remote. The problem with streaming devices like squeezebox is that, while you can control a lot of things via a web interface, volume isn't one of them. So you need at least two remotes. And, in my opinion, that just sucks too much.

I'm using mpd now, which does allow you to control volume. So I use my laptop as a remote to one of mpd's web UIs, then I can hide the ugly sound system in a closet. It's not ideal, because it means you have to turn your amp up really high and attenuate it with your sound card, but it works well enough. The Sonous is so much cooler, though, so I'm thinking of switching.

From Parent:
"What Google needs to do to successfully compete with MSN is to release their own messenger program that's tied in with GMail, only then will it be easier to switch your friends over to another free email service."

From sibling poster:
"Personally, I don't know a single person who uses MSN Messenger. AIM, yes, lots. Yahoo messenger, a few. ICQ, a few."

Instead of writing their own messenger program, GMail could write a plug-in for Gaim http://gaim.sourceforge.net/, then push for its users to switch from over from AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ. Gaim supports all of these and more in one awesome interface.

Well, one improvement over PayPal would be global coverage. Just few days ago I was very impressed by a nice piece of software (mp3splt, BTW), and I decided to donate some money to the corresponding Sourceforge project via PayPal. Half way through I found out that my small European country (Croatia), was not covered by PayPal services.

Geocoding isn't hard. It just takes about 50 lines of code combined with a decent streets database. Add PostGIS to your postgres streets database and you can even easily geocode intersections like "43rd And Pine Streets".

But, the only public domain streets database is the TIGER data, several years old already. However, ESRI does make it publicly available in shapefile format, ready for importing to postgres.

Maybe I've found a new project to start. Or at least a HOWTO to write.

Okay, Neo/J's functionality is restricted to OpenOffice.org's functionality, and one thing that is missing built-in is a good word counter. But as another poster pointed out, there is a great 3rd-party macro available http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=87718&package_id=98079here - which you only have to click on a button in the doc to install - just assign the Wordcount macro to cmd-K and it'll display word/letter/para count for the whole doc, plus word/letter count for selected text (plus the former less the latter for good measure).

I just wanted to say first that I found this really helpful. I'd been merrily encoding without putting limits on bitrate, and my music collection just happens to stay around the nominal bitrate I usually use (128kbps). When I tried to encode some language lessons, though, it varied a lot more I guess, and it didn't work until I applied these limits, so thanks a long.

Secondly, I don't use the UMD firmware (I believe for the iFP-790 series the UMD firmware does not have Ogg support, or at least it didn't when I first got it). So I use the free IFP driver which works well for me. I use it on OpenBSD without problems, and since it's written for (mostly) Linux it should work well there, too. I even did a firmware upgrade with it and it worked fine.

Is there a ClamAV for Microsoft Windows that will scan on demand? This makes scanning happen because its always on and invisible to novice users.

Is there a ClamAV for Microsoft Windows that will upgrade itself (virus definitions and "engine" as some anti-virus programs call it) when needed, invisibly, and on a schedule? This helps novice users not need to think about maintenance issues which, frankly, go unaddressed rather than better understood.

ClamWin won't yet do either of these things, according to its FAQ. I'd love to learn more about a free software anti-virus program for Microsoft Windows that could do these things.

Try mplayerplug-in .

How about if it actually guarded the house? Hook this thing up to your MisterHouse setup and the thing might actually be useful...

...while it is wandering around and guarding, you'd still be able to get it to hump legs when there is an intruder.

That mild distraction might cause some gained time... and gained time might save a life. ;-)

-Aaron