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There is an open source computer version of Titan, that covers many varients and can be played online or against rather weak AI, called Colossus. If you feel like playing against a human opponent, email me. I can also recommend Carolous Magnus (also out of print unfortunately, but more easily obtained than a copy of Titan.)

Unfortunately, it's out of print, but don't let that stop you from searching for a copy.

Titan Fan Site

There is a Java version of the game on Sourceforge, but the fun of rolling 12d6 just isn't hasn't been caputred yet, I'm still waiting.

Colossus

Colossus Fan Site

Java driver development!? I was pretty sure Java couldn't TOUCH hardware...

That's normally true, but with same native code (JNI) you could probably write bindings for a library like
libusb (which you can use to write user-space drivers for USB devices).

The idea isn't as bad as it might sound at first. The kernel doesn't need to know about certain types of devices (eg. scanners), and keeping complexity out of kernel-space is generally a good idea.

Their goal is to write a complete operating system in Java.

A SMTP proxy may be as good: http://sourceforge.net/projects/assp/ I use this configured to give an error response on delivery of messages it rejects. It receives the whole message first and all spam goes into a dump mailbox. So I get to monitor it's filtering and cause failures on incoming spam. FWIW, I've noticed my daily spam message counts decreasing since I enabled error on spam behaviour.

A pop3 proxy works great. I recommened SpamBayes

http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/

I've said it before, but I have to promote PopFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/) again. Since doing a bit of training, it now correctly sorts about 99% of my e-mail. I get about 600 messages a day not including mailing lists, and my accuracy is 99.65%. It is generally not susceptible to new spam techniques unless they can match the subject matter that my e-mail typically covers.

When they start spamming "Linux IPF Apache LOOK! Vi@GR@ makes your peNi$ PHP Bug CSS" I will be concerned.

An 8086 system is really, really slow and had very little memory. It was desireable to have all the power and memory possible available to the application. You wouldn't want to try somthing like a modern Linux kernel on it.

Maybe they received a lot of complaint by audiofile? Coded in FLAC format? Who knows?

Adobe are bundling the Yahoo Toolbar with the new Acrobat Reader 7 for Windows, along with Photoshop Album SE and 7.2 MB of extra plugins. The Yahoo Toolbar then installs not only to IE, but also to the Reader itself. To hide it in Adobe Reader, you need to right-click its toolbar and untick "Search the Internet".

But they do at least offer you a choice: you can choose not to download any or all of these extras, by unticking a few boxes on the download page, which appear after you've chose Windows as the target OS. And they're not pushing this junk with their SVG viewer. Yet. :)

As noted above, this only affects users of MS Underpants Exploder for now. But I wonder if Adobe, Macromedia or other vendors will start offering Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox soon, and on other OSes? Linux and Mac versions of the Firefox Toolbar are reportedly on the way.

It's just one more good reason to use Free and OSS software whenever possible, like GPLFlash, Ghostscript and PDFcreator: no clueless marketing droids "adding value" unasked.

Adobe are bundling the Yahoo Toolbar with the new Acrobat Reader 7 for Windows, along with Photoshop Album SE and 7.2 MB of extra plugins. The Yahoo Toolbar then installs not only to IE, but also to the Reader itself. To hide it in Adobe Reader, you need to right-click its toolbar and untick "Search the Internet".

But they do at least offer you a choice: you can choose not to download any or all of these extras, by unticking a few boxes on the download page, which appear after you've chose Windows as the target OS. And they're not pushing this junk with their SVG viewer. Yet. :)

As noted above, this only affects users of MS Underpants Exploder for now. But I wonder if Adobe, Macromedia or other vendors will start offering Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox soon, and on other OSes? Linux and Mac versions of the Firefox Toolbar are reportedly on the way.

It's just one more good reason to use Free and OSS software whenever possible, like GPLFlash, Ghostscript and PDFcreator: no clueless marketing droids "adding value" unasked.

Well, to be fair, there are a variety of WLAN cards (802.11a/b/g) which work with Linux and even some which work with FreeBSD (the voluntary-charity arm of the capitalist utopia (or the developers who just code for the hell of it without the borderline-explicit goal of tearing down corporations?)? After all, copyrights are still maintained by their authors, so they are still "property" of their authors). Even socialist utopians will work within a market economy to obtain the goods they desire... :P

Anyway, the Netgear WG511T which I use on my laptop is one of them (and I highly reccommend it, BTW, even if it is still a bit pricey and devoid of an antenna jack). Use the madwifi driver for it on Linux (the driver is included with FreeBSD as ath(4)) and you're all set. :)

I'm a developer on the mjpegtools project. It's an open-source video-processing/encoding package.

The CVS version of our package contains a tool called y4mdenoise. It does an incredible job of analyzing a video frame-by-frame and restoring details buried under noise.

You can read the implementation document here if you'd like. Basically, it takes advantage of the fact that video tends to consist of repeated pictures of the same things. It figures out which parts of the picture are repeated frame by frame, compensating for motion, and resolving details down to the pixel level. It then averages together all the instances, and comes up with very smooth values for all the separate images. This is ideal for removing random noise (prevalent in 8mm recordings and VHS tapes), and tends to sharpen the picture too.

We haven't released this code yet, but CVS is pretty stable. I figured the Slashdot crowd would be more interested in hearing about this now, instead of whenever we stop coding long enough to officially release something.

Oh, and our tool for converting frame-rates, and doing 3-2 pulldown, is called yuvkineco. It doesn't support the 16 fps of 8 mm film yet, but we can always add it!

I'm a developer on the mjpegtools project. It's an open-source video-processing/encoding package.

The CVS version of our package contains a tool called y4mdenoise. It does an incredible job of analyzing a video frame-by-frame and restoring details buried under noise.

You can read the implementation document here if you'd like. Basically, it takes advantage of the fact that video tends to consist of repeated pictures of the same things. It figures out which parts of the picture are repeated frame by frame, compensating for motion, and resolving details down to the pixel level. It then averages together all the instances, and comes up with very smooth values for all the separate images. This is ideal for removing random noise (prevalent in 8mm recordings and VHS tapes), and tends to sharpen the picture too.

We haven't released this code yet, but CVS is pretty stable. I figured the Slashdot crowd would be more interested in hearing about this now, instead of whenever we stop coding long enough to officially release something.

Oh, and our tool for converting frame-rates, and doing 3-2 pulldown, is called yuvkineco. It doesn't support the 16 fps of 8 mm film yet, but we can always add it!

I'm a developer on the mjpegtools project. It's an open-source video-processing/encoding package.

The CVS version of our package contains a tool called y4mdenoise. It does an incredible job of analyzing a video frame-by-frame and restoring details buried under noise.

You can read the implementation document here if you'd like. Basically, it takes advantage of the fact that video tends to consist of repeated pictures of the same things. It figures out which parts of the picture are repeated frame by frame, compensating for motion, and resolving details down to the pixel level. It then averages together all the instances, and comes up with very smooth values for all the separate images. This is ideal for removing random noise (prevalent in 8mm recordings and VHS tapes), and tends to sharpen the picture too.

We haven't released this code yet, but CVS is pretty stable. I figured the Slashdot crowd would be more interested in hearing about this now, instead of whenever we stop coding long enough to officially release something.

Oh, and our tool for converting frame-rates, and doing 3-2 pulldown, is called yuvkineco. It doesn't support the 16 fps of 8 mm film yet, but we can always add it!

I'm a developer on the mjpegtools project. It's an open-source video-processing/encoding package.

The CVS version of our package contains a tool called y4mdenoise. It does an incredible job of analyzing a video frame-by-frame and restoring details buried under noise.

You can read the implementation document here if you'd like. Basically, it takes advantage of the fact that video tends to consist of repeated pictures of the same things. It figures out which parts of the picture are repeated frame by frame, compensating for motion, and resolving details down to the pixel level. It then averages together all the instances, and comes up with very smooth values for all the separate images. This is ideal for removing random noise (prevalent in 8mm recordings and VHS tapes), and tends to sharpen the picture too.

We haven't released this code yet, but CVS is pretty stable. I figured the Slashdot crowd would be more interested in hearing about this now, instead of whenever we stop coding long enough to officially release something.

Oh, and our tool for converting frame-rates, and doing 3-2 pulldown, is called yuvkineco. It doesn't support the 16 fps of 8 mm film yet, but we can always add it!

I'm a developer on the mjpegtools project. It's an open-source video-processing/encoding package.

The CVS version of our package contains a tool called y4mdenoise. It does an incredible job of analyzing a video frame-by-frame and restoring details buried under noise.

You can read the implementation document here if you'd like. Basically, it takes advantage of the fact that video tends to consist of repeated pictures of the same things. It figures out which parts of the picture are repeated frame by frame, compensating for motion, and resolving details down to the pixel level. It then averages together all the instances, and comes up with very smooth values for all the separate images. This is ideal for removing random noise (prevalent in 8mm recordings and VHS tapes), and tends to sharpen the picture too.

We haven't released this code yet, but CVS is pretty stable. I figured the Slashdot crowd would be more interested in hearing about this now, instead of whenever we stop coding long enough to officially release something.

Oh, and our tool for converting frame-rates, and doing 3-2 pulldown, is called yuvkineco. It doesn't support the 16 fps of 8 mm film yet, but we can always add it!

I thought everyone knew about it, it's mentioned in the comments almost every day (at least in every TV or Bittorrent related discussion)...

Using something like Azureus' RSS plugins, you can set it up to read certain trackers that have almost every show. I'm not going to link you to the trackers, as I don't want to contribute to some TV executive taking them down, but a simple Google search would come up with it as well.

I thought everyone knew about it, it's mentioned in the comments almost every day (at least in every TV or Bittorrent related discussion)...

Using something like Azureus' RSS plugins, you can set it up to read certain trackers that have almost every show. I'm not going to link you to the trackers, as I don't want to contribute to some TV executive taking them down, but a simple Google search would come up with it as well.

A) not open source. open source is good for me, so closed is worse

Worse, perhaps, but unusable? No. How about your video card driver?

B) platform support. Flash will NOT reach the entire world, simply because you must have the flash player, which is unavailable on most platforms (all but the most popular)

Nothing will reach the entire world, Flash currently covers Windows/Mac/Linux/Pocket PC, and is branching to cell phones. Not bad for a proprietary technology. I still can't play Quicktime movies for crap on Linux, but Flash does pretty well, even the newest features like video.

C) standardization. There is none. it's proprietary vendor lock in. There's no competeing development environments, no competing players

Not entirely true. SWF, the file format, is open and there are several 3rd party development environments (not as functional, but they exist). There are also open source libraries for generating SWF (ming, et al). There are even general purpose encoders for Flash video. NOTHING stops someone from creating Flash content using free tools, and NOTHING stops someone from creating a free, open source Flash player like the below:

http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/

D) breakage of the web. Flash is not the web. therefore, you can't bookmark it, index it, search it. You can't look at the code, or make the text bigger, or have your text reader read it because you are blind

Depends on how it's used -- and certainly this will change over time. Google could write a reader for SWF just like PDF once Flash becomes better at rendering text which would be usable to search on.

Basically, flash is okay for silly games or homestarrunner, but so bad in other ways it's generally frowned upon by those who are not confused by colors and animation.

Simply not true -- perhaps it was at one point but Flash has grown a lot from the Futuresplash days.

It is more than time for an open source Flash player...

Anyone know of any?

GPLFlash is a project to develop just such a player.

lasindi

Not only did Tim Patterson, creator of Q-DOS for Seattle Computer Products, make Bill Gates a man worth fifty billion dollars, even more portentously, Tim Patterson helped out in the solution to artificial intelligence. Back then, Mentifex here was working out the eventual solution to AI on a theoretical basis, and also attending monthly meetings of the Northwest Computer Society in Seattle WA USA - where Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products was an important member. One day at a meeting, the chair asked for volunteers to work on the newsletter. Mentifex was panic-stricken. He wanted to do his part, but he was so-o-o busy solving AI. The silence hung heavy over the room. Then, the all-around good-guy Tim Patterson raised his hand and volunteered to work on the newsletter. As arguably a result, Microsoft would take over the desktop, and Mentifex would solve AI.

Now, about Gary Kildall of Digital Research. In 1981, Gary Kildall published an article in Byte Magazine. Consequently Mentifex wrote to Digital Research and offered them a copy of November Magazine containing first-ever publication of the Mentifex Theory of Mind. Gary Kildall's office manager wrote back and requested that two copies be sent. They were. Nothing happened. Gary Kildall had missed out not only on MS-DOS but also on Mentifex AI.

Not only did Tim Patterson, creator of Q-DOS for Seattle Computer Products, make Bill Gates a man worth fifty billion dollars, even more portentously, Tim Patterson helped out in the solution to artificial intelligence. Back then, Mentifex here was working out the eventual solution to AI on a theoretical basis, and also attending monthly meetings of the Northwest Computer Society in Seattle WA USA - where Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products was an important member. One day at a meeting, the chair asked for volunteers to work on the newsletter. Mentifex was panic-stricken. He wanted to do his part, but he was so-o-o busy solving AI. The silence hung heavy over the room. Then, the all-around good-guy Tim Patterson raised his hand and volunteered to work on the newsletter. As arguably a result, Microsoft would take over the desktop, and Mentifex would solve AI.

Now, about Gary Kildall of Digital Research. In 1981, Gary Kildall published an article in Byte Magazine. Consequently Mentifex wrote to Digital Research and offered them a copy of November Magazine containing first-ever publication of the Mentifex Theory of Mind. Gary Kildall's office manager wrote back and requested that two copies be sent. They were. Nothing happened. Gary Kildall had missed out not only on MS-DOS but also on Mentifex AI.

I apologize for the rotten formatting in the ancestor to this post. As you can see, I am now using the <P> tag.

1. Scan the film to individual images, preferably at 32 bits per color, Kodak's Cineon format will handle this or ILM's OpenEXR format (it's open source too).
2. Load frames onto harddisk
3. Edit each frame gamma, color corection, and dust-busting that's 24 frames per second, that's a lot of frames for a 30 minutes of film.
convert to a color-dept for encoding, then encoding/
4 do the menues
5 burn the DvD
in short a lot of work take a look at Cinepaint for the frame editing software.

Have they found some way to automate this, or can they not yet trust the algorithms enough yet that they still have to manually go over each frame and correct the dirt spots based on previous and future frames?

Go get a copy of VirtuaWin. I've got it giving me a 3x3 grid of virtual displays on my Win2K machine at work. That way, I've got the same capabilities (screen-wise) as my Linux box at home.

Once you get used to it, you don't want do without it, regardless of which platform you're using. My boss saw me using it, and originally thought it was annoying. Then, he decided to grab it and start playing with it. Now, he's hooked, too (and he's got dual monitors to begin with; it's good to be the boss).

I believe there were some ideas about keeping it to license payers only, but in practice I can't see how this could be enforced without DRM.

A plank of the proposed distribution mechanisms was P2P technologies. Another plank is the Dirac codec, a wavelet-based video compression codec the BBC has open-sourced.

Somehow, you can't imagine purely commercial concerns even contemplating such things.

I have my concerns over this re-organisation. While the stated aims are laudable (I'm sick of programming gems like "Pets Win Prizes by Changing Which Rooms they Swap Wives In"), I think it likely that this is a calculated move to decrease the popularity of the BBC to the point where a more direct assualt could succeed.

People joke about things that would make them leave the country, like the election of a particular idiot, or the passing of a particular law. I think the demise or emasculation of the BBC would be one reason I'd consider exile from Britain. Long Live Auntie Beeb!

While Google may or may not be working on a calendar, his "evidence" is lacking. Basically, he's saying that Google is walking his calendar a lot, and using that as evidence that Google is building itself a calendar. There's a much simpler explanation: Google goes nuts when it runs into PHP iCalendar. It sees every link as a new page to look at, and after a few runs by googlebot, it's trying to index the daily calendar page for every day within a decade of today. I've been dealing with this today, adding robots.txt entries to keep it away from PHP iCalendar, because Googlebot is generating thousands of hits per day on my little site.

So, just because Googlebot and PHP iCalendar don't get along, that doesn't mean that Google is busy building up a monster searchable calendar.

Having said that, I'd love to see a gmail calendar component that you could access via WebDAV. I don't see how they'd make money on it, though.

You might want to check out the Free Object-Oriented License, written by those compression pioneers over at lzip.

Highly, highly recommended reading. If you're curious about the tone of the license, consider the acronym formed by its title.

Even the article description is accurate saying the software is licensed under the MIT License. The SourceForge project site says that the project is under the MIT License. The source code says that its files are under the MIT License. The GNU Project web site says the X11 License is compatible with the GPL.

Help me out here in understanding why you could possibly have drawn a conclusion that there is any incompatibility with the GPL when there is not a single reference on the planet from any of the involved parties such as Adobe, MIT, or the GNU Project that claims such incompatibility. Explain why you have to share in a public forum something that is so obviously false and can be checked by anyone in one minute. Someone tell me why there is a continuous stream of licensing FUD towards licenses such as the MIT License.

The tools you are looking for exist, but they're not cheap and they need someone to create test cases for them and run them. I assume it's a web app you're talking about? Really, you need to hire a professional and give them professional tools. There's no good way to test your app cheaply. What you really need is a copy of Mercury Interactive's Astra or Segue Silk and someone to run it for you.

If you have to do it cheaply and by yourself, good luck and have fun writing those tests. Do a web search and have fun evaluating tools and writing tests. Here is the first hit I got on google. I've never used it but maybe you could look into ieUnit.

Oh, and my advice is to find a job closer to home. That commute will literally kill you. No, really, I mean it, you'll die.

You can still do this at a high level.

Check out mute. It's incredibly slow, but provides a pretty solid level of anonimity.

I suspect both general purpose and scientific computing can benefit from nested data parallelism.
The Nepal Project at the University of New South Wales concentrates on Multiple Program Multiple Data (MPMD). In a nutshell, any problem that can be specified as array operations can be flattened, unrolled, and automatically parallelized. This is not the holy grail of general purpose transparent parallelization of purely functional programs, but instead nested data parallelism. This extends research done in data parallel languages such as Nesl, Sisal, and really nifty algorithm shape research done in FISh.
This is the best approach to transparent parallelism that I've seen yet. Anyone know anything better?

No, he means more like pdfcreator , at least for the writing side. There are enough readers already.

OS X Desktop Manager, for multiple desktops (works with Expose)

For those of you that are unaware, since the poster doesn't explain at all what Infiniband is, I will explain it for you.

Infiniband is a high-speed, low-latency interconnect used heavily with beowulf clusters (currently). Infiniband, like Myrinet, addressed many of the problems that are inherent with using interconnects like ethernet.

The biggest problem with any TCP/IP based transport, in the world of supercomputing, is latency. The amount of error checking that is involved creates latencies that bring fine-grained (lots of memory reads/writes/swaps) calculations to their knees. As many clusters use MPI (Message Passing Interface) for sharing memory between nodes, a low-latency interconnect was needed to replace ethernet and TCP/IP. People have worked on reducing latencies over ethernet by designing raw transport stacks, relying on the switch and the quality/brevity of the ethernet connections (using short, shielded cables proved useful), to ensure accurate data transport, but none of these methods have proven viable.

Infiniband has also been used as an interconnect for network storage devices as there are obvious advantages to this; eliminating much of that latency makes reads and writes to a device much simpler thus reducing overhead and improving overall throughput.

More information on Infiniband can be found here at the Infiniband sourceforge page. This should give a sufficiently technical overview of what it does without any of the marketing talk.

On the same subject, please note that HSQLDB is not part of OOo. They are an independant team, working on an OpenSource database. In order for them to give the maximum and work full-time on this project before OOo 2.0 ships, they need some founding to help. Please refer to this page to learn how you can help.

What they don't say is that the databased used, HSQLDB, needs some funding to be as best as possible before OpenOffice 2.0 ships. You wouldn't want the DB part of OOo to be shacky, would you? Then learn how you can contribute to this project!

Well, linger no longer! You can support OpenOffice's back-end DB (which is actually an independent OpenSource project, HSQLDB) here!

Knoppix uses the rewritten NTFS driver which supports loopback read-write mounting a file on NTFS. Nothing new, the now also dead Phat Linux already did the same in 2002 with the same open source kernel driver. Currently the most popular "run Linux from NTFS" distribution is TopologiLinux.

It's very nice to see Knoppix caught up too.

Talking of the Database part, be sure to check out the plea for help from those folks! OpenOffice 2.0 uses HSQLDB as its embeded DB, and those folks don't have any big corp baking them.

The VFS is a better OO abstraction than anything you will ever come up with in your lifetime.

Uh, what? The VFS is hardly a brilliant concept, but rather the sort of abstraction that any good designer will come up with. It's also not an original Linux invention (Sun OS has had it since 1985, I think). The kernel developers also seem to have a perpetual problem with defining an interface once and defining it well. It happened to me more than once that FUSE broke during a supposedly minor kernel upgrade. For all its virtues, the Linux kernel is hardly a case study in good software engineering.

I find just the opposite... When I'm using MacOS X, I have to think way to much about the program at hand. Say I'm browsing a folder and I want to put a file into it... I have to switch from the filer (which is way too much an app rather than a desktop environment) to the text editor, then type, then save, then find the folder in the minifiler if it isn't one of the default folders. I lust for the simplicity of ROX-Filer or even of Windows Explorer where you can just right click and choose 'New text file'!

I personally don't use that feature that much, but you're right, it's not really available on Mac OS X out of the box. On the other hand, if you already have an existing text file, it is effortless to append or prepend text to it. Take a look at a this.

Also, I haven't found out how you can switch between windows in a single application without using the mouse.

Cmd + `. You can redefine this if you don't like it.
Want to reach for a menu? I think it's Cmd-F2 but I redefined this to Alt + `. OS X is highly keyboard enabled -- the dashed problem is finding out what the keybindings are. The list in the Keyboard Prefs only tell you half the story.

There are tons of Emacs bindings (Cocoa-only) plus other stuff that are not mentioned anywhere except on some blogs and books like David Pogue's Missing Manual.

Some bindings don't work universally which is a pain. But this is due to OS X's heritage - Cocoa (NeXT), Carbon (Mac), X. And to top it off, Microsoft uses its own bindings in the Office suite (which are not always analoguous to the Office/XP bindings - e.g. the key to edit a cell is F2 in Excel XP and Ctrl-U in Excel 2004)

And the absence of virtual desktops... I know there's hacks, but the system isn't designed for it, so it doesn't always work well.

I don't know, these Mac virtual desktops seem to be much better than any pagers I've used on any Linux machine. Really. You should take a look at them.... they're no different from X virtual desktops. I suppose they're "hacks" but they're so transparent that they could just as well be a part of the system.

Desktop Manager
Virtue

And did I mention the way *some* options things are auto-apply, and *some* are manual? Coming from ROX/GNOME, where everything's auto (unless it's done in a different toolkit, so its obvious) this is painfully annoying. I don't understand what's so special about say iTunes that its view Options are manual apply, but the Finder's are auto.

True that. There are many subtle little UI inconsistencies in Mac OS X.

It's the accursèd menubar---it forces you to design applications, not windows/tasks/activities.

True, but I don't have a problem with that. This is kind of subjective, of course.

Of course, I have adapted quite well to some things. I now always remember to chose Copy when I want to Copy something, rather than expecting it to be done automatically.

Which is far more intuitive to me than the behavior in X. Especially if you only have one buffer. (Of course, with Quicksilver, I have n clipboard slots. Extremely useful when cutting and pasting many URLs).

I've also stopped trying to get windws to shade rather than minimise.

The most underused (and Mac-like) UI feature is Hide (Cmd-H). I was a minimize person until someone (I think it was Tim Bray in his blog) brought this to my attention. Now I use it everyday.

I find OS X forces me to focus on how I'm doing something, rather than what I'm doing. OS X isn't the be-all end-all of usability, just one inconsistently-followed schema.

I think you're right. There are many flaws in OS X which cannot be simply dismissed as being "stuff that are merely unfamiliar". Some things just don't make sense.

However, on the balance, OS X's UI is more usable than any other single OS that I've used. (Most OSes have some UI features that I like, but none except OS X just the right mix).

I find just the opposite... When I'm using MacOS X, I have to think way to much about the program at hand. Say I'm browsing a folder and I want to put a file into it... I have to switch from the filer (which is way too much an app rather than a desktop environment) to the text editor, then type, then save, then find the folder in the minifiler if it isn't one of the default folders. I lust for the simplicity of ROX-Filer or even of Windows Explorer where you can just right click and choose 'New text file'!

I personally don't use that feature that much, but you're right, it's not really available on Mac OS X out of the box. On the other hand, if you already have an existing text file, it is effortless to append or prepend text to it. Take a look at a this.

Also, I haven't found out how you can switch between windows in a single application without using the mouse.

Cmd + `. You can redefine this if you don't like it.
Want to reach for a menu? I think it's Cmd-F2 but I redefined this to Alt + `. OS X is highly keyboard enabled -- the dashed problem is finding out what the keybindings are. The list in the Keyboard Prefs only tell you half the story.

There are tons of Emacs bindings (Cocoa-only) plus other stuff that are not mentioned anywhere except on some blogs and books like David Pogue's Missing Manual.

Some bindings don't work universally which is a pain. But this is due to OS X's heritage - Cocoa (NeXT), Carbon (Mac), X. And to top it off, Microsoft uses its own bindings in the Office suite (which are not always analoguous to the Office/XP bindings - e.g. the key to edit a cell is F2 in Excel XP and Ctrl-U in Excel 2004)

And the absence of virtual desktops... I know there's hacks, but the system isn't designed for it, so it doesn't always work well.

I don't know, these Mac virtual desktops seem to be much better than any pagers I've used on any Linux machine. Really. You should take a look at them.... they're no different from X virtual desktops. I suppose they're "hacks" but they're so transparent that they could just as well be a part of the system.

Desktop Manager
Virtue

And did I mention the way *some* options things are auto-apply, and *some* are manual? Coming from ROX/GNOME, where everything's auto (unless it's done in a different toolkit, so its obvious) this is painfully annoying. I don't understand what's so special about say iTunes that its view Options are manual apply, but the Finder's are auto.

True that. There are many subtle little UI inconsistencies in Mac OS X.

It's the accursèd menubar---it forces you to design applications, not windows/tasks/activities.

True, but I don't have a problem with that. This is kind of subjective, of course.

Of course, I have adapted quite well to some things. I now always remember to chose Copy when I want to Copy something, rather than expecting it to be done automatically.

Which is far more intuitive to me than the behavior in X. Especially if you only have one buffer. (Of course, with Quicksilver, I have n clipboard slots. Extremely useful when cutting and pasting many URLs).

I've also stopped trying to get windws to shade rather than minimise.

The most underused (and Mac-like) UI feature is Hide (Cmd-H). I was a minimize person until someone (I think it was Tim Bray in his blog) brought this to my attention. Now I use it everyday.

I find OS X forces me to focus on how I'm doing something, rather than what I'm doing. OS X isn't the be-all end-all of usability, just one inconsistently-followed schema.

I think you're right. There are many flaws in OS X which cannot be simply dismissed as being "stuff that are merely unfamiliar". Some things just don't make sense.

However, on the balance, OS X's UI is more usable than any other single OS that I've used. (Most OSes have some UI features that I like, but none except OS X just the right mix).

If you want a multi-document programming editor, check out:
http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
There is also: BBEdit http://www.barebones.com/

I find VS.NET and other pre-VS.NET IDE's like VFP 8.0 extremely frustrating to use on dual monitors with differing resolutions.

In addition, you haven't been productive as a scientist until you've fired up TexShop on the Mac, IMHO the top LaTeX editor.

I'm rather fond of Kile to be honest. I haven't actually seen anything that even comes close for niceness of editing TeX files (plus large TeX documents such as books etc,)

Seriously, just look through the features and screenshots. I presume it will run on a Mac (albeit possibly under the X11 environment)

Jedidiah

I agree about Cacti...it was stoopid simple to install and setup. The same can be said about Cricket.

If you are looking at Big Brother, I would probably recommend you look at Hobbit Monitor instead. Hobbit is Open Source and unconstrained as is BB. They are developing a client-side piece to replace BBNT, as well. Hobbit extends the good things we like about BB and adds some other things we would have really liked to have SEEN in BB.

It seems to me, also, that BB hasn't enjoyed much development activity for awhile now. Every tool has its place...we use BB/Hobbit and Cacti both, each for their own advantages and good points.

-PONA-

I agree about Cacti...it was stoopid simple to install and setup. The same can be said about Cricket.

If you are looking at Big Brother, I would probably recommend you look at Hobbit Monitor instead. Hobbit is Open Source and unconstrained as is BB. They are developing a client-side piece to replace BBNT, as well. Hobbit extends the good things we like about BB and adds some other things we would have really liked to have SEEN in BB.

It seems to me, also, that BB hasn't enjoyed much development activity for awhile now. Every tool has its place...we use BB/Hobbit and Cacti both, each for their own advantages and good points.

-PONA-

Virtual Dimension is free and open source. It doesn't have a limitation on number of desktops etc. You can read about it here:
http://virt-dimension.sourceforge.net/