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I wrote a version of this library originally as a contractor for PARC when I was in grad school, to use as the error correction coding for their data glyphs. This is bsaically the same algorithm used for audio and CD-ROM data.

If you want to benefit from it without learning it, you can use a number of GUIs. Scientific Workplace on win32 (commercial, but good to push on those using Word) or LyX (F/OSS) for nearly any platform or many others. Even abiword can write LaTeX!

It isn't difficult to learn & becomes much more powerful when you eventually ditch the GUI & either use a quality TeX-focused editor like KILE (KDE), TeXnicCenter (win32), TeXShop (OS X) (all F/OSS) or your favorite multi-purpose editor. I prefer vim with LaTeX-Suite.

The best way to learn is to look at other code. Either get some from peers, from the net, or make some in either the GUIs or the friendlier editors. Then just write.

If you need a reference, you can usually learn to google for how to do something (or post to comp.text.tex). I maintain a list of www links. You might find something useful, but I can't suggest the best starting point from that list. The best introductory book I've used is Guide to LaTeX. The other books in LaTeX Companions are also excellent for reference, particularly The LaTeX Companion.

If you want to benefit from it without learning it, you can use a number of GUIs. Scientific Workplace on win32 (commercial, but good to push on those using Word) or LyX (F/OSS) for nearly any platform or many others. Even abiword can write LaTeX!

It isn't difficult to learn & becomes much more powerful when you eventually ditch the GUI & either use a quality TeX-focused editor like KILE (KDE), TeXnicCenter (win32), TeXShop (OS X) (all F/OSS) or your favorite multi-purpose editor. I prefer vim with LaTeX-Suite.

The best way to learn is to look at other code. Either get some from peers, from the net, or make some in either the GUIs or the friendlier editors. Then just write.

If you need a reference, you can usually learn to google for how to do something (or post to comp.text.tex). I maintain a list of www links. You might find something useful, but I can't suggest the best starting point from that list. The best introductory book I've used is Guide to LaTeX. The other books in LaTeX Companions are also excellent for reference, particularly The LaTeX Companion.

I would rather use default OSX over default Windows, but give me a customised Windows, and I'll take it over any other OS.

I suppose you do know you can customize OS X as well, don't you? Everything from WindowShade to Desktop Manager to LaunchBar to Quickeys and a few thousand others!

I agree with your point though: "people are most productive in whatever they're used to, and whatever suits them." I hope that's the theme that emerges from this Slashdot discussion.

Ever heard of Dave's Quick Search Deskbar? It predates (2002) all the other similar products (I "wrote" the Slashdot search for it, that's why it works so craptacularly).

Or are we talking about the same type of desktop search tool?

As a scientist, where I do most of my work in MS Office...I basically have to use MS Office because I need to interoperate with my peers and coworkers.

Furthermore, Excel (every scientists best friend), is still far and away the best spreadsheet application and to me is Window's so called "killer app".

They are apparently including the opensource hsql database engine. I imagine that's the backend if you need it - otherwise, as this screenshot indicates, you can connect to an existing database server and use that. In that case, this becomes a pretty front end.

Remember, because it costs almost nothing to make

Oops. Typo? Freudian slip?

Software has a very high cost to make. It requires highly skilled laborers, and lots of time to make. Making high-quality software is difficult, and by the nature of things it's difficult for a programmer to make software that's easy to use.

Notice I never argued against open licenses. Also, I never argued that software costs little to reproduce. It costs about $0.50 to make a CD-R, if you don't mind a vanilla, paper case.

I argued (and still argue) that software piracy reduces the actual saleability of soft wares. It essentially makes a vendor compete against himself, and therefore should legitimitely be called "theft", because doing so takes value away from the goods that highly qualified personnel spent lots of time to create.

If you want to gouge people, then you can hardly blame them for using it and not paying you.

Don't like the price? Don't buy it. Think it's wrong? Write your own open-licensed product and give it away. There's certainly plenty of people who are.

The ONLY time your arguments might have weight is in the case of a monopoly, and in these United States, we have protections for that, too.

Why do you feel the need to justify theft? Your arguments cast a pall from those of us who are dedicated to using and supporting truly open, free licenses on software!

http://psyco.sourceforge.net/

On the screenshots page http://stripesnoop.sourceforge.net/screenshots.htm l there's a screenshot that has the text "Possibly a: "AAMVA Compliant North American Driver's License"
then below that "Issuing Territory: California"
It also says the standard is used in some parts of Canada as well. Where's my tin foil hat?

written on what appears to be a napkin...

My post was modded "informative" because I actually play with BIOS's.

Good for you. I've played with them too.

Because you've hand-waved away the BIOS level reporting into "ACPI does that for you"

I didn't say that, I said: "The PC BIOS most important function, [other than IPL], is to properly describe the hardware (IOW ACPI).". With emphasis on describe. And it's really funny you should pick on ACPI, because the raison d'etre of ACPI was precisely to runtime remove involvement of BIOS in hardware management, and make BIOS just hand-off the needed descriptive data at boot to the OS to allow the OS to do the runtime management, via the OS's own ACPI interpreter.

The ACPI data is to an extent a mostly static blob of data in the BIOS ROM. The BIOSes job wrt ACPI is to adjust/tweak this template at *boot* and then hand it to the OS, whose own interpreter will be doing the heavy lifting during runtime - no BIOS involed.

(such as setting boot-on-power-failure behavior, setting boot device orders, enabling serial console, hard-coding IRQ's and other stuff I do at least once a month)

Playing with the setup menu is something you consider low level stuff? And you feel qualified to tell slashdot how important the BIOS is and, more to the point, why? ;)

You're simply describing settings in the CMOS data affecting initial setup and bootstrap - irrelevant after OS is booted. You can even manipulate these settings from within your OS quite easily (if you know which bits in the CMOS do what, you can figure that out reasonably easily enough if you want.).

A lot of ACPI functionality is deduced guesswork:

ROFL. ACPI is a published, documented specification by Intel. (It's a rather huge set of specs, but it's documented none the less. The Linux ACPI interpreter is actually written and maintained by Intel staffers.). BIOS vendors often manage to screw up the ACPI data, however the beauty (relatively seen, at least, in context of PC firmware) of ACPI is you can decompile that, fix it and override it if you want. See the Linux ACPI site.

open source BIOS would remove a huge amount of the guesswork and make the code controllable and reparable.

I agree. Though, not because of ACPI (for which open source interpreters *already* exist. ACPI data is machine dependent and requires proper specs for hardware, slightly orthogonal to open source BIOS).

Google is our friend right now because favouring firefox would benifit their own shareholders by keeping Microsoft from introducing more divergent tandards. Whenever I think about Google as the Good Company, I am instantly reminded of a flash intro called EPIC 2014.

The bottom screen shot here even uses Microsoft's Tahoma font.

you missed last year conference?
Download best 2004 videos from Linux.Conf.Au 2004 Videos Information & Downloads Webpage


___________________________
Bridge - Linux Ethernet bridging

Well, it looks somewhat like Plastik, but you can still tell it's GNOME because of all that ugly extra padding and spacing they stick into all their buttons, listviews, and many other widgets.

It one of the main reasons why GNOME visually irks the hell out of me, regardless of the theme.

Imagine that you knock a door and from window of house across the street you get a glass of milk. You never know who stands behind the door and you never know how many phone calls are made to serve you the milk. This is more or less how Rodi network operates. You send IP packet to the range of IP addresses (you knock many doors on the street using correct knock pattern - Rodi protocol) until you find out the IP destination (the right door).

You send IP packet like GET DATA request to this IP address and you recieve IP packet containing requested data from some other IP. you do not need to know what IP address the data arrives from (and it's useless actually) as far as it contains request ID you initially sent (right knocking pattern), authentication of the publisher (see Post IP page) and data with correct MD5.

BitTorrent and other protocols who allow evil corporations like MPAA to find your identity are already drawing their last breaths, these are on the way out

From http://larytet.sourceforge.net/rodiAnonymity.shtml :
Rodi uses UDP packets for both data and control messages; such as search. It can be argued that the source IP of any packet can be faked and the traffic log can not be regarded as proof that a specific host sent the packet. Let's say that adversary sends a data request to specific IP address and receives a reply - a packet containing some other IP source and the data. The Publisher of the data can argue that the data request was handled by some other node. In the real network we can bounce data requests but data transfers can still be P2P. This is very Important! We use conectionless protocol like IP. In case of IP it's enough to specify correct destination IP for data delivery. All retransmission requests are routed through the network.

Bouncers. Let's call the publisher server P, downloader D and some other peer B (bouncer). Let's assume also that the protocol is IP based. P never accepts data/look requests directly from D. D sends the packet to B with it's (D's) source IP in the IP header and in the "get data" request. B forwards the packet to P with B's IP address in the IP header. P receives the packet and conditionally checks that the IP source in the header is (or is not) the same as in the request and then may check that the source IP (IP of B) belongs to friendly host (group security server, for example). P sends data directly to D.

It's a good idea to spend more than no time at all reading the documentation for a new piece of software you are trying before you dismiss it and chuck it away.

If you didn't like the big buddy list items in Gaim, you probably should have had a quick look in the application's preferences. There you would have seen an option under "Buddy list" entitled "Show buddy icons". If you de-select this option, the buddy list will not show buddy icons, and it will therefore become more compact.

There's even an entry about this question on the FAQ: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/faq.php#q20

• Gaim
• Miranda
• EB-lite and Ayttm, which are two forks of EveryBuddy
• IM2

• Gaim
• Miranda
• EB-lite and Ayttm, which are two forks of EveryBuddy
• IM2

How generous and open AOL of to allow applications to hook into their SUCKY client! What a bunch of humanitarians. Praised be AOL.

I see posts here that say this will be good for projects like gaim... No, I don't see it that way at all. AOL is trying to lure people away from open implimentations like gaim, and towards AOL-sanctioned code, which they control.

You want to know how nice AOL is to third-party clients? Well, I wrote my own client. Recently, AOL took away my screen name, for "violation of the Terms of Service."

I can't imagine how I am in violation. I don't use AIM to do anything wrong. I use it to talk to my girlfriend, and a few of my friends here at University, maybe some family members. Oh, and I happen to have written a third party client. Apparently, there was something in that that AOL didn't like.

I have tried to contact AOL about this, ask them exactly WHAT it was that I did wrong. This was probably around a month ago. I haven't been able to get anything out of them.

A buddy of mine and I decided that the ringtones we really really really wanted were the music from isi and Final isi. This is no mean feat, however: our phones (Sanyo SCP-8100s) only play midi and some crappy .wav format, and the latter is clearly unacceptable (both because it's limited in length to 30 seconds and because... well... it's just not cool enough!).

So what did we do? Jim modified DOSBOX's OPL3 emulation code to dump out the opcodes being sent to the FM channels and handed over the output to me.

From there, it was a matter of parsing the various channel setup data into some semblance of notes, deciding which combination of general MIDI patches best emulated the sound of the FM synthesizer given the patchset on my phone, and writing a whole bunch of code.

In the end, we did it: isi.mid and fisi.mid are the full soundtracks to isi and Final isi, respectively. In addition, I made a couple other versions of the Final isi soundtrack to skip to various parts of it that are more interesting and/or make better ringers than starting at the beginning: fisi2.mid, fisi3.mid.

These ringers pretty much rule the roost.

-rsw

I have to admit, at first I was quite pleased with VLC, but on further consideration I've grown to dislike it. Firstly, there's an annoying jagged diagonal line through the picture during large amounts of movement; I've noticed it on every windows system I've installed it on, and one person I gave it to wisely started using the copy of BSPlayer I had also given her instead. True, with VLC you don't have to mess around with codecs, it's all built in . . . but this is one of the downsides, in a way, since then when things do go wrong the user is both clueless and powerless.

A better solution is something like Media Player Classic, which is very simlilar to good ol' Windows Media Player Pre-Evil (and still exists as mplayer2.exe), but with countless little extra features. The interesting bit is that it has quite a few built-in codecs, but these can be disabled, overridden, and indeed quite extensively customized in the background. And it runs from the exe, no installation even necessary. So in sum, it's a simple solution for inexperienced people (the kind that VLC is most useful for, what with requiring no knowledge or extra installation on their part) but also a powerful one for those that really know what they're doing. And of course, there are quite a few other good players with their own little quirks and benefits (Sasami2k for example--oh, if only it was still being developed! It showed serious promise).

And really, that diagonal line in VLC just bugs the crap out of me (and, as noted, this is not just a quirk on my end, one of my friends picked up the annoyance for it all by herself).

Please visit Slashcode bug #981137, which concerns automatically hyperlinking URLs in "Plain Old Text" mode, and add a comment to show your support for a speedy resolution. No progress has been made on this trivial feature request for longer than six months.

Redistribute this comment at will.

Speaking of which, it doesn't seem like it would be all that much more expensive to include a DVR card and freevo. http://freevo.sourceforge.net/

Well lets be fair, in the post I respond to you never mention any OS, Windows or otherwise. I stand corrected on Linux; that does handle HT CPU's specially. I'd be prepared to believe that Windows XP with a service pack may handle HT as a special case.

unless you're a kernel hacker and can prove it, I don't have to take the word of an AC

I won't claim to be un uber-kernel-hacker on the level of Alan Cox, but I do manage Syllable and I do hack on the kernel, although the SMP & ACPI code was written by far more clever hackers than me; namely Kurt Skuen and Arno Klenke.

Of course in true "Post AC, get it wrong" fashion for some reason I kept refering to the ACPI table as "MDT" when in fact it's "MADT".

Call it a draw?

Well lets be fair, in the post I respond to you never mention any OS, Windows or otherwise. I stand corrected on Linux; that does handle HT CPU's specially. I'd be prepared to believe that Windows XP with a service pack may handle HT as a special case.

unless you're a kernel hacker and can prove it, I don't have to take the word of an AC

I won't claim to be un uber-kernel-hacker on the level of Alan Cox, but I do manage Syllable and I do hack on the kernel, although the SMP & ACPI code was written by far more clever hackers than me; namely Kurt Skuen and Arno Klenke.

Of course in true "Post AC, get it wrong" fashion for some reason I kept refering to the ACPI table as "MDT" when in fact it's "MADT".

Call it a draw?

You can help our campaign by buying AMD CPU chips and not buying Intel, and by publishing statements about what you're doing. Likewise, buy motherboards that support free BIOS.

Because that .sys and .inf file that came with your network card won't work most of the time.

The correct method is to run 'lspci -n', get the pciid of your wifi card and look it up in the wiki. Often it's a driver for a completely different card by a completely different manufacturer (but with the same chipset) that will work.

Converting that wiki into something machine-parseable (and keeping it updated) is not a small task.

My post was mainly intended to be cynical ;), but, yes, there is a free portable flashplayer. It won't however run all your latest flash stuff.

http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/

Which DVD player and what wireless network card? If it's an intel pro based network card tryout ipw2100 or something similar found at the same site.

If you're trying to use mplayer to play your DVD's you should try xine instead. It needs some extra libraries (such as libdvdcss etc) but I've found it to be less of a hassle to get going than mplayer (this is just what I've found and shouldn't be taken as the gospel truth).

If all else fails go here and see what other people have had success doing.

Off topic, but for your information:

Multiple desktops are trivial in any version of Windows. There are lots of free or very inexpensive 3rd party tools to give them to you.

There's of course the official MS powertoy but this is largely a piece of crap.

There's DeskSelect $9.95

There's Cool Desk $24.95

There's a whole section of them at tucows.

There's Multidesktop

There's Virtual Desk

There's Enable virtual desktop

Open Source, there's Virtual Desktop, Virtual Dimensions, VirtuaWin, etc... etc... etc..

Unless your company won't allow you to install any software on your local computer, there's no excuse to be whining about lack of virtual desktops.

Off topic, but for your information:

Multiple desktops are trivial in any version of Windows. There are lots of free or very inexpensive 3rd party tools to give them to you.

There's of course the official MS powertoy but this is largely a piece of crap.

There's DeskSelect $9.95

There's Cool Desk $24.95

There's a whole section of them at tucows.

There's Multidesktop

There's Virtual Desk

There's Enable virtual desktop

Open Source, there's Virtual Desktop, Virtual Dimensions, VirtuaWin, etc... etc... etc..

Unless your company won't allow you to install any software on your local computer, there's no excuse to be whining about lack of virtual desktops.

Off topic, but for your information:

Multiple desktops are trivial in any version of Windows. There are lots of free or very inexpensive 3rd party tools to give them to you.

There's of course the official MS powertoy but this is largely a piece of crap.

There's DeskSelect $9.95

There's Cool Desk $24.95

There's a whole section of them at tucows.

There's Multidesktop

There's Virtual Desk

There's Enable virtual desktop

Open Source, there's Virtual Desktop, Virtual Dimensions, VirtuaWin, etc... etc... etc..

Unless your company won't allow you to install any software on your local computer, there's no excuse to be whining about lack of virtual desktops.

You're a little hasty calling OS X lame on the desktop and server. Browse here and here and here. OS X covers a much wider range of uses than any other *nix out there. On the desktop it can run most of the X11 sw out there + the big name sw from Adobe, MS, Macromedia, etc. On the server, you can tweak it just like any other OSS *nix since you have a CLI and free access to the source. OTOH, the GUI is an option for those lacking your elite hacking skills who would have used MS Server but heard this was better...

Besides just being cool to see this with a free tool, I'd like to see what sort of path qualifies as circumnavigation.

Obviously a round the world flight over Antarctica wouldn't qualify, but by staying in the Northern hemisphere and using the jet stream it would seem to abbreviate the full distance of the earth's circumference. (No doubt I'll get flamed by some people better informed than I, but I'm just asking for more info than the article and most entertainment-based media will give.)

I was totally surprised when, when I had heard about The Humane Interface Project from this Master creator of Machintosh and the real surprise was the project was hosted at SourceForge and Jef invited others whoever cared to Join this. Boy, thats a master coding his creation and you got to be careful with the invitation. Came to know later that Jef got $20 millon to develop the project and thought that, his work and dream is not going vain and he's got some support, would be quickening his effort and we could probably see something new when its ready.. but today... Alas! With Respect, thanks Jef for the UI advances and GUI breakthroughs. I sincerely hope that Human Interface project carries along and your thoughts stay alive as the project.

He'll be missed.

He'll be missed.

Would this also work on the Rockbox port to Archos Gmini?

MS DO INDEED support FREE and OPEN SOURCE licences.

WTL

They donated this to sourceforge.

Quit yer whining. zealot.

WTL is FREE and OPEN and its pretty damn good. What I would like to see is somebody port this to Linux as a PORTING aid to help get more apps onto the linux desktop.

WTL

Easy, it already exists, take a look to Anjuta project.

Joe Allen, the creator of Joe's Own Editor (JOE), my favourite text editor.

It has the perfect balance of simplicity and power. Thank you, Joe!

My vote goes to Ben Pasero of RSSOwl. When I had some setup issues with RSSOwl, he was really helpful and stuck with me till I was up and running (a Gmail search of that conversation reveals no less than *14* messages).

http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/

You was robbed!

(who you can see here).

This allowed me to get my machine connected back onto WiFi after switching to Linux. Thanks, guys.

Samba VFS Module, as linked from FLAC website.

Alex Shapiro of 'touchgraph' fame