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Martin: I think a couple of things. One, you know, for the user who really wants to really tear things apart, do things on their own, build their own distribution, they really have, obviously, that level of source code access where they can do things like create a customized distribution with a very, very small footprint with only what they want and not a bunch of other things. You know, Linux is attractive to that class of a user. Linux is attractive to, let's say, Google - a large company that really wants to build a big server farm. They want to hire quite a few very talented engineers to really tune that on a daily basis and things of that nature. So I think that when you get to like specific niche areas and those areas where people really want to get deep on their own and take on a lot of that responsibility on their own, you know, I think Linux is attractive on those scenarios. And obviously that's where you see a lot of the market pick up on Linux on that basis as well.

Most of us here fall into this "niche". But I really don't think it's much of a niche, but more a growing segment of the IT industry. I would even go so far as to say the common home user. My current exploration of AMD Opterons for 64 bit computing in addition to clustering and virtualization with projects like Xen prove that the average home user is moving in this direction. People aren't interested in having plain old PCs that only have a two year lifespan at home anymore. It's inefficien[tt], expensive and limiting. Most home users want clusters with a centralized home application/file server that can suspend and restore virtualized sessions for high availability (HA). HA is not just for "geeks" anymore. After all, I'm not a geek, I'm a musician/artist and I'm working heavily with this stuff because it applies directly to my main interest which is using computers to make music and visual art. There aren't too many people these days that just want to buy a PC that can only run a handful of applications and wastes a lot of CPU cycles doing nothing. For the people who ARE interested in that, there is the Mac Mini (which is the best way to go in terms of being efficient).

Martin: I think a couple of things. One, you know, for the user who really wants to really tear things apart, do things on their own, build their own distribution, they really have, obviously, that level of source code access where they can do things like create a customized distribution with a very, very small footprint with only what they want and not a bunch of other things. You know, Linux is attractive to that class of a user. Linux is attractive to, let's say, Google - a large company that really wants to build a big server farm. They want to hire quite a few very talented engineers to really tune that on a daily basis and things of that nature. So I think that when you get to like specific niche areas and those areas where people really want to get deep on their own and take on a lot of that responsibility on their own, you know, I think Linux is attractive on those scenarios. And obviously that's where you see a lot of the market pick up on Linux on that basis as well.

Most of us here fall into this "niche". But I really don't think it's much of a niche, but more a growing segment of the IT industry. I would even go so far as to say the common home user. My current exploration of AMD Opterons for 64 bit computing in addition to clustering and virtualization with projects like Xen prove that the average home user is moving in this direction. People aren't interested in having plain old PCs that only have a two year lifespan at home anymore. It's inefficien[tt], expensive and limiting. Most home users want clusters with a centralized home application/file server that can suspend and restore virtualized sessions for high availability (HA). HA is not just for "geeks" anymore. After all, I'm not a geek, I'm a musician/artist and I'm working heavily with this stuff because it applies directly to my main interest which is using computers to make music and visual art. There aren't too many people these days that just want to buy a PC that can only run a handful of applications and wastes a lot of CPU cycles doing nothing. For the people who ARE interested in that, there is the Mac Mini (which is the best way to go in terms of being efficient).

Try Anjuta (or here )

It also learns from the patterns you use more often in your code and sorts the suggestions in a way that the probability that you'd need to scroll down the list of the suggestions becomes lower and lower.

"Patterns you use" indicates it's just doing pattern matching, not understanding the language.

The gp wrote that paragraph - not me. You arguing for me? :)

Uncheck, it can't parse C++.

ctags can parse C++ just fine.


1. Do you actually code in C++?

Yes - got a current project of about 20 000 lines that's been going for 18 months now.


2. Have you actually used intellisense/visual assist (code compleition)?

Yep.


3. Do you realize there is more to code completion than recognition of function and vairable names?

Yes and I don't like it. Perhaps my bias has come through in my previous reply. I find my productivity with vim much higher than with vc++ and intellisense/code completion. This is the real problem with my previous post actually - not being upfront and saying "I find vc++ code-completion annoying and counter-productive IMHO for these reasons."


4. Ever heard of a C++ template?

I think so - is that where you write a skeleton file and fill in the blanks later?


5. Are you aware of the other features provided in VC++?

Used to be but I'm not a sharecropper any more.

My guess is that the answer to all the above is no. I really hate it when Slashdoters who defend OSS automatically get moded up even if their information is wrong or misleading.

Well your guess was wrong and you can back off on your hatred since I haven't been modded up (at least at this time of writing).

ctags, for the most part, processes just C language constructs.

Not true.

Even then I'm betting it's rather limited in what it does. In order to do visual assist style code completion you NEED to have a full language parser for C++. ctags has no such thing.

Well, sure. But then I already have a full language parser for c++. It's called g++. I don't need another one built into my editor when I have a set of tools that does what I need to be productive.

Unnnngh, people who talk out of their ass.

Tsk tsk - manners. People are more receptive without personal attacks. You could have pointed out where I was wrong without any labelling or guesses as to my motivations and experience.

I'm no compiler expert, but it's my understanding that C++ refactoring depends on a deep understanding of the already complex C++ language - more so than say code-completion(intellisense).

I know that visual slickedit has it (proprietary - somewhat expensive), but i'm not aware of any other editor/IDE that can.

I know that http://cedet.sourceforge.net/ for emacs can do intellisense type stuff, but not sure about refactoring.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the Eclipse CDT plugin project get it eventually.

I was listening to Bram Moolenaar's (vim head honcho) BOF
talk and he spent about half of it talking about intellisense(code completion), so I think us vim heads might get some of that for vim 7.

Really neat free C/C++ IDE for both Linux and Windows is Ultimate++ http://upp.sourceforge.net/ [SF]. It also includes framework for developing cross platform GUI. On windows it supports mingw and free (well "free") MS C++ Toolkit and native MS debugger. Nice part is that you can have single workbench with projects where you can switch toolchains (mingw/MS).

maybe i'm blowing smoke out my ass (puff puff) but it seems like you can get 80% of that just by using vim. let's look at the feature list from visual assists website:

• Enhanced Listboxes no
• Suggestion Lists ctrl p and ctrl n in vim will auto complete and cycle through all the similar options. you can set your dictionary to include a syntax file. the whole skinny on that is here
• Enhanced Syntax Coloring i don't know how "advanced" the coloring is... but vim certainly allows you to write some pretty "advanced" syntax files
• Goto well, there's bookmarks in vim. that's similar.
• Underlining of Misspelled Words there's a swell spellchecker for vim here. it "highlights" mispelled words... which may be as good as "underlining".
• Auto Recovery. vim does a fine job of recovering (see here) i don't know how "auto" you need it.

then get a p800, p900 or even better, the p910 from Sony Ericsson...
http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/
and
http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/screen_fo_v0 .8.jpg

i've stuffed my p800 with 128Mb memory 3 CDs in ogg format... it also works with wireless bluetooth headsets...
If you get a p900, i think it supports up to a 512 or 1Gb of flash...

and if you need more space... just carry more memory cards... (there's even a trick for the p800 so you can strap a memory along with the battery (inside the phone) for carrying...
I believe other symbian capable phones are also able to run oggplay...

then get a p800, p900 or even better, the p910 from Sony Ericsson...
http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/
and
http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/screen_fo_v0 .8.jpg

i've stuffed my p800 with 128Mb memory 3 CDs in ogg format... it also works with wireless bluetooth headsets...
If you get a p900, i think it supports up to a 512 or 1Gb of flash...

and if you need more space... just carry more memory cards... (there's even a trick for the p800 so you can strap a memory along with the battery (inside the phone) for carrying...
I believe other symbian capable phones are also able to run oggplay...

with a remote cat protocol

The high-end Nokia models based on the Symbian OS have an OGG player available for them. (They also play MP3 and AAC, of course)

The program worked in its unrefined form and now my son is off learning more advanced things. So I'm done with the program. Still, I wish that the open source development model would have worked here.

Please be a good OSS denizen and file bugs at BGO or (preferably) SourceForge. Some of what you mention is possible to do within the GTK theming/settings framework, and some is simply out of the theme-writer's hands presently.

If people identify and file problems, I know what's bugging them and can work to resolve them. But I won't track down and resolve issues on newsgroups and message boards like Slashdot.

Finally, GTK-Wimp's look will "fall back" fairly nicely on Win32 systems that don't have UXTheme installed (2k,9x) or on XP/2k3 where it isn't running. In those cases, it's basically the Raleigh theme engine with Win32's color palette and system settings in effect.

Best,
Dom Lachowicz, GTK-Wimp maintainer

The source is in the CVS. When I was browsing the mailarchive I saw that Ian Clarke (of Freenet fame) seems to behind this as well. Seems like they aim to target it as smaller files than BT, such as blog updates.

Too bad that the Uni through which I'm hooked up doesn't allow P2P, it would be fun to try otherwise. They even have a Firefox extention, that's gotta count for something.

After browsing the "how it works" files is seems to be quite a lot of though behind it. (It's quite a bit more complex than BT eg.) The thing I think seems least robust would be the verification part. It seems like it would be possible to insert false error messages in the system which could cause DDOS of the original server. OTOH perhaps the entire distribution system will help with that as well.

Oh well, there haven't been any news lately on the P2P front. Fun that something new pops up.

Dijjer (rhymes, apparently, with "fridge"-er) is a SourceForge project. It claims to be open source and free software, but I'll be darned if I can find any source code for it!

I will wait until the source is available before installing this one, thanks.

Right here. Works nicely on the SX1 stereo headset.

what about synce?

Did Nokia just get ripped off?

I've always been curious about this. I love Linux, but one of the areas where I think it is sorely lacking is in file system permissions flexibility.

I'm hoping that one of the things that you love about Linux is its flexibility...most distributions can grow far beyond their packaging. :)

I believe that you're looking for ACL support (Access Control Lists). Check this out. Also, just do a google search for Linux ACL's. There are lots of projects in development, and considering how long these have been worked on, there are probably some implementations which are quite mature. YMMV.

If you're referring to GTK-Wimp, then you're wrong - it still is missing several things. This is all based on Windows XP, since the UXTheme API is irrelevant on all other platforms. (Except 2003 Server and Longhorn, I suppose.)

* Menus are themed flat out wrong:
. - Black "etched" border instead of single pixel gray border
. - Separators are "etched" gray, instead of a single pixel gray border
. - Menus are missing the drop shadow
. - Don't animate when dropped down
. - Don't fade out when selected
. - Menubar items don't highlight when moused over
. - Menubar has etched border instead of single white pixel border
* Tooltips are missing the drop shadow too
* Toolbar "grippy" is themed wrong
* Combo-boxes
. - Are bordered the same as menus, instead of a single pixel black border
. - Don't animate when dropped down
. - Use "Mac"-style feel (ie, selected element is centered on top of combobox) and not Windows style (menu appears below the combobox)
. - The dropdown menu does not expand to width of its parent control
* Checkboxes are sized wrong, on occasion (but not always)

The menus are the biggest problem. The Comboboxes violating the Windows "feel" is annoying, too. But the menu immediately stands out as looking wrong on most apps.

Suffice it to say that most GTK+ apps on Windows just look and feel wrong. But it's that "uncanny wrong" where it's MOSTLY right, but just slightly out of whack - enough to be distrubing.

I remember hearing that GTK# was the way to go WRT the default mono toolkit. Bad idea. GTK on windows is pretty bad. However, I found this project which makes wxWidgets available to mono. Why oh why would you want to use gtk# over wxWidgets (which in turn uses native UI)?

I'm not sure if this should be a reply to someone else's comment, so I'll start anew.

I'm the guy who helped port the gaim-encryption plugin FROM Linux over TO Win32. (The opposite of the article and this topic, I know). But, after I sent the patches back up to the maintainer, he was able to easily carry it in his source tree.

I used Cygwin and MingW to handle the compilation with his original autoconf, etc. build environment. Of course, there was the requisite GTK+ libraries, etc. that went along with it too. But the magic was MingW and Cygwin.

Perhaps this could give the various developers some insight that "it really can be done".

--
3. Don't forget to enjoy!

(Oops - I wish Slashdot came with a spell-checker ;)

I wish you used Firefox and SpellBound.

There is an online demonstration of an Alan Turing Machine. http://abacus.sourceforge.net/alanturingmachine/ab acus.php It is basically an idea of a primitive computer with 2 main components. The components include a Tape to hold the data and a Finite State Machine to contain the instructions to process it. This is like the Processor and Memory relationship. The Tape in the demonstration is finite though.

You mean something like okle?
And mplayer doesn't have GUI? Granted, it's not compiled by default, but it's easy to enable, and binary packages usually include it.

Most linux distributions come with at least three database servers, five email servers and a thousand other programs you can install from the disk.

The discussion is about Linux on the desktop. (How did you miss that?) And on the desktop, Linux has very little to offer. My point was that this is because the projects are focused on creating something only marginally better than Windows, rather than something really and truly great in it's own right.

Also, projects like Fink for Mac OS X and Cygwin for Windows make adding those "thousands of other programs" trivial. Unfortunately there's no such trivial way to make Linux GUIs not suck.

And what the hell is POWER and pSeries? I'm pretty much going to ignore this article. I've been writing win32 software for quite some time and am seriously fed up with that platform. Rather than tweaking my software so that it works with Wine I'm much more interested in rewriting the GUI from scratch using wxWidgets. With a wx based application, you can then compile it into native Linux (GTK+), native win32, or even Mac OS X apps. To me that seems like the most promising route. I've used some wx based applications like Audacity and they're just amazing, really look like they belong on each target platform.

You've got a pretty good point.

I use windows a lot, too much. I find it works really well because I use Firefox, Gaim, Azureus, Apache, Media Player Classic, OpenOffice, Sygate Firewall, Norton AV (OEM, free as in beer), Virtual Dub, XviD, FreeRip, Cygwin....

Basically everything my mouse touches in Windows is either GPL, free as in beer or part of Windows itself. I've found that open source software just runs better.

Ok .. gloves off time ..

1) Max OS X also has another ace up its sleave. It's called Hide. If you've too many apps on the screen and you want to clear it up a bit, hit the Command-H keys and it hides all the windows for the current live app. They don't go into the minimized portion of the dock, they just vanish. But the app is still running (the black triangle below the app icon in the doc shows this).

Too much trouble for you to hide multiple apps? No problem. Select the app you want to keep and go to the first Menu item for that app on the menu bar. Select Hide Others and every other app on the desktop gets hidden in one fell swoop.

2) Download Desktop Manager. It's a Virtual Desktop app just like any you get on Linux, only better. At 322KB it takes minutes to download, then you click on the .dmg (disk image) file to mount it and drag it into your apps folder. No messing with rpm, etc. No dependency hell with libraries, just drag & drop and it works. It's released under the GPL License so its free. It has all the features of its Linux equivalents, but in addition is has some very cool optional transition effects from screen to screen. These are:

- Cross Fade
- Zoom
- Reveal (a powerpoint like slide effect)
- Slide
- Warp & Fade
- Swap Over (very cool - old screen shrinks into the distance, new screen zooms towards you)
- Cube (also very cool - uses the same "switch user" rotating cube effect to switch screens)
- Warp

Plus ... you can still use the Exposé and Hide tools right along with your Virtual Desktops.

30-15 to Mac OS X ... your service !!

Check out Irrlicht. It's cross-platform, free, open-source, handles mesh imports from 3d studio max, maya, DirectX formats, and can import Quake 3 levels and Quake 2 models, amongst other things.

Or Blender, which has support for 3d game creation.

Or Ogre3d, which is more of a graphics engine than a game engine, but which can be used for game creation.

But I think irrlicht is the closest to what you're talking about.

If those games are the best you can do, you are a REALLY LONG WAY from mainstream acceptance.

Point taken, but consider this. Look where we were 5 years ago. Look where we are now.

Now imagine where we'll be 5 years from now.

For the moment, the really, really impressive stuff is the graphics libraries. If nothing else, go check out Irrlicht's feature list. Before, we couldn't make good games because we didn't have the tools. Now, we have the tools, and the games are starting to come. Where do you think we'll be once the tools we have now had matured, and the community knows how to play with them? We'll be one or two years behind instead of five.

And that's just the OS community. We're not even talking about the Ids and the Unreals out there.

Unreal Doom3 HalfLife2 Enemy Territory Cube Savage Stratagus Freeciv Wesnoth NeverwinterNights Tribes2 Vendetta YohohoPuzzlePirates Civilization AlphaCentauri FrozenBubble Pydance Teg DeusEx BZFlag XPlane Flightgear Torcs Scorched3d Pingus Lincity Tuxcart Torcs Quake 123 VegaStrike Railz LBreakout Armagetron PPRacer Vendetta and there more impressive titles under development.

Here's my opinion. What "we" need are fewer people saying we need more games, and more people recognizing some of the excellent offerings we have right now. If we support these games (even with nothing more than just a little recognition), the companies WILL notice, see us as a market, and want to cater to us.

Unreal Doom3 HalfLife2 Enemy Territory Cube Savage Stratagus Freeciv Wesnoth NeverwinterNights Tribes2 Vendetta YohohoPuzzlePirates Civilization AlphaCentauri FrozenBubble Pydance Teg DeusEx BZFlag XPlane Flightgear Torcs Scorched3d Pingus Lincity Tuxcart Torcs Quake 123 VegaStrike Railz LBreakout Armagetron PPRacer Vendetta and there more impressive titles under development.

Here's my opinion. What "we" need are fewer people saying we need more games, and more people recognizing some of the excellent offerings we have right now. If we support these games (even with nothing more than just a little recognition), the companies WILL notice, see us as a market, and want to cater to us.

Unreal Doom3 HalfLife2 Enemy Territory Cube Savage Stratagus Freeciv Wesnoth NeverwinterNights Tribes2 Vendetta YohohoPuzzlePirates Civilization AlphaCentauri FrozenBubble Pydance Teg DeusEx BZFlag XPlane Flightgear Torcs Scorched3d Pingus Lincity Tuxcart Torcs Quake 123 VegaStrike Railz LBreakout Armagetron PPRacer Vendetta and there more impressive titles under development.

Here's my opinion. What "we" need are fewer people saying we need more games, and more people recognizing some of the excellent offerings we have right now. If we support these games (even with nothing more than just a little recognition), the companies WILL notice, see us as a market, and want to cater to us.

"Firstly, at this point in time, everything you make that is copyrightable is copyrighted automatically by the law. You are not in fact choosing to do it for a particular reason."

Yes, but I am not talking of my works which I place no notice on, but rather those works I place a notice on. These days, ti is GPL and CC BY-SA for me. Check:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A %22drew%20Roberts%22
http://zotz.openphoto.net/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zbcw/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nanoppix/
http://security.royans.net/projects/dydns/

"Secondly, I think you're confusing something. If you are creating works without any expectation of getting anything at all in return, then you appear to not be encouraged to create those works by the availability of copyright, and therefore shouldn't get a copyright since it is superfluous."

You are missing what motivates me with respect to copyright and also trying to reduce all motivations to economic ones. I think you are mistaken as to what motivates me. Perhaps it is that way with you, I cannot read your mind, but I have some inkling of my own.

"To be honest, I'm dubious. Your posts in this thread are copyrighted. Would you not post on /. if you had to register them in order to protect them? I don't think so. I think that you post here because you enjoy the debate, and the copyright status of the posts is irrelevant."

With the example you chose, which is my posting on slashdot, you are more than likely right. But you chose a wrong example. Check this link:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/userinfo.php?uid=47354

I wrote a novel in November 2004 as part of a contest. If I sort out some issues with my lawyer with respect to short quotes from songs of the era sprinkled here and there in the novel, I intend to publish it under some Creative Commons or similar license.

After all that work, I would not put it in the public domain, but would be happy to release as CC BY-SA. I will be quite happy, even if I do not receive a dime as a result of sales. This brings up a key issue with reguards to motivation. That is that we have a continumm from demotivation to total absence of motivation to motivation. You are speaking like there is only motivation and the absence of motivation.

While I am quite happy to share my work for no monetary reward, I find it demotivating to think others will make a derivative of my work and copyright it all rights reserved and not pay me. I am cool with them copylefting a derivative and not paying me. Perhaps this will remove the need to be dubious.

"Given that the system I describe is more or less how we did things from 1710-1977 and that we had a pretty thriving public domain, and that the number of copyrightable works didn't seem to shoot up upon the effective date of the 1976 Act, or the 1989 amendments, I think that those expansions of the law were not really justified."

I can easily agree that the expansions of the law were not justified. However, if one of the acts/amendments you cite was the one that made all works automatically copyrighted once comitted to a fixed medium, you are seriously mistaken in your claim that the number of copyrighted works did not shoot up (I realise you said copyrightable works, if there is a fine point to the difference, please enlighten.) I take it you meant works where the copyright was registered did not shoot up in number.

"One year statutory bar to filing, probably from publication, where that's significantly expanded from what it means now (e.g. inclusive of public performance). Five year terms from pu

"Firstly, at this point in time, everything you make that is copyrightable is copyrighted automatically by the law. You are not in fact choosing to do it for a particular reason."

Yes, but I am not talking of my works which I place no notice on, but rather those works I place a notice on. These days, ti is GPL and CC BY-SA for me. Check:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A %22drew%20Roberts%22
http://zotz.openphoto.net/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zbcw/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nanoppix/
http://security.royans.net/projects/dydns/

"Secondly, I think you're confusing something. If you are creating works without any expectation of getting anything at all in return, then you appear to not be encouraged to create those works by the availability of copyright, and therefore shouldn't get a copyright since it is superfluous."

You are missing what motivates me with respect to copyright and also trying to reduce all motivations to economic ones. I think you are mistaken as to what motivates me. Perhaps it is that way with you, I cannot read your mind, but I have some inkling of my own.

"To be honest, I'm dubious. Your posts in this thread are copyrighted. Would you not post on /. if you had to register them in order to protect them? I don't think so. I think that you post here because you enjoy the debate, and the copyright status of the posts is irrelevant."

With the example you chose, which is my posting on slashdot, you are more than likely right. But you chose a wrong example. Check this link:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/userinfo.php?uid=47354

I wrote a novel in November 2004 as part of a contest. If I sort out some issues with my lawyer with respect to short quotes from songs of the era sprinkled here and there in the novel, I intend to publish it under some Creative Commons or similar license.

After all that work, I would not put it in the public domain, but would be happy to release as CC BY-SA. I will be quite happy, even if I do not receive a dime as a result of sales. This brings up a key issue with reguards to motivation. That is that we have a continumm from demotivation to total absence of motivation to motivation. You are speaking like there is only motivation and the absence of motivation.

While I am quite happy to share my work for no monetary reward, I find it demotivating to think others will make a derivative of my work and copyright it all rights reserved and not pay me. I am cool with them copylefting a derivative and not paying me. Perhaps this will remove the need to be dubious.

"Given that the system I describe is more or less how we did things from 1710-1977 and that we had a pretty thriving public domain, and that the number of copyrightable works didn't seem to shoot up upon the effective date of the 1976 Act, or the 1989 amendments, I think that those expansions of the law were not really justified."

I can easily agree that the expansions of the law were not justified. However, if one of the acts/amendments you cite was the one that made all works automatically copyrighted once comitted to a fixed medium, you are seriously mistaken in your claim that the number of copyrighted works did not shoot up (I realise you said copyrightable works, if there is a fine point to the difference, please enlighten.) I take it you meant works where the copyright was registered did not shoot up in number.

"One year statutory bar to filing, probably from publication, where that's significantly expanded from what it means now (e.g. inclusive of public performance). Five year terms from pu

There are huge WASTE networks out there and most people simple send each other keys over chat in clear txt or AIM secure. Now if you are telling me that the ISP is going to log EVERY chat session from their users scanning for 1056bit characters which are keys, then you're going a little crazy. Besides. You need the other WASTE guys to add your keys too. So if your WASTE consortium is wise, even without any complicated third-party entities you can be very secure. There are of course some obvious loop holes in the implementation of the software - but none that can't be registered as trivial. This first version of the software was more of a proof of concept and to win the private P2P race.

It's funny how kids on campuses have 2-300 users running WASTE on the LAN on Apple iTunes port to "hide" the traffic and then hooking each other between campuses.

This reminds me of the "Progranisms" project I saw over on the Gentoo Linux forums:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-255505-highli ght-progranism.html
http://www.progranism.com/

Basically some guy put together an executable which makes a few (mutated) copies of itself when it runs, then executes those copies after a short delay. The idea is that executables might evolve which show interesting behaviors.

You can download his source code here:

http://www.progranism.com/junk/progranism-2.3.1.c

Because I like doing strange things, I made a variant of the program which mutates the source code and recompiles it (mutating until it gets something compilable), rather than mutating the executable directly:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/progr anism-neilh.c
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/progr anism-neilh-condensed.c
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/ (some cleanup and maintenance scripts)

Unfortunately, it's stuck in a pretty steep local minima -- it makes some trivial mutations, but nothing major. One interesting possibility would be to have it search your hard drive for other executables and source files, and try to "mate" with those.

Another scary possibility would be to have viruses/worms with non-trivial evolution capabilities. That'd be a pretty nasty outbreak to try to control.

Finally, a rather neat-looking project is AI.Planet, which is trying to create an 3D evolving ecosystem/world of intelligent "organisms." Framsticks, a 3D life simulation project, is also pretty cool.

Probably a lot easier to just use SSL. Most existing protocols (like HTTP, POP3, IMAP) add an encryption layer this way.

There are already some P2P programs that support encryption, such as Freenet and MUTE.

Probably a lot easier to just use SSL. Most existing protocols (like HTTP, POP3, IMAP) add an encryption layer this way.

There are already some P2P programs that support encryption, such as Freenet and MUTE.

This has been done before, it's been around since at least the mid 1980's possibly earlier - it was caleld Core Wars. This evolved into another similar more advanced version called CRobots... Short programs are written to "attack" the other by overwriting the other's memory space. They must alternate between "defending" their own space and "attacking" the other guys's... First to blow stack loses!

Here's some links:

Corewars:

Home Page

Source Forge Page

CRobots:

CRobots Home Page

• Multi-channel audio (up to 10 for audiophiles)
• 24/96 support (it might already have this)
• Full ID3-like info support, but with lyrics as well (might already have most of this, too)

As of right now, FLAC goes up to 8 independent audio channels (with room for expansion), 24bits/96kHz audio support (also with room for growth), it uses Vorbis comments for text tags (track name, artist name, etc.) and has room for additional metadata (lyrics sheets, etc.). There's even stores that'll give/sell FLAC files right now. But the lack of any onerous DRM schemes will likely hinder its growth for any sort of mainstream music distribution.

All that someone would have to do is create a dedicated FLAC decoding chip.

That's probably overkill. FLAC decoding is all integer ops so you could do it on some cheap ARM chip without any problem. The ease of it is likely why FLAC is already supported on various bits of hardware.

... or you have to spend $40 on third party virtual desktop software...

No you don't. Try this one. It works great for me.

Just install Password Safe http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ and generate a new, random 20 character password (Hash That!) for each login. If you don't like Windows-only software, there's Password Gorilla http://www.fpx.de/fp/Software/Gorilla/ (runs everywhere), My Password Safe http://www.semanticgap.com/myps/ (Linux/Qt) or pwsafe http://nsd.dyndns.org/pwsafe/ (command line).

Don't forget to use a good, long passphrase as the database's Master Password.

I currently use Keepass for remebering all my passwords. All I need to remember is 1 master password. Currently it is 16 charachters and includes more than just letters and numbers. I use it mainly for message board passwords, IM, email, websites, etc. Plus it's open source so you should be ok unless you have a keylogger installed.

Is that most programs end up in the "beta" stage. There's only enough incentive to get a program working to do whatever you needed it to do, and then move on.

Really? A quick look at sourceforge shows 14799 projects in beta, while there are a total of 38186 projects in a pre-beta state. Compare that to the 13509 total projects in a post-beta state. Most telling, the largest single development status is Planning, with 15049 projects in that state. Making the assumption that sourceforge is representative of the open source development world, I'd draw that conclusion that over half (based on a total of 66494 total active projects on sourceforge at the time of this writing) of all open source projects don't even get to a usable state (another assumption: a project in a beta state is far enough along to be used by more than the development team and uber power users).

Of course, this all depends on how one defines beta, and since sourceforge developers get to set their own statuses, what they think may be beta code is really mature, or production/stable could actually be alpha. Take the numbers with a grain of salt.

Ironically enough it is now "Pre-Alpha."

Thing about Word 97 is that it was unwilling to save in word 5/95 format. This is something that MS refused to fix for the better part of a year.

In the meantime, any company that bought a new PC was only offered word 97 for the new machine. This meant that, the first time they saved a document that needed to be read anywhere else in the company, all recipients needed to buy the '97 version to read it (much less to edit it). You could save your document in RTF format, but the '97 RTF format was sadly broken.... Back to plan A.

MS did, in time, release an official plugin that allowed you to save in word'95 format (as long as you were willing to work your way thru the warning messages), but I don't believe that it was possible to set '95 as the default save format, so -- sooner or later you'd accidently just 'save', and the next thing you know, your recipients can't read your document.

The end result of this is that MS raked in Billions of dollars in spurious sales by forcing people to abandon all older versions of their word processors. This is part of the way that they cemented their monopoly on the office software market.
_____

Then of course, there's the NT filesystem that is sorely short on public documentation, and almost impossible to figure out. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is entirely uninterested in letting others interoperate with it. In fact, I'm guessing that they put in some strange land-mines just to piss off people trying to use it other than from inside of the most recent versions of Windows.

...in a state of suspended animation here

I prefer Bitstream Vera myself.

For terminals though, I *love* non-smoothed Lucida Typewriter 9 point. Not the Xfree version though (the 'm' and 'w' look wierd), I like the one which comes with Solaris (the standard font used by OpenWindow's cmdtool).

Mmm, functional :).

Fortunately for us, there actually is a way to get Windows fonts on Linux.

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

Long Live Verdana!