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For IM, use GAIM and get the GAIM encryption plug-in. Nice, seamless encryption over anyone's IM service. Only issue - your friends also need to be running Gaim with the encryption module.

But - since HP's pricing has gone worse over time anyway, I think it's time to ditch them for good and no longer buy their products...

The problem with HP is that, as much as their marketdroids suck, their technical counterpart are quite OK, providing us with open-source drivers(licensed under the GPL, MIT and BSD) for their printers and scanners since a few years.
So what to do? Support them for their open drivers, or ditch them due to idiotic marketing choices?

Where indeed:

cell phone: Motorola and DoCoMo both feature Linux based phones (I'm not sure where to get the source, but I don't have one of the phones so I'm not legally entitled to it. Anyone who buys one though is ... does anyone have one of these and tried getting the source?)

Sony's Playstation 2: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/playstation2/

Apple's iPod: http://ipodlinux.sourceforge.net/index.shtml

OS X doesn't support virtual desktops out of the box, but there are plenty of utilities that do a great job. Desktop Manager is free and probably the best of the bunch.

On the topic of little things OS X is missing, Quicksilver is a great application launcher that makes the dock all but obsolete.

Open Source scratches an itch. I write it to solve a problem. For example, talking about digital cameras, I wrote and open source'd Picture Pager, a Gallery Creator for digital images. Have been involved in and lead several others too. So I know where-of I speak with OpenSource and open-ness in general.

My closed Canon does everything I want it to, out of the box. It has been reliable, the RAW format has given me lots of flexibility, I can manipulate any features I care to either using the camera interface or afterwards with an EXIF or image editor. And if I didn't like it, there are ten other brands that are true competitors, with multiple models per. So I have no itches. The camera being "closed" is not causing any problems, and by providing them some ROI giving the vendors cause to invest, it has solved problems.

Why solve a non-problem?

Firefox would include a speller checker

I use a great Firefox extension called Spellbound.

Our current Nikon 950, which is becoming obsolete, has some wonderful free software known as photopc that can control the camera. This software has been extremely helpful. If only every digital camera had protocols as well-known as the 950, my job would be much easier. Kudos to the smart guys who snooped the serial line!

It's possible to buy an inexpensive data cable for a lot of Verizon camera phones; with such a cable, you can copy pics, ring tones, etc. to and from your computer using BitPim. I've got an LG VX6100 and that setup works like a charm.

More info at the Howard cellphone forums.

What phone are you using? I went through a couple of them, and had good luck with third-party cables and software. I had an LG-VX6000 before i moved to Sprint, if i remember right. A $25 cable and the freeware bitpim software allowed me to pull the pics off without paying verizon. I believe it supports quite a few brands and types of phones.

We use CruiseControl for this. Works great.

CruiseControl Home

There's also DamageControl. I checked it out, but got scared off by the need to install and use Ruby. I work with too many languages as it is, and am teaching myself Python, I don't need another especially just for one tool.

If you're interested in Moria, Larn and Rogue on Palm, you do have other options.

--
Evan

The new chipset is the Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG and has linux drivers:
http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/pro 2915abg/index.htm

From http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/ :
This project was created by Intel to enable support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG Network Connection miniPCI adapters. This project (IPW2200) is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available).

From http://support.intel.com/support/notebook/sb/CS-00 6408.htm :
Intel® PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection
A Linux driver is currently under development. A pre-production version of the device driver is available as detailed below.

And for phpMyAdmin fans there's phpPgAdmin.

The Intel 2200BG (a miniPCI Centrino system) seems to have decent support via an Intel-supported project: http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/index.php

Does it mean the end of Freenet as we know it? Because its developers did take more than 'reasonable care' to prevent their software from being controlled in any way, which of course includes having a true free speech medium, but also a platform for any kind of crime, like illegal pornography. Is it possible to stop illegal pornography and copyright infringement, but allow free speech, privacy and anonymity for people living in oppressive regimes? That is something that needs to be done quickly. Freenet is more than just yet another P2P network. We cannot let it fail.

Just this morning I noticed the same thing on pyblosxom (example at bottom).

Most people don't develop software, and so considering the cost of Xcode makes about as much sense as itemizing each background image that comes with the respective operating systems in question, in order to determine the value to the consumer when they're going to download nudie pictures or anime from the Internet and use that instead.

But if they were developing software, I don't know, they might use
one
of the
numereous options available to them for free.

And as for video editing and music editing, I don't have any interest in either. And if my friend wanted me to do anything complicated involving either, I would probably not be qualified to do so anyway. Now if it were simple video editing, there are options.

I doubt very much you would want to pay the premium of a bundled Mathematica with your computer in the off-chance you think you might like to take up mathematics. Nor a bundled Minitab in case you decide you missed your calling as a statistician. But point out that Macs are a poor price-performance competitor and some Mac user will itemize bundled software they don't really use, vacuous claims about the superiority of the manufactured parts, or introduce vague notions regarding aesthetics.

Personally I can't see why anyone with any taste would use Aqua, or programs with ugly brushed metal themes. I don't really see why anyone with any taste would buy a bunch of white objects that will start off by not fitting in with their surroundings, and end up developing a dull tinge as they age. But it isn't really about aesthetics, it's about being superior to others by being in a higher-priced minority, so we can just forego any further discussion about style.

PostgreSQL 7.4 for the mostpart* works fine on Mac OS X. In terms of installation, I do it with fink. I'm not sure when a PostgreSQL 8.0 source package will be available for fink, but hopefully not too long.

*If you want to support more connections or more shared memory per connection, you need to set your sysv shm settings in /etc/rc something similar to FreeBSD 5's defaults and then reboot. They are set once on boot and cannot be changed with sysctl after they are first set.

Here's what I'm currently using:

sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=33554432
sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmin=1
sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmni=192
sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmseg=128
sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmall=8192

• Linux version
• Advanced mode interface (access to EXIF data for instance)
• Album and collection oriented classification (two levels)
• Comment and tags on photo areas (auto detecting human heads)
• Integration with popular blogging software (MT, WP, etc) not only blogger
• More date related auto classification features (detecting and grouping photos in different time ranges: hours, days, etc)
• L10n
• In addition to tags additional ways of stablishing relation between pictures
• Import from Internet
• Be faster

If you really care I will implement this feature for you. Just make a $50 (US) donation to my Sourceforge Project and I'll get right on it. Of course, there's no guarentees that my patch will be accepted and there's even less chance that Slashdot will pick up the change. But hey, at least you will be doing something instead of complaining.

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.

Maybe you want imgSeek. works great for what you suggest, as well as being able to "draw your own".

Even C++ lets you do this, although to a far lesser degree. The Spirit parser library is a good example.

I wish there was something for Linux that would allow me to select a range of pictures and print them catalog style. I remember a M$ prog called Thumbsplus that would do that, I think they called them "Contact Sheets" or something like that.

As it stands now, there are some good viewers, I like GQview which is an included extra with most distros.
It's really handy. Not perfect for for general viewing it does the job. Complaints: no printing ability, extremely limited image manipulation ability, but as a simple viewer, very good..

If I want to print multiple photos on a single page I have to import them into OO which is not on my list of fun things to do...

Have you tried KDE's digiKam? It lets you setup photo albums, add metadata, export to HTML, etc.

Actually that file does still exist. It's here now. Less than a year ago, the package went under massive directory reoganizations. CVS commit comments on the old and the new tell you where things came from and/or went to (and is in the CVS policy). If you want to see one not in the Attic with some age, the README will take you back almost 18 years or so.

Actually that file does still exist. It's here now. Less than a year ago, the package went under massive directory reoganizations. CVS commit comments on the old and the new tell you where things came from and/or went to (and is in the CVS policy). If you want to see one not in the Attic with some age, the README will take you back almost 18 years or so.

I agree that it's just a matter of making the convience worth the money, but I think this is actually going to be very hard. Sure, for the first couple of people pirating the movie is going to be slow and awkward, but once it hits any major P2P network, it suddenly becomes easy. This will be more true as bandwidth to the home increses. Add to this BitTorrent and its inevitable children, and we have easy, and fast pirating.
As for the **AA's lawsuits, this will deter some, but it's also doomed to failure. Take a look at the MUTE page. It proposes a simple, and probably effective, anonymous P2P network. Couple that with a BitTorrent type download system, using file hashes, and a FreeNet style system of web pages and you have untrackable piracy. e.g. A pirate group puts the tracker file on a FreeNet page, which works with a MUTE based P2P application. No one knows who anyone is in the system, or where any of it is comming from. Granted, I doubt it's fool proof, but it's going to get harder and harder to track this stuff on the internet without some rather draconian measures.
The last part of this is already in place, pirate groups that are willing to put stuff out, just because they can. They can post the info to connect to their FreeNet page in a few IRC groups, and tag all of their releases with their info. Word of mouth will bring in more people, and people will probably start to rely on specfic groups, as they show the quality of their work. Heck, I would imagine that IRC would be used to critique said work.
The pieces are comming together to make internet piracy easy, and basically an anonymous activity. Right or wrong (that's not the point of this post) it's going to happen. The **AA will probably have to follow Bollywood's lead at some point, or really suffer from piracy. Or, if the argument is true, just get a bunch of free advertising for their product (I have a feeling we will get to see this theory tested at its logical extreme during the transition, I expect a diminishing returns situation).

As far as web app development is concerned, XML is more and more present in the two domains, either natively or via open source projects.

On the Java side, the struts framework provides logic to the front end so developers can use an XML style language to go through lists, create variables, set objects, etc. You can also make all your build scripts using ANT, which allows for function calls, variable assignments, and other simple tasks.

On the .NET side, ASP.NET pages are in the form of controls, which similarly to the struts framework allow server side logic to be defined through an XML language. You can use NANT also to make builds. Similar to ANT, it allows for many simple programming language tasks including listeners.

I have yet to see exception handling and OO but I'm sure it's not far away.

Not that I would ever have anything to hide, but how safe is data on an encrypted disk, in particular linux encrypted filesystems like this? It seems to me that with a little encryption you would pretty easily foil the efforts of any local forensics people.

You might want to look into:

http://proxytunnel.sourceforge.net/

BRL-CAD is a very large scale project with over 20 years of history in RCS and CVS. The CVS repository now lives on SourceForge with pretty much the entire revision history preserved (the project only recently released as open source). You can see one of the oldest files, for example here (bool.c). If you look to the end of the file, you'll see something like: Wed Apr 18 02:19:43 1984 UTC (20 years, 9 months ago) by mike

Several years ago, many of the current CVS practices were written down and organized into a rather detailed generic CVS policy. It basically all boils down to being able to guarantee a certain level of functionality, being very careful about naming directories, and coming up with good tag naming conventions. Likewise, depending on how many developers you have and how active development is, more or less control may be required for branches and validation.

Those last two restrictions are mainly due to limitations of CVS -- it does not directly manage directories or maintain history of directory changes, so you're left up to tracking those changes by policy conventions. (It's rather annoying that a CVS checkout does not prune empty directories by default!) If your directory structure is likely to change frequently (e.g. a new large project starting up), then something like SVN may be less painful. that said, BRL-CAD's history has easily endured CVS's inadequacies quite successfully.

BRL-CAD is a very large scale project with over 20 years of history in RCS and CVS. The CVS repository now lives on SourceForge with pretty much the entire revision history preserved (the project only recently released as open source). You can see one of the oldest files, for example here (bool.c). If you look to the end of the file, you'll see something like: Wed Apr 18 02:19:43 1984 UTC (20 years, 9 months ago) by mike

Several years ago, many of the current CVS practices were written down and organized into a rather detailed generic CVS policy. It basically all boils down to being able to guarantee a certain level of functionality, being very careful about naming directories, and coming up with good tag naming conventions. Likewise, depending on how many developers you have and how active development is, more or less control may be required for branches and validation.

Those last two restrictions are mainly due to limitations of CVS -- it does not directly manage directories or maintain history of directory changes, so you're left up to tracking those changes by policy conventions. (It's rather annoying that a CVS checkout does not prune empty directories by default!) If your directory structure is likely to change frequently (e.g. a new large project starting up), then something like SVN may be less painful. that said, BRL-CAD's history has easily endured CVS's inadequacies quite successfully.

BRL-CAD is a very large scale project with over 20 years of history in RCS and CVS. The CVS repository now lives on SourceForge with pretty much the entire revision history preserved (the project only recently released as open source). You can see one of the oldest files, for example here (bool.c). If you look to the end of the file, you'll see something like: Wed Apr 18 02:19:43 1984 UTC (20 years, 9 months ago) by mike

Several years ago, many of the current CVS practices were written down and organized into a rather detailed generic CVS policy. It basically all boils down to being able to guarantee a certain level of functionality, being very careful about naming directories, and coming up with good tag naming conventions. Likewise, depending on how many developers you have and how active development is, more or less control may be required for branches and validation.

Those last two restrictions are mainly due to limitations of CVS -- it does not directly manage directories or maintain history of directory changes, so you're left up to tracking those changes by policy conventions. (It's rather annoying that a CVS checkout does not prune empty directories by default!) If your directory structure is likely to change frequently (e.g. a new large project starting up), then something like SVN may be less painful. that said, BRL-CAD's history has easily endured CVS's inadequacies quite successfully.

The protocols for phonebook, calendar, and todo reading and writing are known for a number of Samsung phones. Samsung uses ASCII AT commands for these. The BitPim project is currently adding phonebook, calendar, wallpaper and ringer support for several Samsung phones. The A500 likely has a similar protocol to other Samsung phones. You can see some notes on Samsung AT commands in the file samsungnotes.txt in the BitPim CVS.

I'm guessing that much of that angst has be channeled into PearPC

I agree with your sentiment, but I think that Gnome and KDE are too well entrenched for GNUstep to have much of an impact. There's Simply GNUstep of course...

But I suspect GNUstep is tarnished for several reasons.

Cocoa is a minority platform with even fewer open source developers. And how many people know objective-c? The Mac has a long history of quality shareware; on the whole the idea of giving code away for free never caught on as with Linux. Those with skills in such a niche area are no doubt finding lucrative opportunities to sell their spare-time efforts! :)

Providing a clean-room implementation of technologies is dependant on their being killer-apps to run.
In the case of haiku, it's implementing a much cherished discontinued platform.
In the case of wine, it's running Windows apps without Windows.
In the case of classpath, it's implementing a JVM without Sun's restrictions and support on every platform.

In each case these projects aim to provide API AND binary compatibility. Achieving binary compatibility with OSX would be comparatively more difficult given that Cocoa is one of a number of technologies which might also need to be emulated.

Plus, most of us do without the niceties of OSX. Those priveleged few that do have Macs are satisfied with their choice of hardware & software, so to re-implement the wheel isn't a high priority.

Finally are there any killer opensource Cocoa apps whose equivalents don't exists in the X11 world? For example, if Apple were to donate the rest of the Safari code to the community, as Netscape did with Mozilla, it would provide a tremendous example of a large-scale Cocoa app. This would perhaps attract developers to the platform. Plus, it might spur people on to implement the missing bits in GNUstep.

I'm not sure what the kernel has to do with it. The point of achieving concurrency is to avoid kernel entanglement. That means lock-free programming where possible. How successful you are there depends on the hardware architecture and who's supporting lock-free programming. As someone who's doing the latter (Atomic Ptr Plus), it's not likely I'm going to get ahold of a Niagra processor based system (and I'm going to dump my SB100) so you won't see too much there. However, I am going to get a Mac Mini, so you will see support for Darwin as well as Linux.

"I would feel more comfortable in (given the concept in a skills test is assessment in a short space of time, a conceptually 'nice' RAD language (that can be programmed quickly as well as designed quickly) would win over stock languages)."

That would be Flowdesigner.

Failing that there's Lisp or Smalltalk.

Development for Symbian devices is open. Just take a look at Frozen Bubble for series 60 phones as an example. As for phones, the best smartphone on the market is UIQ/Symbian (Sony Ericsson P910a) and a variety of other phones use this excellent embedded OS. I personally bought an N-Gage QD simply to play with Symbian.

Here, I would like to call everyone's attention so people get rid of the cloth in front of the eyes and see the real status: some do NOT provide info, like Conexant for their new generation prism54 (Intersil did for the first gen), Intel for their 2100 or 2200 chips or TI for the acx100. Others provide binary only drivers, like Atheros (dig in the OpenBSD source, they reverse engineered the atheros hw abstraction layer). If they do not want to help at all, fine, but do not say they are nice for PR reasons.

For me "Open Source Network Sniffer" covers the full kernel and the apps used for the sniffing. Please, think twice before affirming something is open source (binary drivers are not, even if the stub code is open source) and also that the company is open source friendly (provide help to Linux, *BSD and similar coders, maybe even the driver, is). At this moment, the only few I know that still are pro open source drivers, or even provide support (if my investigation isn't wrong), are Realtek and Ralink (and Intersil, but it doesn't exist anymore).

And for those that think binary is better than nothing... then why *BSD or Linux at all? If it starts with "but is wifi card" or "well, it is only the video card", I don't see why not apply that logic to the OS anyway, or all the apps too.

Thanks for your attention.

Here, I would like to call everyone's attention so people get rid of the cloth in front of the eyes and see the real status: some do NOT provide info, like Conexant for their new generation prism54 (Intersil did for the first gen), Intel for their 2100 or 2200 chips or TI for the acx100. Others provide binary only drivers, like Atheros (dig in the OpenBSD source, they reverse engineered the atheros hw abstraction layer). If they do not want to help at all, fine, but do not say they are nice for PR reasons.

For me "Open Source Network Sniffer" covers the full kernel and the apps used for the sniffing. Please, think twice before affirming something is open source (binary drivers are not, even if the stub code is open source) and also that the company is open source friendly (provide help to Linux, *BSD and similar coders, maybe even the driver, is). At this moment, the only few I know that still are pro open source drivers, or even provide support (if my investigation isn't wrong), are Realtek and Ralink (and Intersil, but it doesn't exist anymore).

And for those that think binary is better than nothing... then why *BSD or Linux at all? If it starts with "but is wifi card" or "well, it is only the video card", I don't see why not apply that logic to the OS anyway, or all the apps too.

Thanks for your attention.

Here, I would like to call everyone's attention so people get rid of the cloth in front of the eyes and see the real status: some do NOT provide info, like Conexant for their new generation prism54 (Intersil did for the first gen), Intel for their 2100 or 2200 chips or TI for the acx100. Others provide binary only drivers, like Atheros (dig in the OpenBSD source, they reverse engineered the atheros hw abstraction layer). If they do not want to help at all, fine, but do not say they are nice for PR reasons.

For me "Open Source Network Sniffer" covers the full kernel and the apps used for the sniffing. Please, think twice before affirming something is open source (binary drivers are not, even if the stub code is open source) and also that the company is open source friendly (provide help to Linux, *BSD and similar coders, maybe even the driver, is). At this moment, the only few I know that still are pro open source drivers, or even provide support (if my investigation isn't wrong), are Realtek and Ralink (and Intersil, but it doesn't exist anymore).

And for those that think binary is better than nothing... then why *BSD or Linux at all? If it starts with "but is wifi card" or "well, it is only the video card", I don't see why not apply that logic to the OS anyway, or all the apps too.

Thanks for your attention.

The Proxim Orinoco b/g and a/b/g cards work nicely with the madwifi drivers. Not yet plug-and-play right now, but once it's set up it works very well. Be sure to grab the latest snapshot of Kismet.

Sounds like you like something like this?

From the website above:

"NetReg is an automated system that requires an unknown DHCP client to register their hardware before gaining full network access. Through a simple web interface, the client is prompted for their user identification. Powerful scripts then retrieve the client's network fingerprint and store it along with the user's information in a database. The database provides administrators with real-time information for troubleshooting and auditing their networks. The entire system was developed utilizing unmodified, open-source servers and in-house developed CGI programs."

Well, if you're using the AIM (Oscar) protocol with a different client you're technically still using something made by AOL.

I haven't used the official AIM client on any computer since '97 or so. It's just not a very good client. There's plenty of alternatives.

On Linux and Windows I use GAIM, and on a Mac I use Adium (which is really just GAIM with a redesigned UI). I know some people who use Trillian on Windows and iChat on the Mac, but I personally don't care for either of them.

Honestly, I just wish people would give up AIM and switch over to Jabber. It's perhaps missing a few features of AIM, but it's easily extendable (it uses XML, so adding client-specific features is pretty simple) and at least you're not relying on AOL.

Of course, p2p right now is often thought of as a single file - an ISO, an mpg, an mp3, a zip file). I see nugget has posted in this thread - the peer-to-peer programs which he currently helps maintain use p2p to do operation distribution, not file distribution. As does Folding@Home (which studies protein/gene problems in a distributed manner) and SETI. GPU is interesting in this respect as you are the one deciding what operations to perform - from adding 1 and 1, to calculating pi, to whatever. I really like Freenet - it is a very versatile protocol so that web pages, Usenet type forums, and even (small) file trading are all possible. I've even seen people play chess games over frost. And as a bonus, there is the option of (some degree of) anonymity on Freenet, so that is an added bonus.

I really would love to see someone with no money to host such thing create something as complex as Slashdot, with moderation system and all, and do it over p2p, maybe on something like Freenet, or maybe something else. The same with things like Wikipedia. Nowadays, the little guy is punished by high bandwidth costs if what he made is popular. With p2p this is not a problem any more.

It is plain true: Linux is still far behind Windows for us hard-core gamers.

They give a reason:

Longer term, virtualisation features in next-generation CPUs should make it much easier to support unmodified OSes: at that time we will reconsider Windows support.

The non-aqua version [...] works fine until you actually want to use the wealth of rich, high-quality fonts that comes with OS X.

Wow, TORCS looks just like Gran Turismo 3!

Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game. That'll totally win over the RTS gamers used to Starcraft (which can run under WINE), C&C, the Warcraft series, and so on.

SuperTux is cute though. Might win the kiddies with that one at least...

Don't get me wrong; none of this is meant to slight or discourage the development of these games. In fact, I've often thought about writing games myself, quite-possibly making them OSS (I'm thinking of a fighting game).

My point is simple: these are not games you woo people away from Windows to play. There are plenty of similarly low-budget games on Windows, so why should anybody play these?

These are games that Linux-only zealots are content to play, on the grounds that most Windows games don't run very well with WINE, WineX costs money, and such people don't want to run Windows. Hence, they're stuck with these games and/or their consoles...