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First of all, Super-Tux is an alpha game - their site screenshots still show the tiling grids. Not very impressive.

What, do you mean this?

That's the freakin' built-in tile editor! SHEESH!

there's a script that you can get here called nvcheck to see if your nvidia drivers are installed correctly. You might have to tweak it a bit to make it recognize an Xorg config file if you're using a newer distro, but it should mostly still work and may help you figure out the source of your problem. Tux racer ran fine for me back when I used a TNT2, so it should work just fine on the 6800.

And you can start by Freedroid and VegaStrike

Using Links!

And you can start by Freedroid and VegaStrike

Using Links!

Instructions on fixing that are here. Basicly set CHOICESPATH to whatever you want.

you forgot to add something...

if you absolutely must clutter your desktop with files and icons. add to XFCE the ROX filer from here

it will give you the ability to have thousands of icons and files on your desktop as well as that comforting "my computer" that makes your computer all warm and fuzzy.

• vnc2swf
• vncrec + transcode
• xvidcap
• Use the "better" Windows capture software to capture whatever you want running in VMWare, on a FAST machine.
• (point a camcorder at the screen and encode later)

You can get round the lack of swing, by using SWT (or other GCJ compatabile WT) and SwintWT (or equiverlent for your WT).

Lyx, Tex-Edit. and Ragtime run native.

In X11 you have Scribus, and just about anything that works on PPC Nix's.

Check out Fink to see what they have for the Mac

I dislike xffm, too. Instead, I use ROX-Filer as my file manager.

For Windows, try VirtuaWin. It's GPL and gives you up to nine virtual desktops.

even slower than it's already glacial performance

Drop the apostrophe in "it's", unless you meant "slower than it is already glacial performance". That doesn't make any sense to me, but perhaps it does to you.

there aren't any CS departments that base their courses on Java, who cares about java

As horrible as the idea may be, there are a number of CS departments that made the Java switch during the big Java boom of the late 90s. My alma mater did the switch, though luckily I was always at least a semester ahead of Java changes.

Seriously, we really need a suite of JAVA tools, like word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers, etc... No more of this "well, it works on Windows, if you want it on Linux or Mac though we'll have to sit down and write it all over again, and probably introduce a ton of bugs....." stuff.

Just as soon as Java gets a good, cross-platform widget set, this can start happening. AWT and Swing aren't it. SWT is the right way to go, IMHO, but since it's not built into Java, it'll never have as much acceptance as AWT or Swing, and Java on the client will continue to be judged by those crappier toolkits.

What good is a program that depends on exact versions of 50 libraries (yeah, like I'll be able to reinstall that in 5 years and have even an outside shot at it working) and only works on a couple platforms, if you're lucky.

Java has the same problem. The Java base librraries are good, but there will always be something you want or need to do that the default set of libraries doesn't supply. What do you do? Well, just like a C programmer, you find a library that has already done what you need, and you use that. As for portability across platforms, you still have to worry about differences in the JRE for each environment and if you make any assumptions about a particular platform (paths, for instance). Java gives you the possibility of being portable, but it doesn't guarantee it.

when you make your own custom hacked windowing system to speed the process (Mozilla), it ends up being a slow RAM hog, even more so than it would be if it was written in JAVA, or another portable language to begin with.

The problem is not writing your own custom hacked windowing system (which XUL isn't -- it's a custom hacked widget set; the difference being that a widget set is the stuff inside the window, while a windowing system handles the windows themselves and doesn't much care what's inside), but writing your own custom hacked system stupidly. Mozilla's XUL is written stupidly, because it doesn't use native widgets (hey, sounds like Swing!). If the Mozilla developers would lose the ego, they would find that there are a number of good cross-platform widget sets (Qt, wxWindows (or wxWidgets, I guess they're calling it now), or even GTK+, though that would be my very last choice for a cross-platform widget set). Instead, the Mozilla team created Firefox when people complained about the weight of the Mozilla suite, yet they left XUL in place. At least there's Galeon, K-Meleon, and even Konqueror (since it can use Gecko as a rendering engine) available as native-widget web browsers.

even slower than it's already glacial performance

Drop the apostrophe in "it's", unless you meant "slower than it is already glacial performance". That doesn't make any sense to me, but perhaps it does to you.

there aren't any CS departments that base their courses on Java, who cares about java

As horrible as the idea may be, there are a number of CS departments that made the Java switch during the big Java boom of the late 90s. My alma mater did the switch, though luckily I was always at least a semester ahead of Java changes.

Seriously, we really need a suite of JAVA tools, like word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers, etc... No more of this "well, it works on Windows, if you want it on Linux or Mac though we'll have to sit down and write it all over again, and probably introduce a ton of bugs....." stuff.

Just as soon as Java gets a good, cross-platform widget set, this can start happening. AWT and Swing aren't it. SWT is the right way to go, IMHO, but since it's not built into Java, it'll never have as much acceptance as AWT or Swing, and Java on the client will continue to be judged by those crappier toolkits.

What good is a program that depends on exact versions of 50 libraries (yeah, like I'll be able to reinstall that in 5 years and have even an outside shot at it working) and only works on a couple platforms, if you're lucky.

Java has the same problem. The Java base librraries are good, but there will always be something you want or need to do that the default set of libraries doesn't supply. What do you do? Well, just like a C programmer, you find a library that has already done what you need, and you use that. As for portability across platforms, you still have to worry about differences in the JRE for each environment and if you make any assumptions about a particular platform (paths, for instance). Java gives you the possibility of being portable, but it doesn't guarantee it.

when you make your own custom hacked windowing system to speed the process (Mozilla), it ends up being a slow RAM hog, even more so than it would be if it was written in JAVA, or another portable language to begin with.

The problem is not writing your own custom hacked windowing system (which XUL isn't -- it's a custom hacked widget set; the difference being that a widget set is the stuff inside the window, while a windowing system handles the windows themselves and doesn't much care what's inside), but writing your own custom hacked system stupidly. Mozilla's XUL is written stupidly, because it doesn't use native widgets (hey, sounds like Swing!). If the Mozilla developers would lose the ego, they would find that there are a number of good cross-platform widget sets (Qt, wxWindows (or wxWidgets, I guess they're calling it now), or even GTK+, though that would be my very last choice for a cross-platform widget set). Instead, the Mozilla team created Firefox when people complained about the weight of the Mozilla suite, yet they left XUL in place. At least there's Galeon, K-Meleon, and even Konqueror (since it can use Gecko as a rendering engine) available as native-widget web browsers.

You're sure about that? Anyway, just intall the OGG Vorbis Quicktime component and it will work everywhere in the OS, including iTunes.

Subject says it all. :)

Of course, you might be able to run Windows under bochs, but then, my Sparc is old enough and slow enough that I really haven't been tempted to make the experiment.

I think something like Eclipse Wiki http://eclipsewiki.sourceforge.net/ - a plugin for the Eclipse IDE http://www.eclipse.org/ is open source nice alternative for having relational data organization.

There could be a reason to make clean, but even in other cases, incorrect dependencies will eventually get you in any reasonably large project. If your dependencies are wrong, there are scripts out there (makedep or makemake) for making dependency information.

it's okay, i'm hanging about, just in case of exactly that sort of thing. my comments were based on someone setting up "opengfs" which i am pretty confused about.

I second this. I'm not a big PHP fan, but the Drupal guys (and its cousin project CivicSpace) were very thoughtful in designing a complete drop-in but very extensible CMS framework. Plone with Archetypes is also a good choice, if you prefer Python (and who wouldn't?), and it tends to iron out a lot of the wrinkly parts of Zope that turn people away.

Liferea
Straw
Blam

PKIX / X.509 / PKCS (Public Key Cryptography)

Kerberos authentication

SNMP / CMIP

X.500 LDAP / DAP directory services

X.400 messaging

Voice over IP: H.323 T.38

The 3GPP specifications (GSM / UMTS mobile phones)

OSI layer 7 protocols (FTAM.. etc.)

RFID

In comparison to XML, ASN.1 is a huge bandwidth saver, in fact the PER (Packed Encoding Rules) were designed for saving bandwidth. There is even a way for encoding data in XML using the XER (XML Encoding Rules) specification.

Last but not least there is finally a worthwhile opensource ASN1 to C compiler out there: Get ASN1C here.

New to ASN.1?? Visit this site and be sure to pick up the excellent free book on ASN.1!

Binary XML is nothing new, as I wager that many people here are already using it, albeit unknowingly.

One of the earliest projects that has tried to make a binary XML (as far as I'm aware) was the EBML (Extensible Binary Meta-Language) which is used in the Matroska media container.

Here's the link to VistaA on sourceforge.

http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/. I don't know how anyone lives without this. I get the typical hundreds of spam every day. 99% end up in my "Spam" folder. I stopped looking in the spam folder for false positives after doing that for 3 months didn't turn up a single one. My "Junk Suspects" folder usually turns up 10 or so a day, one of which might be a non-spam email. I can almost always clear my Junk Suspect folder in bulk by highlighting the whole mess of them and clicking "Delete As Spam", thus further training my spam filter to delete those kinds of things in the future.

Of the hundreds of spam I receive every day, now only 1 or 2 a day might squeeze past the filter into my inbox. It is absolutely essential.

I have a linux box right next to a windows box on my desk. I use windows for email solely because of Spambayes' excellent integration with Outlook.

What are you talking about? H.264 (aka AVC) is an open standard. Apple is not the only one who implents this standard. In fact, Apple is quite slow. Here's a short list of available encoders:
Sorenson Squeeze 4, MainConcept H.264 Encoder, Nero Digital AVC, Hdot264, x264, etc....

And when you look how bad the quality of Apple's MPEG-4 ASP is (compared to XviD, DivX,...), I wouldn't bet that Apple AVC will be so great either.
If you want to encode on Mac I guess that Sorenson Squeeze 4 is currently the best sollution. According to the latest codec comparison on Doom9.net NeroDigital AVC is the best codec (Sorenson was not tested).

You don't anonymously receive and send packets on the Internet, you have a designated IP address and that can be followed to you.

That's where designs like Freenet (also Freenet) come in. You can trade ease and bandwidth-efficiency for a smidgeon of anonymity -- not in the sense of "they can't tell I'm running Freenet", but in the lesser plausible deniability sense: "I didn't ask for that file; I was just relaying another node's requests."

In theory, a Freenet node is supposed to cache all of the requests that pass through it, but in practice, it doesn't work very well just yet.... Well, maybe if we're lucky, our children will have free speech before they die.

ROX (RiscOS On X) which has a filer, window manager and a session manager uses Application Directories taken from Risc OS. This sounds very similar to Apple Application Bundles.

Installation is done by copying the directory, and the first time you run it, it will be compiled. You do have to run it from ROX-Filer for this to be supported (just double-click on the application directory), otherwise you have to run a script inside the directory.

Recently ROX has combined AppDirs with the Zero Install installation method, which uses a caching-remote filesystem. You can run things direct from the server they are distributed on using a virtual filesystem which will locally cache the files.

There are already a lot of applications written for this.

ROX (RiscOS On X) which has a filer, window manager and a session manager uses Application Directories taken from Risc OS. This sounds very similar to Apple Application Bundles.

Installation is done by copying the directory, and the first time you run it, it will be compiled. You do have to run it from ROX-Filer for this to be supported (just double-click on the application directory), otherwise you have to run a script inside the directory.

Recently ROX has combined AppDirs with the Zero Install installation method, which uses a caching-remote filesystem. You can run things direct from the server they are distributed on using a virtual filesystem which will locally cache the files.

There are already a lot of applications written for this.

Being a mass storage device, all Archos hard drive players are compatible with Linux. I have mounted my Jukebox Multimedia 20GB player many times to a Fedora Core 2 system.

Any non-compatibility is with the software that comes included with the player, but who cares. Any serious Linux user is savvy enough to know how to find and use the any open source tools needed to convert both CDs and DVDs for playback on the device.

I personally recommend GordianKnot available on sourceforge.net for decrypting, ripping, and encoding your DVDs to DivX(mpeg4 based codec) with an MP3 soundtrack. CDex is a good CD ripper/MP3 encoder, also available on sourgeforge.net.

Who's going to pay the bills?

Same as always - the customers. If they want something not already available, they pay for it. They will be paying a lot less than the $35,000,000,000+ per year that M$ alone is currently raking in. Lucky customers, it's about time it became a commodity market.

This isn't about producing an app, it's about making an app work on a large scale with support, distribution and future developement. Your rant is the sad reflection of a lack of contemplation on the subject.

Yep, linux, apache, open office, samba, other high profile open source projects, the 35,000+ projects on freshmeat.net the 90,000+ projects on sourceforge.net and the 221,000,000+ pages about Linux on google are just a figment of my imagination. Open source existed long before closed source and works just fine without closed source.

I'm sure you know nothing about my education either.

True, just commenting on the consequences.

---

It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.

The upcoming generation of file sharing tools make anonymous sharing pretty simple.

MUTE for instance uses virtual adresses so only your direct neighbours know your real IP. But because every packet you receive from the network is encrypted by the sender node, your direct neighbours can't determine weather you are downloadig legal stuff or not.

If the someone taps one of your neighbour nodes, no harm done, because the network sends the packets to you through several paths, and thus he would have to tap every neighbour node you have, to get all packets and then be able to decrypt your data (strong encryption).

Naturally your neighbours are not geographic neighbours, so if someone wants to prove that you leeched some copyrighted movies, he might end up in tapping several nodes in different counties.

I admit, MUTE is not 100% anonymous but for me 99,99% is just fine. Here is a more detailed description on how MUTE works.

The upcoming generation of file sharing tools make anonymous sharing pretty simple.

MUTE for instance uses virtual adresses so only your direct neighbours know your real IP. But because every packet you receive from the network is encrypted by the sender node, your direct neighbours can't determine weather you are downloadig legal stuff or not.

If the someone taps one of your neighbour nodes, no harm done, because the network sends the packets to you through several paths, and thus he would have to tap every neighbour node you have, to get all packets and then be able to decrypt your data (strong encryption).

Naturally your neighbours are not geographic neighbours, so if someone wants to prove that you leeched some copyrighted movies, he might end up in tapping several nodes in different counties.

I admit, MUTE is not 100% anonymous but for me 99,99% is just fine. Here is a more detailed description on how MUTE works.

Even when I speak to people who do development all day long they still talk about users and developers as if they're two different people. Even when they're talking about themselves they do it. I'm guilty of it myself: I use Mozilla, but I work on Boomerang. Fact is, no matter how much I value my freedom to modify Mozilla, I've probably done it once in the whole time I've been using it. (My Mozilla doesn't have "Close All Other Tabs" right below "Close Tab" cause I accidentially clicked it one too many times.) Why is this? It's because it's just too much hard work to go-and-get-the-source-code that it's easier to just put up with bugs and poor ui decisions, and just hope it gets fixed in the next release. This is especially funny for Mozilla and FireFox cause a large part of them is written in Javascript, meaning you already have the source code. Unfortunately, the effort required to get from noticing an annoyance to finding the right file:line to make a change is still too much. Can anyone think of any way to ease this translation? It'd be really cool if I could hold down alt and middle click on a menu to get a javascript editor focused on the bit of code responsible for the thing I want to fix. Then we can add to that editor a button that says 'email patch'. How many millions of developers-as-users would contribute to projects like Mozilla if this was the case?

You really should be using lzip to back up your information.

It uses lossy compression (just like the compression found in popular MPEG and JPEG files) to get much better that the 2:1 average compression found in "standard" methods.

Play around with the options and you'll be amazed at the speed and power. Use it for all your backup needs and you'll never worry about your data again.

backup2l does a great job at figuring out which files are new or have been modified for incremental backups. Easy to configure a very lightweight.

See projects MUTE http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
and ANts http://www.myjavaserver.com/~gwren/home.jsp?page=c ustom&xmlName=ants for more info

I don't mean to be a troll, and I've read and enjoyed Vavasour's writings on emulation (his webpage is a fountain of info) but I do wonder if it's really as hard as he describes.

Look at stella for example, it's open source, cross platform, does sound and everything. Is the emulation provided by the fine folks at Digital Enclipse that much more perfect? /me goes back to playing Super Mario USA on my Game Theory Admiral.....

Fancy number theory makes a lot of things possible that would seem intuitively impossible. Check out Freenet. You are making assumptions that aren't always true. For example, let's say you download two seeming random blocks of binary data and XOR them together, and you get the latest hollywood blockbuster. Who is violating copyright in this case?

http://flexbackup.sourceforge.net/ might help.

Imagine you're a photographer. Professional or hobbyist, I don't care. You have made thousands of pictures; they all are on your hard drive.

Imagine you're lazy. (Maybe you don't have to imagine that.) You don't want to describe your photos, you don't want to label them. The only metadata associated to your photos is date and time.

Imagine you're looking for a particular photo. You know where you'va taken it, you know what is on it, you can remember the subject, the color shades, etc. You just can't remember exactly when you took that picture. How do you search for it?

Well, you quickly make a drawing in which you try to (sort of) replicate colors and shapes. And you let your computer search for "similar" graphics.

Such software exists already (for quite some time). There's a beta Free software project (GNU licenced) called imgseek . Current version: 0.8.4. I haven't tried it, I don't know how good it is. But this screenshot looks impressive.

Imagine you're a photographer. Professional or hobbyist, I don't care. You have made thousands of pictures; they all are on your hard drive.

Imagine you're lazy. (Maybe you don't have to imagine that.) You don't want to describe your photos, you don't want to label them. The only metadata associated to your photos is date and time.

Imagine you're looking for a particular photo. You know where you'va taken it, you know what is on it, you can remember the subject, the color shades, etc. You just can't remember exactly when you took that picture. How do you search for it?

Well, you quickly make a drawing in which you try to (sort of) replicate colors and shapes. And you let your computer search for "similar" graphics.

Such software exists already (for quite some time). There's a beta Free software project (GNU licenced) called imgseek . Current version: 0.8.4. I haven't tried it, I don't know how good it is. But this screenshot looks impressive.

PAR2 can help with #3, provided your backup's filesystem remains readable.

mondo will do a full image of your drives (including making images of ntfs/fat32 drives). You boot off the image you create with mondo, and you can nuke the machine and do a full restore from cd/dvd, or do a partial restore.

backuppc is perl based and works wonders on a network for daily backups. (you can backup the server backuppc is running on too!)

The famous Model M! I completely understand not wanting that Windows key. I'd still go without too, but the temptation of Bluetooth was too great :)

Anyway, it certainly looks like it's possible. Get a $4 PS/2-to-USB adapter, then install the GPL tool, DoubleCommand (SourceForge Project], Homepage) There's a stack of options there for altering key behaviour.

Heh. I quite like the idea of a tiny Mac Mini with a nice clunky retro keyboard. :)

The famous Model M! I completely understand not wanting that Windows key. I'd still go without too, but the temptation of Bluetooth was too great :)

Anyway, it certainly looks like it's possible. Get a $4 PS/2-to-USB adapter, then install the GPL tool, DoubleCommand (SourceForge Project], Homepage) There's a stack of options there for altering key behaviour.

Heh. I quite like the idea of a tiny Mac Mini with a nice clunky retro keyboard. :)

On that same topic, Azureus is also a quite capable BT client. Far better than the official Python client, especially from an ease-of-use GUI standpoint. Has the ease of use most of us want, but also those power-user style options if you need/want them.

Quite impressive, and extremely responsive for being written in Java. Never crashed, eiter.

Could the 3D Movement Recognition Sensors be used for enhancing artificial intelligence in robots?

Essentially, traditional clustering gives you the ability to distribute jobs or services across an array of servers. But the code has to be written to accomodate that. Most workstation-based applications (DVD rippers, word processors, etc.) aren't architected this way. Think instead of database servers that, in the event of a hardware failure on one node, fail an instance over to another node and maintain all the transactions that were just written on the failed server. You may lose a session or ten, but most of your data is safe. Also think of distributed processing systems like SETI@Home. Redundant images of calculation code run on a wide variety of servers. One server (the job boss) has the task of distributing calculations to the rest of the systems and collecting the results.

I think the Mac Mini is a great contender for grid computing, except that it's missing a high-speed interconnect. If it had a gigabit Ethernet interface with iSCSI offloading or a Fibre Channel port (neither of which would have any use to the common end user), it would make a good grid node. An expansion slot would have taken care of this, but that adds to the cost, and you have to engineer that into your design.

Yeah, "mac mini" according to scale, but according to actual dimensions and color, I think "Big Mac" may have been a better name.

Anyway, how 'bout somebody developing a multi-up rack for these puppies, so we can get a clean little G4 Mosix cluster going on. Kafoom!

I'll agree here with the software argument. When I buy a computer, I only factor in the price for bundled software that I would actually purchase. In the case of the Mac Mini, it's only Panther.

For solitaire on the Mac, I just used KPatience (kpat) which is available for a quick binary download through Fink Commander. It's a few more steps but I think it's one of the best solitaire programs out there.