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For the curious, Google turns up that mcwizard is on the MegaMekNet and MegaMek projects. Both are games: Java clones of BattleTech.

Well, since the original story submitter didn't want to tell me who he was, I figured I'd dig.

His email address was listed as mcwizard@gmx.de.
A Google of that turned up a forum containing a post with both his email address and his name: Helge Richter
Google again for Helge Richter, and we get a Sourceforge profile listing three project affiliations:

MegaMekNet
MegaMek
and
Provoke

Scary world we live in, isn't it?

Well, since the original story submitter didn't want to tell me who he was, I figured I'd dig.

His email address was listed as mcwizard@gmx.de.
A Google of that turned up a forum containing a post with both his email address and his name: Helge Richter
Google again for Helge Richter, and we get a Sourceforge profile listing three project affiliations:

MegaMekNet
MegaMek
and
Provoke

Scary world we live in, isn't it?

Well, since the original story submitter didn't want to tell me who he was, I figured I'd dig.

His email address was listed as mcwizard@gmx.de.
A Google of that turned up a forum containing a post with both his email address and his name: Helge Richter
Google again for Helge Richter, and we get a Sourceforge profile listing three project affiliations:

MegaMekNet
MegaMek
and
Provoke

Scary world we live in, isn't it?

Well, since the original story submitter didn't want to tell me who he was, I figured I'd dig.

His email address was listed as mcwizard@gmx.de.
A Google of that turned up a forum containing a post with both his email address and his name: Helge Richter
Google again for Helge Richter, and we get a Sourceforge profile listing three project affiliations:

MegaMekNet
MegaMek
and
Provoke

Scary world we live in, isn't it?

oops, missed the link: LiVES - 100% DRM Free !

Off the top of my head, KolourPaint comes to mind. Not quite there though, as I think it lacks layers, at the very least. What I'm trying, and not having much luck at, to remember is a story from a couple months ago here. It linked to a QT application pretty similar to paint shop pro - but which I can't for the life of me recall the name of. Anyone?

But still .NET is the speed of Java

If this is another "Java is slow" flame, then you may be behind the times. Before, the Java virtual machine was a pure interpreter; now, it recompiles inner loops, bringing sustained execution speed close to that of native code. In practice, the Java virtual machine seems slow only because the operating system is typically not set to start it at boot time. Slow speed of HelloWorld.class includes loading and unloading the JVM. If, on the other hand, you set the JVM to start when you log in and tell apps to use an existing JVM, you'll get more perceived performance. Undoubtedly, Microsoft will start the .NET CLR when you log in to Longhorn.

with the Platform Independence of Coding in VB.

Apps written using the Gtk# assembly, which wraps Gtk+ and Glib, will run on *n?x and Windows operating systems. Apps written using those parts of System.Windows.Forms that Mono has reimplemented will also run on *n?x and Windows operating systems.

I have wondered alot about the effectiveness of end-to-end encryption and I was wondering what you would say to the MUTE developers views on this. http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/personInTheMiddle. shtml

How much physical RAM does Python require? Could its heap be squeezed onto something small like the GBA (32K RAM, comparatively unlimited ROM)?

The GBA has more RAM than that. It has 32 KB that is so-called "in-chip Work RAM", but according to these specs it also has 256 KB of on-chip work RAM. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I'm sure it can be worked with. After all, people have a gimped-out version of Linux (uClinux) running on the GBA, I'm sure a gimped out port of Pippy could work.

Pippy, you say? While you really couldn't run full-blown, real-deal Python, you could run Pippy, which is a much pared down version of Python for Palm OS. According to the Pippy README, "modern" POS devices have 256 KB of RAM. It may say 16 MB on the box, but that is storage, not heap. If it can be done on POS, it should be doable on the GBA. With the resources of the GBA, Lua would probably be a better fit, though.

It also would probably be possible to have a game pack that had more RAM, and then use it to extend the GBA's RAM, perhaps 8 MB. The GB can address 32 MB total. So, between RAM and storage, you could get a lot in a cart that the GBA could access.

Then... you right a hybrid multi-key/chording keyboard using the buttons on the GBA so you can program it on the device! Or, you could just do what's easier all around and buy a PDA. Even a cheap, older Pocket PC would do. I can run Python+Tkiner, Python+win32, Perl/Tk- not just CLI perl, but a GUI and all- on my old iPAQ 3650. It owns, even.

How much physical RAM does Python require? Could its heap be squeezed onto something small like the GBA (32K RAM, comparatively unlimited ROM)?

The GBA has more RAM than that. It has 32 KB that is so-called "in-chip Work RAM", but according to these specs it also has 256 KB of on-chip work RAM. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I'm sure it can be worked with. After all, people have a gimped-out version of Linux (uClinux) running on the GBA, I'm sure a gimped out port of Pippy could work.

Pippy, you say? While you really couldn't run full-blown, real-deal Python, you could run Pippy, which is a much pared down version of Python for Palm OS. According to the Pippy README, "modern" POS devices have 256 KB of RAM. It may say 16 MB on the box, but that is storage, not heap. If it can be done on POS, it should be doable on the GBA. With the resources of the GBA, Lua would probably be a better fit, though.

It also would probably be possible to have a game pack that had more RAM, and then use it to extend the GBA's RAM, perhaps 8 MB. The GB can address 32 MB total. So, between RAM and storage, you could get a lot in a cart that the GBA could access.

Then... you right a hybrid multi-key/chording keyboard using the buttons on the GBA so you can program it on the device! Or, you could just do what's easier all around and buy a PDA. Even a cheap, older Pocket PC would do. I can run Python+Tkiner, Python+win32, Perl/Tk- not just CLI perl, but a GUI and all- on my old iPAQ 3650. It owns, even.

I play catanwith internet friends all the time, but since none of them run linux, we use Settlers3d.

Its an okay game and runs decently under wine. It would be nice to see the gnocatan windows port working though.

"Abandonware" is something made up by pirates (ooh-arr) to justify their actions.

However, it is a legit 'thing' though, in my mind. I purchase all of my games, I like to support people for their services. However, recently, I think in a /. story, I stumbled upon Sarien and was re-hooked on all of the old Sierra games. Sierra isn't going to re-release things like LSL1 (they tried with LSL for the consoles, but that game can't compare.) and all of the quest games. Especially Hero's Quest 1 (which I STILL can't find.) Anyhow, upon stumbling upon this program I've now been able to play all of the old Sierra games that got me into computer gaming to begin with. I would GLADLY buy copies of these games if they were still for sale. God knows they'd be 5 or 10 bucks a pop. But they're not for sale anymore, it wouldn't be worth it for Sierra to publish even 1 more copy, the costs just wouldn't add up. However, if they would offer downloads on their website for $2 or $3, I would gladly purchase a copy of each. Unfortunately, they don't, so I had to search for copies elsewhere.

PS: I did have copies of each of these games, but that was 10+ years ago, I have no idea where they are now or whether or not they'd still be any good.

CDex can rip both of those CDs out of the box.

*snickers* DRM...

they want to make sure everyone is nice and compliant about upgrading when they decide to take httpd over to java like all the other java kool-aid they are selling --- Maven is Jonestown, lets all program in XML because its standard! Cultures breakdown when there is too little disent and questioning of authority, the apache foundtion is headed in that direction.

Lets move on, SOA and all that, most people don't need any of this mod_* crap and could use:
thttpd he has other servers there, too and http_load.
lighttpd I'm moving to this sweet little server for most apps and the home site runs ea php and ruby on rails
AOLServer like OpenACS runs on
Boa
fnord from our boy who did the (in)famous benchmarks
Cherokee I root for this one for some reason.
gatling
cthulhu
yaws in erlang, should support more simul. connections than the unlying OS can support.
dhttpd
Litespeed check out their php benchmarks
thy
roxen
mini-httpd never tried this one
xitami I have a intranet server running for 5 yrs (without upgrading xitami) on xitami Solaris, simple, small, easy to admin, never dies max uptime was 1000 days+.
eddiefor complex load bal and geographic distribution
hiawatha

And for the love of god, please at least design your sites to get their images from images.mysite.com if possible so that you can use a non-bloatware web server to server the images, reserving horsepower on your apache server for stuff that actually _requires_ some features of apache.

http://www.hcsw.org/awhttpd/ updated on 12-06-2004
http://www.norz.org/zawhttpd.html
http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html

The ANTz paper has been utilized already, with a very interesting fully Anonymous P2P application called MUTE http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/ ? for more details ! ,, this project should be given the communities full support.. Then we all may be able to sleep at night, not worrying about the MIAA people knocking on our peer's doors ! I don't understand why this GPL'd Military grade encrypted p2p client hasn't got the exposure it needs to get it moving to v1.0 !!! Please have a look all !!

Developing with CMF was pretty crappy, developing for Plone with Archetypes is a huge improvement. Python and TAL, may not be perfect, but they provide a very simple platform for rapid web based application development.

Your right about docs, they've been questionable in the past. The new plone.org docs section is a big step in the right direction.

Don't spread FUD.
Sourceforge offers release trackers which the phpBB team openly point people to if they want mail updates:
http://sourceforge.net/project/filemodule_monitor. php?filemodule_id=28882
Or of course, there is the RSS feed :
http://www.phpbb.com/rss.php
And, after 'popular demand' they are currently working on a special security mailing list that people can subscribe to.

Freenet is fun. I set up a 10gb permanent node yesterday just for kicks. Too bad it is so freaking slow and hard to use to really be.. well.. useful, I guess.

I've left my close and trusted friends with a copy of DBAN and had them swear to wipe all my boxen completely clean... I really don't want friends and family and the world to know all of my dirty little digital secrets. Frankly I agree with Yahoo's decision.

- dshaw

Good point!

Spellbound seems to do the trick.. http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/

There is the libecc project on sourceforge: here, they use C++ and assembly. But it seems it is still in beta but it is actively being developed. You can try your own or get involved. When I took a Data Encoding class I found some nice Java applets that illustrate the concept but obviously are not practical.

Indeed so. It's starting to change, though. This project supports encryption if you have a compatible client (Trebuchet (Win/Mac/*nix), Tinyfugue (*nix/Mac OS X), and BeipMU (Win) are all free of charge (the latter two are open source and the third might be; I'm not sure) and alsu support encryption.

The companion encryption-capable server:

SourceForge.net: Project Info - Fuzzball MUCK

Why do not use FreeNet? Isn't it secure and free of censorship? http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ They could post the torrent files in FreeNet without that fear. Even eDonkey's links could be on the net. I know it's kind of crapy search and go thru this net, but maybe it can work and we all be a little bit out of MPAA reach.

That, and many others, were the issues that i noticed while wrestling with IPSec.
I mean, IPSec is nice and all, if you're a medium-to-large company that just goes ahead and buys a full solution from vendor XYZ. But it's a big pain in the butt for everyone else.
At some point, i discovered OpenVPN and i got hooked immediately. Clients and servers for all major operating systems (the same software can be either client or software, just flip a config bit), nice GUI for Windows, compression, rock-solid encryption, reliability, simplicity of installation and configuration...
I'll never use IPsec again, unless i'm doing a corporate-scale deployment. And, who knows, maybe "enterprise" solutions based on OpenVPN will become available at some point.

IPSec sucks. Overdesigned protocol that simply gives you too much rope to not be tempted to hang yourself, too many "slightly different" implementations that are actually different enough to not interoperate, a big pain in the ass to configure correctly, no good AND free clients (especially GUI ones) for popular OSes, etc.

Have a look at OpenVPN. After i tried it, i swore i'll never get back to IPSec.

According to this very article we're commenting now :-) it's not secure.
Have a look at OpenVPN instead.

But it's also a lot more limited.
Have a look at OpenVPN. I did, and i never looked back.

I'm doing the same thing, but i'm not even restricting MAC addresses. I even give DHCP addresses to anyone. :-)
But, once you connect, you can't do anything. You're behind an allow-nothing firewall. You must open up an OpenVPN tunnel if you wanna go through the firewall.

IPSec is not the way to go, not for a small setup. I've been there, done that. It sucks. Overdesigned piece of crap.
Since i started to use OpenVPN, i never looked back. All the features of an IPSec VPN, but none of the hassles.

By far the best way to accomplish that is by using OpenVPN.
I tried everything, IPSec, SSH tunneling, you name it. They all suck. SSH is, let's face it, limited. IPSec is cumbersome, not exactly friendly to all operating systems, doesn't play well with NAT (unless you use UDP encapsulation), etc. It is glaringly obvious that it's a severely overdesigned protocol.

Enter OpenVPN. It uses SSL for encryption, but it's not a SSL-based pseudo-VPN, but a true VPN - it can forward any IP protocol. Think of it as having the functionality of IPSec, but using a simpler and more sensible implementation.
It's cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Solaris... you name it). It's simple to install and configure (same software can be either server or client and the config file semantics are similar). It's secure (it can use signed certificates, passwords, any authentication mechanism you like). It can compress the traffic on the fly (using LZO which is pretty damn fast and low-overhead). If you use TCP transport instead of UDP, it can tunnel through ordinary HTTP proxies. It has dummy-friendly GUI for Windows. It slices, it dices and it makes coffee... oh, well, maybe not that.

Anyway, i'm running an OpenVPN server on my home firewall, and i put OpenVPN on all my computers (my workstation at the office, my laptop, etc.). Wherever i go, i just fire up OpenVPN and "i'm home".
I run IMAP through it, so my IMAP clients (Evolution), no matter where they are, they "see" the same IMAP servers and folders. That is awesome - different systems, yet my mail looks the same. And it's also secure. ;-)

My wireless access point has no security whatsoever: no encryption, no MAC filtering, no SSID cloaking... it even gives you a DHCP address. :-) However, it's behind a totally restrictive firewall. The only way to work around that is to open an OpenVPN tunnel. Then you can do pretty much anything, through the tunnel, of course.

It rocks!

Chrome? You sir are a big L4M3R.
Chrome is a nasty pointless waste of time eyecandy that is either bullshit marketing or a half assed effort to ignore a broken user interface by given it new colours.

If you really want to waste time on that kind of crap GTK can be themed even on windows, the best know example of which is GTK-Wimp
http://gtk-wimp.sourceforge.net/

Torsmo

Projects like ndiswrapper prove that it is possible to maintain a driver compatibility layer outside the kernel. If you really want a stable driver ABI for linux, develop it yourself, because Linus isn't going to do it for you.

...when you've got private garden paths? :) I use OpenVPN to build my own private network between friends and family. It's getting easier to do, it's encrypted, and it's sweet as hell once you have it up and running. Just imagine having a virtual network cable between your house and your friends and families homes and you've got the idea. It works on *nix, Windows and Mac OS X. Give it a try.

A working IPsec wireless gateway setup is described at WAVEsec.

The best lightweight VPN suite available in the free software world is probably OpenVPN. It uses standard SSL encryption instead of trying to invent its own, and so far no doubt has been cast on its security.

A native Windows md5sum is available. It's part of an assortment of utilities called textutils.

In that work I have received loads of emails from people who would like to use Firefox in an assisted way. That is why I am planning to start a new project using the same rendering engine as Fangs to create a navigatable text representation of a web page. Much of the work is already done in Fangs.

Creating software for visually impaired users requires a decent speech synthesizer. This should preferrably be part of the OS. Check out FreeTTS and the "alan" voice. FreeTTS is the only OSS speech synthesizer I know of. Does anyone know of a distribution with libraries for text to speech synthesis?

In that work I have received loads of emails from people who would like to use Firefox in an assisted way. That is why I am planning to start a new project using the same rendering engine as Fangs to create a navigatable text representation of a web page. Much of the work is already done in Fangs.

Creating software for visually impaired users requires a decent speech synthesizer. This should preferrably be part of the OS. Check out FreeTTS and the "alan" voice. FreeTTS is the only OSS speech synthesizer I know of. Does anyone know of a distribution with libraries for text to speech synthesis?

Admitedly, I last messed with this with my DLink card in the earlier days of 2.6. Out of curiosity, I took a peek at the madwifi project's readme and howto files. I'm sorry, but I doubt people who have trouble figuring out how to send an email attachment are going to succesfully compile the modules, put them where they need to go, not to mention building a script to run the necessary iw* commands. There might be some management tool available that comes with Linspire that takes care of figuring out what adapter you're using and assisting the user with setting up WEP (or other security) and creating profiles for different access points. If so, this post is moot, my bad.

A Windoze or Mac notebook pretty much either has wireless functionality out of the box or with the insertion of a card and CD. I was unable to find a reference to Linux compatibility with wireless adapters on a cursory check of the Linksys, Netgear and DLink sites. Who's Joe N00b going to call if the manufacturers doesn't support Linux? Walmart? Linspire?

Admitedly, I last messed with this with my DLink card in the earlier days of 2.6. Out of curiosity, I took a peek at the madwifi project's readme and howto files. I'm sorry, but I doubt people who have trouble figuring out how to send an email attachment are going to succesfully compile the modules, put them where they need to go, not to mention building a script to run the necessary iw* commands. There might be some management tool available that comes with Linspire that takes care of figuring out what adapter you're using and assisting the user with setting up WEP (or other security) and creating profiles for different access points. If so, this post is moot, my bad.

A Windoze or Mac notebook pretty much either has wireless functionality out of the box or with the insertion of a card and CD. I was unable to find a reference to Linux compatibility with wireless adapters on a cursory check of the Linksys, Netgear and DLink sites. Who's Joe N00b going to call if the manufacturers doesn't support Linux? Walmart? Linspire?

I can understand the commenting thing, that makes sense and seems like a good way to give feedback. In this case though I never got feedback. I'm not as cynical as the fellow who replied above you, partially because the content of my assignment wouldn't really serve any purpose outside of that paper and that class, as far as I can see. And I know the professor and he seems to be generally a good guy, just maybe not all that tech savvy.

On the WordPerfect converter thing, thanks for the heads up. I did a little more researching and Googling on the subject and found that there is indeed a WordPerfect filter for OO.o that can be found here. Actually that site is the Sourceforge page for a multipurpose WP-converter library, and they happened to make plugin for OO.o out of it. Just wanted to relay that for anyone in a similar situtation as me, who happens to read this deep into the discussion :).

As an engineer of 30+ years who has recently (ine the last 2 years) become visually impaired, I have looked at, tried, and cobbled together numerous solutions. Here are my observations and recommendations. Keep in mind that Visually Impaired and blind are two different things, and with an aging baby boomer population visual impairments of one sort or another will be on the increase in the coming years.
One of the Linux distro's worth watching is Oralux http://www.oralux.org/, a bootable Knoppix based live CD distro that contains an audible desktop and includes braille drivers. I've had mixed luck with this distro depending on what kind of hardware you attempt to boot it on.
Personally, I use two types of system configurations to access computer based resources.
On my laptop (Win XP PRO) I use ZoonText http://www.aisquared.com/ which is a little expensive, but does the job well.
On my desktop(s) (Win XP Pro &/or Win 98) I have a very inexpensive system. A second monitor on which I place the standard windows screen magnifier. Add Virtual Magnifying Glass http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/ and Natural Voice Reader http://www.naturalreaders.com/ at a cost of $0.00/$39.95/$69.95 depending on the version. This combination works very well for a desktop system. Add Firefox, Thunderbird, Cygwin, Putty and a few other tools and you can easily use the Web and administer your Linux boxes.
On the Linux boces (I have several) I share a 19" or 32" monitor via a KVM switch. This allows reasonable access to a consol. When running X-Windows you can simply add additional entries in the XF86.config (or it's equivalent). This lets you select the zoomable features provided by programs like ZoomText. There are a lot of other pieces availble for Linux (like Festival) but unfortunately none of these are available in a comprehensive, eacy to install set. This makes it hard for the non-geek to easily install & use these tools.
This is one of the biggest areas that M$ Windows has it over Linux and OSS for the time being.

This is also why I know of a lot of shops are not jumping into the mix, and migrating over their NT systems to A linux system. Its just too risky though and there is no standard "bridge".

Its easy to write a program in NT, package it up with the free MS installer and all the dependencies, in one nice executable file.

There doesn't seem to be a single full featured platform that meets NT developers in the middle. I think Mono is getting close, but is nowhere near primetime.( Perl is promising as well).

I could only imagine what would happen to Linux, if a project came out with an easy RAD IDE that worked on any OS and had the full steam/publicity as say Firefox.

I fully agree. My BT download rates were lousy until I limited my upload rate between 10 and 20KB/s (where my maximum upload is 30KB/s) using Azureus. It seems that BitTorrent drowns itself for no good reason, which is a shame when you are unable to set your maximum upload speed (like in the generic client, which has no default upload cap AFAIK). I supposed it is difficult to specify a cap without knowing the maximum capacity of the connection, though.

I use ASSP - its a transparent SMTP proxy that does RBLs, Bayesian, attachment scanning and most recently virus scanning (using clamav dbs).

Its simple to setup and works great.

ASSP

I'm kind of surprised nobody has brough up Emacspeak yet. Since Emacs is already a complete text-based replacement for everything anyone could ever want to do with a computer system, making it blind and visually-impaired accessable is a no-brainer.

Plus, it's written by the blind, for the blind, and is it's own development platform. Is there anyone out there using Emacspeak that would care to comment on it?

My project at sourceforge is not *quite* ready for the blind yet, but its getting there. Keyano is only 14 days old but we already have nearly 200 downloads and are in the top 10% of projects at sourceforge.

Keyano does a number of things that could be used to aid the blind including a rare mix of Text to speech (using festival as a backend) the dict protocol for a handy reference, Alphabet mode (type into a text area as the letter names are said out loud) as well as a virtual keyboard onscreen so that keypress events can be custom set for the sampler.

I think keyano has alot of potential as an aid to the disabled members of our community even if it is seemingly just a "kids game" to the rest of us.

(karma free for your pleasure)

cheers!

--tb

Actually it would be possible to become a self-taught chip designer, though not quite trivial. And it'd be cheaper and faster to do a quick college course (I learned enough about mask level design in one fifth of a one-year undergrad course to get a job in the industry...) to pick up the basics.

Anyone who knows some basic electronics can design complex gate-based circuits very easily (it's just 74xx design, which is so not rocket science). Gate level simulators are easily available (and not too hard to write from scratch if you're not concerned about the details of timing too much). At that point you can easily do FPGA design, especially if you learn some Verilog.

Want more? Static CMOS transistor level design is trivial (as long as you're not overly concerned about area or performance). Mask level design of those transistors is a little trickier, but given the mask level layout tool, a netlist extractor and a copy of spice anyone who's good at SimCity could pick it up with not much more than a copy of Weste and Eshragian

Fabbing them, now, that's much trickier.

So a consultant gate array designer is... not terribly exciting, and were she doing anything of the low level of complexity other than retrocomputing, noone would care.

Not that retrocomputing isn't cool, an' all, but there are hobbyists who have made new CPU designs for new architectures, got them fabbed, developed software for them and so on.

There are some very nice open-source schematic capture tools being developed out there (at least one of them in python - and it's more than competitive with the commercial tools already.). There are a bunch on sourceforge too. gEDA is one of the better known toolchains. There are still some backend tools for which there aren't good freely available equivalents but you can cobble together most of a toolchain already.

"I said you were being a dick because you interpreted my assertion that "they've managed to pollute the network enough to make it almost unusable" to mean that I'm too stupid to know..."

Ok, we can stop right there. Did I say "stupid" at any point in anything I said? You can pick my points apart all you like, but please don't add to them without making it clear that they are YOUR comments. I doubt that you're stupid at all. I just think you're someone who doesn't know the current state of Gnutella usage very well (hardly the mark of stupidity), and you took a shot at it on Slashdot (more haste and poor judgement than stupidity).

Like I said in my last post, if you want to interpret this as some kind of personal attack, then have at it. That's not how it was intended, and I've yet to see anything specific that you've said to counter my original point.

"what most people want is to type in what they're looking for and get it"

I find that too difficult. I prefer to click on a link. This works very well with a magnet-URI-capable web client. There are also sites that review Gnutella-based content and others that index it. Harken back to the dawn of the Web and you'll see many parallels.

As for DC++, it's a nice effort, but is currently as limited as Gnutella used to be when it was first introduced, lacking the features of BitTorrent or modern Gnutella in terms of chunking/swarming and UDP-notification. These features make downloads far, far faster and more reliable for large, popular content. See DC++'s FAQ for more information. For small things, like songs or images, you probably don't care, but when you start downloading whole operating system images, you're going to want more than one source per target active at a time. A LOT more.

I'm sure they'll add this functionality to their network, or perhaps they'll decide to merge their protocol with Gnutella and take advantage of thousands upon thousands of download sources already using it. Either way, I'm glad people are thinking about these problems rather than just sounding off like you and me ;-)