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From the Bspam website which was last updated 30 June 2004:

BSpam is inactive. Shortly after the last release of BSpam, I took a new job and moved across the country. When I moved, I closed my account with my existing ISP, started getting my mail via POP for easy portability, and started using POPFile. At that time I put BSpam development on the back burner, fully intending to return to it one day. Well, almost a year has passed, and I still find myself fully absorbed in other activities, so I am officially declaring BSpam inactive. I encourage you to look at other packages such as CRM114, bogofilter, or POPFile (which does its job pretty darn well).

Though it's a small project, bspam is an excellent Bayesian filter for *nix... I tried bogofilter and some others but nothing jived with my qmail/procmail/pine setup as nicely as bspam.

You can use wpd2sxw, which is a part of libwpd). Since it's a command line tool, you can use it to convert all your old files to OOo in a single bash loop. If you hit problems with some of the formatting features after conversion, read this tutorial, which might help you get it back into shape.

hsql

Macs are good for "new to computers" people.

Uh... this statement is just wrong. I use a Mac, but then again I also own a PC with Debian Linux and Windows XP Pro on it. I'm a software developer with experience in several languages, and lots of experience with various *nixes, yet my main machine is a Mac. Am I "new to computers"? Definitely not.

What's great about Mac OS X is that it's perfect for virtually everyone, it doesn't make using a computer "easy" because it lacks features, but rather because its design is logical and intuitive. At the same time it's a powerful *nix system with FreeBSD (Darwin) under the hood. X11, Fink, Expose, hell, for a more complete list of features just go to apple's site.

OSX is easy to use, and a lack of moving parts on the computer makes it hard to mess with (which is bad for a geek, but good for a newbie).

Perhaps true for the eMac, but certainly not true for the PowerMac, which could very well justly be called a geek's wet dream.

wrong. Nitro can be found http://sourceforge.net/projects/nitro/here and has tons of credible code in their repository. People got it to work, but it still needs tons of tweaking before they can make a public release.

But we know the important question is really, will it run Emacs?
And fortunately, the answer is yes, yes, and yes.

On the Linux side of things, I run Gentoo and just use the regular old Gnome desktop with Nautilus even. My system is fast enough to keep up with it, and Athlon-XP 2400, GeForce FX-5900, 1G of RAM, a fast 120G HD, 20" Monitor, SBLive! sound card, and some USB joysticks and game pads. I use the JFS filesystem in Gentoo because it has the lowest CPU usage and its speed is comparable with the other guys.

One of the greatest things for the Linux gamer is DOSBox. Using that program, I can play Wing Commander: Privateer, and X-COM UFO Defense in Linux. You can adjust the speed of DOSBox so the game feels about right. You know its getting pretty good if it can run Privateer (which is now abandonware and a free download from The Underdogs). In fact, you can probably run most of the great old DOS abandonware games in DOSBox with zero problems now. This one program increases your Linux gaming library to thousands of freely available commercial quality games.

Next are the nice commercial games which have a linux port. Neverwinter Nights and Doom3 stand at the forefront of the pack and run great on my system. Also there are great ports of Quake1/2/3, RtCW, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 1/2, and Doom.

After that, you enter the realm of Open Source games, with great titles like the Ur-Quan Masters, Vega Strike, Battle for Wesnoth, and any of the thousands of other games listed at The Linux Game Tome. Having Gentoo is an advantage here because the compiler toolchain is particularly strong, so its easy to compile and try out the latest cutting edge CVS versions of these in-development games.

Then you have the Wine and Cedega games. I use this for Jagged Alliance 2, Fallout1/2, and Diablo II. These (and other) well programmed games are totally playable in Wine, so there's no reason to have to special boot to windows just to play them, might as well just use Wine to play them. The windows versions of most of the old Loki games that are now broken typically work under Wine.

I won't even go into the other emulators, but suffice it to say that there are emulators for most consoles, such as ZSNES, and arcade games, like MAME. There are thousands of games which will work great using these things. I sometimes boot up ZSNES and play some ShadowRun.

Which leads me finally to the unfortunate state of the Loki titles. A lot of these are linked against older libs and may or not work on a new system without some serious fiddling around and building of compatibility libs. Some still work, some don't, but chances are that they will all eventually die of bit-rot. Poor Loki Games, you are missed.

I've been doing serious Linux gaming since 1998. There are tons of great games available, thousands that can be emulated, and the best part is if you want to take a hand at making your own games, you have every tool and library under the sun right there at your fingertips.

I had some problem getting acceptance when I wanted to use Super-PIMP at work. The name was later changed to NSIS (http://nsis.sourceforge.net/), but I'm still known as the pimp around here.

<a href="http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/">Cinepaint </a>

<URL:http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/>

<a href="http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/">Cinepaint </a>

<URL:http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/>

Cinepaint, interesting. I note that nor does this project currently CYMK support (although they are planning it).

Cinepaint, interesting. I note that nor does this project currently CYMK support (although they are planning it).

"The most obvious difference is that MusE doesn't have a score editor"

"The most obvious difference is that MusE doesn't have a score editor"

Cedega is a non-free version of wine with directx capabilities. You can browse their supported games here.

Of course not all games now-a-days require wine or cedega in order to run on linux. Games like unreal tournament and doom III include fully functional linux versions.

There are several open source games developed for but not limited to linux. torcs, flightgear, tuxracer are some examples.

Projects like libsdl are making cross-platform game development easier.

Probably the biggest problem you'll encounter is building drivers for your video card. I've heard it argued both ways but as I understand it, both nvidia and ati drivers are ass-pains in linux. Nvidia's drivers are free as in beer, not speech. If you don't really care about free-software principles and philosophy then this is not a problem for you. ATI's drivers I understand to perform less than ideally. If you haven't already purchased your video card, I would encourage you to do extensive research beforehand.

In reality, linux distributions have few differences. Any recent, major distribution should be able to accomodate gameplay. I myself use debian unstable for amd64.

As far as performance, it really boils down to hardware. My advice is to install the linux distribution of your choice. Once you get glxgears to run, give ut2004demo a try, and if you like the way it works, then stick with linux.

Cedega is a non-free version of wine with directx capabilities. You can browse their supported games here.

Of course not all games now-a-days require wine or cedega in order to run on linux. Games like unreal tournament and doom III include fully functional linux versions.

There are several open source games developed for but not limited to linux. torcs, flightgear, tuxracer are some examples.

Projects like libsdl are making cross-platform game development easier.

Probably the biggest problem you'll encounter is building drivers for your video card. I've heard it argued both ways but as I understand it, both nvidia and ati drivers are ass-pains in linux. Nvidia's drivers are free as in beer, not speech. If you don't really care about free-software principles and philosophy then this is not a problem for you. ATI's drivers I understand to perform less than ideally. If you haven't already purchased your video card, I would encourage you to do extensive research beforehand.

In reality, linux distributions have few differences. Any recent, major distribution should be able to accomodate gameplay. I myself use debian unstable for amd64.

As far as performance, it really boils down to hardware. My advice is to install the linux distribution of your choice. Once you get glxgears to run, give ut2004demo a try, and if you like the way it works, then stick with linux.

• NRPN's to CC's and back again.

• Program a graphical interface to MIDI gear

• Track automation layers.

• MIDI plugins

And then you have to come back every week and clean out the audit logs to avoid filling the drive with them... so there's more time spent babysitting the box...

so to run windows securely you have to go in and spend at least an hour setting up auditing, installing new software,

Yes he should have firefox installed, but that isn't the point either, the point is if MS says their system is for "everyone" then they should make a system that doesn't require knowledge of open source at all, and can still be used for more than 4 minutes on the internet without being hacked.

in windows you have to do x, y, z, and then the whole rest of the alphabet again, probably with additional aa, ab, ac steps as well...

Let's say I see a /. post that is going to be censored but contains material that I think is important to get out there (like copyrighted Scientology texts, or maybe Windows source code).

Assuming I have a halfway stable connection, in roughly 5 minutes I can create a torrent and host it myself using Azureus' built-in tracker. I can either post a link to the ad hoc tracker ("http://123.456.989:6969/" or "http://mymachine.dyndns.org:6969") or post the .torrent file itself here on on IRC or whatever. When I'm done I shut down Azureus and the tracker goes away.

Peers as trackers is as distributed as you can get.

It's not up to 2.2 yet, but Gimp.app manages to integrate into MacOS X in a surprisingly elegant manner. It's got a dock icon, which I drag photos from iPhoto on to; it can take screenshots with Grab.app; it can read images from the Mac clipboard. It comes as a single program package (Gimp.app, imaginatively) which you just drag-and-drop into your Applications folder, like any other decent Mac program.

My only real complaint about it is the default theme - I've replaced it on my iBook with one called Milk 2.0 which manages to look a lot cleaner and smarter than the standard.

There's this general opinion that The GIMP is somehow utterly impossible to use, but I really do disagree. I taught myself to use it very quickly some years ago, merely by sitting down and playing around with it. Compared with something like vi or Blender, it's absolutely brilliant - while it's a bit quirky in places, it's generally very consistent in how it does things, and menu entries are logically named and placed. There aren't multiple modes for the program to operate in (beyond indexed, greyscale and full-colour), and with a comprehensive help system, tooltips and so on with no hidden basic functionality, it's more akin to pico than vi... ;-)

I started off using The GIMP because it was all that I could afford. I continue using it (towards my paid work as well as hobbies such as photography and computer game design) because while I could probably afford Photoshop these days, it doesn't really offer me anything useful in addition to what I already have for free.

If you want to use The GIMP, try it with an open mind. Don't expect Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or whatever, it's its own program in its own right, with its own advantages and disadvantages. Do appreciate that it's a cross-platform thing with its home on X11 and UNIX - the Windows and Mac ports are very close in user interface to the original, for ease of maintenance and porting. And above all, have fun. :-)

Which Windows version is this? Is it 2.2-pre2? In the future, please name your torrents with the program's version number in the filename.

I couldn't find a timetable for when the Windows binaries would get updated. How long does this usually take? Or what major bugs are still in GIMP unstable 2.2-pre2?

most of my friends want my mp3's because even the loq quality 192 fixed bitrates aound better than their best VBR rips in windows.

Tell them about CDex. It also uses LAME, so the Mp3 quality should be comparable. It doesn't use Paranoia, so the final quality could be a bit less (or more then a bit on heavily damaged discs), but I have had few real complaints. Oh, yeah, it's also Free & Open Source.

Maybe you *should* study "EE", or rather software engineering

This is an Ad Hominem argument, a logical fallacy. And for the record, the 1.8 million downloads of my top100 project at sourceforge say that I'm doing just fine as a software engineer. Moving on, you claim that:

My entire post is about a redesign to get it to be, or rather, to get something similar to BT to be that protocol.

However, the introductory sentence to the original post reads:

The real breakthru for distributed P2P tech will come when someone publishes a BitTorrent content distributor that can be plugged transparently in front of an HTTPD

And I've simply explained why it's a bad idea to use BitTorrent. I didn't say it was a bad idea to use a custom system, it's just that isn't what I got from reading your original post. Free advice: miscommunications happen, and you really should try not to take things so personally, you sorta come off as a raving loon.

Maybe you don't even need EE training - just (dare I say it) some marketing experience.

I've been first to market on a number of new technologies (mp3, p2p, etc..) and millions of people have used and continue to use my products. My marketing is working out just for me...

PS: Bram Cohen is the software engineer, as far as I'm concerned he's the world's leading authority on p2p right now. I try to follow along, understand how it all works, and release some useful tools for the public.

Azureus, the open source, cross platform, java bittorrent client, supports connection through a socks or http proxy...

of course passing all your data through an anonymizer proxy can slow down some of your downloads, but this might be the solution...

No direct contact with the tracker/seeder, all identifiable traffic stopping at some proxy, the proxy resending it to you on an know port...

easier than recreating a fully encrypted, non tracable p2p network from scratch, and only uses existing tech...

Now where can I find a nice, free, fast, anonymous proxy in the EU that can support a 2Mb broadband connection speed ?

I'm really fond of Fire. It actually uses Gaim (and other existing libraries), but gives a very Mac native look and feel.

When I switched from windows, it was the best replacement I could find for Trillian Pro. A multi-protocol client was a hard requirement for me, which knocked out iChat and most of the others I looked at.

But the fact that 35% of all 'net traffic is being carried by one program is simple awesome, and a great credit to BitTorrent's creators.

Have you ever used BT?

You mean one protocol. There are many, many different BitTorrent clients. In fact, I don't know anyone who uses the original client (at least, not directly). Most people I know use Azureus. And it's much to the credit of the BitTorrent creator. One guy called Bram Cohen.

Why would they need to sniff the traffic? They simply connect to machine advertising torrents of copyright material and note the IP addresses of all the people who send them parts of the file (or at least enough to qualify as having tried to ilegally obtain a copy). This is why people opt for IP blacklists like Safepeer for Azureus or Protowall for clients that don't have a blocklist plugin. It blocks connections from organisations with a vested interest in snooping on your shares. In many cases it's a bit overbearing though.

But the fact that 35% of all 'net traffic is being carried by one program is simple awesome, and a great credit to BitTorrent's creators.

Have you ever used BT?

You mean one protocol. There are many, many different BitTorrent clients. In fact, I don't know anyone who uses the original client (at least, not directly). Most people I know use Azureus. And it's much to the credit of the BitTorrent creator. One guy called Bram Cohen.

Why would they need to sniff the traffic? They simply connect to machine advertising torrents of copyright material and note the IP addresses of all the people who send them parts of the file (or at least enough to qualify as having tried to ilegally obtain a copy). This is why people opt for IP blacklists like Safepeer for Azureus or Protowall for clients that don't have a blocklist plugin. It blocks connections from organisations with a vested interest in snooping on your shares. In many cases it's a bit overbearing though.

I currently get 400+ fps on glxgears because of DRI, with minimal CPU usage (good since I have a 466Mhz celery). I got a first generation radeon (7000?).
http://dri.sourceforge.net/
Be hardcore though and don't use the binaries, get the CVS source and build everything yourself. They have instructions on the site. Be sure to use optimization flags:
-march=$your-architecture
-O3
-ffast-mat h
at the least; not using any optimization I was only getting ~100fps on glxgears.

if you don't like the FAQ response regarding Linux and Mac support let 'em know."

I did, by not renewing my license and switching to Gaim.

Almost all of the IM services support voice and video but, none of the open source ones seem to.

Almost all of the IM services support voice and video but, none of the open source ones seem to.

For those of you who wish for an opensource IM application there is the GAIM win32 port.

There's not a Mac user out there who would possibly want Trillian when there's both Proteus, Adium and Fire.

I've always found Trillian to be really bloated, lacking in features, incompatible and generally just an embarrasing piece of software. It didn't even have server contact list syncing! The new version looks promising though. I wonder if their Rendezvous chat is compatible with Apple's (it'd be quite silly if it isn't).

-- Tested it--
Figures, Rendezvous is Pro only. And yay, surprise, the interface is still bloated and designed by someone who should stay away from an interface editor. What the hell is up with a minimum height of about 100 pixels just for toolbar with useless icons, a tab bar that I don't want, a titlebar for a *window in a window* (who the hell came up with that stupid window-in-window idea, anyway?), and twenty pixels of font editing buttons (really, I don't edit my chat text often enough to need buttons available at all times)?

Not only that, the View menu can only enable and disable UI elements that should be automatic (or disablers that are redundant - why would I want to disable the part of the interface where I read messages? The part where I write text? Wouldn't it then be smarter to open whichever chat part you're actually using (video, audio) in a separate window? (Think iChat)), and the Options menu presents me with *twelve* submenus (Who forbade option dialogs?).

Congratulations, Trillian team. You have successfully written an app with an interface that is even worse than MSN Messenger's. Again.

(btw, on Gaim -- Gaim has a nice share of features. I got my hopes up when I saw that its interface had been updated. However, that interface, too, is either bloated or just plain space-wasting, depending on how you configure it. That leaves us with zero (0, nil, none) chat clients with a decent interface on Windows (that I know of). Does anyone know of any reasonable apps? (Don't you dare mentioning Miranda) )

Try the gaim encryption plugin. It sounds like you had the same problem I did.

Get it from here

I've been using these two for 1.5 years, after switching from trillian (2 years)

This may change soon.

There is a GAIM Voice and Video project, that is a friendly fork off the main GAIM project.

Hope something good comes out of this, since I too use Yahoo on Windows because of voice.

I like Trillian, it has a lot of nice features and looks pretty. However I switched to gaim because of it's cross platform support.

for windows is 2.6.0 not out yet, you can install the 2.4 version though:

So you said the same thing yourself.

I'm talking about the free driver. The story is talking about the ATI binary driver.

Even with this older hardware using OSS drivers, I couldn't come up with how I should be able to have 3D-acceleration (Utah-GLX) and video capture (Gatos)

Well thats probably because Utah-GLX isn't what you want. DRI is, and its included with Xorg. And you can use Gatos and DRI at the same time.

He didn't exactly say "ATI are teh suxxors"

I was referring to the headline. Pardon me, it said they are crap, not suxxors.

ATI drivers for cards later than 9200 (IIRC), that have any 3D support, are not free either. And they will never be

See the R300 driver effort here.

If he would want both 3D and the AllInWonder features - he will have to alternate between different drivers

Or he'd buy an older card. Thats what ATI doesn't see, the many of us who just don't upgrade because the driver won't work.

...fired up Safari and went to my bookmark bar's comix folder and selected "open in tabs"... That opens all my bookmarked webcomics in tabs, simulteniously, with one click: Very cool.

But what if you're not at home?

I setup a cgi page on my webhost which runs dailystrips with all my favorite comics, bookmarked it, and gave the bookmark a short keyword. Now I just go to the address bar, type two letters, and hit enter. The better part, though, is that I can get my comic page from anywhere using any browser, I don't have to be at home with my particular setup.

Linux _desperately_ needs to have a working, easy to use RAD environment.

I think that the KDevelop IDE already allows for true RAD in Python and Ruby (with an embedded GUI designer that ties into the editor functions), but if you want a VB workalike without the VB idiosyncrasies, give Gambas a go. It's about to reach 1.0, and seems to work really darn well, from what testing I've subjected it to.

The best way to learn masses of vocabulary at a rapid pace: Supermemo http://www.supermemo.com/.
Another one I rely on: Pauker http://pauker.sourceforge.net/

You could create some Japanese vocabulary bundles tailored to Readings and Audios you have.

Check http://antimoon.com/ for some great advice on general approaches, and why traditional classroom instruction fails.

Having just spent the past year studying Japanese at an intensive immersive program at Cornell University (FALCON), I might be able to provide some insight. First and foremost, your technology should support your teaching/training methodology. Develop your methodology first, then build your technology around it. Otherwise you may wind up spending your budget in ways that do not clearly contribute to your learning process.

For example, the methodology at Cornell is to build both understanding and automaticity with the language. Understanding is achieved using detailed textbooks (Eleanor Harz Jordan, which some students complain about for being too dry, but which I believe explain the details of the language more completely than any other series), and daily lectures that further explain aspects of the grammar that students may not have completely understood from reading. The technological contribution here is minimal.

Automaticity - the ability to speak Japanese correctly without thinking about it - is achieved by having students memorize lots of conversations and grammatical patterns during homework and study lab. Then, during 3 drill periods per day led by native Japanese speakers, students are challenged to use these conversations and grammatical patterns in new ways. Once students reach the point where they can instantly recall and apply various grammatical patterns to new conversational situations without much thought, then they have achieved automaticity with the language.

Technology is used to support achieving automaticity in several ways. Much of it is audio-based, and some of the audio is on language tapes, other is in quicktime audio on a website (http://lrc.cornell.edu), and other is audio/video in quicktime vids on the website. The most important aspect of the audio is that it is all spoken by native Japanese speakers, and in Cornell's case, by Tokyo-ites. If you do something similar, keep in mind that the goal should be to create an efficient method of accessing whatever audio your class uses.

For a little more detail, audio is used in several ways. First, on the course website are quicktime videos of native Japanese people in various everyday situations. Students watch the video and are required to 1) understand the situation and the cultural aspects of it, and 2) to memorize all sides of the converstation, and 3) to re-enact the conversation during drill class with the native Japanese teacher. The teacher will change things around and challenge the students to step out of the memorized comfort-zone and use the patterns, vocab, and newly acquired knowledge of Japanese culture to respond correctly to different situations.

A second use is something called "Eavesdroppings", in which students listen to quicktime audio files of conversations between native Japanese speakers, and must translate what was said. It tests listening and understanding ability.

Third, the Eleanor Harz Jordan books come with a CD-ROM companion program that's very good, although a bit dated (must run in Win95 compatibility mode on Win2k and WinXP). It contains all the Quicktime video and audio, along with breakdowns and eplanations of new vocab and grammar as it occurs. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/030 0075634/qid=1103321825/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xg l14/002-1361347-6472006?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)

Also, one thing that helped me was that I was able to convert all the Quicktime audio and video to MP3 files using Quicktime Pro and Audacity (http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/), and put them on my iPod, which let me carry around and listen to my Japanese wherever I was, or even when driving my car four hour

Take a look at PADict - open-source Palm OS Japanese dictionary with built-in Japanese fonts and handwriting recognizer.

(shameless plug) My company, Pleco Software makes a similar product for Chinese, and we've found that for a lot of people ready access to a character dictionary can greatly assist with their studies and their later word recall.

mod_bf

Yup, PMD rocks! And the guys who work on it are really awesome, cool dudes! Especially Tom Copeland, he's the best!

Ahem.

Anyhow, if you're looking for Java bytecode analysis, FindBugs is excellent. Nice folks, too, and the mailing list is pretty active.

Truecrypt (http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/) can do this, but it's a windows-only program at this time...

In a similar vein, Checkstyle is also very good. I especially like the checks for variables that mask those in a higher scope, unused variables and unused imports. I'll deinitely be checking out PMD as well, as the rest of my team are novice Java programmers and I don't have the time to audit all their code. These kind of analysis tools are great, because they allow me to pinpoint likely areas of particularily bad code.