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Being high profile like they are, they present an enticing target. Joe average at home though, presents a very uninteresting target, not to mention hard to find.
I'm personally not worried about it, if they were hacked it didn't involve the GPL version, they run the corporate version. And if there is a vulnerability in the GPL version, they'll shortly have a patch available.

Also, another poster mentioned add-ins. Yep. A bunch of them. http://sourceforge.net/projects/smoothiemods/

Precisely. I would like to know exactly what criteria Valve used to figure out who to ban. I bought the retail version and was considering installing a No-CD crack to avoid having to put the disc in when I want to play...I guess not anymore!

Assuming I did and I got banned...I paid $60 for the game after tax, and just like that Vavle decides they can pull the rug out from under me because I don't want to have to find the damned CD when I want to play? That is utter BS. And let's remember this is the software industry, things can change overnight. Valve could close down one day (anyone remember Sierra?) and what happens then? I'm not allowed to play the game anymore? What happens if Steam gets hacked and my key gets stolen? Is their bot going to auto disable me? I respect that Valve is trying to limit piracy, as is the right of any software publisher, but Steam is going overboard. I feel I haven't paid for jack, and that Valve controls when I can play the game which I shelled out this money for.

I had no idea how evil Steam was before I bought HL2, but you had better believe it will be the last game I buy or play that uses it or a similar activation scheme. The sad thing is I'm willing to bet that other software manufacturers will see how much money Valve is raking in because of it and adopt a similar scheme, or maybe even license Steam itself. Oh well, I've given up TV and movies, how much harder can video games be?

At least I'll have the time to do more Linux hacking or go back to the occasional classic with DOSBox :)

Smoothwall GPL 2.0 final
POS PC = free from side of road
Smoothwall GPL = free

Problem solved..

For maximum WOW be sure to include XDesktopwaves!!!

Of all of the live-cd's that I've passed around to my non-tech (or just non-*nix friends), movix is the one that gets the best reaction. It's nice to be able to watch a movie even if your main os is having problems (due to reinstalling, driver problems, spyware/viruses, or being windows . . .). Plus, because it's so specialized (there's no other crap running in the background), it even works with older systems that might not otherwise play dvd's reliably. It is small, too (30 MB if I remember right), so it will fit on a mini-cdr.

I've found that the best live-cd to give to non-tech friends is movix. A specific-purpose cd seems to be more useful to people, maybe because it fits into a niche. Or, maybe I just know a lot of people who have trouble getting dvd software to run in windows . . ..

That would be Knoppix MAME then.

That means http://sourceforge.net/projects/knoppixmame

Have you tried http://dbd-pgpp.sourceforge.net/? I haven't used it, just heard of it.

Agreed that the list is skewed towards game programming, and java isn't the place to be for bleeding edge games, however there is a java games community, and more specifically an eclipse games community.

Note - I am not a games programmer, however given some of the solutions listed ( I mean, I used to love chipmunk basic but I'm not going to use it these days ) I thought eclipse should have been pointed to. Eclipse on mac doesn't seem to be as big as eclipse on linux / windows ... I was guessing this was the cause of the overlook (or maybe they hate java (-; )

Parent is not flamebait; it's a valid observation.

Here's a draft copy btw; follow the warning at the top and don't use it yet. It hasn't seen a lawyer test; but it does display the spirit of the desired license.

1: How is MYSql cutting edge? SQLLight is probably more cutting edge than MYSql, but even then I can still run M$ Access 97 in a ram disk using wine.

2: I've never have problems with PostgreSQL, and the command line is at least as good as Oracle, though you were probably using toad for oracle, and than isn't oracle or command line. Try PGAdmin, it goes along the same lines as Toad.

SQL Server is quite easy to maintain but I've had it blow more chunks than a monkey in a chocolate factory, and most SQL server installs I'e seen have been done by a less than professional DBAdmin? (like they've still left dates returning in US format, even though I live in the uk and some idiot's actually written code expecting us format).
SQL Server is also a pain with replication and trasaction logs, and it doesn't (or at least didn't ) support sequences so you were forced to write your own table, or use the monstrosity that is autonumber.

PostgreSQL may not be quite so feature rich (have you every used natural language query with SQL server?), but it's getting there pgpsql's ok too.

All in all the only time I've had a problem with postgreSQL was the first couple of times I installed it and it didn't have pgpsql switch on, and when it started comming with TCP disabled by default, and I had to go and setup some default permissions.

oh, Oracle pre 9 was a nightmare too, no support for inner joins except via where, outerjoins used that weird + syntax and that just the start of the mess.

I don't know what kind of work you do, but I expect it's low scale web development work because from my perspective MYSQL is sloopy and it's lack of ANSI SQL is a pain.

I've used Oracle 8, Oracle 9, SQL Server 97, and 2000 (and the one before 97 for a while), Access 95 and 2000 and reverse engenireed the db format, SQLLite, infomix, itrabase, MySQL, Lotus notes (if that counts) and more weird ODBC connection that you could imagine.

Personally if you said write something using MySQL I would tell you that your requirements and specification wouldn't support continued growth and development and download PostgreSQL.

IMHO, VS.NET 2003 is the weakest link in the .Net story. The platform is great. The FCL is incredible. The IDE is pretty buggy and when its not buggy, its real slow. You won't run into these issues with a small project for a single developer. A lot of VSS integration problems show up with multiple developers and multiple large projects in a single solution. Don't even think of bringing up a reaonsably complex web form using the WYSIWYG editor. The real reason for not using VB.Net on large projects is the unstoppable background compile which kills your IDE.

Fortunately, all the source files are ASCII text and everything can be done from the command line. Someone went to the bother of developing an emacs major mode too. Without these points, I'd by SOL.

Regarding the original article, this is pure market-speak. Let's just cut to the chase and paraphrase the illusion in 23 words. Too cheap to hire good people? Don't worry. Buy our tool and your cheap, dumb people will be able to do the job. The reality is this. The cheap, dumb people will be able to do a quickie prototype with moderate success but the final project will fail without at least one good developer.

As a child, you may have heard the story of stone soup. A beggar got a free meal off of a village by promising them something for nothing. In this case, he promised them tasty soup from a stone. But there was scope creep as he was making the soup. Soon the villagers were adding beef, cabbage, etc, to the soup. The stone was just a gimmick. The tool vendors are like that beggar. Promising something for nothing. In this case, software without developers. Along the way, you find yourself adding expensive developers to the mix. Pretty soon, you realize that you didn't need the fancy tool after all.

Second, we've successfully recompiled scads of old ( and not-so-old ) fortran code for OS X already. I guess the programs we had didn't need to much in terms of special support- we used g77. It's good to hear GCC is ( of course ) keeping up with the times.

A quick google search and a peak at the ADC website and it does look like GCC and the Macintosh are being used by the HPC folks. Altivec libraries available and everything, pretty much like you'd hope for, if FORTRAN is your bag.

Yeah but my.yahoo (for example) gives you a 100 megabytes of storage space for email, 30 megabytes for random online storage, contact list, calendar, and notepad for free (you can get higher quotas for pay). So you've already got the basics of hyperoffice (i.e.; online email, file storage, contact list, calendar and the applications to manage them); hyperoffice just adds a couple of applications and gives you a simulated desktop in a browser window to use them in.

When will gmail "discover" that people want to use some of their online email space as storage without using a hack like filebunker, or add an online calendar to their contact list? After they do that, they're already halfway to something like hyperoffice.

I'm not saying that my.yahoo or gmail should use hyperoffice as their interface. The downside is that hyperoffice is a very heavyweight application for a browser app and almost requires a broadband connection, but my point is that there are already online sites that offer much of the functionality of hyperoffice.

There are a few Common Lisp implementations as well

Open Source:

Open MCL
SBCL

Commercial:

Macintosh Common Lisp
Allegro Common Lisp
Xanalys Lispworks

...but JDK 1.4 certainly had a lot of duplicate code.

Ummm... My Win machine is running SP4. Oh, you mean XP SP2. Not on my machines, man... The highest I'll go on my personal machines is 2k. Wow, thanks for that little tidbit. Now we all know that xp is t3h sux0rz. also, don't forget lynx, links, and Mosaic

I have just been hired as the webmaster for local college.

This is your problem right here. If your predecessor did not have root access, you are going to have to prove to the admin that he should give it to you. Even if your predecessor did have root access, the sys admin may not be inclined to hand out root privileges to anyone with the title of webmaster.

Just to give you some background, I work in a small college department, and I've got about three times as much access now as when I started 18 months ago (sometimes I wish I didn't). The secret is to be patient, work with the admins, and prove yourself over time. Also, help them out whenever you can (but only if you can). It's not in your interests to get in a power struggle with them.

Consider pursuing projects that will benefit everyone in the value chain. For example, a lot of people use write only memory for their web logs. Perhaps you could implement some kind of log analysis tool, that could:
1) Help the admin/you monitor attacks and load.
2) Help you/content providers monitor page usage and user demographics.

Maybe you could use something like AWStats. A project like this will give you an opportunity to work closely with the admin, demonstrating both your expertise, and your ability to add value.

I wonder if someone gave Dana Rohrabacher a copy of X2: The Threat or Vega Strike for his birthday?

After playing those for a few hours I always go outside and gaze up at the sky wistfully.

I hope Elite 4 is released soon.

We should give these games to more politicians around the world - with god mode pre-enabled - and say (lie outright),

`This could be you. Just forget the military and help us get into space.'

A boy's got to have his dreams.

But to me as an end user the real question is whether or not the phone uses an open protocol to synchronize with a computer. I believe that Treo 600 synchronizes flawlessly with gnome-pilot. This is why I want a Treo.

PS: Here is a page about initial attempts to connect a Linux box to a Motorola a760 .

The default Gimp layout is actaully the same as the default Photoshop layout under Mac. I personally do not like the Photoshop layout under MS Windows. If I maximize the image I am working on, all the other docked tool windows are always topmost and cover parts of the image. With Gimp, I have every tool window docked into one nice main tool panel. If I need to change a tool, I just alt+tab, select the tool and then alt+tab back to the maximized image with nothing covering the image.

Whitelists also eliminate 100% of approaches from potential new customers ... it's not entirely clear how I could earn a living if I did that.

Too late. For example, Where have all my preferences gone?.

Or check out the open dialog used for importing bookmarks into the latest Mozilla.

Gnome2 is the epitome of this question, not necessarily in look/feel, but in abstracting things away, burying preferences in themes, oversimplifying, and removing options.

I don't believe that's the case with freenet, AROS and if you look at most of the projects on sourceforge (Don't look only at the most popular, look at how many projects there are, and check how many of them are suitably developed).

• Costs around $10, or you can get two free samples from Dallas Semiconductor, the manufacturer.
• 8051 archictecture.
• Also a 40-pin DIP package; just add a crystal and some capacitors.
• 33 MHz, and most instructions are executed in 1 clock cycle.
• 1k RAM, 64k Flash.
• Two serial ports, 32 pins of digital I/O, timers, counters, etc.
• Serial port programmable with just a MAX232 and a 74HC125; there's a bootloader program in ROM built in on the chip.
• Programmable in whatever, but there's a free C compiler available, which is quite easy to get started with

CinePaint, formerly Film Gimp, "...is a free open source painting and image retouching program designed to work best with 35mm film and other high resolution high dynamic range images. It is the most popular open source tool in the motion picture industry -- used in 2 Fast 2 Furious, Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, Stuart Little and other feature films. CinePaint is used for painting of background mattes and for frame-by-frame retouching of movies. It is being extended to do film restoration. CinePaint is available for Linux, Macintosh OS X, Windows, and other popular operating systems... CinePaint Features: ... 8/16/32-bits of color per channel (up to 128-bits RGBA)"

CinePaint, formerly Film Gimp, "...is a free open source painting and image retouching program designed to work best with 35mm film and other high resolution high dynamic range images. It is the most popular open source tool in the motion picture industry -- used in 2 Fast 2 Furious, Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, Stuart Little and other feature films. CinePaint is used for painting of background mattes and for frame-by-frame retouching of movies. It is being extended to do film restoration. CinePaint is available for Linux, Macintosh OS X, Windows, and other popular operating systems... CinePaint Features: ... 8/16/32-bits of color per channel (up to 128-bits RGBA)"

Read the manual and discover the power and wonder of virtual desktops.

GIMP IS a viable alternative to PS, but not if you're so stubborn to belive that PS is where every such application should be.

Here's a challenge, come up with one problem with GIMP that isn't the skipping record of UI complaints (which are, in my opinion, due to a mix of ignorance and stupidity) or lack of CYMK (which is a patent issue).

Erm.. I can't work out if you're trolling or not ;)

Clicky for Win32 goodness

If open source was that great, you wouldn't need to install individual extentions for each site that doesn't render correctly

I suppose you mean extensions. May I suggest an open source spellchecker? Perhaps aspell?

if they're hooked on virtual desktops, get them a copy of Desktop Manager... best solutions I've found for OS X so far.

nope:
http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/

We even run this at work within my group to keep our conversations out of the hands of those pesky sametime admins.

http://clamwin.sourceforge.net/Clamwin
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/7 Zip, if their version of windows doesn't already have built-in ZIP support.
http://www.mozilla.org/Mozilla or FireFox, depending on their and/or my mood.
And yes, it's occasionally burnt to optical media, or thrown on USB thumb drive for my parents only have dial-up.

Even though they have a Mac, they have just as much trouble with it as most people have with windows.

And, the real Mac guru in the family lives 15 minutes away and refuses to help them.

http://clamwin.sourceforge.net/Clamwin
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/7 Zip, if their version of windows doesn't already have built-in ZIP support.
http://www.mozilla.org/Mozilla or FireFox, depending on their and/or my mood.
And yes, it's occasionally burnt to optical media, or thrown on USB thumb drive for my parents only have dial-up.

Even though they have a Mac, they have just as much trouble with it as most people have with windows.

And, the real Mac guru in the family lives 15 minutes away and refuses to help them.

Just grab a computer and stick 3 video cards in it. Configure X to run multihead and then use mplayer or xine or totem to send the videos to your 3 monitors. If you want to be really cool, you could use gstreamer to build a custom app pretty quickly that sent 3 separate video streams to 3 different monitors and kept everything synchronized with a single point of control.

Slackware, you insensitive clod! ;-)

Actually on a serious note, I install (for my mother, family and friends)...

7-zip
gs / gsview
Firefox / Thunderbird
AVG
WinPT
Eraser
OpenOffice
Gimp (depending on the family member or friend)
Gaim
FileZilla
Amaya (only because bluefish is not available on win32 yet)
RealVNC
VIM
irFanview
Azureus (depending on the family member or friend)
Daemon Tools (depending on the family member or friend)

Slackware, you insensitive clod! ;-)

Actually on a serious note, I install (for my mother, family and friends)...

7-zip
gs / gsview
Firefox / Thunderbird
AVG
WinPT
Eraser
OpenOffice
Gimp (depending on the family member or friend)
Gaim
FileZilla
Amaya (only because bluefish is not available on win32 yet)
RealVNC
VIM
irFanview
Azureus (depending on the family member or friend)
Daemon Tools (depending on the family member or friend)

Slackware, you insensitive clod! ;-)

Actually on a serious note, I install (for my mother, family and friends)...

7-zip
gs / gsview
Firefox / Thunderbird
AVG
WinPT
Eraser
OpenOffice
Gimp (depending on the family member or friend)
Gaim
FileZilla
Amaya (only because bluefish is not available on win32 yet)
RealVNC
VIM
irFanview
Azureus (depending on the family member or friend)
Daemon Tools (depending on the family member or friend)

Slackware, you insensitive clod! ;-)

Actually on a serious note, I install (for my mother, family and friends)...

7-zip
gs / gsview
Firefox / Thunderbird
AVG
WinPT
Eraser
OpenOffice
Gimp (depending on the family member or friend)
Gaim
FileZilla
Amaya (only because bluefish is not available on win32 yet)
RealVNC
VIM
irFanview
Azureus (depending on the family member or friend)
Daemon Tools (depending on the family member or friend)

"It would be great to have a "trickle-sync" directory designation, so you could automatically share amongst group members. It would work like this: One person would drop files into a directory designated as "trickle-sync", and it would be slowly passed-along to everyone else in the group automatically without any prompting (assuming they enabled that feature on their machines). Rather than using full available bandwidth, it might be set to, say, a 5kb/sec maximum or something (or dynamically adjust the bandwidth depending on what else is happening on the network at the time)."

konspire.sourceforge.net/

Create a channel simply by publishing its key, and send out an anonymous announcement of the channel with a description of what you plan to use it for.

People receiving these annoucements sign-up for ones which sound interesting

When a channel-owner publishes a file, it magically and anonymously arrives on the PC of everyone who's subscribed to that channel.

Kind of like a TV or radio station, except you don't need millions of dollars to be the one speaking.

A lot of my family members and friends use Microsoft Windows and over the years I must have spent months fixing their systems myself or telling them on the phone what to do. I am tired as hell of playing the pro bono Microsoft support tech and I no longer offer any kind of support for anything Microsoft related to anyone. Period. My immediate family members now all have a dual boot system with their favorite version of Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD 4 with the following free software:

• KDE
• OpenOffice
• Sylpheed-Claws
• Opera
• FireFox

Keep in mind that all of the software above also has versions that run on Windows, so there is no need to use one application under Windows and another under FreeBSD. Great integration, no confusion, easier transition.

The raw Windows partition is backed up in an image file created with dd, so if there's any Windows related trouble they can't fix on their own they just boot the special FreeBSD floppy which employs a simple shell script (using dialog) to let them backup or restore the primary partition image. If you need something more complex like Norton Ghost then I suggest you use the absolutely free and cool replacement called PartImage.

If they have any trouble while using FreeBSD they just click a special icon named "Call for help" which starts a shell script that sends a number of specially crafted packets to my computer's static IP, where such packets are logged in a special file which I see on my desktop (tail -f), so if I'm available I can log into their system via ssh within minutes of any sign of trouble and they do not even have to bother to email me, let alone use the phone to call me. It works like a charm.

I feel sorry for the people who buy Microsoft Windows and then call me to help them out when things go wrong, but I just can't afford to waste my life fixing what should not have been broken in the first place. Enough is enough.

The explosion of Freenet...

What did you think I meant?
Get your mind out of the gutter!

Got my 4GB freenet store, please do the same.

sorry you geniuses, but WASTE has been around for a while now and more than serves such purpose. This sounds like a restricted hybrid between WASTE and VideoLAN...

DING! next 'marketable product service' please.

stop wasting our f-cking time.

Cheers.

A little different, but similar: Konspire

Wine is the name of the opensource project (that started the whole thing).

Then theres a fork of Wine made by Codeweavers called Crossover Office (and originally Crossover Plugin). The Codeweavers product is aimed at (you've already guessed if you don't know) office/productivity software support, like Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver, Windows Media Player and more recendly iTunes. Codeweavers gives their improvements back to the community (I'm not sure Transgaming does).

Of course the product we are talking about here is TransGaming's Cedega, which is yet another fork from the original Wine project (was previously called WineX). They of course support games, directx and proprietary safedisk copy protection schemes.

Both products apparently try to avoid stepping on eachothers toes (so to speak). And both products approach licensing very differently (after forking from Wine proper, Transgaming had a bit of scandel about not giving back, old story).

Personally, I think its pretty funny loading up IE or Word under Linux. Its also pretty nice being able to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver without having to dual boot.

How is this different from WASTE?

If you use Windows there is this.

However I can say that one product that stands out, and I have seen used successfully, is Bricolage (http://www.bricolage.cc/) which is on the flexible side of the above spectrum.

Bricolage is built on top of HTML::Mason, which is also the basis for some huge sites (e.g., Amazon).

Mason isn't a CMS itself, but you can do pretty much anything you can imagine with it. There are some other CMSs built on Mason that might be worth a look, however, including Mason-CM and Bricks.

Mason can also be used with CVS/Subversion/Arch/your-favorite-VCS-here to build a home-grown, terminal-based CMS of sorts.

Which brings up the catch-22: can't have a job without any experience, and can't get any experience without a job.

Yes you can.

Think FOSS. Typically, an open-source project will not ask to see your resume before you can get involved. Take a look at SourceForge. There are many, many projects to pick from. Find something you are interested in. Join the mailing list. Become active. This helps to document the work you do, which you can then put on your resume.

A personal web site can also be used to document skills. For example, my web site runs PHP on Linux and there is a page on generating random values in PHP. (Caution: DSL bandwidth limited.) I have zero project/position experience with PHP, yet a recruiter called me about a PHP position. Even though it is not listed related to a specific project or position, it is a skill I have documented and can show evidence of having worked with.

There is nothing to prevent you from documenting this type of work on your resume. And, there is the upside of showing that you actually enjoy the work and are not doing it just to pay the bills. Enthusiasm counts. Of course, it is up to you to show that you are enthusiastic about what the company considers 'work' and not just about playing games, browsing the web, etc.