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by not re-using either the BSD or GNU kernels and toolchains

GNU toolchain? That'll be Autoconf, Automake, Make, Binutils and GCC then will it? Right oh.

by not re-using either the BSD or GNU kernels and toolchains

GNU toolchain? That'll be Autoconf, Automake, Make, Binutils and GCC then will it? Right oh.

by not re-using either the BSD or GNU kernels and toolchains

GNU toolchain? That'll be Autoconf, Automake, Make, Binutils and GCC then will it? Right oh.

Just because they're aimed at being an easy to use dominant desktop OS, doesn't mean they have or will get there. Just look at what happened with Freedows.

I played Sam & Max and Day of the Tentacle a little while ago when I got myself vdmsound. The reason why I love these games is the same why I love cartoons like Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny, etc. There's no need for realism, everything is a caricature of itself, colours just clash. The whole idea is to have an adventure just for laughs, not to save the world from demons from hell (sort of).
Now I have to admit I haven't been looking much into the games section in the stores, but I haven't seen games like this for quite some time.

GNAP [Gay Nigger Associated Press], ASSEVILLERS, FRANCE - In a move that is sure to redefine the open source community of the future, Gay Nigger Association of America (News | Websites) introduced the first open source corpse after the untimely death of Hans Bakker.

Bakker, a developer for the OpenBSD project, which preceded him in death, was travelling back to Paris after the SANE conference. Unfortunately, known hippie and NAMBLA member Richard Stallman had been dropped off at his hotel and was not in the car when a truck made the first contribution to Bakker's corpse's CVS by merging into it at high speed. Bakker's death was confirmed immediately via IRC by his virtual girlfriend.

The instant the opened skull was declared in the public domain, GNAA member Gary Niger annointed it with Holy Gay Nigger Seed to ensure a smooth passage into the afterlife and robust continued development. Thrusting rhythmically into the still-warm and pulsing brain of the dying man, Gary shouted "FUCK BSD; BSD IS DYING; BSD SUCKS; BSD IS DEAD TO ME; BSD DID WTC LOL" before exploding in orgasmic waves of pleasure as the sensitive nerves at the tip of his penis made contact with Bakker's last semi-conscious thoughts.

Associated bacteria immediately lined up to make their contributions, as did several nearby flies hoping to raise families of open source maggots. However, CmdrTaco of Slashdot, a known scene gadfly and AZT addict, flopped heavily into the area while loudly proclaiming first dibs on the rectum. In response, #GNAA attendee GasJews challenged him. "Tell that fag CmdrTaco that I've got first dibs on this dead anus," he said, "and that I'm going to beat him down, then fuck him tenderly all night long," said GasJews, liberally spraying Holy Gay Nigger Seed over the EMS personnel and local French police, who were delighted.

Since the 1990s, open source has been a popular way of developing free software for the general public, maintained by teams of pimply nerds with angst at their utter uselessness outside of the imaginary world of computers and networks. Much like a religion, it requires absolute obedience to its concept and encourages contributors to vehemently rail against any software which actually functions, including Microsoft's popular Windows operating system.

The future of Open Source Hans Baker Corpse (OSHBC) remains to be determined as the development team is still being assembled. Using the Concurrent Versions System (CVS), developers will be able to modify the corpse to refine its function as a BSD-analogue, something made easier by the fact that both are dead. All interested developers are encouraged to contact the OSHBC project at http://sourceforge.net/.

About Hans Bakker

Hans Bakker was a lowly BSD developer who like many sought to replace a real world life with online presence as a feeble justification that he was "doing something" about the world's dire situation. Most of his days were spent on IRC, flirting with fat girls who had once gone through a gothic phase before deciding on Lesbianism, at which point the resounding lack of attention nearly starved them. Read more at his unfinished closed-source site, http://www.hans.cx.

About Assevillers

Assevillers, France, is a small town of population 228 in the gorgeous pastel-colored French countryside. During WWII, it was home to several prostitutes who slept with occupying Germans, recognizing the dominant cocks of these very hetero warriors as the future of France, which has been a bottom since roughly AD 1250. The French people have fought many wars during that time and have won none of them, distingu

Many questions:

Why did you choose TightVNC? Why not RealVNC, UltraVNC, or TridiaVNC?

Is it better to pay for VNC software, like Tridia VNC Pro or Radmin? Which software has video resolution scaling of the remote desktop?

What security is best? Is it good to use a VPN for secure access, or is SSH better? What Windows SSH server do you use?

What VPN hardware is best? We bought a NetGear FVS318 hardware firewall/router/VPN for a customer, and discovered that the remote administration password is openly transmitted. We found that logging out in the remote administration menu didn't always actually log out. We found Javascript errors. With the 2.4 firmware, more than one client can be logged in at the same time. That situation, two clients at the same time, would give an error message with the 2.3 firmware, so things seem to be going backward in some ways, in firmware that is already shaky. Our experience with Netgear technical support is that it is very limited. On the telephone we got someone in Tamil Nadu, India, who was allowed to practice for a short time with Netgear equipment, but who doesn't any longer have access to actual equipment. The online tech support just gave error messages. Not only that, but Fry's and Netgear arranged a rebate trick. They have a very long rebate receipt, and ask you to enter your address both at the top and at the bottom. If you don't enter it at the bottom, they deny your rebate.

First, I keep a diary on mine. I'd been keeping a diary for several years on little pads of paper, but a paper diary is rather inconvenient for searching. If I want to remember what the name of that bed and breakfast we stayed at a couple years back was, I can find it in seconds. Paper diaries are also much harder to encrypt, if you're worried about snoopers.

Second, a real geek use - I like to program. I have three languages on my PDA - C, Scheme, and Forth. I can write small apps, test out algorithms, and even learn new languages, no matter where I am. I have the full ANSI C spec, as well as tutorials for both Scheme and Forth on an expansion card and can study them at my leisure.

Iceland's net traffic plummets, following P2P raids

Police in Iceland raided the homes of 12 people and confiscated computer equipment and CDs this week as the global war on file sharing reached the volcanic homeland of elves and trolls. Police targeted individuals using the popular DC++ file sharing application to share movie files. One suspect was found with approximately 2.5TB of allegedly illicit material.

Within hours of the raids, net traffic in Iceland fell 40 per cent, according to SMAIS (Iceland's association of film right holders), which filed the complaints which prompted police action. Its take on the raids (in Icelandic, unfortunately) can be found here.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/30/p2p_raids_ iceland/

That's a heckuva lotta file sharing.

And within that 2.5TB of data, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some pirated software [MSDN Universal, Autocad, Acrobat/Photoshop] that might interest the BSA [or whatever they call it in Iceland].

I had to look that one up

FYI

http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/faq/faq.php?disp lay=faq&faqnr=1&catnr=1&prog=1&lang=en&onlynewfaq= 1

Interestingly, the poster above seems to work for HP. And he apparently knew about the loss of UDC (unless there is some other "red-hot" project that HP is cancelling). And he apparently was not too pleased about it.

What is this "Integrity Virtual Machine" thing? Does anybody know?

4. Get bitten by this bug.
5. Whine about it in the comments.

See http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=deta il&aid=994148&group_id=4421&atid=10442 1

Taco has "known" about this since late July or earlier. He promised to fix it "soon". Taco, Slashdot is now officially pathetic. Karma be damned.

Keep shoving Politics section (among others) down our throats. Way to go.

--
I'm Omahajim and I didn't approve your message.

The Perl bit is already written. You just need to write a set of Template Toolkit templates. I seem to remember from looking before that the way they are used in Slash is pretty obvious once you find the template files in the source distribution.

" Yeah, because device drivers and operating systems are being written in Java"

http://jnode.sourceforge.net/portal/
"The goal is to get an simple to use and install Java operating system..." ;-)

During development, you can easily setup PHP.XPath to automatically validate every page you create.

Simply turn on output buffering at the top of your script using ob_start(). It's best to do this in a common header script called by all your pages.

Then, in a common footer script, load the output buffer (retrieved as a string using ob_get_contents()) into an instance of PHP.XPath using the importFromString method.

If your page displays, it will at least be valid XML (most of the way towards being valid XHTML). If you break the well-formedness of your output your page will not display because PHP.XPath will raise an error.

That feature's turned off (for the time being?)

There have been a number of bug reports about it.

So, here's the question: what do you, members of the /. community, use your PDAs for, anyway?
Palm's DualDate helps me coordinate my schedule with my wife's Zire
I use the address book extensively, with a few hundred entries
But by sheer hours-of-use, the winner has to be Diddlebug since my kids have drawn close to 500 sketches for me over the years, starting on my Palm III (I didn't have PalmOS 3.5 back when I had my USRobotics Pilot) on up to my current Palm Vx


--
Free gmail invites

[...]

The products to be acquired are derived from the Netscape Enterprise Suite and include Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System. Red Hat plans to start marketing these products as part of its Open Source Architecture over the next 6 to 12 months

[...]

"We believe the acquisition of these Netscape assets has tremendous long-term strategic value for the open source industry and Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers," said Matthew Szulik, Chairman and CEO at Red Hat.

[...]

Echo does not make use of partial updates to pages using DHTML after a server roundtrip yet (and I must emphasize the word "yet" here, as this feature is one of the big ideas for 2.0).

In the current version, when Echo is notified of a server-side change to the state of the user interface, it will update the client by refreshing whatever HTML frame has changed. The long refresh delay you're seeing is in no small part caused by the demonstration server being entirely overloaded due to /.'ing. (I've actually pulled the demos at this point, this machine barely has the bandwidth to serve the static web site and downloads at the moment).

That said, there are numerous components that make extensive use of DHTML, mostly found in the EchoPoint toolkit. The immediate example that springs to mind being the pulldown menu component.

With regard to making such extensive use of DHTML as to minimize the load on the server, bear in mind that server load is only one factor (though today, for the underpowered nextapp.com box, is was a very notable factor :)). In most cases a more powerful server is far less expensive than having developers write unmaintainable code. I'm all for making as much use of DHTML as possible, but it must be done behind the scenes of a more practical API.

But I will say DHTML Lemmings is quite extraordinary, that is one of the most impressive uses of DHTML I have seen.

There is no way for anyone to know what will be in the 1.5 release to offer support for those features in the 1.4 JRE.

This isn't true because the JRE is a general computing platform. Sun can add features to the Java compiler that will generate bytecode compatible with v1.4 JREs.
Indeed, as someone else mentioned, forwards compatibility can be achieved using Retroweaver.

- Brian

How about tiny linux

... a small Linux Distribution for i386 derived from SuSE 6.4. In the base version it just contains the things which are necessary to run Linux. Therefore the base package is rather small and requires approx. 7MB./SNIP

or DSL

.. a nearly complete desktop, including XMMS (MP3, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, links-hacked web browser, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US Engli /SNIP

Or go with my favourite and install just what you require...

So if I decide I don't want Linux, or decide to dual-boot, or reformat/reinstall like I tend to do (last weekend was a nightmare involving an existing Win2k install with an added on install of Gentoo and later Yoper, leading to a total wipe of all three [PEBKaC, but still] - still trying to get Win2k to run MediaPortal), I can't?

GREAT IDEA!

thbbbhthbhtpppt.

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

Well if you look at this page here, they do say validation has to be done in both client & server.

The question is what happens in the client after your request has been validated - they believe that a page submit/refresh should not be done, it should be done as it is in thick-client apps. Pop a messagebox, show your errors in a status bar, whatever. That's not a bad idea, really.

We need such a framework for PHP. How else can we put 6 calendar "controls" on the same webpage? WACT
seems to be something like this, but I think it needs more support...

Mono implements the ECMA/ISO covered parts, as well as being a project that aims to implement the higher level blocks like ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms

Freenet is kind of slow, look at the 2nd generation of anonymous P2P applications:

AntsP2P
I2P

Freenet is kind of slow, look at the 2nd generation of anonymous P2P
applications:

AntsP2P

I2P

Try FreePOPs - it allows you to access almost any web-based email service (including Gmail) as if it were a POP3 account so there are no ads.

Runs on OS X, Linux / Unix and Windows...

DosBox: DOS sans CtrlAltDel, plus multiple instances and remote access.

I'm in the same boat, although I do think that it takes an above-average level of computer competency to run Windows XP without spyware problems. Then again, I've always had hardware problems under Linux, so it seems like you need to excel at computers regardless of the OS you're using if you want it to be stable. Or maybe run Mac OS X (I don't know, I haven't tried it).

But yeah, I play games, do .NET coding, surf the Internet, and do school stuff all on Windows. What's nice is that a lot of what seems like Unix-exclusive software also runs on Windows. There's ActivePython, MiKTeX, a large collection of command-line Unix utilities, including wget, and even games such as FreeCiv. Other people might have different needs that necessitate Linux, but Windows runs fine for me.

With that said, Txiasaeia, you might want to try Gentoo for something different in the Linux world. Installation takes a while since it's a very manual process, but the entire distribution makes me feel "cleaner" when I use it (yes, I still take showers). Mandrake feels like absolute bloat to me, but I fell in love with Gentoo once I tried it.

CAD systems: I am not familiar with those, what exactly is too performance-critical for Python in CAD systems?

graphics systems: Huh?

image encoders/decoders/editors: Image encoders/decoders are typically very small projects - small enough to write in C or other low-level languages.

vector graphics renderers: Probably true

typesetting and layout software (including web browsers and editors): Python is fast enough for these, on non-antique hardware.

audio encoders/decoders: Similar to image encoders/decoders, these are small and should be implemented in a low-level language.

GIS systems and mapping programs: What is time-critical about these?

speech recognition engines: I suspect there's a small algorithm running in an inner loop and a lot of higher-order code. Only the inner loop needs C, and that only if you want Real-Time behavior.

Ever since I turned to write nearly all my code in Python, my productivity was boosted by hundreds of percents, and I am less surprised with time that Python is fast enough in almost all cases when it is used right.

There needs to be a Slashdot story done on the following application that is breaking new ground on almost a daily basis .Soon there will be Jabber support for this application via Jeti Java Messenger http://jeti.jabberstudio.org/ .

Ants P2P Website
http://www.myjavaserver.com.nyud.net:8090/~gwren/h ome.jsp?page=custom&xmlName=ants
Ants P2P Sourceforge Page
http://sourceforge.net/projects/antsp2p/

Ants P2P Features

* Open Source Java implementation (GNU-GPL license).
* Multiple sources download.
* Torrent download from partial files.
* Automatic resume and sources research over the net.
* Search by hash, string and structured query.
* Embedded support for etherogeneus data types (not only arrays of bytes...).
* Completely Object-Oriented routing protocol.
* Point to Point secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128)
* EndPoint to EndPoint secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128)
* Automatic serverless peer dicovery procedure.
* IRC based peer discovery system.
* IRC embeded chat system.
* Full text search of indexed documents (pdf, html, txt, doc etc) -> QUERY REFERENCE.
* Distributed/Decentralized Search engine
* HTTP tunneling.

The programers answers to all those damn FAQ's

1) ANts supports point to point encription (AES 128 - DH 512)
2) ANts supports endpoint encryption ( " " )
3) ANts supports multipath routing for packets
4) ANts supports preferential connections (to create a fast backbone and
to let everyone going faster)
5) ANts supports PARTIAL DOWNLOADS and it has a unique and very
innovative system to do this (in theory it could be better than
bittorrent inspite of routing overhead and speedes reached on LAN showed
this!)
6) ANts supports AUTOSEARCH SOURCES function for active and interrupted
donwloads, if your donwload pass in the interrupted box this DOES NOT
MEAN that you have lost it... it is just paused and it will restart as
soon as possible!
7) ANts can find partial files through normal queries or queries by hash
since version 0.4.1 beta!
8) ANts supports FULL TEXT indexing and do searches over full file
content and FULL FILE PATH LOCATION.
9) ANts will (perhaps) support instant messaging integration
10) ANts IS NOT a simple IRC client
11) ANts relies on ad-hoc network theory as well as MUTE
12) ANts is strongly beta... this means it is not intended to be dummies
probed!
13) ANts releases ARE NOT backward compatible, so if you can't find
peers you probably has an old version! Use Java Web Start to be sure to
have te newest one.
14) ANts exploits IRC CTCP commands for initial ip exchange!
15) ANts supports internal ip exchage during and after your first
connection.
16) ANts queries are cripted in an asymmetric way. This means YOU are
the ONLY who can read you queries results. Everyone can read the query
string but this approach reduces drastically the potential power of a
node in trasit queries analisys.
17) ANts uses TWO consecutive ports (Like HTTP does) default are 4567 &
4568 but you can change the lower getting automatically changed the
highest. If you are NATTED you don't need two non consecutive ports,
cause these ports are used ONLY for incoming requests. Your own requests
are made on any free port, so you don't have to care, it can take a
little bit more to obtain your first connection if you are natted, but
ANts can work with natted peers as well as with unnatted ones without
ANY difference
17) Internal protocol is not harmed by nats and firewall... so once you
get a connection it doesn't make sense saying "I'm natted my queries are
not working!".
1

Sounds like we need a REAL ANONYMOUS p2p network now! They will never take us down! perhaps it is time to take another look at MUTE http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/!

No matter how good Gnome and KDE have gotten, if the .net and JAVA software is lacking (Mono is not nearly complete, and is exactly fighting this catch-up game, JAVA is a nifty SUN Trap)

Between gcj, Kaffe, JamVM, SableVM, all driven by the GNU Classpath library, experimental stuff like Jnode, and the massive wealth of Java code in projects like Eclipse and those driven by the Apache Foundation..

I'd say that Free java is alive and kicking. Yeah, it still hasn't become usable with respect to AWT/Swing. But most of the core is there, even up to some 1.4 stuff. (and work on 1.5 features is underway)

I don't buy the "catch-up game" argument. Most people don't write programs for the absolute latest and greatest. Platforms tend to reach a certain level of maturity which is 'good enough' for most people, and then it slows down. I think that soon enough, the free Java implementations will be able to compete with Sun's.

For example, how many compilers can you name which fully implement the C99 standard?

Everything is a catch-up game... it's just a question of what the game looks like. MS can arbitrarily change things in the Word file format just to screw with people. APIs don't work that way though, you don't change an API unless you have to.

No matter how good Gnome and KDE have gotten, if the .net and JAVA software is lacking (Mono is not nearly complete, and is exactly fighting this catch-up game, JAVA is a nifty SUN Trap)

Between gcj, Kaffe, JamVM, SableVM, all driven by the GNU Classpath library, experimental stuff like Jnode, and the massive wealth of Java code in projects like Eclipse and those driven by the Apache Foundation..

I'd say that Free java is alive and kicking. Yeah, it still hasn't become usable with respect to AWT/Swing. But most of the core is there, even up to some 1.4 stuff. (and work on 1.5 features is underway)

I don't buy the "catch-up game" argument. Most people don't write programs for the absolute latest and greatest. Platforms tend to reach a certain level of maturity which is 'good enough' for most people, and then it slows down. I think that soon enough, the free Java implementations will be able to compete with Sun's.

For example, how many compilers can you name which fully implement the C99 standard?

Everything is a catch-up game... it's just a question of what the game looks like. MS can arbitrarily change things in the Word file format just to screw with people. APIs don't work that way though, you don't change an API unless you have to.

Note in the 2002 version that the dialog server is not included, this would be great to have too. MIT also has some very cool technologies in this area - SUMMIT, TINA, GENESIS, ... - which I do not believe are public, they just show little bits and pieces of PR about them, but include natural language parsing, question answering, sentence generation, etc. It would be cool if someone on the inside could document just what things are available, what works with what, what is definitely ready for prime time, etc. There must be some people who hacked on this in the past few years and are still developing things, it would be cool if some of their experimentation was available to the open source community so people could get an idea of what things are possible. When I did my survey just about 1 year ago, Communicator was daunting, intriguing, and it looked like you could do tons of stuff if you had some secret decoder docs and a spare year to hack. Maybe now's the time to dig into it hip deep?

Note in the 2002 version that the dialog server is not included, this would be great to have too. MIT also has some very cool technologies in this area - SUMMIT, TINA, GENESIS, ... - which I do not believe are public, they just show little bits and pieces of PR about them, but include natural language parsing, question answering, sentence generation, etc. It would be cool if someone on the inside could document just what things are available, what works with what, what is definitely ready for prime time, etc. There must be some people who hacked on this in the past few years and are still developing things, it would be cool if some of their experimentation was available to the open source community so people could get an idea of what things are possible. When I did my survey just about 1 year ago, Communicator was daunting, intriguing, and it looked like you could do tons of stuff if you had some secret decoder docs and a spare year to hack. Maybe now's the time to dig into it hip deep?

Note in the 2002 version that the dialog server is not included, this would be great to have too. MIT also has some very cool technologies in this area - SUMMIT, TINA, GENESIS, ... - which I do not believe are public, they just show little bits and pieces of PR about them, but include natural language parsing, question answering, sentence generation, etc. It would be cool if someone on the inside could document just what things are available, what works with what, what is definitely ready for prime time, etc. There must be some people who hacked on this in the past few years and are still developing things, it would be cool if some of their experimentation was available to the open source community so people could get an idea of what things are possible. When I did my survey just about 1 year ago, Communicator was daunting, intriguing, and it looked like you could do tons of stuff if you had some secret decoder docs and a spare year to hack. Maybe now's the time to dig into it hip deep?

Why not use DBAN ( http://dban.sourceforge.net/ )? That way you won't need to nanny it for very long.
All it takes is for you to boot the cd or floppy and hit enter, it will do a secure wipe of all the partitions/disks it can find and you can almost certainly remove the floppy once it's started.
It would be relatively trivial to set it to reboot when it's done too.
This way, unless your friend has access to a scanning electron microscope ( hope he isn't a slashdot reader... http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/0 3/0239230&tid=137&tid=134&tid=14 ) it's going to leave far less trace than wiping it in knoppix with ordinary unix tools.

I thought of two apps off the top of my head that are very responsive: jEdit and jDiskReport. Try one or both of them out, I'm sure you'll be surprised.

On a tangentially related note, check out these pictures of a whiteboarded Java timeline at the 2004 JavaOne conference, there's some neat memories and comments in there. One of the attendees called it "a real life wiki".

Look around at the shpinx project and freetts. Alot of really good voice stuff going on. FreeTTS is excellent, and if you've got time, you can even model your own voice:) Anyway... I forget which of the two sites I got to it from (think it was sphinx) and its got a whole scenario with an airport calling program, its very very nice and sounds great.
Regards,
Steve

The very small vocabulary needed for desktop control makes the speech recognition much more accurate and usable.

"There is no speech-recognition system available for Linux, which is a big gap."

Um, Sphinx 2 (a predecessor of Sphinx 4) has been around for quite some time now. Like Sphinx 4, it's speaker-independent. Unlike Sphinx 4, it's a C library, and is thus easily interfaced with other languages (insert shameless plug for a simple Python interface for Sphinx 2 I wrote).

Interesting that it's PriceWaterhouse that put this out.
Would this be the same PriceWaterhouse with this patent: "Method for electronically recognizing and parsing information contained in a financial statement"
...which caused the developer of Groovy Java Analyst to abandon his open source project.
Though he doesn't say that he received any correspondence from them, just idea of getting tangled up with a corp. over a patent was enough to send him packing.

I'm sorry, but software patents as well as BP patents are blatantly wrong.
Just imagine someone had managed to patent "Method for looping over an range of integers to control algorithm execution".
Nowadays, they could probably patent "Method for serving fast food with customer still in their car"

IMHO, a more general (and interesting) technique is meta-programming. You can automatically add code. See http://mozart-dev.sourceforge.net/pi-tracer.html for an example.

This is an underpowered aspx Wiki. See OpenWikiNG, a branch of OpenWiki for a stunning ASP version with: - WYSIWYG editor
- XML output etc etc SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openwiki-ng/ Discussion group: http://s8.invisionfree.com/OpenWikiNG/index.php?