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for linux, you could use DMX, and if you wanted OpenGL for that, Chromium works with DMX :)

for linux, you could use DMX, and if you wanted OpenGL for that, Chromium works with DMX :)

All of the GNU tools in *BSD are kept in the codebase of the BSD in question. They're customized versions of the official GNU tools (even gcc). On top of that, not all of the tools that exist in GNU/Linux exist in BSD as the GPL'ed version. Awk in FreeBSD 5.x is the One True Awk, nearly all the GNU tools in OpenBSD have been replaced with BSD licensed tools. In FreeBSD ls, vi, cat, grep, more, less, etc are mostly BSD equivalents of the GNU equivalents of the original UNIX toolset. In some cases, they ARE the original UNIX toolset, where the tools have been open sourced. This is the case of Awk in FreeBSD 5.x - it is awk written by Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan, available here.

That said, there are people over at debian who have slapped the GNU tool set on both NetBSD and FreeBSD kernels, and called it GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/NetBSD. This precedence seems to push myself towards the conclusion that changing the toolset does, indeed, warrant a name change. For the most part, GNU/FreeBSD and FreeBSD will behave the same, until you type ps -aux on GNU/FreeBSD and get a warning about "bad ps syntax", or fire top and notice slight differences in how it behaves vesus top in FreeBSD.

Personally, If the GNU toolset was thrown on a SunOS kernel, I wouldn't get my panties in a bunch over people calling that system GNU/SunOS. But, perhaps my priorities differ from yours.

We would be happy to accept Apple's check to license our useless (to Apple) tech. But we all know that won't happen because Apple is all about keeping people as locked into Quicktime's own codecs as possible.


Locked into QuickTime's codecs? Which would those be? One of the codecs on this page?

QuickTime is a container, and even does vorbis with the appropriate component.

You can complain about DRM'ed AAC if you want, but don't get that mixed up with QuickTime.

Since Adium (can't speak for Fire & Proteus) is nothing but a nicely done GAIM port, for me it IS GAIM on OS X.

What would be interesting, now, would be to get Adium ported to Linux (and, why not, Windows), using Qt, for instance.

GAIM has a real problem of being ugly, has usuability issues, and lacks the general polish you get with Adium. The Kopete project looks interesting, but it's not there yet : missing buddy icons and file transfers in everything but MSN Messenger - and even there, it has issues with NATs and can't display a MSN picture full size (yes, real people want that).

Has anyone experience in porting Cocoa (Obj-C) apps to Qt?

Since Adium (can't speak for Fire & Proteus) is nothing but a nicely done GAIM port, for me it IS GAIM on OS X.

What would be interesting, now, would be to get Adium ported to Linux (and, why not, Windows), using Qt, for instance.

GAIM has a real problem of being ugly, has usuability issues, and lacks the general polish you get with Adium. The Kopete project looks interesting, but it's not there yet : missing buddy icons and file transfers in everything but MSN Messenger - and even there, it has issues with NATs and can't display a MSN picture full size (yes, real people want that).

Has anyone experience in porting Cocoa (Obj-C) apps to Qt?

I use Fire. I do not like iChat yet. It grows on me, but it hasn't won me over yet, maybe in 10.4. From their website: "Fire is a free Instant Messaging Client for Mac OS X which supports all of the most popular Instant Messaging services in one easy-to-use application: AIM, ICQ, irc, Jabber, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger."

When it comes to MacOS X, there are several worthy contenders: Fire, Adium to name a few.

One big problem I have with Fire is its lack of good Jabber support. Basics are there, but I can't reliably use it for group chatting. (It might not even support it, IIRC)

For Jabber, I've had to use Nitro to get the group support I needed. And on Linux (since I have an ancient RH 8 box) I end up using Gabber instead of GAIM

We must applaud that Apple is using open standards for their own good? What's in it for us?

Interopability. Future-proofing. Apple's contributions to the standard. Are you saying companies shouldn't be applauded for using standards? I'll applaud every time a company chooses an open standard over a proprietary model.

More like the other way around - their contributions (while very welcome) are few and far between.

As far as I can tell, they've given back every time they've taken. That's more than I can say for myself.

iCal (open file format)

But not open itself.

Safari (built on Open Source code)

But itself totally proprietary, except for WebCore, which is currently primarily usable for cocoa (e.g. proprietary) developers.

So the apps are closed? OK, they're not totally 'Free.' Granted. But the ical format is open. You can write a better iCal and not have to do a damn thing to get the data in. Webcore can be used by open-source developers as well as proprietary developers. It's based on khtml (from KDE). They've given back. WebCore is Open (LGPL).

iTunes protocol and code is proprietary.

iTunes protocol? Do you mean DAAP? Yes the app is closed but the tools are there to re-implement as you see fit. Even the iTunes Library is accessible as XML.

OS X uses and relies on proprietary drivers (Broadcom, are you listening?).

So go ahead write your own drivers.

iChat primarily uses AIM instead of Jabber.

Did you miss what this post was about?

Maybe we could do it in perl!

ask and Ye shall Recieve!

BEHOLD!

Perl rear's it's ugly head almost everywhere!

Yup. Debian and GNU and others detail their problems with Java here. When I first read this article, I thought it might imply that Sun might be moving forward in opening up Java more, unfortunately the influences go in the other direction.

C'mon, go the extra step and link it! :-) And the homepage is here.

We've been running linux clusters like this for years and have recently released the software for doing it. The software is called oneSIS (http://onesis.sourceforge.net/). This does mostly everything it looks like the fedora stateless project aims at doing:
- Read-only root NFS
- bit-for-bit identical root filesystem
- local disk cache (if desired)
- fine-grained control of independent node/role behavior
- mkinitrd (only better, IMHO)

However, it supports more than Fedora. Currently supported are redhat,fedora,suse,gentoo,and debian.

I've kept it pretty quiet so far, but I guess now might be the time to go public.

If you're interested in the future development of oM then check out http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/plan.html. This shows that 2.6 patches are planned within the next 6-12 months. oMFS is coming out and oGFS, Lustre and PVFS are replacing it. SHM support is to be stabilized. Usability will really make leaps and bounds in the next year if this plan works out.

For Windows Miranda is nice. On Linux I use GAIM -- it works well and is easy to use.

I used to think PDF Creator was fantastic, but when I tried deploying in the office it had problems I hadn't encoutered in my limited use of it.

The worst of these was in the save dialog where if you clicked on a directory shortcut - to jump to a directory - it would save over the shortcut instead of opening the directory. The sad thing is I reported this bug over two months ago, and it still hasn't got fixed.

In the end I went with the free but non-open source alternative of CutePDF

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

IE is no match for Firefox, but IMHO (and as much as I love it) Thunderbird still needs to catch up to Outlook. Outlook 2003 just has more features and a better interface. Major things I'm waiting on before switching to Thunderbird at work are integration with SynCE and the Novell Connector.

Noticed that Thunderbird now includes RSS Integration... yay! Now all I need is SynCE support...

Unfortunately that won't do you much good on the GBA, as it's still over 200K.

This can already be done with legacy/consumer hardware in Linux thanks to the Linux Console project: linuxconsole

I am really looking forward to when the linuxconsole code is in the Linux kernel - since this will make Linux even better.

When you have the patched kernel you can just put in as many AGP/PCI graphics cards, USB mices and keyboards as you need consoles. I have yet to find a motherboard with multiple AGP ports - and that is the type of hardware jetway should have done in their project - not specialized windows fluff.

Anyways, I am running a setup with 2 userconsoles at home, and it works great! The setup I have was extremely cheap, like sub 300-400 USD for a 2 user setup (the most expensive stuff being the monitors). It is possible to play fullmotion video or 3d games on both consoles at the same time if you have nvidia graphics cards. (Finally good ping in quake 2! ;)

Btw a cool "by-product" of the linuxconsole project is that you apparently can use both PS/2 ports for keyboards (or mices) :)

Also I believe that HP already have a multiconsole (4 users) product based on Linux with Linuxconsole targeted at the african market.

http://tcljava.sourceforge.net/docs/website/index. html

sounds like they are combining OpenSSI and DRBL.

I tried following the directions and wound up with jack.

Ahhh, you must have followed the wrong directions. Jack is a low-latency audio server, designed for professional audio work. Maybe you should consider KPlayer, the wonderful KDE frontend to mplayer?

I tried following the directions and wound up with jack.

Ahhh, you must have followed the wrong directions. Jack is a low-latency audio server, designed for professional audio work. Maybe you should consider KPlayer, the wonderful KDE frontend to mplayer?

You don't need Java on a typical desktop system.

Whatever you reckon

Azureus

I overlooked the "installed by default part". Thanks for the clarification. And it's a good thing they do come with most distros now (I've not touched Linux in several years) because that link you pointed me to was informative, but the process it described was overly complicated. :-)

The people who think it's reasonable that a machine should be slowed to a crawl by locking up the disk every single day at an arbitrary time for 10+ minutes for infrequent random searches are not being very sensible.

Particularly since most people usually only search a tiny fraction of the disk each day.

Cron usually makes sense only on an always-on machine and is fundamentally inefficient.

I don't see what all the fuss is. If you do not like cron, updatedb, etc, just turn them off! MS Windows starts every stinking thing in the world that most home users do not need, most users are used to extra services running. The thing is, is that you can turn off what you don't want, no big deal.

If this thin client cluster idea appeals to you, please see ltsp-mosix.

"I want a distro where by default packages install under $HOME so that someone can install their favorite browser without root access."

Take a look at zero install. You can install 0install on many distros (as root) then install apps as a user exactly like you want.

Or buy a mac!

Nevermind.

Instead of Basillisk II, try PearPC .

What did you expect killall to do? It has been around since System V and kills all processes. It was introduced to Linux in the PSmisc project and took on another meaning.

The Solaris equivalent is pkill and is also available on Linux from the procps project.

The more sensible thing would be for all distributions to remove killall and standardize on pkill. killall5 could be retained if necessary.

What did you expect killall to do? It has been around since System V and kills all processes. It was introduced to Linux in the PSmisc project and took on another meaning.

The Solaris equivalent is pkill and is also available on Linux from the procps project.

The more sensible thing would be for all distributions to remove killall and standardize on pkill. killall5 could be retained if necessary.

domainkeys

It allows the edge mail servers to sign an email, and it does not break email like SPF does.

Download PearPC and my sound emulation patch on the sourceforge site and eat your heart out. http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/pearpc/

No, because OSX does checks to look for Apple-specific hardware on boot.

Interestingly, if you boot OS X using Pear PC a message appears during verbose boot stating "Warning: Apple Mac I/O Self Test fails", but then continues to boot. It would seem that OS X knows it's not Mac hardware, but doesn't care.

The reason why is Apple's Mac OS X requires Apple ROM.

I'm pretty sure at some point, someone's going to come up with either a hack for Mac OS X, or a way to fake out via some open source ROM.

I'd bet it takes some serious skills... but it's bound to happen.

And Apple's DMCA lawyers will be all over it.

Someone will still attempt it, because it would be one hell of a feat. I'm curious if PearPC might be moving towards that direction slowly.

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The JRuby article is part of the alt.lang.jre series, with announced articles about "Rhino, Nice, and NetRexx, and many other exciting alternate languages for the JRE". It looks like the articles are coming in this order, one around the beginning of each month.

We also have a BitTorrent distribution of the album's whole WAV compilation.

Here you go. Painfully slow though.

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ Qemu needs work, but already has several different host-target CPU combinations complete (in the ARM x86 and PPC areas anyway).

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/ PearPC fills in the gaps on PPC emulation where Qemu is lacking. (I run OS X 10.2 on my PC at work.)

The summary should almost be modded flamebait for making such an obviously impossible statement like that.

So what's really up here? TFA says they demonstrated running a Linux Quake III on a OS X powerbook.
(And they quote Rob Enderle praising this technology.. this is the guy who thinks SCO will win, which speaks loads for his credibility.)

Now, I haven't seen the source for Quake III, but I'm pretty certain it uses OpenGL, which the Mac has. OS X is also POSIX-compliant. So, most of the API calls done by Quake can already be done natively on OS X.

So what I guess they're doing here is translating API calls (like Wine) while emulating the processor core (like a real emulator).

That isn't anything new. For instance, I've written similar code for an Atari emulator, which can emulate an Atari hard-disc filesystem as a local directory through translating OS calls.

(Note: And that was far from the first time it'd been done either.)

For an open-source speech recognition system with a real open source licence check out the CMU Sphinx Project, a family of speech recognition engines, training tools and associated acoustic and language models. The latest version Sphinx-4 is written in Java and is released under a BSD-style license.

For an open-source speech recognition system with a real open source licence check out the CMU Sphinx Project, a family of speech recognition engines, training tools and associated acoustic and language models. The latest version Sphinx-4 is written in Java and is released under a BSD-style license.

Free software for speech recognition.

FreeTTS is a speech synthesizer written entirely in the Java programming language.

FreeTTS is a speech synthesizer written entirely in the Java programming language.

It would be nice not to be constrained by this whole 186,000 miles per second thing :)

Setting your speed at "c" and it takes a while to get out of the Solar System. Set it at a few AUs per second and you can clear the solar system more quickly, but once you are out, it seems like you are not moving at all. Once you accelerate to a light year per second, things start moving a bit, especially the neighboring stars, but it is still pretty slow going on a galactic scale. If you want to get out beyond the galaxy, I recommend going perpendicular to the galactic plane and accelerating to a few thousand light years per second (ummm...that is rather fast, don't you think).

Doing this gives you a pretty good perspective on things. Once you are in inter-galactic space, if you aren't moving about a thousand light years per second, it seems like you aren't moving at all. For an even better perspective of mixing size and speed, try manually flying back to Sol. It seems easy, and you even decelerate a bit, but it seems like you are going kind of slow until you suddenly zip past Sol doing about 100 light years per second. Go back and try again.

Back to the original point, yeah the speed of light is fast, but on a galactic and/or universal scale, it isn't that fast. I too hope they either find some loopholes in relativity, or find some loopholes in the universe (such as Asimov's idea of Hyperspace), or we won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

Yeah, I know this is deeply in the realm of Science Fiction, but I'm kind of hoping that it becomes Science Fact someday...