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Without media player classic picking up where microsoft left off, I would be using crappy media players to watch movies.

I'd say that FUSE, which is the other package gmailfs is very dependend on, is even a bigger programming venture. One day I'll have to take a sharp look at it.

Software like Xplanet be effected too? I hope not.

Fwiffo, darling. Answer the door!

Roberto De Leo is the creater/maintainer of The Movix Project, one of the most useful live Linux Distros I have ever used.

With Movix, I can boot up to a linux environment that plays all forms of multimedia. It uses mplayer. It came in really handy my Linux drive died. I was still able to play all the media on my /home partition without issue.

The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.

Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.

Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.

Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.

Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.

Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.

Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.

And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.

The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.

Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.

Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.

Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.

Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.

Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.

Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.

And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.

The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.

Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.

Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.

Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.

Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.

Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.

Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.

And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.

All those random people that have single lines in software changelogs... Take this for example. There's a project that helped get support for a popular USB camera out into the wild.

Look all the way at the bottom. There's one guy there that did a TON for the community ;-) I hear he's really sexy too!

Did a quick search with Google and got the following:

Gamecube Controller Firmware

Which is part of EzHid Firmware project. On other hand, if like me, you would like to skip on the soldering iron there is this adaptor.

Did a quick search with Google and got the following:

Gamecube Controller Firmware

Which is part of EzHid Firmware project. On other hand, if like me, you would like to skip on the soldering iron there is this adaptor.

Am I the only one who prefers a keyboard to console-style controllers/gamepads?

It depends on the game. In platform games, I prefer a gamepad. On the other hand, in Star Control: The Ur-Quan Masters 2 a keyboard is a must - a gamepad simply doesn't give enough accuracy to safely maneuver around plasma blasts.

As for joysticks, they're good for flying sims, and only for them, IMHO.

The only advantage consoles really have are analog sticks

NES had analog sticks ?-0

Slower in what context? Gnome vs KDE vs the Windows DE? If you want a faster destop, you can use Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. A heavyweight DE takes serious resources, if you wanna play, you gotta pay.

I partially agree with your statement about not needing to tweak services, when I installed FC2 recently there was a boatload of unnecessary services (which are part of the base install) running by default. On the other hand, if you choose to install a server (Apache, Postfix, etc) running the service by default is only logical. Hey, if you didn't want to run it, why did you install it? :)

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
-- Dr Johnson

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Joi Ito...

(My blog; my blogging application.)

First released notice in May.

This is a good demo of the power of Java, it handles the game, then passes this smoothly to the native opengl rendering. Jogl is great, I hope I can find time to work with it some more.

Those crazy Germans do deserve some awesome credit for this! (having lived in Germany I can say I love Germans, and they are crazy! :-)

Sourceforge page

Marlin 0.6 Sample editor is out Great timing! :)

Freecraft received a C&D letter and ended up changing their engines name to Stratagus with the FCMP media renamed to Aleona's Tales.

For old memories sake, Freecraft still works out of the box here (eDonkey link)

ed2k://|file|freecraft-030311-win32-with-fcmp.ex e| 8310061|FAF827D537033A8E3E7EA97BC9E5CA93|/

Search no more: Clippy for VI... the horror!

I think it needs to be made clear (no pun) yet again, that all this work is not just about drop shadows (they are just one thing you can do with it) or "useless" eye-candy (sometimes beautification is critical to the user). This work is about new options in enhancing usability and improving performance. These new extentions do far more than just add shadows and transparency (no, not translucency, that is something else).

Off-screen compositing allows new effects that can add emphasis to certain user interface elements. They allow for windows with arbitrary shapes that do not appear "jagged" and "rough". Better performance means we can create more fluid effects in windowing systems. For instance, users are much more comfortable with things that slide around or fade smoothly rather than just snapping into position. It allows the eye to keep track of what's changing. Tools like Exposé are now possible. Overall, there are more possibilities for open source user interface developers to add significantly more polish to the desktop without resorting to cheap hacks (such as the static transparency found in KDE, Eterm, and Aterm).

And just to reinforce the classic uses of this: drop shadows really do add emphasis to the current focused window (I write this on an OSX box). Also, it can be really convenient to have window transparency in many cases (for example, when I have multiple Terminals open I can read a man page behind the console I'm currently typing in). Again, keep in mind that these features are not the goal but simply benefits of the new extentions.

The future of the F/OSS desktop is really looking up thanks to new technology like this. Eventually these things will be hardware accelerated (like Quartz Extreme) and then some really cool things will be possible.

So, in conclusion, don't knock or belittle the work that's going into X.org these days. In the future, most of you will appreciate them the same way you appreciate the flexibility you have now with choosing how to configure your window managers to your liking. No doubt a lot of people will take this stuff and produce a lot of crap, but we'll definitely see a lot of excellent work that will use it to improve the user experience.

That's of zero use on a 2D screen! Close one eye. Spot the difference? Nope, me neither.

Second, without drop shadows, it is really easy to see which window has focus:

Your URL screwed up. Try this. I disagree with the point that drop shadow interferes with focus. Right now, my focussed window has a *deeper* dropshadow than all the others, giving the illusion that it is actually 'closer', not to mention the outlining, title bar colouring, etc, etc

Yes, these things take time. States take years to certify voting systems. The Open Voting Consortium has been at it since November 2000, has a prototype system built, with a web demo and publicly demo'd, which the San Jose Mercury referred to as The touch-screen holy grail.

The goal is to have HAVA funding enable the Open Voting Consortium to finish the system in time for the 2006 elections. Feel free to help out the the project.

I dunno about drives, but the iPod firmware is quite easy to replace. Witness iPod Linux.

The Neuros Audio Computer Team is just doing the same thing for it's far superior player. But this time, the releasing of the firmware code was done after the manufacturers approval. Way to go!

Too bad the released code will only compile under Texas Instruments' Code Composer Studio, a USD. 3500 closed source IDE and compiler.

A GCC target for the TI DSP the Neuros has in (C5416) is already on its way, though.

Here is a few that I found at http://www.sf.net/ and I searched for lawyer.

http://etude.sourceforge.net/
http://www.yoma.com.au/products/cmfpractice

I hope these help.

I cannot validate how useful these will be for you since I myself have no idea about what it takes to run a law office or be a laywer but theseshould be a good start for you.

First of all, it really makes you feel like an old fart, especially if you have kids. And, trust me on this, these games are dorky and far from exciting to anyone who plays them for the game, and not for the memories and geek bragging rights. Plus, it just is not new, sexy technology any more. In the old days, we didn't mind typing up pages and pages of BASIC code - that was an integral part of the fun. Try doing that nowadays. Chances are you'll just feel it's pointless. Times do change.

There's some cool stuff going on in the do-it-yourself scene though. Over at the Xbox-Scene forums there's lots of discussion about creating custom controllers and even full-blown old-school arcades. And since the Xbox is pretty hackable, with MAME readily available (Sourceforge link), it's just a natural choice.

Well, I guess when I have time, I could start cranking Burn to the Brim again to include that. But sigh, my time is short these days ;/

However a lot of stuff uses serial ports in non-standard ways and I doubt you can do that with a USB-to-Serial converter. LIRC and WinLIRC allow you to send and receive remote control signals but don't work with the converters. A converter also might not allow you to talk to calculators, program some microcontrollers, decode and encode radio signals and more.

Sure, you can find microcontrollers with a USB interface and use those instead but that's more expensive and more work. Many people who would feel comfortable with making a simple interface involving a few resistors and diodes wouldn't build a USB interface.

Harmony!=FairPlay
apple could keep upgrading Fairplay [just like yahoo and msn keep upgrading their authentication scheme
of their IMs to keep away third-party IM's like gaim and trillian]...
would Harmony keep up with Fairplay just as well ?.

I nave the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-PCI (model 880)
it sucks. it does have hardware encoding, but i'd be damned if it uses it. I had bad audio problems when recording with it. Seems that putting another 512mb into my amd2600 (for 1 gig total, dual channel, was single channel before) helped that.
I found a web page that makes drivers for bt8X8 vid decoder cards, which is: http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/

it's a great driver, I got it to work for my card. But I haven't done any recording for it. I'm going to be working on that in the future. Currently I'm using Hauppauges lame software because the TitanTV works nice, i'm going to test every which way I can do it, because I'd like to grab quality grabs for myself, so I can view them later if I want.

... he does actually have a point with his Introduction to REL. I wrote a comment in the last article which puts SQL and DB design into perspective. It actually emphasises what he's trying to do with REL. There's no doubt: SQL does suck, whether it's sufficent to describe relations or not. And while you definitely shouldn't use a DB PL to design a DB (see other comment), we actually could use a successor to SQL.

And one I never see mentioned, spellbound. It allows one to right click on a webpages text entry box, and do a spellcheck on what has been typed.

Some additions, corrections:
- Don't discount Safari as a browser - it's the best browser I've ever used. just turn on tabs (looks in preferences), and popup blocking, which for some reason I'll never understand are disabled by default.
- Third party utilities including Path Finder and Onyx will allow you to quit the Finder. there's really no reason to, though.
- You really don't need to reinstall when you first get the machine - just look through places like your Applications folder for things you don't want.
- And now, my "things no Mac should be without" category:
Quicksilver - the app/document launcher on steroids.
Adium - multi-protocol IM client
Desktop Manager - virtual desktops. Cooperates with expose and multiple monitors.
MenuMeters - CPU/bandwidth/HD Monitor and more, in the menubar.
SideTrack - replacement trackpad driver allows the sides to be used as scroll wheels.
Colloquy - modern IRC client

This is not the place to post bugs in slashcode. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=104421&group_ id=4421

DoXfs

I have the same problem the grandparent post mentions. I used to like a game by Electronic Arts, "Need for Speed - Porsche Unleashed", which was released in 2000. Then in 2003 they released "Need for Speed Underground", which required a card beyond my Riva TNT2, so I got a GeForce FX5200. Now NFSPU doesn't play in the FX5200. Unfortunately, the newer NFS sucks, it's a game designed for an arcade experience, while NFSPU was designed more like a simulator.

But why, you will ask, is this micro$oft's fault, if Electronic Arts is the company that publishes the NFS series? Because of DirectX. OpenGL games, like "Grand Prix Legends", for instance, keep running in newer hardware and software. It's micro$oft's fault if the DirectX standard changes from one release to the other making older software incompatible. The newer release should be guaranteed to support every single feature in the older version.

Of course, Electronic Arts is also guilty in this case, if an open standard exists, they shouldn't adopt a broken monopolistic standard. Well, I guess I'll never buy another racing simulator again, I'll either get an open source alternative, or pirate the commercial games.

DEM is the work of Bernhard Fastenrath, the poster.

I really wish the default font situation would be better in the world of X and nix/bsd distros.

The problem is that apple and microsoft have both invested a lot of money having people hand-tune their fonts, and do not allow linux distro's to distribute their fonts. But you CAN download and install the windows fonts for free and have identical fonts to your XP setup on your linux box. In debian it's as easy as "apt-get install msttcorefonts". Most distro's have specific one-liners that will install the fonts for you, and there is a more involved generic routine as well.

The open source community does have the bitstream vera fonts to include with distro's, and they are very nice, but they're not quite as good as the windows fonts.

I think it would be nice if the distro's gave you an "install windows fonts" link in the start menu post install. But that's really the only criticism I have of fonts on linux right now. After all, if you have fontconfig installed, installing fonts can be as simple as copying them to the .fonts folder in your home directory.

Here is the announcement BTW.

The scroll event would go to the editor if the cursor was within the editor window. It's nothing that requires "some intelligent window manager"; it would just send the event to whichever window was topmost at that screen coordinate, regardless of focus.

Anyway, as I said before, this could be anything from a feature of Sawfish to a bug in Firefox -- I don't know. But as for scriptability, Sawfish is the Emacs of window managers -- it's got a complete Lisp interpreter embedded in it : )

In that case, I might as well post a link to some screenshots.

If you have a license to use Apple's patents on anti-aliased fonts, then you can rebuild FreeType's Font Engine to support pretty fonts. They switched it off due to legal uncertanities, but it is still included with the source code. You have to edit an header file, determine where your Linux desktop distribution stores FreeType's libraries, remake, and install it (as root) to enable it. That sounds complicated, but it is actually really easy to do. Just follow the instructions; you don't have to be a hacker to do it!

It just keeps getting better: Vladimir Dergachev of the GATOS project (support for the tuner on ATI All-in-Wonder video cards) just announced that he now has write access to the X.org CVS - so he can finally merge GATOS into the mainline X code!

Just think: A day in which support for the tuner on ATI cards is simply in the X server, rather than taking a great deal of pain and suffering to get working!

(Of course, this only applies to cards supported by GATOS, the older cards. But perhaps, just perhaps, if enough people bring pressure to bear upon ATI, then ATI will use the GATOS code to support the newer cards as well.)

if they make it so I can sync with my P900 that'd be a big plus.

If someone could write a Sunbird plug-in for Multisync then you wouldn't only be able to sync with your P900 and many other devices, you would be able to seamlessly switch between Evolution and Sunbird.

Phillip.

With the several websites I run, Safari users rank between 2.5% and 35% of the hits. I'm using awstats to analyze the logs, and it reports Safari users... but I think that if other log analyzers lump Safari users into the Mozilla category, it may disproportionally affect any statistics reporting Mozilla users, no? I mean, Safari and Konquerer are NOT the same as any Mozilla browser, and Safari is the pre-installed Mac browser....

There is such a project in development called Elektra (electra.sourceforge.net). A registry-style configuration database is probably a good idea in theory for *nix, but it's very important to get it right to prevent it from becoming a painful mess... (see Microsoft Windows for an example of such a registry gone mad)

Or do some things work in MSIE but not in other browsers? Or will some things work better if they're told that the visitor is MSIE, even if it's really links or w3m?

Any of this would slant the stats.

Another interesting site is Accelerating Apache Project. I don't know why this approach was rejected by the Apache Group. I used their State Threads Library with success.

Unless the user has used UPX to compress their binaries, or strip to remove debugging data, both completely valid, normal, and reasonable reasons to have different binaries.

You mean multiline string literals?

I thikn there is something called DIBS that does pretty much what you describe.