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Bochs is known to run Win95, I would imagine it would run other Windows flavors as well, perhaps with varying degrees of success.

Wow, no Putty on Mac OS X? Damn, I thought putty ran on everything. There's even a version that runs on my cell phone. No lie, http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/

I started using LaTeX in my freshman Calculus class becuse my writing is illegible - even to me - and trying to do math in Word is just no fun at all. Since then I've found myself using Office less and less. Need a presentation for my Public Speaking class? Forget PowerPoint, use Beamer! Technical manuals for Tech Writing/Editing courses? LaTeX makes it so much easier to do those pesky TOCs, indices, bibliographies, etc. The only thing that can get more difficult is group projects, but I always try to do those by myself anyways.

The only part of Office that I still use for anything is Excel. I had to write a paper for my Algorithms class comparing different all pairs shortest path graph algorithms, so I had my benchmark program output csv files, generated the graphs in Excel, and printed them out to PDF files that I could include in my report. Once I find a good standalone (I don't want another office suite - I only use the spreadsheet!) replacement for Excel, I guess I'm home free!

Well you Unix users feel left out by the annoying paperclip?

Well do not feel left out no more. You too can be annoyed!

Well you Unix users feel left out by the annoying paperclip?

Well do not feel left out no more. You too can be annoyed!

No, you need psDoom. (the Doom interface for process management)

"However, I am curious as to just how accurate the proofreading is."

That's very hard to tell, as there is no gold standard for accuracy. There are two sometimes conflicting goals in regards to accuracy that we have; one is to preserve the author's intent, the other to preserve the actual printed text. At some points these two conflict, for instance, when we would like to normalize spelling to increase readability.

There is currently some talk going on at the DP forums as to which system would be best to eliminate common errors, that everybody tends to overlook.

We already have several systems in place to help us with these. For instance, we use a specially modified font that helps to highlight differences between letters. It's dog ugly, but that's intentional; because it grates, you see errors much more quickly.

Also, once common errors are identified as such, we write software that can help us find such errors.

Finally, we use these new-found methods to look at books we posted to Project Gutenberg in the past, to measure the increase in accuracy.

Anyone know if there is a DLL/print driver available for enabling the Print to PDF in windows? One that *doesn't* require the purchase of PageMaker (which is how I picked it up way back when).

There is also Evidence, the enlightenment file manager. See the Screen Shots and download the release.

There is also Evidence, the enlightenment file manager. See the Screen Shots and download the release.

A great libre project that could be worth the try (even more so if you're into old games) is DOSBox which does a great job simulating a 1990-era DOS machine, using SDL. As it's emulating the CPU, you'll be able to summon it on your reverse-endian architecture. All you need now is a good telnet client.

Overhead for a telnet session, you could object, but as an added bonus you'll be able to reminisce all those 2 and 4 and 16-color days.

Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?

Hey, load up Fink and you can have Enlightenment on your Powerbook. Or any of a bunch of other window managers.

Hey, load up Fink and you can have Enlightenment on your Powerbook. Or any of a bunch of other window managers.

Perhaps this? I can't find the id number, but that seems like a nice guess.

I hope Rasterman has remembered to include plenty of that CPU-crushing eyecandy that was the major (indeed only) feature of earlier releases.
I always found Enlightenment to be the most enjoyable of WMs, as it felt so good when you stopped using it.

Enlightenment - the best advertisement for Ratpoison yet!

I notice everytime I use JAVA, it simply eats processing time, even though I am not currently running anything.

Perhaps you should look a bit closer at the efficiancy of your code. There are plently of Java programs that preform exceptionally. Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net/), for example, is a bit torrent client that balances constant disk i/o, network i/o and lots of arithmatic calculations. It handles a large load with minimal cpu usage compared to the C alternatives.

Well, while we are at it, here is another cheap plug...

http://jimage-mosaic.sourceforge.net/

JImage Mosaic is another open source Photomosaic program, but its written in Java. Inspired by metapixel, not nearly as fast, but its cross-platform.

There are still people worrying with playback control on DVD players?

Media Player Classic

http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

VLC

http://www.videolan.org/

Pick yer platform

WTL indeed started life as VC++ sample code (some four or five years ago), but it is somewhat more than that now. It's a fairly widespread tool, particularly where developers are looking for something more lightweight than MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes). MS has assigned a full-time developer to the project.

There is a WTL mailing list where one can obtain more information (also acessible through the Gmane mail-to-nntp gateway at gamne.comp.windows.wtl), and a WTL area on CodeProject, in addition to the SourceForge WTL page.

I'm a moderator of the Yahoo group, and a developer on the SourceForge project, so I may be a little biased, but I find it to be an extremely useful tool for Windows development.

There was an optional mini-quest involving a lonely, melancholy woman who spent all day near the town shrine, wondering whether her father was still alive. You could offer to help find out what happened to him.

As a 13 year old boy with very little female experience, I was really enraptured by this quest, and made it my top priority! And even though the game engine's reward was (no kidding) a text message of "She moans deeply as you passionately kiss", that was pretty cool. And it's a fond memory to this day.

This phone game is just another way of letting people have fantasies. I don't see the problem, except that "money" is such an important factor.

I've written small servers in java before, and they always got really unreliable after about 2-3 days of running. If I restarted the program, it'd work fine

Then you did something wrong. There's nothing inherent in Java that causes it to be unstable. It's possible you were leaking threads or objects in your program, and that's what caused you problems. I can almost guarantee that you'll run into the same issue with a server written in any other language. C/C++ would be particularly bad, because memory can leak in ways that are nearly undetectable.

If you have an example of a small server, feel free to mail it to me. I'll take a look at it and see if I can spot the problem.

anyway, I need something to search through my logs faster. I'm getting tired of having to jump to the console and do a "cat * | grep what I am looking for"

When you've got 75MB of chat logs in thousands of files, that can take a bit of time.

Fair enough. I still think SQL Server is an overkill, but to each their own. In case you're interestedd, here's a small SQL engine that can be easily embedded into your program.

Isn't "spam firewall" just a marketing term for "filter"?

A spam firewall? Don't they mean an SMTP proxy? Like ASSP

When I looked at Sourceforges projects by languages it came up with:

• C++ - 13440 projects
• C - 13254 projects
• Java - 12436 projects
• PHP - 9201 projects
• Perl - 5321 projects
• Python - 3316 projects

This hardly supports the argument that open source programmers prefer open source languages since none of the source forge crowd's top 3 languages are open source.

Ok here is a live one.

If you want all the nice Java libraries, strong static type-checking, and compilation to JVM bytecode, why not try Nice or Scala? Both provide everything Java has, including the ability just to use arbitrary Java classes and APIs completely transparently - and they add many of the best features of functional programming, and have terser syntaxes than Java too.

Worth considering, anyway.

They started by creating the CPL, getting it certified, and have now been hiring prominent open source developers to work on CPL.

The CPL was not created by Microsoft - as mentioned here, it was created by IBM, and is essentially an updated and generalized version of IBM's original Open Source license, the IBM Public License.

When someone incorporates CPL code, there's no way to prove that they modified it themselves, and so CPL compliance is based entirely on the goodwill of corporations, and we've seen how generous that goodwill is...

Irrelevant - there's no way to prove that someone has incorporated GPL code into a closed source product, short of obvious indicators like embedded strings, etc. GPL compliance is also "based entirely on the goodwill of corporations". The long and the short of the matter is that a company that's willing to knowingly violate the CPL will probably also be willing to knowingly violate the GPL.

The CPL is designed so that companies can take advantage of the work of open source developers without having to compensate them in any way... traditionally, with Open Source, the developers receive the source for their project, and any derivative works.

As is the GPL. Neither the CPL nor the GPL are concerned with the origin of software, they're concerned with the distribution of software. They're both designed to ensure that the recipient of a piece of software has access to the source code. That's it. Nothing in either license about compensating the original developers, or having to give back source code to the original developers. Even you recognize this - while it's "traditional" to contribute back changes to an GPL'd project, it's not required. In fact, the FSF considers this kind of requirement onerous enough that they explicitly classify licenses that have this requirement (for example, the Open Public License) as non-free.

Now, the reason why I bring this all up is that, as mentioned above, Microsoft has been hiring prominent open source developers, having them release their source under the CPL.

...which is bad, why? We're talking about Microsoft's own code, here - it's their choice as to what license they want to release their code under. The CPL is recognized by the OSI. It's acknowledged as a free software license by the FSF, albeit one incompatible with the current GPL because it addresses patent issues that the GPL does not.

In fact, at this point, if there's anyone that's getting a "free ride" off of Microsoft's actions, it's everyone except Microsoft, who now has access to - and can use - Microsoft's CPL software, as is, without any obligation.

Overall, I think this is a positive event. It appears there are OSS advocates (not juse Josh!) within Microsoft who seem to be trying to convince the corporate culture there that OSS is not neccesarily a threat to Microsoft, and they're going about it in a very reasonable way. They selected an existing OSS license instead of coming up with Yet Another License. They released code for a couple of trial projects under this license, and have been following the OSS philosophy of "release early, release often". They've apparently met with enough success with these projects that they feel they have a good reason to actively encourage the release other projects under OSS licenses, and they're asking the community for input on what else to consider releasing

media wiki is built on PHP, served from a webserver and keeps its data in a database. Currently I am running Apache and mysql. I believe their are windows ports of both available, as well php. Here are a few links.

http://us4.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.php
http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/4.0.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikipedia/
http://www.cygwin.com/

I have not heard of anyone installing it on windows, so if you do get it running you may want to consider documenting your results and post it somewhere for others who want to follow in your footsteps. If you decide that it is to much effort, Linux generally installs very well on older hardware that can be had for virtually pennies.

Oh, and I feel safe enough from a slashdotting now that the thread activity has decreased, here is my website http://butsuri.homelinux.net/. It is on a dynamic IP but freely hosted through dyndns.

But it is impossible to write an OS for a x86 with it.

Sure?

First, an initial startup of a JVM does take up a larger memory footprint. But subsequent calls to the JVM do not... it's that initial runtime environment that needs resources. So if you're running several Java apps at a time (such as NetBeans, ConsultComm, Resin and other fun stuff memory and resource allocation is still much more conservative than apps that would exist outside of a runtime environment.

The original abstract windowing toolkit was kludgy, but the advent of the Swing API and the native look-and-feel within Java make things run and look like native apps. And with NetBeans GUI editor I can build windows and forms faster than a VB app in Visual Studio. Plus things are nicely skinnable by using GTK themes, QT themes or a combination of the two.

Plus let's not forget JDBC, something that I just can't live without anymore. Take a single file, drop it into your classpath, and you have instant access to whatever database you want. Want to change your database? No prob. Just drop in a different JAR file as your JDBC driver and tweak your SQL as needed. No connection recoding necessary. Much, much, much better than installing new ODBC drivers.

And system independence isn't to be taken for granted, either. I like being able to just create one package and have it run on my Linux box, then hand it to a WinXP user without recompilation. Keeps my apps easily cross-platform.

Um, yea, as the article states: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/

Um, yea, as the article states: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/

When a teacher submits a paper to turnitin.com the paper is archived indefinitely in their database for comparison to future paper submissions. In nearly all cases this is done without the student's knowledge or permission, which violates that student's copyrights.

Believe me, this technique has pissed me off no end, so much so that I wrote a lengthy essay detailing my criticism, as well as a supporting open source application. I cover a lot of the points mentioned in these comments as well as a few others. Please have a read and comment if you wish. It is an important issue for current and commencing students.

For crying out loud, this is slashdot! Hasn't anyone here ever heard of Gaim? Or for that matter, Gaim-Encryption? I have one cellphone for use with any telcos's subscribers. (and I can take it in my pocket) Same with GAIM for IM.

For crying out loud, this is slashdot! Hasn't anyone here ever heard of Gaim? Or for that matter, Gaim-Encryption? I have one cellphone for use with any telcos's subscribers. (and I can take it in my pocket) Same with GAIM for IM.

Tengo cojones grandes.

Seriously, been feeling the love of Love sources for over a week now, with 60GB of reiser4 goodness.

Mind you, you have to take what the love-sources guys say seriously, about renicing the filesystem process to prevent it from bogging down under load -- but that was all prerelease stuff. Plus, as much as I b0rk that box, the constant rebooting while still mounted can't even dent the fs.

Fantastic.

Google is your friend: SpellBound.

Why can't they just change their compiler to generate managed code? Why do they need to change the syntax of C++ at all? In the open source project I work on we use the Boehm garbage collector for C++. So the number one reason to use managed code, automatic memory management, is already available to us. It would be nice if we could just recompile with some settings under VC++ and get a managed version to compare against Boehm. Of course, we'll need to be able to mix safe and unsafe code as our project is a little heavy on the bit manipulation side.

Gaim does that much already. It even preserves the protocol smilies...and it's all free.

Somehow I doubt they'll do that.

GAIM is another open souce muliplatform and multi IM protocol client.

I use it in Linux and Win, for messaging in MSN, ICQ and Jabber :-)

Gabber, you say?

There is a solution, and it is called PearPC. It is an amazing opensource PowerPC emulator. It's currently fairly slow, e.g. 40 times slower than native speed of your processor, but it works quite well. I am currently running Mac OS 10.3.4 on my X86 Mandrake box. They are working on optimizations and it is getting faster with every release (currently 0.3.0) PearPC

You might want to start here http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/, at the least you'd get both the day & night images.
XPlanet does a wallpaper for X-windows or MS windows that runs in the background and shows day/night illumination plus near real-time cloud cover. Ambitious folks could probably mod it to do the equivalent as a screen saver.

everyone i need to talk to is connected to an IRC network

I hope you use encryption for that.

Actually, you want xplanet. It's more powerful and flexible.

How about a way to run Max OSX apps in Linux???

Well, if you're on a PPC architecture already, there's Mac-On-Linux. Though, I'm sure that by the tone of your comment, you actually meant x86. Well, ask and you shall receive. For the x86 folks (or just about anyone on Linux), there's PearPC. And you know what? They're both open source...

Seriously off-topic - not going to waste karma on this post...

Tried NDISWrapper - and got nowheres. It's a 802.11g Intel Pro Wireless 2200 on an Inspiron 600m. I've been waiting for the ipw2200 official project before I try again w/o the D-Link.

BTW - the laptop itself is damn sweet - Centrino 1.6 Ghz, 1.5 GB RAM, 60 HDD, CD/RW/DVD, dual-head under XWindows as one giant screen... Gbit ethernet... nice.

OpenSceneGraph (http://www.openscenegraph.org) had a pretty good showing at SIGGraph. I attended the BOF (Birds of a Feather) meeting, and presented what my company has done with it.

OSG as it is known is a modified LGPL -- modified to allow code to be included in commercial projects via C++ inline functions, which technically would violate the pure-LGPL stipulation of dynamic-linking only.

OSG is an excellent example of the marriage of commercial/proprietary software and Open Source. Tons of people use OSG to build Open Source and commercial apps. No one minds if my company, or anyone else builds commercial, closed-source apps with OSG, because it's the meat of OSG that is valuable to the community. There may be useful parts in other people's applications, but it's the improvements of the core code that drives the project. If enough closed-source people need the same capability, befor elong, it will ge developed and put into the code OSG project for all to benefit from.

It's a profitable deal for everyone involved, and I think it's a great example of how Open Source and proprietary projects aren't necessarily at odds with each other, and can mutually benefit from their relationship.

The Dell laptop on which I type this is running Fedora Linux - and with only the exception of the integrated wireless card, does an excellent job.

Offtopic... but... I have a Dell 8600 with the Dell TrueMobile 1400 wireless (broadcom) and it works great with the ndis driver wrapper. Not sure if that's what you're using, but just letting you know just in case.

Any month in which a single game worth playing is released for free is a good month. That said, the good folks over at Hack'n'Slash are on their way to delivering. Check it out here. Admittedly, it is an action rpg, not really an adventure game - but I figure that it would appeal to a similar crowd.