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What!!!
Are you saying you have never seen Vigor?!?
You don't need Clippy in a shell, you need him in your editor. Such as Vi...

I've now read through some pretty fanatical fanboy responses. People who have no grip on reality. I've read through some people who think Apple is the cause of all evil, and even a few who think that the Apple has fallen from the tree on this one entirely.

Why should Apple care that Real has released a new firmware for the iPod? Because the iPod is so successful for being intimitely intertwined with iTunes. Apple does this because the number of software releases are remarkably few -- and Apple has the rights to the code to hunt down any problems.

But they're not Apple's iPods! I bought my iPod, I should be able to do what I want! That's fantastic, enjoy. I've heard the ucLinux people have had some fun. Nobody will stop you. Real, on the other hand, is parting people (customers) from their money, and giving them a tangible product. They did not secure the rights or any agreement from Apple that they won't break the product. This means that either Apple has to fight Real's concoction or do more regression testing. There be dragons down the latter of the two if more companies than Real start releasing firmware that consumers think they can install. And what if Real and Microsoft both release their own mutually exclusive firmware? Does Apple get the phonecalls from Ma and Pa (realistically, not too many grandmas own iPods, but I know some parents who do) who want support for both file formats? This is a big financial burden for Apple with no income.

But Apple is evil for invoking the DMCA! Fight the law. The best way to do that in the US justice system is to find an example case that demonstrates it being used poorly, break it, and fight the law in the courts. You may want to get the ACLU involved. Apple has to protect their interests, and their lawyers obviously felt the DMCA was the most straightforward way to do so.

Apple reverse engineered lots of stuff! How hypocritical to bust on Real for reverse engineering! When Apple reverse engineers a protocol for communicating with an Exchange server, the protocols are mostly established, and breaking that protocol involves Microsoft breaking their own clients. In this case, Apple either loses their ability to add functionality for fear of breaking third party unendorsed firmware, or Apple has to make it clear to everybody that this is unsupported and will likely break in the future. Will it really? Who knows. I don't expect Apple to go out of their way to break it but the best thing to do is overestimate the probability just in case.

This is horrible! This is the worst thing Apple has ever done! Well, that's what lots of people said when Apple licensed the one click patent. They're not exactly a perfect company.

Hey, genius.

The evidence doesn't really support your claims. There are many people hacking the iPod every day. There are entire sites about it.

The iPod works seemlessly with Microsoft Windows. Apple even ported their jukebox program over to it! Does that really sound like a company whose motto is "Interoperate And Die!" Jesus.

Why is it that you're lambasting Apple for this particular decision (heavy-handed though it may be), but you haven't raised your voice in protest over their lack of WMA inclusion? Oh, right...they have a vested interest in promoting their own file formats...WHICH IS WHAT THEY'RE DOING RIGHT NOW!

Look...it's hard to laud Apple for this (though some people are trying). I'd much rather have had them do nothing. But really...who cares? Real was stupid to try it.

Hmm Sounds like they would like to go after the FOSS community if somoeone released an updated iPod OS.

Try iPodLinux, at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipodlinux/

Cursed GTK is a text console port of GTK+ ;-)

...you can go full-circle, and use Cursed GTK!

Either I don't understand something but Python has some of the things you say it doesn't:

- class methods - you need to morph the method with classmethod(). Yes, it's terribly awkward. There's discussion
on ways to improve this.

- class variables - they've been around for quite a while (sorry, can't get the indentation to show)

class MyClass( object ):
aClassVariable = 36

def SomeFunc( self ):
print "The class variable is " + str(self.__class__.aClassVariable)

- Python's got private members (via leading "__"). Protected is a leading "_" by convention only (although I think
some forms of import respect it). (You probably knew that one -- just making sure).

- something like strict would be nice. Until then, pychecker will fix you up (http://pychecker.sourceforge.net/). It's basically
a lint for Python. Extremely helpful.

I used to think that checked exceptions were a natural progression but they can be such a pain in practice.

Ah, yes, old content dense games. I, perhaps would not kill, but am partial to commiting lesser atrocities for getting my hands on the MMO version of old gems like Star Control (2 of course). Which is much older, but also quite content dense single player game. One of the best games of all time ever made too. :) Hopefully the Ur-Quan Masters project will take that direction somewhere after the 1.0 release. It could grow into something as fabulous as this MMO remake of the Pirates! While there is in currently made games, and games of old that can be improved in terms of appeal for both casual and hard core gamers, there are also a lot of good ideas, that can be taken from them.

I'm helping to work out a web portal for an international nonprofit org, and we sure could use some packages to help with admin.

We're not pro coders, just interested neophytes. So far we've rolled out own with PHP/MySQL based site, with self made template main pages, phpMyAdmin, phpbb conferencing, LinPHA photo album, and some other stuff.

Getting it all to work together and getting the config for each done has proven to be a great DIY project, but it sure is a long road. It's been in process for quite awhile, and we're still not ready to open to our public.

It would have been great to have a package to start with, so that we could use it to create a site to do the stuff that our nonprofit was created to do. As it is, maybe we'll be able to contribute back to the OSS community by virtue of releasing a finished site, if we ever get that far. Yeah, I know this is a whine.

fwiw, we looked at Compiere ERP + CRM, http://sourceforge.net/projects/compiere//
Lots of features. Too business oriented.

As far as the metadata side of the linux.com article is concerned,
many of the things talked about have been implemented and working
nicely in libferris for
quite a while now

Most filesystems these days support EA (ext3, xfs, Reiser etc) the
trick is having the system do something interesting for you with that
EA capability automatically. This is another area where libferris
helps, making EA that is trapped in files available aswell and
providing indexing over your EA. (A catch-22 is that EA for files is
supported in many kernel level filesystems but can be very slow
relative to even file access, you have to index EA in some way in
order to search for your files based on queries over your metadata).

Supporting ACID at the libferris level is a pending challenge.

Thank goodness for Sarien.

Haha, 3D and 1600x1200 graphics are what we dreamed of ages ago with all those migs and megs... and now that we have it all I want to do is play Cosmic Relief, Zak McCracken, Cliff Hanger, Below the Root, Realms of Impossibility, Killed Until Dead, and the like.

Trouble is, having so many classic games to choose from I end up not playing any one game for more than 30 seconds.

Still, it is nice to just look at the amazing graphics. I <3 big blocky pixels.

"We've considered archiving our video in some kind of compressed streaming format like AVI, Quicktime, or MPEG-2, but none of these offer lossless codecs that are appropriate for us, and we're unwilling to accept using a lossy compressor."

Try Huffyuv. Fast, free, and comes with full source. I'm sure any capable programmer can make it work under Linux.

Actually, ffmpeg, which is a video codec library for Linux, already supports it completetly: both encoding and decoding.

Actually, the FFV1 lossless codec in ffmpeg compresses better than huffyuv.

And the text above should also provide some initial insight in why stuff like this is not in the filesystem, and better taken care of on application level...

Of course it makes a lot of sense. There's a ripe market for a public wiki a la friendster, tribe.net, or linkedin.

There's a ton of wiki engines out there, not least MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia. Almost any one would be sufficient to make a good social networking site.

All that's needed is some effort to make it happen.

Ada, Assembler (NASM, MASM), AutoIt, Avenue, Batch files (MS-DOS), Baan, Bash, Bullant, C/C++/C#, CSS, diff files, E-Script, Eiffel, Erlang, Fortran, Forth, HTML (with embedded JavaScript, VBScript, PHP and ASP), IDL - both MSIDL and XPIDL, Java, JavaScript, LISP, LOT, Lout, Lua, Make, Matlab, Metapost, MMIXAL, nnCron, NSIS, Octave, Pascal/Delphi, Perl (most of it except for some ambiguous cases), PostScript, POV-Ray, Python, Ruby, Scheme, scriptol, Specman E, SQL and PLSQL, TeX and LaTeX, Tcl/Tk - using the cpp lexer, VB and VBScript, Verilog, XML, YAML

Have you had a look at SQUASHFS? It is great for archive purposes, which may be what you need for video you don't new frequently.

• MP3Gain at Sourceforge"

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

First off, I think Netscape on a linux box is just *wrong*. It offers no extras over mozilla, and because of all the bloat it's a little more unstable.

Second, I've used Gaim for quite a while and haven't turned back. I've tried aol's linux IM, but it really sux compared to Gaim... but I guess that's just one man's opinion.

/nova20

However in voting systems systems there can legally and technically be only one "ballot". And that is a piece of paper deposited in a ballot box. The "voting workstation" role in that scenario is to act merely as an audit for the paper ballots.

Furthermore let each voter have as many ballot "receipts", with whatever results on them that they want. That way voters are free from coercion or corruption. They can sell as many of these "fake" receipts as they want. Only the state voting commission server would know which had been cast as the official ballots, and which "receipts" were sham "receipts".

Please see for just such a solutionThere is also an OSS project underway to provide just such a system at Sourceforge. Any volunteers?

The Epic plugin provides a basic Perl perspective for the Eclipse IDE. Basic syntax-coloring is provided, along with syntax checking, content assist, outline mode and other stuff.

pydev and TruStudio give some hope for turning Eclipse into a Python IDE.

Barely less than a week ago, I bought a Sony Vaio VGN-S150 laptop, to replace an old HP Omnibook subnotebook running Linux. I wanted something that was small-ish but had more than 1024*768 pixels on the panel. The VGN-S150 is a "mid-size" laptop, with a panel resolution of 1280*800 and absolutely amazing brightness and clarity.

I was aware that Sony had a poor reputation for reliability and suport when I bought it. However, since I don't tend to abuse my machines, I don't anticipate needing to deal with Sony. If the machine craps out, it will be because the machine is legitimately a lemon, and that fact should be revealed within the one-year warranty period.

I'm finding, much to my delight, that the VGN-S150 is turning out to be a rather fine Linux laptop. The ATI graphics drivers, both XFree86 and radeonfb, can drive the odd panel resolution directly without complaint, so I get to use all the pixels. The internal 802.11g card, with the Intel 2200BG driver, appears to work fine (although Kismet isn't talking to it). I have yet to get sound working, and I'm still trying to get ACPI standby/suspend to work. Elsewise, it's just lovely. Once I get Linux fully working, I'll do a write-up for the TuxMobil pages.

Schwab

To be fair, Visual Studio .NET (2002 edition and higher) has Perl, Python, and XSLT , and there's also PHP available. I've personally used all of these when on Windows, and the quality is pretty nice. Komodo always seemed to have problems on my 'slow' 600Mhz computer with speed. It'd take far too long to do anything, with a great deal of lag inherent in using the Mozilla codestuff to make such an IDE, though on Linux I almost always use KDevelop or Anjuta, which I believe support several of the mentioned languages.

Ever since I switched from Perl and PHP to Python I've been looking for the perfect Python IDE. Kokodo 3.0 looks interesting. I think ActiveState does a nice job and the folks there put together what I think are the best Perl and Python installations for Windows (although I don't normally use Windows). I like the Komodo Tcl based designer for the the cross platform abilities but the resulting apps always look too "old". If Komodo used XUL and Mozilla to create gui apps then I would be really impressed.

So I have yet to find the perfect Python IDE but here's a start.

Kdevelop is very robust but is more focussed C++.
Leo isn't pretty but the outlining features are very cool.
BoaConstructor hold lots of promise for better cross platform support, zope support, a debugger and form designer but the project seems to have stalled.
Eric might be my best bet with project mgt, CVS/Subversion and Qt-Designer but I've encountered stability problems.

Actually I wish I could have something with the feature set of Eric with the stability, speed and maturity of Kdevelop plus Leo's outlining abilities. Oh yea, and I'd really like an form designer that uses XUL and Mozilla for building cross platform GUIs. ;-)

I am not sure why most feel the absolute need to have a full IDE. Code highlighting is usually good enough.

I use Scite which supports syntax highlighting and support for more than a dozen languages, including commong config files like Apache. It does code folding, block comments along with compiler output and most of the normal features of an IDE but it is very light weight.

Besides I do not want evaluate something and then get the features cut or it stops functioning if I do not buy it.

The bigger difference is that Mac users still don't mind paying for a product, Linux users have never cared for paying for a product...

The real issue with commercial software on Linux is, does it add value or features that I do not have from current F/OSS software. For the majority of the $5 - $50 "shareware" crap on MS windows, the answer would be _no_. However, there are plenty of professional, top-notch closed/proprietary applications only available under MS Windows that would do just as well on Linux if Linux has a large desktop market share.

I know a bunch of non-technical Linux users would love quality applications that made some hard task eaiser. For example, imagine if there were an easy to use firewall app for Linux such as Kerio Personal Firewal, or Sygate pro for the average, non-techy Linux user (the best and easiest I have found is FireStarter. How about a nice, easy to use DVD/Media player that doesn't require you to download Win32 DLL's and place them in /usr/lib/win32 (MPlayer, Xine) to be able to play current media? There is a market for commercial Linux applications. Those applications won't have the same easy ride under MS windows, they will have to add value/features not available in current F/OSS offerings to compete.

See:
http://openwrt.ksilebo.net/
http://www.linksysinfo.com/
http://www.sveasoft.com/modules/phpBB2/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wifi-box/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/newbroadcom
etc.

It is Linux, and more or less Linux is equal to Linux. Many people are good in Linux development and administration ;-)

See:
http://openwrt.ksilebo.net/
http://www.linksysinfo.com/
http://www.sveasoft.com/modules/phpBB2/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wifi-box/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/newbroadcom
etc.

It is Linux, and more or less Linux is equal to Linux. Many people are good in Linux development and administration ;-)

Yeah, unfortunately, most IrDA transmitters in PDA type hardware isn't strong enough to control AV equipment very well. You end up having to get really close to the TV to use the PDA (or cellphone) based remote, and at that point you can just stick your arm out and use the buttons.

I've tried using various AV remote software on Palm 3, Palm V, and (most recently) my Nokia 3650 phone. The results have always been disappointing.

On the other hand, a Bluetooth based remote would rock.

(Warning: beer-swilling geek trivia/rambling follows)

When I throw a party, I hook my laptop's video out up to my TV, audio to the stereo, and load up a 3-5 hour playlist and some XMMS visualizations. With Bemused and KDE Bluetooth, I can control the media player from my Nokia from anywhere in my apartment. Line-of-sight is not necessary, so I can be in the bathroom vomiting and queue up my favorite vomit music with ease.

It would be great if I could control my regular AV setup with Bluetooth. I could do it from my PC, laptop, cellphone, PDA, or whatever else. Even better would be something like this, but more universal. It would be great if I could stream audio from my PC to my stereo via Bluetooth, controlled by another BT device.

Be even better if BT had enough bandwidth to do video.

for the Linux guru's to start an "OpenNAVITUS" project, complete with remote terminal and gui console for a Freevo setup!

Just a shameless plug for Freevo, the free Linux PC media platform.

but IMHO Gentoo could really use a decent installer.
gentoo installer project
GLIS
gentoo anaconda

My particular itch has nothing to do with programming.

Hey, that's wonderful! Totally useless to most of the world, of course. But I'll bet you get lots of praise from the small crowd that's interested in the history of Central America.

One suggestion: In the News list, you should include the long-count date along with the Gregorian date. Maybe both in Arabic numbers and in glyphs. Putting the glyphs in stela form to the left of the news would be very cool.

Several years ago, I added a gimmick to my personal web site that simply converts Arabic numbers to Mayan numbers. No need to link to it, I suppose; anyone interested probably knows where it is. I like to describe it as "my entry in the ongoing competition for most useless web page".

I think I'll add your link to my page. ... There; it's done.

I wonder if anyone has yet put up a page that does such conversions for a long list of number and calendar systems? If so, I'm not guessing the right keywords to feed google. There is a site that does Roman-system conversion, a Hebrew-to-Gregorian date converter, and a Chinese-to-Gregorian converter. I don't seem to see any site that does more than one.

There's a conceptually similar site out there, which takes measurements in any of a long list of units and converts them to any of the other units. One of my favorite is the conversion between fluid ounces and cubic attoparsecs. These differ only in the third decimal place, of course, which is one of the more amusing coincidences in the insanity of measurement systems.

It's hard to imagine corporate support for any of these things.

I had the exact same phone until I dropped it. What a shame, that phone had awesome battery life and great signal stregnth. My past 3 phones had been Sanyo candy-bar style phones and got great reception, but i missed the coolness factor of my old samsung flip-phone (not the reception tho). I decided to replace the broken 4900 with another sanyo, the SCP-8100. This phone is a color flip with camera and vision. The 4 factors for buying this phone were:

1. Vision
2. Use same date cable from 4900
3. Great sanyo reception
4. Flip (yay, I'm r33t now!)

What I didnt take into account was how much battery that thing would suck up. The camera was cool for like a week until I figured how lame the QVGA pics were, but I still post to my moblog just for the hell of it. Anyway, I have to charge this puppy every night and I only talk on it maybe an hour a day, do maybe 10 shortmails (fake SMS), and connect it to the laptop about once a week for email on the go.

What was this thread about again? Oh yeah, PDAs. Um, keeping on topic, if you have a phone and a data cable, you may want to check out bitpim. Its can access your phones calander, phone book, pictures, etc... worth checking out Jeff DeMaagd as its compatible with the 4900.

Now if only sprint would embrace the MS Smartphones, I would love to get a windows mobile phone that could sync with exchange and open word docs. Er, I mean, so I could put linux on it, sync with sendmail, and use vi. right ;)

Give me $600 for this phone.

I'm sure you have heard of Creative Commons. Get a license, let somebody hang it in his/her server, and send an e-mail to Anthony from iRATE Radio. Bingo, people like me will hear, enjoy (and rate) your music :)

I'd like to rebut the major points of this article:

1. "If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it": As an Open Source developer myself, I can understand the sentiment, even though I do disagree with the way some people state it.

   Most Open Source projects are the work of only a handful of people at best -- and not all of those people are coders. In my project (the jSyncManager), we have a total of TWO primary coders for the core project. And sometimes a user will suggest a feature or enhancement that, while useful or cool to do, is something we just don't have the time nor developer resources to complete.

   Two recent Requests For Enhancement illustrate this well. The first is a feature that would take a decent amount of work, and for which the end result, while interesting, would be useful to a very small minority of users, making it a very low priority item we may never get around to implementing. The second requires skills the existing developers don't possess (internationalizing into other languages. The code itself is already internationalized, but needs more translations).

   In these cases all I can do is tell the requestors that while I'd like to add the functionality they're requesting, we simply don't have the development capacity to consider them right now. However, if they're willing to offer any help, we'd be happy to accept it.

   The sentiment is analogous -- I just try to phrase it in a much less confrontational manner. Open Source developers don't have unlimited resources to implement everything -- any project of any significant size needs to ultimately rely on volunteers.

2. "Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems": The article author here is trying to extrapolate their experience as being universal, and I just don't buy it. I've tinkered with a number of Open Source projects. Anyone who has ever ported an Open Source project from one platform to another has had to go under the hood to tinker with it in order to get it to work on a system with a different set of assumptions and/or features.

   And just because you haven't done so yet doesn't mean you never will. Yes, it's sometimes better to get the core developers to implement a fix or change because you don't want to figure out their code (I often dispair the level of code commenting in OSS projects...), or to ensure that the modification becomes part of the default install of the subsystem. But what happens if you need an innocous modification to fit your special needs, and the core developers are unable or unwilling to implement it? Doesn't it make you feel better knowing that you can fix the software to suit your needs if absolutely necessary? Or of being able to hire anyone you choose to fix it for you?

3. "All software should be free": Okay, perhaps not all software should be free. However, the comparisons drawn to art are incorrect. Works of art are usually the efforts of single individuals, where each copy is either unique, or a licensed reprint. Software is different, in that any given project is usually the work of multiple developers anyhow. Van Gogh could afford to take his time painting sunflowers -- the end result would be a unique work that can be apperciated for centuries. Software doesn't have the benifit of taking its time -- the things we develop are the things we need TODAY, so speed is of the essence. You can't afford to take ten years to write and release your software, because by the time you're finished it may no longer be needed (in the case of the jSyncManager, if we were to take ten years to complete our software, we could wind up in the situation where the PalmOS-based hardware we synchronize

I'd like to rebut the major points of this article:

1. "If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it": As an Open Source developer myself, I can understand the sentiment, even though I do disagree with the way some people state it.

   Most Open Source projects are the work of only a handful of people at best -- and not all of those people are coders. In my project (the jSyncManager), we have a total of TWO primary coders for the core project. And sometimes a user will suggest a feature or enhancement that, while useful or cool to do, is something we just don't have the time nor developer resources to complete.

   Two recent Requests For Enhancement illustrate this well. The first is a feature that would take a decent amount of work, and for which the end result, while interesting, would be useful to a very small minority of users, making it a very low priority item we may never get around to implementing. The second requires skills the existing developers don't possess (internationalizing into other languages. The code itself is already internationalized, but needs more translations).

   In these cases all I can do is tell the requestors that while I'd like to add the functionality they're requesting, we simply don't have the development capacity to consider them right now. However, if they're willing to offer any help, we'd be happy to accept it.

   The sentiment is analogous -- I just try to phrase it in a much less confrontational manner. Open Source developers don't have unlimited resources to implement everything -- any project of any significant size needs to ultimately rely on volunteers.

2. "Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems": The article author here is trying to extrapolate their experience as being universal, and I just don't buy it. I've tinkered with a number of Open Source projects. Anyone who has ever ported an Open Source project from one platform to another has had to go under the hood to tinker with it in order to get it to work on a system with a different set of assumptions and/or features.

   And just because you haven't done so yet doesn't mean you never will. Yes, it's sometimes better to get the core developers to implement a fix or change because you don't want to figure out their code (I often dispair the level of code commenting in OSS projects...), or to ensure that the modification becomes part of the default install of the subsystem. But what happens if you need an innocous modification to fit your special needs, and the core developers are unable or unwilling to implement it? Doesn't it make you feel better knowing that you can fix the software to suit your needs if absolutely necessary? Or of being able to hire anyone you choose to fix it for you?

3. "All software should be free": Okay, perhaps not all software should be free. However, the comparisons drawn to art are incorrect. Works of art are usually the efforts of single individuals, where each copy is either unique, or a licensed reprint. Software is different, in that any given project is usually the work of multiple developers anyhow. Van Gogh could afford to take his time painting sunflowers -- the end result would be a unique work that can be apperciated for centuries. Software doesn't have the benifit of taking its time -- the things we develop are the things we need TODAY, so speed is of the essence. You can't afford to take ten years to write and release your software, because by the time you're finished it may no longer be needed (in the case of the jSyncManager, if we were to take ten years to complete our software, we could wind up in the situation where the PalmOS-based hardware we synchronize

Two programs I regularly use are Fire and Meteorologist. Fire is the best multi-service chat app for OS X (IMHO) and Meteorologist is the best menubar/dock weather app. As for them being OSS, I usually toss the source code as soon as I download these programs, because I can't do anything with it. I just want to USE THE SOFTWARE. I will report bugs that I find, but I can't do anything to fix them. I do this with non-OSS software too. The CAD software I use at work has some very responsive developers, and I've gotten patches to bugs I've found within a few days.

I am tired of hearing all these arguments that the people who download and use open source software are all going to edit the code and contribute to the project. Here's a clue, WE'RE NOT ALL PROGRAMMERS, but some of us are savvy power users who just want the best software for the job. Most people who download open source software have no idea what it means, nor do they care about proprietary data formats, full control of their system, running in a CLI, or being part of a community. They just want software that does what they want.

Two programs I regularly use are Fire and Meteorologist. Fire is the best multi-service chat app for OS X (IMHO) and Meteorologist is the best menubar/dock weather app. As for them being OSS, I usually toss the source code as soon as I download these programs, because I can't do anything with it. I just want to USE THE SOFTWARE. I will report bugs that I find, but I can't do anything to fix them. I do this with non-OSS software too. The CAD software I use at work has some very responsive developers, and I've gotten patches to bugs I've found within a few days.

I am tired of hearing all these arguments that the people who download and use open source software are all going to edit the code and contribute to the project. Here's a clue, WE'RE NOT ALL PROGRAMMERS, but some of us are savvy power users who just want the best software for the job. Most people who download open source software have no idea what it means, nor do they care about proprietary data formats, full control of their system, running in a CLI, or being part of a community. They just want software that does what they want.

"Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems"
How is this a myth? Nothing prevents me from doing it, whether I want to is my choice. And those that do are always going to be in the minority.

"All software should be free"
Aaaagh. How many times do we have to reiterate it, not as in beer? Another "software is manufacture" argument.

"Scratching the personal itch"
So the desire to rule out leeching wasn't a valid itch in the case of bittorrent. Or the wish for a fast uncomplicated window manager made blackbox the choice of only programmers. My particular itch has nothing to do with programming. This might have made sense maybe five years ago, now it's laughably easy to shoot down.

"More choice is always better"
This is a bad way to put it. "A bunch of bad choices is worse than a few good ones" is a better argument, and has much better application to software.

This was lazily written and needed more thought before /. got hold of it. Bad move :)

Yes, I agree, that the UNIX'y way of things is showing it's age.

I mean, there have been some really good efforts to de-unixify unix, such as the STEP's (NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, Rhapsody, OS X)
how many normal users are going to figure out what /bin /usr /var /etc /sbin mean?
I know a at least two Linux distros that are going to attempt to fix this, GenSTEP and Komodo

from what I have seen and heard from the developers, the release looks to be very promising in terms of leaving behind the old timey UNIX guts, and looking like a modern, well designed OS.

SHAMELESS PLUG TERMINATED

> Name me five open source products that aren't simply
> a clone of a commercial products.

Pick any five you like

In software business it's all about implementing the 10 or 20 things users want to do with their computers, so i don't expect very much "really new" software, be it OS or CS, since VisiCalc and Mosaic :-)

oh, the joys of google!

someone tried to write such an emulator. gave up, though. He wasn't writing a virtualization layer, like I think you're proposing though, rather a complete emulator.

Ratpoison is the only window manager anyone needs.

It's called Fluxbox.

star wars pre se ld

WHile it will be pissed away at first, somebody will suddenly come up with an innovative idea that requires hire speed. It will go beyond simple transfer of a ripped(-off) movie or music. But it will happen.

Has already happened: clusters become much more effective as the speed of communication between individual nodes increases.

Imagine buying a future with nearly every computer running some kind of clustering software, forming a worldwide supercomputer with their spare resources. Imagine what you could do with such a thing.

We'd need 256 bytes just for process identifiers ;).

<a href="http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/docs/artwiz-f onts.php">Artwiz Fonts</a>

Uhhhhh....no

Us geeks without girlfriends, our pr0n usage scales O(n^2) with bandwidth. So if there's one thing we want, it's more bandwidth, and better compression.

And some of us are teenagers.

Bah. Get prboom. 1600x1200 OpenGL Doomy Goodness.

Basically, yes. Some have argued that the odds are tiny that hostile aliens would harass Earth even if they wanted to, but the counter-argument is that we have no defense against any ET advanced enough to even get here in the first place, so why take any chances, no matter how small?

Also, there are counter-arguments to support the position that any ETs that went to the trouble to come here would actually be likely to be hostile.

Obviously no one really knows either way, but prudence essentially costs nothing.

The Ur'Quan Masters