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Why stop at Konq for X11? I'd love to see Konq Embedded or whatever variant is best suited for the task ported to Windows as well as general *NIX usage!

Seriously, it would make another great alternative browser to IE, along with Firefox and Opera. One guy started a port but got waylaid. If any skilled C++ developers are reading and interested in a project, there you go :).

2. Create a full-text index in real-time of every page that has been browsed. When the user visits any web page, display a sidebar of "Related previously-viewed pages."

see http://pychelsea.sourceforge.net/

God, I love watching you young kids.

You mean "MACSYMA, the ancestor of things like Maple and Mathematica".

Look at this or this, or this.

That last, "Maxima", is an open-source version. Not quite as slick as the commercial one, but not half bad.

sort of.
if you are talking dial-up, then it's going to take a while for your node to learn the neighborhood; you would probably want to turn it on and run FROST for about an hour; you still are going to have problems getting to some freesites. You will also want to go into your default.ini file and change transient=false to true.

BTW, when people are saying FREENET is not searchable, they are mainly wrong; the Internet isn't searchable, or at least most search engines don't search it the way it would be searchable, by hitting every IP address. It's searchable because search engines go to known sites, index those, and follow the links it just found to other sites, rinse, wash, repeat. You have the same thing going on in freenet, with tools like spider.

If you are expecting freenet to act like emule or gnutella, don't. it's not. If you mainly want to trade files, run frost, it's sort of like using USENET.

Freenet is actually still working pretty well, BTW.
The developers have a nasty tendency to come out with a working build, wait about 2-4 weeks, then come out with a non-working build. the last 6 stable releases have all worked about as well as any have in the past, and we are WAY overdue for the must upgrade non-working build.
Frost is even working pretty good; it has unnecessary libraries (why, exactly, do you need to format the messages in XML? what was wrong with TXT?), and is about 2mb more bloated than the may 9th, 2003 build which worked better, but it DOES work.

There is one alternative called Mute, which solves one key problem with Freenet or Entropy which is that it is searchable.

Just to bite the Java troll, may I cite the example of Azureus as an example of a Java program done right(tm). Runs fast, is responsive and doesn't use the godawful swing toolkit (it uses SWT instead).

Yeah, but everyone does that more than they do other things and should be using free software for it. Microsoft should not be used for anything that touches the web and should be run virtualized of firewalled heavily if not blinded to your network.

Dual booting solves the game problem and more often than not, the games are moving to Linux anyway. Dual booting is a pain and best done with bios or swapable hard drives unless Winblows requires a rebuild. At the same time, Windows gaming, with all of it's Direct X dll hell has always been a pain under winblows, so gamers should not have a big problem with your proposition.

Until it is possible to run practically any Windows software under Linux with no problems, the most you are going out of the majority of home users is a dual-boot, if that. Certainly not complete swap-outs.

Bah. I've been swapped out for years now. There's enough "good enough" free software for everything. Let me tell you, it all runs much more practically and easier than Windoze junk ever did.

A nice little program called Bosch can solve the rest of the world's windoze problems. Check out these screenshots for yourself:

Official shots
XP running in Bosch under Linux

It may be slow and hurt, but it's way easier to do that than it is to keep a real windoze machine going with email, web browsing and all of those other things Windoze is not good at.

Just wondering; have you tried Ogle or Xine? IIRC they both support DVD menus...

Just as Mozilla gains market share, I am starting to see Netscape re-apear in my server logs, Mine aren't public but these guys are.

If MS doesn't issue a quick fix for IE then people may perminately switch to Mozilla or Opera. As many companies know, customers don't think about product loyalty when a better cheaper product comes around.

This time MSIE is so far behind, And people are beginning to know, when your average joe (for whom your product is designed) decided not to use, or more importantly buy your product, then you have a problem.

... your code eventually boils down to machine language

A person who can agree with both statements has clearly accepted one intermediate language (in this case C) as a firewall between the programmer and the machine language. The same person may also be aware that the machine language is yet another proxy, this time hiding the circuitry within the microprocessor. At any rate the person has rightfully dismissed the direct, exclusive use of the machine language --- or even electronics --- as realistic for providing web services.

If you can accept being one or two layers removed from the bare hardware, the next step is inevitable. Pending on a demand from the complexity of the system to be built, there are no problems and only benefits adding a third layer. (Of course if the system is trivial, like Hello World, anyone can write it in the machine language and have it correct, optimal, and maintainable.)

Indeed a web server has been written in Haskell [link]. Haskell, in turn, has compile-to-C compilers. This example happens to use the machine-C-Haskell layering; the idea is the same with other languages and numbers of layers.

To debug the system, the C compiler team debugs the C compiler, the Haskell compiler team debugs the Haskell-to-C compiler, and finally the webserver author debugs the 2000 lines of Haskell code he writes. If the system is large enough, this partitioning of labour is the only way (the monolithic, one-man alternative is out of the question).

To optimize the system, there is the theoretically optimal way of optimizing a web server written entirely and directly in the machine language, or the practical, sub-optimal way of asking the C compiler team, the Haskell compiler team, and the webserver author to do their respective parts in writing good-enough code or generating good-enough translations. It is clear which one is realistic when the system is extremely large.

The hard work put into the compilers benefits many projects, and the cost is amortized.

Jesus has nothing to do with spam filtering. Please keep your religious brainwashing to yourself.

Spam filtering is a whole lot more than just using some blacklist and assuming anything from that mail server is spam. Sure, that's what some places do. "Ooooh, look, 1.2.3.4 spammed, lets block 1.2.0.0/16"

Have you even looked at the SpamAssassin page, before making yourself look like an idiot? It checks the header, body, blacklists, and Vipul's Razor.

Generally, it's score is based on the subject and body of the message, not the server it came from.

For a long time, we didn't use any blacklists. I added a few, and ended up blocking more "good" messages than it should have (>1). SpamCop is the only one which I see being consistantly good at their blacklisting, so we volunteered a mirror for them. Sometimes we use it, sometimes we don't, it all depends on my mood.

Obviously Gmail is doing something of this sort, but is not up to the quality of SpamAssassin (yet).

Jesus has nothing to do with spam filtering. Please keep your religious brainwashing to yourself.

Spam filtering is a whole lot more than just using some blacklist and assuming anything from that mail server is spam. Sure, that's what some places do. "Ooooh, look, 1.2.3.4 spammed, lets block 1.2.0.0/16"

Have you even looked at the SpamAssassin page, before making yourself look like an idiot? It checks the header, body, blacklists, and Vipul's Razor.

Generally, it's score is based on the subject and body of the message, not the server it came from.

For a long time, we didn't use any blacklists. I added a few, and ended up blocking more "good" messages than it should have (>1). SpamCop is the only one which I see being consistantly good at their blacklisting, so we volunteered a mirror for them. Sometimes we use it, sometimes we don't, it all depends on my mood.

Obviously Gmail is doing something of this sort, but is not up to the quality of SpamAssassin (yet).

My native is Russian and when I had decided to learn English well, I looked around for Linux apps and couldn't find what I wanted. So I wrote a coupe of applications myself.

granule is my indexcard program. It's UTF-8, so you can use and keyboard bindings you want.

gwavmerger is a memory-training program targeted for learing foreign languages. All you need is a microphone and a sound card to make your own lessons for your own level. I tried to explain the process in its manual.

I have been using both programs on a daily basis for several years now and they helped me to make a giant leap towards my goals.

For an on-line dictionary I highly recommend StarDict.

The skeleton of studying any foreign language is, of course, its grammar. Don't overlook it.

Don't believe all the BS teachers say about submerging into the environment and making friends with native-speakers. It is all baloney. Grammar, and daily practice of memorizing words and text senteces will do the trick.

Hope this helps,

--3rdShift

My native is Russian and when I had decided to learn English well, I looked around for Linux apps and couldn't find what I wanted. So I wrote a coupe of applications myself.

granule is my indexcard program. It's UTF-8, so you can use and keyboard bindings you want.

gwavmerger is a memory-training program targeted for learing foreign languages. All you need is a microphone and a sound card to make your own lessons for your own level. I tried to explain the process in its manual.

I have been using both programs on a daily basis for several years now and they helped me to make a giant leap towards my goals.

For an on-line dictionary I highly recommend StarDict.

The skeleton of studying any foreign language is, of course, its grammar. Don't overlook it.

Don't believe all the BS teachers say about submerging into the environment and making friends with native-speakers. It is all baloney. Grammar, and daily practice of memorizing words and text senteces will do the trick.

Hope this helps,

--3rdShift

This does not seem to have been posted yet...

I've you really want to have GLP'd QT on Win32 help out here...

Otherwise stop moaning about it.

The Kernel Instrumentation Process has already started creating the foundation for a kind of dtrace functionality. The profiling mechanisms appear to echo some of what Sun has done to Solaris to enable this kind of process-less profiling. Hope someone is still pushing this along...

DaGoodBoy

I don't know what you use for default settings for reading Slashdot comments, but I read at threshold 3, nested, and highest comments first... the nested option makes it a lot easier to read.

A place to submit feature requests is at Slashcode sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

More slashcode stuff at the Slashcode site. Dunno if you can submit bug reports and feature requests there though.

Cheers.

FreeBSD also has the NDISulator that loads pretty much any Win32 NIC driver built in.

And Linux has NdisWrapper.

Microsoft open source developers would think about start accepting donations.

The only part that appears to have been eaten by HTML is the foreach macro, since you have already found the execinfo header. So I'll reprint it:

#define foreach(t,i,c) for(t i = c.begin(); i != c.end(); ++ i)
foreach (array::iterator, i, container)
modify (*i);

It prevents infinite loops and buffer overruns, because the range is obtained from the container, and the increment is autogenerated. I use it all the time; it is included in the uSTL library.

No, you cited an example, not the actual definition.

The "writing your own program" part is not part of the definition.

And no, it does not neccesarily mean decompiling. Decompiling is only one method of reverse-engineering. Examining the program by comparing input/output is another one.
Perhaps you'd never use a decompiler to reverse-engineer anything, but I'm guessing that you haven't either. There are many cases in which you can't use that method, or that method is simply to difficult.

But the actual code-writing is not part of the reverse-engineering process. Writing code is engineering. You're not reversing anything!

It's called 'reverse-engineering' because engineering is the process of going from an idea to a concrete thing, like an actual program or a bridge or a car.
Reverse-engineering is the study of the engineering product in order to figure out which ideas were behind it, reversing the process. Hence the name.

Some real-life examples:
Samba is an implementation of the Windows SMB protocl based on reverse-engineering. This was done through packet analysis, not through decompilation. It is therefore also 'clean room', because they haven't seen any actual code.

Hatari, an Atari ST emulator I've contributed to, has emulation of the Atari hard drive hardware which I coded after reverse-engineering the hard-drive interface protocol. Not having an actual Atari hard-drive to test on, or a full protocol spec, I did this through disassembling and studying the driver software. It is not clean-room, since I saw the other guy's code.

(However this is not a legal problem, because A) I didn't implement a driver, rather I implemented the 'hardware' part in software. and B) I didn't use any of their code and C) Nobody cares anymore anyway.)

Classpath, an reimplementation of the Java class libraries, is 'clean room'. Sun distributes its sources to these, but noone is allowed to contribute to Classpath if they have seen them, or if they've decompiled them. The Classpath project itself is not reverse-engineering. Although some reverse-engineering is probably done by means of writing small test programs to clarify omissions from Suns Java Specification.

Decompiling is not in itself cracking. "Cracking" depending on what meaning you chose, can mean many things, among others the removal of copy protection from software.
I've did so myself back in my Atari years. Cracking is a form of reverse-engineering, and usually (but not always) entails using a disassembler. The only difference between cracking and traditional reverse-engineering is the intent.

And in the USA this is also a legal difference: The DMCA prohibits reverse-engineering with the intent to circumvent a copyright-protection device. It expressly allows it in order to achieve interoperability.

If you're European, you can look at directive 91-250-EEC of the EEC (now EU), Article 6. This legislation has been implemented in laws of all member states, and it expressly allows decompilation for interoperability purposes.

I frequently endup using reformatting tools for bad code that i get handed to. I mostly use: indent (probably already installed on your machine), AStyle (far better than indent), and perlTidy, there's more xxxTidy programs like html/php, etc have a look on google... there's probably dozen of flavors around.

I frequently endup using reformatting tools for bad code that i get handed to. I mostly use: indent (probably already installed on your machine), AStyle (far better than indent), and perlTidy, there's more xxxTidy programs like html/php, etc have a look on google... there's probably dozen of flavors around.

scite would beat notepad and take the throne itself and you know it.

I have yet to see any program, free or non-free, compare to Dreamweaver.
Quanta really isn't bad.

Visual Studio is the best development suite I've used.
I'm hooked on Anjuta. Others may prefer KDevelop.

Or Matlab.
Octave completely replaced the casual use of this for me.

I have yet to see any program, free or non-free, compare to Dreamweaver.
Quanta really isn't bad.

Visual Studio is the best development suite I've used.
I'm hooked on Anjuta. Others may prefer KDevelop.

Or Matlab.
Octave completely replaced the casual use of this for me.

I know that five years ago, when I wanted software to do something, the first place I looked was a CompUSA or such. Today, the first place I look involves the link above.

When I wanted software to back up my DVDs, I spent a bare minimum of time searching around before I found free, open-source solutions on-line, where once I might have paid $100 for shrink-wrapped software.

And I do not think I am the only one.

Amarok's all right and all, but it has one serious failing - it doesn't seem able to do gapless playback. Given that Ogg Vorbis is the geek audio format of choice, and that its biggest USP (for me, anyway) is proper gapless playback, why hasn't it been implemented in Amarok from the beginning? Or am I just stupid and missing something, and it's somwhere that I haven't managed to find?

Also, it needs work on its playlist manager. The simple drag-and-drop interface is nice, but it shouldn't go by how you organise your music files on your hard disk. It should sort your music by the tags on the songs. That's what they're for.

Why isn't there a really competent all-in-one media player/ripper/organiser out there? There seems to be nothing that gets anywhere near something like Media Jukebox for functionality. SnackAmp is decent, but its user interface is messy (and it doesn't seem to know what FLAC is, nor in fact do many others). Rhythmbox and JuK are just rotten. It's a bit frustrating, really.

First, the root servers have different dns server software and OSes, not because Vixie thought of it, but because it is policy codified in the BCP RFC for root servers best practices. In fact, I think he was unhappy about other root servers using non-BIND software in the beginning.

Second, he is being disingenuous about his comments about patents, his company owns at least one patent related to the Verisign "Site Finder" service methodology. Nominum Patent I didn't see any statements by him disparaging his company when they applied for that patent. So it isn't that he doesn't like patents, it is that he doesn't like that Akamai is making money doing third party DNS without paying him money or homage. Note: His commercial, for profit dns server software company has a white paper enumerating the scalability and other problems with BIND, and they use an architecture more similar to DJBDNS than to BIND 9 - separate auth and resolving dns server packages, most modern dns server software uses this architecture to reduce code complexity and improve security and performance.

Third, if he wanted to be the pillar of dns server software that he supposedly is, he could have sent a few goons from Nominum over to Akamai and set up some boxes with his commercial, for profit, "scalable" dns server software and Akamai would have been able to see if his software was able to stand up to the ddos attack better than what they have. If it did, he probably could have gotten a sweet, lucrative contract out of it and been a hero for helping thwart the attack, rather than a hypocritical, self serving competitor hiding behind Open Source to appear credible.

Fourth, Akamai is a single point of failure because that is what they do - offload dns and content load from the biggest companies on the net life MS, google and ebay. No, I don't work there, but I would venture a guess that they carry more traffic than (maybe) any other company. So I am sure it is easy to armchair quarterback and say they should do this and that, but when the attacks are probably at 10's or 100's of GiB/s I am not sure what I would do.

Nominum is also involved in RFID stuff, so I will be interested to see what happens with him and his companies as that ramps up. And who knows what deals have already been made - "the future of DNS is right."

Some DNS software links:
nsd - high performance, uses BIND style files and authoritative only
They have an interesting testing procedure where they run nsd and BIND, have them build responses to the same queries and then analyze any differences: diff analysis
maradns
Powerdns, mysql and a pretty website
djbdns he's grouchy and the no license license thing freaks people out and pisses them off, but people become attached to the quirky but rock solid software.
nstx, ip over dns, yeah...

I am running OSX on my Dell, thanks to PEAR.

Maybe this will help.

1. PNG is lossless, so image quality is always perfect (not merely "surprising").
2. JPG is lossy, so it's allowed to degrade image quality to get better compression (and this is something you can tune when you do the compression).
3. GIF is lossless also, but it doesn't compress as well as PNG, usually.

So, to answer your questions...

Can you get amazing compression rates with PNG? Yes, but this depends on your definition of "amazing."

How do I achieve better compression than GIF or JPG? Pngcrush will take an existing PNG and make it as small as possible with no loss of quality.

How can I get PNG to perform consistently better than GIF or JPG? You can't. As you observe, it depends on the image. A photograph will pretty much always compress better with JPG (which loses quality, remember). PNG will do better on an artificial image such as a cartoon or a screen capture.

Hope this helps.

It does if you extract with TyTool and play back with TyShow (or simply burn to DVD). Yes, it's not "out-of-box", but it's not exactly hard either.

Let see, can a Tivo:
Play my media files from a network share?
Display my pictures from my digital camera?
Timeshift radio including net radio streams?
Support multiple input sources?

The answer of course is no, but you can with a PC based PVR. There is an opensource project with all of those features present or on the todo list available from source forge it's windows 2k or XP only but it's really nice. I know there's a Linux based player with similar features.

- and the remote was pretty sexy (anyone wanna help me write a driver for Linux?)

Take a look at the LIRC 0.7.0 snapshots. The Microsoft remote has been in there for quite some time and works well. In fact, you can use the IR receiver that comes with it and quite a few compatible IR remotes.

I have MythTV set up with a PVR-250 and it's the best thing ever.

Hear hear! I have a Myth server running two Hauppauge PVR 250s and it is smooth. The guide is smart enough that I just select two shows to record and it handles the rest. The best part is that I have a Myth client running in the main TV room that is a stripped down Dell 4600c which I got refurbished for $360that fits perfectly into the entertainment center. All the advantages of the two tuners, but the quiet-ness of a small form factor PC. Awesome stuff AND two TVs can use the same recording repository!

I'd add MediaPortal to that list for comparison, although I would agree MythTV should come out on top, it's awesome!

Can people poor in the modelling language (like me) enter the contest using the other uml?

I own an iRiver flash MP3 player because it's tiny and light. I use it while jogging, so I wanted the lightest and least cumbersome player I could find. It also plays OGG, has an FM tuner, and is linux-friendly (thanks to the ifp-driver project). I think flash MP3 players are still a significant niche.

It plays havoc with people wanting a linux compatible Wifi card as well. Basically no wifi manufacturer has released a card that at one stage had say a nice prism or orinoco chipset in it that hasn't changed it for something uncompatible like a Broadcomm or TI.

eg:
Netgear WG311 was an Atheros supported by the madwifi driver but is now a Texus Intruments which is yet to have a stable driver (partial success has been had with this one, just not by me). At *least* Netgear had the kindness to call the TI version "WG311v2" and change the box slightly (documented here it still makes it really annoying when you see "supported" next to "wg311" at places such as here, then you buy one and find out it's changed from 4 weeks ago)

The (in)famous Linksys WMP11 used to be a linux-friendly prism but is now a Broadcomm or inprocomm (I think it's been both according to The List

Many other wifi cards have undergone such massive (I consider a chipset change massive) changes without there model numbers changed and it makes getting a wireless card for linux *VERY* difficult and frustrating.

It plays havoc with people wanting a linux compatible Wifi card as well. Basically no wifi manufacturer has released a card that at one stage had say a nice prism or orinoco chipset in it that hasn't changed it for something uncompatible like a Broadcomm or TI.

eg:
Netgear WG311 was an Atheros supported by the madwifi driver but is now a Texus Intruments which is yet to have a stable driver (partial success has been had with this one, just not by me). At *least* Netgear had the kindness to call the TI version "WG311v2" and change the box slightly (documented here it still makes it really annoying when you see "supported" next to "wg311" at places such as here, then you buy one and find out it's changed from 4 weeks ago)

The (in)famous Linksys WMP11 used to be a linux-friendly prism but is now a Broadcomm or inprocomm (I think it's been both according to The List

Many other wifi cards have undergone such massive (I consider a chipset change massive) changes without there model numbers changed and it makes getting a wireless card for linux *VERY* difficult and frustrating.

Check out PRAMFS

"Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch, clearly targeting P-to-P vendors, claimed his bill focuses on companies that profit by encouraging children and teenagers to infringe copyrights."

But what does that mean for the organizations that develop P2P applications, but do not profit from thier development. For example gnutella, giFT, and OpenFT ?

Would bittorrent fall in this category? It is certainly used to distribute pirated material, but its intended purpose (and popular use) is to distribute legal (FLOSS, demo) items.

The Yahoo! article wasn't clear. It says the bill attacks P2P developers, but all the direct quotes by Hatch say that he is after companies that develop software anticipating that software to be used for piracy.

"it creates a new class of people who can be sued or prosecuted for copyright infringement -- those who a "reasonable person" would believe "intentionally aids, abets, induces or procures" copyright violations"

"Tragically, some corporations now seem to think that they can legally profit by inducing children to steal. Some think they can legally lure children into breaking the law with false promises of 'free music.'"

I don't know if you can fault the intent, but my guess is that poor legal implementation will again be our undoing.

"Hatch says such firms 'think that they can legally profit by inducing children to steal."

Thankfully I only use P2P programs that are GPL, and thus free as in beer, so little if any profit motivation there.

The best p2p applications are usually free / open source like eMule, Freenet, and how apparently even Shareza 2.0 is open sourced under the GPL.

The Parchive Project

They've had stuff on the box for decades about individual kernels being lovingly toasted. So they built k3b into their kernels? Well... they were just a bit ahead of the "rip, mix, burn" curve, that's all.

You might also be interested in Smart Bootmanager for older computers that can only boot to floppy/HDD.

Ahhhh, yes. Broadcom has never been very friendly towards driver developers.

The good news is, your card works under Linux with NdisWrapper.

Which Linksys 802.11g card has either a Prism or Atheros chip?

The WUSB54G has a Prism Chipset.
The WPC55AG and WMP55AG have Atheros chipsets.

Use IMDbPY to populate a database with all data from the downloadable files from the Internet Movie Database.

Doom Legacy, has OpenGL, network & other kewl stuff
ZDoom, a hybrid of Doom, Hexen and other weird things, also check out ZdoomGL
PrBoom, very old school, the only port compatible with Compet-n demos.

jdoom_mpack.exe is pretty much obsolete nowadays. You should definitely try the official jDoom Resource Pack (jDRP) instead.

If you don't feel like downloanding hundreds of megabytes of high-resolution textures, I highly recommend the detail textures available from the SourceForge deng project page. They will make jDoom's textures look much better by overlaying details on them on the fly.

jdoom_mpack.exe is pretty much obsolete nowadays. You should definitely try the official jDoom Resource Pack (jDRP) instead.

If you don't feel like downloanding hundreds of megabytes of high-resolution textures, I highly recommend the detail textures available from the SourceForge deng project page. They will make jDoom's textures look much better by overlaying details on them on the fly.