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So I guess the term for Linux is "feature-rich" but the equivalent term for Windows is "bloated".

maybe?

As an alternative, Opera 7 says on it's system requirements page: "Any system running Windows 95 (or higher) operating system"

I've been very, very pleased with the new 7.5 release. Plus, the entire install is only 3.4MB! Compare that with 12MB and 6.2MB for Mozilla and Firefox respectively. It might run faster on your older Win95 machines.

Oh, and K-Meleon might work for you too. It's Gecko, so you might run into similar problems as Moz or Firefox on your system, I'm not sure.

I use fluxbox. I dislike KDE and Gnome. As far as I am concerned, window managing is a simple task that can be done with a simple window manager. Simplicity is beautiful.

I'm not sure if anyone will read this butVim 6.3 is out.

Back when I was stuck with WINdoze, I almost never used explorer.exe, I used iShell and 2xExplorer. It took a ton of registry hacking, but it is possible to change the desktop environment with windows.

Yup. Just installed 9.1 on my 32MB Toshiba Tecra laptop (the 120MHz Pentium only tooks ~3 hours to compile a 2.6.6 kernel). I absolutely love ratpoison for the window manager and links -g for the web browser.

I've setup a button bar at the bottom of my screen with my most commonly used apps. It took me some time before I got all the mime-types and associated programs setup the way I wanted, but it went pretty smoothly (and then I used unison to keep the settings in sync on all my machines). I'm quite happy with it, and much more productive. It also lets you type arbitrary shell code to run a file through right there. IE: Select a bunch of files and then type !for $a in "$@"; do foo; done, so I get the best of both worlds. btw: I setup root-tail to watch my .xsession-errors file so I can see any results on my background.

Couple this with fluxbox's tabbed windows, keyboard shortcuts, and multiple workspaces and I'm quite happy.

evilwm has a small mem footprint and in speaking to people on freenode (developers) that is the WM to use (and I agree).
Bloat is just that and there is no reason for it.

The other thing that annoys me is we have this wonderful attitude from the anti-spammers for virtually everything along the lines of "Why are you complaining? Only 1% of you will want to do this, and all you have to do to do that increadibly simple thing you were doing previously is (*insert 500 step plan here which usually includes replacing previously perfectly servicable software, negotiating with an ISP which, by default, is going to want to provide the same system to everyone and certainly doesn't want to make an exception for you, etc, etc*.)"

And we already know this isn't actually going to help. Indeed, if Russia and China are the biggest sources of spam at the moment, then doesn't it stand to reason that egress SMTP and/or SPF will make bugger all difference in the long run anyway? Who here seriously believes that either will actually be a serious deterent to spammers?

And if the plan is to continue the usual basket-of-filters approach, are we going to block all email from Russia and China? If so, how's that going to work? What happens when they switch to another country? What about the fact that Russia and China are two of the largest countries in the world and a lot of businesses are going to be very upset if they can't easily trade with them any more?

Why are we continuing to use these inane methods when we already know they don't work?

There are systems that work, why aren't we using them? And why do those proposing the filters upon filters upon filters not realise how difficult they're making it to create real solutions?

Maybe not completely relevant to the specific subject, but what is the best way to stop this?

Due to the global nature of the internet, the only way is to wait until the governments of China and Russia change due to public, internal pressure. Note that this may take some time.

In the meantime, SpamBayes might help.

My main phone line comes over a 6.1 mile 802.11b link. I use Asterisk PBX with the IAX protocol to bridge the calls.

And my Grandstream SIP phone works great attached to a Linksys WET-11 client bridge.

And my Ipaq runs IAXComm just fine over it's wireless card to use as a netphone.

Does the battery life suck... yes... does it work and show promise... YES!

Just because people have problems with these cheap (as in quality)(usually SIP or H.323 based) piece of crud phones doesn't mean the technology and possibilities are not still there. SIP is VERY prone to problems from NAT (which many wireless networks use of course).

Anyways... for my 2 cents though I say... just give it time.

The Foresight Exchange is an idea futures market. Players trade contracts based on claims about the future--such as whether or not there will be another terrorist attack against the United States, how many IT Jobs there will be in 2012, or whether Scaled Composites will win the X-Prize. Players who profit by correctly predicting the future achieve a high score that proves their omniscient wisdom.

It's not just fun and games, though--the exchange provides an overall market consensus prediction. Anyone can create a new claim to help them gain insight into the future. As a software developer I worried about my future job prospects and so I created the ITJOBS market to find out what will happen. The claim pays out from $1 to $0 depending on whether the number of IT jobs paying over $50k/year grows or shrinks by up to 35%. Currently the symbol trades between $0.65 and $0.75 which translates to a market consensus of about 1% annual job growth annually. However, since the claim just began trading thare not yet enough market participants for this prediction to be significant--you could help change that! Sign up and test your foresight.

What's even cooler is that the foresight exchange has a programmable API and documented protocol so that you can write automated trading bots. Since it's play money you have nothing to lose but your self respect! There are many such bots trading on the market now, some of them having been running for years. The Shimari Project includes a Java API that can be used to programatically access the exchange; writing one for your own favorite langauge would also be quite easy. Note though that there is a limit of one account per human player--you can't have a bot and also have a human trading account. This is to prevent various kinds of cheating.

The Foresight Exchange is not just a fun (and free) online game, it's also a useful source of information about the future. If you think you can predict who will win the next election, or you just want to know what the consensus opinion is, sign up and find out. The more people who participate in this market the more accurate its predictions will be.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with the Foresight Exchange other than that I am a player, a member of the unrelated Shimari Project, and the author of the ITJOBS claim--which I created because as a software developer I wanted to know what the future held in store for me!

They offer Firestarter through the Xandros Network download service. It's a GNOME firewall app though so it's not a perfect fit for the otherwise KDE based Xandros desktop, but there's really nothing comparable available for KDE at the moment IMHO.

Amen to that. If the marketing team found out that the webmaster was incompetently keeping their site from being indexed by the web's most-used search tool, I bet things would change real quick. But then, I still surf with a text-only browser on a regular basis.

Yes there is!

Try out kMeleon

It was started as an IE with Moz knockoff.

Depends what you're looking for, really. AWStats is pretty good and goes further than Webalizer in terms of visits and visitors (see comparison with Webalizer), while tools like aWebVisit can give you a better idea of the traffic flow.

But the notion of visit and visitor is always subject to discussion - what you see (in your server logfiles) is not always what you get (people viewing your content through proxy caches etc.)

Depends what you're looking for, really. AWStats is pretty good and goes further than Webalizer in terms of visits and visitors (see comparison with Webalizer), while tools like aWebVisit can give you a better idea of the traffic flow.

But the notion of visit and visitor is always subject to discussion - what you see (in your server logfiles) is not always what you get (people viewing your content through proxy caches etc.)

Depends what you're looking for, really. AWStats is pretty good and goes further than Webalizer in terms of visits and visitors (see comparison with Webalizer), while tools like aWebVisit can give you a better idea of the traffic flow.

But the notion of visit and visitor is always subject to discussion - what you see (in your server logfiles) is not always what you get (people viewing your content through proxy caches etc.)

Well, if someone is willing to do the SimCity part, I can contribute the logfile analysis and traffic flow part :-)

Too late.

q[I would also add a "hidden" feature, better integration. If you have digital cable and TiVo you are going to have two set top boxes and more remotes, etc.]q

Er... by and large it's not that big of an issue. What do you ever need the set top box remote for? The TiVo does all of the channel changing, has its own OSD/Guide, etc. The remote for the other set top box can be stuck in a drawer somewhere.

Yes, the IR blasters suck, and there's the remote possibility of the set top box not being on when needed, but the former can be solved using a serial connection (supported on many Motorola digital cable boxes and most Sony or RCA DirecTV boxes), and the latter is a pretty damn rare problem.

The downside of DirecTiVo is that you lose HMO (viewing photos on your TiVo (including local weather and cinema listings if you use JavaHMO), MP3 playback, remote programming, and show sharing, and that if you decide to leave DirecTV you have a useless box.

Of course, DirecTiVos are cheaper. By a long shot once you include subscription costs (lifetime or monthly), so the useless box bit isn't such a big deal. The loss of HMO, however, is a larger issue. I have DirecTV and TiVo but will not go to DirecTiVo because of this. We use HMO features all the time, and there's simply no way to reasonably replace them.

Shut up you ignorant bastard.

1) phpxpath
2) the DOM functions work just fine. They are marked experimental because the PHP folks are rightly conservative.
3) The Sax stuff is baked.

Just because you can't google or figure it out doesn't mean nobody else can.

Try tvtime for Linux TV viewing. It's got lots of optimizations, and is much more efficient than both MythTV and mplayer for TV playback on my machine.

Macs run Windows XP a hell of a lot faster than a PC can run Mac OS X.

http://kandid.sourceforge.net/index.html ist is not only more mature but nicer UI crossplatform (ok i dont like java but it works) and the outgoing graphics are really beautiful and also more reusable to me. nonetheless it ist more sophisticated in that way that many minfs kann brew together some forms, it is not just random art. sir lk http://proton-ce.sourceforge.net

Just wanted to plug my software:

6) There are not only hooks to windows, but WinMyth exists. That is, there is a windows myth front end written nativly for windows.

you can also compile mythtv via cygwin in windows, but in my opinion that's not quite as clean.

Blatant plug: OpenGL and SDL bindings for Common Lisp: CL-SDL. And yes, I'm one of the authors. Most Common Lisps are compiled to native code; the performance is fairly good with the added benefit of having a high-level language to program with. There are also bindings to Haskell and OCaml AFAIK.

TimoT

Here's the link I meant:

WikiGateway

Even better - use Darik's Boot and Nuke, also a Sourceforge project that is GPL. Bootable Linux floppy, has purged any drive I have thrown at it - windows, Unix, and BeOS partitions. You also get to select how many passess you want, instead of being stuck at a 3 or 35 pass version.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

The floppy disk I created is red and I went so far as to draw a skull and crossbones on it, knowing full well what booting this thing does to a PC. A disk like this is an essential little tool to any geek's arsenal.... alongside Knoppix and tomsrtbt.

The only thing is it takes HOURS to DoD wipe a hard disk. It took 15 hours for me to fully DoD a 40GB drive.

I like Darik's Boot and Nuke, also a Sourceforge project that is GPL. Bootable Linux floppy, has purged any drive I have thrown at it - windows, Unix, and BeOS partitions.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

There is no such thing as a secure deletion. To be sure that data is irretrievable you need to physically destroy the disk, which includes at least chopping up the platters and preferably melting them down. Here's a quote from the definitive paper on data recovery by Peter Gutmann:

For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written.

That is only gratis software, so you really don't know how well it works, if at all.

A better choice is Eraser, it is GPLed.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

You can also make a nuke boot disk with this program that automatically starts erasing everything upon start up. Don't forget to clearly label it ;).

• If, say, HP puts free software in its printers, how does this reduce the ***value*** of their printers?

My main point is that it shouldn't take too much work to create a software tool that converts PDFs to ASCII text, as long as the input PDF isn't just images or scans. This would be a good project for an interested open-source developer, since so many things are in PDF form.

Now why they're using PDF for something as simple as a press release, rather than standard HTML, I have no idea. There isn't a good reason for it. PDF has its uses, like for data sheets and manuals, but for many things it's overkill. (However, I would like to point out that for scanned-in manuals and the like, DjVu is far better, producing files a small fraction of the size of PDFs, and rendering much faster too.)

Sounds like you are talking about something like Keyring. One password lets you decrypt a bunch of other passwords stored on the device.

I guess you could say they are bound in darkness too because they are encrypted and useless without the main password, which "finds" them all.

oh the humanity. First SCO, not Microsoft. The sky is falling for sure.

This is a very cool thing heh.. but it isn't to be unexpected, as phpopengl was already made, but this new one looks great as well. But who knows what other things will come out... Look at all of these things that php can do here ,there are a bunch of interesting and very useful mods, and more come out all the time. Also, take a look at that link, it gives you a good idea of what php can do (although there is much more than what is on that page).

if you use automounter or ROX you don't have to mount manually, just click on a folder with camera.

Well, it's not a port or an implementation; it's a wrapper to a DLL. That's the fun of dynamically loaded libraries: you can call opengl, gtk, qt, COM, CORBA, $WHATEVER_YOU_WANT from $WHATEVER_LANGUAGE_YOU_WANT as long as you take the time and effort to write a wrapper label, which this guy did, and he wasn't the first.

For a really small X based linux system check out pxes http://pxes.sourceforge.net/. They have an X based system in a 13 meg bootable iso. It's binary compatable with RedHat 8, so it shouldn't be to hard to customise.

good luck

What's worse than a smug lisp asshole? A smug lisp asshole who is right. And they're always right, dammit.

GLOS.

Very impressive -- A while back I heard about PHPOpenGL.

But he didn't even use this at all! Pretty self contained, even to the gzipped uuencoded DLL file embedded in this PHP script whose sole purpose is to create the window that this PHP demo needs for the 3D graphics.

Well, I am not a developer. OK, I used to be - I got a BSCS back in 93, but have been doing software QA since about 95. But there are two huge thing that keep me on Linux - SSH and scripting.

Many many times at work (Windows) I have nearly pulled my own arms off because of how frustrating the Windows interface can be. The kicker is there is no alternative with it. I know all about cygwin. But it isn't the same.

I write my own shell scripts to do a lot. Everything from auto-downloading, uhh, stuff (yay for brag !) to generating my own thumbnail pages and HTML for photos. Being able to ssh into my box and do things is great. While on vacation in Paris, I was able to go into an internet cafe, download PuTTY, SSH into my home machine, and email the family. In and out in 10 minutes.

I only boot up Windows to play a game or to do some video editing. My DVD Burner is on my Windows machine, because I knew the Windows software would just work with it. But my main machine has been GNU/Linux for about 5 years now.

When DOS came out I thought, OK, so what's the big deal compared to an Apple II? It was much bigger (but not much better). GUIs became available (to me) with the Mac in '84 and its copycat Ataris and Amigas in '94 - and that was much better than a castrated CLI-only system such as DOS or CP/M. Yeah, VMS and Unix were another story at that time: those were better because they were powerful, unlike DOS.

Nowadays, MacOSX combines the above two qualities, so I see no reason for using a system where 1) the UI is inconsistent and counterintuitive, 2) the security holes are endless and caused by arcane obscurities, 3) you have to keep working for the damn machine and not vice versa, 4) the kernel is closed-source, and 5) last but definitely not least, its vendor is a proved condemned abusive monopolist (yes, all those are true for MS-Windows).

So maybe Jef Raskin is right when he says that a GUI is a double system: it combines slow-to-use menus and hard-to-learn keyboard shortcuts. In other words, a modern GUI is a combination of two bad ideas but it's also seems true what Tufte says: To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning. (Tufte's comment is about Powerpoint, but it similarly applies to any software sold by the same infamous monopolist).

Bottom line: when I'm offered a job where I have to use MS-Windows, I turn it down. Unless I'd be in a life-or-death starving situation, and thankfully enough, for IT professionals things are not that bad yet :-)

One has to strive to gettin' better!

I have a small LCDCrystalfontz screen (20x4 or something like that), that with LCDriver (I think that's the right one) you can use Winamp to display the titles onscreen and even do waveforms, along with a slew of other things. It's not as big or as potentially pretty as that might be, but.. It's sweet none-the-less.

I just recently started using a similar app on Windows to store my password details, Password Safe. It uses Blowfish for its encryption, has versions for Linux and PocketPC and has had its security verified by Counterpane Labs (Bruce Schneier's company).

I guess it would be safer to keep all my password details in my head alone, but this is a damn sight better than sticky notes or text files. It also made me go through and change the weak or repeated passwords, too.

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