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I use cygwin on a daily basis, was nice to see that on an upgrade it removed all of Xfree and upgraded to X.org X11 server.

Seems everyone is ditching Xfree. (About damn time too!)

BTW, those use mentioned screen because they don't want to use a mouse. There are X window managers like EvilWM or Ratpoison that are mouseless. Though, my favorite WM is IceWM with the PicoGUI theme. Though I like to modify it with additional buttons. Freshmeat has a ton of themes for it.

Widespread adoption of X.org Server could also lead to the full integration of auxilliary X.org projects, such as Xinerama, into X11 as standard features.

X.org Server is the MIT/X license's flagship product (in an inverse sort of way), so I think it's also a good possibility that the systematic proliferation of X.org's server may magnify the popularity of its license among OSS developers in general (it's an interesting license!).

The real killer is that one has to get something useful going quickly; rather than the language itself. This helps to maintain interest in it.

Unlike BASIC, rexx is fairly easy to learn, while having structured programming, rather than goto's. Also, one does not have to invoke libraries for things.

If she has a mathematical bent, try also the rexx routines at the Album of Algorithmic Techniques.

There are another kind of collaborative work, that is the process of discussing something. Is not announcing, nor defining, but a lot of people talking around something interchanging points of view, giving new data, etc. Usenet, forums, comments attached to wiki pages or blog entries, even this very discussion, are examples of this third kind of online collaboration. In the discussion you maybe not reach a "conclusion", is not part of the forum itself (but someone could extract what he interprets as a conclusion on some topic and post it in i.e. a wiki page), is the discussion what is the final objective.

If you develop open source software with any expectations of making money from it, you're in for a big letdown.

If you develop open source software with any expectations of making money from it, you're in for a big letdown.

If you develop open source software with any expectations of making money from it, you're in for a big letdown.

If you develop open source software with any expectations of making money from it, you're in for a big letdown.

well the obvious and easiest choice...

PERL of course
*evil laughter*

(well, perl was the first thing to come to mind, but there are lots of things one could say here... java.. brainf*ck.. or even the shakespeare thing :)

Before EclipseME, I used Antenna. It obviously doesn't integrate as nicely into Eclipse, but it still beats writing Makefiles by a longshot.

Before EclipseME, I used Antenna. It obviously doesn't integrate as nicely into Eclipse, but it still beats writing Makefiles by a longshot.

An example of this is maxima. (Quotes from this link.)
"Maxima is a full symbolic computation program. ... Maxima is based on the original Macsyma developed at MIT in the 1970's. It is quite reliable, and has good garbage collection, and no memory leaks."
Maxima was maintained by Professor Schelter at the University of Texas:
"This particular variant of Macsyma was maintained by William Schelter from 1982 until he passed away in 2001. In 1998 he obtained permission to release the source code under GPL."
"Since William Schelter's passing a group of users and developers has formed to keep Maxima alive and kicking. We are currently in a transitional state, deciding what directions to go in next and seeing what our abilities and resources are. Maxima itself is reasonably feature complete at this stage, with abilities such as symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver, but there is a lot of work yet to be done in terms of bug fixing, cleanup, and documentation. This is not to say there will be no new features, but there is much work to be done before that stage will be reached, and for now new features are not likely to be our focus."
There is more history on this project (e.g. here)

Actually, LEGO Mindstorms are not really that childish. They're a really great educational toy. The bundled software uses a crappy GUI aimed at younger audiences but there are other alternatives. NQC is a nice, simple programming language for the LEGO bots. It's essentially simplified C. I showed my dad the robots, and how they are much more fun to play with using an actual language (and not dragging-and-dropping commands onto a colorful workspace). It's not hard to learn, it takes less than a week to get acquainted with the basic functions... If you've got the $200 for the Mindstorms kit, not only will you introduce your mom to fun, simple programming, but you'll have an awesome toy to play with ;)

sourceforge! Or is there some reason why this project can't be hosted there?

Others I've had direct experience with are spamprobe, spambayes, and CRM114.

My best experience has been with spamprobe, because it compiles as a standalone app, is very fast (at one point I was filtering over 10,000 emails a day on a Pentium 200 MHz) and is completely command-line oriented, best for scripting/custom mail systems. Colleagues of mine who use CRM114 are very happy with it, but I got discouraged by its large database files. I'm now experimenting with spambayes, the only difficulty so far being installing the python/bsddb environment.

Others I've had direct experience with are spamprobe, spambayes, and CRM114.

My best experience has been with spamprobe, because it compiles as a standalone app, is very fast (at one point I was filtering over 10,000 emails a day on a Pentium 200 MHz) and is completely command-line oriented, best for scripting/custom mail systems. Colleagues of mine who use CRM114 are very happy with it, but I got discouraged by its large database files. I'm now experimenting with spambayes, the only difficulty so far being installing the python/bsddb environment.

Others I've had direct experience with are spamprobe, spambayes, and CRM114.

My best experience has been with spamprobe, because it compiles as a standalone app, is very fast (at one point I was filtering over 10,000 emails a day on a Pentium 200 MHz) and is completely command-line oriented, best for scripting/custom mail systems. Colleagues of mine who use CRM114 are very happy with it, but I got discouraged by its large database files. I'm now experimenting with spambayes, the only difficulty so far being installing the python/bsddb environment.

Here's how you do it with K-Meleon. Works for a majority of ads, though not specifically Flashy ones.

Better than the rational plugin described in another reply, check out the open source Clearcase plugin on sourceforge: http://eclipse-ccase.sourceforge.net/.

We've been very happy with eclipse in my development group, and all our code is in clearcase. With this plugin, we can do all our clearcase work quickly and easily from inside eclipse.

Perhaps you are talking about JOS. It was quite a happening project couple years back , and now seems to have splitted into couple of different projects.

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Perhaps you are talking about JOS. It was quite a happening project couple years back , and now seems to have splitted into couple of different projects.

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1. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the project matures. As I understand it, they can either a) make the entire project open source, or b) make the entire project proprietary. Option (a) is obviously preferred to most of the folks around here. Option (b) will require them to rewrite any open source dependencies they currently have. Of course, one could argue that they have been "tainted" by viewing/using projects like Wine...

As for Wine itself, that applies only to the LGPLed branch -- not MIT/X11-licenced branch. Transgaming uses the pre-LGPLed branch and a public project named ReWine does as well.

*BSD licenced open source can also be made propriatory.

IMNSHO: The choice of licence can be critical and should not always be GPL-like or BSD-like or propriatory -- or even "none". In some cases (protocols, file formats, ...) MIT/X11/BSD-style licences make sense. In others, GPL-style works better since it keeps all competitors "honest". In a few, keeping it propriatory (even if open) is best though as time goes on this becomes a smaller %. IMNSHO, of course!

K-Meleon for Windows. It is Gecko without the Mozilla GUI bloat. Kind of like Safari is to the Mac.

Since the main routines of Prime95 are in intel assembly it can't be compiled for the Mac. For the mac you can use GLucas (which was also used in the 2 verification runs), you kan find it at http://glucas.sourceforge.net/

Remember when Apple tried to own all the intellectual property for the GUIs, even though itself copied it from Xerox?

The actual history behind your hopelessly naive statement is far less black and white than you (and every other clueless twit) would like to paint.

Jef Raskin (the father of the Macintosh) had never seen the Xerox GUI until the Macintosh was well underway. Don't believe me? Read the man's own words.

> touch pad (really, can't tap to click)

This seems to affect older laptops primarily and has been a relatively easy fix for most people. There has been plenty of list traffic about the Synaptic touchpad issues and a quick google will provide instructions if you need to download an RPM to get running. However, for my wife's HP omnibook XE2 which allowed tapping under FC1 but lost that function under default FC2, all I had to do was add psmouse.proto=imps to the kernel options in grub.conf. Some people have had to download a bios update for their buggy laptop bios.

> XFCE4 (incompatible with xorg?)

Hmm. No problems here. I am happy they included it in the distribution; it's fantastic interface for older pcs.

> wlan card (linuxant drivers)

I don't see how it's the Fedora dev team's responsibility to work out your problem here. You bought a card whose vendor doesn't want to support linux. Linuxant is providing a proprietary interface to that card using propietary Windows drivers, charging what I consider a reasonable fee for their efforts. If these were natively-supported wireless chipsets, you may have a case, but in this circumstance I think you should go to the Linxuant user lists, not indict Fedora for reaching "too far".

Anyway, Linuxant has an rpm for the standard Fedora Core 2 kernel included in the distribution. Are you using a custom kernel or are you running with a kernel from a third party repository? If so, did you try the source-based rpm? In Core 2 I have had no issues with the Linuxant driver for a Dell 1300 (broadcom), nor with recent cvs builds from the MadWifi project for Netgear/Atheros-based card.

I think if selinux had been enabled by default, that would have been reaching too far. I lost a lot of hair trying to get my head around selinux while running the release candidates. Otherwise, I think that Core 2 is a fine improvement over Core 1. Everything "feels faster" to me with the 2.6 kernel and I am really enjoying the direction Gnome is going. So are the several Windows users with older PCs who I have helped start running Fedora Core 2 instead of buying a new pc.

Don't forget to add fedora.us to your repository list for extra goodness.

I am a bit late on this thread. You need to check out padict . It's GPL, runs on a Palm and is fantastic! What more could ask?
It won't teach you to speak Japanese though. I don't think software are much help with conversation. Have you though of trading English conversation with a native speaker?

you may want to look at Jack and Soundflower too.

The Wix Project which was the first project to be released by microsoft as free code, is an XML based windows installer suite. This is a good alternative to Nullsoft's if you are looking for something a little more hands on.

The project can be found at http://wix.sourceforge.net

Free maps from the TIGER data, as well as the (free) software that draws them. Here's Gregg Townsend's package in Icon. (Icon is a free VHLL -- very high level language -- of which Unicon is the current development extension.

You should consider yourself lucky. Most of the information you need is already avaiable to you, in the public domain. As several other has mentioned, the Tiger-files will provide loads of information and you should really have a look at those (to convert them into your own format). It took a few weeks to do it, but the task is far from impossible.

The other question asked is however much more important, what about completly open maps in a free for all use setting? As i mentioned, this is the case for the US, but quite far from the truth for some other countries in the world :| If you're going to let other people use your data, please provide them in an open and accesible format, like WFS. Have a look at GeoServer and PostGIS (for PostgreSQL) or do as we do, store everything as GML - an open standard presented by OpenGIS (which also stands behind WFS and WMS). Take a look at their website which features quite a few important standards and other resources.

Making data available as WMS or WFS allows other people to seamlessly integrate them into their own applications. Seeing an application just importing more and more information thats available by WMS is simply amazing. The norwegian rescue service uses an internal WMS-server for all their mapping data, which provides information about currents, weather, available ships in some parts of the world that supports the system and loads of other information. This comes from several different sources and are integrated into the application on the last step. All the seperate units are responsible for their own mapping data and can upgrade and improve their data at any time without any interaction from the end user.

We export information by WFS, although probably not very interesting for your use, it demonstrates the possibilities. You may browse our repository at OneMap by using our SVG client.

The lack of free, accurate, detailed and comprehensive GIS data is *the* canonical problem obstructing development of free GIS software. We are talking about current street-level data, points of interest, geographic features, topographic data etc., preferably on a global scale.

There is certainly free data for various regions (esp. US, various sources already mentioned) and some of it is detailed and accurate, but it is generally not even close to the quality that users expect in comparison to commercial mapping products.

To give you an idea of the effort involved in assembling maps from available GIS sources, I have heard that Microsoft's mapping team has over a hundred GIS developers constructing the maps for their MapPoint/Streets&Trips/AutoRoute products. And MS mostly just assemble data they license from various commercial sources (which has already been cleaned and standardised before it reaches MS). These maps are actually very good for the price (I use them for driving around US and Europe). MS maps don't yet cover regions outside US and Europe because of lack of available mapping data in a usable format.

No flames please about US free data being sufficient - I am talking about the general problem, and although US free data is much much better than most places, it is still not up to the quality of commercial data.

Having said all that, there are some interesting projects using free data - e.g. Wissenbach Map uses free topographic and aerial maps and exchanges data with GPS receivers. There are also a large number of free programs (e.g. GPSBabel) for exchanging data with GPS receivers and the map file formats used by various GPS software vendors, and mapping programs which require the user to supply maps. Search for GPS or GIS on SourceForge for more projects. I also recall a project in Thailand where a couple of guys created their own maps by riding all over the country with GPS receivers and painstakingly adding information like road and location names.

Various people have suggested projects to develop an open source database of GIS to rival the commercial sources. That would enable a large number of cool apps that are not feasible otherwise. But this would be an enormous project - both the data collection and assembling it into maps. E.g. certain GIS data vendors have a number of vans out permanently driving US streets with GPS receivers - trying to cover all streets and keep them updated. They do this because the free data is too inaccurate and outdated.

I did investigate purchasing alternative installers to NSIS for my own use, however I soon realised I couldn't find anything better in terms of cost and it's powerful functionality. If you download NSIS then I recommend downloading HM NIS Edit also as it's wizard is very useful for knocking up quick installs. Just in case any of these guys happen to see this post: "a very big thank you for these excellent tools".

I did investigate purchasing alternative installers to NSIS for my own use, however I soon realised I couldn't find anything better in terms of cost and it's powerful functionality. If you download NSIS then I recommend downloading HM NIS Edit also as it's wizard is very useful for knocking up quick installs. Just in case any of these guys happen to see this post: "a very big thank you for these excellent tools".

Definitely something useful for small developers who can't afford an installshield license.

Winamp featured this iPod plug-in not too long ago in this hilarious article: Have Winamp, Will Travel.

This seriously is an awesome plug-in. It does pretty much everything I want it do with my iPod (file/playlist transfers, syncing, media management, etc..), except integrated with the media library in Winamp, which I much prefer over iTunes' interface. It even has a few features that other apps like ephpod doesn't have. The ads are great, too.

Winamp featured this iPod plug-in not too long ago in this hilarious article: Have Winamp, Will Travel.

This seriously is an awesome plug-in. It does pretty much everything I want it do with my iPod (file/playlist transfers, syncing, media management, etc..), except integrated with the media library in Winamp, which I much prefer over iTunes' interface. It even has a few features that other apps like ephpod doesn't have. The ads are great, too.

Jef Raskin - desinger of the Macintosh interface and keen RC modeller - published an article, Next time it can be worse about model aircraft being used as an instrument of terrrorism.

A year or so ago, setting up a PXE linux based system took a little bit of effort, but today? It's cake. Check this out. Its a simple to setup PXE environment. The documentation is fantastic and it 'just works'. You can setup a simple browser only xwindows type environment or do what I prefer to avoid weird windows issues: Setup a Windows terminal server and use Rdesktop in that pxe environment to give everyone a real microsoft desktop. I had difficult making the sound pipe down to the local machine but . . .who needs that anyways? With the money you save on replacing those hard drives buy that staff IPod's (and two or three for yourself) (though getting stuff on the ipods with those pxe boots might be challenging).

The things that fail most often are things that move . . . it is absolutely possible to eliminate every fan and drive with this type of environment. Ram fails, but its a whole lot less often that the drives . . .and so what if it does?

"What? Your system is just beeping. Oh. Well just use this system which I have magically moved all your stuff to already"

Hope this helps someone.

http://www.3ddownloads.com/Action/Unreal%20Tournam ent%202004/Mods/AlienSwarm

There's also a Loki Setup-based Linux package here:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/liflg/alien.swa rm_1.0-english.run?download

There is already a current sourceforge project called My PBS which seems to be a program for collecting baseball stats.

Tom.

Or you can spend $1000 on getting microphones and $0 dollars for the software.

Believe or it not it is possible to produce decent music cheaply. Equipment is another problem...a good eight track sound card (e.g. Midiman Delta 1010-LT) will run you around $250, more if you want something fancy (e.g. the Midiman Delta 1010 which has the connections in a rack mounted breakout box instead of the back of the computer--much easier to use). The cost of a reasonable workstation has gone down a lot--my Dual AthlonMP 2800+ machine cost around $2000 total (including all of the equipment I got to upgrade my old 500Mhz k6-2 that ended up in this box and my used 24" SGI Monitor).

The microphones are what kills me. I use my live sound stuff to record occasionally. An SM58 will run around $85 for vocals, an SM57 $75 or $80, and a set of drum mics...I have a cheap $140 set of Samson drum mics with a pair of weird overheads I got from a guy for $20 and it sounds OK but in reality they suck. A good set of Shure drum mics (for live sound) would cost around ... $600. Add a second kick drum (grr, stupid Brent) or a fourth tom and you'll add another $200. It's cheaper to buy a cheap drum machine than to get mics for a real drum :)

Recording demo quality material is cheap and easy nowadays if everyone in the band has mics for live performances. Recording studio quality stuff is still expensive for a bunch of college kids making subs all day. Sure, maybe the guy with a good tech job and lots of money to waste can do it but the people actually making music all day can't. The important part is that it is a lot cheaper now to maybe record at home and trick your friend in the college music program majoring to be a mastering engineer to master your recordings cheaply and then get some CDs pressed with a small booklet to send to the labels.

There are still labels that accept new music. Even the big five do--InsideOut is an imprint of EMI and carries only progressive rock/metal bands like Symphony X and Transatlantic. Relapse Records consists entirely of Grindcore (well, most people wouldn't think of Grindcore as music...), SPV carries a lot of metal now; everything from Hair to Black to Progressive. Koch records also has quite a few excellent bands (e.g. Opeth).

Lastly, life is not all about records. It is easy to book a tour if you don't care where you will be playing or whom you will be playing with. Hell, I am planning on doing vocals for Recently Vacated Graves on a two week Canadian tour at the end of July. Look at the lyrics...there are a week worth of shows booked so far for three weeks worth of time spent contacting venues. Every band should tour a few times before they release a real record (that's how people get to know who you are when you don't have a huge marketing machine behind you).

The above is based on the experiences of several friends who are in bands which are mildly successful (successful enough to be on tours, one in Europe and to have actually gotten signed to real labels with DIY demos).

P.S. Are you planning on going to a show on the Dream Theater and Yes tour? I'm afraid of how much those tickets will cost.

It's important to note that Sveasoft is not the only group out there extending the abilities of these boxes. Linksys/CISCO releasing the code has allowed many groups a crack at modifying these systems to their hearts content.
Wifi-Box is incredably stable, and offers many options, taht are also being extended.

OpenWRT aims to be very light, but allow you to add packages to customize anyway you want.

More info on the router can be found at Seattle Wireless.

The Flash file format is open. I don't understand your point. Just because something is proprietary doesn't make it not open, or bad for that matter. There are tools out there which output Flash and are not made by Macromedia themselves. There are even open source Flash production mechanisms. Yes, Macromedia could at some point change the file format to obfuscate it, yes they could make it non-backwards-compatible, they could even decide to abandon Flash completely. That doesn't put the genie back in the bottle, and its still not making Flash a bad thing in and of itself.

This is an open source project making one: Flash for Linux

Or even better, be active: Hop over to iPod Linux and join the hackers there - for OGG support (& more!) on the iPod. 'Tis beautiful, this open-source thing of ours *sniff*.

All this is doing is pushing people into using anonymous p2p applications. The four main ones are:

Freenet

Mute

I2P

GNUnet

All this is doing is pushing people into using anonymous p2p applications. The four main ones are:

Freenet

Mute

I2P

GNUnet

For controlling a computer via bluetooth, there is Bemused Which works pretty well for playing mp3s, and can do other things which I haven't tested. There have been a lot of other attempts to read data in with camera phones. http://semacode.org/ allows you to open up web links from physical items.

I'm working on an open source bar code recognition program which functions, but is still in its alpha stages.