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A 700 page spec that reuses W3C specs still beats Flash, a complex binary format that nobody supports.

Are you on crack? *Everybody* supports flash, and it was already the defacto before they open sourced their format in 2000. Also, that format is quite elegant; it's not complex if you understand 2D vector graphics well. (This would be like calling Mathematica elegant; it's a fairly minimal implementation for the amount of math it does.)

Yes, and the same functionality is present in Flash (when it isn't, as in MathML, it's a deficiency).

"Huhuh, it's all there, and when it's not it's a failure." Um. MathML doesn't need to be in Flash. Flash's text tools already encompass placement well enough to handle math. It would be useless cruft, especially given that some of those no programs which support flash are actually designed to turn MathML into flash.

Now, when you try to do your own implementation of Flash, you have to start from scratch, trying to implement Macromedia's counterpart to ECMA Script, SMIL, etc. How is that better?

Who said it was better? The parent poster was just noting the difficulties involved in making a compliant SVG renderer. In the meantime, there is no Flash counterpart to SMIL, and it's a damn silly thing to call ActionScript a counterpart to ECMAScript.

This is like, in response to observations to the difficulties of deploying a hydrogen car fleet, saying "Well yes, but in order to support a gasoline system you need twice the infrastructure in tanks and pumps." Whereas that may be true, the important part is that that's already done; you're comparing an incomplete investment to a complete investment and suggesting that the incomplete investment is cheaper.

Besides, Flash with all of its bits and pieces (except the mp3 player, admittedly) is simpler than SVG-sans-dependencies alone; the argument just doesn't doesn't hold water. Perhaps you should go read the flash spec. It's actually quite a bit of fun to script in Flash; even though it's binary, things like Ming, which has native PHP library access, are simply put a joy to use.

When you roll in Flash's elegant resource sharing model, the flexibility of ActionScript, and the high performance of the primary distribution Flash renderer, you begin to realize that Flash isn't so stunningly successful because it did things wrongly. Please remember that flash and shockwave used to have *lots* of competition, and they weren't the first ones on the block.

modern vector graphics format based on XML, something that the world really does need

Agreed and disagreed. I agree with you, that an XML-based vector graphics language would be a powerful tool. However, for something like vector graphics, which is element intense, it is my strongly held belief that XML is far too verbose to offer efficient distribution of large files. If SVG attains a native compressor/decompressor pair, if compression in HTTP starts taking on alternate algorithms for alternate tasks, or if we see a binary compiled form of SVG, *then* *and* *only* *then* do I see it as a competitor to Flash, which can make complex UI interactions with high graphic precision in a handful of K.

I'll be much much more convinced when you see a converter from one to the other, or bidirectional. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see SVG end up as an intermediary language between data and representation.

But the future has surprised us all before...

I think what open source really really needs is a version control system that forces code review and testing.

Dosbox definitely does Keen, and it sortof does Duke Nukem 3d as well if you have a fast enough computer. The better option for Duke3D is to get it for Linux. ROTT is also on icculus's site somewhere.

Sound-wise, dosbox is pretty good, except for the newer games where you either get small skips in sound or choppy video (at least on my comp). It emulates loads of sound cards, too. Network-wise, I remember reading something about emulating modems using network sockets (so you could 'dial-up' to game just over the lan), but I can't seem to find any info on that right now.

I havn't run dosemu ever since dosbox first came out, so I can't speak for that.

Dosbox definitely does Keen, and it sortof does Duke Nukem 3d as well if you have a fast enough computer. The better option for Duke3D is to get it for Linux. ROTT is also on icculus's site somewhere.

Sound-wise, dosbox is pretty good, except for the newer games where you either get small skips in sound or choppy video (at least on my comp). It emulates loads of sound cards, too. Network-wise, I remember reading something about emulating modems using network sockets (so you could 'dial-up' to game just over the lan), but I can't seem to find any info on that right now.

I havn't run dosemu ever since dosbox first came out, so I can't speak for that.

Dosbox definitely does Keen, and it sortof does Duke Nukem 3d as well if you have a fast enough computer. The better option for Duke3D is to get it for Linux. ROTT is also on icculus's site somewhere.

Sound-wise, dosbox is pretty good, except for the newer games where you either get small skips in sound or choppy video (at least on my comp). It emulates loads of sound cards, too. Network-wise, I remember reading something about emulating modems using network sockets (so you could 'dial-up' to game just over the lan), but I can't seem to find any info on that right now.

I havn't run dosemu ever since dosbox first came out, so I can't speak for that.

Granted, star control 2 had some of the best mod's to ever grace my ears. more recently, however, the baldur's gate series, planescape torment, system shock 2, the fallouts, and the "newer" lucasarts adventures like grim fandango or curse of monkey island all have tunes permanently lodged in my brain. if you think all video game music has to be dull, lifeless, or uninspired, please do yourself a favour and buy these games or leech their soundtracks.

inertplay had, up until a short while ago, an online mp3 collection of the soundtracks to a good chunk of the games they put out. not sure why the page was taken down.. used to be here .. anyone know what happened to it?

There is already stow [gnu.org].

...the FreeBSD LiveCD wasn't mentioned.

It's the older FreeBSD LiveCD around, a project carried by the Brazilian FreeBSD User Group.

That sounds a lot like the MacOS bundle system.

That is, an application and all or most of its dependencies can exist in one directory. To install the application you just copy a directory. Delete the directory to uninstall.

The ROX filer can also do this for Linux but I haven't used it much.

By the way, I use GCC 2.95, 3.0, 3.2, and 3.3 on Debian all at the same time (for compatibily tests). Debian is pretty good about concurent versioning.

At first glance, I thought this would be similar to Cleese, a Python-based operating system, but it isn't: RubyX is a distro with some stuff written in Ruby, and Cleese is an actual effort to write a kernel in Python. Not that it's progressing a lot, though... the CVS tree can be found here.

At first glance, I thought this would be similar to Cleese, a Python-based operating system, but it isn't: RubyX is a distro with some stuff written in Ruby, and Cleese is an actual effort to write a kernel in Python. Not that it's progressing a lot, though... the CVS tree can be found here.

DOSBox is even able to run Zone66, which is pretty finicky about DPMI and EMS and XMS.

There is also Inkscape for editing SVG.

Gambas and HBasic are working in this direction.

Gambas and HBasic are working in this direction.

Check out the 'modules' program at modules.sourceforge.net. It makes it fairly easy to switch between versions of any program you like (and choose to set up with modules).

It's distribution-agnostic (works on non-Linux UN*X, too). The common usage is more or less module load gcc2.95 (now, 'gcc' will execute gcc v2.95).

Anyway, as someone else mentioned, Debian already offers this for some packages (the package maintainer has to do some things differently to make it work). For gcc, there's a gcc-2.95 package which installs /usr/bin/gcc-2.95 (CC=gcc-2.95 ./configure; make CC=gcc-2.95; etc.). Relatively few packages are available under this scheme, though.

Debian also has 'alternatives' (/etc/alternatives) which route common binaries to a system-wide configurable version of a package (or meta package). Example uses of this system in mainline Debian are 'editor' (vim, emacs, nano, ...), 'sensible-browser' (galeon, mozilla, firefox, konq, ...), and 'java' (kaffe, sun, blackdown, ...).

From the wiki page: ...
Maybe it's just me, but where's the frickin' download link?

The Audacity homepage is http://audacity.sourceforge.net. There are nice, big, download links there.

The Audacity Wiki is a community-maintained site for organizing information and resources relating to Audacity. It's publicly editable, so if you want to put download links there, you're welcome to do so!

Fortunately, now with zlib, PNG and Ogg Vorbis, this is not an issue this time.

And, don't forget, with LAME. While LAME generates MP3 format-compatible files, it does not use any Frauenhoffer patented techniques to do it.

"Using the LAME encoding engine (or other mp3 encoding technology) in your software may require a patent license in some countries." So no, I didn't forget about LAME. It is just illegal to use as freely as Vorbis. LAME is free software using patented algorithm. For me, it might be proprietary software as well.

In support of this suggestion, you can get the mplayer binaries, and a GUI player, from here.

You could also use Audio Hijack, which is (very nicce) shareware, or Wiretap, which is free(beer)ware.

I find mplayer is very nice to have around and will often chip in and help where Quicktime fails. Same can be said of VLC.

Sorry Slashdot readers, but I'm a little pissed.

Dogster. Wonderful. I write an Open Source Social Network program, and Slashdot rejects any sort of story on it only to put a story about Dogster.

Sorry, but I feel a little shunned. I do have a little bit of pride in what I do, and things like this kind of shatter it.

Yeah, I know, the type of site I'm doing has been done... But then again, does that make Linux "Just Another Kernel?" I'm sure that would be up for debate.

Yes everyone, the ideal is novel. But hello, anyone? This is news for NERDS, not, news for dogs. We typically like things like anime, Open Source, Star Wars and SCO. This fits under neither.

This wasn't even marked as "Humor". I'm not laughing anyway.

/Rant off.

They were waiting for a new version of SOLID to be released for the physics side of things and based on the forum @ blender.org, it seems like the game engine might finally be buildable from CVS again - but very buggy.

At any rate, if you're looking for a good 3d engine, checkout OGRE. If you need everything, including the kitchen sink, then look at Crystal Space 3D.

What you really want then is not Audacity, but Ardour together with Jack and an ALSA-supported soundcard

I personally pipe my guitar from the POD to a laptop with Audacity to a home stereo/PA. Very nice, I always get my playing recorded, and with Audacity's very efficient handling of large files it's easy to pick out the good bits.

You should check out Ardour for a more professional, multi-track recording environment. It shouldn't have any serious latency issues, at least given that you run a low-latency kernel. It's still under (active) developement but it works quite well already.

Seems like everything leaks these days? Even an open source game, work in progress, "leaked" recently - but I think they only used that term to be cool and trendy.

Too bad the leaks sometimes contain spoilers, though. Or as Triumph the Insult Dog puts it:

Triumph: Spoilers? I've got some spoilers for you!
(StarWars nerds starts to look a little more curious and alert)
Triumph: You will die ALONE!

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Don't forget Xen, VMWare, and Bochs (not as fast, but still cool).

There are already a ton of viable OS virtualizers out there. This news is seriously a real yawner.

Is this similar to running multiple instances of VMWare or Bochs?

Where have I seen this before... Oh that's right, the features Compaq/Hp have been shipping with their Tru64 Alpha Servers for _years_. Good job Sun. http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/nextgen/part itions.wmv. ANyone who buys Sparc over Alpha is an idiot. Hell, you can even do this on Linux with UML..sun is playing catchup with just about everyone, but somehow manages to push enough spin on it to make every dumbass journo announce as an amazing technical innovation. http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/. Sorry people, but sun are pushing 20th century technology with some marketing spin to make it sound up to date.

Another "killer app" is Rosegarden, which is rapidly becoming a suitable replacement for Steinberg Cubase. The Hydrogen sample based drum machine is also worth a mention. The exciting thing is that JACK allows easy multiplexing of things like Rosegarden and Hydrogen, and has kickstarted a whole load of audio and MIDI projects.

My only regret is that my preferred operating system lacks an ALSA compatability layer, so things like JACK and Rosegarden are Linux only at the moment.

Chris

Popfile strips out any invalid tags and increments the pseudoword html:invalidtag for every such tag.

There's some great audio stuff happening in linux land lately. I'll give you the two examples I've been playing with today alone, for example:

GALAN - Graphical Audio Language

and

Specimen, MIDI sampler for Linux

These two apps alone prove that Linux is as ready for Audio applications development as any other, and Audacity proves that its possible to do it in a way that caters to -all- platforms.

Gonna be an interesting year for Audio apps in Linux land this year, I think ... Very interesting.

A Webmin module

Try here. A FreeS/WAN webmin module is standard in the latest release of Webmin. Unfortunately, it does little to unobfuscate FreeS/WAN. I have been looking into FS for the last couple of weeks and was planning on implementing it this weekend at a client's office. Now, I will look at alternatives - lord knows they can't be any more complicated to configure that FS.

Oh, boy. Either I missed the humor, or you are clueless...

Have you ever tried to bzip an audio file and compare it to an MP3 encoded version? The MP3 file will always be smaller, because the encoder throws out data that it doesn't expect people will actually need to hear.

Even for lossless compression, [b,g]zip sucks on audio. Codecs like Shorten and FLAC work really well for that purpose.

You mean something like this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pipelinemanager

ipsec-tools

I don't think you're alone there. I myself have tried FreeS/wan several times over the years and have always found it a frustrating experience. I think the documentation should take a lot of the blame for the problem. It was never too clear and gave only a few wildly different (and sometimes conflicting) examples. Left side? Right side? They would often switch the left/right-side convention for no apparent reason. And it I found it wasn't always clear what configuration settings were required and how they interacted. Because of this it was hard to condense a working configuration out of the few examples they did give.

Many years ago I was trying to connect my network with my familys' network (linux to linux) I eventually went with vtun. It worked fairly well. More recently I went with OpenVPN when I needed to connect my dads' Win2K laptop back to the family network over a dial-up line. In both these examples I originally tried using FreeS/wan on the linux side(s). I thought it would be easier (especially with W2K in the second case) because IPsec is a standard. Nope. Now I'll go look at this new Kame port in the 2.6 kernel and IPsec-tools. Hopefully it's fairly easy to setup.

Learn to spell, retard. Maybe this will help...

to switch to Vorbis/FLAC/et al

There's also giFT - basically a daemon that provides a "framework for bridging multiple backend peer-to-peer protocols" using plugins that connect to several p2p networks.
e.g. FastTrack (the Kazaa network), OpenFT (Open FastTrack), OpenNap (Open Napster) and Gnutella.

Couple that with clients like apollon in KDE, giFToxic in GNOME and even KCEasy for Windows and you have pretty promising p2p connectivity in Linux.

What's wrong with implementing OpenVPN- the SSL approach? I suppose it may be difficult for some companies to upgrade . . . but if they require it, and it is a viable alternative- why not?
Would it really be that difficult for somebody to take over the development? Maybe their role could be more to administer the operation rather than code a lot of it.
Also, this (google's cache) or the PDF version of the above claims that FreeS/WAN does not support PKI.

...this project would be a little better of a choice for VPN than FreeSWAN? I've been looking it over and it looks pretty cool. I still have to actually try it though.

Apparently the person who modded you up didn't check on what you said or just doesn't run Linux.

Ever heard of Firestarter? That's one GUI firewall I can think off the top of my head. Let's see here, how about fwall?

As far as your corporate firewall question, you might check into PF and OpenBSD OpenBSD As far as Smoothwall did you try the corporate version or just a free download? Googling, lookg what I found as far as your remark about outgoing ports and Smoothwall.
Haven't seen such a blatantly uninformed post in a long while.

Thanks again.

public void testShortNames() {
CommandLineOptions opt = new CommandLineOptions(new String[] {"file", "format", "ruleset", "-shortnames"});
assertTrue(opt.shortNamesEnabled());
}

public void testNullArgs() {
try {
new CommandLineOptions(null);
fail("Should have thrown an exception when null passed to constructor");
} catch (RuntimeException re) {
// cool
}
}

The thing is, just because someone looks at a bunch of code doesn't mean they somehow assimilate the knowledge needed to produce said code. We have enough trouble reading other people's code that is uncommented.

I work for a small school district looking to put our grades online. We found an open source program, BASMATI (here and here), to export grades to. We use the open source code for free, and will pay for support. I can't be bothered with digging through the code, because I have other things that I am paid to do.

Everybody gets paid.

Isn't that the other way 'round? As demand increases, price will increase to profit as much as possible.

As for programming what you feel, that's great in principle. But hoe many CD Rippers, MP3 Players, and IRC Clients are really going to get you noticed? How many network monitor tools really stand head and sholders above the rest of the development community?

I can't see these kinds of projects really attracting the attention of someone willing to pay good, make-a-living-from-it money for your skills. And I'm sure for every MP3 player out there there's two dozen ID3 tag managers and a hundred playlist editors! If you get 'discovered' from writing one of those, you should buy a lotto ticket - maybe you can retire early too!
=Smidge=

Isn't that the other way 'round? As demand increases, price will increase to profit as much as possible.

As for programming what you feel, that's great in principle. But hoe many CD Rippers, MP3 Players, and IRC Clients are really going to get you noticed? How many network monitor tools really stand head and sholders above the rest of the development community?

I can't see these kinds of projects really attracting the attention of someone willing to pay good, make-a-living-from-it money for your skills. And I'm sure for every MP3 player out there there's two dozen ID3 tag managers and a hundred playlist editors! If you get 'discovered' from writing one of those, you should buy a lotto ticket - maybe you can retire early too!
=Smidge=

Isn't that the other way 'round? As demand increases, price will increase to profit as much as possible.

As for programming what you feel, that's great in principle. But hoe many CD Rippers, MP3 Players, and IRC Clients are really going to get you noticed? How many network monitor tools really stand head and sholders above the rest of the development community?

I can't see these kinds of projects really attracting the attention of someone willing to pay good, make-a-living-from-it money for your skills. And I'm sure for every MP3 player out there there's two dozen ID3 tag managers and a hundred playlist editors! If you get 'discovered' from writing one of those, you should buy a lotto ticket - maybe you can retire early too!
=Smidge=

Isn't that the other way 'round? As demand increases, price will increase to profit as much as possible.

As for programming what you feel, that's great in principle. But hoe many CD Rippers, MP3 Players, and IRC Clients are really going to get you noticed? How many network monitor tools really stand head and sholders above the rest of the development community?

I can't see these kinds of projects really attracting the attention of someone willing to pay good, make-a-living-from-it money for your skills. And I'm sure for every MP3 player out there there's two dozen ID3 tag managers and a hundred playlist editors! If you get 'discovered' from writing one of those, you should buy a lotto ticket - maybe you can retire early too!
=Smidge=