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The ubiquitousness of OWL/RDF on the web would, IMHO, be tied to two things; adoption by a large search engine such as google and the availability of a cool tool that would make the authoring process easy.

Imagine a mind mapping tool like freemind that could export to OWL. That would work for static content. Content publishers would do it for the same reason that they include keyword meta tags in their pages now.

On my debian laptop... Debs and instructions can be found here.

I'm not involved, but I'm a regular user.

I am the opposite in a way, I am not a user at all. But I run a node because I want to support the project and its ideals. Yeah, it uses java, and I am not thrilled about that but I run it and kill and restart it when it spins out of control. I may dedicate a separate machine to it soon. I would run an IIP IRC server/proxy but I haven't read the docs to figure out if that is possible (anyone have the one line answer?)
I have run Grapevine because it looks promising, but as of now doesn't do alot yet. I will also run 6/4, these guys may not have received as much press and recognition as freenet but they have put alot of thought into their license, I would put it in the category of seminal documents that make a stand for freedom like the Magna Carta, US Bill of Rights, GPL... that may seem overreaching, but you can check it out for yourself at 6/4 License

I want to do what I can to support people doing experimentation, sometimes you need stuff running out in the wild to be able to move your project forward. I use plenty of low profile Open Source stuff that is imperfect in various ways. One of the main reasons I use and support Open Source software is to support innovation, freedom and liberty - I don't look at every package as "What can this do for me?" esp since the cost to me of helping out is relatively low compared to people who risk their lives to speak out whether it is standing in front of a tank or publishing articles.

feel so strongly about enabling criminally free speech (kiddie porn, etc.), then they should feel strongly enough about it to be able to do so without my money or anybody else's

what i would really like to know, do they feel so strongly about free speech that they would be willing to take responsibilty for what's said. someone correct me if i'm wrong, but all other civil rights movements seem to have involved people with conviction (openly) defying unjust laws/etc and being willing to take responsibilty for their actions. freenet seems like it is (or is becoming) all about shirking responsibility or shifting it off onto someone else.

having said that, i think freenet is a fascinating project. but until i can control what i'm hosting, i think it's unacceptably flawed.

someone mentioned in a different thread the MUTE project, which i find more acceptable because i have direct control over what i share

I'm in the same boat of moving to a new place. Currently, everything, including TV and TiVO, is served by my main computer, and while that works well for a single guy, it doesn't work so well for a married one.

Since I have a receiver, will buy a new TV, but don't have a CD player, I figured it was cheaper to buy Tivo's Home Media Option, which uses my computer to stream mp3's and images through my Tivo and by extension, stereo. While I'm sure Tivo's media server is fine, I installed the JavaHMO which not only lets me serve up mp3's from my linux box, but also movie listings, weather reports, and even stream mp3's off shoutcast. Since I rip all my CD's to file anyways (usually ogg, but Tivo doesn't support Ogg :/), now I can access my entire music collection plus internet radio stations through the simple Tivo interface. Add a wireless 802.11b USB adapter, and you have a nice wireless media server through your Tivo.

The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting. If this is not acceptable to you, you should not run a Freenet node. There is another thing you can do. Since content in Freenet is available as long as its popular, you can help limit the popularity of whatever information you do not like. For example, if you do not want a file to spread you should not request it and tell everyone you know not to request that specific key. However, keep in mind that freenet is not designed so as to only allow communication between people if a sufficient number of people agree with the communication. Freenet is designed to make communication possible even if there's just one publisher and one reader, and this is already reasonably feasible on the current freenet.

Well, I downloaded and installed this java client only to find out the Freenet is not yet searchable. I've read several articles about the freenet over the last few years but have never figured out how to find anything of value (to me) on it.

In fact, further reading of the FAQ states that if you don't want your node to harbor child porn, you should not run a Freenet node.

I'm all for freedom of speech but i don't support anyone who would take other's freedom away. Child porn is exploitative and robs children of their childhood. The concept of freedom of speech is only useful if it promotes freedom. For example, supporting the right of Nazi freedom of speech can only lead to the growth of a movement that wants to take your freedom away. Logistically, this makes absolutely no sense to me.

I'm uninstalling the freenet, sorry.

Well, I downloaded and installed this java client only to find out the Freenet is not yet searchable. I've read several articles about the freenet over the last few years but have never figured out how to find anything of value (to me) on it.

In fact, further reading of the FAQ states that if you don't want your node to harbor child porn, you should not run a Freenet node.

I'm all for freedom of speech but i don't support anyone who would take other's freedom away. Child porn is exploitative and robs children of their childhood. The concept of freedom of speech is only useful if it promotes freedom. For example, supporting the right of Nazi freedom of speech can only lead to the growth of a movement that wants to take your freedom away. Logistically, this makes absolutely no sense to me.

I'm uninstalling the freenet, sorry.

Someone already wrote the geneator.

He also wrote bogofilter, a very useful bayesian filter.

AdvanceCD is a bootable cd that contains the AdvanceMAME emulator and plenty of room for all your roms. Works like a charm.

score anotoher one for mepis. we used it at work when knoppix was locking up at the hardware detection phase when installing on a inspiron 5150. mepsi installed fine, and had qtparted, which we needed to resize the ntfs partition.

WarLinux 0.5

I am a happy user of Common Lisp, which supports imperative, functional, OO etc. out of the box. But what is more important is that the language itself is extensible. It is a rather common approach to write applications by first extending the language, and such extensions can go quite far. For example, people have integrated prolog style logic programming into Lisp, there are libraries that support nondeterministic evaluation and backtracking, prototype-based alternatives to the native OO system, dataflow, you can use it as a dynamic markup language etc. The nice thing is that all this gets part of the Lisp system just like the builtins, so that a programmer can mix and match all of these, and the features of CL itself.

Paul Graham has written a really cool book on that topic, which is freely available.

I would like to see a live Boot CD build system which allows you to customize the payload *easily* (easier than it is to actually 'install' something on a local dedicated machine, individually, and administer it, anyway)

The base, the Knoppix part contains the kernel, kernel modules, hardware detection, etc. This base is left untouched. You can either a change a mainmod or add lots of minimodules.

The are four basic images to start off with. So making you own LiveCD is much easier.

Brendan

According to those busy beavers at groklaw the kernel version they are referring to is *not* a vanilla kernel. It's vanilla-2.4.1 with rclock-2.4.2-01.patch from http://lse.sourceforge.net/locking/rclock.html applied.
Looking at the patch, IBM is listed as the copyright holder. The code also acknowledges that it is based on the Dynix implementation.

The Ultimate Bood CD mentioned earlier here has such utility on it. Smartmontools for Linux/unix is another tool to achieve that.

How many of those operating systems use Apache?

You mean including Windows, all of them can, but there are fare more webservers available for Unix like systems than there are for Windows. Thttpd, wn, Thy, Roxen, Fnord, Dhttpd, Caudium, Bozotic, Boa, and AOLserver are all available in Debian in addition to Apache. Most of these are IPv6, ssl/tls, and cgi capable. They all have their strengths, and they all are being actively maintained. Most of these will operate as a drop-in replacement for Apache for most sites.

You are correct that most of the web servers on the net are Apache installations of one type or another. Most sites do not need or use all of the features that Apache offers, but install Apache anyway. Sound familiar? They are still thinking in traditional market terms, instead of looking at what is available to them. They treating Unix as if it were Windows, but if an cross-platform Apache-specific worm were to affect them adversely, there will be alternatives available to them that they would not have on Windows.

The point is that Unix like operating systems offer greater variety of more services in more implementations than Windows does or ever will. There is more room for fault tolerance, more methods available, and more capability to find new solutions to new and old problems (including security) in Free Software than any company or group of companies is capable of providing.

I've looked at a number of Wikis for doing exactly this.

I ended up settling on moin, for the following reasons:

1. It's easy to set up

2. Stores everything in plain text files: no fancy SQL database backend that I don't need for this small/scale stuff, and I trust text files.

3. It supports uploading of files as attachments to pages in the wiki. So if you come to a PDF document you want to save, you can easily dump it into the wiki.

So far, it's been a pretty nice way to organize stuff like this.

Ever since I discovered this little gem, my need for other players has been rare indeed. In fact, the only occasions on which I've needed any other media players is to play ASX or WMV files. I also have Quicktime Alternative and Real Alternative installed for good measure. Incidentally, these downloads come packaged with the ability to install Media Player Classic, albeit not necessarily the latest and greatest version.

1. China - Wensong Zhang, LVS Project
2. Japan - Kunihiro Ishiguro, Zebra Project
3. India - Naba Kumar, Anjuta Project

India has over 20 languages in widespread use, and just localizing Linux to these is a mammoth task.

A couple of projects which are worth mentioning:

Indlinux

and the Simputer

The basic limitation that I've seen is that most of us Indians are a bit more inward-looking, which means that a lot of open-source work in India looks to solve local problems.

Both are perfectly usable, small, and almost without any runtime configuration. Still, those are my top-2 of window managers. If I did a top-3 list, then Ion would be the third I think.

That is the default behaviour of Windows. It is however possible to seperate the mice by inserting a filter in the driver-stack. Unfortunately this requires support from applications that wish to use it. CPNMouse is a library that implements a basic api for such support.

I suggest you make a Knoppix CD with LTP installed. With a little configuration, that will take care of all of all your tests for the memory, disk, IO, and CPU. You might want to install America's Army or something to test the video subsystem.

If you put a little effort into it, you'll have a test suite as good as, and likely better than, anything you could pay money for. If you want to buy something, you can make a donation to the LTP and Knoppix projects.

There are also simpler tools, like Memtest86. I find this tool to be invaluable when I try to salvage old hardwar. I can't begin to tell you how much time it's saved me that I would have spent aimlessly swapping components around.

Kaspaliste is a literature database. It handles all kinds of books, articles, journals, webpages etc. The database goes beyond storing bibliographical information. There is the possibility to create annotated links between pieces of information (like the content of a book chapter) and to group links into categories.

The user interface works just like a web browser: You may follow the links to open records. You may walk back and forward through previously edited records, change fields, and create or delete links, publication, authors etc. on the fly with just one mouseclick.

Kaspaliste does not only store pieces of information about publications. It stores files as well. Kaspaliste handels various formats like html, pdf, ps, dvi and pictures (depends on your KDE-installation since the kpart-technology is used). You can for example store ocr'ed parts of interesting publications. The fulltext search covers these files.

NeXT also came with Zilla, the predecessor to all grid computing that let the Zilla project steal unused cycles on all volunteer NeXT computers in the world.

Rather apropos GNUstep plug: Zillion.

OpenVPN is SSL based, and runs on Linux and Windows.

http://openvpn.sourceforge.net

Sims Proposals

Here are some proposals and documents I've written, describing the work I've done and projects I've proposed with The Sims character animation system, plug-in objects and tools. After four years, a great deal of useful information has been reverse-engineered by independent third-party developers and open source projects like The Sims Technical Library. I hope these ideas will inspire more tool developers to contribute their programming skills to the Sims community.

Will Wright's original vision was enabling creative storytelling, by allowing players to add their own characters and objects to the game, and encouraging developers to program new objects and create tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic. Before The Sims was even released, Luc Barthelet sewed the seeds of its success by providing fans with content and tools like SimShow, so they could start making web sites and character skins. By the time it was released, you could already download a wide range of skins from many different web sites!

Four years later, Sims Object hackers have taken it much further than anyone ever imagined. A third-party tool called "iffpencil 2" has taken the place of Edith (Maxis's visual Sims object programming environment) in the Sims object hacking community.

One mind-blowing example is Slice City, which is an amazing game within a game: SimCity within The Sims! Your Sims can walk around and interact with a live, growing city like a Lilliputian scene from Gulliver's Travels. I'm not making this up: this actually runs INSIDE The Sims, and is ingeniously implemented by plug-in objects!

You start with a power plant, which gradually grows a whole city populated by swarms of insect-sized people. As the city grows, it spawns new objects including buildings (reprogrammed houseplants that the gardener still waters), crowds of people (reprogrammed cockroaches that you can still stomp to death), parks, marinas and monuments. You can go into build mode and rearrange them however you like, place roads (that get extremely busy at rush hour), and interact with the buildings through pie menus in play mode. There's even a tornado that comes through and knocks down your buildings. And you can download add-ons and pre-made cities!

Nothing like SimSlice was in the original design plan, but Will Wright credits all the creative players as the primary reason The Sims has become the #1 selling game of all time.

I believe the starkly contrasting failure of The Sims Online has a lot to do with the fact that it doesn't support player created content like the original Sims. One of the fundamental reasons that original Sims players have been disappointed with The Sims Online, is that Maxis never executed on the original plan to let online players upload and exchange their own skins and objects.

In order to help more fully realize Will's original plan, I wrote these proposals and documents to support the community of Sims artists, tool developers and object programmers like Bil Simser, Judson Hudson, Michael Watson, Rick Halle, Tom van Dijk

of sketchbooks and Idea Knot although I am going to try
MAK as a group project.

It's awfully dangerous to be honest around here. You get modded as a troll. Actually, I have three sketchbooks going right now.

i am the lead developer of an open source game,Fmorg and somehow these arena unlimited people got my emailaddress, and sent me THIS....

First, let me apologize if the e-mail was unwanted. Your e-mail address is listed on the Fmorg project page and we thought you might be interested in what we're doing.

this sounds like a sort of scam to get us OO & indie game developers into some kinda contract on the off chance our game hits it big, and creates a demand for this crap

Second, we're not a contract-based service. We don't charge or require anything from developers. Period.

Personally, I'm an advocate of and contributor to the Open Source community. As long as I have any input, games released under any approved license will never be required to pay licensing or developer fees to use our system.

We are constructing and offering a set of tools to be used at will by any developer who might benefit from the inclusion of such features. For example, if a developer wants to sell, say, cars to augment a racing game to help support development, etc., then we would like to help facilitate that in a convenient and secure manner. We don't have or want any say in setting the price. We're looking to support ourselves by collecting a small percentage of the sale (the majority of the revenue goes straight to the developer).

my personal recommendation, JUST SAY NO TO SUITS!! -Ted

We're really not suits, we promise! (If you don't believe us, then check out our pictures.) :-) So far the project has been entirely self-funded (all our cars are beaters and paid for if you don't count the repair bills -- by the way does anyone have a spare alternator for '92 MX-3?). Our biggest hurdle to date (aside from trying to find Other People's Money) is tearing ourselves away from BZFlag and Armagetron long enough to get some work done.

But if you feel violated by our approach, I sincerely apologize. I hope you continue work on Fmorg with our without our help, as it looks very promising.

Rather than going Microsoft, maybe you should use freemind. I've been using it the last six months on Linux and Windows, and am very pleased with it.

(unless (equalp
(lisp-implementation-type)
"SBCL") (quit))

I agree that some programs have a quality that is somewhat close to literature, but maybe not poetry. In particular, I agree with Richard Garbiel that there should be a Master of Fine Arts in Software.

I still claim that software is a discipline of its own, and natural languages and its literature are only very loosely related to it.

If you want to make a brand new space sim free to the public, go right ahead

Done, and without the licence restrictions on the code.

The artwork, however, is still a different matter. If I ever get rich I'll set up a well-connected ranch somewhere and fill it with digital art geeks tasked with polishing FOSS projects.

Go check it out. It's really, really, good, and free, as in, well, um, beer?

I have spent too many hours building elaborate rule sets, banning Class A IP's, keyword filters, etcetera. The spam still gets through and it carries nasty payload half the time. Bayesian...bayesian... bayesian...

Without a Microsoft monoculture, he said, most of the recent progress in information technology could not have happened.
Really? Could someone more familiar with Microsoft and their products kindly give me examples?

• Samba
• FreeDOS
• WINE
• The XBOX Linux Project
• Ximian Evolution
• Open Office
• Mozilla
• etc...

I'd like to see Linux drivers in the "roadmap". I still can't get 3d acceleration and tv-in on my 8500 card. The newer gen. cards look great, but how long till the drivers are available for them? By the way, this is a good open source project for drivers (ATI) here.

Right now the best Virtual Desktop App for OS X is Desktop Manager. Any number of virtual desktops you can name and switch to with command-option-left (or right) arrow. The end desktops roll to each (turning your desktops into a loop). The latest rev even lets you specify the transition effect between virtual desktops -- mine set to slide, like it sliding around that loop of desktops.

Fast user switching rolls me between users with an effect like it's rotating a cube.

I've got systems running Linux and XP --with MS' virtual window add-on-- at work and the combination creates the best virtual desktop and fast user switching setup I have access to.

And expose is mindblowing. Between that desktop manager, the Dock really only has to be there so you can start apps/sometimes open docs (via a popup folder)/stash a open app to move it between virtual windows.

The three work great together.

But I'm still going to install Linux in some form or another when I get a larger harddrive. Why? Because it gives me a way to try things without fscking a production LAMP box. In general, there are always things that can only be done when you've got access to that OS.

Sorry, but that can't be done: Python is a nice language, but it is not designed to be compiled as efficiently as C#.

While there's some truth to that, you might want to check out Psyco - a just-in-time compiler for Python.

By using run-time optimizations, it might be possible for code written in a high-level language like Python to actually run faster than C code. That's still a long ways away, though...

Try MUTE http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/

Simple, anonymous, encrypted. I noticed the MS source code was available on the MUTE network yesterday.

Last I checked, many (most) Linux IDEs weren't available under OS X:

• BlackAdder
• Boa Constructor
• Eric (not sure)
• Komodo
• WideStudio
• Wing

My reasons to do this would be to access the wealth of software out there. Does OS-X have the ability to support gnome and/or Kde apps? I figure it can be done, but how much hassle would it be?

I have mod points right now, but I'll respond to this instead.

KDE and Gnome have been ported to run on MacOS X. Apple provides a version of XFree86, which is bundled with Panther, or a free download for Jaguar. X11 runs rootless, which means all of your X11 windows are mixed in with your normal OS X windows. KDE and Gnome have both been ported. KDE is a little farther along than Gnome, but both are available through Fink. Check to see which packages are available.

Also, with KDE, the Qt library has been made available under the GPL for MacOS X, just like on Linux. So KDE software can be ported to MacOS X native with much less hassle than before.

Apple also supports Linux on their computers. TerraSoft makes the Yellow Dog Linux distro. They are also an Apple Value Added Reseller, and they sell Macs with YDL preloaded without voiding the Apple warranty.

There is a port in the works for NuBus machines. I have not tried it though.

Ah, X11 has been available in one form or another for OS X for quite a long time. It's been availble on Fink for ages and Apple's X11 is included as an option in 10.3

I think you'll also find that most everything you need to run in Linux will compile on OS X or is already available in Fink.

I've never had any stability issues with Office, and OOo's glacial speed puts me completely off of it.

If you want an open source VB-alike, check out Gambas. I've been using it for only a couple of days and have managed to put together a stupid game with a GUI, which is more than I can say for my time with VB.

Check out:
http://vigor.sourceforge.net/screenshots/

I see this is yet one more area where emacs is lagging behind vi;-)

1) Intellisense... when you hit the open paren for a function, it brings up all the overloaded prototypes WITH the documentation on the screen!

Ah, okay I haven't gotten into this sort of thing, so I can't speak for how the two compare, but emacs can certainly do this.

2) Hit F1 while you're working on something and it searches for the word on which your cursor lies and automatically displays it to you.

Like, looking up a function? When you have the cursor on the symbol you want (say, printf), hit Meta-X and type info-lookup-symbol and hit enter (or bind that command to F1). You'll get documentation on that symbol. Or do you mean just having it use the current word in a search to a web brower?

And... the RAD Designers that are not integrated are not seamless like IDEs are.

Err...yes. That's by definition -- they are two different tools, as opposed to one large tool. I don't see what technical issues that causes.

Also, hardly anyone uses the POSIX or WIN32 APIs directly anymore, so, in Windows, those man pages would be useless.

I suppose it depends on the type of software you write. I do.

Again... why would you use a DSW file in Cygwin? If you want to put out a snapshot of a project, how hard is it to transfer it binary or put it in a Zip file? It's not like people don't know the difference between ASCII files on Unix and Windows...

I don't, but I check out files using Cygwin's CVS. And the problems come up when folks do checkouts on non-Windows platforms and then send snapshots around. The whole problem is partly because of CVS (it could contain a ton of special cases for extensions, but I've never had problems except for with VS), partly because of whoever neglected to manually specify binary usage when checking in a .dsw file, and mostly because the project file parser for VS 6 sucks -- the thing is a text file, for Chrissake. Parsing a text file without breaking on different newline formats is not rocket science.

I guess when the whole trade secret thing stops working, it's time to patent!

I use Gordian Knot to encode DVDs (uncopyrighted religious movies that just happen to be CSS 'protected' ;), and it takes more effort then I'd like. I have to make decisions, for crying out loud!

The only effective way to stymie the illegal copying of DVDs is to make the purchase price attractive enough that they'd rather just buy it. In my opinion, if you appeal to the lazy in people, you win.

Try Source Navigator:
http://sourcenav.sourceforge.net/index.html

PTC is likely fucked.

More telling is that their competitors (SolidWorks etc) are posting large profits while PTC loses money.

The ease of use arguement is more powerful than it should be in MCAD circles. (Again in the States at least.) Somehow, people seem to expect to do complex things easily. Putting a nice braindead GUI on top of powerful software seems to make people think they are getting something more for their money.

This should only work if the packages are very close otherwise. With FEA, Ansys has a pretty GUI, but people inevitably switch to Abaqus, inspite of the steep learning curve and license ($100,000/year/machine).

Even the bigger companies are finding it hard to pay for development and sales costs given the reduced margin they see in software sales. Another expensive port is a very hard sell on that basis alone, because they do not see customer demand.

You paint a bleak picture. There is a definite step down in intensity from a couple of years ago when Linux was the marketing buzzword you could not do without. The only way out would be for the academia to step up and support OSS, as they have done for many packages in the past (e.g. Maxima for computer algebra). The interfaces might be less polished, but that is where the general OSS development community can help. And many smaller companies might be tempted to use this solution instead of the expensive proprietary ones (like MySQL vs Oracle, say).

The movie studios have similar problem now that they are moving lot of the production to Linux. Even their considerable influence hasn't been able to make the software companies port to Linux.

Linux's success on the server has bought us time, since the hardware makers will no longer design exclusively for Windows. It is up to us to take advantage of that opportunity.