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It publicly debuts in beta next month! And its open source and voter verifiable. Its on source forge right now if you want to look. see EVM2003 or open voting By the way they still need more developers, testers and documentation writers. Also they need financial backers to package finished systems with tech supprt for the end users.

Have a look at phpGedView for a nice open source php based website that can show off your family tree. All it takes is a standard GEDCOM and you are off running.

Shout box is a nice little php/sql dealy-bob that allows just about any one to post anything. It's quick and dirty, just like Santa. shoutbox.sourceforge.net

Well, the real strength of PNG is that it is a binary string, so all the available tools for dealing with and processing data consisting of 1's and 0's can be used to generate PNG documents.

The implications of this are slowly beginning to be understood.

Imagine how many binary data processing devices could use this. Anything from business documents (graphs, etc), to medical records (graphically showing the timeline of a patient's medical operations, for example) can utilize these techniques.

The coolest example I can point you to is this. A program, expressed as a binary string (!) is used to transform any arbitrary image definition into a .png image. Beyond cool.

(Note for the exceedingly stupid: I'm /not/ advocating the use of bitmaps over vectors here).

There is no need to fear this. This is just a matter of Phoenix proving a market trend. Either the proof will be true or false in the end. Which brings me to this point "who is in control?" and I say whomever has possesion of a thing controls it. We will have physical possesion of the hardware thus we will ultimately be the most powerful factor in this market. We can exersise this power or not. Those of you who have been around long enough will remember the days when you could buy your bios separtely from your motherboard or gasp program your own. This happens all the time in the embedded industry (not as much as it use to though). So if the market is unfavorable to Phoenix's new bios and unsavory locks on our hardware we can always roll our own. Nay you say? Well I offer up these links for you to browse. Free the bios open the bios

Check out this site for linux ATI drivers.

A good Media player that I like is Core Media Player. But media players are getting to be a dime a dozen. Video Lan Client isn't too bad.

We've just started using MailScanner on a box running Fedora Core 1 here. So far MailScanner with SpamAssassin, DCC, Razor and Pyzor is doing a good job, but it is too early for us to get meaningful statistics. A nice web front end for MailScanner is MailWatch, and we monitor the throughput and performance of the box with MailScanner-MRTG.

Phil

We've just started using MailScanner on a box running Fedora Core 1 here. So far MailScanner with SpamAssassin, DCC, Razor and Pyzor is doing a good job, but it is too early for us to get meaningful statistics. A nice web front end for MailScanner is MailWatch, and we monitor the throughput and performance of the box with MailScanner-MRTG.

Phil

But according to Tog this principle has been patented by apple like ten years ago: Tog has been touting the "Piles" concept ever since.
Before wasting you time you may want to read a book or two.

I, my wife, and yes - even the inlaws - run PopFile

It can be used locally, or used at the mail server. Either way, I'm over 98% alltime accuracy - with thousands of mail's checked and its very easy to config via its web interface.

Bayesian filtering is a bit like fuzzy-logic. Right now, it's best known for filtering spam. SpamAssassin uses a whole long list of tests and assigns +ve or -ve scores to each test that comes out positive (a bit like Slashdot's moderation).

I know someone who did a project on classifying video using Bayesian filtering. It looked at stuff like brightness, contrast, volume, basically everything they could extract from the movie file and give a value to. The concept itself is quite powerful; the difficulty is getting a list of tests that can accurately predict / classify what you have (spam/non-spam, or for video, thriller/drama/etc).

If you're interested in finding out more about actually coding Bayesian filters, you can check out the Bayes ++ project page.

Since when was ming qualify as histrionics? SWF has its faults but there are ways to work with it nonpainfully and dynamically.

He sent a long open letter to SAtalk. You can find it in the mailing list archive

SpamBayes, by far.

For (innovative?) eye candy, it's hard to beat 3D-Desktop.

As for the Windows look and feel, I think this is done to make it easier for new converts. Plenty of users (Linux and otherwise) are quite happy to run window mangers like blackbox, which certainly does not have Windows L&F.

Ruling the software world is all about Embrace and Extend, just ask Microsoft. I believe this is something OSS does well and many projects that start as "clones" become something more.

For (innovative?) eye candy, it's hard to beat 3D-Desktop.

As for the Windows look and feel, I think this is done to make it easier for new converts. Plenty of users (Linux and otherwise) are quite happy to run window mangers like blackbox, which certainly does not have Windows L&F.

Ruling the software world is all about Embrace and Extend, just ask Microsoft. I believe this is something OSS does well and many projects that start as "clones" become something more.

However, it was added without patching the wm itself and thereby bloating its code. Instead, since ratpoison can be fully controlled via the commandline, the "expose" functionality (to be found in the "contrib" directory as "rpshowall.sh") was written as an external shell script which tells ratpoison to split frames in a certain way. Through ratpoison's freely definable keybindings, the script can be used like a built-in function/command of the wm.

Yup, virtual desktops are cool, but 3D virtual desktop selection is even cooler, and surpisingly fast if you have a decent video card: http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php

Although i think there might be easier grammar than XML for both humans and software, giving the user access to a fileformat in human readable form is generally a great idea. Take a look at SNG . It translates PNG raster images to XML and back. It allows users to tweak every byte of the PNG or just check if some application software put too much personal information into it.

It is one of the reasons why I prefere LaTeX over WYSIWYG-Tools. (Nice for scripting, c&p etc.)

You know, they've put Linux on the iPod. :)

Last time I looked (but please, correct me if this has changed) there was very little in the way of DVD authoring software for *nix...

There are a few projects, mostly towards the stable end of beta, that I've used without many hassles.

'Eugenia Loli-Queru: In your opinion, which is the hardest step to take in the road ahead for full interoperability between DEs? How far are we from the realization of this step?

'Havoc Pennington: I think the "URI namespace" or "virtual file system" issue is the ugliest problem right now. It bleeds into other things, such as MIME associations and WinFS-like functionality. It's technically very challenging to resolve this issue, and the impact of leaving it unresolved is fairly high. Here are some links on that here, here and here. '

OK -- so, unsurprisingly, having GNOME have one set of apps that can read one namespace, KDE have another set that can read another namespace, and a whole load of command line tools that can't read either, is a problem.

I still can't understand why this hasn't made it into a mainline kernel hook, or at least a shared library kludge. Something like AVFS
is infinitely preferable to a filesystem that can only be accessed by a small subset of applications...

> As to Mozilla/Gecko, I'm not sure but I know there is a GtkMozEmbed and I doubt the API is significantly different to GtkHtml.

Erm, there is quite a large difference between just embedding a widget and having a web browser. gtkhtml and gtkmozembed provide a quick API to embed a html widget into an app, but last time I checked, the app had to do a lot of logic to make everything work together. This would be the equivalent of khtmlwidget then, not khtmlpart, which is actually used by applications.

I think the LOC argument is best supported from people who've actually ported code between gtk and Qt, and vice versa. The kvim authors wrote a piece about this a while ago, and I found the same thing to be true, when I ported xchat's xtext text widget to Qt (see here compared to here).. they are nearly functionally equivalent, but one is less than one half the size of the other =)

True, Xindice (Apache license, has reached version 1.0) looks good (I've no experience with it), but some of the original developers (Tom Bradford - dbXML, see below, and Kimbro Staken - Syncato, also below) of the source donated to Apache think they (Apache) haven't made the most of it. I don't know if this is true, and I don't know nor have any connections with either Bradford or Staken, but they seem like competent developers; they certainly churn out code - positive sign, right?

There is choice :): Check out Kimbro Staken's weblog Inspirational Technology (who also develops Syncato, an XML database weblog system using Berkeley DB XML.):

Consider Berkeley DB XML (currently at v1.1.0). Built on Berkeley DB and identically licensed (open source, free for non-commercial/development use, etc.); tons of APIs - can't get hold of the link but one of the developers (at least I think so) maintains a weblog of 'all' things Berkeley DB XML. Googleit.

Bradford recently released dbXML under GPL (commercial licenses available should you need it), there's a v2.0 beta available at the site.

Another native XML database is eXist, at version 0.9.2, java-based, LGPL licensed, I've only glanced at it, looks alright though I'm not the guy to say..

Then there're several commercial alternatives - X-Hive, Birdstep, Virtuoso, et al. - but this is Slashdot so..
Well, someone called Ron Bourret has compiled a full-bodied overview of XML databases, and have a big list of XML/DB links too (some link-rot). Goto.

If you know your XML will conform to a particular DTD, FleXML can be used to generate a very fast parser for it in the style of lex/yacc. You don't have to mess with all that slow DOM or SAX stuff if you're concerned about speed. It may still be a resource hog compared with binary file formats and protocols but not nearly as sucky as often seen (my own code included).

You might want to look at FreeVSD ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/freevsd/ ). It used to be a commerical package and many ISPs have used it over the years. It hasn't been updated in a few months though since the company went under in Jan. 2003.

It has all your virtual server stuff and even has a web interface to manage everything as well, like the creation of new virtual servers, etc.

I don't see why the Open Source community couldn't pick up on it and update it for the last releases of Linux distributions. Everyone keeps saying that they would pay to help develop an Open Source virtual server program, well here is your chance to do so with a working program.

If you are looking for a web hosting control panel then you also might want to look at Vishwakarma (http://kandalaya.org/vishwakarma.shtml). It is a nice package and has been around for awhile with a nice web interface and even has support for reseller, and user management options.

You might want to look at FreeVSD ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/freevsd/). It used to be a commerical package and many ISPs have used it over the years. It hasn't been updated in a few months though since the company went under in Jan. 2003.

It has all your virtual server stuff and even has a web interface to manage everything as well, like the creation of new virtual servers, etc.

I don't see why the Open Source community couldn't pick up on it and update it for the last releases of Linux distributions. Everyone keeps saying that they would pay to help develop an Open Source virtual server program, well here is your chance to do so with a working program.

If you are looking for a web hosting control panel then you also might want to look at Vishwakarma (http://kandalaya.org/vishwakarma.shtml). It is a nice package and has been around for awhile with a nice web interface and even has support for reseller, and user management options.

http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net

UML has a number of differences when compared to chroot environments.

• Resource usage is higher because less is shared.
• Each virtual needs a real network, and usually a real public IP
• Network configuration can become nightmareish as the number of virtuals grows unless you write some signifigant config scripts that run dynamically.
• You really need a good understanding of networking and especially routing and how ARP works. The docs on the UML site are correct, but they only scratch the surface.
• You still have to secure the virtual on the host system. This usually involves running UML as non-root inside of a chroot jail that is as sparsly populated as possible.
• You will want the SKAS patch.
  • With the SKAS patch, you will need a /proc in your chroot jail. Look at mount --bind to just mount /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/mm

On the other hand, UML is good enough to fool even the hackers (I have had UMLs hacked and the hacker didn't realize they were in a virtual).

We run public webservers, and mailservers on UML. We are at the point where we just assume that you use one UML per application. The manageability of running single-application servers is just too good to pass up.

in the enterprise datacenter has to be Cisco Enterprise Printing System of CEPS for short. With CEPS Cisco has over 10K printers in thousands of sites around the world with only 2 print admin's!! CEPS is based around SAMBA and CUPS and allows windows, linux, and unix clients to print to printers in a way that is unmatched for redundancy in any other product commercial or otherwise. Remote print servers can take over controll of print queues quickly in the event of a print server failure and queues can be rerouted to a new print device should a physical printer fail all without client reconfiguration! Cisco was nice enough to give the system back to the world. They have a sourceforge project available for anyone interested.

Meanwhile, while linux tries to infilitrate the government, the DoD is tyrying to infilitrate the linux. The DoD Defense Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment is/was an initiative to to define a common software stack to run across multiple platforms that includes software installation, user management, and printing tools. When you talked about putting Linux on the DoD desktop, that used to mean having a DII COE stack for linux. This year DISA released a beta Linux COE kernel and then released the source code for it which can get from anonymous CVS. DISA has paired up with the OpenGroup to define a testable/brandable definition of COE. And there is a project to develop a platform independent COE stack from scratch.

Relevent URLs:

http://www.disa.mil/coe/kpc/linuxpc.html

http://gforge.freestandards.org/projects/qp-coe

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/coe

http://opencoe.sourceforge.net

DVDs seem too new to trust my data to.

The current crop of DVD+/-R(W) drives are indeed about as mature as the first bunch of CD-R(W) drives were at this point. They're a bit sensitive as to which media you use and the planets have to be aligned properly. For DVD media, I only buy the major brands (Imation sells a 25-disc spindle at around $50) and I've had *mostly* good luck. Lately the drive was failing (lots of coasters even at 1x) but then I rebuilt the box and the drive suddenly became reliable again.

As to the data integrity issue... I usually burn around 3.0-3.5 Gb of data onto the DVD and fill the rest with parity data using QuickPar. Gives me an easy way to check the disc for errors that are more then the underlying RS encoding can handle and lets me possibly still recover the files.

I used to think that too. I've had a rude awakening over the past couple years. The issue that defines the difference between excitement and apathy for mid-to-upper management? It's the same one that your mother used when picking out drapes or a new dress;

It's all about "pretty".

Well, pretty vs. the unspoken alternative "ugly". A close second is 'can this give me bragging rights about using "the best" most professionally accepted choice?'. Think binary; it's either yes or no, with no middle ground. Managers make decisions or they are ineffective.

It's not what we want or even see is necessary...it's what management (in a 15 minute or shorter meeting) can be convinced of. In that time, they can spot UGLY a mile away, though ugly is often confused with "unfamiliar". Keep in mind that they see "pretty" as "polished and complete" so anything that isn't pretty is not ready...and bosses don't want to mess with something that isn't ready to go. Case in point, Gnome gets quite a bit of corporate backing...because it is pretty (polished consistant from desktop to desktop and app to app) while KDE looks like an errector set. This isn't a flame, the truth is much more complex, though if you have 30 seconds to show someone both...Gnome looks more pretty.

15 - or 5 - minutes of rational talk about pros and cons will not change *anyone's mind*. Habbits and superficial issues will swamp all concerns. Even what is pretty or ugly will change from person to person, but typically not by much.

If you want people to start using OSS, use it yourself and deploy it everywhere. Are you using it for your desktop? I am. Are you using it for corporate servers? I am; ugly Bugzilla, and pretty DCL. Bugzilla serves a necessary function of a project, so it actually gets used more. I've also made a point that there is a migration path to pretty in the form of Scarab. In the meantime, I've modified Bugzilla to make it a little more pretty.

Make sure it looks normal and nice; that it looks pretty and isn't awkward. Costs less is a motivator, though pretty really does matter most. The cost and savings -- both up front savings and in the lower costs for maintenance and lost data -- are the mass of the avalanche, not the pebbles that get it moving.

Actually, suspending to disk isn't an ACPI-only feature; all it needs is kernel and (some) driver support.

Like this: http://swsusp.sourceforge.net/

np: Plaid - Quick Emix (Spokes)

FreeDCE is a Linux implementation of MS-RPC and DCOM. Could be a nice starting point. I have used to successfully talk between a Windows server and a Linux client app.

reading that post gave me deja vu Not that I don't partially agree. I'd say conflicting projects, lack of hardware vendor support, tier 1 (or even 2) games, the reliance on the console (I'm not complaining but the average user would), and vaporware- see For Details- is probably far more dangerous.

We use this method of automatically publishing our calendars via SSH to a web server at my office and, thus far, it has worked flawlessly. Perhaps somebody can use JiCal as the backend for this bounty?

FLAC is perfect.

FLAC is too big. I think it's a great solution for permanent archiving where you want EVERY little thing to be preserved, but most of us just do not have the hard drive space, or more importantly, the portable player space to hold that stuff.

And for those who need a link, here's the FLAC homepage.

Erioll

Umm, there's a TCP/IP stack and a 10Mbps ethernet card (granted, Marinetti doesn't play nice with the ethernet card, but it WILL play nice with a modem). It's got Internet capabilities. WP software? That's why there's OSS - keeps platforms from dying completely off.

Hell, I posted a bug on sourceforge back in August 2003 about this (and it's a bug that's been around for far longer).

Strange pagination issues with comments

The bug got marked as closed but the problem still exists... (one wonders WTH the bug was closed).

Does anyone know of a project like this underway?

If you are truely getting above 500 spams a day you really need to take matters into your own hands about that. If you are using outlook you should really look into spambayes or use another mail app that has some bayesian filtering built into it, once you train it you'll cut those 500 or so down by 95% or so.

I'm a self-proclaimed hippie as well, people. What self-respecting young man ISN'T in favor of independence and free love these days?

Anyway, what I really wanted to scribe here is that iRATE is an amazing new program. You can learn and meet new artists through their music, and it's entirely Free as in an STD (-;

I recently found that after being disappointed with MP3.com, and I must say that I love it so much that I had a dream about it last night that I would wake up and only have the damn OMNIMEDIA radio crap stations playing Pinkin Lark and crap like that (which encourages violence, mind you).

Again, please support iRATE -- it's SourceForge code, it's Open-Source (~95%), it's made by Americans and Europeans, and it's really cool and a great replacement for MP3.com.

What, like Medion? I know they're a seperate company, but anyone want to bet they're under Aldi control? (BTW, their products ARE pretty cheap - $799 for a P4-2.6HT, 512MB RAM, DVDRW (forget whether it was +, -, or +-), 160GB HDD, wireless kb/mouse, then there's the USB tablet - $40 for an aiptek 12000u clone (linux drivers), and vnunet likes it) At least Medion makes stuff that's worth something (except for their first PC - only popular in Europe, but it made WAY too much noise - so much that aftermarket fan kits were made for it), unlike some of the Sam's Crap...

I hope they implement ASAP.

But there is another challenge, and that's the posts people write. Anybody care about their code? For example, quoting, to do it properly, one should write: <blockquote><p>blah, blah</p></blockquote>. That's an awful lot of typing.

A page is not going to validate unless the posts are correct.

The way I have planned to do this on one of my sites, is to make sure that every time somebody clicks "Preview" or "Submit", the post is handled to Tidy for sanity checks and conversion. By using preview, you can correct you're code, but you can never submit something that isn't well-formed.

I'm using Perl too, not Slashcode, but AxKit. Nevertheless, a good Perl implementation of Tidy is still lacking. There is a HTML::Tidy project page on Sourceforge, but it hasn't really gotten off the ground.

Does anybody else want to work on this, or do you have other ideas for cleaning up posts?

I hope they implement ASAP.

But there is another challenge, and that's the posts people write. Anybody care about their code? For example, quoting, to do it properly, one should write: <blockquote><p>blah, blah</p></blockquote>. That's an awful lot of typing.

A page is not going to validate unless the posts are correct.

The way I have planned to do this on one of my sites, is to make sure that every time somebody clicks "Preview" or "Submit", the post is handled to Tidy for sanity checks and conversion. By using preview, you can correct you're code, but you can never submit something that isn't well-formed.

I'm using Perl too, not Slashcode, but AxKit. Nevertheless, a good Perl implementation of Tidy is still lacking. There is a HTML::Tidy project page on Sourceforge, but it hasn't really gotten off the ground.

Does anybody else want to work on this, or do you have other ideas for cleaning up posts?

I LOVE my Neuros... I've had it for about 3 weeks now and if it broke tomorrow I'd have another one overnighted the next day.

Granted, the USB 1.1 can be annoying at times, but think about it this way: Even if you're loading up a full 20GB collection you'll only need to do it a few times. I've transfered my entire (albeit rather small, only like 5 GB) music collection to my Neuros like 4 times* so far and usually I just start and let it run overnight and have not been too bothered by the speed as such.

All-in-all you really can't beat the $229 price right now, and if you've got the money and you're tired of USB 1.1 then you can just upgrade to the USB 2.0 backpack when its released. The backpack will have a USB 2.0 mini-port built-in (whereas the Neuros main unit, not the backpack, has the USB 1.1 port) which will allow you to d/l music to the backpack without having the main unit connected to it.

I highly recommend the unit to all of my friends looking to purchase a portable music device... And to those who would say that the Neuros is more for geeks: Even my non-technical wife wants one now because she's so used to MyFi (the built-in FM transmitter) and she sees how handy it is for me to be able to take my music anywhere and listen to it on anything. The killer app for portable music.

*1st time when I first received my Neuros...
2nd time because I did the 1st sync from work and would rather have my main 'sync base' be one of my home pc's. (Syncing to other machines is possible though, read on...)
3rd time because I did something stupid when updating firmware.
4th time because I switched from their proprietary sync software to an open-source solution called the Neuros DB Manipulator which I liked better because I can just drag & drop my mp3's to the music folder on the Neuros and then do a 'Rebuild Database'. That's also the best way (IMHO) to sync with multiple PC's, although when you use NDBM instead of the provided software you lose the ability to choose what music you'd like to d/l from the PC on the device (when you sync, the program makes a list of all songs in the library that you don't currently have on your Neuros and allows you to use the menu on the device to specify songs to grab on the next sync... Kinda handy.)

Sure Enough... (props to google for this one)

I'm sure I'll be modded down, but I'd like to point this bug. Having comments not work at level 2 is quite frustrating.

Try YahooPOPs which emulates POP access to Yahoo. You can use this with pretty much any mail reader I believe. I use this and it works very well.