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I rather like this for quick and simple things:

http://seashore.sourceforge.net/

It's under active development again. The "preview snapshot" is quite nice.

I have used two programs for Statistical Analysis that have one advantage of R: both are free, nad part of the GNU project. Of course, both have disadvantages.

1) PSPP - a free alternative to SPSS. It does not have every option as SPSS, but in my opinion is fairly complete and has a lot of power. It is just like "click click. There is the average, the median, the standard deviaton, my null hypothesis cannot be rejected, let`s go back to work".

2) Gretl - Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library - a great tool for econometric analysis. If you are interested only in econometrics, I find it much more powerful than PSPP. If you are an R guru, you can use Gretl (which can be operated from a GUI or a CLI) for most calculations and, whenever you find a dead end, send the data to R.

For me, R is an incredible beast that I would like to tame. But programs like PSPP or Gretl (and SPSS, eViews, etc) can help me in so many situations that I don`t find myself needing R that much.

Check out: http://xtf.sourceforge.net/

I think it uses lucene on the backend. It's designed to map meta-data sources to meta-data outputs via XSL templates. I talked with some of the developers recently and it sounds reasonable. If your inputs are binary then it's probably not much help but for XML-like inputs it might give you some of the capabilities you're looking for. HTH

Since you bring up VistA, there are three items to fill in the gaps in the list you show:

1. "Ancient" can be two kinds, ancient like old cabbage or ancient like a shark is an ancient design. With M, aka MUMPS, it is more of a case of being ancient like a shark. The style is a little different, but it is really powerful. With the resurgance of interest in NoSQL databases, it should be top on your list to at least look at for larger projects. Like with anything else, it's a matter of choosing the right tool for the job and in some cases a hierachical database, as opposed to an object database or an SQL database, is just what the doctor ordered. (Pun intended.)

2: MUMPS (aka "M") is a very powerful and, in the health sector, rather widely used hierarchical database standard and language. It's ISO/IEC 11756 (2005) and has several engines that support it. GT.M, MDH, ANSI MUMPS. There are situations where a hierarchical database like M is more appropriate than the more widely used database standard, SQL aka ISO/IEC 9075(1-4,9-11,13,14):2008.

3: AFAIK the only example of a cross-platform GUI for VistA is Ovid. The most widely used client is still CRPS which is still dependent on Delphi (pascal) and kind of works with WINE or might do ok with tweaking on Lazarus. It's possible to write one, there are bindings for Python and Java. However, getting up to speed means at least one experienced clinician spending a lot of time with the system and at least two programmers (real ones, without Windows) with some clinical experience getting up to speed with VistA. R

4. The design is quite modular, but since all kinds of shysters and carpetbaggers are wanting a piece of the Brewster's Millions spent on electronic health care, there is all kinds of external politics interfering with development and deployment. For example, it is common for some shysters to peddle solutions built around M$ imitation of Java rather than sticking with actual Java for their extensions.

That said, there are also a good dozen open source health care systems designed around various types of clinics and demographics. Some are very good. Good luck finding them though. Wikipedia won't show them, being the playground of marketing corporations and lobbyists. Google won't find them unless you already know the name. Even then there is a good chance a competitor has been jamming the search engines with chaff.

Since you bring up VistA, there are three items to fill in the gaps in the list you show:

1. "Ancient" can be two kinds, ancient like old cabbage or ancient like a shark is an ancient design. With M, aka MUMPS, it is more of a case of being ancient like a shark. The style is a little different, but it is really powerful. With the resurgance of interest in NoSQL databases, it should be top on your list to at least look at for larger projects. Like with anything else, it's a matter of choosing the right tool for the job and in some cases a hierachical database, as opposed to an object database or an SQL database, is just what the doctor ordered. (Pun intended.)

2: MUMPS (aka "M") is a very powerful and, in the health sector, rather widely used hierarchical database standard and language. It's ISO/IEC 11756 (2005) and has several engines that support it. GT.M, MDH, ANSI MUMPS. There are situations where a hierarchical database like M is more appropriate than the more widely used database standard, SQL aka ISO/IEC 9075(1-4,9-11,13,14):2008.

3: AFAIK the only example of a cross-platform GUI for VistA is Ovid. The most widely used client is still CRPS which is still dependent on Delphi (pascal) and kind of works with WINE or might do ok with tweaking on Lazarus. It's possible to write one, there are bindings for Python and Java. However, getting up to speed means at least one experienced clinician spending a lot of time with the system and at least two programmers (real ones, without Windows) with some clinical experience getting up to speed with VistA. R

4. The design is quite modular, but since all kinds of shysters and carpetbaggers are wanting a piece of the Brewster's Millions spent on electronic health care, there is all kinds of external politics interfering with development and deployment. For example, it is common for some shysters to peddle solutions built around M$ imitation of Java rather than sticking with actual Java for their extensions.

That said, there are also a good dozen open source health care systems designed around various types of clinics and demographics. Some are very good. Good luck finding them though. Wikipedia won't show them, being the playground of marketing corporations and lobbyists. Google won't find them unless you already know the name. Even then there is a good chance a competitor has been jamming the search engines with chaff.

Take a look at http://hyperestraier.sourceforge.net/ ... there might be something newer by the same author, Mikio Hirabayashi

Extracting the text from whatever files you have would be a separate step.

Designers win, because they use one design (compliant, too!), for all browsers. Users win, because everyone sees the same design/version/look.

Best yet, when you pile on a library that fixes CSS3 (this article), and one to fix the CSS box model ( http://webdesign.about.com/od/css/a/aaboxmodelhack.htm ), and then another to fix the png transparency issue ( http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/ ), and another to add canvas support ( http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/ ), and another ...

Then you explain that everyone will see the same design (yay!), and people using older browsers will experience a VERY SLOW page load. That is why they should upgrade to a more up to date browser.

process control is still handled by the PLCs (unaffected by any sort of malware... that I know of) and if something was looking like it was about to go wrong, then the PLC should be set up to deal with it...

The PLCs I'm forced to work with (that happens to be from the same manufacturer that produces the POS that's WinCC[*]) can be networked and, as soon as you connect them to a network, you can control them (as in, modify the program, start them, stop them, the whole lot) remotely.
The communication is not encrypted and it's not password protected[**], so anybody that can obtain access to the network (and that's not very difficult in many factories, especially the very big ones) can control them at will.

[*] and other manufacturers aren't better

[**] there's a password protection, but it's enforced by the programming software, not by the PLC itself. You just have to use your own program, using the reverse engineered communication protocol and you're set.

Yes, there are open-source HMI projects available, but try convincing someone to deploy a life-critical system using one of them.

That's the first time I've seen alpha software with a "This may kill you and everyone around you" warning that was literally true.

It's not a great confidence boost when you're thinking of switching from the commercial solution which I am sure makes plenty of soothing cooing noises about its safety.

The target here is likely the HMI side of things. Many (most?) of the HMIs are Windows based and often built, installed and then ignored. The implementers routinely expect them to be running inside air-gapped networks, so vulnerability patching is not performed and sometimes even actively discouraged. Yes, there are open-source HMI projects available, but try convincing someone to deploy a life-critical system using one of them.

just open source the engine that runs it, because quite possibly you wrote a new one.

Look at the Doom and Quake engines, etc Doomsday is a nice example of that and you can take the WADs from your old ID games, even if they only played on DOS with a PC and Doomsday can be ported to other platforms besides Windows. eDuke32 is a Duke Nukem engine and you can buy the DOS Duke Nukem program for $5.99 if you lost your old floppy or CD, or if you are new to it, just pay the $5.99 and use the data files to play under eDuke32 then.

I bought my son a Sega Genesis 40 game collection for the Playstation 3. He likes them. Heck on the PC and other platforms there are emulators but you need to buy the ROMs. This Sega Genesis 40 game PS3 sounds like such a good idea it should be sold for Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS X systems. This way old games can still be played on modern systems. So even if the company does not open source it, they can still sell the old version to modern systems and use an emulator or something and then a whole new generation of fans enjoy it.

I grew up with the Atari 2600, a member of the IMagic Numb Thumb club and won an Activison Chopper Command contest at a local store and got a poster for it. I was so close to beating the Swordquest series until Atari canceled it for some reason, otherwise I would have qualified for the main contest to see if I could win the prizes that are objects used in the game with gold, silver, and gems to make them. I heard a rumor this was one Jack Trermiel left Commodore and bought out Atari and then to save money canceled the contest. I had an Atari 2600 ready to buy an Atari 800 computer until I learned how Atari treated their programmers and fired a lot of them and they formed IMagic and Activsion, and some went to Mattel and others to Coleco to make a system to compete with Atari. So when the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga 1000 came out I bought the Amiga 1000 and never regretted it. I got an Amiga 500 that replaced it and run my Bard's Tale on it, and hope Western RPG games like that make a comeback as every RPG (or most) are Eastern based Japanese Anime stuff, so when I ask Gamestop for Nintendo DS games that are RPGs based on D&D and stuff, does not exist they claimed. Man I want to learn Nintendo DS programming and write my own RPG using Western European and US themes in them. Paladins, Warriors, Bards, Clerics, ect. :)

get yourself a copy of Gnaural or SBAGen and play around with the different programs. i frequently drift off to sleep with one running in my ears, and have noticed i seem to sleep fewer hours and feel more refreshed. also good for naps and creative boosts.

oh, and *slow-clap* to the gp. well done, sir.

Uh oh, and here we are with Sourceforge hosting SBaGen. http://sbagen.sourceforge.net/ Hurry and download it before it's illegal!

A javascript non HTML5 puzzle game(just DHTML):
http://hylzee.sourceforge.net/hylZee/

It's not even that. It's plain old rewriting a library to remain compatible.
Here's an example of some end-user programs that use those very enumerations. The ELF_Type enumeration is used on page 37 in an end user application and ELF_T_WORD value is assigned to it on page 45.
http://elftoolchain.sourceforge.net/for-review/libelf-by-example-20100112.pdf

There's no coincidence involved. If you write applications that use the ELF_Type enumeration and you decided to write a new elf library to support that app you'd end up having the same enumeration names to maintain compatibility.

Copyright allows you to recreate something that's compatible as long as it isn't copied directly.

http://bitcoin.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?page=FAQ

There are some times when the underlying file system can matter, but the file sharing server must be aware of the limitations and deal with the problem transparently. If it doesn't, it can cause a lot of problems.

File streams are a pretty annoying problem when the underlying file system doesn't support them. Microsoft also stopped storing metadata in alternate data streams because people would copy them to file shares and would sometimes lose the ADS data. AppleShare is an even worse nightmare because many file systems strip the resource fork. Netatalk for Linux intelligently stores the streams as separate directories so they will work on file systems like ext2. Microsoft's Services for Macintosh doesn't do this kind of thing and will only work properly on NTFS which can store them directly in alternate data streams, which FAT doesn't support.

There are also various file permissions and attributes which depend on the file system. Newer versions of Windows file sharing supports NTFS style file/folder ACL's and Volume Shadow Copies which are not implemented the same on many other file systems. AppleTalk also expects all of the various bits of extra information stored on an HFS volume (like the file type and creator mappings).

It appears to me that the design and features of ZFS allow it to easily support the features of other file systems without a lot of extra work. If you had the NAS running something like ext3, I think the file servering services would probably have to do a lot more work translating those features to work correctly.

EVMS ( http://evms.sourceforge.net/ ) could do some of these things and shared the same vision as ZFS: "EVMS provide[d] a single, unified system for handling all of your storage management tasks." The memory is a bit fuzzy but I think it was a port/reimplementation from AIX or else IBM was involved. I think it died because it didn't integrate well into the kernel (like ZFS it smashed many layers into one).

Heh, already looks like someone is working on this: http://pentagram.sourceforge.net/
Though it appears to be more of an engine port to run the game under modern OSes

Yup. It's a Dungeon Siege 1 mod, just like the Ultima V - Lazarus remake project.

Crap. Don't have my Dungeon Siege disks anymore :-/

On a related note, Ultima VII (which you can play on modern PCs w/ shinies using the Exult engine) is still the best Ultima of all time - its NPC AI was revolutionary for having rotating schedules and jobs, which Oblivion & Fallout 3 copied.

It's worth to metion that Ultima 4 has a remake too: http://xu4.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Funny you should mention railroads...

Shazam wasn't the first to identify songs based on a hash of the audio. I worked for a start-up, eTantrum, that developed similar tech, Songprint, which it open sourced (under the moniker "Freetantrum"). I always assumed that Shazam was extended from that work.

The next generation protocol has already been invented too, the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) recorded as IEEE 1588, with open source implementations already available.

PTP isn't a replacement to NTP: it's trying to solve a different problem. It's not useful on a general company LAN, but rather on a network that controls robotics or measurement devices.

Some limitations of PTP:
  * only one "grandmaster" clock, i.e., no redundancy
  * no WAN connectivity; it's UDP multicast-only, and so not very routable
  * no security/signing of timestamps; NTP has security extensions if you need to be able to trust the time
  * patented by HP/Agilent; NTP is both open and free

http://www.meinberg.de/download/docs/ieee1588/meinberg_ieee1588_conference2005_whitepaper.pdf

PTP was designed for small subnets of systems where measurement instruments and robotic systems are running on. This isn't a general PC/server solution.

The next generation protocol has already been invented too, the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) recorded as IEEE 1588, with open source implementations already available.

Howdy,

I posted above, but I think things were lost in the noise. I've been using anyInventory ( http://anyinventory.sourceforge.net/ ) for my electronics catalog. The bonus is that it is a web interface, so you can use any web browser to view/search/edit your inventory, which is a big plus over zparts, I think.

I have it setup to track these fields:

    My 'part number' (which I put on schematics so I know what I used)
    Vendor, price, Vendor part (for re-order and quick costing of a project)
    Manufacturer, part, link to datasheet, part photo
    Value, tolerance, power rating, package, etc
    Location (more below)
    Quantity on hand/order
    geda footprint (for geda's PCB http://www.gpleda.org/index.html [gpleda.org])

My internal part numbering system is a 3x4 part number, ie, 100-0001, where the first 3 digits are a category of part (resistor, 74 series, whatever) and the 4 digit is just a number I assign to make it unique. This allows me to specify my part number on a schematic or BOM along with the refdes and value so I know exactly the part and footprint I need.

Secondly, I have a series of drawer cabinets, bins, etc as needed to store the parts, each labeled with drawer, cabinet, shelf (usually with a barcode for some future fun with a barcode reader).

Anyway, I hope that helps.

First of all, thank you. It's always good to hear some criticism on definite and specific issues, rather than the generic "M$ sucks".

(I am a VS developer)

Or how about, starting in either VS2005 or 2008 (can't remember which one), I opened up a project written in VC++6 and freaked when I suddenly started seeing hundred and hundreds of warnings, telling me that functions like strncat() (strncat!) were "unsafe" and I should use something like _strnscat or something like that, which supposedly was "more" safe at the cost of being totally Microsoft-specific.

It was added in VS2005, but it's not quite MS-specific. OpenWatcom also provides it out of the box, and there's a cross-platform FOSS implementation available now.

The reason why the text says that they are unsafe is because, frankly, they are - as a result of several security studies, they account for a very significant proportion of known buffer overrun vulnerabilities. Of course, it's perfectly possible to use them in a safe way, but surprisingly many people actually do... but this take has been fairly controversial, anyway, I won't deny that.

It should also be noted that this isn't actually the default for the compiler as such - if you directly do "cl.exe foo.cpp", you won't get any warnings for strcpy. It only pops up if you raise the warning level to /W3 or higher, which is what IDE does by default for newly created C++ projects. The text of the warning also clearly states what to do to get rid of it:

warning C4996: 'strcpy': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using strcpy_s instead. To disable deprecation, use CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details.

When you refer to it being per-project, do you imply that it was inconvenient to add the define to all the numerous projects you've had in the solution?

How about the auto-hide windows that seem to randomly decide to suddenly be pinned or to suddenly appear during unrelated actions?

Tool windows in VS have different and separate settings depending on which mode you're in - aside from the default one which you get on normal VS start and/or project open, debugging is a separate mode, and opening VS with a single file (aka "simple editing") is yet another. This is somewhat similar to Eclipse perspectives.

If you pinned a toolwindow in one of those modes, it will not be pinned in other modes. The idea is that you generally want different toolwindow configurations depending on activity - e.g. you might want Breakpoints window to be set to auto-hide during normal editing, but pinned in debugging. So you will, at most, need to pin the window in all modes in which you've made it visible, and most likely, you'll be dealing with just the default mode and the debugging one.

If you experience random pinning/unpinning that cannot be explained by the above, then please describe the scenario under which it happens - which toolwindow, what were you doing when it got unpinned, etc. Better yet, do it in a bug tracker.

When working with C#, the compiler and editor will give you a red squiggle under code it can't compile, but gives you know way to know where or how many places in the file they are

If you open the Error tool window (which will happen after the first build, but you can do it manually), it will list all IntelliSense errors just as if they were compiler errors, so you can see the error descriptions, and double-click to jump to location. By the way, this (as well as squiggles themselves) also works for C++ in VS2010.

If you want margin markers as in Eclipse, you can

Thank you for the suggestions everyone. I've got to say that I know physical storage can be very nice. But when I'm limited to storage space because I'm a college student then I need something to keep track of what I have. I've got my parts semi-organized in a fishing tackle box but it's not a very precise organization, which is why I'm looking for some sort of software to keep track of what I've got. I'm not look for any DIY setup because I honestly don't have the time commitment to put into something like that. From what I've seen of the suggestions I think that zparts ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/zparts/ ) is probably best suiting to what I'm looking for. Thanks everyone

Here's the solution I use to inventory my electronic components.

First, I have a database setup using anyInventory ( http://anyinventory.sourceforge.net/ ) that catalogs the important bits, ie:

  My 'part number' (which I put on schematics so I know what I used)
  Vendor, price, Vendor part (for re-order and quick costing of a project)
  Manufacturer, part, link to datasheet, part photo
  Value, tolerance, power rating, package, etc
  Location (more below)
  Quantity on hand/order
  geda footprint (for geda's PCB http://www.gpleda.org/index.html)

My internal part numbering system is a 3x4 part number, ie, 100-0001, where the first 3 digits are a category of part (resistor, 74 series, whatever) and the 4 digit is just a number I assign to make it unique. This allows me to specify my part number on a schematic or BOM along with the refdes and value so I know exactly the part and footprint I need.

Secondly, I have a series of drawer cabinets, bins, etc as needed to store the parts, each labeled with drawer, cabinet, shelf (usually with a barcode for some future fun with a barcode reader).

Why go to all the bother? Seriously, I have hundreds and hundreds of parts. I work on circuits for a living, and trust me, not having the organized blows.

I started on another project at one point in time that would automate assigning parts to a 'product' or 'project' so you could wasily generate invoices or costing, but I have not completed it yet. I'll probably get back into that this year, though.

You can contact me thru the Realeyes forums on Sourceforge. The areas where I could use some help include:

- The sensor has its own memory management because of buffering requirements. This and the ways buffers are used and released by the analysis engine need improvement.
- I would like to port the DB interface from Java to C or C++.
- I would like to improve the DB exporting capabilities for better reporting and interfacing with other systems, such as problem ticketing systems.
- There are several features I would like to add to the user interface.

Later . . . Jim

Surprisingly I suggest my own project. :-) Let me explain why I think that supporting a programming language project (and especially Seed7) is important: Languages are an instrument to think. Natural and computer languages provide a way to formulate ideas. How easy an idea can be formulated depends on the capabilities of a language. When new ideas emerge a language might need to be extended. Remember that the only constant thing in life is change. This led to the idea to make extensibility the most basic concept of a programming language. When a language is syntactical and semantically extensible all other features can be added sooner or later by using extensions. Most languages are extended by using ad hoc extensions for the syntax and the compiler. In the long run this is a wrong way. Syntactic and semantic extensions should fit into a structured concept. Otherwise a language and its compiler are in danger to become unmaintainable.

Seed7 has several areas which need improvement. E.g.:
- A database interface. Here I suggest something in the direction of LINQ. It is IMHO important to integrate database statements in Seed7 to avoid SQL-Injection. Sending unchecked strings as database commands from the user level should be avoided (or even prohibited).
- Integrating a widget library (or inventing a new one) without complicated concepts with events and event loops (this should be hidden somehow).
- Interface to OpenGL/Mesa (Complexities and OS/library differences should be hidden in a thin layer).
- Checking and improving the documentation (this is a good first step to get understanding of Seed7 and its concepts).
- Introduce statements with curly braces (many people are opposing Seed7 and don't have a closer look just because it is not a curly brace language).
- Provide a mechanism such that Seed7 functions can be called from other programming languages.
- Of course you can choose whatever you want.

If you want to make a better world and don't fear the language competition Seed7 is the right project for you. :-) Please give me some feedback.

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.

SourceForge does have a help wanted page at: http://sourceforge.net/people/

Hi, We have recently open sourced a project and we could really use your experience. The idea is, there are a lot of content publishing platforms like MediaWiki, Drupal, Jhoomla and so on. But there is no free and open source Video publishing and streaming platform right now. So, we went ahead and wrote one. Its fairly primitive right now as we are following the open source philosophy of "Release Early - Release Often". Its both flash & HTML 5 compliant and has a some basic features. Check it out and help us if you can or at least give us some feedback so that we can take this in the right direction - http://sourceforge.net/projects/ytube/

http://goldchest.sourceforge.net/

A little browsing on Sourceforge and Savannah should have led you to http://sourceforge.net/people/ and http://savannah.gnu.org/people/

One of the things I like the most about Windows 7 is that unlike XP my RAM actually is being used for something useful, instead of sitting empty most of the time. I have about 500Mb of my 8Gb free, because thanks to Superfetch Windows knows which programs I use and when and has them waiting in RAM for me.

Linux has this as well. It's called Preload.

jdb2

NTFS or any other FUSE (MacFUSE) file system. However in a heterogeneous environment NTFS has the bonus of native Windows support.

There is NTFS-3G for Linux and Mac OS X

There is also an EXT2 Fuse FS (for Mac OS), and probably many other options.

Having said that, I have never had a problem with Linux's HFS+ write support.

Has a song too http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/Site/Song.html

Ever heard of unetbootin? In some cases it's even easier than burning a distro to a CD, because it will even handle downloading the ISO for you. Just stick in a formatted fat32 flash drive and within 15 minutes you can have a liveusb stick working.

It's pretty sweet!

http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/Site/Home.html

The other application of the Geoid is that it is essentially the "Mean Sea Level" across the globe.

This is essential for you GPS Receiver - the height calculated by a GPS receiver is the height above a theoretical ellipsoid that has pretty much the same shape of the earth. However, the geoid is used to calculate the difference between this "Ellipsoidal Height" and the "height above sea level" that is reported by receivers - sometimes known as "undulation". Without it, Brisbane, Australia would report being about 40m above the water when out on the Bay in a boat.

GPS Receivers typically use a lookup table for it, but can be calculated from scratch using a geoid model such as EGM96 using Spherical Harmonics. Of course, there is an open source implementation of it in C and MATLAB.

The other application of the Geoid is that it is essentially the "Mean Sea Level" across the globe.

This is essential for you GPS Receiver - the height calculated by a GPS receiver is the height above a theoretical ellipsoid that has pretty much the same shape of the earth. However, the geoid is used to calculate the difference between this "Ellipsoidal Height" and the "height above sea level" that is reported by receivers - sometimes known as "undulation". Without it, Brisbane, Australia would report being about 40m above the water when out on the Bay in a boat.

GPS Receivers typically use a lookup table for it, but can be calculated from scratch using a geoid model such as EGM96 using Spherical Harmonics. Of course, there is an open source implementation of it in C and MATLAB.

The biggest example was probably how they handle multiple size screens on an extended desktop: click through the dialog once, and it remembers. The next time you connect that particular screen, you get your nice big desktop back. The Linux equivalent is a full workday worth of xorg research, and God help you if you want two different profiles (like laptop+big screen and laptop+projector).

Actually my netbook does this under Fedora 12 without issue or any special configuration.

The video chipset is Intel based (lspci says "945GME"), so it uses the fully Open Source X.org driver, and perhaps that helps.

When I plug in a screen to my netbook at the office, it recognizes the monitor ID, sets it to maximum resolution, and correctly places it relative to where the netbook sits on my desk. If I close the netbook lid and the screens go to sleep, I can unlock the system without opening it (running Synergy) and the desktop area automatically resizes to just use the monitor. If I then open the lid it resizes again to use both the netbook screen and monitor again, with the same resolutions and relative positioning as before.

The same thing happens when I take the netbook home - although there it recognizes a different monitor is being used, with a different resolution and relative position - all of my settings are remembered without my having to do anything manually. And I should probably say all of the original resolution and layout settings were done with the default, graphical tools, not by having to drop to the command line or hack any special scripts. Hell, there's not even a "xorg.conf" text file on the system, everything is auto-detected and launched automatically through the boot process.

Except for the Synergy part this is all out-of-the-box and "just works." Only caveat is I can't run Compiz at the same time because it doesn't handle the layout/resolution changes properly.

OH MY GOD!! So excited!

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/petition/petition.php

I love Activision right now. Would that they let TFB have access to Star Control license ...

For encryption check out http://phpseclib.sourceforge.net/
"LGPL-licensed pure-PHP implementations of an arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic library, fully PKCS#1 (v2.1) compliant RSA, DES, 3DES, RC4, Rijndael, AES, SSH-1, SSH-2, and SFTP."
Great to have if you're not sure others will have mcrypt or other options installed on their server.

I prefer on-demand content for my TV shows, for which BitTorrent is the perfect solution. For sports live streaming is required, as I came to realize with the football[1] World Cup, and there is no good open standard today. I hope GoalBit gets momentum, but so far only proprietary applications[2] have some live content available (mostly copyright infringing channels from asia).

I feel really guilty about wasting all that bandwidth with that Flash streaming crap.

[1] football: the sport played with the feet, not hands
[2] e.g.: Veetle, Stream Torrent, SopCast, TVAnts.

Seconding OpenGTS. I don't use it personally, but my uncle is a private investigator who chases trucks around California to find them for repo men, and he recently switched to OpenGTS (from some insanely expensive tracking system) for GPS tracking and loves it. It would be great for fleet tracking as well. I believe it uses SMS to transmit real-time location data, so you will need a texting plan for each device.

http://opengts.sourceforge.net/

I'd like to invite you to check out the lynx and links web browsers.

The problem with MSIE6 is that it adds nonstandard extensions to HTML and CSS, does not (natively) support the full PNG spec, it is pathetically insecure, it adds padding to certain HTML elements in a lot of situations where everybody else assumes padding=0 so by making a web page in standard HTML/XHTML that looks gorgeous in every single other web browser will be horribly broken in MSIE6.

MSIE7 and MSIE8 have progressively gotten a TON better but they still don't handle broken pages gracefully (see the acid3 test) and will still degrade to MSIE6 compatibility mode, encouraging corporate web developers to be lazy and keep things as-is.

Now, as far as "fancy effects" go - those "fancy effects" led to the possibility of google docs, web-based photoshop elements replacements, online banking that doesn't take weeks to navigate (do you have an AmEx account? Log into your account on AmEx and you will see online commerce done right), and even legal free and low-cost on-demand video programming, and online classes. It also allowed for the building of "community" web sites that made the whole world a lot smaller, connecting people from nearly every nation.

It also allows us to research products better before we buy, so when companies post their products online they can post a LOT more detail than they ever did in printed brochures, and you can educate yourself so that salespeople who nothing about the product beyond what their commission is won't steer you wrong.

You can stick to the web as it was circa 1997. I'll take today's "web 2.0" (wait, did I just say web 2.0?), thankyouverymuch. And, I'll be very happy using non-Microsoft browsers.

http://slfcfd.sourceforge.net/

I haven't used it, but I've used his related SLFFEA for a project before, and was surprised how easy it was to use.

http://slfcfd.sourceforge.net/

I haven't used it, but I've used his related SLFFEA for a project before, and was surprised how easy it was to use.