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I was impressed that Andrew Tridgell was able to reverse engineer the bitkeeper line protocol to develop sourcepuller. Especially since he claims to have done it without access to a client. The story is he polled the server to get samples of the protocol.

I have seen many binary line protocols reverse engineered over the years. If you have enough data quite a bit is possible.

While not provided by Mozilla, the tools are there.

FrontMotion make Firefox Packager. You can use choose a Firefox version, a language and up to ten extensions. Press a button and in a few minutes you can download your customized MSI package ready for deployment.

FirefoxADM is a way of allowing centrally managed locked and/or default settings in Firefox via Group Policy and Administrative Templates in Active Directory.

For restricting users from adding unsupported add-ons, do the following.

1. Restrict Firefox (using FirefoxADM and GPO) to using only digitally signed add-ons.
2. Get, or make, a corporate code-signing key.
3. Sign the .xpi files of your tested and approved add-ons.
4. Make them available on your intranet.

If users claim they can't live without other extensions, have them use your software approval policy and procedures for getting that add-on approved.

The only add-on I "can't live without" is AdBlock Plus. I consider it a security feature, blocking drive-by malware from various 3rd-party banner ads.

There's XL. OK, to be honest, it doesn't handle parallelism that well yet, but how this will be done is understood. And whether it's actively developed or not depends on your definition of "actively" ;-)

Pros:

  - Designed for meta-programming
  - Extensible (you can add your own notations with compiler plug-ins)
  - No forced placement of { and } (largely because you don't need them)
  - Probably the first language where you could redefine a Pascal-like WriteLn (way back in 2000 or so)
  - The XL compiler is written in XL (the Go compiler isn't written in Go)
  - Expression reduction, a generalized form of operator overloading, e.g. define expression A+B*C=0 when A, B and C are matrices
  - True generic types, e.g. a way to use "array" as a type to denote code that doesn't care about element type or size
  - Generic validation, i.e. detect in the specification whether it's OK to use a given generic type, e.g. maximum only works if you have an order relation.
  - Generates C or Java (work currently in progress for generating machine code on the fly using LLVM)
  - No parser-injected semi-colons. What were they thinking?
  - OTOH, the new-line that separates statements is an infix operator (and so is the semi-colon). Now, that is cool.
  - Very simple base syntax, implemented within less than 1000 lines of code

Cons:

  - Not backed by Google or any large company
  - Never went much beyond the "amusing exercise in compiler technology" stage, i.e. not used for any real stuff

Disclaimer: I invented and implemented that language, which means that you are probably biased :-)

There's XL. OK, to be honest, it doesn't handle parallelism that well yet, but how this will be done is understood. And whether it's actively developed or not depends on your definition of "actively" ;-)

Pros:

  - Designed for meta-programming
  - Extensible (you can add your own notations with compiler plug-ins)
  - No forced placement of { and } (largely because you don't need them)
  - Probably the first language where you could redefine a Pascal-like WriteLn (way back in 2000 or so)
  - The XL compiler is written in XL (the Go compiler isn't written in Go)
  - Expression reduction, a generalized form of operator overloading, e.g. define expression A+B*C=0 when A, B and C are matrices
  - True generic types, e.g. a way to use "array" as a type to denote code that doesn't care about element type or size
  - Generic validation, i.e. detect in the specification whether it's OK to use a given generic type, e.g. maximum only works if you have an order relation.
  - Generates C or Java (work currently in progress for generating machine code on the fly using LLVM)
  - No parser-injected semi-colons. What were they thinking?
  - OTOH, the new-line that separates statements is an infix operator (and so is the semi-colon). Now, that is cool.
  - Very simple base syntax, implemented within less than 1000 lines of code

Cons:

  - Not backed by Google or any large company
  - Never went much beyond the "amusing exercise in compiler technology" stage, i.e. not used for any real stuff

Disclaimer: I invented and implemented that language, which means that you are probably biased :-)

There's XL. OK, to be honest, it doesn't handle parallelism that well yet, but how this will be done is understood. And whether it's actively developed or not depends on your definition of "actively" ;-)

Pros:

  - Designed for meta-programming
  - Extensible (you can add your own notations with compiler plug-ins)
  - No forced placement of { and } (largely because you don't need them)
  - Probably the first language where you could redefine a Pascal-like WriteLn (way back in 2000 or so)
  - The XL compiler is written in XL (the Go compiler isn't written in Go)
  - Expression reduction, a generalized form of operator overloading, e.g. define expression A+B*C=0 when A, B and C are matrices
  - True generic types, e.g. a way to use "array" as a type to denote code that doesn't care about element type or size
  - Generic validation, i.e. detect in the specification whether it's OK to use a given generic type, e.g. maximum only works if you have an order relation.
  - Generates C or Java (work currently in progress for generating machine code on the fly using LLVM)
  - No parser-injected semi-colons. What were they thinking?
  - OTOH, the new-line that separates statements is an infix operator (and so is the semi-colon). Now, that is cool.
  - Very simple base syntax, implemented within less than 1000 lines of code

Cons:

  - Not backed by Google or any large company
  - Never went much beyond the "amusing exercise in compiler technology" stage, i.e. not used for any real stuff

Disclaimer: I invented and implemented that language, which means that you are probably biased :-)

There's XL. OK, to be honest, it doesn't handle parallelism that well yet, but how this will be done is understood. And whether it's actively developed or not depends on your definition of "actively" ;-)

Pros:

  - Designed for meta-programming
  - Extensible (you can add your own notations with compiler plug-ins)
  - No forced placement of { and } (largely because you don't need them)
  - Probably the first language where you could redefine a Pascal-like WriteLn (way back in 2000 or so)
  - The XL compiler is written in XL (the Go compiler isn't written in Go)
  - Expression reduction, a generalized form of operator overloading, e.g. define expression A+B*C=0 when A, B and C are matrices
  - True generic types, e.g. a way to use "array" as a type to denote code that doesn't care about element type or size
  - Generic validation, i.e. detect in the specification whether it's OK to use a given generic type, e.g. maximum only works if you have an order relation.
  - Generates C or Java (work currently in progress for generating machine code on the fly using LLVM)
  - No parser-injected semi-colons. What were they thinking?
  - OTOH, the new-line that separates statements is an infix operator (and so is the semi-colon). Now, that is cool.
  - Very simple base syntax, implemented within less than 1000 lines of code

Cons:

  - Not backed by Google or any large company
  - Never went much beyond the "amusing exercise in compiler technology" stage, i.e. not used for any real stuff

Disclaimer: I invented and implemented that language, which means that you are probably biased :-)

There's XL. OK, to be honest, it doesn't handle parallelism that well yet, but how this will be done is understood. And whether it's actively developed or not depends on your definition of "actively" ;-)

Pros:

  - Designed for meta-programming
  - Extensible (you can add your own notations with compiler plug-ins)
  - No forced placement of { and } (largely because you don't need them)
  - Probably the first language where you could redefine a Pascal-like WriteLn (way back in 2000 or so)
  - The XL compiler is written in XL (the Go compiler isn't written in Go)
  - Expression reduction, a generalized form of operator overloading, e.g. define expression A+B*C=0 when A, B and C are matrices
  - True generic types, e.g. a way to use "array" as a type to denote code that doesn't care about element type or size
  - Generic validation, i.e. detect in the specification whether it's OK to use a given generic type, e.g. maximum only works if you have an order relation.
  - Generates C or Java (work currently in progress for generating machine code on the fly using LLVM)
  - No parser-injected semi-colons. What were they thinking?
  - OTOH, the new-line that separates statements is an infix operator (and so is the semi-colon). Now, that is cool.
  - Very simple base syntax, implemented within less than 1000 lines of code

Cons:

  - Not backed by Google or any large company
  - Never went much beyond the "amusing exercise in compiler technology" stage, i.e. not used for any real stuff

Disclaimer: I invented and implemented that language, which means that you are probably biased :-)

There's XL. OK, to be honest, it doesn't handle parallelism that well yet, but how this will be done is understood. And whether it's actively developed or not depends on your definition of "actively" ;-)

Pros:

  - Designed for meta-programming
  - Extensible (you can add your own notations with compiler plug-ins)
  - No forced placement of { and } (largely because you don't need them)
  - Probably the first language where you could redefine a Pascal-like WriteLn (way back in 2000 or so)
  - The XL compiler is written in XL (the Go compiler isn't written in Go)
  - Expression reduction, a generalized form of operator overloading, e.g. define expression A+B*C=0 when A, B and C are matrices
  - True generic types, e.g. a way to use "array" as a type to denote code that doesn't care about element type or size
  - Generic validation, i.e. detect in the specification whether it's OK to use a given generic type, e.g. maximum only works if you have an order relation.
  - Generates C or Java (work currently in progress for generating machine code on the fly using LLVM)
  - No parser-injected semi-colons. What were they thinking?
  - OTOH, the new-line that separates statements is an infix operator (and so is the semi-colon). Now, that is cool.
  - Very simple base syntax, implemented within less than 1000 lines of code

Cons:

  - Not backed by Google or any large company
  - Never went much beyond the "amusing exercise in compiler technology" stage, i.e. not used for any real stuff

Disclaimer: I invented and implemented that language, which means that you are probably biased :-)

There's XL. OK, to be honest, it doesn't handle parallelism that well yet, but how this will be done is understood. And whether it's actively developed or not depends on your definition of "actively" ;-)

Pros:

  - Designed for meta-programming
  - Extensible (you can add your own notations with compiler plug-ins)
  - No forced placement of { and } (largely because you don't need them)
  - Probably the first language where you could redefine a Pascal-like WriteLn (way back in 2000 or so)
  - The XL compiler is written in XL (the Go compiler isn't written in Go)
  - Expression reduction, a generalized form of operator overloading, e.g. define expression A+B*C=0 when A, B and C are matrices
  - True generic types, e.g. a way to use "array" as a type to denote code that doesn't care about element type or size
  - Generic validation, i.e. detect in the specification whether it's OK to use a given generic type, e.g. maximum only works if you have an order relation.
  - Generates C or Java (work currently in progress for generating machine code on the fly using LLVM)
  - No parser-injected semi-colons. What were they thinking?
  - OTOH, the new-line that separates statements is an infix operator (and so is the semi-colon). Now, that is cool.
  - Very simple base syntax, implemented within less than 1000 lines of code

Cons:

  - Not backed by Google or any large company
  - Never went much beyond the "amusing exercise in compiler technology" stage, i.e. not used for any real stuff

Disclaimer: I invented and implemented that language, which means that you are probably biased :-)

The issue here I think is where small game developers "clone" old games. Instead of cloning them - re-image them instead. I started a new gold box game engine (web site ugly right now) which uses a similar look and feel but I'm redesigning it from scratch (and implementing new features).

http://projectm.sourceforge.net/

I don't see the connection with moon though.

At first I thought this was going to be about giving scientists LSD, playing some Pink Floyd, and making them watch visualizations until they think they're flying through space...

For PHP + *SQL, use DBO, first proper interface for databases in PHP IMO.

Could you provide a link? Are you referring to PHPDBO ?

For those using php, ADOdb is a great way of doing this, and also adds a lot of great functions similar to the perl DBI: http://adodb.sourceforge.net/

FoFIX is still hideously slow due to being written in Python. Try Strings on Speed. It has vastly improved performance and works with FoF songs.

I also find it curious that an anonymous coward would accuse me of backing out of a discussion. Only one of us is hiding his real name here.

I will, however, refute your accusation that I am a liar. Verdana for Linux is legally available at zero monetary cost from http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/.

#4 on Google for "osx emulator"

http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FAQ

For Christ's sake, I didn't even try.

Now THAT would shut them up!

There are ups and downs to many solutions out there. One of my current projects involves XML files and migration into databases (Oracle or MS SQL - both commercial) larger than the application memory limit on 32 bit windows machines let alone the (practical) limit on any editor. Since I'm stuck having to use windows, I needed a solution to split them up, so I had a perl script (free) written that does the job beautifully. The files would be hard to manage if there were too many of them, so the sizes are still large. (70-100M) TextPad (commercial) or saxon-b's XQuery engine (FOSS) to run searches and analysis, but if I am doing anything simple with XML app configuration files, transforming table name lists into SQL create scripts, or non-XML text processing, I use Notepad++ because it's simply better than TextPad AND free, but doesn't handle larger files easily. While our main product is MS SQL-based, our internal project tracking system is MySQL/PHP/Apache with a dash of MS SQL (we have bulk licenses anyways) for convenience.

Anyone who's worked IT (not just tech support) knows that FOSS practically is your trade, or you'd go broke in license fees. Sure, where I work we have some commercial products we work with, but much of the bulk of the business core is custom-built and on platforms we didn't have to pay for. Using the equivalent reasoning of smart business decisions only becomes a problem to the MAFIAA companies when the decisions are in the public eye. (government) Heavy users of IT (including those who work IT) should be using the least costly, most agile solution. Sorry, but that means that a lot of commercial firms will lose out. That's market forces for you. People who whine about that aren't so much capitalists as casting themselves as an obsolete feudal lord in the 21st century. If you're main trade is moved in on, you either adapt and become better, or become obsolete. This is what software is all about.

The only problem I see with mandating (as opposed to recommending) FOSS everywhere might be slow development in the long run but could make software writers more free agents who get contracted at the drop of a hat to interpret and expand a dead project that they built infrastructure on. Much like civil engineers obtain contracts.

Now THAT would shut them up!

There are ups and downs to many solutions out there. One of my current projects involves XML files and migration into databases (Oracle or MS SQL - both commercial) larger than the application memory limit on 32 bit windows machines let alone the (practical) limit on any editor. Since I'm stuck having to use windows, I needed a solution to split them up, so I had a perl script (free) written that does the job beautifully. The files would be hard to manage if there were too many of them, so the sizes are still large. (70-100M) TextPad (commercial) or saxon-b's XQuery engine (FOSS) to run searches and analysis, but if I am doing anything simple with XML app configuration files, transforming table name lists into SQL create scripts, or non-XML text processing, I use Notepad++ because it's simply better than TextPad AND free, but doesn't handle larger files easily. While our main product is MS SQL-based, our internal project tracking system is MySQL/PHP/Apache with a dash of MS SQL (we have bulk licenses anyways) for convenience.

Anyone who's worked IT (not just tech support) knows that FOSS practically is your trade, or you'd go broke in license fees. Sure, where I work we have some commercial products we work with, but much of the bulk of the business core is custom-built and on platforms we didn't have to pay for. Using the equivalent reasoning of smart business decisions only becomes a problem to the MAFIAA companies when the decisions are in the public eye. (government) Heavy users of IT (including those who work IT) should be using the least costly, most agile solution. Sorry, but that means that a lot of commercial firms will lose out. That's market forces for you. People who whine about that aren't so much capitalists as casting themselves as an obsolete feudal lord in the 21st century. If you're main trade is moved in on, you either adapt and become better, or become obsolete. This is what software is all about.

The only problem I see with mandating (as opposed to recommending) FOSS everywhere might be slow development in the long run but could make software writers more free agents who get contracted at the drop of a hat to interpret and expand a dead project that they built infrastructure on. Much like civil engineers obtain contracts.

Idea/prediction markets are actually a hotbed of research, and there are several different theories about what could've happened with the terror attack thing. In any case, it was less about specific terror attacks and more about stability indexes for different parts of the world, etc.

By the way, there's awesome open source software under active development for running your own prediction markets and experiments with prediction markets.

I don't have time to look this up at the moment, but what I recall as the most important and least conventional GPL interpretation is that MySQL (the company) took the position that applications that depended on MySQL (the RDBMS) as one of their components were derivative works that incorporated the RDBMS--and that details about linking or protocols were just not relevant. Therefore, unless you bought a commercial license from the company, such applications had to be distributed under GPL terms.

Put more carefully, the idea is an application is a derivative of MySQL is whether if it relies critically on MySQL to provide its functionality. So, for example, a blog management tool that absolutely required MySQL as its backend would be a derivative work, while a graphical SQL client that could connect to many different RDBMSes and generically examine and modify the schema might not be (at least not under this criterion).

They may have additionally taken the position that the protocol is subject to the license, or something similar to that, but that would hardly be the whole position they've taken.

Note that the FSF itself takes a similar position with regards to linking to libraries, as shown by this old exchange about CLISP and readline. Quoting from one of RMS's emails there:

The FSF position would be that this is still one program, which has only been disguised as two. The reason it is still one program is that the one part clearly shows the intention for incorporation of the other part.

I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.

What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.

So the lesson here is one should not put too much stock on arguments about static vs. dynamic linking, linking vs. network protocols, or other such technical details, because judges will most likely find that none of those details are really the essential issue.

The JMRI sourceforge page acccepts donations, a proper slashdotting could make make up the difference between expenses and $100k pretty quickly!

Why the heck is Bruce Perens' name all over this and in the summary TWICE while Bob Jacobsen's name is only listed in the summary in case name?
It was Bob Jacobsen that paid for this case, risked his job, and wrote the software while Bruce Perens' did even go on the stand!
Here is a much better summery.

"Open source programmer Bob Jacobsen wins an historic case establishing the legal validity of Open Source Licenses ,
The court awarded Mr. Jacobsen $100,000 after years of appeals and many thousands of dollors of personal expenses.
The actual court ruling is almost like some kind of Hollywood movie ending for Open Source, with the judge so unequivocally siding with the underfunded open source developer.
Here is a link to Mr. Jacobsen's project JMRI http://jmri.sourceforge.net/ where you can read about his software and contribute to his project to show your support and gratitude for the legal fight Mr. Jacobsen fought for all of our benefit."

"

Here's the link to their donations page:

http://jmri.sourceforge.net/donations.shtml

I have to admire what these guys are doing and the good it will do for the open source community as a whole (at least in the US). I've seen this case pop up off and on over the years, and it always struck me as a scary plight for an open source developer to be in.

(Not affiliated with the project in any way and nobody asked me to post the link - I just think a slashdot effect is in order here given what they're doing and what he's been up against.)

Here's the link to their donations page:

http://jmri.sourceforge.net/donations.shtml

I have to admire what these guys are doing and the good it will do for the open source community as a whole (at least in the US). I've seen this case pop up off and on over the years, and it always struck me as a scary plight for an open source developer to be in.

(Not affiliated with the project in any way and nobody asked me to post the link - I just think a slashdot effect is in order here given what they're doing and what he's been up against.)

I see you found an ADM for Firefox. Personally, I think that anyone that says that they won't deploy something because they can't control it, plainly isn't trying hard enough or at all. Firefox is probably one of the easiest applications I've had to deploy. It's small, simple and not hugely difficult to control.

GPO is a backwards pile of crap, There are plenty of other far superior ways of deploying settings and applications. Novell Zenworks being a personal favorite. Version 10 is directory/OS independent (can run on windows and use AD as a user source) and it has some pretty nifty features such as deploying Local and Domain GPO in a more logical fashion, manipulating txt files/infs and a swag of other things that make deploying an application such as firefox a breeze.

Lets talk again when group policies are present in Firefox/Chrome

I came in to say this myself. I can't believe the article didn't even really hit this point. It's a huge issue once your organization scales past a few dozen machines.

I think it's kindof a systemic open source blind spot, actually, a product of the fact that most open source developers are (a) unlikely to have an itch involving centralized administration and (b) probably not keen on the principle of centralized administration in general, since software freedom in the end means control of your own machine.

Of course, at work, it's not your *own* machine, and it serves the purpose of software freedom if free software can circulate more broadly. Plus, Firefox is just a better too. So people have been talking about this very point for years. And amazingly, nobody at Mozilla seems to get it. I'd bet Firefox could have another 10-15% of browsershare if they did.

There is at least one project out there which is aiming to change this, but I think it's going to take more than one isolated and barely known project to get around this issue.

It may be too early in your education to know what you want to do in your career, but I would start looking in to areas where you can specialize. Client/server architecture will always be a skill that looks good. If you want to go this route, look into learning Java Enterprise Edition. UI design is good to know, but with abundance of WYSIWYG editors that are available now, writing UIs is becoming less of a skill. UI design theory is still pertinent even if the coding skills are going the way of the dodo. Some other skills that will come in handy are writing web services, database interaction (with JDBC and JPA, both good to know), and multi-threading. I would also recommend the book Head First Design Patterns to get started on learning how to design software (as opposed to just writing software).

I would agree with what a lot of people have been saying, though. The best thing that you can do is put what you know in to practice. Start out writing a small application for yourself. Write unit tests.Do some code coverage analysis on the code and make sure you are completely covered. You can start with Cobertura. Get to know what APIs are available in JSE. I'm assuming that in an academic environment you are using the latest JSE (6), so I would also look into familiarizing yourself with JSE 1.4. There are some major differences between 1.4 and 5 (and not a whole lot of major differences between 5 and 6), and if you are working on legacy code in the future, it helps to know what differences there are. Write an app in whatever you are used to using, write it again with JSE 1.4. Check out an open source project and debug it. Get code coverage on the project and write tests to cover more lines of code. Most OSS projects would be happy to integrate tests that increase their code coverage. Look through the bugs that have been logged against the project. Pick something small, fix the bug, and submit patches. Get familiar with build systems like Maven 2 or ANT. That should keep you busy until next semester.

The best stuff to read after you think you've got the basics are anti-patterns which show you what not to do. A lot of that stuff can be quite eye opening to read. One of the best books on that topic is Effective Java by Joshua Bloch. Also, search the web for sites like this one: http://www.odi.ch/prog/design/newbies.php

Also, not a book per se, but if you do write some code it's possible to learn more by analyzing the code with tools like findbugs which will show you a list of things wrong with your code. Even professional programmers can learn something from these kinds of tools.

I'm certainly not saying it can't be duplicated on Linux, but there's obviously a reason it hasn't been, and it's obviously not because the feature is useless

Have a look at preload (project registered in 2005). I believe it's installed by default on Ubuntu. YMMV. HAND.

Out of the box it has all the features you describe. Flash, Java, A/V codecs all pre-installed along with the usual plethora of software. The only manual steps would be to install drivers (nvidia, some wifi; you'll be prompted by a notification balloon) and if you're in the US, edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change the ubuntu repos to a local mirror. They're set by default to the main servers which apparently are connected to the net via the AT&T EDGE network... The MintMenu is a very good replacement for the start menu found in XP/Vista/7.

But definitely hit up distrowatch and check out the screenshots and reviews. If the target machines are able to boot off USB stick, then grab unetbootin which will automate the process of downloading the iso and putting it on the stick.

NESticle == NES emulator. Surely I'm not the only one into classic gaming.

NESticle has been far surpassed by FCEUX and Nestopia. Even FCE Ultra, which is in the Ubuntu repository, is way ahead of NESticle. It takes literally four lines of code for an NES program to determine whether it's running on NESticle.

640x480 == Again, classic gaming.

I imagine that the excuse is that Free games can be ported to run natively in Linux at the native resolution of the LCD panel to which the computer is connected, and that's at least 1024x600 pixels for anything sold within the past couple years. Such a port can even upscale sprite cels algorithmically without making them look too crappy. Non-free games cannot be distributed with Ubuntu.

Dialup == Needed for use in hotels without highspeed connections.

I thought that's what phone tethering or MiFi was for. Even 2G EDGE is faster than dial-up.

codec packs are really never required and often just crap up your system .. Media Player Classic Home Cinema http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ has built in EVR renderer and plays 1080p files (at at least up to 40mps bitrate) on ION netbooks and ION 330's using the GPU instead of the CPU .. also - XBMC has two different branches out now that use GPU acceleration for perfect 1080p playback hardware like above ...

An essay I wrote connected to a free software project on educational technology:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
(The title has a double meaning. :-)

The essential part is extracted here by Bill Kerr:
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-education-technology-has-failed.html
"""
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
    Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change...
    So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process.
"""

More recent stuff by me on education and socio-technological change:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

The good news is, in two to three years, people will be discarding today's fancy Google Android Smartphones, and they will make amazing educational platforms once they are free as hand-me-downs (instead of or in addition to OLPC-like endeavors):
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
No doubt most compulsory schools will try to suppress them. At least they will be usable outside of school.

More on this general idea of wearable computers changing the nature of education (and society) from Theodore Sturgeon written as a sci-fi short story "The Skills of Xanadu" in 1956, and which inspired Ted Nelson and other technology pioneers:
    http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51

Part of the point of anyone doing streaming video (or audio) is that the data doesn't touch the hard drive thus preventing (casual) recording, only screen captures of single frames.

Most streaming media can be downloaded to the hard drive easily. Have you never heard of
Streamripper?

If the protocol is HTTP, Squid can be configured to always cache large files. As a last resort, the simple BSD licensed PacketProxy program can intercept TCP connections on any port.

Perhaps mtpaint:

http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/

mtpaint can also be set to do external actions on an image so if you find an exif utility you like.......

When it comes up, you may be fooled into thinking it is a 256 color program. It isn't. It defaults to 256 color palletted pix for new images but will edit and allow higher depth color choices fine. gwenview is nice to view a directory of images and has a nice enough gui for editing exif and can be set to use mtpaint as an editor.

Even better: Get netcat to turn off images, CSS, HTML, and graphical renderers entirely. ;)

For example, in my Vista media center, I have an ATI 5770.
- However I can't use DXDA because I need software ffdshow.
- And the reason I need software ffdshow is to enable mediacontrol plugin, which allows me to use my remote to change / toggle audio channels and subtitles.

I take it you don't keep up with ffdshow development, because mediacontrol's author actually added DXVA support (and limited OSD/subtitles support for it) five weeks ago...

np: Pantha Du Prince - Lay In A Shimmer (Black Noise)

> He also argues that the Coverity scan was not an example of many eyeballs because it was government funded. So, the government paid for it - but it still happened.

FOSS static code analysis tool Cppcheck has done similar job (after the Coverity scans) and found bugs (that were reported and fixed) from the Kernel and other open source projects. It is not government funded, it is purely made by the community. Here is a list of reported and fixed bugs:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/cppcheck/index.php?title=Found_bugs

There are a lot more bugs found and fixes that are not in the list as many developers have started using it on their own after seeing it in use and the members of the Cppcheck project are nowadays more focused in developing Cppcheck rather than testing it against other open source projects.

That's very kind....makes my day.... There was also Ada Lovelace on the other side of the card...... Tech details... Ubuntu, python http://www.python.org/ enthought http://code.enthought.com/ opencv http://opencv.willowgarage.com/ yarp http://eris.liralab.it/yarp/ KDL http://www.orocos.org/kdl Gamera http://gamera.sourceforge.net/ Shapely http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Shapely/ few other bits and pieces Hardware: Dell xps13, Intel atom motherboards, 1gig ram, 4gig usb thumb drive, and wifi dongle, router... Arduinos, philips webcam, low cost micro servos, AX12 Bioloids servos, USB2Dynamixel, ikea lights and tables...that's about it..pen and paper...

I use AstroGrep on Windows http://astrogrep.sourceforge.net/.
You only need right to create the folder and copy the exe into that folder no installation necessary.

Tim S.

During a co-op job I worked on a very large multi-platform app (several million lines of code)

the team had an LXR setup to do project wide searching, however it was aging and having problems, and is a bit difficult to work with.
As a side project intended for a report once I was back on campus, I set up OpenGrok, which worked brilliantly, and was reasonably easy to configure, and nicer to use once we got it setup. The team liked it enough that they switched to that permanently.
both are open source, and were built to handle large code bases (LXR was built for the linux kernel, OpenGrok for when Sun open sourced Solaris).

Another one I had tried, which was very easy to setup was Gonzui. It's also open source, but didn't really handle the huge codebase as well as OpenGrok or LXR. For under 100k lines, it's probably fine, and the ease of setup may be worth it.

All three provide a web interface, and do indexing as a separate process from search, so we would re-index the code base nightly. works very well for larger teams, might be overkill for what you need though.

I feel the same way as OP when trying to make sense of some open source library I'm interested in extending. Doxygen has been a big help. In the future I might also try Source-Navigator.

Are you Microsofties really so stupid and ignorant that you're not aware of the ports of GNU utilities to Windows or Cygwin or even your own company's Interix and Services for UNIX products?

No, but to explain this, I need to give you some background.

When I joined Microsoft, I hadn't used any version of Windows at all for any reason other than playing games. After joining Microsoft, I never used Windows at home for any purpose other than logging into the VPN to work from home... and since I did not even have an x86 machine, this required using Virtual PC on my Mac OSX box.

Now, I know of all of these tools, and I even could install GVim on the machine as well. However, I was working in a Build Group. This required me to occasionally log into 100 different machines at once in order to start the build process for WinXP/Server 2003. Most of these machines require no more input than logging in and starting up a single app... thus no reason to install special software on them.

Then, something would break, and I would have to read logs, and/or code on the actual box that had the exact problem. Spending an hour installing apps to do my job would be an unacceptable use of my time, and delay the build unnecessarily.

I learned to use the tools that were available with the environment that I was in. Thus, I did almost all of my programming at Microsoft in notepad.exe, and I'm not kidding you.

Were I in a different group? The results could have been different... but having 100 different machines, most of which I didn't have admin rights to, meant that even just installing Notepad++ or something like that would have been a waste of time.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/findutils.htm
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm

They work fine (as far as I have exercised them).

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/findutils.htm
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm

They work fine (as far as I have exercised them).

Are you Microsofties really so stupid and ignorant that you're not aware of the ports of GNU utilities to Windows or Cygwin or even your own company's Interix and Services for UNIX products?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/aatv/

Should work with your DVB tuner, if it has V4L drivers, and supports textmode output to a terminal...

Jabref? http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ It's open source & cross platform (java). I use it to manage about 1500 articles and related academic texts in a mix of pdf, odt, and doc. You can add notes about files. It can operate as a standalone or can be connected to a shared mysql database (to allow sharing of the files, their cites, and any notes you add). The one thing it can't do directly is annotate the original documents, but you could presumably annotate them using something else before replacing them in the database. Finally, it allows saving of metadata to pdfs, which I think can be used to save your notes about the file to the pdf metadata. Not so useful for non-pdf documents though. Finally, it pipes direct to latex and has a good plugin for openoffice, so if you use openoffice or latex you're in business..

On a Mac, bibdesk wins hands down. It'll store and sort, search, use external editors, etc. Open source, and uses bibtex. http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/