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There's an open source one that can use the original game data but also comes with fan-made levels and so on, if that's what you want.

Yes, exactly. And if you are really worried about legal problems, why not ask the orginal developers BEFORE developing the game? You can mail them saying you'd like to make your game as a tribute to their old game, that you can't afford to pay them any royalties. They may be ok with it. As long as you have an answer, you know what to do. In my experience, I've been working on an open-source clone of the Magical Drop game (Krystal Drop: http://krystaldrop.sourceforge.net/ ), it was 8 years ago, and I've never had a single complaint.

It's about an AI that was drugged and was told to "go F itself" (as seen here). What's not to understand?

Simply put, it's this type of "experimentation" that will create Skynet. Do you think that the reasonable, docile AI variants are even going to *try* to take over? No, it'll be survival-driven, drug-crazed maniac AI that will.

Then they are certifiably disqualified from IT. Haven't they heard of bogofilter? Christ, I'm a civil engineer and I get that one...and you'd be amazed how many people design bridges and use AutoCAD but get dumbfounded by a web browser...

The article does mention Apples and Oranges

API bindings are rather messy

For C apps, libdbi supports Firebird, and many other RDBMS with a single API.

Reverse engineering the sucker...

No need to reverse-engineer it, an open source femtocell project with working implementations has been out for awhile now. Look into OpenBTS; the hardware portion commercially available from Kestrel.

If you're maniacal, you can do what these guys did at last year's Burning Man.

You can probably use something like Virtuawin to force it off screen:

http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/

Adobe should move away from JavaScript and move to declarative form definition and validation, which carries no risk of code attacks from errant JavaScript. In fact, there is a standard for validating forms declaratively, called XForms. It lets you write validation expressions for saying when data is valid, required, readonly, or calculated from other data (i.e. totals), and also lets you assign data types using the widely-deployed XSD type names (integer, URL, string, regexp string, etc).

XForms is modular enough that it's been incorporated into ODF, and there's no reason other that it can't be used in PDF to define and validate forms, other than that Adobe has a vested interest in maintaining its proprietary technology forms instead. There are a number of folks who would be quite ready to help Adobe incorporate XForms into PDF.

There are in-browser JavaScript implementations of XForms (here, here, and here), server side implementations a la GWT (here and here), and mobile implementations (here).

I've been working with XForms for many years, and find it an excellent solution for deploying rich internet applications; we've switched implementations a few times, and have had to do only minor changes to our applications, so using a standard preserves our investment in stuff already written.

I hope you have read this old exchange between RMS and Bruno Haible on whether CLISP had to be released under GPL if it was written to link to Readline.

At one point, Bruno Haible asks whether he could avoid releasing CLISP under GPL by bundling it with a libnoreadline that he would write, which duplicated the interface of libreadline but offered none of the functionality. The end user compiling the program would the link it to the real Readline. This is the response RMS gave him:

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. [my emphasis]

The way I read this is that the technical details of dynamic vs. static linking are just not decisive. The key questions come down to a judge's judgement call whether the part under dispute "incorporates" the GPL'ed work, and that the set of arguments that can be made in one direction or another is actually somewhat open-ended. So, for example, I bet you that if I wrote a debugger-like tool that allowed me to dynamically link into arbitrary libraries at runtime, inspect their symbol tables and call into their functions, nobody could make me release it under GPL if I distributed it together with a GPL-licensed library that was in no way needed for my program to work.

The converse of this is that there are GPL licensors that take the position that some uses, despite not involving any linking at all, create a derivative of their own GPL licensed work. IIRC MySQL AB took this position with regard to client applications that used the GPL-licensed version of MySQL, even if the client applications did not link any MySQL-provided client libraries. In RMS's terms, these applications would "clearly show the intention for incorporation of" the MySQL server, by being written to rely on features unique to MySQL (e.g., by using MySQL-specific syntax or commands), or by virtue of only working if used with a MySQL server.

As to why GPL Firefox can link to proprietary Flash, I'd suggest that a key reason why this is so is because no copyright holder that would have standing actually objects to it. Courts in the USA for the most part are only allowed to rule on actual disputes, and clearly it seems like none of the potential parties here have any dispute.

Newcomers.. ofcourse GSpot exists. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/
It's just discontinued and we all use this now instead: http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en

If you have access to MATLAB, give the following project a shot:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/srtm-matlab/

Unfortunately, it only supports the worldwide 90m dataset, not the 30m dataset exclusive to the USA.

No idea if it works in Octave or not.

Judging by your link the data is supplied through google maps I couldn't see a way to get at the raw data. As for what to do with it, I'd suggest providing it free in a commonly used format like SHP or BIL. Accurate terrain data is insanely expensive so any freely available data is good.

You could then also import it into things like OpenLayers or things like Open Street View.

seen here.
Makes Perl look like fucking Shakespeare.
Other than that - it's an OS created to run games, that doesn't run games, but has the GNU toolchain ported. Is this Linux?

In Europe they went crazy for the Amiga. Most Amiga users are upset at Microsoft and Apple for screwing them in the past and some dual-boot AmigaOS and Yellow Dog Linux or some other PowerPC version of Linux.

If Slashdot had bothered to cover the Amiga we'd know what went wrong and what they are currently doing.

AmigaOS 4.0 was written by Hyperion or some other company and there was licensing deals. AmigaOS 5.0 was supposed to outclass and outperform Windows Vista and Mac OSX. But due to lawsuits it never got released.

The best open source project to come out of the Amiga technology is Amiga Research OS which will work on Intel X86 systems and virtual machines and has a version that runs native inside of Linux. But it lacks proper third party hardware drivers for modern systems so I'd run it in VirtualBox or some other virtual machine like HaikuOS does. AROS is AmigaOS 3.1 based on the APIs and started out as a WINE product and became a full OS.

Amiga, Inc. sells some of the classic Amiga games for Windows and mobile devices under the Amiga Anywhere titles. Some day like the C64 they will port them to the WII, PS3, and XBox 360, etc.

In an attempt to open source and modernize the Amiga and AmigaOS technology they are taking a page from Apple and making an AmigaOS merge with Linux to create Anubis OS but it is not Amiga, Inc that is doing it but another group. While Mac OS X was based on NextStep (A MACH kernel *BSD Unix based OS) and the Classic MacOS series the Anubis OS claims to be Linux based with the Amiga GUI and ability to run Amiga software.

I hereby challenge Slashdot editors and readers to report on the Amiga projects as they mature and make progress. See if 2010 can be the year of the Amiga coverage at Slashdot and create an Amiga category if one doesn't already exist.

Try the sguil console, and you'll be happier with handling alerts. It presents the data from full content pcaps, Snort alerts, and session data, together with a handy window to to reverse DNS and whois. It will give you the signature that fired the alert, or, if no alert fired (say someone emailed abuse@yourdomain.tld with an IP and time range) you can look back in time and see what connections your host had open when. It will even help you decide which alerts are useful and which are useless, but you still have to tune the rules yourself. For handling that, I use oinkmaster. Sguil scales to billions of rows.

Some folks have worked on integrating bro (or was it prelude?), which is another interesting alerting engine. It might be possible to integrate with this project.

http://sguil.sourceforge.net/

If you just need debugging, try cgdb. It's very lightweight.

I use Vim (mostly gvim built with gtk2) with the following plugins:
- bufexplorer: a quick way for changing buffers
- cscope_maps: full access to cscope, inside vim.
- taglist: by using (ex)ctags it gives you a window with all the tags in the opened files, with the possibility to quickly jump to any tag you want

I also set shortcuts for building and cleaning projects (for instance F8 and F9), for checking errors (F3 to open build log, F4 and F5 to go to prev. and next error), for folding and for many other things.
The only thing that I haven't tried yet is to integrate vim with gdb (I think I saw some plugins for this), and only because I already use cgdb, which is extremely useful. Basically you have a gdb with the extra benefit of having a special window for code listing.
Also, I can use this combination over ssh, which is a big plus for me.

Another option would be to go for xemacs, which is at least as powerful.

There's also http://www.viemu.com/ (it costs $$$, but if you are forced to use VisualStudio...) and http://ideavim.sourceforge.net/ (free plug-in for IntelliJ IDEA). And for people who use EMACS as their IDE, there's http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ViperMode :-)

After having tried vimplugin and not being happy with it, I'm now trying out vrapper: http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/ and having a better experience with it.

Netbeans with the Vi Vim for netbeans plugin.
 
Netbeans is FOSS, runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. It handles Java, C/C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy and does a bunch of other stuff.
 
There is the viPlugin for Eclipse as well - I just happen to like Netbeans better.
 
The ActiveState folks list VI key bindings as a feature for their Komodo and Komodo Edit products. These are closed source though Komodo Edit is free as in beer. It is cross platform - covering the win/lin/mac world.
 
I'm sure there are other options but those are the largest projects I know of that do what you want.

2: Still takes a while to load and looks ugly!

If you're on Linux this will solve any performance problem from the second time you open OO.

$ sudo apt-get install preload

More info here.

Another useful Python learning environment is RUR-PLE: http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/en/rur.htm

I believe they are probably working towards a system similar to Zero Install.

http://zero-install.sourceforge.net/faq.html

Apps would run on the device, but be initially loaded from the web. There is no installed, only cached. When net connectivity isn't available, they run from the system cache. Syncing is done when connectivity is restored. I mean, if it was 100% web based then there wouldn't be much of a need for a big SSD, would there?

It actually has a lot of potential.

Are you sure you don't want to close the Vigor assistant?

I have been teaching some youngsters programming with Basic-256 for kids they really liked it. Because it has a very easy syntax, and it has an inboard drawing pane. So the kids could draw stuff like a circle and get it moving.

From the Reference

Format circle x,y,r
Example
color red
circle 100,100,50
// Will draw a red circle of a radius of 50 with it's center at (100,100).

For kids this is a ZOMG!!! "Look dad! I made this!!!" *shows a circle that is moving*

I think a simple LISP interpreter would be a great way to get started in programming. You can move on from basic maths (1 + 2) pretty easily to LISP. LUSH looks good http://lush.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html as it provides a complete environment including graphics and combines LISP with inline C, in a similar way to the way BBC Basic has inline assembler.

self-aware

Been there, done that.

I've been fortunate enough to mentor a couple of prodigies. The key is not to Go Big, or Go Small, or Go Bare Metal, it is to go where their interest lies. If they really want to know about electron migration through a solid state material, Hell, go for it. But if they are interested in how to generate a web page, that's where you start.

If they get hooked and you start to work together on really interesting problems, you will eventually get into all of the classic core problems of program development: design, platform choice, networking, deployment, security -- you'll get to all of these eventually.

My vote for a first language is Python. I also suggest starting with Guido van Robot as an interesting starting point. Even older kids will understand that this is just a starting point and they may zip through the problems in a matter of days or even hours. You will encounter limitations in terms of functions, looping, etc., but that can be a springboard to how you do it in real Python.

For Windows I found the Aptana environment (Eclipse + PyDev plugin) to be easy for kids to understand.

Saying this as a fairly experienced python/pygame programmer, be sure to throw in Psyco once you get to doing complex games with dozens of units. It magically makes all of your "140 ms per frame isn't fast enough" woes go away in 2 lines of code (and that is not, in any way, an understatement, their boasts of 2-100x speedups are accurate).

You did not say what OS you are using, so I will try from a Windows Perspective. First I really love GAMBAS http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html which is open source and free. There are also the Visual Studio Express downloads from Microsoft. If the child's interest is in creating games then there are specialized open source Games engine like moodle, and a bunch of other really weird sounding names. Until you are more specific it is really hard to go down a whole list of everything that is available, even if we restrict the list to Windows.

http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/ one of many.

Interestingly along those lines someone has created a low-entry-barrier BASIC type language. Check out http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/

Console, a very nice application that has tabs, sane copy/paste functionality, and can be configured to launch bash or whatever you want. Not sure about Unicode.

I can do one better... I don't really even use the Cygwin shells most of the time. I have Cygwin installed because it has a ton of other utilities... you get Grep, Sed, Flex and Bison, GCC, GNU Make, etc.

(For the curious, I don't really use the Cgywin shells because I find Cygwin doesn't integrate all that well with the rest of the system. You can't easily copy-and-paste paths back and forth (at least Cygwin->native apps), Cygwin's environment variable translations of paths is incomplete, etc. I therefor try to stick with native stuff as much as possible. I *do* use a different terminal emulator though; the default one with Windows is a piece of shit.)

I really like Tux Commander too.

It sounds like you'd be interested in at Perl/Linux, a linux distribution where ALL programs are written in perl.

Support this: http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ [robot OS] So we don't have to fight the closed systems like we did with the PC.

What do you have against Microsoft Cylon 6.0?
       

I know this comment will get lost in the sea of other comments, but my recommendation to you would be a hybrid solution.

Create a small partition (1GB would be overkill) and format it FAT32.
Create another partition for the rest of the drive (or however you please) with your choice of FS (I prefer XFS, personally).

Store the drivers(/utilties) for the FS you chose and store them on the FAT32 drive.
Some popular drivers/utilties for Windows are:
ext2fsd for EXT2 - http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/
rfstool for ReiserFS - http://freshmeat.net/projects/rfstool/
ltools for EXT2/EXT2/ReiserFS - http://www2.hs-esslingen.de/~zimmerma/software/ltools.html/
and so on and so forth (a simple google for "[FS] Windows Compatibility" usually works.)

Just my thoughts. :-)

For the curious, a few years ago the 1990s game Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space was open-sourced to the "Race Into Space" project:

http://www.raceintospace.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/raceintospace/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/buzz-aldrins-race-into-space

It's pretty cool and now runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. Here's the description from MobyGames:

Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space re-creates the thrilling endeavor of trying to lead your country's space program to the moon before a competing superpower does the same. As head of your country's space program you will need to develop all the hardware you need for your spacecraft and make it safe, choose the right persons to send into space and make sure they come back alive. Loaded with lots of historic video clips, and other historic correct items make this game reflect the "Cold War" situation as it should.

Support this: http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ So we don't have to fight the closed systems like we did with the PC. Really, robotics is going through its early DIY stage, where most interesting stuff is built by hand using lots of modified parts. Anything we can do, as it moves into mainstream products, to keep the DIY rights to open the hardware and change the software if we want, helps our future freedom.

Considering DVD files are typically split at the 1 GB mark, you should have no issues with DVD. Assuming you have other files that break the 4GB barrier however, leaves you with EXT3, HPFS, or NTFS. The EXT3 support for OS X is supposed to be there using the SourceForge EXT2 driver, but I never managed to get them to mount. NTFS support is good on the OS X side, seems to be good on Linux and of course on Windows.

I'd go with NTFS using NTFS-3G as it gives read/write support on all 3 OS's and is open source ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfs-3g/ )

Considering DVD files are typically split at the 1 GB mark, you should have no issues with DVD. Assuming you have other files that break the 4GB barrier however, leaves you with EXT3, HPFS, or NTFS. The EXT3 support for OS X is supposed to be there using the SourceForge EXT2 driver, but I never managed to get them to mount. NTFS support is good on the OS X side, seems to be good on Linux and of course on Windows.

I'd go with NTFS using NTFS-3G as it gives read/write support on all 3 OS's and is open source ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfs-3g/ )

I guess I'll be the first to give a shout-out to Pitivi and Open Shot Video.

Reading Jonathan Thomas' ( Open Shot Video ) valiant attempt at creating a NLE from Gstreamer/Gnonlin it appears that the Gnonlin API/toolkit/whatever is VERY confusing to program a video editor in ( and unstable ). But since Jonathan chose MLT things are rapidly moving along for him. I often wonder why KDEnlive is so unstable because Kino is rock solid ( for me ) and it is also based on Dan Dennedy's impressive MLT toolkit.

But I truly believe that Pitivi will be the defacto NLE on linux. For the sole reason that Gstreamer is the defacto multimedia framework. It will probably be another five years before Pitivi is really a good stable functional application, and I say that because it took Gstreamer 10 years to do the same.

So, how do I pick the best one (or at least the "good enough" one) to use? The one that I can trust to be fully compliant, and that will be kept maintained and ported to new language/framework versions? Let's say, I need one for C++.

JSON is pretty simple, there aren't going to be a lot of major changes to it. This one gets good ratings, and you know it must be good because it's open source:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsoncpp/

You misunderstand me. What I meant is that there are kinds of XML documents in which tags take up the minority of the content, and the majority is text. XHTML is a classic example;

I'm not suggesting JSON as a replacement for text markup, I'm suggesting it as a replacement for data exchange. For that matter, I also wouldn't suggest XML as a replacement for HTML 4, I don't see any problems that HTML 4 has which can be solved by using XML. I just used a SCORM example because that's been the majority of my experience using XML, that was the file I had handy. For representing any document structure I would still be inclined to target the current version of HTML, that's been working fine for years.

you need to quote all keys

Right, my mistake. I typically don't write JSON by hand, it usually gets generated automatically from a native data structure. But, when I write object literals in Javascript the property identifiers don't need to be quoted.

TXT doesn't HAVE to be about DRM and selling your computer's soul to the big corporations. TrouSerS is a FOSS implementation of the trusted software stack. There are legitimate uses for trusted computing aside from DRM enforcement.

But I agree that there is probably is very little need for a typical user to be running TXT on their machine; I definitely don't trust MS/MPAA/etc not to abuse the technology

Just to back the parent up - there are definitely more ways to contribute than coding. Find your particular niche skill and find how it might help.

* You may not think of yourself as a documenter but can't you post useful bug reports?
* You may not think of yourself as a programmer but can't you contribute to user wish lists and feedback?
* You may not think of yourself as a teacher but can't you give advice on forums?

I code free software as part of my job and my hobby but I've found other ways to contribute outside of coding as well (I don't do all of these myself):

* Advocacy : tell your friends & help them
* Artwork : I recently came up with a couple of additional "playgrounds" for Ktuberling for my kids. They liked them so much I'm considering submitting them to the project. It was really easy - draw the objects in inkscape and edit a text file. Okay you need the graphics skills but just saying it wasn't a programming task
* Translations : We participate in a multi-cultural web and sometimes your language won't be the first language of those behind the project. They may have made a sterling effort but the grammar needs tidying or something - you could help with that.
* Packaging : some packages are only available in rpm or deb or just source and they need packagers to make them available in other formats
* Testing : you can use software so can you not test it?

You've made a good start asking here but really - just go out there and do it. Browse the forums, read the help wanted section on Sourceforge and don't forget you can and should engage with the developers of free software.

Many of us have patched SDL ourselves with the functionality. I cribbed code from tightvnc and got it work on x11(well linux), osx and win32. but I didn't try to support any other platforms.

a function to set a selection string(SetClipboardData). a function to get the current clipboard(GetClipboardData). to do a cut or to end a selection I just handle setting an empty string as a special case (EmptyClipboard).

the linux and osx version was easiest. I took a lot of liberties with pasting in a bunch of win32 source I didn't understand. Other patches out there are much better than mine, and don't have questionable copyright/license status.

(I don't use SDL anymore, preferring my own OpenGL wrapper or GLFW.)

I vote for suggest new features and options. We are proposing a redesign to an open source project called KATO (mainstreaming software agents) where we have made available a discussion area and survey for soliciting feedback and ideas on the redesign. You can make a difference there on that project in only 5 minutes.