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Free/open-source software has a lot of these. As an open-source developer myself, I can understand why. One issue is that a lot of open-source projects are started by young naive people who do not realize how much time and effort it really takes to make a software program. Probably over half of the projects on Sourceforge fall under this category. One example is MooDNS, a DNS server that stopped development around the time the developer realized what a pain in the butt DNS compression is.

Another way open-source projects get abandoned is when other software that does the same thing comes along. For example, the GNU Hurd never became production-ready because Linux came along and was good enough that the perceived need for Hurd development went away.

Other projects that stop development are projects where the developers stop going to school and get real jobs, and no longer have time to devote to an open-source project. One example of this is the Y Window System

For all of the advantages of Free software, one issue is that, without, by and large, the developers being paid money, there is not nearly as much motivation to get something finished, so a lot of projects become vaporware.

Closer to home, I've told myself for years I would have a thread-free version of a recursive resolver for my own MaraDNS. I finally started writing the code in late 2007. Around the end of 2007, I had a working basic non-recursive cache. The project was put on hold in 2008 while I got out of the Slashdot-posting basement and looked for a girlfriend. I finally got one around the end of 2008, and was able to spend 2009 adding a lot of features to the code, making a lot of releases of the code.

Well, around September of 2009, I got burnt out. Too much work for too little (almost no) pay. I stopped doing major development on the recursive code at that point, but have a really nice non-recursive cache with most of the foundation needed to make it a recursive cache. I do want to get back in to the project; but it's a lot of work and having a few thank you emails doesn't feel like enough compensation at times, especially when the other half of the emails are people asking me to implement their favorite pet feature for fun and for free, or asking for free email support. I finally put a plug on that nonsense by making it extremely clear that I only answer private email for people willing to pay me. Here are some of my rants I blogged about. I do get the occasional "you made this nice DNS server, we would like to hire you" email, but haven't gotten a job from that yet.

I do want to finish up the recursive code, and put closure on my DNS server project, but I just haven't gotten myself in the "develop free software" mindset again.

Maybe it's time to stop goofing around on Slashdot and finish up the code. :)

when I ran a business in 1995 to 1997 and 1999 to 2000, I could have used free and open source business documents and software.

Every job I had a manager would say "you nerds don't understand business" when we wrote programs for them, as to calling us programmers as nerds. I went for computer science and information systems college courses and then later went for business management and e-commerce courses so I could learn how to make those documents, do accounting and finances, etc.

I at one time worked for lawyers and wrote a program that filled out legal documents like you describe from their templates. I never kept any of their files nor templates and I wouldn't do things as they did.

But I do have an interest in developing open source business applications and automatically filling out forms via office templates and documents, but I would use OpenOffice.Org as well as MS-Office templates and documents.

Here is the OpenOffice.Org Templates website and I am sure you can search for some of them. OpenOfficeUSA.COM has more of them here and you can Google for "Legal Templates" or "Open Source Legal Documents" and see what comes up by varying your terms to narrow it down.

Yes there is Open Source tax Software and A Classic Slashdot story on Open Source tax software in case you missed it.

I've written a few genetic algorithm/programming things for "music" over the years. However, not being a musician, I approached it only from an algorithmic perspective. The last of these, called "grammidity" can attempt to evolve sequences of midi events based on a kind of grammar that evolves (loosely based on the ideas behind L-systems). I had it online for a couple of years, but it never evolved much of anything interesting. The source code (java) is on sourceforge and includes ways to evolve "plants" and a fuzzer that generates html and which worked quite nicely to break browsers a couple of years back.

Call me old fashion, but I am a firm believer of do on thing and to it well. Your list of requests have a very broad scope and it wasn't clear if you expected one software package to do all of it. There are many great open source software packages for use with business.

GnuCash is an excellent accounting system to help you keep your financial accounts organized. I'm not really sure what is entailed with 'issuing a W-2' other than handing your employee a form. I have seen various companies use a combination wiki, dms and cms, all of which have many open source choices, to organize corporate data, and serve it in an clean and clear fashion to interested parties.

As far as tax filing software, it looks like this is not a foreign question to slashdot:

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/09/011259

One of the products offered in the above link is: http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ Open Tax Solver

I am unclear what you mean by legal template. If you mean pre-formated document, OpenOffice.org has a large collection of templates you can browse through. If you mean canned agreements and contracts, they are around on the web, if you search for them. I must add IANAL so be careful using any generalized contract.

Your C++ info is so 90s. FYI:
A descent C++ web framework: Wt
Memory management is a non-issue with RAII, smart pointers, Boehm garbage collector, and finally Valgrind.
Qt or LiteSQL don't need to be "standard" to do their job.

As an aside, Flex has about 268 job opportunities which is roughly equal to 25% of the number of Microsoft based development jobs.

Who had thought there is so much demand for an Open Source lexer? :-)

since the MPlayer developers develop ffmpeg.

I've never heard this, and it surprises me. Mplayer ships with mencoder - and although both FFmpeg and mencoder use libvacodec (and I'd bet that FFmpeg and mencoder developers also contribute to libvacodec), it seems odd that a development team would work on two competing projects. Do you have any links for this?

But VLC has a significantly better UI

Obviously it's subjective - but, have you tried SMPlayer (Linux/BSD/Windows), or if you use OSX, MPlayer OSX Extended? I have nothing against VLC (it beats everything at streaming, hands-down), but Mplayer seems to give nicer playback quality, has more options, and the UIs I linked are closer to their respective platforms' look-n-feel (the most obvious example is that VLC UI is MDI and Windows/OSX/Linux don't particularly embrace MDI). HTH, HAND.

SPF records are easy to implement, but also easy to subvert (as one of the other posters already mentioned in his comment's link).

You should really look into implementing DomainKeys instead, which (while a little more difficult to set up) are almost required if you do any kind of significant email volume.
Yahoo, Gmail, MSN/Hotmail, and AOL pretty much require that you have DomainKeys implemented if you want to email their users, otherwise you'll find yourself on the wrong end of a blacklist someday.

Postfix can easily be set up with DomainKeys support using dkimproxy, check it here: http://dkimproxy.sourceforge.net/

Good luck!

If you're going to use GTD to manage your commitments (which I am a big fan of), there are a number of free tools you can use do the GTD methodology. Some of the tools I looked at are:

• ThinkingRock (http://www.trgtd.com.au/)
• MoneyGTD(http://monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com/#MonkeyGTD)
• GTD Free (http://gtd-free.sourceforge.net/)

Plus there is the ever present use of hosted online solutions, such as:

• Remember The Milk (http://www.rememberthemilk.com)
• Toodledo (http://www.toodledo.com)

And the ever popular pen and paper method

If you're using Eclipse for development then combining Redmine (or one of the many other supported bug trackers) with Mylyn (using http://sourceforge.net/projects/redmin-mylyncon/develop ) can be a big win. More so if you have multiple developers but still. Among other things Mylyn stores a context against your bugs (locally by default but it can attach it to the ticket for other users to fetch). The context keeps a track of which files you were working on, including which functions if you're using the Java tools, and restores them when you activate the task/ticket.

Also they have a commercial add-on called Tasktop which extends the integration out to other more desktop oriented stuff like Outlook and Firefox.

Hi, it won't necessarily do the project bit, but for organizing lists of tasks I find freemind a great tool. http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I have the same problem with the LiVES project. Over 3 years ago, I managed to compile the sourcecode for OSX/Darwin, it took a lot of fiddling around, but it worked. I excitedly posted the news on the website and mailing lists, but no OSX users seemed interested. Since then, the code has changed a lot, fixes were made for it to compile on IRIX and Solaris.
 
Recently somebody posted a forum message noting how easy it now is to compile under OSX. I again posted this news, and asked if somebody could kindly compile it and send me a link to the resulting binary. Since then...nothing. Hence I have come to a conclusion about OSX users...well, I will let you guess what it is.

http://php-todo.sourceforge.net/

is lightweight and easy to use.

Burn has been around for years...YEARS. It still bloody supports PANTHER. The last update to panther was in 2005! It still even has G3 support! You obviously don't know how to hunt for software properly. There's also fink, macports, and gentoo on mac that exist and have databases of burning apps, as well as music apps.

Sometimes I wonder about the slashdot crowd's ability to think like a user and just search for it or even how to do it...

• I always had trouble keeping track of my home maintenance tasks, so I wrote this little program. It allows you to create hierarchical tasks. Tasks are prioritized by due date. Attachments aren't supported, but you can put arbitrary text in each task, so I suppose you could include links to files/directories on your machine. The program works as a standalone client or in a client/server configuration.
• At work, I typically had several open tasks, so I built a custom application to solve this problem as well. I can't share this one with you, but I will share that developing this program was well worth the effort. The primary benefit to developing the system yourself is that you can integrate it with your revision control system, issue tracking system, time charging system, etc.

I use WebCollab, great tool and fits the description of a "task list on steroids" and its open source! What is nice about WebCollab is that you have one object, a task, and a task can have multiple tasks in a hierarchical organization or can be by itself. http://webcollab.sourceforge.net/

Spoken like someone who doesn't develop software for a living.

I'm not the OP, but I develop software for a living. My boss often lets me give away useful stuff I've written because it's not directly related to our business model.

My company (among other things) develops software.

Mine too.

The sale of that software pays for our homes, electricity, computers, and the ability to continue developing programs that people need.

Interesting extrapolation from this to the idea that every software company works on this obsolescing model.

If Microsoft couldn't make money from their software, and Bill had decided to pump gas instead, where would you be today?

Getting paid to write Free Unix software, most likely (the FSF coming from the Unix subculture and not dependent on Microsoft).

Would linux be where it is today?

Without all the targeted FUD from Microsoft? No. It'd probably be farther along.

Seems like deja vu, since this has issue cropped up before, what with everything from Adobe wanting to install (at least on Mac and Windows) with system level privileges and enable javascript by default. [Tell me again, how is javascript a desirable feature for this file type?]

Which makes it a good idea to use alternatives like Preview, and Skim (for OS X), as well as Foxit Reader for Windows.

It's not like there's a paucity of options to get away from Adobe's bloatware, no matter what OS you're running.

you can use psad to blacklist people making bogus requests

From the wiki:

The game is a single-player and multi-player first-person shooter, built as a total conversion of Cube Engine 2

That alone adds a dimension that simply won't be there in Quake 3: real-time, multiplayer map editing, on the server, while others are still shooting each other.

To burn CD's/DVD's under Mac OS X, use Burn OS X.

I suspect the GP is talking about the interactive features of Zone Alarm.

Yea, I should have caught that. I wonder if TuxGuardian is more what the GP is looking for. From their site:

TuxGuardian was developed after the observation that Linux security applications were not tailored for lay users. With TuxGuardian you'll be able to implement access control policies to the network resources in order to identify and control every application that tries to access the network.

I remember seeing a conversation in the UBuntu forums a while back. It was talking about how application level firewalls didn't offer much protection. Someone had asked about Zone Alarm for Linux. The reply was that it would be difficult to implement because many of the tools you want to access the net can also be used to do Bad Things. For example my Linux distribution uses wget to download updates. However, wget can be used by any script to upload information from your system or download payloads. If you block wget, you block both the good and bad applications that make use of it.

Zone Alarm checks to see if the binary has changed since it last connected to the net. This is good. However, does it also check all of the settings? Wouldn't it be possible to construct an application in Windows that seemed beneficial to end user and had the ability to update itself over the net? The application binary wouldn't need to change to do Bad Things. It could be a data file it uses, or a different site it points to.

I've seen some conversation concerning the restrictions available that can isolate an application to prevent this kind of damage. SELinux seems like a match. It is difficult to set up. However, it can control what various applications can access. AppArmor offers similar protection based on path names.

It is easy enough to tell by looking at the Nature paper. Hint, the plot in the paper does not have this correction applied.

Actually, the above statement implies, you've reproduced their results successfully yourself. Have you? Where did you get the data and how did you run the IDL-interpreter (or the GDL-clone of it)? I don't think, you'd be able to, because the data used for this chart(s), apparently, comes from /cru/u2/f055/data/obs/grid/surface/lat_jones_18511998.mon.nc, which is not included in the leaked archive...

The thread you pointed to is inconclusive on the matter, but you are sure, there is nothing to look at here, and we should move along. What did you do to confirm that?

So I dragged my Windows taskbar to the top of my desktop and, viola: tabs for my applications. Then, using VirtuaWin, I have multiple application "windows". Go figure. This is sooo 2001.

The new project called OpenMediaVault is linux based, as iXsystems takes up FreeNAS...

http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/freenas/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4959

or...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/


...

Oh look! There's an open source clone. I'm afraid your prayers will go on unanswered.

I mean, and this isn't even hypothetical, if no Notepad came with Windows, there'd be many, dozens of alternatives with marginally more features. This was the case even when Windows just came out, that applications with hardly more features were on the market. I don't know about the state of calculators, but certainly Notepad and Wordpad killed an entire marketplace.

Worst Example Ever.

And that's not including universal text editors like emacs and vi (as gVim). The examples I just threw out are considered the best in a big market, not the only replacements for notepad. Source

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdisaster/
http://dvdisaster.net/en/index.html
?

Or something which will make par files...

Parchive: Parity Archive Volume Set for linux/unix

Funnily enough, I've shown this discussion to my friend and he, having ready my post, said - Did you see the Bristol project? I said what? And he gave me a link: http://bristol.sourceforge.net/index.html I've installed it now and now trying out. Great GUIs, beautiful sounds. I may have to take the above soft synth rants back.

Why can't there be an app which takes midi input and plays sounds (from a sound font file, wav file, etc) when it gets them?

Try lmms? It's come a long way. There's a Windows port available too if you want to try it out. Works with the (very low end) midi controllers I have.

In some ways this is a good point. Distros intended to have desktop users should probably include options to use low latency kernels. I don't see how it would be too difficult to include a few kernels compiled for different uses.

• High latency (100Hz), no preemption for server / intensive cpu jobs.
• 300 Hz with Voluntary Kernel Preemption for gamer / media playing. I noticed videos were not jumpy at all with this setting. The default would sometimes cause mplayer to stall for a several frames, then play them all at once. I didn't think about this or consciously notice it on video before I did this, but I really can tell now.
• One with the lowest latency setting and complete preemption, etc for more time critical and reaction sensitive work such as music and running robots and such.

All a distro maintainer needs to do is compile them with a few minor option adjustments each time, then either put each kernel in a separate package or just install them all and config the bootloader to run the correct one. Not a huge amount of work, relatively.

This seems to be a decent article about preemption.

As for an app which takes in MIDI and plays sounds, would Zynaddsubfx be it? I seem to remember seeing that feature when playing with it, though I have no MIDI devices, so I couldn't use it or say if it worked...

Some of these are on par with MOTU's basic interfaces List of Supported Devices FreeBoB

Of course, the software to really put any of those to full use really isn't there...

Oh yes.

Throw in "automate the acceptance tests" between the usage agreement and coding, just for good measure. Well, actually to free the developers from ever worrying whether they met the goals or broke any planned functionality again.

Really. It's not that hard:
- Expect for the commandline,
- Netcat for network,
- Selenium for web,
- Robot framework for graphical user interfaces.

Googleable, deadwooden and professional help are available on all of above.

It's a world I'd love to live and work in where programmers were engineers providing precise solutions to actual problems!

If you don't mind using a different player for those softsubbed MKVs, I strongly recommend SMPlayer, a well-designed front-end for mplayer. The Windows version includes an up-to-date mplayer build as well. I use the Linux version for this task, and it's superb including support for vdpau on my NVIDIA card. I do build my own mplayer binaries from the CVS snapshots, though, then tell smplayer to use the one I have in /usr/local/bin rather than the stock Ubuntu release. A quick "apt-get build-dep mplayer-nogui" will get all the development files you need to compile mplayer.

Looks like it actually is approaching a reasonable number of electrodes, unlike other the bunch of other 'brain control' devices (a pair of electrodes on your forehead does not an effective EEG make). Still too few for any sort of fine control, but you might just be able to get 2d bang-bang direction control going with a large amount of practice.
Of course, if it costs something ridiculous, then it's probably easier to make your own.

I'm on the TiVo boat as well. If you want to serve up media from a PC, throw pyTiVo on it, and point it at whatever directory contains your video files. The format of the video files doesn't even matter -- on the back-end it uses ffmpeg to do the video conversion.

I have a refurbished Compaq with a 2.4Ghz Core2Duo I bought last year, and it can convert at about 200fps, easily saturating the TiVo's network capabilities. Once setup, the system just appears in the Now Playing List. It has easily passed the wife test in my home over and over again (especially as she has access to the movies directory over the network from the desktop of her Mac -- if she gets something she'd like to put up, she knows to just drag and drop it into the folder, and then start playing it from the NPL on the TiVo).

Yaz.

Well, I used javascript for a puzzle game when there was no Ajax; I used an iframe for loading data instead of xmlhttprequest, and things were called dhtml for dynamic html. Game is still essentially working without modifications in modern browsers: http://hylzee.sourceforge.net/hylZee/
(Preview; The full version is meant to be downloaded and hacked.)

On the other hand, somehow, in ff+addons the victory advancement to next level doesn't work and the loss message is hidden/misplaced.

I use adzapper for squid on my router. works well.

You mean until somebody invents something like this?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpterm/
or this?
http://anyterm.org/

Install Linux on your netbook. Do not trust Windows.

That's my top tip for you right there.

I also use NoScript because I don't trust Javascript. The problem with Noscript is that so many web pages require Javascript to be enabled, so you need to use the Noscript control to permit Javascript. The usual sequence is: Why is this page acting funny? Why is the search feature broken? Oh yeah, it probably requires Javascript; enable it, then wait for the page to reload. So, Noscript is really a bit of a pain. But I use it anyway because I don't trust Javascript.

On my netbook (an Acer Aspire One with a 10.1" screen, 512MB of RAM, 160GB hard drive) I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 and it works great. The only issue I have noted is that if it goes into sleep mode it doesn't wake up; I need to power it down and then up. One of the cool features of Ubuntu 9.10 is that you can have an encrypted home directory; that would be nice for your credit card numbers and other personal data. I installed with this option and I have not noticed any slowdown in using the computer.

To install Linux, get a (cheap!) 1GB USB flash drive, and use Unetbootin to make a bootable installer for your chosen Linux distro. Ideally, you should use a flash drive with a physical write-protect switch; these are not common but do exist. Then, after you have set up the netbook, pack that flash drive in your luggage; if you ever need to you can re-install Linux from scratch. Or if your laptop is lost, stolen, or destroyed, you can get a new one and set it up again with Linux. But you will know the Linux installer on that USB key is a trustable Linux, especially if you have it write-protected.

By the way, when you set up Linux, be sure to put your data files one a separate partition from everything else. In other words, have two partitions: "/" (for everything but your data files) and "/home" (for your data files). If you ever do need to re-install your whole OS (due to horrible crash, or somehow getting 0wned) it is really fast to just say "go ahead and wipe the whole / partition, but don't format /home". You can completely re-install Linux in this way, losing no data, faster than you can run the Windows installer in "recovery" mode to try to fix a broken/0wned Windows install.

As others have suggested, you might want to keep your data "in the cloud", such as by using a webmail client. The major advantage is that if your laptop is lost or stolen, your data is all still where you left it; you just need a new netbook/laptop.

I'm sure you will bring a digital camera. A 160 GB hard disk can store a whole bunch of photos, and when you are in an area with good WiFi, you can backup your photos to the cloud somewhere. In future years you will treasure those photos. Looking over your photos you will say "Oh wow, I forgot all about that day; but this photo just reminded me!" Unless you tirelessly record everything in a diary, the photos will be crucial to reminding you of your trip. (And the netbook can record your diary, either by you typing it, or by you talking to the microphone. A netbook is handy no matter how you look at it.)

If you ever use a computer in a cyber cafe, just assume that a keylogger is recording your password, credit card numbers, etc. (It doesn't even need to be a software keylogger, it could be hardware!) Bringing your own computer is a good move. Using Linux to avoid your computer being 0wned is also good move.

steveha

Pretty sure he was referring to Apple buying "Logic Studio" and then cutting off the Windows line.

Think about that, Apple discontinues Logic Studio for Windows. But Apple did not prevent people from using other music production software, on Macs or Windows. Sonar, Cubase, and Reaper all run on Windows. The free and open source Audacity runs on *unix, OS X, and Windows.

Falcon

http://www.fwbuilder.org/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtfw/

No one's writing web applications in assembly. And no one's using Jakarta Struts to control an embedded device.

I wouldn't be so sure about either of those, to be honest with you. I've certainly seen people attempting to write web apps in Forth, which is approximately the next best thing in terms of ease of writing, and the hardware you'd need to run JRE+Tomcat+Jakarta+Struts (+ presumably HSQL or something similar for storage) is already present in some higher-end embedded devices.

For people who like abstract open-source games, Cultivation is a very interesting tiny (400k, 300k 7-zip compressed) game. You need to grow a garden, mate, and have children to win the game.

Finally, I'll just tack on that if sparklines are so great and this is all so obvious, then surely there's an open source version that predates this application.

Yup. Here's one: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sparklinesforxl/

that's not a proof...

It isn't? Here is the source if you don't believe me:
http://aros.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/nightly-download?20091120/Sources/AROS-20091120-source.tar.bz2

Feel free to verify it yourself too.

This appears to be a specific implementation of sparklines in an Excel spreadsheet, not sparklines in general. This blog talks about this specific implementation (sparklines in Excel) in 2006. This comment on that blog says that there are three current commercial implementations.

There's even a Sourceforge project for Sparklines in Excel, but it appears to have first published in early 2009.

One i've not seen anyone mention yet is JFileSync.

Yes yes, we all know that java is anathema around here, but this is an exceptional tool to have in the toolchest...