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Azureus has the Ono Plugin that you might want to try. It uses CDN redirection information to identify and give connection priority to geographically nearby peers. I haven't heard of any similar efforts for other clients.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=ono

...clonezilla can do all of that too. did you even check the site? and might I mention that clonezilla's free as in speech, and not super-expensive like Acronis.

No it can't. You can't run Clonezilla from within Windows to do a hot-backup. Clonezilla live requires booting from the CD and taking the system down. This isn't an option where the system must stay up 24/7 and you want seamless automatic backups. If I'm mistaken, please show me on their site where it claims this capability (I looked).

Last time I used Clonezilla, it had no clue about NTFS and simply used dd to copy any partitions it didn't understand. That also had the limitation that it could not resize the partition during restore. Their website implies it knows about NTFS now, but it's not clear if it can resize while restoring now.

Clonezilla also used dump and restore to backup ext volumes which can cause corrupted files in your backup if you use it on an active partition as files can change mid-copy. Even Linus says dump/restore is deprecated http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html.

For workstation use, Acronis is pretty cheap if you look for their sales. I paid $11 for Acronis Home not too long ago. The server version is pretty expensive though.

Besides, who said speech was free?

Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?

Mr Gates, here's a list.

Not that he will ever read this.

IIRC it expands to a 100 meg disk image, of which about 50 megs is used. http://sourceforge.net/projects/user-mode-linux/files/Root%20filesystems/1/Debian-3.0r0.ext2.bz2/download It's an image you can copy right onto the drive. It was made for User Mode Linux, but I'll bet it'll work with only a little bit of apt-getting. Then you can dist-upgrade to Lenny.

Remember, 486 machines predate the advent of DMA transfers, so you'll be sucking up all of your (already very limited) CPU just to manage disk activity.

This is a total load of crap. Even of the 8088 IBM compatible computers, most (if not all) had DMA chips. I learned assembly programming on IBM compatibles before 486s were in regular use, and all the IBM compatible computers had DMA chips. As best as I recall, the only PCs which didn't have DMA chips were early IBM and compatibles, the 8-bit 6502 based computers (Atari, Apple, Commodore), early Macintosh, and maybe the Atari ST and Amiga. I could be wrong in they may have had DMA chips, but I know later computers did have them. Here is an article about old 8088 computers and DRAM refreshing.

About using a 486 and X: you obviously know nothing about this. I used a 100MHz 486 with 16MB of RAM from 1996 to about 2000 or 2001, and it ran X okay. When I say "okay", I mean okay for me. Current "fast" computers with KDE or Gnome are not okay for me: they run slow. Yes, Mozilla had problems, but it certainly was not slower than browsing with current "fast" computers. This guy wants to run Dillo. He will be just fine. Dillo is fast even on a 486.

Yes, I did have problems with swap storms. Mostly if I opened too many windows in Mozilla (or a heavy page), or if I tried to edit a big photo (larger than a resolution than probably around 1500x1500) in GIMP. However with more ram, this won't be as much a problem (I think the submission said 24 MB).

You must be using a different version of blackbox than I do. As I remember, blackbox was just fine on my 486 I don't recall it being slow, though I mostly used fvwm. Blackbox was certainly snappy on my 500 MHz K6. I know because the fvwm project degenerated into a buggy mess with fvwm2 and didn't seem to have the features I needed anymore, so I used blackbox quite a bit. I don't really like blackbox because of the way it is set up, but it isn't slow.

In fact, if you compared blackbox on a 486 running against KDE or Gnome on a "fast" modern computer, I doubt you could tell the difference in response speed. If anything the Knome computer would be slower. I think blackbox had a delay setting for accessibility, but so do Gnome, KDE and MSWin. Maybe you had that turned on? Blackbox Configuration wiki session.autoRaiseDelay: look down in section 2.4.8

It may require using an older X binary (better lock it out of the internet with -nolisten tcp and such), it will probably also require compiling a custom 2.4 kernel, but I don't see the big problem. What is with all the naysayers?

CloneZilla? It's linux-based, but it'll run as a LiveCD (aka, put the CD in and reboot). It comes in Live and Server editions for different needs. The backups are fast and you can choose how much compression you want as well. It can connect to remote drives and physical drives and I've just tried running the server edition at my old school (I volunteer there) and it works great! We got a whole lab of computers-around 20 of them-in only 3-4 hours! They were all running Windows XP.

And IIRC, it supports FTP and Samba/NFS. http://clonezilla.org/ for the regular LiveCD or http://drbl.sourceforge.net/ if you want a live server edition.

[GMP] does not, for example, let you do square roots or trigonometric calculations

I know that. I recommended GMP because the article is about improper handling of rationals, not square roots or trig (or even Trig Van Palin for that matter), and Maxima would have been overkill.

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/

In that list, I tried blue flops before, (a two floppy distro, with an enhanced graphical Links browser) it worked fine on an old mostly broken pentium 1 laptop with 16 megs RAM that I was given. It says in the notes minimum requirement is 16 megs or 8 with swap, and a 386, has Ethernet card drivers and a text editor and some other stuff. I know I was able to get online with it and surf reasonably.

http://blueflops.sourceforge.net/

A Trove of these things:
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/

Promising:
http://atomic.eyedropvideo.com/remote1.shtml

Non-X woth graphical browsing:
http://blueflops.sourceforge.net/

Where can i find this list? Or does it only exist in the SLASH source code?

The SLASH source code is published in a Git repository. However, SLASH exposes several settings to the site owner, such as how much karma a "Funny" is worth (+1 in stock SLASH, 0 on Slashdot), and I'm guessing this character whitelist is one of those.

It looks to me they just threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Given how few articles on Slashdot are explicitly about internationalization, there is only enough baby to count as "acceptable collateral damage". A SLASH-based site directly about i18n issues would obviously have a wider whitelist.

If the problem was unicode's direction control characters, why not just blacklist those few control chars?

Because we don't know what additional control characters Unicode Consortium will define in the future. Also because Slashdot admins want to discourage, say, ASCII art made out of Japanese characters.

Instead we now have a whitelist so ridiculously small, it's useless.

The success of Slashdot shows that the character whitelist on Slashdot is useful for everything but talking about i18n.

"Great, now even less chance I can identify NSFW links before they are blocked by my work's big brother app and my boss is notified... again."

If this is a common problem for you, turn off your browser's "load images" setting. Not a perfect solution, but better than a flashing neon animated GIF of bouncing boobs right as your boss walks by. Myself, I've a number of people I follow on twitter who post links and often fail to mention if they're work appropriate, so I set up PuTTY to be an SSH tunnel/SOCKS proxy (scroll down to, "PuTTY for WindowsXP") to my home file server.

With Vim's editing capability, the shortcuts defined in VIM-LaTeX let me take notes as fast as my professor types them.

I love PDFs, but not so much Reader. It's more of a necessary evil... although for most purposes I could probably get away with using an alternative PDF viewer.

I always install a PDF printer (PDFCreator is a nice one, but if you just want something vanilla then CutePDF Writer usually does the job). Then I use it for anything that says "print this page for your records". Digital, indexable copy of whatever it is, arranged by the date I printed it, with no wasted paper or ink.

Short of PDF, I don't know what else you'd use... XPS? XPS is just as bad as PDF, except it's from Microsoft instead of Adobe. Wait... does that make it as bad, or worse? Nobody uses XPS.

What I do hate, with a fucking passion, are protected PDFs. Especially since CutePDF tends to crash (prints an error message document) when you try to print a protected PDF through it to remove the protection... this is, in fact, one of the only uses I've ever had for the MS XPS Document Writer (sometimes it'll succeed where CutePDF or PDFCreator fail, then I can reprint the XPS as a PDF).

For older machines I would suggest Kmeleon if you are low on RAM, and Kmeleon CCF ME if you have over 128Mb. Both are built on the Gecko engine and VERY fast, but CCF ME has built in ABP and since it is a standalone also makes an excellent flash drive browser, but if you are below 128Mb I've found the memory footprint of stock Kmeleon can't be beat. And both can be run on Win95 on up according to the FAQ.

For older machines I would suggest Kmeleon if you are low on RAM, and Kmeleon CCF ME if you have over 128Mb. Both are built on the Gecko engine and VERY fast, but CCF ME has built in ABP and since it is a standalone also makes an excellent flash drive browser, but if you are below 128Mb I've found the memory footprint of stock Kmeleon can't be beat. And both can be run on Win95 on up according to the FAQ.

Get unetbootin. It will download the ISO and jam it on a USB stick for you.

Yes you can. You need either -
  a Windows system and unetbootin: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
  or, an Ubuntu system with usbcreator: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick#usb-creator%20(Windows%20or%20Linux)

I used unetbootin on Windows and it's a very well-made program, no problems at all.

UNetbootin can create a bootable Live USB drive from ISO images (also requires a USB thumb drive of course)

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

I always hang up as soon as I recognize them for what they are.

Not me. I set the phone on my desk, press the "mute" button and tie up the telemarketers' phone lines for as long as possible while I get back to reading /.^w^w^wwork. Kind of a low-tech La Brea tar pit.

In another instance,

Nicholas Harbour, who at the time was working for the Department of Defense Computer Forensics Lab (DCFL)

wrote a loving modified dd that writes to multiple files and streams to multiple programs at the same time. The program, dcfldd, also introduces the sorely missed VERIFY operation, and even block-by-block hashes, ( dcfldd Man page)

Maybe someone will combine this with dd_rescue, ddrescue and dd_rhelp to make the ultimate "Convert and Copy" utility :-)

Ah and I can dream of SCTP support too :-)

You should be able to access the drives with smartctl even though they're behind a RAID controller. For example, to access information about the drive in the first port of a 3ware controller:

smartctl -a -d 3ware,0

Check out the manpage for more example devices.

I was disappointed that there's no Ekiga for Maemo on the N800.
If you don't particularly care about using the branded Ekiga client, SIP support is shipped with device software images. However, it (and any other implementation based on Sofia-SIP) does not work with the SIP proxy at ekiga.net, because the proxy imposes restrictions on certain SIP header contents, which: 1) go beyond what's actually specified in SIP RFCs; 2) if followed, break NAT traversal with other, perfectly good SIP proxies. The reason is, the Ekiga client does not work if the proxy does not enforce these restrictions.

Any idea how much longer I have until they crash?

While nothing is ever a certaintly -- a tool for your OS that inspects SMART data from your drives' electronics would answer that question, at least from a trend perspective. I like smartmontools, but you may prefer something else, or it may not be applicable for your OS.

See Wikipedia for some background information on SMART, and what it can tell you.

This is a bus that is growing rapidly in the automotive industry and is also popular in vending machines. There's an element of structure built into the network level to enhance safety as it's an automotive standard.

There has been an open source home automation system based on it for several years.

Yeah, here it is:
http://caraca.sourceforge.net/

My favorite example of a prediction retroactively corrected (albeit more tongue-in-cheek than most) is the Subgenii, who, when the world didn't end in 1998, decided that they'd gotten the date upside down! The correct date, they now proclaim, is 8661. :)

(Actually, they apparently now have end-of-world celebrations every year, just in case, but I remember when the 8661 date was on the front page of the Subgenius website, and that date is still commemorated in the ddate man page as above, and is mentioned in lots of related material.)

Ironically, the page you linked to includes the original Subgenius date with no commentary on either the nature of Slack, er, Bob, er the CoSG, nor any mention of the updated 8661 date.

Slirp and TIA for emulated SLIP and PPP through UNIX shell accounts FTW! :P

Get off my lawns, younglings. :P

I prefer marching penguins. (Windows port)

Having recently bought a neat $3000 Wintendo box (must've been drunk or something, but I can't say I wouldn't like it), one of the very first things I did was get Win-X-Move and enable focus follows mouse ("X mouse") by fiddling around in HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop UserPreferencesMask.

I prefer the former to your AutoHotkey solution because it also enables Alt-RightClick to resize windows (the corner nearest to the cursor will be moved), but the script ought to work just as well.
About the latter: It's such a lovely feature that MSFT actually put a switch for it in the Control Panel, so no need to fiddle around, just do like here.

Windows 7 is, if you aren't too dependent on your console fix (sorry, but cmd is just nasty), a great, snappy, stable and very usable OS that can very well compete with current Ubuntu. Both have their advantages and drawbacks, but after several months of growing dislike for Windows, I must admit to not favouring Linux over Win or vice-versa anymore.

[No mention of OS X because I'm heterosexual, z/OS because I don't quite have that kind of processing power around here or Gentoo because ... I already said I didn't have that kind of machine -- how would I ever finish compiling? ;)]

Google is your friend:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/firefoxadm/

I use http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

Ipods (iphones) need Itunes.

No, they don't

This is slashdot, OF COURSE you should use Nagios!

And to increase your /. Kung-Fu, buy an EM01;
http://www.nagios.org/products/environmental

Learn Nagios the FAN way;
http://fannagioscd.sourceforge.net/drupal/

or play with GroundWork, they're awesome;
http://www.groundworkopensource.com/community/community-edition.html

(Yes, I actually run this in a real data center, we eat our own dog food.)

did you check out Vega Strike? It's on http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/ and it runs many OS including Linux. There was even a Privateer mod, so you can do the same missions etc.

AC

Honestly the amount of fine grained control mixed with sudo (neither run-as or UAC are sudo, they impersonate another user rather then privilege escalation)

We you referring to sudowin http://sourceforge.net/projects/sudowin/, which does maintain the user id and escalates privileges? The linux sudo impersonates another user just like run-as (http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/man/sudo.html). Windows UAC controls privilege escalation.

you get with *nix environment is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows. Admittedly group policy has some nice default templates, but as soon as you step an inch outside the norm (which is hard not to) be prepared for pain, so much so that the only place we employ GP is on our Terminal Services boxes. Even then a lot of the "Lock Down" is pretty much just obscuring things without actually adding any security.

I think you're Linux expertise is better than your Windows expertise. Group Policies are very easy to use and work very well. Even going outside the norm, you can do a hell of a lot writing custom gpo templates or scripts. Most of the "lock downs" really do lock things down, but as you pointed out some are indeed security-through-obscurity like hiding some control panel options that the user can manually with a registry editor.

No, it works great on anything from Win95 (just follow the FAQ Guide) on up through Windows 7, but since it doesn't have XUL getting extensions to work that aren't installed by the developers is a royal PITA. Sure, there are sites out there that have recompiled stuff like No-script and other popular extensions, but it is a long complex affair to get them installed.

With CCF ME it already has ABP built in, and has a nice Safari/Chrome feel to it. Basically it comes down to the hardware. On pre DDR RAM machines I've found Kmeleon gives a nicer experience with a much more responsive UI, as well as much more conservative RAM usage. It also work VERY well from a thumbdrive, with fast starts and minimal writing. But like most Firefox users I'm a bit of an extension junkie (right now I have ABP,Distrust,Nightly Tester Tools,Downloadhelper,Download statusbar,FEBE,ForecastFox,Noscript, and iMacros) and trying to get all those working in Kmeleon is frankly more trouble than they are worth. So I simply use Kmeleon on my thumbstick and on my older machines like my Nettop, and save my extension madness with Firefox to more capable machines.

But if you haven't tried Kmeleon CCF ME, give it a go. No need to install, just unzip and use. And like I said it is GREAT for thumbdrives or less powerful machines like older desktops/laptops.

Which probably works rather well in a Technology based company. But in an Industry where technology is far from the focus and appears as "cost" of doing business to the higher ups and a proportion of the users have trouble using their mice, love screen savers and porn, your thinking has to change. Then there are viruses, malware, smitfraud etc that are so prevalent in even the most "innocent" of sites, you just can't blame them for having a laptop popping up with Antivirus 2009 etc.

For our next implementation I want to lock things down further as currently it's hard with the types of Apps people require that need admin rights (unless our department pays to get things re-written this won't change and we don't have the budget for that!). I'm thinking sudowin may be the answer.

We do this for many many Drupal sites on many horizontal web nodes via bzr + ant. By 'sites' I mean no multi-site; each 'site' gets its own Drupal instance. By 'Drupal instance', I mean the 'Drupal instance' is an ant-powered deploy from a branch in bzr comprised of vendor branches (core + modules) merged in plus customizations by our shop. Each environment gets a branch, and we merge code upstream (dev -> tst -> prd).

The only thing 'shared' across the infrastructure is the web services and frameworks on the webapp nodes. Ant is great at auto-magic MySQL db provisioning, Drush calls to pound the schema, APC cache flushes, Memcached bops, etc. Also I would throw myself off a bridge if I had to manage all the complex merges across our branches and dealing with updating the vendor branches.

Others here also made the comment wrt code up, content down. Live it, love it; SERIOUSLY! Refresh often, and give your devs anonymized slices of the db for them to keep on a laptop they will undoubtedly leave in a cab. Were currently bending ant to perform the downstream refreshes + sanitizes. Looks very promising.

Also if youre not able to bastardize ant to do what you want it to do, look at ant-contrib to further extend the tool.

http://bazaar-vcs.org/en/
http://ant.apache.org/
http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/

Slightly OT: The J2EE guys at $employer prefer a maven+ant+svn approach. YMMV.

Have fun. These are very interesting toys to play with, tbh.

PDF is a format designed to preserve the original page size and layout, while its certainly commonly (read: usually) used with no regards to those, it really really sucks at doing so. html based options like epub are much much better at having the content universally fitted and sized to the device in question. Also, PDF sucks for conversion to other formats as well.

I've been using a DS homebrew app called DSLibris for a while now, The DS is naturally shaped like a book when held sideways, and it certainly beats paying a lot of money for a dedicated device vs something I already have and use frequently. The top right corner page turning touch controls are also pretty nifty. It does currently lack a few features, like the ability to download/sync with books stored on my PC automatically, although it could easily be done given the DS' wifi functionality. And I'm not paying 250$ just to automate something that can be done fairly easily manually to begin with.

You should try regain http://regain.sourceforge.net/?lang=en . There exists a desktop and a server version. And if you are clever you mix them. You can create your indices with the server version (crawler) and copy the to your desktop computer. So you can search without the need of an application server to run the search frontend.

Under linux/unix:
1. mount CIFS share
2. run updatedb
3. run locate/slocate

Under Windows:
1. Do the above with cygwin
Other Options:
Locate32
Femfind
Lan Finder

I actually did something like this for my senior year project. We tried to make a Warhammer 40k game. We didn't use MS surface we used Reactivision, to do the tracking. And Reactivision was actually much better than most of the other implementations because it could also track an objects orientation. We never really got it to work that well but it was a fun project

http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/

Is not "worry about the content, not the presentation" the mantra around here? If we are supposed to follow that for the web-pages we produce, why should the resumes be different?

One's resume should be in XML, from which various other formats can be produced automatically (and consistently)...

LogicMail. Open source loves you (it's a great program)!

i always thought that an active-desktop-esque window manager for linux would be cool, as it would allow users to write applications in HTML, Flash, or anything, and have them in the "Start" Menu, or as part of the desktop.

it turns out ironically that google's "chrome os" is pretty much exactly that, and the Palm Pre is already well on its way to being a "web" os, too.

thus we ironically come full circle, as the startling implications of ideas that microsoft creates over fifteen years ago eventually filter through the security nightmares and negative public perceptions of the windows OS....

Who will write the first USB slave app that turns this into a real keyboard (HID device) for another computer and lets you do two things at once like a KVM does?

The problem is not a software one, it's a hardware one. This thing does not have a male USB cord that hooks into the keyboard, it only has female USB ports that connect to the motherboard. Granted, you could get a USB MM cable/genderchanger/whatever, but that would not be original to this device - I'm sure plenty of people have written programs that have a USB port emulate a keyboard controller (can't be bothered checking). However, that's still not a very good solution because it requires extra hardware. What you COULD do is install everyone's favourite multi-platform FOSS KVM-over-LAN program, . It's trivial to set-up, and can be made to accept keystrokes as the KVM trigger (though I've only ever used the cursor-to-edge trigger, so I'm not sure how well that works). Not only that, but since it's network, it can be run over wireless - so you don't even need to carry a cord around to use this thing!

I also come from an embedded background and I didn't find a C++ platform abstraction library to my liking (i.e. fun to use and giving the programmer maximum power and control), so I went off and wrote my own: http://www.nedprod.com/TnFOX/ (docs are at http://tnfox.sourceforge.net/TnFOX-svn/html/). You can build a noGUI version which leaves out all the GUI stuff which should provide what you want: it also has a type reflecting metaprogramming database adapter with a copy of SQLite3 thrown in for good measure, and it is very seriously fast and efficient unlike most GUI toolkits e.g. all the bottlenecks use assembler or intrinsics and there is ample stream computing support which uses metaprogramming to assemble vector instructions. One major difference from libraries such as ACE is that I deliberately made TnFOX as fun to program in as possible - I have made zero attempt to make it academically "proper" or "pure".
Hence it does come with an unusual programming paradigm - I make heavy use of C++ metaprogramming constructs and C++ exception handling and pervasive multithreading. And almost no one else uses it which I take it to mean that its learning curve simply isn't worth it for most people which is fair enough. In the end, if you ever want someone else to be able to work on your project then you need to use a well established toolkit which has a significant programmer pool attached to it. And ease of finding programmers is vastly more important than a "right" or "proper" or even "good" programming paradigm - as the designers of Plan 9, BeOS and NeXT found out.
If your project is something recreational, do give TnFOX a look. If it's for something ever destined for outside your personal fun time, go with Qt or wxWindows or any big free portability library.
HTH,
Niall

I've spent time on:
Fish Fillets NG - an aquatic themed puzzle game.
planetpenguin racer - a downhill racing game.
supertuxkart - a go kart racing game
torcs - a racing car simulator

All of which also have Debian packages.

I've spent time on:
Fish Fillets NG - an aquatic themed puzzle game.
planetpenguin racer - a downhill racing game.
supertuxkart - a go kart racing game
torcs - a racing car simulator

All of which also have Debian packages.

I've spent time on:
Fish Fillets NG - an aquatic themed puzzle game.
planetpenguin racer - a downhill racing game.
supertuxkart - a go kart racing game
torcs - a racing car simulator

All of which also have Debian packages.