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Whether or not the license makes sense is up for debate, and I completely agree with you that it is ridiculous. You're wrong, however. Become familiar with the LGPL. Here's a hint: it's quite a bit different from the GPL. Here's a simple explanation if you're so inclined to learn: About the LGPL. There is indeed a distinction made by the LGPL between using and modifying an LGPL work in connection with your rights to link your own code against it.

See: why clisp is under gpl"

I think "New Scientist" was trolled. The concept makes no sense. Sure it wasn't an Onion article?

The New Scientist reports that at present, all robot software is designed uniquely, even for parts common to all robots but that could be about to change as roboticists have begun to think about what robots have in common and what aspects of their construction can be standardized, resulting in a basic operating system everyone can use.

Here's a top secret copy of "std_robot.h":
(blank space here)

No parts are common to all robots. Roombas and toys operating on extremely simplified flowcharts plus a touch of randomness, remote space exploration vehicles that are semi-autonomous, those battle-bot things that are just human controlled R/C cars with weapon hardpoints and are not real robots, hydraulic arm industrial welding robots, lynxmotion-ish multi-leg crawlers powered by servos, G-Code programmed numerically controlled lathes and milling machines, and last but not least RC airplanes converted into UAVs. They all have the general idea that something electronic controls something mechanical. Beyond that vague idea, what they all have in common is... Umm ... yeah, nothing at all, thats it.

Gerkey, who hopes to one day see a robot "app store" where a person could download a program for their robot and have it work as easily as an iPhone app."

Why an app store? Why not:

http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=robot

Why would it work as easily as an iPhone app? All iPhones are "the same" more or less. In the future, why would all robots be the same?

Mystifying how the article got it so wrong.

If you read the exchange, you'll see exactly what happened. It's not a nasty exchange, and not a matter of someone "deserving what they got."

The Clisp authors wanted to link to readline in addition to other libraries, giving the user a choice as to what library to use at compile time. RMS in effect tells the Clisp authors that since they use an interface designed to link to readline in their application, it's a derivative work, regardless of whether the user chooses to link to readline or not.

But in the exchange RMS very clearly states his view of the legal matters behind the GPL, and in my opinion his views are ridiculous. But it's important even if you disagree to understand what RMS thinks "linking" and "derivative work" mean, and he spells it out right here in no uncertain terms.

Link

http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL

It's not a direct link, but nonetheless you should strive for independence of that functionality. Otherwise you are trying to comply with the letter of the law, but it may not be enough.

http://tinytimetracker.sourceforge.net/php/ "Tiny Time Tracker is an unobtrusive personal time tracker that fits nicely at the bottom of your screen. Switching between tasks is made easy with auto-complete and a "task history" dropdown. Times may be viewed in an Excel spread sheet."

I only discovered this app a month ago, and I've fallen in love. It doesn't really integrate itself into your task bar, it's just a very small window you can drag anywhere. I keep it near the top of my screen, because it can get lost as I dock and undock my laptop all day. I'm only using three tasks, not the dozen they show in the screen shots: Personal, Non-billable, and Client. I've discovered that I was actually working more hours than I thought, about 50 hours per week. I'd already figured out the "send emails as you start and stop work from home" so everyone knows what I'm doing. Now I'm taking a four-day weekend every other week or so just to burn my comp time. It does help that the client bought a fixed number of my hours, and really doesn't want my contract to expire 25% sooner than planned.

The standard docs pretty clearly state that the default error hander does nothing and returns to the function, and that the strcpy_s function truncates the buffer and then returns after the error handler returns.

Okay, let's try this again. Here is the most recent draft. Look at 6.6.1.1 "The set_constraint_handler_s function", paragraphs 2 and 4. Here's what it says:

2 The set_constraint_handler_s function sets the runtime-constraint handler to be handler. The runtime-constraint handler is the function to be called when a library function detects a runtime-constraint violation. Only the most recent handler registered with set_constraint_handler_s is called when a runtime-constraint violation
occurs.

4 The implementation has a default constraint handler that is used if no calls to the set_constraint_handler_s function have been made. The behavior of the default handler is implementation-defined, and it may cause the program to exit or abort.

And also 6.1.4 "Runtime constraint violations":

2 Implementations shall verify that the runtime-constraints for a function are not violated by the program. If a runtime-constraint is violated, the implementation shall call the currently registered runtime-constraint handler (see set_constraint_handler_s in ). Multiple runtime-constraint violations in the same call to a library function result in only one call to the runtime-constraint handler. It is unspecified which one of the multiple runtime-constraint violations cause the handler to be called.

3 If the runtime-constraints section for a function states an action to be performed when a
runtime-constraint violation occurs, the function shall perform the action before calling the runtime-constraint handler. If the runtime-constraints section lists actions that are prohibited when a runtime-constraint violation occurs, then such actions are prohibited to the function both before calling the handler and after the handler returns.

4 The runtime-constraint handler might not return. If the handler does return, the library function whose runtime-constraint was violated shall return some indication of failure as given by the returns section in the functionâ(TM)s specification.

I hope this is clear enough. I expect that you've just looked at the individual description of strcpy_s, and didn't find anything about runtime violations; but the paragraphs cited above apply to all functions for which there's a "runtime constraints" section.

I never actually tried calling these things as I want to write portable software.

But you do use strlcpy. I don't see how this is any different - in both cases, if you want to be portable, you have to use a third-party implementation on all platforms where this functionality isn't available out of the box (as neither is included in the base standard for the language). And yes, there is an independent, open-source (MIT license), cross-platform implementation of TR 24731 - the Safe C Library.

Anyway I don't see how a DOS is much better than a buffer overflow.

Well, it's obvious - a buffer overflow is a potential high-risk security exploit, while a DoS is just a DoS.

Anyway, the philosophy is that if there is a problem in your application, it should be made obvious as early as possible. With strlcat, there are all kinds of interesting possibilities - perhaps someone used it but didn't check the error code, and, in fact, didn't bother to handle the truncation case specially at all. Depending on the circumstances, this may lead to a crash or other form of DoS down the line (e.g. when trying to parse the buffer expecting well-formed data, since it was already validated before the call to strlcat), but worse, it may lead to silent wrong behavior - imagine trun

FreeMind idea mapping software is excellent.

I have a nearly identical setup, and can verify that it works amazingly well. My Mac Mini runs MythFrontend and streams TV from my Linux backend. After a wall or two the Apple keyboard/mouse become unusable... but it's way more range than you need.

I normally have my laptop in front of me while watching TV, so I've started using Teleport, which is also great. I've used Synergy, but it's not nearly as slick as Teleport.

The username in the article links to pam-krb5-ldap.

I did the same in pretty much every game. I have to kill every monster, collect every powerup, and do everything possible. And I can tell you the causes of this with a very nice example. (I have forgotten the details, so I will fill in my own.)

There is an old movie, where there is a imminent nuclear explosion. And the women in the household, just starts to clean everything in the house to total perfection. Because her mind can't stand the "chaos". She feels the extreme urge to order that chaos. So instead of running to a bomb shelter, she dies ironing shirts in the living room.

Find out what gave you the urge.

I have a well-proven method to find it: When you are doing the "landscape raping", stop for some seconds, and concentrate on the bad feeling that that gives you. Try to do as much as possible to strengthen that feeling. (Create congruence.) Like adding other things to the situation (or removing them). Jump right in the middle of the feeling. And get it to the absolute maximum.
Yes, it will hurt. and your subconscious will fight it tooth and nail. Which is why it's much easier, when you have someone who can keep you on that path, while not bringing in his own (possibly twisted) influences. Also it means that you have to be in an environment, where you can really act out the stuff. It must be OK, even if you flip out, destroy half the room, do "perverse" things, or cry like a baby. (Shame is the natural enemy here.)
This usually re-activates old (=weak) neural associative pathways, that once were created when the original source of the problem happened. Which means those old things suddenly pop up and reappear in your mind.
Now beware that more often than not, there are many steps to re-activate, and the first thing is usually not the original source. Which means that you can only be sure to have reached the real source, when after a long time, you still don't get to a next step. Which is unrealistic, because it takes very long. But prepare for your first "final source" to not actually be the final one, and having to do the whole thing even deeper, when you find out that it's still not really solved. (These intermediate "sources" usually are re-traumatizations that added something to it. Often they also are *partial* "final sources", because there is more than one final cause.)
Anyway... when you have reached that final source/cause, you usually see a huge range of things in your life, that are very twisted, and have nothing to do with how you thing it would make sense to react. WRITE THEM ALL DOWN! (In a tree-like mind-map. I recommend paper, or the FreeMind mind-mapping software [open-source]) This again is a process where you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for those "twisted" things. To really get them all.
Once you have that map of your not-so-rose-colored glasses, you can start to re-train yourself. Which means that every time you get to such a situation, you (usually) automatically notice that what you would do now, is something that makes no actual sense, but only in the context of that "twist". So you do what you *actually* think makes sense.
This again is a hard process, because you fight against age-old habits. So reward yourself generously, get as much mental strength / love from your loved ones as possible, and just expect it to hurt to fight it, until you are over the top of the mountain (a more accurate description than "out of the woods"). And don't let this stop you. :)
It will take time to re-train yourself. And the stronger the new impressions, the more you learn, and thereby the faster it goes. But keep your personal balance between "too hard" and "too easy", to keep the acceleration at a maximum. It's no help when you get completely off the "road" because you were too fast.
Allright. Good luck. And try it with a professional, if needed. (Just beware that most professionals actually can *also* get to a level where it's too much for them. They are only human, even if they are trained to stand it. But that is their fault, and you do not have to take this into consideration. If needed, find a better/stronger/stabler one. After all, you're paying for it.)

I did exactly this, but I ran etherape image.

Right away I saw the infected windows machine sending traffic on a strange port to a strange IP (home DSL connection).

Another way to to build a Bart PE disk with antivirus software and do an offline scan of the filesystem.

http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/ Can sniff switched traffic.

Sorry, forgot to mention the name of the program. it's called "tea".

http://tea-editor.sourceforge.net/downloads.html

> 2) Plug the router into this HUB

Ettercap: http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/ removes the need for a HUB.
It uses arp table poisoning to fool your dads computer into thinking your Linux box
is the router, allowing you to view all traffic.

A word of warning though: do /NOT/ use ettercap on other networks than your own,
and do it behind a router. Your ISP will not think highly of you if you ARP poison the
entire neighbourhood...

Mozilla Backup, MozBackup is very important free open-source software.

Backup your Firefox settings and add-ons, and restore them to another computer.

Scilab numerical algebra system
unxutils native ports of some unix utilities to Win32
speedcrunch calculator
vim better than emacs
Sumatra PDF fast clean pdf viewer

I mean come on, what kind of troll is this? Can't you even be bothered to change some names and repost the BSD is dying troll?

It is official; Netcraft confirms: Slashdot trolling is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleagured slashdot trolling community when SilverHatHacker couldn't even make the effort to edit the classic BSD is dying post. The resulting post, reduced to one line, with no hyperlinks, now represents less than a fraction of one percent of all slashdot posts. Coming hot on the heels of recent slashcode modifications that make it harder to view the -1 rated posts, this post serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot trolling is collapsing in utter disarray, as fittingly exemplified by Anonymous Cowardon failing dead last in the recent Firefox website rendering test.

Audacity - audio editing

Thunderbird with Lighting extension? It isn't pretty, but it is effective, for me at least. And I do work in a corporate environment exclusively Outlook/Exchange. (there might needs be a calendar/task_manager extension, it's been a while since I set it up.)
Here is the portable version that I use.

Surely VLC [videolan.org] should have made this list? While it isn't exactly pretty it is very much FOSS, cross platform, and removes the need to download endless quantities of random codecs. Definitely better that Media Player classic in my book.

Well, yes, and no. VLC should've been included, but so should some other programs. I have a feeling I could list over 20 deserving freeware programs. Heck, I think MediaCoder should be on the list, too.

My personal opinion is that MPC is more useful - in part because of the hardware acceleration, and limitless amounts of DirectShow codecs available - and in part because MPC-HC includes quality enhancing GPU shaders.

VLC is an absolute must on many other platforms, but on Windows there's better solutions if you take the time to find them. (I say "better" from a codec compatibility, decode speed, and image quality standpoint)

Audacity is one of the best free audio editors. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

How about a list of more apps?

• Calibre ebook manager
• Last.fm streaming music client
• VLC media player
• CDex CD ripping software
• MusicBrainz Picard for tagging audio files
• Pidgin IM client
• OpenPandora to put Pandora on your desktop and scrobble to Last.fm
• VirtualDub for simple video editing

Anyone else have any good recommendations?

The Open Source For Windows project

http://osswin.sourceforge.net/

And while the Open Source CD project is dead, it looks like there's an alternative.

http://www.ttcsweb.org/osswin-cd/

Now if only Windows had Debian style repositories.

--
BMO

Programming games are fun!

However, I've yet to see a such a contest in which the successful entries used AI techniques rather than handcoded decision-making. My money says the winners of this will be handcoded and possibly tuned automatically, and not based on neural networks or genetic programming or whatever. I suspect this is true because these games are set up so that the game mechanics and the outlines of good strategy are very intuitive to humans, and so it's most efficient for the human programmer to encode that knowledge into the controller. Then if there's some minor detail that the programmer doesn't know how to optimize, like "what is the exact threshold from which I should switch from strategy X to strategy Y", then that can be found by running a lot of games automatically.

That's how I'll be working, at least; in any case, I don't think I could write a decent learning algorithm for something like this in a month (or probably even given a lot more time).

I hope this isn't considered spam, but those interested in this might like to know about some other programming games I've enjoyed:
http://jrobots.sf.net/ (Java clone of CRobots)
http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ (More complicated version of above)
http://sillysoft.net/ (Risk game that accepts AI plugins)

For the new/seeking, see these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMMS

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/

http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=opera&rls=en&q=lmms&sourceid=opera&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=FL14SrTCLYW0sgPfqe3xBA&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4#

http://keepthemfree.net/application/lmms-044

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

http://linux-sound.org/notation.html

And a slew of others are starts if not replacements, depending on what any given person is after. If someone can top Rosegarden, Lilypond and LMMS, or combine the best of all these and some others, you'll probably see/hear Apple whip out the patent/copyright infringement... But, i DO have to say, Garageband is FANTASTIC. I watched a demon in the Apple Store, and it's hard (it appears) to beat GarageBand (for now?).

Semi related to this, people using Fedora (which is probably packages and integrates KDE the best of any distro I've tried) can get 4.3 by enabling the Redhat KDE testing repos from http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/

I just installed it about an hour ago and have been pretty impressed with the improvement from 4.2. In particular, the notifications are very improved and kopete is actually verging on usable again. General polish all around is certainly helping too.

There's now strong evidence that it's possible to train fluid intelligence. For a long time it was considered impossible, and most types of training are indeed ineffective, but not all:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/04/25/0801268105.abstract
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=7546690114547074715&hl=en
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18556560

If you want to try it yourself you can download software here:
http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

That is why I have had good luck switching folks to Oxygen Office. It and Go-OO are what Open Office SHOULD be. I don't know why in FOSS the most popular is usually the crappiest. Meh, maybe its a taste thing.

Anyway, for those that have had problem with Open office I would suggest Oxygen Office or Go-OO. Oxygen Office if your users miss the extras that MS Office has like layout and clip art, and Go-OO if you need more features like better macro support. Either one of these IMHO will beat OO.o when it comes to giving your users what they want, and both have the nicer 2K3 layout (on screens which are 1024x768, which many offices have here, the ribbon in 2K7 is just painful) enjoy!

OpenSSL has a cryptographically secure random number generator. I know not everything uses it but doesn't (Open)SSH?

No. By default, OpenSSH will use the system's pesudo-random number generator, but you can also make it use prngd or EGD (the Entropy Gathering Daemon) instead. Whether either are more "secure" than the kernel's built-in RNG I am not qualified to say.

Jeremy Reimers' article is about systems that make collaboration easier.

Considering only that aspect, PDFs would need to die even faster than MS Word, because the installed base of PDF editors is not even close to that of Word. So you cannot realistically expect that the guy who receives you document can edit it and send it back with annotations.

MS Word actually does a halfway decent job there. Except for the occasional format change that spells trouble for owners of old Word versions, and the change tracking that cannot compete with a real version control system (over multiple versions it becomes a real mess).

But Open Office wins on the format change topic, because upgrades are free. So you can always upgrade without much hassle if you get stuff in a new ODF version. It might eventually win on change tracking too, if things like http://sourceforge.net/projects/odfsvn/ are successful. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried that one)

But the real question is if we shouldn't drop the "document to send back and forth" paradigm. Jeremy Reimers reports that his company had good results from moving to a wiki.

Personally, I think something Wiki-like with more WYSIWYG and GUI editing might offer the easiest migration path. Jeremy Reimers reports that he didn't have much luck with that, but I guess that was a case of weak implementation.
The technology exists, and I don't see why it would be impossible to make it work smoothly in a wiki.

Sounds a bit like LinuxCOE, which has been around for a while, and supports a bunch of different distros.

My undergraduate school developed a Windows (not cross-platform) circuit simulator called Cedar Logic which is being hosted on SourceForge here. It works well for digital logic gates, but doesn't do anything more than that.

Actually it's called Darwine

I did some basic simulations in Ngspice using Kjwaves as a waveform viewer and it worked pretty well for my purposes (I did end up editing a little of the Kjwaves code to fix some issues I had with autoscaling axes, but it was pretty minor). The interface is comparable to using HSPICE + Awaves in my experience. http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/kjwaves.html

Qucs is very capable.

I've never used it on Windows, though I see there's an installer for it. I use qucs on linux quite a lot, though.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/qucs/index.php?title=Main_Page

You might look at JMCAD. I haven't built it since v0.08.087, but v1.4 is current.

Yep. There's absolutely no way to use an iPod under Linux

Now, don't you start your whining about your precious Ogg and FLAC or-anything-else-support neither!

Now STFU, you fucking Troll...

Casio made several label printers, for which PEGG was written. I have used it successfully with the KL-P1000 "mouse pad" printer. You will probably have to buy it used though... I think they are out of production. Also the Casio labels are annoyingly hard to peel from the backing paper. Most others (e.g. Brother, Brady) are much better in that regard.

You can really print via CUPS, but it's kindof a kludge. My favorite way so far was perl CGI -> postscript -> convert to pgm -> convert to casio raw format -> send via USB to the printer. I had a web form for each type of label I was interested in printing, and the perl CGI substitutes fields into a postscript template. (CUPS doesn't have to be involved, the printer just has to be connected via USB to the web server.)

(Disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer but I didn't write it, and haven't done any actual maintenance yet, other than writing the CGI/Postscript stuff. :-)

I use syn.

http://syn.sourceforge.net/

Too bad you left out the best free option, but at least now we know you don't know what you're talking about. Not that it's massive, but it's persistent and allows ~32 players per server.

32 != Massively Multiplayer. That's not even half a monkeysphere.

Now what about a space sim MMO? Aside from a few no-name indie offerings or a Freelancer hack to play multiplayer on a server with a few other people, your only option is EVE.

Too bad you left out the best free option, but at least now we know you don't know what you're talking about. Not that it's massive, but it's persistent and allows ~32 players per server. You can pilot arbitrarily-sized ships in the game, although the bigger they get, the more you see the flaws (e.g. the failure to properly implement docking/undocking for different sizes of craft, etc.)

Here's a mac client: http://xmeeting.sourceforge.net/pages/index.php

Thanks, but you know it doesn't sound stellar when the last item in their "news" is dated 2007-07-03... :-/

cheers

http://sourceforge.net/projects/kbarcode/

IIRC, there's some nice command line options which allow you to specify barcode type and data, with PS or EPS output.

They've modelled him on Vigor

I'm surprised that the TTY subsystem is still in the kernel. By now, it ought to be in user space. It's rare today that a serial port is attached to an actual terminal (let alone a real Teletype), and separating the serial port driver from all the backspacing and line handling stuff would make both parts simpler. Most of the time, the TTY stuff in the kernel just gets in the way of other uses of serial ports.

They've been separated in QNX for a decade, for example.

I remember playing Stellar 7 before Starglider (doesn't mean that's the order they were released, of course).

Marathon by Bungie Software is another one that is often forgotten -- probably because it was only available for Apple Macintosh initially (1994). Frankly, it blew Doom out of the water with better storyline, graphics, and 8 person multi-player deathmatch -- appletalk network, no tcp/ip support.

Not sure if Marathon would qualify as a 'game engine' for this list, though the game engine for Marathon 2 was open sourced eventually, now called 'Aleph One'.

I loved playing 'Elite II: Frontier'; cruising around in a Cobra Mk 2, with the Stardreamer on and Sting's "Dream of the Blue Turtles" playing in the background...

Currently, the Vega Strike project looks like the best open source Elite-style universe. I've gotten it to run on an Ubuntu system, but very much unlike Elite, it exceeded the graphics capabilities of the computer I was using at the time, so I can't comment on gameplay.

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/

Haven't been looking for games lately, though. I played NetHack for 15 yrs or so, and felt no need for other games; but that's been replaced now by Dungeon Crawl.

http://www.chaosforge.org/crawl/index.php?title=CrawlWiki