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Yes, especially regarding Privateer, StarCon (1 or 2 - I'm fine with remaking either of 'em, or just restarting the whole franchise) and Master of Orion.

For what it's worth, Privateer and StarCon 2 are still alive in open sauce form:
Privateer Gemini Gold - Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, though, at least in my experience, Compiz ("enhanced desktop effects") breaks full screen on Ubuntu. Your mileage may vary, and turning off desktop effects isn't hard. It's very much an "update the graphics" port, though.
Ur-Quan Masters - It's StarCon 2, but they don't own the name. They did own the original code, though, and have since updated it for more modern platforms. Like any good open-source project, it runs on damn near anything.

I'm not sure if there's a MoO remake out there. Honestly, I felt the franchise just kept going backwards with each release, which was really sad. MoO 2 was, in many respects, just a dumbed down version of MoO 1, and MoO 3... I honestly don't know what that was about. Then again, I could say the same thing for StarCon 3... I mean, muppets?!

Check out Urquan masters for more open ended Star control 2 goodness. It's free, and it's a great time waster. It takes all the ships and more from SC2 and puts you in control of an epic mothership with the mission to free the galaxy from the terror of the masters. Great stuff.

http://ufo2000.sourceforge.net/

http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/

http://ufo2000.sourceforge.net/

http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/

No need to recode from the IAPWS standards (I've done it, but those equations are huge and a pain to type and debug). Just go use http://freesteam.sourceforge.net/

Chrome does a really fantastic job with SVG JavaScript DOM manipulation; it's crazy fast. Safari 4 does as well.

Firefox is okay, but slowish and the latest 3.5 build breaks some things with SVG transforms that worked fine in 3.0

I'm not sure that you can categorize it as not being "fast enough". The progress in WebKit based browsers is really quite remarkable. I've been writing an SVG application for the last year or so that relies on the ability to manipulate a dynamically generated network map with JavaScript (move it around, scale, etc., found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/flower-nfa/) Chrome and Safari do a great job. Firefox did in 3.0, but is badly broken in 3.5.

Also, check out Google's SVGWeb project. It looks like it might be promising if MS decides to never build support for SVG.

A related documentary in three parts (TechnoCalyps):
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7141762977713668208
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2258529707984107504&hl=en
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8945702810854373085&hl=en

I'd suggest that to make those decisions with insight and compassion, we need better communications and design and analysis and simulation tools for collaborating on the problem. I've been working on that here:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

And here it is...

You can even convert your hard disk to a VMWare VM and keep your complete installation using Live View.

BASIC is usually used because it was designed for beginners.

Yeah we can skip the Visual BASIC because it has become too complex and is locked into Windows. A simpler BASIC is Free BASIC. It is also cross platform between Linux and Windows. Another BASIC is BASIC-256 designed for kids to use.

A more easier and simpler language is Logo which uses a turtle with a pen to draw things and is designed for younger kids to use, but older ones can use it as well.

It is better to start out children and teenagers on the easier and simpler languages so they don't get discouraged and give up. Do you really want to teach them C first and then try to explain the proper use of a semicolon and pointers? You teach them the languages you know later, after they mastered the simpler and easier languages. After mastering BASIC or Logo you can teach them C, C++, Python, Java, PHP, whatever later.

Personally, I don't have much liking for FOX. The main reason why Acronis is using it today is because in-house FOX fork has been ported to all kinds of things: not just Win32 and X11, but also Linux framebuffer (this is used for Acronis recovery CDs), and even EFI (this is fore special editions of Acronis products that are sold to hardware manufacturers to be embedded into sold hardware; imagine True Image restore module in your BIOS...). It's a pretty interesting port, too, because it tries to preserve look and feel of Win32 widgets (if you ever saw an Acronis boot CD, or Acronis boot loader, you should know what I mean).

When FOX was originally chosen, Qt was IIRC still GPL'd and thus unusable in commercial settings, and there was a need for a toolkit that draws all its widgets itself (rather than a wrapper on top of OS or another toolkit), for those framebuffer and EFI scenarios.

By itself, FOX is really just your basic C++ toolkit. I'm not aware of any special tooling existing for it, but even if it does, we just hand-coded all UI. So all you'd really need is a C++ compiler. Can't beat VC++ on Windows (I know it's not free, but there's a reason why virtually all commercial shops use it, and not e.g. MinGW, for Windows development); and, of course there's no contest with g++ on any other platform.

We used VC2003, later migrating to VS2005, for all Windows builds, and g++ for Linux/MacOS/EFI (several different versions, I don't remember the exact ones, but it was 4.x by the end of it). IDEs? Well, Visual Studio provides very nice debugging experience on Windows (duh), and our hardened and brutal Linux guys mostly just used gdb directly. No idea about how OS X team handled it, but I'd guess XCode.

Editor-wise, it was free for all. Some used VS, some Vim (including Vim/Win32), some Emacs (again, including Win32 port), a lot used the built-in editor in Far Manager with Colorer for syntax highlighting, and there were some even more obscure combinations.

Consider Shareaza which was first released in 2002. Now a company claims the trademark of Shareaza and the USPTO is about to grant it. It would be enough to Google for it, but even several protest letters failed to change their mind.

PS: (Previous story on /. covering Shareaza: P2P Scammers Lawyers Attack Open Source Team).

lol...I wasn't aware my XML file was encrypted. I'd suggest you start here: http://www.sourceforge.net/

If you've ever actually run a j2me app on android, you would retract your claims. HTML based apps are far better.

HTML based app are far better? LOL

For your information, Java != Sun Java. There are lots of implementations of Java compilers, VMs etc: from very small VM's, like 220Kb only (e.g. http://jamvm.sourceforge.net/) to quite serious implementations (e.g. http://www.cacaovm.org/). And does not matters what VM Android is using in particular (they use Dalvik VM underneath their framework, so what?).

Whilst J2ME looks less powerful than what Google came up with on Android, however, there are tons of applications already done, up and running. Folks from Assembla does great job: http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/j2ab

Also for a record, JavaFX is running on Android: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sopao9Y7-GQ -- be our guest beating JavaFX features with that your "far better HTML". :-)

The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop (I've worked on) is intended to be something like this, but in Java and more decentralized.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

NEPOMUK is another such social semantic desktop system.
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/

Due to the issues of concurrency and locking

File systems have synchronization bottlenecks too: not just within your application and among applications that access your database but among all applications on a system.

the SQL check is frequently more expensive, especially when you have to do an out-of-process operation (passing the message from the web server over to the database program) vs. an in-process file system lookup.

In a user-space file system, a file system lookup isn't necessarily in-process.

Add to that the cost of moving a large amount of data (the blob itself) from the database process to the web server process to the kernel TCP stack vs. being able to do a simple send_file() operation on the inode from the web server process

In other words: "The file system is faster because it supports send_file()." That's a good point.

rather than using a very cheap sort of database (a file system) they use an expensive data base, for no real advantage

In some case, the expensive database's advantage is that it efficiently stores blobs smaller than 2 KB, while file systems without the uncommon "tail packing" feature use fixed-length records called "clusters".

Maybe most people started playing Frets on Fire... LOL!

Seriously though, if that game (had) really caught on, Guitar Hero and Rock Band would be finished. Especially if there was full band integration and some of the other features from both other franchises were added.

You can't exactly hop on your friend's XP box and run an X application from a remote server, unless he happens to have Exceed installed (for $$$).

Actually, you can. There do exist free X servers for Windows, see XMing.

We have had/do have similar issues and have not found a single solution. For windows host inventory, we're utilizing Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager (previously we were using System Management Server) For network device inventory (managed routers and switches) we take a two-fold approach: Rancid for configuration (and therefor inventory) and NeDi for network discovery and inventory. For IP address Management we tried a few apps (phpIP and IPPlan) but I found issues with both...so i wrote my own and we use it now: Collate:Network. I had written something similar to Collate:Network for hardware/software/user-assignment management called Collate:Inventory but it never caught on so it mostly sits idle now waiting for someone to ask me to get off my butt and start adding new features. To a certain extend I think this mish-mash of tools works well for us. Each tool is good at what it does (at least the ones I work with are...i don't really use the Microsoft tools personally) and so we usually get what we want out of them. The problem we run into is that there are so many tools to manage that they sometimes don't get the attention they need to stay up-to-date on our environment...though i don't know if a single monolithic tool is the answer either.

I realize there are proximity-based USB dongles that will lock the screen when the remote adapter is beyond range, but this may be far too impractical to use. A USB security dongle sticking out the side is a quick recipe for a broken USB port...

If it has bluetooth you can use BlueProximity with your phone(or any other bluetooth device), instead of a specialised dongle.

I haven't actually used this but take a look at synergy.

While your suggestions may stop a consistent number of thief's from accessing data, they are pointless to a more determinated thief that want's to access data. BIOS passwords and simple Windows XP login passwords are just not good enough, as they are easily breakable.

While I'm answering this, I may also give a suggestion. Encrypt the drive, or if you are worried about performance, simple create a new partition for your documents, encrypt it, ad if you want seamless integration mount it as Documents And Settings Folder. Also I suggest changing your password to a strong password.

Advertising: You can use a program that I've wrote for strong password generation.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kpgen/

For those who don't own a Mac:

http://docsynch.sourceforge.net/index.php?page%5B%5D=0.Home

As others have said, you'll need some kind of source control (SVN probably - easier to understand and will let the students concentrate on the tasks rather than the tools). Then you'll need a voice link. Either telephone, Skype or a SIP-compliant VOIP thing. IM would be useful for communication between one pair and other pairs.

Then an IDE with collaborative editing. Netbeans has it built in apparently, but I haven't tried it. Eclipse has a number of plugins to facilitate collaborative coding:

Shareclipse: Does voice and video inside Eclipse, but projects not genuinely shared. Project might be dormant. linky

Saros: Does voice, but not video. Whole project shared. Uses a local IRC server, like XMPP or Jabber. Great demo vid. linky

Xeclip: Dependent on CVS and costs $$s. linky

XPairtise: Shares both code and code/test execution. Shared whiteboard. Needs a server in your intranet. Doesn't highlight users' cursors in different colours. linky

XCDE: Uses a intranet-local server. Shares bookmarks and tasks too in Eclipse. Has integrated voice (but requires JMF). Project might be dormant. linky

Other projects which look very dormant or incomplete: PEP, Sangam. Me, I'm planning to try Saros.

As others have said, you'll need some kind of source control (SVN probably - easier to understand and will let the students concentrate on the tasks rather than the tools). Then you'll need a voice link. Either telephone, Skype or a SIP-compliant VOIP thing. IM would be useful for communication between one pair and other pairs.

Then an IDE with collaborative editing. Netbeans has it built in apparently, but I haven't tried it. Eclipse has a number of plugins to facilitate collaborative coding:

Shareclipse: Does voice and video inside Eclipse, but projects not genuinely shared. Project might be dormant. linky

Saros: Does voice, but not video. Whole project shared. Uses a local IRC server, like XMPP or Jabber. Great demo vid. linky

Xeclip: Dependent on CVS and costs $$s. linky

XPairtise: Shares both code and code/test execution. Shared whiteboard. Needs a server in your intranet. Doesn't highlight users' cursors in different colours. linky

XCDE: Uses a intranet-local server. Shares bookmarks and tasks too in Eclipse. Has integrated voice (but requires JMF). Project might be dormant. linky

Other projects which look very dormant or incomplete: PEP, Sangam. Me, I'm planning to try Saros.

As others have said, you'll need some kind of source control (SVN probably - easier to understand and will let the students concentrate on the tasks rather than the tools). Then you'll need a voice link. Either telephone, Skype or a SIP-compliant VOIP thing. IM would be useful for communication between one pair and other pairs.

Then an IDE with collaborative editing. Netbeans has it built in apparently, but I haven't tried it. Eclipse has a number of plugins to facilitate collaborative coding:

Shareclipse: Does voice and video inside Eclipse, but projects not genuinely shared. Project might be dormant. linky

Saros: Does voice, but not video. Whole project shared. Uses a local IRC server, like XMPP or Jabber. Great demo vid. linky

Xeclip: Dependent on CVS and costs $$s. linky

XPairtise: Shares both code and code/test execution. Shared whiteboard. Needs a server in your intranet. Doesn't highlight users' cursors in different colours. linky

XCDE: Uses a intranet-local server. Shares bookmarks and tasks too in Eclipse. Has integrated voice (but requires JMF). Project might be dormant. linky

Other projects which look very dormant or incomplete: PEP, Sangam. Me, I'm planning to try Saros.

As others have said, you'll need some kind of source control (SVN probably - easier to understand and will let the students concentrate on the tasks rather than the tools). Then you'll need a voice link. Either telephone, Skype or a SIP-compliant VOIP thing. IM would be useful for communication between one pair and other pairs.

Then an IDE with collaborative editing. Netbeans has it built in apparently, but I haven't tried it. Eclipse has a number of plugins to facilitate collaborative coding:

Shareclipse: Does voice and video inside Eclipse, but projects not genuinely shared. Project might be dormant. linky

Saros: Does voice, but not video. Whole project shared. Uses a local IRC server, like XMPP or Jabber. Great demo vid. linky

Xeclip: Dependent on CVS and costs $$s. linky

XPairtise: Shares both code and code/test execution. Shared whiteboard. Needs a server in your intranet. Doesn't highlight users' cursors in different colours. linky

XCDE: Uses a intranet-local server. Shares bookmarks and tasks too in Eclipse. Has integrated voice (but requires JMF). Project might be dormant. linky

Other projects which look very dormant or incomplete: PEP, Sangam. Me, I'm planning to try Saros.

(I'm aware that my suggestion doesn't deal with an already-logged in scenario. If anyone has an answer to that one, please, do reply with it!)

Sounds like you need some kind of RF token and a receiver attached to the netbook; if the token goes out of range, the machine logs you out and/or shuts down. If push came to shove, I imagine you could bodge something together with a Bluetooth receiver and a Bluetooth enabled phone like BluePromixity does.

I haven't used it but Collabed looks interesting. Of course most kids would probably end up doing it with im and the occasional email, but it still looks interesting.

Well, I wrote also a lunar lander. Here is a page with screenshots:

http://seed7.sourceforge.net/scrshots/lander.htm

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.

Well, I wrote also a lunar lander. Here is a page with screenshots:

http://seed7.sourceforge.net/scrshots/lander.htm

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.

Sure. Each client's configuration can contain a pre and post backup command. The pre-backup command could be:
wakeonlan aa:bb:cc:00:11:22 ; sleep 30

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Get an old P3 for free somewhere and load this up on it with a big disk or two for storage, put it on your network, and run it. That's what I do and it works like a charm. I went through all the options over the years, tape, DVDs, manual copying to a server.

Backuppc backs up all my windows and linux PCs. It backs up only what I tell it to, and it does both full and incremental. Sort of a pain in the ass to set up (I use cygwin rsyncd on the windows boxes, and regular rsyncd on the linux boxes), and it works well.

Only drawback is it is still on site.

what about power usage? having a p3 running all the time, can this program wake the pc when the scheduled backup is due?

I second this.. I do this as well.

I have three repositories:
- A 2TB internal raid 10 composed of four 1 Tb drives
- An external USB drive that acts as a repository for BackupPC
- A plain external USB drive at my parent's house

-Almost everything (ie. easly replacable) goes on my 2Tb RAID 10 except for the stuff that is on the solo primary drive, which is backed up with BackupPC on an external USB drive
-The hard to replace stuff goes on the RAID and has incremental backups via BackupPC
-The impossible to replace stuff gets all three. on the RAID, backup with BackupPC, rsync every four hours to the drive at my parent's house.

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Get an old P3 for free somewhere and load this up on it with a big disk or two for storage, put it on your network, and run it. That's what I do and it works like a charm. I went through all the options over the years, tape, DVDs, manual copying to a server.

Backuppc backs up all my windows and linux PCs. It backs up only what I tell it to, and it does both full and incremental. Sort of a pain in the ass to set up (I use cygwin rsyncd on the windows boxes, and regular rsyncd on the linux boxes), and it works well.

Only drawback is it is still on site.

Or would you onion-route the downloads too? Let me know when Tor has become efficient enough to run BitTorrent or eMule Kad Network over it.

Neither.
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/

And for Linux as well:
http://aufs.sourceforge.net/

frets-on-fire has been doing this for a long time. Although, its nice to see the commercial market has caught up with its open source counterpart.

Although you've already found a solution, for anybody else having this problem, there is an arguably easier way to upgrade Firefox on Ubuntu short of using the 'Shiretoko' branded version. Just download the 'Ubuntuzilla.py' script ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/ubuntuzilla/files/ ) and then at the command line run 'ubuntuzilla.py -a install -p firefox' and follow any prompts.

I'm assuming you want to automatically/programmatically discard the one with the least/most artifacts. In this case there are very few programs around, but I'm working on a rules engine for my program that may be able to help you in future. Please evaluate DuMP3 at http://dump3.sourceforge.net/ to see if it may suit your needs.

True enough, that's how I used to archive my music. But since space is no longer an issue for me, I use FLAC. Been doing so for about a year now, and so far it's been very stable. It does take a little longer to sync with the old iPod, since it has to transcode first, but other than that no worries.

Linux does not require a reboot to load a new kernel, just to let you know.

Yes, yes it does. Oh, you don't have to do a machine reset, but you definitely have to re-boot. See, "Booting" is bringing up the computer including its OS, and you have to do that last part again. There are two projects which seek to do this: kexec (I don't link it because it doesn't work on most platforms) and monte (I link it not because it works but because less people have heard of it.)

Either way, you will have to IPL all over again. Monte and kexec just let you do it from Linux, allowing you to use Linux as a boot loader. This is handy for fetching kernels from NFS shares and the like (in theory it makes root on NFS without network boot trivial. Probably all you need is a kernel and a loader and if you make the default cmdline and/or kernel level autoconfiguration work properly, you may not even need boot args.)

When you compile a new kernel and don't reboot, you're running the old kernel, even if you lay the new kernel down over the top of the old one. The original file is still stored on disk until it is unlinked, which is not permitted to happen until you reboot, and the filehandle for the kernel is closed.

There is an alternative to losing all your installed apps. Bit more of a mess about but you can have a clean install and access to all your previously installed apps.

I'm sorry, but where does it say that Apple must support every player on the market with iTunes? It is designed to work with an iPod, an iPod Touch, or an iPhone. If Palm wants to write their own software, they are perfectly capable of doing so. There are also numerous free open source apps that do the same thing on http://sourceforge.net/

Perhaps if Palm hadn't claimed it was an 'iPod' when syncing, they wouldn't have gotten their hand slapped? Why should Apple allow someone else to use the iPod brand (the Palm does show up as an iPod in iTunes) without any control over content or quality with the experience? It's trivial to read and write to the XML files for the iTunes library.

Palm is just being lazy.

About using the Digilent USB for data transfers from Linux, you might want to check out the project I recently started: http://mhz100q.sourceforge.net/. It includes VHDL and firmware for the Cypress USB chip to support transfers using libusb.

Actually, you can program Nexys under Linux - I upload firmware to FX2 chip using fx2_programmer and I program the FPGA and flash using parallel JTAG cable.

You use a product written by people who didn't foresee what you were going to use it for and they end up integrating changes to benefit someone whose use they didn't foresee. By keeping the code free over the long haul you get fascinating cooperation at the code level.

Yeah, I've told this before, but anyway: my company had an itch that needed to be scratched so I wrote a program to address it. My boss let me release it under the GPL since we had zero interest in profiting from the program. It exists solely to perform one specific task for us, and not so that we can sell or charge support for it.

As it turns out, that seems to be a fairly popular itch, and I've gotten requests from people all over the world to add new features or to handle special circumstances that never would have occurred to me. Everybody came out ahead on this! The world got a handy piece of Free software, and we got some new ideas that made it work better in its original role here in our office. To reword your statement:

You write a product used by people who don't use it the way you foresaw and they end up suggesting changes that benefit your own needs in a way they didn't foresee.

For VHDL itself, I learned that with GHDL (VHDL front-end to gcc, though it hasn't been updated in a year now) and GTKWave for viewing the waves. Throw in make for a build system, and it was all I needed to design and implement (VHDL only, that is) a simple microprocessor.

That's a start anyway.

If I use Latexki or DocBook Wiki, then my prof will certainly accept the export I turn in, since it'll be a PDF.

I know this wouldn't be too helpful to openoffice and the FOSS world in general in terms of getting a leg up on native format overlords but it would help me not just deploy it in a large office by saving myself some clicks as I'm running around installing it but it would also enable me to hand out a CD to someone with an openoffice installation on it if I could somehow modify it to set the default save formats to Microsoft's. I also realize there's a risk such users should know, that they may lose certain formatting in doing this (and maybe I'd want to encourage them to crank out PDFs on final drafts), but most people just don't have the technical acumen to change these settings themselves and would have little interest in an editor that would only save a new document in an MS format if they went out of their way to specify it each time. Being able to double click an icon, type something, hit save and email to someone else who will then be able to open it with or without openoffice without having to do any extra steps would be a strong selling point.
 
So is there any way, a simple way without having to sift through all the source code, to modify some kind of openoffice installer to use ms formats by default? Maybe something like this exists already?
 
Ideally MS would be kind enough to support oo formats...
 
While I'm posting here's a link for MS fonts and another for Vista fonts for OO, works on all platforms OO works on according to what I found on google just now. Oh yeah, and back to my question, how about modifying an installer package to toss in fonts like this? Again, dealing with people who can barely click through a simple installation, not people who know where to find the basic settings of this kind of software.