Slashdot Mirror

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Catholic marauders (Jesuits, Knights of Malta, etc...) are responsible for the sinking of the Titanic, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and the Vatican itself was instrumental for intentionally sewing seeds of discontent in the Islam relegion by planting Mohammad as a prominent religious leader of Islam.

We have all been mind fucked and lay as dizzy almost dead on the side of the road as road kill to the information war (which we are loosing) and to the war between the Masons and the Catholics for dominion of the world, and to the war for complete tyranny by the US government and it's puppet master, Israel.

Honoring government only leads to your neighbor's imprisionment for j walking. Please study anarchy and detach yourself from every system of authority you are under and realize that you are sovereign - NOT A CITIZEN. That you are bestowed by the creator of the universe with the inheritance of the land, and inalienable rights. One of those rights is to be free to associate with others without being easedropped on. Use PGP/GnuPG encryption for crying out loud for even emailing your grandmother.

I have a bug report in about Slashdot not allowing PGP style signatures in postings here:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2817084&group_id=4421&atid=104421
It could use some more emphasis to get action on it.

Government is a tired old game of mental manipulation of the masses --- to "Govern" "ment" (Minds). We simply don't need that anymore. As a rule we all get along just fine thank you until somebody gets the idea that "It's my job to...." like a policeman enforcing "rules".

Oh, god, I could go on and on and on and on about all this. Go back and re-watch the matrix and ask yourself how many aspects of life are like the matrix?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAkpYylYACgkQ7J1dPd3sAmALYQCdHprxBHBZjCq/WHrPaSoCIosV
Eu4AoIQmDiw0WBLHwP7rj/XSWY/srbWY
=8pIf
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

From what I understand, dosbox emulates the CPU as well. DOSemu should run it at your CPU's speed, but I haven't used it since Linux kernel 2.0.x days. Lately I have thought about getting some of my old DOS games going, but haven't put much effort into it. Though DOSemu seems broken on 2.6--I get "LOWRAM mmap: Invalid argument / Segmentation fault" It could be a permissions problem though...(haven't tried it as root yet) The page says it was last updated in 2007, so maybe it was updated to 2.6?

This post from the Arch Linux forums may help: kernel 2.6.30 upgrade causes dosemu to segfault. It seems dosemu doesn't work with .30 but .31 version from git does work? Looks like they have a configuration suggestion too...

Then again, you may have problems with speed. Quite a while back, I tried Syndicate Wars, and it ran at about 10x speed. Way too fast. I think DOSbox solved that by emulating the CPU, so everything the game sees works like it did on an old computer. Though since it is emulating, it takes many processing cycles to do on emulated processing cycle, which means your 2.0 GHz computer may only be able to run it at say (just a wild guess), the same speed as a 100 MHz machine. Probably not even that. So I don't see a 1996 game working too well.

I would guess the easiest way would be to use an older computer and install FreeDOS or something on it. You know, that 900 MHz one collecting dust in your closet. Then you don't have to worry about emulating crap. ;-) But then you may still run into the super speed issue. This is partly why old computers had a "turbo" switch--some programs assumed the processor was at a specific speed. Some programs assumed the MIPS / clock speed was constant. 486 was below 1 MIPS/MHz, Pentium was about 2 MIPS/MHz, todays CPUs are probably much higher before you even get to the multiple cores. I think some just detect if it is a 486 or pentium and do their calculations. They don't know anything about newer CPUs, so it doesn't work...

Have you tried Megamek?

I like your logic.

Apple's free iPhoto application doesn't do stuff as well as you'd like, therefore the Mac fails at "getting stuff done."

Yup, that's good thinking, right there. There can't possibly be any other apps for the Mac outside of Apple, can there?

http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/
http://www.pixelmator.com/
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/

Ah, you get the idea.

And no, the iPhoto red-eye removal is not just a black paint tool. I just tried it (never use iPhoto, but was curious about your earlier claim) and it seems to try to find nearby red pixels before stripping the red out and shading them with a dark grey. I don't like red-eye removal tools at the best of times, so I'd not tried this before.

Out of curiosity, do any image editors actually recognise an eye, and refuse to use a red-eye reduction tool outside the eye's pupil? That's pretty sophisticated image recognition.

No. the 286 and 386 are very different CPUs and the linux kernel cannot be compiled for it.

The full kernel, probably not, but there are things like the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS) that support Intel 8086 and 80286 CPUs.

Let me introduce you to something.

There's a nifty little thing called ELKS (Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset) that would run from here. I've run it on an IBM PC Convertible with 512k before, but there's not a whole lot I could do with it. Especially compared to the massive number of DOS programs that would run on it (even Windows 3.0!). It does claim to support networking and TCP/IP though, which might let it do more on a system that actually had such things (The PC Convertible's only networking options were serial and parallel ports, neither of which I felt like messing with).

You'd need ELKS on a pre-386 machine.

http://elks.sourceforge.net/

Okay, this may not help but then again it might...

I dug up an old Laser 128 (Apple II compatible) with no working software and was able to get it working using the following method. I don't know if your machine has a compatible feature, though.

http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/bootstrap.html#Starting_from_bare_metal

In short: using a second machine (In my case, running Win98) and a homebrew serial cable, configure the machine to be revived to treat serial port input as keyboard input, then keyboard input direct into memory (like a DEBUG prompt) - If you can do that then the rest of the procedure might actually work with compatible software.

The support machine "types" the software directly into the host machine's memory and executes it. In the link above, you start with a ProDOS image which then gets written to disk so you can boot the machine normally.
=Smidge=

No, can't do that.

But... It could run the elks kernel with the regular gnu tools on top of it.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/elks/

Hi Try out ELKS http://elks.sourceforge.net/ and Movitz LISP kernel http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ on your machine. Both are excellent.

Swing is horrible and instantly recognizable as "Java" when you run one of the apps.

It doesn't have to be. This look and feel (requires java installed) can be used for prototyping (so the boss doesn't think it's done) but mostly shows the power of swing + PLAF (pluggable look and feel). Here's a screenshot and this is the site, those widgets actually work.

Swing is horrible and instantly recognizable as "Java" when you run one of the apps.

It doesn't have to be. This look and feel (requires java installed) can be used for prototyping (so the boss doesn't think it's done) but mostly shows the power of swing + PLAF (pluggable look and feel). Here's a screenshot and this is the site, those widgets actually work.

Swing is horrible and instantly recognizable as "Java" when you run one of the apps.

It doesn't have to be. This look and feel (requires java installed) can be used for prototyping (so the boss doesn't think it's done) but mostly shows the power of swing + PLAF (pluggable look and feel). Here's a screenshot and this is the site, those widgets actually work.

A major fault that I've seen in numerous sub-threads is the idea that a Java user interface equals Swing. It most certainly does not. Swing is merely Java's complete pure-Java (i.e. cross-platform) user interface geared towards providing a unified look-and-feel. In this respect, it does a good job. While there's nothing inherently wrong with it from a toolkit perspective, it is absolutely not appropriate for usage on the Linux desktop.

Programming for the Linux desktop means more than producing a windowed application; one must integrate their application, both in terms of user interface consistency and application interoperabililty, with a major desktop distribution. Specifically, I'm talking about Linux's "big two" desktop environments, KDE + Qt and GNOME + GTK+. While each of these environments have their preferred languages (C++ and C respectively), many other languages have no issues whatsoever being tightly integrated into them via bindings.

Java is no exception! In Java, I can program a wonderful GNOME/GTK+ application just fine with java-gnome. Similarly, I can program a Qt4 application with Qt Jambi (although I can't seem to find an equivalent KDE4 bindings library) in Java. An application written in either will appear and operate on par with any application written in other languages, either natively (via C or C++) or via another bindings library (Python has a ton of bindings).

Furthermore, just like GTK+ and Qt have cross-platform capability, so do the bindings, and if the appropriate binding library for a given platform is installed on that platform, the Java application, too, will be able to be cross-platform without modification. This is, of course, the job of the distribution and/or installer software, but operates similar to the Deluge (Python) installer for Windows, installing the client port of the toolkit (GTK+, in this case) and the language bindings (PyGTK) alongside the application.

That's exactly how the Mono desktop applications work: they write their logic in native C# and use GTK+ bindings (GTK#, in most cases) to integrate with the Linux desktop environment.

Any Java application written for the Linux desktop that uses Swing over native desktop bindings is foolish. Each has their place, for sure, but on the desktop integration is everything.

A major fault that I've seen in numerous sub-threads is the idea that a Java user interface equals Swing. It most certainly does not. Swing is merely Java's complete pure-Java (i.e. cross-platform) user interface geared towards providing a unified look-and-feel. In this respect, it does a good job. While there's nothing inherently wrong with it from a toolkit perspective, it is absolutely not appropriate for usage on the Linux desktop.

Programming for the Linux desktop means more than producing a windowed application; one must integrate their application, both in terms of user interface consistency and application interoperabililty, with a major desktop distribution. Specifically, I'm talking about Linux's "big two" desktop environments, KDE + Qt and GNOME + GTK+. While each of these environments have their preferred languages (C++ and C respectively), many other languages have no issues whatsoever being tightly integrated into them via bindings.

Java is no exception! In Java, I can program a wonderful GNOME/GTK+ application just fine with java-gnome. Similarly, I can program a Qt4 application with Qt Jambi (although I can't seem to find an equivalent KDE4 bindings library) in Java. An application written in either will appear and operate on par with any application written in other languages, either natively (via C or C++) or via another bindings library (Python has a ton of bindings).

Furthermore, just like GTK+ and Qt have cross-platform capability, so do the bindings, and if the appropriate binding library for a given platform is installed on that platform, the Java application, too, will be able to be cross-platform without modification. This is, of course, the job of the distribution and/or installer software, but operates similar to the Deluge (Python) installer for Windows, installing the client port of the toolkit (GTK+, in this case) and the language bindings (PyGTK) alongside the application.

That's exactly how the Mono desktop applications work: they write their logic in native C# and use GTK+ bindings (GTK#, in most cases) to integrate with the Linux desktop environment.

Any Java application written for the Linux desktop that uses Swing over native desktop bindings is foolish. Each has their place, for sure, but on the desktop integration is everything.

There is a team working on Amizilla which is the AmigaOS version of Mozilla web browser. But it was last updated in 2006.

The other project is AMozillaX which was announced but no code or web browser was released and it seems to have vanished off the Internet.

They must have added mouse support when they added the paperclip.

Hey! Stop supporting their sick point of view, by also acting as if the command line was something bad like a cancer, and acting defensive!

The command line of Linux (bash plus all the apps and the "everything is a file" philosophy), is one of the greatest things in computing, ever made!

Why that bold statement?

Because it is the missing link between the basic Joe Sixpack user, and the programmer. It is the ability, to start out with one app command, make a small loop out of it, then later maybe put it into a shell script file. Oh, and I could add this little check in front of it, to make it more comfortable. And a month later, I notice i could do it better in this way. I add a GUI button to it. maybe one, two shortcuts, and some informative output.
And before I know it, I have grown a neat little (prototype) of a tool, that makes my everyday life easier.
I did not even have to learn programming. I just looked up what I needed in the bash man page and tldp.org bash scripting guide in the process.
And sure it is no great programming. But:

It makes my life easier and way more efficient!
It makes computers work for me again! Instead of what some development team thought I would need.

And maybe in a year, I will post it on the net, for others to use, and someone will re-write it in C++, with a bash interface and maybe a GUI.

My first result of this process, was this very very useful little app: https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=2942061&forum_id=19083

Therfore I proudly recommend the bash shell as the best thing since sliced bread to my friends, my brothers, moms, old car mechanics, etc, whenever I can.
They feel like gurus when they get their first little working "magic thingie" that they could make in an hour and saved them sooo much time! :)

You could try RTG. It's a non-averaging alternative to MRTG. I used it a large telcom provider I used to work for to monitor several thousand circuits. I kept a years worth of data on-hand (MySQL database instead of RRD). It works VERY well. It takes a bit more configuration than MRTG but if you want to keep NON-averaged data, it's a good choice.

Quick disclaimer I am a long time user and contributor to OpenNMS. I would post your questions to the OpenNMS discuss list there are many ways to tackle your requirements. Some using SNMP, some with other solutions. You'll find that the OpenNMS community is very very resourceful. See our video for the Sourceforge Community Choice Award http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09

In DOSBox you can bump up the resolution to 640*480 and it still looks awesome. :) They're doing great things to classic with scalers these days. Ur-Quan Masters has a nice array of scaling options too, for you Star Control II fans.

Depends on the format, too, though.

I did some totally subjective comparisons a while back, and found that:

On my computer, with my horrible onboard sound... these formats and bitrates sound the same:

3GPP AAC+ encoded @ 28kbit
ogg vorbis encoded @ 32kbit
lame mp3 encoded @ 72kbit abr

MP3 has great fidelity at high bitrates, but it just wasn't made to scale well to lower bitrates, often employed in streaming.

44kbit AAC(3GPP AAC+ doesn't seem to go beyond that?) sounds very good to my ear. My results are completely subjective, but I'd say it's close to 96kbit lame mp3. Maybe a tad better.

CT AAC+ requires a higher bitrate. To match 3GPP's 44kbit, it seems to need about 64kbit.

FAAC needs about 80kbit. Still better than mp3, but not nearly as impressive as the 3GPP encoder.

I discovered these differences while playing around in MediaCoder. If interested, check it out for yourself, and compare with your own sound card. :)

Sure it can, with an emulator.

There are several desktop applets that shows what happens in more "serious" (or at least massive) monitoring solutions. Nagstamon shows nagios alarms (and let you ssh/vnc or even see nagios reports onproblematic hosts right there), ZApplet shows Zenoss alarms/warnings too.

There are several desktop applets that shows what happens in more "serious" (or at least massive) monitoring solutions. Nagstamon shows nagios alarms (and let you ssh/vnc or even see nagios reports onproblematic hosts right there), ZApplet shows Zenoss alarms/warnings too.

The closest thing it might run with sufficient hacker dedication would seem to be LUnix.

They're not in the business of raising your opinion, BitZtream, rather to take advantage of a possibly symbiotic arrangement with a company that may help them market their product. That said, on behalf of these guys I apologize for letting you down and suggest you try DopeWars which it addition to the platforms this game runs on also runs on the TI-82.

Players could upload screenshots or exportable files of game-generated planets, ruins, structures, races, etc.

If developed right and with the right pay structure such a game could probably bring in revenue for quite awhile since the content would/could be limitless and always fresh.

Very exciting IMHO

I'm thinking this is all coming down to speed. With the prevelance of Flash, a smattering of Java, and the sheer volume of crap on most sites these days, the speed increases in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are actually noticable on a real world basis to the average Joe/Jane.

On top of that, the plugins on Firefox are like crack. Nuff said there.

Even Safari has AdBlock now which was a show stopper for me. I've used it for my primary over the last month and I can't complain other than the refresh button location sucks.

You seem more skilled than I!

Just browse Source Forge for a bit to find a project you would like to (or have the skills to) contribute to. If you already know a project which meets these criteria then that's great. Go hang in the IRC channel and maybe just start with some bug fixes or a simple plugin.

You can also be of great help to some projects and not "just another contributor" by checking out which projects are looking for help. Go to the SourceForge Help Wanted section and pick your weapon/project.

As long as you know how to write documentation, administer a mailing list/forum or do HTML/CSS then you can get into FOSS.

I am not afraid to stand up for VLC for I've never found something that has worked so flawlessly crossplatform

How about MPlayer and its various Grafical User Interfaces?

Why is playback of multi part rar/archives such an requirement in a media player?

The vast majority of media is already compressed. That's why, for example, a standard xvid, dvd/mpeg2, divx, [insert favourite codec here] is a fraction of the size of the source/uncompressed/raw media. Use of multi-part archives is mainly to simplify transport/distribution/rebuilding of the compressed file. If the archive is considerably smaller than the compressed media then the codec isn't doing its job properly.

I may have missed something, but unless you keep a whole load of uncompressed media in multipart archives that you frequently access, not being arsed to unpack the rars just seems lazy for the sake of a couple of clicks.

I'm a media player home cinema guy http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ myself so don't even know if it is supported or not in the latest VLC, but I can just imagine the dev 'princesses' having a good laugh:

dev1: "Here... check this email... this lazy fk can't even be bothered to extract the movie from multipart rars... he wants it added as a feature..."

dev2: "AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

dev3: "Should I start on the code? What's the best approach? Spend time unpacking it completely before playback, play it, then cleanup? Or some clever code to continuously unpack enough to keep the buffers full? What about skipping forward and backward?... What about rar not being open source? I know we can unpack for free but..."

dev1: "How about 'right click, extract to...' for the lazy fk?"

world: "AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA" x 100
 
;)

mplayer has complete support for VDPAU as well as support for things like SSA/ASS subtitles. While the current repository versions tend to run a bit behind the development versions (bzip2 archive) at mplayerhq.hu, rvm's builds as part of his smplayer project are quite up-to-date. smplayer is a fine GUI front-end to mplayer as well, and it runs on both Linux and Windows.

I complete agree. The best way to learn is to find a good problem you enjoy and solve it.

I have been trying to learn practical Java even though I have a good C background. I found out the source code for The Ur-Quan Masters was released for GPL and I thought, "Hey! I love that game, it has a special place in my heart. I also know it backward and forward, lets try to convert this C application to Java!"

Trust me, its a miserable experience though. The code is organized haphazardly, even after its been ported to the PC. I never dealt with SDL so I have to go back on a lot of API's to figure out how they are doing the graphics. Heck, all I got now is just a handful of objects that just handle some simple database operations. Did I mention I am also "learning" Java? I barely know how JFrame works let alone the Graphics object. (Or Graphics2D)

However, but struggling with this I am learning, by leaps and bonds, more about Java than I would of ever done in a book. I have to make practical decisions on the conversion that may effect the rest of my coding (ie, should I keep the original uqm file and resource file, or construct one easier for Java to manipulate)

If I was you, I would search the net for a project I was interested in, see if there is free code available, then attempt to finish it. At the very least your learning some basic programing skills. If you finish, you would also contribute to the coding community :)

PS - Also, it teaches you to document your code. I can't wine about the quality of the C comments in this thing because I don't comment very well myself:P

Sourceforge
Gna!

Okay so the fastest engine is using Lucerne, a Java search engine, and this is neither tuned nor horizontally scaled (which it can do very well).

C++ and C both fail to deliver the same level of performance as the Java virtual machine.

Oh wait hang on... does this mean that for complex applications the most important performance piece is normally actually the efficiency of the code rather than the efficiency of the base platform and therefore having a language in which it is easier to write efficient code is better than just having the one that is fastest to execute a for loop?

But hell this is Slashdot and Java is Slooooooow...

Actually if you check here, you will find that an implementation of the exact same Lucene done in C++ is about three times faster than Java.

Sorry for spoiling your moment there...

Ah, thank you. So indeed, an implementation of the same algorithm turns out to be _three times_ as fast in C++ than it is in Java (see here).

I wonder if eldavojohn wishes to comment on that?

Kind of like... CLucene?

Last time I had to implement an indexing and searching solution, swish++ was by far the performance winner.

Far more likely to be because of the choice of algorithms and the resources behind the project. Would be interesting to see how CLucene performs.

C++ and C both fail to deliver the same level of performance as the Java virtual machine.

The first requirement to successfully mock the uninformed wisdom of crowds, is to be informed yourself.

HTH

Sorry but my laptop can do it faster when using something like CRM114 or DSPAM.

When ever I see those wild claims how good and accurate a commercial service or filter is, then I get reminded on the excellent text written in 2005 by Jonathan A. Zdziarski called Justifying Statistical Filtering.
 
Postini might be good but I am not letting them decide what spam is and what not. Users have their own opinion and something so static as Postini can not adapt fast/good enough to my needs. And the same goes for the other services like MXLogic, SpamSpy, MessageLabs, Barracuda, IronPort and all the others out there.
 
And why paying money when I can have better for free?

Sorry but my laptop can do it faster when using something like CRM114 or DSPAM.

When ever I see those wild claims how good and accurate a commercial service or filter is, then I get reminded on the excellent text written in 2005 by Jonathan A. Zdziarski called Justifying Statistical Filtering.
 
Postini might be good but I am not letting them decide what spam is and what not. Users have their own opinion and something so static as Postini can not adapt fast/good enough to my needs. And the same goes for the other services like MXLogic, SpamSpy, MessageLabs, Barracuda, IronPort and all the others out there.
 
And why paying money when I can have better for free?

Wow, what Bayesian filter are you using that is only giving you a 20% catch rate?

I'm using spambayes (a pop3 proxy) and I would estimate it catches well above 95% of my spam. My inbox would be utterly unusable without it.

It requires some training - the more training you give it and the more religious you are, the better it works. I've trained it on around 3000 ham and 3000 spam messages and it is incredibly accurate (almost scarily, sometimes) at catching spam. False positives are extremely low - here's the stats it reports:

SpamBayes has processed 114790 messages - 56469 (49%) good, 54032 (47%) spam and 4289 (3%) unsure.
2328 messages were manually classified as good (2 were false positives).
2483 messages were manually classified as spam (829 were false negatives).
34 unsure messages were manually identified as good, and 1583 as spam.

SPIM? Ack! I took (and later was a teaching assistant for) a class which used SPIM for teaching MIPS assembly. It is a god-awful program. It is horribly outdated and hasn't been updated in years and has the most confusing UI I've ever seen in any program ever.

Some students wrote a replacement with a reversible debugger (can go forwards and backwards through the code) here:

http://mipscope.sourceforge.net/

Seriously dude: try out one of many dedicated SDKs for game-creation. And then MAKE a game for yourself. You don't need to switch jobs just to give it a shot!

The PopCap framework could be a good place to start (the company PopCap no longer accepts 3rd party submissions and has closed down its own developer-forum but the PopCap framework itself is released as Open Source on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/popcapframework/).

Another option is PTK which you can find on http://www.phelios.com/ptk

Both use C++ so you would probably want to get a few books on C++ programming as well.

- Jesper

I'm not sure if this is precisely what you are looking for, but you might want to check out the various "structured text" systems. For example, "reStructuredText":

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

Obviously the only sensible robust solutions to this problem are either LaTeX or Docbook. The main problem with both of those is they're kind of painful to author. What I've switched to for any quick documents I write is reST. It's easy to learn for quick documents, you can edit with just about anything (its rudimentary tables support is best handled with emacs), includes features like footnotes, and is easy to render into HTML and PDF. After a few months of writing docs for some projects I work on in reST, I've found myself even writing all my random notes in that form, so that I can generated nicely printed versions of them at any time.