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It has exactly what you need, an html-like format, but tagged by meaning, not presentation. The project has tools to convert it to printable formats.

The spec: http://www.docbook.org/

The tools: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/

Dungeon Crawl is a rougelike game similar to Nethack, and includes a version with pretty graphics and easy-to-use features (the "tiled" version). Be warned, however, you WILL die within 5 minutes of starting your first game. http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net/

One of the most useful pixel art tools I've found so far is mtPaint - I did a lot of little isometric drawings for a game project I'm working on (e.g. this one of a park) entirely in this program. Far easier than using paint or a full-fledged image tool (although I did use GIMP for compositing layered tiles into final images at times).

there is no usable ext2 implementation for Mac OS

Not true at all; I've been using ext2/ext3 partitions with OS X for quite some time now via macfuse and fuse-ext2. I still don't really use it for my usb sticks though. Much as I dislike FAT it is the one fs I can use with any computer I end up at without having to download anything.

I use PostgreSQL daily and I love it. The window functions are an enormous boon! It's still the best.

We need some distribution happening a la Netezza, Greenplum, etc:

• pgpool-II: old Oracle-style partitioning on a single column with fixed partition values
• GridSQL: stuck in 1.1beta for a long time but promises Teradata-style shared-nothing parallelism

Anyone know better?

Um.... checkout http://usnatch.sourceforge.net/ there are also numerous FF plugins to do that.

Try opening a newlined file with notepad, for example.

Gedit on my Ubuntu laptop saves with LF newlines, and Windows Notepad can't read them because it expects CRLF newlines. But I add one to Notepad and all is well. In fact, pretty much every text editor but Windows Notepad can handle the differences between UNIX and Windows.

As for VMS, how much VMS is used in world-facing applications as of June 2009? Even HP, the owner of copyright in VMS after having bought Digital's parent company, uses HP-UX, Linux, or Windows Server on its popular public websites. Even HP's site about VMS was found to use HP-UX. Netcraft confirms it: VMS is dead.

And if FTP translates oddball operating systems' conventions for text/plain files, why doesn't it do so for image files (.ppm vs. .bmp), audio files (.au vs. .wav), or other MIME types?

I wonder if something like this http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=monitoringplugin can be coded in Firefox, as extension to firefox like firefox:memstats

What it does is giving stats about memory usage, one click "garbage collection". Of course, it is Java.

It should be easier to do in C right? So people could see where did memory go, if it is used in caches etc. I don't think XUL is allowed to do such things for security so it should enter to main code.

May I really ask who or what Firefox developers fight(!) with? Like or not, MSI is the way to get into Enterprise, a signed MSI is even better. In fact, most of .exe installers you see these days are actually MSI packaged in .exe.

It is really interesting that they insist on not shipping MSI versions of their software, at least in a FTP folder like "alternate_installers" which admins will pull msi from. It became even more interesting since I found this: http://wix.sourceforge.net/ , yes open source from MS, hosted by Sourceforge and it actually works. What does MSI do? Hurt feelings of the developers there? I really can't understand. It is basically RPM for Windows which gives some bonus features like repair etc. to ordinary users but it is huge deal on enterprise.

ps: Same thing on OS X but we are kinda fine with Drag&Drop installs while it even matters at home sized networks. A .pkg would be way better. Anyway, no gigantic enterprise sized OS X networks around like the Windows ones.

According to the NRC's Singer, the chief constraint that Jazz faces is that it works only on the Eclipse platform. Says Singer, "The only people who can adopt it are those who are using Eclipse."
Singer also feels that some processes might not accommodate Jazz's idea of collaboration. "People use all sorts of tools and ways of communication to coordinate their work, to be able to collaborate, to be able to put together big pieces of software," she says. "Some of this has to do with following a particular process. Where Jazz might be constraining is when the model behind it does not jive with these preexisting processes."
Meanwhile, Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, told eweek.com last March that IBM developers account for as much as 80 percent of Eclipse's development team. He questioned whether that kind of environment is good for Eclipse or Jazz. He also noted that some have charged IBM with killing off the Jazz developer tool competition with Eclipse. Finally, he wondered whether having two open source communities--one for Jazz and one for Eclipse--will ultimately weaken Eclipse.

I'm not sure but I would wager that's as true today as it was in 2007. How do you address those concerns?

I've also noticed--through use of the Rational Suite--that you can't just use one tool in the suite. You need them all. And, you know I understand it's IBM's business model, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way that I was using all these great Maven2 tools to do releases and automagically test and build inside subversion. But when we went to ClearCase, we had to do releases through ClearCase and our test and builds through CruiseControl and I never found any plugins for Maven2 to ClearCase. ClearCase was really too much for such a small team. We had to bring in an administrator part time who had 20 years of ClearCase experience and the team just complained non-stop about moving off subversion. Why is everyone trying to "own" the whole stack? Why can't I recognize one Rational product is great and just use that and integrate it in with the rest of my tools? It seems like if you buy one you soon find yourself buying them all. Great for IBM but not always what we need. Is Jazz the same way?

I mean, it's fine if the answer is that if I want to use Jazz I have to use Eclipse ... or if I want to use Composer I have to use Concert and Manager. But it would then seem that collaboration is only being aimed at a very certain type of developer. This may be a "loaded question" but is IBM hoping Eclipse will become the be-all-end-all integrated development environment? I know Flex Builder and Workshop are already built on top of it, is world domination in sight?

Use any common P2P file-sharing system, preferably one that doesn't require a central server. Gnutella would work fine, I know people do this using Shareaza and Limewire, and probably any other of the clients will work. DC would work. I used WASTE for a while to do this. Probably some other P2P software would work, too. They almost all use hash checks to ensure accurate transmission. Set up a private file sharing network, using one folder on each end, and your files should get transferred 100% error-free between your computers. Should be fairly simple, just don't share C: :) The only downside I can see (outside of the IT people freaking out because you've got a file-sharing program on your computer) is that they're "pull" oriented, rather than "push", so the recipient has to retrieve the files. See also Friend-to-friend and Private P2P

Like others have said, find out why your network is breaking data in transmission and fixing that would be the more direct fix, but I'm guessing OP doesn't have control over that part.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openas2

FYI BackupPC is pretty nice, itself.

TCP is so horrible. I wish HTTP used UDP by default so I wouldn't have the pro

Aspera is little better than Tsunami.

As an exercise for the reader, guess which one is cheaper.

In Windows try Kmeleon or Kmeleon CCF ME. Both are based on Win32 instead of XUL and use much less RAM. That said multi-process is NOT the way to go. There are still quite a few Windows and Linux boxes out there maxed out at 512Mb of RAM. For them Firefox works, whereas Chrome grinds to a halt.

I've also found if you are picky with your extensions memory usage in FF3 isn't bad. I am typing this on a 1.1GHz maxed out with 512Mb running Win2K Pro and it makes a great netbox, even with 8 extensions and multiple tabs. But adding multi-process is like sticking bandaids on a bullet wound. There needs to be more control on extension management, or at least a rating system with memory and CPU usage figured into the ratings. But please don't screw FF with multi-process BS. Not everybody is using a dual core with 4Gb of RAM you know.

Try Magnatune. They:

• treat their artists far better than any of the major labels
• let artists license, not sign over, music for distribution so artists keep their copyrights
• let you listen to their entire catalog without charge
• work with music player programs (Rhythmbox, Amarok, Songbird, and proprietary software including iTunes)
• offer purchasing by the track, subscription (for streaming or download), and all-you-can-hear prices
• offer downloading in multiple formats including FLAC
• offer redownloading without hassle (compare this to what Apple told Wil Wheaton after Apple's software erased purchased tracks from his iPod)
• offer all tracks without DRM

Photoshop has become so essential that it should be in every kids grasp.

Those kids should instead use the (legally) free GIMP for Windows.

Aspire one netbook running ubuntu jaunty belkin micro usb bluetooth adapter and an old motorolla v3

sudo apt-get install subversion g++ autoconf libtool libspeexdsp-dev libasound2-dev libbluetooth-dev libaudiofile-dev libdbus-1-dev

svn co https://nohands.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nohands/trunk
cd trunk/ ./autogen.sh ./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo hciconfig hci0 scomtu 64:8
hfconsole

pair the phone and the laptop

dial out using the netbook

It works not sure of the audio device settings yet thou just took a few minutes to download build and install

you can use checkinstall to build a deb package
sudo apt-get install checkinstall
and instead of make install use
sudo checkinstall

easy :)

If you're looking for snapshotted backups, Im partial to BackupPC (for home-style use). It does the rsync (or tar over ssh, or smbtar, or an arbitrary program), exposed over a web interface. And it's in the Ubuntu repositories, among others.

The big win, IMHO, is the way it stores files. It essentially keeps the files - compressed - as checksums in a pool, with hardlinks from the daily backup into that pool. Therefore, duplicated files on a single system or across multiple systems are only stored once. It's reasonably fast, too, though that largely depends on your filesystem (ReiserFS or XFS for the win). I've currently got just under 600GB of full backups and daily snapshots - about a month worth - stored in 85GB on one machine. My videos and music (and some other similar very large, static things) are backed up elsewhere, but it works awesome across the 8 Linux machines and 2 Windows boxes on my home network - and one Linux-based VPS over the Interwebs. Due to the duplicate file detection, I don't even bother excluding /home (which is NFS / Samba shared).

It doesn't solve the OP's problem, but it's cool for home or small office backups. :) Add network block devices or iSCSI or similar, and you've pretty quicly got an off-site backup duplication solution as well (coming soon to my house).

You probably want to look into the No Hands project. It'll allow you to control your phone remotely over bluetooth from your PC. Aimed primarily at in-car situations, I guess it'll work just as well on the desktop.

The whole premise that better usability will come out of getting usability designers involved in the free software development process is fundamentally misguided. It's really easy to get such feedback for most open source software. Just look at the forums and mailing list of people using the software, and it's trivial to find out exactly what are the confusing parts and what really needs to be improved. As for motivating improvements, most developers working on open-source software want their software to be better. But what does "better" mean?

The problem is that the developers working on the software don't use it the way everybody else does, which means there will always be a clash between their priorities and tastes and what regular users want. This means the people capable of fixing the usability problem believe many requests are misguided, and therefore don't do anything about them. I see this all the time, in projects big and small. On the open source project I contribute the most to, PostgreSQL, some of this disconnect is warranted. For example, users want the software to be super easy to use out of the box, while developers want it to be secure out of the box; that's a very hard split to reconcile. Sometimes instead you'll see features requested by DBAs that make perfect sense to other DBAs, but are shouted down as a bad idea too. This is because many of the most influential developers are not DBAs of large databases, which you'd expect almost by definition. They don't have the right context to fully appreciate some usability decisions. If the development community is healthy, when enough such requests come in eventually some concessions will get made, even if some of the developers don't quite get the motivating reason fully. Enough people complain about something, you just accept that's what everybody wants and bow to community pressure.

But there are plenty of communities where this doesn't seem to happen, and usually it's due to arrogance on the part of the developer rather than them not having design feedback. A classic example was last year's Pidgin UI disaster. Look at that ticket--the entirety of the user community was lined up against the developers, and the lack of response to that feedback even forced a fork whose tagline was "we work for you" as a noteworthy difference from the original project. Completely ridiculous.

I'm suffering from a similar bit of developer arrogance right now, with the standard GNOME terminal app. A change was made recently, first showing up on a lot of people's desktops via Ubuntu Jaunty, which reduces the ability to overload common function keys (like control-C) to either execute terminal functions (like "copy") and still work as terminal input if no text to copy has been selected. There's been a stack of bug reporters, and it turns out the only reason for the change was the developer thought it was a bug--there were no user complaints driving the change. The only right response in this situation, which is strictly a UI decision, is to man up, admit the change was wrong and you were wrong for thinking it, and thank your community for pointing it out. As you can see, that's certainly not happening here. (Yes, I can fix it myself. Not, that doesn't matter, because the thing I'm annoyed about is that it's a step backwards on the most popular default terminal people new to Linux use, which hurts the OS as a whole.)

You can collect usability data all day, that's easy. Doesn't take a designer, it just takes listening to your users. From where I'm sitting it looks like the hard problem is getting open-source developers to pay attention to what they're saying.

You're just a bit ahead of the curve here... There is a 32-bit version in development though: http://freedos-32.sourceforge.net/

I think you're looking for UNetbootin.

I would not be overly worried about id going closed source. While ZeniMax/Bethesda is not really known for opening up their source code, they do expose nearly all of the material through their editors. I would guess that they are not all that strongly averse to the idea of openness, it is likely more to do with demand not being high enough. That they haven't come down on projects like OpenMW may be telling too.

"Lunix is the crappiest OS since the days of Dos 6.2"

Honestly, what did you expect from a small Unix for the Commodore 64 microcomputer? Frankly, I think its features list is pretty damned impressive considering the hardware they're targeting.

You know, I don't really understand why the Linux guys point to OO.o as a substitute to MS Office when there is Oxygen Office Pro out there also free, which IMHO is a MUCH better substitute for MS Office since it already has the templates and clip art and all the bells and whistles that folks are used to with MS Office.

That said until I can get assurances from the Linux community that a good 90%+ of the items sold in Staples, Best Buy, and Walmart work in Linux I won't be carrying it in my shop. The support costs for home users and Linux is a nightmare and I was looking at 600% return rates compared to Windows. Before you say "Ur doin it wrong" or some other snarky BS I'll point out that MSI was looking at similar numbers, and I bet if you asked them they would tell you consumers buying stuff in the big three retailers and then finding out it will never work was the cause of a great number of returns.

So while Linux is great if you are running a server (its intended task) and wonderful if you are willing to research every single purchase for the life of the machine, that just cut out 95%+ of the market, including all my customers. Sorry, no sale.

DBAN http://dban.sourceforge.net/

It's GPL 2 or later as per the
source
code
files.
It is also distributed with the
GPL2.1
and
LGPL2.1
license files, though I could not find any actual files in the source that use the LGPL.

The authoritative source for the version is the headers in the source code files.

Note that the
FAQ on their website
links to the
GPL 3
but this is not authoritative, what is in the source code header files is what counts.

It's GPL 2 or later as per the
source
code
files.
It is also distributed with the
GPL2.1
and
LGPL2.1
license files, though I could not find any actual files in the source that use the LGPL.

The authoritative source for the version is the headers in the source code files.

Note that the
FAQ on their website
links to the
GPL 3
but this is not authoritative, what is in the source code header files is what counts.

It's GPL 2 or later as per the
source
code
files.
It is also distributed with the
GPL2.1
and
LGPL2.1
license files, though I could not find any actual files in the source that use the LGPL.

The authoritative source for the version is the headers in the source code files.

Note that the
FAQ on their website
links to the
GPL 3
but this is not authoritative, what is in the source code header files is what counts.

It's GPL 2 or later as per the
source
code
files.
It is also distributed with the
GPL2.1
and
LGPL2.1
license files, though I could not find any actual files in the source that use the LGPL.

The authoritative source for the version is the headers in the source code files.

Note that the
FAQ on their website
links to the
GPL 3
but this is not authoritative, what is in the source code header files is what counts.

It's GPL 2 or later as per the
source
code
files.
It is also distributed with the
GPL2.1
and
LGPL2.1
license files, though I could not find any actual files in the source that use the LGPL.

The authoritative source for the version is the headers in the source code files.

Note that the
FAQ on their website
links to the
GPL 3
but this is not authoritative, what is in the source code header files is what counts.

There http://pyloris.sourceforge.net/

Rolled and GPL'ed my own:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nekjs/
It does exactly what I need it to do ;)

Might I suggest

http://assp.sourceforge.net/

Developers can be a little hostile but it's so good you can use the defaults, train it a bit and leave it be.

Don't worry, they've only known about it for six months. By the time they actually get around to fixing it Idle won't exist anymore.

you can just look at the screenshot

http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=161656

Well, maybe...;-)

http://lng.sourceforge.net/

You may have broken the law.

http://lame.sourceforge.net/tech-FAQ.txt

6. Does LAME use any MP3 patented technology?

LAME, as the name says, is *not* an encoder. LAME is a development
project which uses the open source model to improve MP3 technology.
Many people believe that compiling this code and distributing an
encoder which uses this code would violate some patents (in the US,
Europe and Japan). However, *only* a patent lawyer is qualified to
make this determination. The LAME project tries to avoid all these
legal issues by only releasing source code, much like the ISO
distributes MP3 "demonstration" source code. Source code is
considered as speech, which may contain descriptions of patented
technology. Descriptions of patents are in the public
domain.

Several companies plan on releasing encoders based on LAME, and
they intend to obtain all the appropriate patent licenses. At least
one company is now shipping a fully licensed version of LAME with
their portable MP3 player.

Note that under German Patent Law, Â11(1) a patent doesn't cover
private acts with non-industrial purposes. Probably interesting for
developers is that a patent doesn't cover acts with experimental
purposes, that aim at the object of the patented invention (Â11(2)).

Better be careful - you wouldn't want to goad Microsoft into turning "Clippy Bob" into a Linux app.

Heh, I thought you said;

Closed source companies have to add useless and failed features to public domain projects, to confuse and muddy the waters, otherwise the investors may sue the company.

No no no, we don't need Microsoft or closed source companies to do that - open source is one step ahead, as always: Vigor "has all the features of traditional Unix vi, plus the friendly and helpful Vigor paperclip assistant"...

There are instructions for getting it running in Wine, that said since the whole point of Kmeleon was to convert XUL to Win32 I doubt it would be easy to convert to Linux native. Of course one of the nice things about OSS is you are free to do it yourself or talk someone who is a Linux coder into helping as the source code is freely available.

After all that is how we got Kmeleon CCF Me(which I have been using and is quite nice) which was just a Kmeleon user deciding that they would like built in ABP and a nice modern looking interface. While I haven't heard of this fltk I'm sure there are many Linux coders that are familiar with the language and syntax. If one was to convert I would look at Kmeleon CCF ME for the built in ABP and nicer interface. It would probably look good on any KDE or Gnome DE.

Have you tried Kmeleon or Kmeleon CCF ME? Both of those are OSS and from my own experience with older machines both use far less memory than FF3, due to the fact they are coded to run Win32 as opposed to XUL. The Kmeleon CCF ME build uses a little more memory, but that is due to the built in ABP support.

So if you want to get away from IE but need a browser that is light on RAM I would recommend either of the above. The CCF ME build comes in a zip so it is also quite useful as a flash based browser, if you require one. But either works really well if you are low of RAM, and they even have instructions on how to use Kmeleon on OSes as old as Win95. So give them a try, what have you got to lose?

And a lot of people use a PC where they don't have administrative rights to install an HTML 5 viewer.

Download and unpack this:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/smplayer/smplayer-portable-0.6.7.7z
(Via)

Problem solved. :)

And a lot of people use a PC where they don't have administrative rights to install an HTML 5 viewer.

Download and unpack this:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/smplayer/smplayer-portable-0.6.7.7z
(Via)

Problem solved. :)

In other words, your conjecture is wrong.

That wasn't conjecture. This is my experience of making hard drive sleeping when I work under Linux.

Also, it doesn't matter what mode is used to open a swap file - its syncing is regulated by :help 'swapsync' option. It is set to 'fsync' by default on *nix systems, meaning that fsync() would be called when something new is written to swap file.

You should have applied some really disrupting tuning to your I/O subsystem - for it to delay write out of synced data. This breaks all application's expectations regarding file I/O integrity. A trouble in making.

Since I presume that you really mean "VIM", then I have an information which might be interesting to you.

No, I use nvi.

Also writes to .swp on Vim have an impact if the file is opened O_SYNC, else it goes to cache and is rarely written. I just installed and tried Vim and the harddrive indeed does stop (I can hear it). Linux will indeed eventually wake up and commit the cache to disk. But it does take a while, but it's totally tunable. Takes about 7 minutes(and 13 seconds) for a 16K text file on my system to be committed to disk after it has been "written" 8 times (timed with stop watch, nothing super accurate)

strace output shows that I am correct (opens swp file with O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE). as well as checking the source in http://vim.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/vim/vim7/src/

In other words, your conjecture is wrong.

Actually, the world of free software has Jokosher, which is inspired by GarageBand, and to me seems as easy to use. Still at an early stage, but I recommend taking note of it! Note that it's actually not JACK-based, which would make it so much easier for new users (the crowd usually drawn to GarageBand) to get into. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, Jokosher could be bundled into free operating system distributions, making them a nice alternative to Apple computers.

I also recommend Qtractor, which is more full-featured, but still not as intimidating as a full-blown DAW.

But, I must say, being a heavy user, that I feel that Ardour has come a long way in usability in that last two years, and these days it's almost as easy to use as all the above. It's not hard to get productive with it fairly quickly. If you gotta learn a piece of software in order to produce music, I would recommend Ardour right now. It can start you small, and take you very high up in features. Ardour's huge problem right now (if you ask me) is it's outdated and paltry documentation.

That said -- I fully agree with your statement that audio production on free software is not ready for self-congratulation. It's immensely powerful (there's nothing quite like JACK in the proprietary world, and there are some truly astounding LADSPA effects) but it's hardly rock solid, and definitely a mess.

On the contrary, it's becoming easier and easier to create games. There are message boards crammed full of people participating in indie games competitions, many with only the most rudimentary of programming and art skills (no offence to them). The tools have progressed to the point where these people can put together a game, and sometimes the result is (in my opinion) worthy to be called "art". Of course, the majority is utter rubbish, but you can say that about commercial games also (Sturgeon's Law).

Funnily enough, with the rise in popularity of "pixel art" in indie games, many even look like the 8-bit games you called the "cavemen drawings of what games will become". I take your point, and perhaps games will never be as easy to create as a doodle. But it's becoming easier every day, and this, if anything, is what will deliver games as art.

Obviously need to verify this, but we already run mod_cband with a per-IP connection limit of 5. This is in place to stop the over-zealous "download accelerators" from taking all our connections and DOS'ing us. I expect it would stop a single attacker using this attack, but we'd still be vulnerable to a concerted attack by MaxChildren/5 IPs.

Adventure games have broken fresh ground with intriguing and sophisticated new ways of storytelling, both in genre and mechanics. I've never seen an FPS or RTS with the kind of eye-popping cultural creativity of, say, Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey. Those games had excellent writing.

The Bladerunner game used recombinations of footage to create new instances of basically the same mystery: "Who's the replicant this time." It helped add replay value to what would otherwise be a straightforward game.

If you're looking for a remake of Star Control, look no further than Ur-Quan Masters. I did a review of the new version a few months ago: see the link on my sig.