Slashdot Mirror

If you want a fast and non bloated Firefox, get Kmeleon. If you are on Windows you have the choice of Kmeleon proper or Kmeleon CCF ME with built in ABP, and if you are Linux here is a tutorial on how to get Kmeleon going under Wine.

If you want a fast and non bloated Firefox, get Kmeleon. If you are on Windows you have the choice of Kmeleon proper or Kmeleon CCF ME with built in ABP, and if you are Linux here is a tutorial on how to get Kmeleon going under Wine.

I released an open source web browser called SupraBrowser a while back. It has very similar characteristics to Opera Unite, in that it's designed to act as both a client and server at the same time (we called it a "servant") :).

This was more of a research project, as in fact, it was designed as a research and collaboration system for financial services companies and is currently used heavily by several very large financial services companies. It's almost like a combination of Google Wave and Opera Unite, in that it's based on a secure real-time messaging layer (xmpp/jabber wasn't stable or mature enough when we started....if we were doing it over today we might use jabber, but we also had the need for a lot of queuing and persistence that jabber wouldn't have provided), where all communication is completely encrypted using 3DES and a zero knowledge authentication. It supports email, mailing lists, group posting boards, link sharing, workflow, and a bunch of other really innovative features.

That said, I don't know how to manage an open source project and generate a community around our efforts other than posting to various blogs every once in a while when I see something related. Even still, its' frustrating because we actually went far down the road of trying to do kind of what Opera is doing, but without a middle man/trusted third party (hence the requirement for SRP Zero Knowledge auth). We want to build a personal cloud collaboration environment where data becomes user-centric and controlled, where other services federate from that single point of truth owned and controlled by the user.

Given that it's a research project, there are also some very innovative ideas, and I have yet to see anyone implement tagging better or provide a better way to manage personal information. I have over 25,000 bookmarks and files that are all full-text indexed (on Lucene), and tagged so that I can easily get back to stuff and correlate it within my existing cloud of data.

This I think is one of the real weak points of the open source model. If there is something very innovative, it generally requires sales and marketing to shove it down users' throats given their natural tendency to resist change. When the users are the developers are the users, the self selection process tends to restrict certain things. I can think of no other explanation for why releasing 4+ years of effort has been almost completely ignored. If someone can point out why the open source community has ignored SupraBrowser I would be all ears!

If anyone has any ideas or feedback, please reach out to me! suprasphere ____ @ ___ gmail.com

David

This is what you can get for free at at the moment:

http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=134

Why use Tomboy at all? I much prefer WikidPad. Portable Python, can be installed on a USB key, the wiki's can be easily revision controlled (mine is squirreled away in a Git repository)... works great for me!

Samba also do the have the AD mode, central authentication and profiles, no need to run samba as workgroup... so no need for a windows server for AD

    - Have easy central printer queues
useless... its faster and safer to directly use a printserver and configure the clients to use it.
If the server goes down, you can still print... but if you really want centralized queues, cups already do that, no need for a windows server

    - Have easy central file shares with easy to apply security

ooh good... samba do this since... ever... no need for a windows server

    - Install WSUS on the server. It's a free addon. Poof! Microsoft patch management! (...) Works well and can't beat the price.

yes you can... you still have to pay for a windows server... this ones are free:

depending on what you want, just save bandwidth? try http://update-accelerator.advproxy.net/ or even a plain squid with lots of HD space. this is what most small companies want.

want full control of patchs and all packages/updates installed? check the http://wpkg.org/

as a bonus, something that windows doesnt give you, unattended windows installations, with full patchs and software:
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

beat this price!

    - Group Policy (install/update software, apply software settings, lock down security on all systems, etc.)

Ok, this one you cant still do with samba3, but samba4 will have this.

if you really need this, check the http://www.nitrobit.com/grouppolicy.html, it can be configures to use samba and a openldap server, but it costs money (but hey, still less than a windows server)

most small companies dont use GPO anyway and most of the more important things can be controled by the local policy (and pushing the .pol file to each client)

    - Login scripts (and have install or apply updates to any updates to programs that don't do updates via WSUS and Group Policy, e.g. Firefox, Java, etc.)

ooh good again... check above... no need for a windows server

    - Oh, and yeah, install your antivirus server here too.

most of then can be installed in any windows, no need for a windows server

So no, there is no need for a AD server

It's one of several CSS bugs currently plaguing /. They usually don't occur if you're logged out, FWIW.

We tend not to like IDEs very much.

There's an awful lot of them, to say you don't like then, there's the Qt IDE, Sun's IDE, KDevelop, Anjuta...

Because it doesn't?

Um, look beyond the word processor. The spreadsheet is pretty rough and the Access-clone is terrible.

There: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html [sourceforge.net]. Or Python / Ruby with Qt / Gtk, depending what you mean by "VB". Or Mono.

Gambas doesn't even match VB 6. And what I mean by VB is an all in one integrated RAD development environment where Forms, Event Handling are built into the one thing. That pretty much means, Gambas...

Oh, and by the way, neither Qt or Gtk have a native grid that matches the grid controls used in Windows. The only Linux GUI kit that has even halfway decent widgets is WxWidgets and it falls short of what you can get out of Win32 native components...although I will say that Wx has a better document / component model than MFC does.

> Right off the wheel, I would say that if Microsoft is so terrible, why is no one in the FOSS movement able to come up with an IDE consistently as good as Visual Studio?

We tend not to like IDEs very much.

> Why is it that the state of the art in FOSS Office applications still has less features than Office 2000?

Because it doesn't?

> If Microsoft is such a shoddy company, where's the VB for Linux?

There: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html. Or Python / Ruby with Qt / Gtk, depending what you mean by "VB". Or Mono.

> If I look around Linux, the only big thing that's innovative is KDE 4.

You didn't look very hard didn't you? The most innovative thing I saw recently is how perl 6 reinvented regexes, I can't wait for it to spread to other languages.

There is a Wikipedia article on wireless mesh networking. A little research reveals there are a few OpenWRT-based projects for zero-configuration wireless mesh networking using the OLSR protocol: ROBIN for one. Freifunk-Firmware is the most professional looking one.

I am not sure what you would do with such a network if you had one. I suppose running an IRC server (trivial to setup, no login) might be a good idea. XMPP servers everywhere might make more sense... not sure if you expect internet access or just a local mesh.

Others have suggested HAM radio for communications. Even others have suggested that communications aren't that important.

But will it run on LUnix

Run Firefox in one and Seamonkey in the other. Seamonkey the browser component is nothing but Firefox, and even many Firefox extensions work just fine with Seamonkey. You can choose browser only on install if you don't want/need the email, IRC chat, or HTML editor. Plus it is nice to have a "guest browser" for when you have.....guests.

Or if you are on Windows you also have the choices of Kmeleon or KmeleonCCFME. Both are superfast Win32 native gecko engine builds, but they don't have as many extensions due to not using XUL. Of the two Kmeleon is great if you want it installed, but I prefer KmeleonCCFME because it comes with ABP installed and is already portable. Just unzip to a flash and go.

This IMHO is one of the great things about Open Source software. if you think you have a better idea you are free to fork it your own way. I have found Seamonkey to be a very useful for getting my older clients away from Outlook Express/IE, and Kmeleon/CCFME is simply very fast on Windows.

For when you don't need/want all of Cygwin, you can use this little package of Unix utilities. It covers the basic Unix commands and includes a basic shell.

Nice true open source alternative to SAP:
http://openerp.com/

OpenERP looks like it might be a re-branding of TinyERP. However there's no obvious link from the TinyERP page on SourceForge nor on OpenERP's Launchpad page.

Probably a better one is Pupesoft, though the documentation is not quite as accessible to some as one might wish...

KMyMoney is one that I've been using for a few years now, and it's very, very good. No Windows version yet, but if you can't wait (or run andLinux, or use VmWare Player, or get KDE for Windows, or...), you can use GnuCash, which is also quite good.

1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.

Not a bad idea, in principle. Over the years, there have been several sites that slashdotters would talk about as good alternatives. I was active on the old kuro5hin.org site for a while, before they erased the whole database of stories and comments and started over again from scratch. A lot of those folks seemed to move over to hulver.com. Bruce Perens tried to do it with technocrat.net, which is now a redirect to his own blog because he gave up on it. There was also half-empty (what was the url?), which was cool for a while.

The impression I got in the cases of technocrat and the original kuro5hin was that they failed because of issues with social dynamics. Kuro5hin somehow lent itself to a cliquish dynamic, where tribes got more and more hostile to one another, and it also seemed somehow very vulnerable to trolls and sock-puppets. At some point there was an infamous incident where someone got a hold of a picture of Rusty's (the owner's) wife and photoshopped it onto a porn picture. I believe Technocrat somehow attracted a nucleus of crazies (right-wing survivalists types, IIRC?), who dominated the site.

Although slashdot is having some serious technical problems with slashcode these days, the truth is that they've accomplished something very rare. They've managed to reach a stable equilibrium, where jerks, trolls, and crazies aren't able to make things miserable for everyone. They've also built up the membership of the site enough so that on a lot of issues, you'll get comments from individuals who are experts on the topic. (Of course you'll also get 10 times as many people who think they're experts.)

In the past when I've looked at Slash's perl code, I was always very impressed by how clean it was. However, they just seem to have taken a wrong turn with all the CSS and javascript features, and they seem to have zero interest in fixing bugs like these.

What they really need is an option 3 to add to your list: admit they have a problem with maintaining slashcode, and open up the development process in the same way that X11 had to fork and evolve into x.org to keep from dying.

1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.

Not a bad idea, in principle. Over the years, there have been several sites that slashdotters would talk about as good alternatives. I was active on the old kuro5hin.org site for a while, before they erased the whole database of stories and comments and started over again from scratch. A lot of those folks seemed to move over to hulver.com. Bruce Perens tried to do it with technocrat.net, which is now a redirect to his own blog because he gave up on it. There was also half-empty (what was the url?), which was cool for a while.

The impression I got in the cases of technocrat and the original kuro5hin was that they failed because of issues with social dynamics. Kuro5hin somehow lent itself to a cliquish dynamic, where tribes got more and more hostile to one another, and it also seemed somehow very vulnerable to trolls and sock-puppets. At some point there was an infamous incident where someone got a hold of a picture of Rusty's (the owner's) wife and photoshopped it onto a porn picture. I believe Technocrat somehow attracted a nucleus of crazies (right-wing survivalists types, IIRC?), who dominated the site.

Although slashdot is having some serious technical problems with slashcode these days, the truth is that they've accomplished something very rare. They've managed to reach a stable equilibrium, where jerks, trolls, and crazies aren't able to make things miserable for everyone. They've also built up the membership of the site enough so that on a lot of issues, you'll get comments from individuals who are experts on the topic. (Of course you'll also get 10 times as many people who think they're experts.)

In the past when I've looked at Slash's perl code, I was always very impressed by how clean it was. However, they just seem to have taken a wrong turn with all the CSS and javascript features, and they seem to have zero interest in fixing bugs like these.

What they really need is an option 3 to add to your list: admit they have a problem with maintaining slashcode, and open up the development process in the same way that X11 had to fork and evolve into x.org to keep from dying.

Yep, that would be this bug, which, like pretty much all bugs in slashcode, will probably not get fixed.

And then there's this bug, which they don't seem to be in any hurry to deal with. If you read through the comments on the bug, they add up to complete info on how to reproduce and fix the bug. The bug only occurs for stories in certain slashdot sections, because only those sections' CSS is messed up. So all they had to do to fix it was to copy the correct CSS out of the not-broken files into the broken files.

Yep, that would be this bug, which, like pretty much all bugs in slashcode, will probably not get fixed.

And then there's this bug, which they don't seem to be in any hurry to deal with. If you read through the comments on the bug, they add up to complete info on how to reproduce and fix the bug. The bug only occurs for stories in certain slashdot sections, because only those sections' CSS is messed up. So all they had to do to fix it was to copy the correct CSS out of the not-broken files into the broken files.

I'm a big Basic fan, and love how FreeBasic is like one of the top languages in terseness and execution speed at http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability-of-v1.html. (The updated version doesn't even mention the word "basic.") Unfortunately there seems to be a massive campaign against assembler and basic these days in favor of bytecode compiler languages, simply because the heavy extra layers that are placed between the user and the cpu, layers that can be claimed as intellectual property and the whole computing world sort of blackmailed into paying for a rental fee for living on top of it. Assembler is difficult to work with, but cheap. Basic is so simple anyone can do it. The drive towards dotnet/java or other so called "professional" languages is like having to use Latin in the middle ages for both religious ceremony and scientific writing. This kept the bulk of the population who didn't speak latin clueless. These days very little official discourse is in latin, and knowledge is more freely accessible to the general public. You could argue that the general public doesn't know how to write proper programs just like hillbillies don't know how to properly spell and create written text that monks properly trained in Latin would cringe at. So what? That's not a good enough reason to deny them the right to write anyway.

It's been a few years since 2005 when I was looking at a replacement for VB6 to bangup a quick and dirty db interface for SQL Server to manage some lab samples. I simply can't stand dotnet and java bloat and slowness, and even interface reaction time - I can't zip through the menus with the speed of light in the newer Visual Studios, and the test programs were similarly sluggish. I almost settled on programming in C++ and wxWidgets, which had decent speed, it it weren't for the codesize - DevCpp static linking minimal programs were well over 1 MB, for a previous VB exe app that used VBRUN600.dll was less than 64 KB. Win32 C apps were just too verbose to write and debug compared to VB. I ended up sticking with VB6 even to this day, which pretty much has both feet in the grave by now and a few nails driven into the coffin, but I still couldn't find anything better than VB6/Excel VBA that would be officially supported by MS, so my ass is covered when I give it to a large corporation. I'm quite tempted to go for unofficially supported things like sqlite in the future with a simple file access protocol, because even ADO/SQL Server is becoming ridiculous compared to old ADO classic/MS SQL Server 2000 version that was quick and dirty and flying like a breeze. I set up this VB6 frontend/ADO/SQL Server 2000 backend db app in 2002 to replace an old file-access based Foxpro app that was very slow, but the daily security patches sometimes break the whole show, with ADO getting messed up with an MDAC update, and good luck trying to fix that. Going back to a slow file access based db where all the data is pulled across a network to be locally sorted seems retarded, but in view of the heavy layer of moving targets in an officially supported server-client setup, something simple that relies on Win32 API with sqlite and simple file access is starting to seem like a breath of fresh air.

By the way I never really knew what i386 registers were, and these days I'm learning assembler programming, starting with http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html and http://asm.sourceforge.net/intro/hello.html . Jeebus, assembler is hard, but it's so sexy, supersmall, superfast, with all middle man libraries out of the way. Libraries are like having someone else do a repair job on your car that you don't know how to do. Knowing assembler is like knowing how to repair it yourself, and when you take your car in for repair, you don't get shafted, because if t

Absolutely you can play these! And I'm not talking about 'ported' packages, and linux / BSD game stuff. I'm talking the actual 4BSD stuff. Check out SIMH, along with the TUHS archives, and you can run the real deal! I've setup some pointers on running this here: http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.0_BSD http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.2_BSD http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.3_BSD Of course curses didn't make it's appearence until 4.0BSD. And TCP/IP in 4.2.. 4.3BSD was without a doubt the best. And of course the guy who got it running has his pages, along with 'tape' images here: http://zazie.tom-yam.or.jp/starunix/ And of course for windows users there is the ready to run packages here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42

I'm glad this is getting some exposure. I know that Warren & co worked hard to get this ancient UNIX not only in a working state, but also he is the one responsible for pushing SCO with the oldSCO source license, and played a hand in getting Research UNIX 1-7 & 32v under a BSD style license, thus setting the foundation of UNIX free. Now SIMH may not be the 'friendliest' software out there for a new user to get used to, so I've done my part in making it a little more accessible. On the sourceforge project https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42 I've created Windows installable versions of the 4BSD stuff, 32v and UNIX v1. I do plan to add all the other research versions, along with a new build of RENO that doesn't need 1.8GB... Anyways try them out! the 4BSD stuff has TCP/IP along with a SLiRP hack it can connect to the internet immediately! IRC/Lynx/GCC work great on the Uwisc 4.3 BSD build. Ok that being said, there is a repository of SIMH binaries on https://sourceforge.net/projects/simh , and the MS-DOS build includes some small 'bootstrap' versions of various OS's including v1 UNIX on the PDP-11 simulator. The bar to trying this stuff is a lot lower then you may have guessed, and I'd encourage any fan of UNIX to really check it out.

I'm glad this is getting some exposure. I know that Warren & co worked hard to get this ancient UNIX not only in a working state, but also he is the one responsible for pushing SCO with the oldSCO source license, and played a hand in getting Research UNIX 1-7 & 32v under a BSD style license, thus setting the foundation of UNIX free. Now SIMH may not be the 'friendliest' software out there for a new user to get used to, so I've done my part in making it a little more accessible. On the sourceforge project https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42 I've created Windows installable versions of the 4BSD stuff, 32v and UNIX v1. I do plan to add all the other research versions, along with a new build of RENO that doesn't need 1.8GB... Anyways try them out! the 4BSD stuff has TCP/IP along with a SLiRP hack it can connect to the internet immediately! IRC/Lynx/GCC work great on the Uwisc 4.3 BSD build. Ok that being said, there is a repository of SIMH binaries on https://sourceforge.net/projects/simh , and the MS-DOS build includes some small 'bootstrap' versions of various OS's including v1 UNIX on the PDP-11 simulator. The bar to trying this stuff is a lot lower then you may have guessed, and I'd encourage any fan of UNIX to really check it out.

I guess it depends on the type of scientific computing you are doing. If you need a cluster to crunch numbers, don't use python. However, there are huge areas in scientific computing where: 1) speed isn't the primary concern or 2) languages like python are fast enough. Also, python has some pretty significant scientific computing tools like scipy (see http://www.scipy.org/), visualization using matplotlib (see http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/ ), etc. I personally know a lot of people doing scientific computing and general research who use python.

If speed was the only concern, people wouldn't be using tools like Matlab, IDL, python, and the like. Obviously, a significant number of people doing scientific computing find these tools fast enough.

Python may be great for serial processing, but when it comes to massively parallel computing, fortran is still king.

Maybe when MPI-aware Python gets out of Alpha stage you can dump fortran. Until then I don't think you're going to see much python running on the world's supercomputers.

Or DMS. Commercial packages include Docs Open, and Soft Solutions.
Open Source DMS = http://mydms.sourceforge.net/

You can look also at OpenDMS. It's not very active lately but might have a good core that you can expand on.

I happen to have written one:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/docdb-v/

could be what you are looking for. Of course, it'll take effort to catalog the documents.

I'm in the same boat. For years I've been looking for a file system can hold files larger than 2GB and can be mounted from Windows and Mac OS X (and maybe Linux).

How about ext2? You can mount it with full read/write access both in Windows, and in OS X.

You might take a look at FFS UFS, form me it worked for NetBSD and FreeBSD disks I had to mount under Windows XP and Vista:

http://ffsdrv.sourceforge.net/

Supposedly it works with FFS from basically all the BSDs. The last time I looked UFS on Apple was essentially BSD FFS UFS. The headers look like it may deal deal with an Apple Partition Map as well, so it MIGHT work with that as long as you do not use GUID instead. Solaris UFS has made some changes long ago that make things different sizes than in FFS, so mounting FFS under Solaris is not possible in any way that I know of.

The other thing is that there are various journaling schemes for FFS and that as well as extended attributes and acls are fairly recent additions. I don't know how much of that ffsdrv nor Apple UFS support.

So now that I think about, man do I wish FFS would have been the best option, but I guess not. I guess cifs on top of whatever is sadly the best option these days.

Actually Palm has a history of providing unencrypted ROM images for their devices and explaining how to create your own ROM dumps from a device especially to registered developers. There are also numerous tools designed to allow people to customize these ROM images and install them on their devices some of which are supported by the device manufactures.

I doubt releasing the root image for the Pre was unintentional and I highly doubt Palm will do anything to discourage people customizing the root image and adding their own applications.

That was a whole different era. Since then Palm has been restructured a half dozen times, and fallen quite hard from their former glory as the #1 handheld platform. The new devices have all kinds of features the old ones didn't - features that some people won't want you to use with complete liberty. I don't think you can take it for granted that they'll continue playing by the rules they followed in the days of POSE and copilot.

Actually Palm has a history of providing unencrypted ROM images for their devices and explaining how to create your own ROM dumps from a device especially to registered developers. There are also numerous tools designed to allow people to customize these ROM images and install them on their devices some of which are supported by the device manufactures.

I doubt releasing the root image for the Pre was unintentional and I highly doubt Palm will do anything to discourage people customizing the root image and adding their own applications.

http://trousers.sourceforge.net/faq.html

XBOX kicks ass, but not thanks to Micro$hit. All thanks to XBMC. Oh and what goes for playing games, it's ok, but us that use XBMC know that it's no longer a gaming console once you have installed said software. However since it is Micro$hit that makes the console they of course tried their very hardest to prevent anything like XBMC coming to 360. God forbid Micro$hit to release a good product.

There are already good solutions to this problem: it is called revision control and the Subversion system is a high-quality open source solution to most common version control / sharing scenarios. Visual Source Safe wishes that it could be as good as Subversion, but the open source crowd beat them to it.

That misses why Google Docs was actually popular. If two people edit the same document at once, using a revision control scheme, then there's a significant potential of a merge conflict or of a nasty "someone else has the lock on this document" message, both of which are a usability nightmare if your users are non-technical -- the user is stopped in their tracks, gives up, and goes away. Google Docs does use a revision control method behind the scenes (google-diff-match-patch), but because the commits and updates are happening automatically every 30 seconds, the changes are kept very small and the chance of a merge conflict is very much lower. To show just how simple it is technically, Docwit is a very small hobby open source project that ties TinyMCE to google-diff-match-patch to do the same thing, but because you can run your own server you don't have to give Google your data.

Google Wave essentially just goes "Hmm, why don't we shrink the update period even further, and (like SubEthaEdit, and also quite like a few other projects that have involved working on XML documents remotely) send operational changes when they happen rather than polling every 30 seconds?". The change size gets even smaller, and with it the chances of having to show a user a "merge conflict" or "lock conflict" scary box are also reduced.

You see, it turns out not many people use Google Docs for "proper" documents (of the corporate kind) but a heck of a lot use it for collaborative note taking, as a cheap-and-easy wiki, and for lots of other "low-fuss" tasks.

The freely available x360mediaserver http://sourceforge.net/projects/x360mediaserve/ will send streaming internet radio to the xbox360. It runs on any PC with java (Linux or windows). I haven't tried it with last.fm, but I assume it would work. If it doesn't, run the Lastfm stream through LastFMProxy http://vidar.gimp.org/?page_id=50 and connect to the proxied stream with x360mediaserve.

Prior art:

http://www.finkproject.org/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fink/

Registered : 2000-12-27 22:07

Its good to hear Novell has caught up to the open source world of 2000, unfortunately for them, today is June 9th 2009.

But you see, you look at it as a "netbook" which is geek think. I know, because at least three times a week I have a customer in my shop ask about them but I have NEVER heard them referred to as "netbooks". Do you know what Joe and Jane average refer to those as? They call them "baby laptops". They see no reason why they can't use the stuff they have for their desktop or laptop on them, they'll just be slower because they are "babies".

In this floor of my apartment building alone there are 9 printers, none of which I had anything to do with the purchase. They simply come to me when they have a problem because I don't charge them a service call to walk down the hall. There is exactly ONE HP, and can you guess what the other 8 are, including the brand new one sitting on my desk because the landlady got a laser printer as a gift from hubby? That's right, those "evil" Lexmark all in ones. They do really nice scans and print nice pics BTW, and Walgreen's refills the carts for $10 so nobody cares about those expensive ink carts anymore. Why the Linux guys can't make an NDISWrapper for all in ones I don't know.

Oh, and to answer your question of "what they do when they want Word"? They bring it to me and for $5 I plug in my flash and give them Oxygen Office, which works great in WinXP. problem solved. More importantly for that same $5 per app I'll rip the programs like the driver for the Lexmark and their camera software and install it on their "baby laptop" and it behaves just like they expect, which is just like a bigger laptop only slower because it is a "baby".

The simple fact is Linux is easy to run IF you are a geek. A geek sees no problem running Bash, or editing config files, or using sudo, or make. Any of the previous sentence would be a deal breaker to Joe Average, who hasn't seen a command prompt since Win3.xx and honestly doesn't know Windows has one. The fact is you could remove CLI support from Windows and OSX and frankly the user would never know it, as it is used so little by the average person in those OSes. But in Linux, even the most simple problem like setting screen resolution when it isn't detected correctly means often the first and usually ONLY advice you'll get is "open up bash and type" some horrible string of Unix commands. And if you aren't comfortable doing that? If you aren't comfortable using CLI or Sudo or editing config files? Tough luck.

With Windows I have a folder with the top 100 most encountered problems, like the audio server refusing to launch. Do you know how I am able to fix every single one, even from long distances, in under five minutes? .REG files. I send them a .reg file and have them go "clicky clicky" and reboot. It's that simple. No CLI, no Sudo, no config editing or make, just "clicky clicky". Needless to say this keeps my support costs WAY down compare to an OS where I would have to be in front of it to fix it like Linux. Look, for servers there is none better than Linux. For enterprise if your hardware is supported the same hold true. But for home users ATM there is simply too many things that don't work, or require driver compiles, or bash or sudo or....you get the picture. There is a REASON why Windows and OSX own the market, and it isn't some "M$FT conspiracy" it is because Linux is just too difficult for Sally home maker and Joe SMB. Sorry, maybe next time.

OK, for those who don't read the discussion, let's repeat the obvious
The latest version of FirefoxADMrelease notes specifically list the feature Added: Ability to replace certificates for all user profiles.

Taekwindow can solve that problem on Windows.

How hard is it to keep a Linux, AIX and SunOS servers patched with security updates, seriously. These boxes must of never been properly secured in the first place for that many operating systems to be compromised. I know it is a bit of security through obscurity but having multiple server OS usually offers you some protection but to have this many fail seems like they need to pay more $$$$ and get a competent sysadmin group. I would not be surprised if a majority of their day to day sysadmin work was outsourced. If you do not have someone that is there with the firewall logs in real time, at least one honeypot behind the firewall and tripwire setups that page everyone but god when your honeypot is disturbed you are not even trying. Hell, I have that at home.

Last year I put together a basic kernel reimplementation in portable C (as much as possible); interested parties may want to check it out. It was a pretty unpleasant job. While RISC OS looks elegant on the surface, inside it's a nasty maze of inconsistent APIs, duplicated APIs, APIs that require certain (unfriendly) implementations, APIs that should have been deprecated and haven't been, APIs that don't exist and should to avoid having to read the kernel private workspace, and most terrible of all, APIs that expose kernel implementation details. And, just to add insult to injury, most of RISC OS is written in hard-to-maintain machine code. (And the APIs are very unfriendly to C.)

Not to mention the fact that RISC OS is missing certain bits of functionality that everyone nowadays takes for granted: threads, preemptive multitasking, memory protection between processes, a GUI that can be driven from the keyboard...

Given how much of an overhaul it would need to be meet modern standards of functionality, it'd probably be easier just to start again from scratch with a proper OS design. I find myself rather intrigued by Prex, for example, which is a minimalist embedded operating system with hypervisor-like functionality and a Unixish system call interface. And, unlike RISC OS, it's BSD licensed.

We have it here too.

The "Clean Security Agent," if I'm not wrong, is the Cisco Clean Access Agent that comes with the Cisco NAC Appilance, which runs on Windows only, and is a pain esp. for those who are running Vista. This beast have to run under Administrator privilesges and pops up a login window everytime you connect back to the network, and doesn't even want to accept certain types of Anti-virus software (such as Avira.)

Workaround: It doesn't run on Mac and Linux. If you use WIndows, you can convince the NAC you're using Linux and it will believe it until the appliance gets restarted. If you have Linux - great, the NAC just let you pass through. If you have Windows, Kevin, a program with a great icon, used to work but recently it didn't, but there is always an easy way to get over it: boot into Linux and fire up firefox and click on a link, and then boot back to Windows.

And just FYI: Due to an insane number of complaints received from the students, the IT Staff over here is getting rid of the Cisco CCA this summer :-)

If you look carefully at the plots on the website, e.g.: http://plplot.sourceforge.net/examples-data/demo08/x08.03.png you'll see that the plots are indeed antialiased. For the website plots a driver based on the cairo library is used.

The example graphs don't look so pleasant though. The (default?) colour scheme is excellent for a semi-lit astronomical dome (doesn't ruin your night vision) but I put those in front a business board without a fair bit of work on the aesthetics

Agreed. When it comes to your papers, you really want the best looking plots, and the examples on the PLPlot site don't even use anti aliasing! Check out the commercial competition. Mathematica generates pretty plots too, and some amazing mathematical graphics. Hell, even a recent Gnuplot seem to do a better job at plotting.

Look at this library's example plots: http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html

Hmm, reminds me a bit of R, the plotting part of it, at least. There are a few examples of the kind of plotting you can achieve in R here.

There are a plot of quite good open source plotting tools out there. I would consider R useful in as much as it provides powerful data crunching tools to distill your data into something essential to plot, but for plotting alone it is merely adequate. GNUPlot is actually surprisinly powerful and flexible with professional output if you're willing to take the time to learn all it can really do (it's default output can be rather underwhelming). Going outside the box of what GNUplot does easily can be an exercise in extreme contortions of an already slightly arcane language however. matplotlib is one of the best straight plotting tools out there, with a good mix between simple high level plotting, and sane easy to manage low level drawing tools, and good looking default output. CairoPlot is nice for very pretty charts, but is not as flexible as one might like. I'm sure there are more, but I don't happen to know them offhand.

Hmm, reminds me a bit of R, the plotting part of it, at least. There are a few examples of the kind of plotting you can achieve in R here.

There are a plot of quite good open source plotting tools out there. I would consider R useful in as much as it provides powerful data crunching tools to distill your data into something essential to plot, but for plotting alone it is merely adequate. GNUPlot is actually surprisinly powerful and flexible with professional output if you're willing to take the time to learn all it can really do (it's default output can be rather underwhelming). Going outside the box of what GNUplot does easily can be an exercise in extreme contortions of an already slightly arcane language however. matplotlib is one of the best straight plotting tools out there, with a good mix between simple high level plotting, and sane easy to manage low level drawing tools, and good looking default output. CairoPlot is nice for very pretty charts, but is not as flexible as one might like. I'm sure there are more, but I don't happen to know them offhand.

I hate to be a jerk, but the example plots are not of the quality I would be proud to publish in a paper. I wish there were more of an open-source tradition among graphic artists.

This is a list of examples..

Quite a good record too. I went looking for howlers to link to but they seem to be doing a good professional job of tracking changes to their code.