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Password safe , add the question and give a randomly generator combination as the answer. Problem solved.

Scribd's "iPaper" page is laughably false. I remember it being even worse before, but it's still bad now:

iPaper is a rich document format built for the web

Kinda like PDF?

iPaper will display documents in the same way regardless of whether you're using Windows, MacOS, or Linux

So, it's like PDF?

Your readers no longer have to download files or extra software to view your documents

Because every computer in the world comes with Adobe Flash and not Adobe Reader. No sirree.

But it gets worse:

You can convert just about any major document format into iPaper, including Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs,OpenOffice documents, and PostScript files.

Because apparently, PDF converters don't exist. There is no such thing as Acrobat Distiller or PDFCreator.

Scribd documents are indexed by major search engines

That's kind of like saying that "Volkswagen cars use engines" and touting that as a feature.

Scribd's iPaper document viewer is embeddable in any website or blog

Conclusion: Scribd is a needless Flash-based frontend to PDF. In fact, I remember that when Scribd was launched, it actually used Macromedia's FlashPaper, obviously used by Macromedia to turn people away from Adobe Reader (before they got acquired by Adobe, of course).

I often have about 50 tabs open in Opera, and I can handle them just fine. Right now I have about 25 tabs open. Most of them are documentation (eg. mysql, posix threads) or work-related (lua binding tutorial, stackoverflow threads) or news (Slashdot!).

In Notepad++ I also have lots of tabs open. I need lots of tabs in order to do my work; I always have lots of things on the go. I like to have as much information layed out as possible, with everything I have worked on recently open and "stacked" much like papers or books would be on a real desktop. I guess I'm a very spacial thinker.

A few times I lost my Opera or Notepad++ sessions, and then I felt very lost.

I did my research and found a TV tuner that would work under Linux so that I could run MythTV. How many tuner cards work with OSX?

Many TV tuners are supported on the Mac, so if you do you research well, you could probably find one that works on Mac, Windows and Linux, and maybe even Linux on non i386 hardware
http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/software/EyeTV3/product3.en.html

Webcam drivers are bit irrelevant on the Mac, considered that Apple bundle WebCams with many of their hardware nowadays. But anyway:
http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/cameras/index.php
http://www.ioxperts.com/devices/supportedvideo.html

I stopped reading halfway through. Its a troll. I could say Windows isn't ready for the desktop because there are no CLI utilities or scripting languages built in.

Windows has PowerShell. It has some features which I have never heard of on Linux (but I'd like to be proven wrong): the pipeline support typed objects and not just text streams that Unix tools spend their time parsing; powershell allows full access to the DotNET api.

If you want to do something in batch like resize and auto-rotate a bunch of digital camera pictures you need to search for and download a program that does exactly what you want and hopefully not get a virus.

You could use Powershell and jhead to accomplish the same thing on Windows. (Or even cygwin!) Or use jhead on MacOS X :)

Or you use powershell, access the DotNet image framework, even create a CmdLet encapsulating the hard nifty tricky details...

I'm moderating on this thread, so I'll post anonymous.

As for Linux, I won't bother telling you the pain I went through to get WPA2 to work.

wicd is your friend. Lets you choose your WPA driver, doesn't automatically disconnect your wireless connection if you get a wired connection (useful for laptops), and best of all, allows you to have scripts run based on various connection phases (pre-up, post-up, disconnect) - fantastically useful for CIFS mounts, PPPoE connections, proxy connections, etc. The downsides are that it's basically a glorified python script, and it runs the scripts as root as a lazy workaround around some bug (I think involving scripts which needed su/sudo? But why it doesn't kick up kdesudo/gksudo is beyond me..), and you may find it either conflicts with or uninstalls KNetworkManager/NetworkManager (depending on whether you used source or deb package). It's in the ubuntu default repos as of 9.04, or the sourceforge source download page is here (also carries a link to the .deb).

Actually Photosynth started off as a PhD project called Photo Tourism. You can download the source code of Bundler (GPL license) as well. The idea of using geo-tagged photos to create a 3D view of the world is really cool. However there are various challenges: occlusion, moving objects (people, foliage, ...), changing illumination, different cameras, cameras with distortion. The software needs to be robust and discard those "outliers".

SceneLib is a software for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) which essentially is a similar problem. However here the assumption is that the camera is always the same.

Creating a panorama with and Enblend on the other hand only allows pictures taken from a single view point.

Actually Photosynth started off as a PhD project called Photo Tourism. You can download the source code of Bundler (GPL license) as well. The idea of using geo-tagged photos to create a 3D view of the world is really cool. However there are various challenges: occlusion, moving objects (people, foliage, ...), changing illumination, different cameras, cameras with distortion. The software needs to be robust and discard those "outliers".

SceneLib is a software for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) which essentially is a similar problem. However here the assumption is that the camera is always the same.

Creating a panorama with and Enblend on the other hand only allows pictures taken from a single view point.

you can modify this : http://yhs.sourceforge.net/yvmap.html

It's doable with gphoto

libptp
for canons : http://capture.sourceforge.net/
others http://www.gphoto.org/doc/remote/

There is a C++ framework called Sector/Sphere, that is quite a bit faster but not as stable. I don't think it scales as well either (yet)

http://sector.sourceforge.net/

It usually outperforms its Java sibling in an order of magnitude.

Do you have any actual benchmarks for that? According to the benchmarks page at the official cLucene wiki, cLucene is roughly twice as fast as the Java Lucene at indexing, and it's only about 10% faster at the actual searching. That's not even close to an order of magnitude.

Assuming the document is small, you could install Xerobank (formerly TorPark) and create an account on Wikileaks and upload it to Wikileaks through the Tor onion router. Your anonymity would be assured in a hilariously sound manner.

Your website need do nothing more than link to Wikileaks and ponder how it got there.

That would be my plan of action. I would also be careful with all the machines/devices used to transfer that file.

Depending on how important/inflammable this document is, I might look into buying a cheap 20GB laptop hard drive, installing ubuntu, going to a star bucks, doing the above and then "disposing" of the drive and all media so that there are no questions. Sorry to sound like Harvey Keitel on Pulp Fiction but ... when you're dealing with serious stuff ...

My question is: would you host it if you were asked? How would you go about protecting the document and yourself?

Anonym.OS is a the way to go: http://sourceforge.net/projects/anonym-os/ Discard of the CD-ROM afterwards, or not: no trace left. Ideal for a hit&run-action. But one question: why would you upload the document and such? Just give them an account with some webspace and email-account on your server/domain, "so they can play around with php and mysql wink-wink notch-notch", and play innocent when the cease-and-desist letters come in.

Also, as a general FYI, we decided to use rsync over ssh into a BackupPC datastore. There is then an archive of this information created on removable media (that is unplugged, rotated, and kept off-site). I first heard mention of BackupPC here on /. a few years ago and wanted to pass the info on to those who haven't heard of it yet. Works well for me/my company.

If you do Windoze, you might also consider Unison instead of rsync as I hear that Unison can do the volume shadow copy stuff in Windoze. (YMMV as I haven't tried unison yet.) AND, yes, I know there is an ugly Cygwin version of rsync that doesn't do volume shadow copy and can't backup an outlook.pst file when outlook is running.

How hard is it to automatically translate C code to, say, C++/CLI?
It's certainly doable for C and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be for C++ too (though writing a correct C++ compiler targetting anything is a PITA afaict)

http://cluecc.sourceforge.net/

One thing I do find interesting is their benchmark results. translating C to java using thier tool (which is probablly not optimal) brings a pretty substantial performance penalty but the penalty for converting to java is far lower than the penalty for converting to any of the other managed languages they support.

This is not the first time MS has done this. They have plenty of other standard functions that they have deprecated.

Yes, you read that right. Microsoft is deprecating parts of an ISO Standard all by themselves.

No, Microsoft isn't deprecating "parts of an ISO Standard" - only the standard committee can do that, by marking those parts as deprecated in the next version of the standard. Microsoft has enabled warnings on use of those "unsafe" functions by default, yes, but it is very much not the same thing.

Regarding "all by themselves" part - do you realize that all those "safe" *_s functions are actually covered by an ISO C99 TR?. There's also a FOSS implementation available under the MIT license.

And the warnings are irritating. You can't write a nice cross-platform library without either spewing tons of warnings or having to put in a bunch of #defines to shut the compiler up.

You don't have to use #defines for that purpose, you use compiler flags in your makefile. You'll have to write one specifically for MSVC anyway (since it uses its own Make), so it's not a big deal.

And if you do that, your users get irritated if they depend on these warnings because you just turned them off

That doesn't make sense. If you turn them off for the code of your library, they're obviously not turned off for code of your users - unless you put #defines in your headers, which is obviously a dumb thing to do for many reasons (and I've already explained the proper way to do this above).

Or you can use a general purpose language and be done with it.

Python has its uses, but it also has its overhead. Good luck getting any kind of performance with pure Python code on a handheld device with 4 MB of RAM and a 67 MHz CPU. Or good luck getting a good frame rate with a graphics engine that uses PyOpenGL. (And why is the snake wrapping itself around EA Games' old box-ball-cone logo?)

I prefer backuppc.

When I started looking at oss backup solutions I first started using duplicity. It was nice and simple, did full+incremental and encryption. It didn't have built in multi-server support and direct file access.

I then started looking at Bacula. Bacula looked ridiculously complicated for what I needed (backup of maybe 5 workstations and 5 servers). Bacula has a half dozen different modules that can be split across multiple servers to make a clustered backup solution. I fought with it for about a week, got nowhere, and gave up.

I then found Backuppc. A single daemon, with a single web interface, with a super-easy installation. It literally took 10 minutes to set it all up, and I had every computer I wanted being backed up.

It also supports pooling to the hard drive and you can then stream off to tape. Despite backing up 10 computers, my pool is about 20gigs. Backuppc will find duplicate files across the entire backup pool and store them as one. So even if you have 2000 windows pc's, but users store about 100 megs on each, your pool size would be only 200 gigs. Plus the size of one windows/program backup.

I got bitten by the crappy hardware of the first GP2X (4-contact digital "fake analog" stick so about 75% of the movable area was "dead zone", and diagonals were almost impossible), lousy battery life, tendency to blow capacitors...

I had one of those too, and I actually ordered a replacement thumb grip from the UK (ie. concave, not convex). I bought the F-100 when it came out, and they changed it to 4 separate digital buttons (much better). The touch screen was pathetic though; it didn't even register most of the time in the official menu system, and the image browser would crash after 5 minutes or so of usage (memory leak I think). Anyone with half a brain would be using GMenu2X though.

I bit the bullet and bought an NDS and M3 Real cartridge last week. I think I should have just bought one in the first place.

Is your application CPU-limited?

No, it's developer-limited. For most applications, development time is a bigger issue than execution speed. Only for very heavily used low-level routines (OS stuff, graphics libraries, VMs, etc) is it really worthwhile spending extra effort on extreme optimisation.

If so, is it *the* fastest language?

I don't have any recent benchmarks, but I remember that back in the days of the Java 5 JVM, Java is about 10% slower than equivalent C++, which is pretty good. But since then, JVMs have gotten quite a bit faster. It would surprise me if Java was not on at least equal terms with C++ now, alhough highly optimised low-level C is still going to be faster. But that's also extremely tedious to code.

Those are the questions one should be asking when picking a programming language.

No, the main question you need to ask when picking a language is if your code is going to be maintainable, and how expensive you can afford your maintainance to be. That's still the main timesink in development.

If your application is limited by the CPU, only the fastest language, C, will do for some routines. You may even consider using assembly or machine-optimized code such as Atlas

You accidentally hit the nail right on the head there: C is not necessarily the fastest language, highly optimised custom assembly is. And any language is only as fast as it can be if the programmer knows what he's doing. Some language do more for you to make optimal code easy to write than others.

Java development, in my experience, is more laborious than Python or Ruby. Unless you have big teams of developers who must work close together, I wouldn't recommend Java for anything.

Oh, I agree, Java stopped being an easy development language quite some time ago, and moved to the side of the fast execution languages. This is also why I switched from Java to Ruby. However, I just might switch to Scala because recent JVMs are so incredibly cool. The power of Java these days is more in the awesomeness of the JVM than in the language itself.

Even so, there is an enormous amount of support for Java. It is by far the biggest language for enterprisey server stuff. I think there are as many webframeworks for Java as there are for all other programming languages put together. This is one of the big stengths of Java, but at the same time, this architectural overload is also one of the major hurdles for starting in Java.

However, my point was that Java is pretty fast, which it is. If speed is an issue, Java can be an excellent choice (unlike Ruby, for example). If speed is the only thing that matters, then highly optimised C or assembly is really the only option.

Java is now one of the fastest languages around.

Is your application CPU-limited? If so, is it *the* fastest language? Those are the questions one should be asking when picking a programming language.

If your application is limited by the CPU, only the fastest language, C, will do for some routines. You may even consider using assembly or machine-optimized code such as Atlas

If your application isn't limited by the CPU, then development speed is more important than execution speed. A rule of thumb I use is how big is the development team. If there are just a few people, or if the developers work more or less independent of each other, I'd recommend Python.

Java development, in my experience, is more laborious than Python or Ruby. Unless you have big teams of developers who must work close together, I wouldn't recommend Java for anything.

That has nothing to do with how efficient compilers have become in the last years.

Try extracting anything useful from Sourceforge - and did I mention that you have to register before you can take a look around, poke the tires?

What do you mean? This is a link to Scribus project. The description and download link is right there. Screenshots just a click away. No registration required.

The problem with Panera wifi users is they have a habit of taking up an entire 4 person table for more than an hour in the middle of lunch rush and buying little more than a coffee. I often go to Panera with friends and can't find a table because all of the large tables are taken by greedy laptop users and the small tables they should be using are empty.

I don't think the problem McDonalds is having is new and I don't think recommending Panera is the solution.

If he wants to try to beat the system by changing his MAC. Maybe I'll bring a backpack with airpwn next time.

By the time we get source code, OpDE, the Open Dark Engine, will be finished.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/opde/

There's not a lot of discussion on the mailing list -- it's mainly a two-man project ATM. More devs are always welcome.

if only we could get an Azureus version of this app...

Here's one.

And I wish Apple the best of luck should they ever wish to block it.

The problem with free (gratis) is that it doesn't pay the bills for the developer. I'm not talking about being greedy, but accessories like kids, spouse and house come in handy in winter :-)

News to me. My boss lets me release my work projects as Free Software because they're not related to our business (i.e., we need their functionality but only as a means to an end) and we're not set up to handle software sales or support. If we're not going to make money off it, and someone else could use it, then why not? We've gotten bug reports and feature requests that made it work better, so we're actually better off for having given it away.

I think you'll find that the vast majority of FOSS comes from similar situations.

What's wrong with 'ls -X'?

Doesn't solve the same problem. lf(1) packs more information into the same size screen, by being terse; all the files with the same extension are printed together, with the extension printed just once (at the beginning of the line) and then omitted to save space. If you have a big project with a whole bunch of files, lf(1) helps you see the forest; ls -X just gives you a listing sorted a different way.

See the screenshot on the Sourceforge page.

steveha

As a developer you should be fully aware of the fact that you can extract the files from the MSI if you really want to. I'll help though. For most MSI files a simple:

msiexec /a filename.msi /qb TARGETDIR=C:\tmpdir

Will do what you want.

There is also the Less MSIerables app from the WiX project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/ that will let you extract the files directly. Plenty of tools to accomplish what you want if you'd take the 2 seconds to Google for it.

You should also be aware of the fact that the MSI probably goes ahead and integrates the SDK with Visual Studio so the libraries, binaries and help are in path and available without a bunch of extra crap to do on your part, which for me personally, I'd rather have it do than wasting my time trying to figure out what needs to be done even if they did bother to document everything.

I realize that most of the slashdot crowd thinks having to do everything from the command line based on a man page is a good thing, but for the rest of us it stopped being cool when we got out of school and had to get a job where they expected us to actually get shit done and not sit around all day with our thumbs up our asses playing with Linux.

Oh the horrors....

But at least U7pt2 came with a little card that told you exactly what to load to get things to work. God help you if your sound driver took up too much RAM, though.

These days, I'm glad we have http://exult.sourceforge.net/ though it's not exactly the same.

I've had better results with DOSEMU than with DOSBox. Despite it's name, DOSEMU seems to be more virtualization and less emulation (see wikipedia), which means there's less overhead. The downside is it can only run on x86(-64) and I think it only works on Linux at the moment.

I think I'll go install XCOM again now...

In late July of LAST year WinMo _alone_ had 18K applications.

Does it matters? Most of WinMo apps are utter crap. The platform itself isn't good for any specific purpose.

Seriously, I find my old Nokia N-Gage with Symbian more useful to make calls and manage contacts than my WinMo device.

So lets all assume the platform is more useful for non-phone applications. But it isn't!

The IE browser is totally useless, it cannot render correctly most pages (meaning that you cannot really surf them).
The embedded "office" is a joke, even the MSN messenger is so badly designed that makes me feel totally annoyed with constant popup windows (people login/logoff) that steals the window manager focus.

IM+ is a very good replacement for default mobile MSN messenger. There is also skyfire that renders your pages on their servers and sends you layered jpegs, it works very nice but has privacy issues.
So what can we tell when third party apps are better than platform bundled ones? We can tell that after spending 600â on a HTC phone with WinMob, we need to spend a lot more buying apps to make the brand new phone near useful.
It makes sense, doesn't it?

If everything wasn't bad enough, the bundled messaging app is always crashing. Activesync (which I don't really use) starts up randomly for no reason on the phone at starts hogging the cpu.

Then there is also stupid design issues like when the phone is getting with low battery. In this case, WinMo likes to awake the device from his low power state to inform me that the device is low power. Of course it would be enough to tell me this once, but it doesn't. It turns on every 10 minutes or so.

This is only what I could remember from the top of my head, but I assure you, there is a lot more.
I didn't dumped the device just because I'm actually enjoying hacking Linux into it:
http://linwizard.sourceforge.net/

Dunno if your aware, or how good the current release is (not played it in a while) but there is an X-com inspired (the basics are the same but its more than a straight up clone) OSS game called UFO:AI

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=4421&atid=104421

If you hate it, start filing bugs.

I'm tempted to just leave Slashdot. I'm sick of the bullshit. A good portion is the changes (and you know, you can file bug reports here), but a lot of angst comes from idiots and trolls.

Yeah this is an easy one, my project comes with the GPL and, both in the license and splash screen, comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY :)

Even if you're only focusing on automated buying and selling, those algorithms were still programmed by humans with their own subjective approaches and underlying premises.

Even these humans with their subjective approaches sometimes create stock prices that follow Benford's law. Presumably analysits already use information like this to pick apart a certian stock price from a set of stocks, or to pick apart a stock's history. It is these anamolies that are interesting.

What they found is that even some sets that do not strictly follow the first version of Benford's law (such as primes) do follow another more generalized version of Benford's law. If it could be shown that stock prices follow this version of the law, it could have wide reaching implications.

NASM is still alive and kicking, it's latest release was about 3 days ago, there are plenty of tutorials and plenty of example code around to get you up to speed.

Personally, my fav x86 assembly program was A86, i found it much easier to use that NASM.

It looks like Python + Pyro will get you Erlang-like functionality, and then some - including remote execution.

"Unfortunately I can't really play any of those formats save for on my computer"

Wrong

FLAC fine. But have you anything to play Theora video that isn't a PC?

Oh, and don't forget to rockbox your iPod.

From the page you linked: "not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd/4th gen Nano, Classic or Touch". That's why kelnos says Rockbox doesn't count.

"Unfortunately I can't really play any of those formats save for on my computer"

Wrong

Oh, and don't forget to rockbox your iPod.

That is why you make your money selling the "full package" treatment.I take those couple of hundred bucks worth of parts and sell it for $500 and have customers sending their family and friends to get boxes built from me. Why? Because when you get an XP PC from me you get a "just flip the switch and go" solution.

First I find out what they are going to use it for and tailor the hardware to their requirements. Then when they power it on the find it has antivirus and spybot already installed and set to do their nightly scans and updates when they aren't using it, they have Oxygen Office and Gnucash already to go for any office work they need to do, they have Firefox with ABP already installed for ad free web browsing, they have Klite Mega Codec pack so any video format they run into "just works" out of the box, I give them Songbird for their music needs, and if they bring the discs for anything proprietary they own(cameras, printers, etc) i install that too. That way when they get home all they do is "plug in and go" and they are quite happy to pay for that convenience.

So it is all about providing that extra bit of effort, adding that extra value. Of course they don't need to know that thanks to Almeza Multiset, or as I like to call it the PC guy's little helper, it is all pretty much "stick in the disc, hit go and go have a smoke" but what matters to them is that they don't have to fool with it. No hours installing stuff, or dealing with crapware, they just flip the switch and enjoy. So if you feel bad about charging for the time pick up a copy of Almeza, make you a few unattended CDs with it, and then offer Packages with your repairs. You'd be surprised how many folks are happy to pay to have the PC just "do what they want" out of the box with no fuss. And it will give your customers a reason to rave about you to their friends/family/coworkers. And more business in this economy is always a good thing ;-)

So, anybody want to give odds on whether Oracle will let OO.o wither on the vine or not? Because I'm betting they let it rot. From everything I've read it is a royal bitch to code for, there are all these forks because of disgruntled developers( I prefer the Oxygen Office fork over OO.o myself, as it is much more usable out of the box than OO.o) from what I've read they have a serious case of NIH syndrome, etc.

Frankly it just doesn't feel like something Oracle would be interested in. By owning Java, Solaris, and the Sun server hardware they can deliver a top to bottom RDBMS solution while maximizing throughput and stability. I just don't see an office suite fitting into their business model. So I'm betting once Oracle has control they will slowly starve OO.o or just toss it to the community and let it go. So I really wouldn't be surprised if this time next year we are talking about the latest release of Go-oo or Oxygen Office because they have taken over development while OO.o rots. So anybody on the inside of either company want to give odds?

And there you have it. What more can you really do with HD effects when the gameplay cannot keep up with the game and with your imagination? I still fire up Rogue to while away the minutes waiting for compilations to complete (maybe I'll get a quad-core after I get another job...). I also run iRogue http://roguelike-palm.sourceforge.net/iRogue on my Palm when I am away from home. It's a bit quirky, but lots of fun and quite engrossing. You should see the looks I get from kids who've never seen a character-based game with real gameplay on a handheld. Woohoo!

For those who want to work in PHP, one can already work JavaScript-style (as of PHP 5.3), or even JavaScript proper... (While I'm at it, I may as well mention our bringing PHP to JavaScript (PHP functions implemented in JS, that is), hopefully making SSJS more appealing (though still requiring host support). Help welcome!...)

And here you can find a GPLed port of TurboVision, the Text-user interface library that powered later Borland products and that used to be bundled with the compilers (and later released into public domain).

While in general I agree with your evaluation of the bill's prospects, I still object to the entire enterprise on Constitutional grounds. What right does Congress have to tell anyone what they must include in computer software? We're not regulating automobile safety and mileage here, we're regulating speech. Can Congress tell novelists that they must include material describing the health risks of smoking whenever a character lights a cigar? What's the different between a book and Enhanced C Torrent? (Will command-line file-transfer programs like that or rsync have to add a "--Bonozo" switch constituting agreement with her proposed rules?)

Still, a bill introduced by a Republican with one Republican and one Democrat co-sponsor probably isn't going very far in this Congress.

Except that Linux and Mac users aren't immune to viruses, they just aren't the big target. {...} As those OS's {...} gain position in large targets (corporate servers), they too will become larger targets.

Given the huge proportion of *servers* already running some flavour of Unix or another, POSIX-compatible environment *are indeed* a pretty juicy target for evil-doers since a long time.
Even more so because they are *servers* (thus run mostly unattended, are connected to the interweb with a "phat pipe", and might contain a lot more interesting private data).

And indeed there are efforts to attack machines running Linux and other unices. Lots of efforts.

The only problem is that the standard way unix-like OSes are organised makes them much more difficult to attack.
- For one nobody runs everything as root, unlike Windows where 99.99% of the machines only have 1 single "administrator" account.
- Files aren't executable by default, but require further step to be validated as such (except for the recent exploit of shortcut formats featured on /.)
- The unix-like world is much more diverse than the Windows world. People are complaining of the byzantine complexity of Vista flavours. But technically, under the hood they are the same beast, with a different set of limitations put on by the marketing department. The same exploit would work against any of them. Whereas, in the OSS world only, you have countless different distributions of Linux (*several* of which are widespread) and multiple versions in the *BSD family. Next to that you have also big variations in the commercial unices. You can't just have "one kernel exploit to rule them all".
- And in addition to that, most of the users happen to be a lot more technically educated (although *that* is something that can get diluted once Linux gets popular).

Thus to be able to gain access to juicy bits requires much more complicated and contrived means, in a territory which offers a lot less exploitable bits.

A widespread virus outbreak on windows is something really simple and sometime entirely automatic, like Code Red.
Pwning a unix machine often requires a multi-staged approach and is most of the time something done by hand, trying to adapt the steps to the peculiar combination of factors found on the target.

In fact, if you are working in a secure environment, *every machine* must have antivirus software installed, if it's available for the OS.

Well, someone has still to be able to detect and notify which of the other bozos has an infected machine.

Most of the servers at your ISP will probably run Linux or some other unix-like OS. Nonetheless these machine will have at least one antivirus software (and sometimes several) in order to be able to stop infected e-mails, or be able to detect if you start to send contamined mails.

Norton AV for Mac. {...} McAfee offers Linux/Solaris as well as Windows too.

Well, if you want to give example of AV running on Linux, then you should have kept with the opensource spirit and also cited ClamAV which is quite widespread on email servers, has a very fast response time in case of new threat (and also a couple of handy plug-ins for desktop use).
And is entirely free and open-source.

In addition to detecting viruses (mostly other OS'), a proper shielding of an unix box should also comprise good root-kit detection softwares, such as rkhunter and chkrootkit.

Simple games can be the best games... I am still waiting for someone to replicate Starflight

Have you tried The Ur-Quan Masters?

However, I'd hesitate to call Starflight or Rogue "simple". Many of these games have quite a lot of depth compared to the FPS of the week.

JabRef http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ is a great option for Linux.

Well if you prefer your ascii graphics rendered a bit more fancifully, there's always the opengl/smooth-scrolling ascii GoblinHack.

While this isn't answering your question, I'd like to point out my favourite Nethack interface:

http://glhack.sourceforge.net/

GnomeHack was a very nice version of the game... But the GUI-ness of it (popup windows, scrollbars, etc..) really wasn't to my taste. So I started work on glHack, to make it feel very similiar to the text-terminal version (nice & snappy). but with graphical tiles.