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JamVM proved that interpreting java can be faster than JIT compiling it. JamVM is the fastest JavaSE-capable JVM for ARM based devices that isn't made by Sun.

It's still way slower than optimized C or assembly, but... GCC is pretty bad at optimizing for ARM, so the difference between C and interpreted java isn't that huge. (maybe 2-4x faster)

Like the Universal Netbook Installer? Plug in your thumb drive, select a linux distro, and the program downloads the image, and copies it to your usb stick. Reboot your computer, and install.

This is exactly what I was talking about, thank you

Indeed. What advantage would Windows 7 starter offer over Ubuntu Netbook Remix?

Also, about installing an OS from a flash drive, remember the advances we have seen in OS install programs in the last 10 years. I am pretty sure there could be a program to sell cheap 1GB drives with different flavors of Linux preinstalled...

Like the Universal Netbook Installer? Plug in your thumb drive, select a linux distro, and the program downloads the image, and copies it to your usb stick. Reboot your computer, and install.

> Also consider that no OS would be immune from that. With cooperation a trojan could be slipped into Linux, OS X, Solaris, OpenBSD, Trusted. Anything where you're getting software from somewhere else.

He'd probably be pretty safe if he accessed the ransom website from a computer booted from a Live-CD of a less popular distro. We're talking about a guy committing some serious crimes... it would be worth his time to compile Minix or something totally obscure and use telnet to grab the webpage from the ransom site.

Hell, I just saw a kid browsing a webpage on his DS the other day. There are a lot of ways this guy could have avoided getting caught. I'm glad he got caught of course. But he could have at least tried a little harder :-).

The real weak link would be whenever and whereever he physically took possession of the money. That's where his real identity must interact with the "chain" the money has followed.

PS IAACFI (I am a computer forensics investigator).

This is the kind of thing where the perpetrator would want to use Anonym.OS Live CD along with connecting from a random cracked wireless router or WiFi hot-spot.

That would be pretty darned tough to track/crack for law enforcement, given a reasonably-clued perpetrator.

Strat

This thing contains afaik 3 multi-axis accelerometers that are way more precise than what was possible during the launch of the Wii years back.

Sounds great! Is the output from the new accelerometers in an easy-to-decode format so it works on Linux with libwiimote and similar software?

Actually - if you want to avoid as much malware as possible you should consider an operating system that's less common than Linux or Windows.

You will of course run a risk by doing such a bold move.

I'm thinking of a system like AROS.

It sure isn't top of the line, but it has potential and may also benefit from having an addition to the community.

Another alternative is to develop a new operating system, but that is something that's incredibly hard and takes a decade or so to get up and running.

Yeah, but wouldn't it be nice if we didn't *have* to go to the comments for the (almost inevitable) corrections to the story? Wouldn't it be great if the Slashdot editors would actually, you know, update the articles based on the corrections provided by the first few commentators? Or even pull ridiculous stories the instant they realized how ridiculous they were?

Wouldn't it be great if the editors of this site were tech-savvy enough to reject stories like this one: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/2259257 out-of-hand?

I know, I'm living in a fantasy world. They can't even fix the "Reply" button when posting a comment. In 6 months:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2159787&group_id=4421&atid=104421
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/reply_button_with_growths.png

But it would be nice.

How about https://keyserver.pgp.com/ or http://www.rossde.com/PGP/pgp_keyserv.html or http://pgp.mit.edu/ or roll your own at http://pks.sourceforge.net/ if you are so inclined.

You mean like this? http://sourceforge.net/projects/windows-get

As long as your query looks something like this...

SELECT * FROM mydata WHERE stuff LIKE '%YToyOntzOjc6InBhY2thZ2UiO3M6MjM5OiKyKHPh9ZawDX6KyA62cMd6p+mjBybGwJyCaNfFb7S.........

Seriously though, if I understand your objective I think it would be feasible to develop something like that, but I don't think its something you could integrate into Google's search services unless they added something on their end.

You could pass a decryption key along with your query and the server would then decrypt records as it performed the search. It would be very resource intensive.

As an close example, I have a web based password storage application in which I did not want to keep the encryption keys on the same server as the password database. So I generate a key with which to encrypt the records and the user keeps their key and must supply it every time they want to decrypt a record. I don't go so far as to enable searching of the encrypted data, I have a description field specifically for that purpose. The web application is called Passbox and is written in PHP.

win-get is it.

There is a Google earth repository, not to mention it is part of the medibuntu repository. Proprietary software / closed source for many reasons can't / isn't put into the main repository in part because they have their own license and TOS agreement.
 
apt-get install wine-doors will let you install a LOT of windows commercial applications. Some require the CD (because if it just let you download it, it would be "piracy"), but Blizzard has a net installer. So for MS Office (why??? *cry*) from wine-doors, with the office CD in the computer, it is one click for each application.
 
While I would like to see some improved development in wine-doors, what it does do, it does very well. It keeps a repository of windows applications and uses scripts to automate their installers making the installation and maintainence of windows applications easier for Linux/Wine than native windows. I expect win-get will be about the same thing, but for windows :)

win-get

Bam! And the stain is gone.

Wait, what?

For just installing software:

http://wpkg.org/

For installing windows over a network with applications and drivers preinstalled:
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

I have yet to try wpkg, but I've been messing with unattended off and on for a while now, and it's pretty good. There are scripts that will automatically download most of the open source applications and place them in the "repository" you create on a samba share that also contains scripts that help install them automatically. The hard part is actually configuring windows from a script. For example:

Enable Status and Address Bar In Explorer
http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/registry/57/

Change My Computer Name
http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/registry/35/
(here I can "read" the ascii, but I don't know where "20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D" is coming from.

I run into similar problems when trying to make "details" the default view for directories in explorer. I don't have time to look that one up right now, but I had to create it by setting it manually, then doing a diff on the registry, but the config option was for "local user" and I still haven't found where to place it in the "local machine" section.

But anyway, this is about the closest that I've seen to something that is similar to apt for windows. BTW, even though unattended is for installing windows, you can use it to just install applications, bypassing the installation routine.

http://cpulimit.sourceforge.net/

preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.

I have been using this daemon for a while now and have found it a) to speed up the loading of commonly used programs (since idle time is being used to load them into memory) b) not to cause any noticeable slowdown in system responsiveness (since it runs at such a low priority).

As someone who is typing this on a Win2K machine that runs beautifully, why would I want to upgrade? It is starting to look like Mozilla is jumping on the MSFT "You NEED Vista" bandwagon. Oh well, that is the great thing about browsers today. I can just jump ship to vanilla Kmeleon or Kmeleon CCF Me both of which run faster than FF3. And as you can see here with Kmeleon you can go all the way back to Win95 and still run the Gecko engine just by adding a few files.

Maybe if Mozilla pulls this BS somebody will fork it? Considering how many 2K/XP machines are out there they will have plenty of users. But Win2K/XP isn't like Win9x where the stability issues gave you a reason to switch. They are solid, reliable, and with a little tweaking easy to lock down. Why would I want to jump through all the compatibility hoops, dealing with tons of software that won't run, etc just to have MSFT's latest OS which frankly looks like a cross between OSX and "pimp my ride" and adds nothing of value but lots of bloat? No thanks. If Mozilla does this I bet all those gains they have gotten against IE will start dropping off. Dumb move Mozilla, just dumb.

As someone who is typing this on a Win2K machine that runs beautifully, why would I want to upgrade? It is starting to look like Mozilla is jumping on the MSFT "You NEED Vista" bandwagon. Oh well, that is the great thing about browsers today. I can just jump ship to vanilla Kmeleon or Kmeleon CCF Me both of which run faster than FF3. And as you can see here with Kmeleon you can go all the way back to Win95 and still run the Gecko engine just by adding a few files.

Maybe if Mozilla pulls this BS somebody will fork it? Considering how many 2K/XP machines are out there they will have plenty of users. But Win2K/XP isn't like Win9x where the stability issues gave you a reason to switch. They are solid, reliable, and with a little tweaking easy to lock down. Why would I want to jump through all the compatibility hoops, dealing with tons of software that won't run, etc just to have MSFT's latest OS which frankly looks like a cross between OSX and "pimp my ride" and adds nothing of value but lots of bloat? No thanks. If Mozilla does this I bet all those gains they have gotten against IE will start dropping off. Dumb move Mozilla, just dumb.

None of your examples are of games. There are no good, free, fun, games.

You forgot the best example of all. There is even a Mac version for jimicus and a Linux version for the rest of /.

There's an mplayer-plugin for Firefox that streams flash (and many other formats) right in the browser.

• The Ur-Quan Masters, if you missed Star Control 2 before it was open sourced.
• Globulation 2 is still a bit pre-release, but the game is playable and has a lot of potential.
• Oolite is a faithful recreation of Elite, but with massively updated graphics. It's certainly not a modern game, but it's a wonderful nostalgia trip if you played the original.
• OpenTTD is an open source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, which fixes a lot of the irritating misfeatures in the original while remaining totally addictive.

There are quite a lot of fun games in the list, but these are the ones I've played and remember enjoying.

None of your examples are of games. There are no good, free, fun, games.

Read this post full screen with diagrams and photos

As I tend toward fleeting obsession, and writing up this account of my poor work experience at UnnamedCompanyXXX hits the spot in the exact way that I only wish editing my resumé did (as Joey Cameau puts it, resumé writing seems largely an exercise in "listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least") what follows is a rather long explanation. For the short answer, just scroll to the image at the bottom. (The forum may crop the image, so use your browser to view the full image if you must.)

I'm hoping some day to find enough interesting artifacts from my work there (like a graph I built of the model schema) to make a really bitchin TDWTF submission, but to directly answer your question: It would seem from my research (which was quite painstaking given that that company's idea of revision control was a stack of CD-R'd ZIP archives of their Java Servlets project directory) that the original hacker to build their web-based business coordination platform understood relational databases and data access abstractions.

He or she wrote Hibernate XML model schema (a technology I thoroughly enjoyed learning to use) with logical relationships between different models, and when I ran the graphing program I wrote (produced a GraphViz DOT graph, which was transformed into SVG and then fed into ZVTM) that model schema formed very cogent, logical constellations showing at most two or three individual constellations -- everything else was well connected and sane.

The later person(s) to work on their platform, however, had no understanding whatsoever of databases, SQL, or Hibernate (I didn't know about Hibernate either, but I learned.) The "holes" I mentioned were in fact new unformalized relationships in the model schema: the programmer(s) had actually added fields like "employeeName" to, say, the Project model, and employeeName was actually a numeric key corresponding to the model called Resource, which due to the lack of documentation, evaded me for some hours as actually meaning freelancers who we may call on or have called upon in the past. Now you might even think that it was a good thing that one of the clueless hackers in between the first hacker and myself thought "employee" was a more intuitive term for this role, but in fact Employee was another model altogether! Extremely confusing!!!

The reason their system was even ailing to begin with was because some hacker(s) had actually written database queries without any SQL -- they simply pulled (often many copies of) every instance of a certain type of model in the database into the servlet task, and then filtered them down to whatever subset it was that they wanted in Java-land. A similar sort of reach-around was employed to bridge relational connections between different models without taking advantage of the programming abstractions for those either.

The first couple of weeks I spent setting up a second server, revision control, bugzilla, documentation wiki, and familiarizing myself with the code (I didn't get any documentation for months.) I spent an entire month mired in a protracted software upgrade side-quest to avoid only a few critical shortcomings in only a few software components: because the system had not been properly maintained in so long, every single software component was out of date by years and had a slew of dependencies that needed upgrading.

The very first change I committed to the new Subversion repository removed 4000 lines of code and replaced it with 14.

One day (long after it was very relevant anymore, unfortunately) they finally got the previous hacker (who was too busy with better paying work to work there anymore) to come in and help answer my questions about the code. I pleaded with him t

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia from 06-08 as an ICT (Information Communication Technology) Specialist / Education Volunteer. I had two primary projects - one was to teach software programming to students at the Gambia Technical Training Institute (GTTI) in Kanifing (which was a whole boatload of problems, let me tell you - just try teaching programming in a computer lab - WITHOUT WORKING COMPUTERS! hah! yeah, that's what I had to deal with for an entire semester, to say nothing of the intermittent electricity, crummy virus-ridden workstations, and students who classified as "advanced" by knowing how to use Microsoft Office applications.

anyway.

my second project was to create population statistics collection software for the Gambian government's Office of the National Population Secretariat. I decided to write the software using Java with RMI over SSL using a PostgreSQL back end, with a Swing front end. problem was, I didn't have a computer - last thing I thought I'd do in a rural West African country was to write software, so I didn't bring my laptop.

so I built one from spare parts at GTTI and brought that back to my place. it wasn't much, but it's what I used to start development on the software for the first 4-5 months until I could coerce another Volunteer who was visiting America to courier my laptop back with her, which she graciously did.

so then I had my laptop. but working conditions still weren't very good, in particular the heat (got upwards of 120 Fahrenheit in the hot seasons), all the fine particulate sand that blows everywhere and gets into everything electrical (especially with fans sucking it in the way it does), the intermittent electricity (thank you laptop battery and voltage regulator, surge protector, and hackneyed grounding setup!), NO internet anywhere near my place (I had to walk a couple miles to get to the nearest net connection, where I'd do my research, download files and whatever to a USB flash drive at a whopping 6-10k per second, and then walk home, clean the viruses off my flash drive that it had picked up at the internet shop (all running cracked copies of Windows without virus scanners, of course), and continue my development. Until I hit my next roadblock, at which point I'd do it all over again.

on the plus side, I didn't have anyone looking over my shoulder telling me how to write the software, which was really nice 'cause I got to try my hand as a software architect - think I did a pretty good job with it all.

by the end of my service, I had gotten the software to work, and work well - of course, the government office I was working for had neglected to follow my instructions to procure a server for the software to run on until the last week of my service (and even then it only happened because my APCD pulled strings with the Vice President, to whom she was related, to get the computer purchased). still, it was only enough time for me to install the software and then fly back home to the US. we never did pilot launch the client applications, sadly....

A Volunteer replace me there as I understand it, but he's not a software engineer and although I've offered to assist from here how I can, I'm fairly certain the project fell apart.

Oh well, c'est la vie.

if you wanna check out the software I wrote, search for "Population Tracker" on Sourceforge. or rather, here's a link: http://poptracker.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/poptracker/

http://shimmer.sourceforge.net/

Adds another layer of security if you've got SSH running.

That is why I use DenyHosts, it shares the ip's of brute force addresses among its users. That way you don't get attacked by all the bots in the botnet. If you use a rule like 3 strike-out to it you can even contribute and help others before the masses of zombies are on their doorstep.

Use SSH keys in addition to passwords. Disable ssh root logins. Use the AllowUsers command in sshd_config to restrict what accounts can log in with ssh. Edit /etc/hosts.deny and add IP ranges for where you are unlikely to login from. Use iptables rules to block people who are hammering your ssh server from the same address. Use tools like Fail2ban and DenyHosts to block other abusers and share abuser information with other victims.

Obviously good coding helps too but there is going to be some inherent latency because of the fact the Java code isn't compiled to machine code.

Actually, these days it is, especially on enterprise systems. The latest Java JITs are very, very good, and will emit machine code that rivals C and C++ for most tasks.

The biggest performance hit between Java and C is that Java programming styles involve more dynamic memory allocation than C does --- it's very common to allocate objects that will only be used a few times and then discarded. C doesn't, of course, but at the expense of significantly more complex code.

I have a pet project, Clue, which is a C compiler that will compile mostly standard C89 code into source code for dynamic languages like Javascript, Lua, Java, Perl5, etc. The code it produces is crap, but it's still an interesting toy. One of the backend targets is Java. When I do the benchmarks and compare my program, compiled from C into Java and then run on a decent JIT, I see that the Java version runs at 40% of the speed of a native version compiled with gcc.

Given the huge amount of overhead and the fact that Clue itself produces awful code --- Java doesn't support goto, so clue has to emulate them with a while loop around a switch statement! --- that is scarily good.

One day I want to replace Clue's compiler front end (currently based on Sparse) with a better one that generates Java bytecode directly and see what that does to the benchmarks.

Apache, Lighttpd and my current favorite nginx are awesome, but they dont have the close integration with their development tools and operating system that IIS does. Speaking of development tools... there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.

True, the web servers just serve webs, they don't have integrated debugging engines that IIS has... oh, wait a minute... lets take the most common web language for apache - PHP. Can you debug live PHP sites? I suppose you can. All you need to do it either know how to already, or use Google like everyone else. Failing that, you could always go to the Zend site and see what resources they have to help you (a little like going to the Microsoft site when you need information. I'd stick with Google though)

If you want an open source equivalent of Visual Studio, there's the biggie - Eclipse. That has plugins for every kind of development environment you'll ever want (just like VS where you plugin C#, VB.net, C++ modules). If you wanted something more lightweight so you can run several of them, try google again.

As for MSDN, its true MSDN is wonderful, well it was, before they deleted most pages in favour of the "this is how .net does it" versions. But on Linux you have man pages - but they're more the equivalent of technet, for programming APIs, you do have to go to the API you want, try google and bookmark the page where you got the API from. eg for Perl, there's wonderfully comprehensive documentation that actually puts MSDN to shame, for PHP - go to Zend site and see for yourself.

You have to do this anyway, even with MSDN. If you want to code Perl, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, etc - MSDN is useless to you. Even supported languages are not the best - try javascript reference in MSDN. The web's better.

But I guess, if you only want to know the VB.NET language reference, and the .NET framework then VS and MSDN are all you need. All in one handy container that you'll never think to look outside of.

Now its true that most applications run on Windows so you don't need Linux (shame really), and that MS has woken up to the areas were Linux shone (eg web serving) and is taking market share from it. I, however, think that this doesn't matter - as long as the applications are free, if everyone ran them on Windows it would cripple Microsoft. Why bother buying Office if OOo is acceptable? If MS loses all that revenue (and it has a big mouth to feed) then it will wither away quite quickly. Linux doesn't *have* to take market share from Windows. I think 5 years from now things will be different in the software world.

Check out Sunflow, a very nice and fast raytracer:

http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/

Seriously, it's a fantastic renderer and its quite speedy! :)

http://wanem.sourceforge.net/ is a great tool for this. We use it at work to test thin clients over simulated WAN links. It has a ton of options (latency, jitter, packet loss, bandwidth, etc).

http://www.rastersoft.com/programas/devede.html http://www.dvdstyler.de/ http://qdvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

How about using dvd(un)author
I have a gui app which wraps this (amongst) loads of other stuff at http://burn360.sourceforge.net/
Called obviously enough Burn360

With dual sided dvd's so cheap these days, why bother 'shrinking' the dvd?

Because one has no intention of burning it off, one just wants to dump it to ones computer? Although this raises an interesting point. What costs less, ripping the disc and compressing the contents, or buying more HDDs to store full DVD discs? Will you use less electricity powering the extra HDDs and playing back an MPEG2 (iirc, DVD is MPEG2?) than you would use re-encoding the DVDs into a more compressed format and playing back that?

To get back to the original question, I don't remember off the top of my head what I use to rip the disc, and this is a Windows solution I am providing, but MediaCoder works well for me, although as I discovered the hard way, depending on the codecs chosen the audio could be out of sync with the video after compression.

Stick in the DVD, choose the size + parameters and off you go.

http://k9copy.sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K9copy

It's very nice if you want to watch your movie with your portable mp3/video player.

I didn't go through all the messages so if it's been mentioned I second it. K9COPY is the most awesome dvd ripper/copier out there. http://k9copy.sourceforge.net/

Try using Wanem http://wanem.sourceforge.net/ You can even download it as a vmware virtual appliance.

OGMRip has been my favorite for a while. The only downside, as of now, is that you have to manually tell it if the video source is progressive/telecined/etc (the author is working on that feature). However, I might have to try handbrake again. When I last tried it, there was no good Linux GUI.

dvdbackup is your friend. If you really really really require it be packaged into a pretty ISO, then run "mkisofs -dvd-video" against the resulting directory.

http://wanem.sourceforge.net/

I think what you are looking for is something called "document management" software.

... where he could archive the PDFs and scanned documents and be able to search by keywords?

I agree with the OCR requirement, but if he just needs to search the resulting PDFs, wouldn't DocSearcher do the job for him? I've found it trivial to set up and run and it's certainly helped me keep track of docs etc.

Do people still use JDBC directly for webapps? I thought most people were using either JDO/JPA. Most of the JDBC stuff is boilerplate and takes a long time if you have a large database.

I have used this DAO Generator a few times and it really cut down development time when using postgresql databases.

Only free one I found that seems to follow the DAO pattern closely. It's a little rough but it works.

Using Google App Engine I guess is a little more like Hibernate, where it's and object relational store, except without the relational part. You need to handle the relations in your code.

Looks like it also supports JPA.

I wrote and maintain a project to do this:

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

"DocDB is a powerful and flexible collaborative web based document server which maintains a versioned list of documents. Information maintained in the database includes, author(s), title, topic(s), abstract, access restriction information, etc."

It's intended for collaborations, but groups from 5 to 500 use it.

For an Open Source DMS that generates searchable PDF Files, try ArchivistaBox: http://sourceforge.net/projects/archivista/

Tesseract (including fracture / black-letter recognition) and the Linux port of Cuneiform (BSD licence) OCR engines are used for text recognition. The hocr2pdf module (see http://www.exactcode.de/ is used to generate the searchable PDF files.
(http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=868471)

If on a Mac, here's two you may consider (neither have a web interface).

Skim is open source and is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X.

http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/

Yep is not open source, but will scan, tag and search PDFs ("like iTunes for PDFs").

http://www.ironicsoftware.com/yep/

Look into GOCR or Tesseract if this is the case.

Unless you're really lucky with the images, OCR requires a lot of work correcting errors. It would probably be less work to just be able to add searchable tags to whatever system is used to store the PDFs and leave them as images.

... where he could archive the PDFs and scanned documents and be able to search by keywords?

So, my big concern is the part where you said he scans things from books and articles and so some of the PDFs might just be massive images, right? I don't think you're going to find systems with OCR built in so you might have quite the chore on your hands. If you don't have it electronically or if it's just an image electronically, you may have to implement some sort of process for getting a doc into this system so it can be searched, right? Look into GOCR or Tesseract if this is the case.

Also, judging by your nickname ("Sooner Boomer"), you're at the University of Oklahoma. Why in the world would you name yourself after a group of people who not only disobeyed the Indian Appropriation Act but also moved out onto Native American territory before it was officially declared property of the United States? And then you also chose "Boomer" which refers to "white settlers who believed the Unassigned Lands were public property and open to anyone for settlement, not just Indian tribes. Their reasoning came from a clause in the Homestead Act of 1862, which said that any settler could claim 160 acres of public land. Some boomers entered and were removed more than once by the United States Army." If you are a descendant of either a Sooner or a Boomer, I respectfully do not agree with their actions.

Well no wonder nobody finds your site: you made a post about your fancy new domain name without even so much as shameless plug!

On a related note, try FlacSquisher today!

Seed7 :-)

Sorry, couldn't resist...

Greetings Thomas Mertes

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

I would be hesitant to sink much work into multiple mice. You would be stuck with a very small number of touches, and probably wind up using buttons to emulate multi-finger gestures. Without good guidelines for designing applications on large touch-sensitive surfaces, you're going to have trust the 'feel' of the application. Not sure how that would play out with mice.

The reacTIVision folks have an input simulator that might be a good place to start. The TUIO protocol is common enough that you wouldn't be committed to a single toolkit down the road, though it does focus on individual touches. I heard some discussion of multi-touch-and-pressure-sensitive tablets (about a foot square) last year, but don't know if it has developed into actual products yet.