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I've never seen anything on Allegroserve. What other Lisp Ap servers are there. Haskell is a kissing cousin and Happs exists.

I don't think either is nearly as full featured as ROR, much less the professional quality ones that Scala uses. Playing with Happs is on my todo list.

We use achat in our organization: http://sourceforge.net/projects/achat/ It covers all our needs.

Perl supports Unicode just fine. It is Slashcode itself that is stripping out anything that isn't the Queens ASCII. If I could hazard a guess as to why, it would be some kind of cheap way to prevent XSS attacks or page-widening posts. Dunno

Animal Shelter Manager is a free computer package, covered by the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is designed to take most (if not all) of the paperwork away from running an animal shelter/sanctuary. The system can also be used to manage a veterinary surgery or clinic.
It runs on any computer platform, utilizes other open source components and does not require a modern computer to run. http://sheltermanager.sourceforge.net/home.php

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=buy+diskless+workstations&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f

http://dosemu.sourceforge.net/

http://www.ltsp.org/

If you have the finances to go for a lawyer (which you'll need in order to send such a threat in this society) you better take them for all its worth. If they contacted his clients with paper or left them voicemails (and they still have it) then he better be suing for libel and if it was merely phone calls, slander. Either way this is the type of case that you'll win unless you either are up against someone with a big legal department or be trying to lose.

Precedent says otherwise. In a very similar case, data files from the open-source JMRI project were stolen by a crook named Matt Katzer who runs a competing company KAM Enterprises or KAMIND. Katzer also listened in to a hobbyist mailing list and patented things that the developers of various similar projects mentioned there. Katzer hired a lawyer to contact the lead JMRI developer's workplace and accuse him of being a patent and copyright thief. The JMRI developer sued for libel and was fined $30,000 in "attorney's fees" under anti-SLAPP laws.

More information about the JMRI case is at the JMRI page. The case has been covered on Slashdot before. Katzer is currently threatening JMRI with $6,000,000 in fines for copyright infringement plus three years of legal fees.

I don't think that was a tautology.

The poster I was answering to was making a point that because OM was open source, the knowledge generated by the project would not die.

I made the point that most of the code will not be reused anywhere, and therefore should be considered dead. Perhaps I should have made that clearer.

In any case, there is code that although unmaintained, reaches a level of stability and usefulness that makes people continue using it. Synergy is an example of an unmaintained project that people keep using because there is no better alternative. I don't think that there is any code from OpenMoko that will be used like that outside of the Freerunner context.

I bought a Qtek 9100 (aka HTC wizard) some years ago (~4~5). It came flashed with wm5.

Guess what? Qtek is killed, the official firmware updates went from a very reduced quantity to null.
So, right now - Zero support.

Fortunately there are groups of people constantly cooking their own ROMs with updated stuff.
www.xda-developers.com
Although, rom cookers have a hard time looking for a way to flash these phones that are usually locked down.

For those looking to have Linux on their phone, (I found http://linwizard.sourceforge.net/ for the HTC wizard and I'm part of the development team for a long time now) the task is even worse, there is absolutely no documentation about the hardware.

My point is that with opensource hardware, if the vendor dies, "supporting" the device by the community is much easier.

I would say that your list should be the other way around and the most important factor is to understand and communicate not with the people that are paying you. They are often just accountants and similar people with little insight in how the customer actually behaves.

The essential point here is that if you can understand the need of the customer really well then you are already ahead of the crowd. Every customer has their own semantics, business language and methods no matter how similar their products are to their competitors products.

If you can't understand the customer you can produce something completely and utterly useless or even something that's harmful for the customers business. That regardless of how good code you write.

But writing good code is of course also important. And if you select the right languages you can get a lot of help on the way to write good code. For Java you have FindBugs and a lot of other tools.

And if you can communicate with the people that are paying you it's an added bonus, but if they consider you a grumpy and obnoxious nerd that still is able to do a good job and actually takes good care of the customer you may have your ways. A satisfied customer is good for the business.

And even if you don't directly communicate with the customer in day to day work it's not wasted time to actually try to understand their case. Don't be afraid to check out what they actually do, and get a sense of their situation. Most customers aren't starting from zero, but have a long history of how things are done.

But be very careful with cases where the application requirements are passed through several layers before reaching you as a developer because that is How Shit Happens.

MPC-HC might be called "Home Cinema", but it also works quite well as a general continually updated fork of MPC.

ffdshow itself is long dead, with the current active fork being ffdshow-tryouts: http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/

I'm sorry, what?

The KMPlayer (Windows)

SMPlayer (Linux)

Ooooh, I should have checked out that link to Media Player Classic Home Cinema before posting. The release notes say it has a multi-monitor configuration, which probably isn't 100% of what I'm looking for because it probably doesn't have a control window to display on monitor 1, but I can live without that for now.

Any other options? Any way of getting an independent control window for MPC?

It's "current" as of September 2008..

O Rly?
*cough*

np: Autechre - We R Are Why? (WAP72 12")

If you like Media Player Classic, be sure to check out the Homecinema adaptation from Casmir666 and others:

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/

MPC-HC adds hardware accelerated H264/VC-1 decoding via DXVA for windows. There's also a new build patched by Beliyaal which uses a new Vsync detection method to substantially reduce jitter for very smooth playback:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=145203

Media Player Classic was great, but it's no longer updated and has several security flaws that are un patched.

I don't know about security flaws, but the latest version of Media Player Classic Homecinema was released in November 2008. It's one of the nicest players around. It's certainly better than VLC because VLC's UI still sucks. You guys are really funny for modding great-grandparent Funny.

After forking, the last update dates from December 10, 2008 and it is a strong sign that it is, in fact, updated. There are also another fork that specialises in home cinema, hence its name Home Cinema.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli2/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpc-hc/

Also, why hunting for all the codecs when you can just as well download the current ffdshow from, say, afterdawn?

Media Player Classic was great, but it's no longer updated and has several security flaws that are un patched.

There's a current and very good fork called Media Player Classic Homecinema, you just needed to do a very small amount of research.

VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player was good up to the 0.8.6 releases and after that it took a bit of a tumble in design and lost popularity because of its tendency to crash or freeze at any minor error or corruption in the media files.

Media Player Classic Homecinema stepped in and took the reigns after that. This player includes internal decoder filters for MPEG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (XviD, DivX), H.264 (Blu-ray), and VC1 (Blu-ray) along with audio decoders for AC3 (Dolby Digital), DTS (Digital Theater Systems), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), etc. It also includes native support for MKV (Matroska) and AVI (Audio Video Interleave) file formats.

The most important feature of MPC-HC is the hardware accelerated DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) decoder filters for the H.264 and VC1 Blu-ray codecs allowing this player to leverage ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards to handle the work load with complex 720p and 1080p movies. The difference in CPU usage goes from 70-100% on software decoding with dropped frames to 5% on DXVA decoding and no dropped frames, of course this is relative to the CPU being used.

DXVAChecker is the best tool to use to determine if your video card and latest drivers support hardware acceleration. It will list the list of video streams that are accelerated such as MPEG2, WMV9, VC1, H264 along with DXVA1 (XP DX9) or 2 (Vista DX10) for the version along with the resolution such as 720x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080 that is supported.

FFDshow Tryouts is another codecs to look into is that is based on libavcodec and ffmpeg-mt (multi-threaded) and handles pretty much all audio and video codecs in software using CPU decoding and includes a lot of filters for audio 2.0->5.1 up-mixing, real-time AC3 encoding for surround sound, noise filtering, and video filters for noise, sharpening, and subtitle support.

CoreAVC Pro codec is the most efficient software and hardware nVidia CUDA accelerated H.264 (Blu-ray) decoding. In hardware CUDA mode it users ~15% CPU to perform decoding and in software mode it users 50-70%, relative to the CPU being used of course. This codec a bit more efficient than FFDshow in software but a lot better in CUDA mode, nVidia video card required.

Haali Media Splitter is the preferred splitter for MKV (Matroska), MP4, and AVI files. This is the recommended splitter for these file formats over the internal splitters that usually come with the players.

MPlayer Media Player is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.

VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player was good up to the 0.8.6 releases and after that it took a bit of a tumble in design and lost popularity because of its tendency to crash or freeze at any minor error or corruption in the media files.

Media Player Classic Homecinema stepped in and took the reigns after that. This player includes internal decoder filters for MPEG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (XviD, DivX), H.264 (Blu-ray), and VC1 (Blu-ray) along with audio decoders for AC3 (Dolby Digital), DTS (Digital Theater Systems), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), etc. It also includes native support for MKV (Matroska) and AVI (Audio Video Interleave) file formats.

The most important feature of MPC-HC is the hardware accelerated DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) decoder filters for the H.264 and VC1 Blu-ray codecs allowing this player to leverage ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards to handle the work load with complex 720p and 1080p movies. The difference in CPU usage goes from 70-100% on software decoding with dropped frames to 5% on DXVA decoding and no dropped frames, of course this is relative to the CPU being used.

DXVAChecker is the best tool to use to determine if your video card and latest drivers support hardware acceleration. It will list the list of video streams that are accelerated such as MPEG2, WMV9, VC1, H264 along with DXVA1 (XP DX9) or 2 (Vista DX10) for the version along with the resolution such as 720x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080 that is supported.

FFDshow Tryouts is another codecs to look into is that is based on libavcodec and ffmpeg-mt (multi-threaded) and handles pretty much all audio and video codecs in software using CPU decoding and includes a lot of filters for audio 2.0->5.1 up-mixing, real-time AC3 encoding for surround sound, noise filtering, and video filters for noise, sharpening, and subtitle support.

CoreAVC Pro codec is the most efficient software and hardware nVidia CUDA accelerated H.264 (Blu-ray) decoding. In hardware CUDA mode it users ~15% CPU to perform decoding and in software mode it users 50-70%, relative to the CPU being used of course. This codec a bit more efficient than FFDshow in software but a lot better in CUDA mode, nVidia video card required.

Haali Media Splitter is the preferred splitter for MKV (Matroska), MP4, and AVI files. This is the recommended splitter for these file formats over the internal splitters that usually come with the players.

MPlayer Media Player is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.

Sorry... though I appreciate VLC, I think its far from the best media player. My vote would go to the numerous incarnation of MPlayer. From Xbox Media Center to SMPlayer on Linux and Windows to MPlayer OSX Extended on Mac OS X, MPlayer has always been able to play whatever weird codec or container I toss at it. Meanwhile, every time I've attempted to use VLC (mainly on OS X) I've become frustrated by hangs and crashes... Maybe I'll hate this version a little less?

Upgrade to links. Srsly. I used it for some time on a lousy laptop with excellent results.

Yes, in fact, HtmlUnit is my preferred browser simulation library in Java for this very reason: it allows you to write very easy to understand Java code, and it uses Rhino as a JavaScript interpreter. Completely brilliant, and yet few people know about it.

Out of curiosity, is that actually true? Last time I checked, the only way to compile applications for the Windows Mobile platform required that you have at least the "Standard" edition of Visual Studio, which will set you back $250.

http://cegcc.sourceforge.net/
http://classic.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=11502&associateid=1224

I'm sure at least one of these WinCE ports of GCC works.

Note that they never sere alleging violation of FAT32 patents, merely long name support.

When you say "Nobody supports anything else" I presume you mean in small devices, cameras, phones, thumb drives, etc.

But use of other file systems on such devices would be no worse than distributing drivers (like was done for Win98) and using EXT2/3/4.

A high quality windows driver released free and clear for that pretty much flips the coin on Microsoft. There are several of these out there: ( http://www.fs-driver.org/ http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/ ) but its not clear that they are robust enough for device vendors to ship millions of units with.

Amiga OS still multitasks when running one application,

Not necessarily - "Grabby" AmigaOS applications could "take over" with the (badly named) Forbid() call, disabling preemptive task switching, later returning control with a Permit() call, at least if they hadn't trashed vital OS structures in the meantime.

Importantly, other interrupts (display, disk, ports, etc.) could be left intact. Meaning you only needed to override the bits you needed to override. You could also disable interrupts totally with the (also abominably named) Disable()/Enable() pair. Note that suspending multitasking didn't preclude you making lots of OS calls, since the amigaos was mostly made of reentrant shared libraries.

Amiga sound and video apps and of course games regularly did so to get realtime guarantees, though it was *not* officially encouraged: users mostly disliked apps doing so, mind, but so long as the app eventually returned to the OS it wasn't a total showstopper. Gamers of course didn't care and just rebooted after games anyway, so games tended to never return to the OS and irreversibly (for that boot) trash OS structures and custom chip registers and such.

On a modern OS the ability to mess at that level is of course more tightly controlled - linux has its realtime extensions and so forth.

Several similarly silly schemes actually exist (see the OFF System, and lawyers tend to be unimpressed - they all amount to encrypting the communication and/or obfuscating what you're transferring. So if what you're transferring is copyrighted, you're still infringing on that copyright.

See What Colour are your bits?.

Even worse, Psyco is
32-bit only : Psyco does not support the 64-bit x86 architecture, unless you have a Python compiled in 32-bit compatibility mode. There are no plans to port Psyco to 64-bit architectures.

I hear you. I don't have any more 32-bit boxes to my name, and I'm hesitant to upgrade a few of our servers at work to x86_64 because, without psyco, it'll slow things down drastically.

Psyco is x86 only and uses a lot of memory

Even worse, Psyco is 32-bit only : Psyco does not support the 64-bit x86 architecture, unless you have a Python compiled in 32-bit compatibility mode. There are no plans to port Psyco to 64-bit architectures. This

However , as far as "requires addition coding", I think you're a little off-base.. unless you consider "import psyco" to be a lot of work.

Psyco only works for 32-bit x86, and many Python features are unsupported.

I use the libpurple-based Mac OS X client Adium, and there is a plug-in available called Challenge/Response. This plug-in will intercept any messages from users not already on my buddy list and ask any question I like; if the user gets it right, I am asked to block/allow the user as if the plug-in wasn't even there. I used to be flooded with spam whenever I used my old MSN/Windows Live! account, but now I never get one bit of spam.

Windows and Linux/*NIX users should check out Adium's sister project Pidgin, and you can use the Bot Sentry or pidgin-privacy-please plug-ins to the same effect.

AROS is an open source operating system largely source-compatible with AmigaOS 3.x APIs and runs on modern PCs. It's not "finished", and shares AmigaOS weaknesses as well as strengths, but is usable (helped by recompiles of a load of amiga stuff from the Aminet (still around!) I guess) :

http://aros.sourceforge.net/

Grab a liveCD from Icaros desktop and give it a go.

http://vmwaros.blogspot.com/

I wouldn't really want to use a system lacking full memory protection in the modern era (though some effort at retrofitting memory protection is underway IIRC), but it does work.

This would be a good time to spread the word of one of my favorite open source game projects, Voxelstein 3D:

http://voxelstein3d.sourceforge.net/

It's still only at v0.1, it only has one level and it is a bit buggy in places. But the fact that due to being build from voxels, EVERYTHING is destructible (even more than in Red Faction) sort of makes up for it. It's a really fun take on the Wolfenstein ideas, and I would love for it to be build into a full 10+ level game.

Blowing down walls with C4 never gets old :-)

Also, the FLAC SourceForge page lists some portable/handheld players with FLAC support, but it's obviously not exhaustive since no Samsung players are listed.

It's not just about sticker price, and "FOSS beyond Linux servers" is pretty broad.

I'm a tech writer/UI designer/sometimes web guy at a small (~75 employees) ISV. Our company uses, and even prefers, FOSS when it suits us. Our two head IT guys are Linux nerds like me, which helps.

Basically, the F/OSS software we use falls into one of several categories (this only includes the software I use in my roles, and that I encountered during a stint in QA).

1. FOSS software that sees regular use.
   • Linux: It powers our web and mail servers. Our QA guys use Linux + VMWare to test our (Windows-based) server software. I've been offered a Linux workstation for a web-based project I'm working on, but XP+IIS may be the only solution.*
   • Audacity: We use this to record voice tracks for Captivate demos.
   • 7-zip: Every workstation has this.
   • Firefox: Again, the company standard.
   • Notepad++: A few of us have this for editing raw HTML/CSS/XML/etc.
   • OpenOffice: Don't get excited, Office 2003 is still our bread and butter. This lives on my secondary workstation for simple one-off tasks.
2. OSS software that was tried but failed
   • GIMP: This was before I started at the company, and at the time it couldn't equal Paint Shop Pro (which is what we use now).
   • Scribus: We tried this before caving and purchasing FrameMaker 8. Scribus simply can't match the features or (more importantly) training resources of FrameMaker.

We also use Lotus Notes, which is based on Eclipse.

* I have 2 XP workstations so that I can run every product I might need to document, some of which must be run simultaneously on separate machines. Neither machine is up to spec for Xen or VMWare.

It's not just about sticker price, and "FOSS beyond Linux servers" is pretty broad.

I'm a tech writer/UI designer/sometimes web guy at a small (~75 employees) ISV. Our company uses, and even prefers, FOSS when it suits us. Our two head IT guys are Linux nerds like me, which helps.

Basically, the F/OSS software we use falls into one of several categories (this only includes the software I use in my roles, and that I encountered during a stint in QA).

1. FOSS software that sees regular use.
   • Linux: It powers our web and mail servers. Our QA guys use Linux + VMWare to test our (Windows-based) server software. I've been offered a Linux workstation for a web-based project I'm working on, but XP+IIS may be the only solution.*
   • Audacity: We use this to record voice tracks for Captivate demos.
   • 7-zip: Every workstation has this.
   • Firefox: Again, the company standard.
   • Notepad++: A few of us have this for editing raw HTML/CSS/XML/etc.
   • OpenOffice: Don't get excited, Office 2003 is still our bread and butter. This lives on my secondary workstation for simple one-off tasks.
2. OSS software that was tried but failed
   • GIMP: This was before I started at the company, and at the time it couldn't equal Paint Shop Pro (which is what we use now).
   • Scribus: We tried this before caving and purchasing FrameMaker 8. Scribus simply can't match the features or (more importantly) training resources of FrameMaker.

We also use Lotus Notes, which is based on Eclipse.

* I have 2 XP workstations so that I can run every product I might need to document, some of which must be run simultaneously on separate machines. Neither machine is up to spec for Xen or VMWare.

The only acceptable scaling method for pixel art is unfiltered "nearest neighbor" scaling, as used in the original game.

There exist algorithms for enlarging pixel art that overcome both the blocky appearance of nearest-neighbor resampling and the blurry appearance of linear resampling. The Scale2x algorithm, for instance, can be applied multiple times. The hq2x, hq3x, and hq4x can be applied only as the final step, but with amazing results.

I dunno. At least with email, if you set up a chain of accounts that bounce around to a number of nym and mixmaster remailers...and have the final destination be a USENET group set up for nothing but encrypted messages....you are pretty close to completely anonymous.

That's what application data blocks would be for: http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html#metadata_block_application . Nobody has written such an application yet, though.

I like how in Windows there is this clip art thing that comes up when you try to get help in office and it tells you stories but it doesn't really help you find any answers.

Solved.

How about this? http://ipodlinux.sourceforge.net/screens.shtml

This will really give you geek cred.

But this new format makes two copies of everything, it only packages it in one file! It's the same thing as picking a mp3 and "attaching" a flac file at the end. The space occupied by the too is the same, but in only one file. If you had the two, at least you could save space in your portable players.

Btw, http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/ is great: I keep my flac dirs in music/flac and I mount them using this in music/mp3. The mp3 dir show me all the tracks in mp3, so I can copy them directly to my player, but in reality they're converted on-the-fly as the copy occurs, so the used space isn't duplicated.

There's a FOSS program called Synergy which basically acts as a virtual switch-box, with the switching action triggered by moving the mouse pointer off the side of the desktop. Basically, it lets you control multiple computers as if they were multiple monitors on a single computer. (Obviously each computer has its own taskbar, or equivalents). It's very awesome, although it obviously relies on the computers being networked.

There are proprietary equivalents as well, which appear a bit more polished, but the value they added didn't seem worth the price to me.

Just keep all your FLAC files on PC or NAS, and when you want to load them on a player, copy them from the MP3FS directory.

You don't need to keep duplicate lossy files around, and you don't have huge chunks of lossless music taking up space on a player that can't play them anyway.

If you're really so curious you can oprofile and find out yourself.

Note: I'm not defending the Phoronix guys. As a previous poster pointed out, they are inherently bad at explaining the why things are slower and sometimes they are flat out wrong

For others who are interested in Berkeley-style key-value stores, check out Tokyo Cabinet.

I know you said no vi editors, but there are visual fully GUI editors based around vi. Some of them start in edit mode and you never have to use command mode if you don't want to, because nearly everything is in the menus.

One such editor is Cream which doesn't even enable vi/vim's command mode unless you set a preference to use it. Everything is available via the drop-down menu and/or keyboard shortcuts (which follow IBM's Common User Access guidelines).

Cream includes tabbed file editing, optional function folding, handles different line endings on any host platform, unlimited undo/redo, syntax highlighting for 250 languages and variants, optional automatic text indention based on language, macros with recording capability, block comment and uncomment selected text, diff mode, separate configurations for separate users from a single system-wide installation, column (as opposed to line/row) selections, multiple color themes for syntax highlighting, go to line number or percentage through file, and a whole bunch of other features.

There are also plugins to do everything from GPG encryption at the selection block or the file level to automatic email address munging to keep spammers from easily harvesting addresses in the text.

It's built around Vim, but it's also built to allow you to completely ignore that fact.

Personally, I use gVim as much or more than Cream when on Windows, and I also use regular console vim on Win on my office Windows box. On Linux I just use regular old console Vim in a better console than what Windows has standard. I'm a Vim aficionado, though, and several people I know who don't like Vim do like Cream.

I don't think the server version of OSX can even do it, but nearly every version of Linux can do it. The normal version of OSX at least supports text based ssh logins.

Actually, if you use this FREE Vine server, you can run multiple concurrent ***GUI*** sessions (using computers with VNC clients, like this one, or this one) even with the desktop versions of OS X (since 10.4). The only thing you can't have remotely is sound (which is a VNC restriction).

This is a zero-dollar solution, and it works just fine. I tried it about a week ago using OS X Tiger (10.4).

I don't think the server version of OSX can even do it, but nearly every version of Linux can do it. The normal version of OSX at least supports text based ssh logins.

Actually, if you use this FREE Vine server, you can run multiple concurrent ***GUI*** sessions (using computers with VNC clients, like this one, or this one) even with the desktop versions of OS X (since 10.4). The only thing you can't have remotely is sound (which is a VNC restriction).

This is a zero-dollar solution, and it works just fine. I tried it about a week ago using OS X Tiger (10.4).

Their server is extremely slow right now that Slashdot's linking it. Here's some binaries:
Win: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/wesnoth-1.6a-win32.exe?download
OSX: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/Wesnoth_1.6a.dmg?download
and the source code:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/wesnoth-1.6a.tar.bz2?download
The Linux binaries page doesn't load right now to get more links, sorry.

Their server is extremely slow right now that Slashdot's linking it. Here's some binaries:
Win: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/wesnoth-1.6a-win32.exe?download
OSX: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/Wesnoth_1.6a.dmg?download
and the source code:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/wesnoth-1.6a.tar.bz2?download
The Linux binaries page doesn't load right now to get more links, sorry.