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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.

I ran my first VM on a 386SX-16, not the point really. This guy wants a SAN and to run Oracle RAC on it.

Which also doesn't require special hardware. He could set up a virtual disk and attach it to all of the machines using the Linux kernel's network block device support. Sure, it won't be (anywhere near) as fast as a fibre channel setup, but it'll do the job (i.e., allowing him to share a single [virtual] disk between multiple [virtual] machines in order to test the software and do development work).

I have to agree; yet parallel or (at least) multi-threaded algorithms haven't made it into standard libraries. An extreme example is the Standard C library qsort(3): There are multi-threaded versions of it available http://libmt.sourceforge.net/ but not included in the base libraries. And the glibc is imho a integral part of Linux. I don't know exactly about Windows, but I assume the standard sorting function to be a serial one, too.

I honestly want to know why vendors don't use MSI.

Because there's no good way to make MSI's easily.

On one side, there are probably plenty of GUI apps to make MSI files. A basic one comes with Visual Studio, but you just don't have control enough over what it does. There's InstallShield too, but it's pay-for, and kinda heavyweight.

On the other side, you have WiX which attempted to be a scripting language to make MSI's, but that failed spectacularly IMHO. You have to declare in advance components, paths, files, and assign GUIDs to every single thing, it's a bother. Oh, and, all this, and you don't even have a GUI for your installer, just the "Please wait, Windows is configuring blah blah" dialog.

GUI support in MSI's seems to have been an afterthought.

And don't even get me started about trying to do it from scratch using Orca.

So, by the time I'd be done fighting with whatever restrictions the tool I'd have chosen would put in front of me, I could have whipped an NSIS installer script in 10 minutes with complete Modern UI and such.

WARNING: The following post is spazzy, and also a huge wall of text. Don't get flattened.

Linux has an annoying security model, for one reason - it's not very unified between cmdline and GUI.

I've been using Ubuntu for about a month now. There's a few things that just don't make sense, but most do. Now that I'm thinking about them, I may as well list them.

1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?

2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?

3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal.

These fail:

cd etc/X11/

cd etc/X11

cd /etc/X11/

cd /etc/X11

cd etc
cd /X11

cd etc
cd X11

This doesn't:

cd /etc
cd X11

Would it hurt to be a little intuitive about where I wanted to go? Apparently so...

4) More #2. It would be much easier to have a way to kick gedit up to root so I can save xorg.conf. That'd save me having to navigate to that folder, which took 10 minutes the first time.

5) Argh. More #3. My Windows partitions often have folders about 8-20 deep. Navigating with the terminal is... horrible. I may have to resize my linux partition and just stick everything on it, because accessing stuff on a shared partition with good organization is such a huge PITA.

6) Oh dear god. I made a shortcut to a file on an NTFS partition and put it on the desktop. The thing is, when I open it, I can't go "up" to the folder's parent folders - it takes me "up" (back) to the desktop. Great. I guess I'll get into the habbit of opening the terminal, typing "gksudo nautilus" in, then navigating manually to the folder I need on my NTFS partition, so that I can go "up" properly and copy stuff around...

And btw, this only takes 1-3 seconds on Windows, because I have a modified run box that opens the correct folder based on the name and some simple heuristics. Why can't linux have a decent find feature? And for that matter, why can't Microsoft create one for Windows? Bleh. They both fail at finding - but at least I can navigate quicker under Windows thanks to brilliant third party coders.

And now some more subjective personal peeves...

7) I hate bash. I really really hate it. A misplaced space, and the whole script breaks down. It's actually simpler for me to script stuff in java than in bash - perhaps because of the more lenient syntax of java. O_o

8) What is up with all that MIME handling rather than extention handling? I have some folders that take a second to display on Windows, but literally take 25-40 seconds in Ubuntu, because of all the identifying of file types.

9) I love the desktop security. Just about everything I try to run off the desktop fails. I tried running a java jar that loads and displays a PNG file from the same folder. It failed - no read permissions! Then I tried un-taring something, and that failed too! (tar -xvvf blah.tar?) I tried to copy it to my NTFS partition, but that also failed, so I re-downloaded it. After verifying they had identical MD5's, I deleted the one on the desktop and un-tar'd it successfully from the NTFS partition. Very cool desktop security. I'll make a note not to download stuff there. That's not really a peeve, to be honest - it was more fascinating to me than anything else.

Final Note: Right now I'm happy and a bit annoyed.

I got systester to compile a little while ago. After that, I installed Fennec, which I had to manually un-tar into /usr/share/, then set up privs so th

I would buy it, open it, immediatly rip it to FLAC, convert those files to MP3 V0, and drop it on my MP3 player. From that point forward, if I am at my computer, I am listening to FLAC, and if I am away, I am listening on my MP3 player.

Shameless plug: I wrote FlacSquisher for just that purpose. I do the same thing, but with Oggs on my Rockbox'd Sansa.

Having been a hiring manager for a couple of years, I got used to scanning resumes and deciding within 10 seconds whether to read further or not. Guess what: the one thing that matters is relevant experience.

How can you get relevant experience in a few months? Contribute to an Open Source project. Join one of the Fair projects listed on my site.

Contribute. Learn. Then put this fresh experience on your resume. Then you'll be hired (at least you would have a year ago - in this new economy, even Bill Gates would be jobless).

Buy used CDs, or buy music directly from the artist (either "buy a CD at the show" for local bands, or go the Trent Reznor route). That way, you don't get high sound quality, and the labels don't get a dime.

Then rip the CDs to FLAC (and get FLACs from Trent Reznor if you buy his music), and use FlacSquisher (shameless plug) to convert the FLACs to Oggs for any portable devices you might own.

Unfortunately, many password systems will reject those passwords. I used to use a similar system, but started seeing errors about "your new password cannot use more than x characters from your old password." This of course means that they're saving my old passwords in plaintext or reversible encryption, which is a security risk in itself.

My most recent scheme is to use a pattern on the keyboard (yay for muscle memory). Usually I'll do the pattern once, then hold shift and do the same pattern. This gives you upper and lower case, and if you include a number or two it gives you numbers and punctuation. As long as your pattern is 5 characters long you'll pass 99% of the password rules out there (5 keys, hold shift then the same 5 keys makes 10 digits). When the time comes to change your password, shift the pattern one key to the left or right. This way I can at least guess my password in a few tries if I have to.

My fallback is this:
http://gnukeyring.sourceforge.net/
Stores the passwords on my palm pilot, encrypted. As long as I remember my decryption password and don't lose my palm pilot, I'm golden.

http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ I love this app, only need to remember a single password.

Personally, I believe they are all doing it wrong, and all in the same way. They all assume things about the programming languages that will target the VM, and build the VM to support the constructs they've assumed the language will use.

I am much more in favor of a language-agostic approach. In my own TurboVM, I have instead chosen to implement a simple, RISC-like instruction set, reasoning that this would allow the same techniques that are used to implement existing languages on real hardware to be used to implement languages on TurboVM. No need to work around the fact that you get objects and methods, garbage collection, dynamic typing, etc. when you don't want them - TurboVM gives what a real machine would give you, without any bias towards specific programming languages.

Need for Speed, isn't a simulator, it's arcade. Although more recently with Carbon, and Undercover, a lot of the cars are day-to-day drivers, but you can still plow into a wall and drive away, and excluding cop spikes, you wont get a flat tire or blow an engine (except maybe in the drag races).

Simulators, like GTR/Race/Evo, Live For Speed, rFactor or TORCS either come with, or are available as downloads after, normal day to day cars, likewise most flying sims have Cessna's and ultra-lights which some people do use daily/weekly/monthly...

And generally most people with a bit of extra cash (usually couple hundred dollars, sometimes they go on insurance + per-lap basis), who lives near a race track, can go race their car, someone elses car, and depending on the track, rent a car, which sometimes does include Ferrari's et al.

riiiight, and you liked cabbage as a kid...
if some of your colleagues regularly create a spreadsheet with that many rows, then they are doing it wrong... they need a different tool called Database...
they can't be possibly scrolling through that amount of data and another simpler alternative is to use a Linux JDBC/ODBC driver on the Excel spreadsheet:
- check this
- or someone suggested to write a control file and put it in oracle using sqlldr

You might want to have a look at Synergy for working across both systems. It can share the clipboard between them so you could copy something on the Linux box, and paste it into an email on the XP box.

Edit your hosts file (theres even one for Windows), and put in all adservers to redirect to localhost. There. No ads, similarly, no extra bloat from Adblock. Plus, it works on whatever, e-mail, browsers, etc.

Thanks for the tip. But this has been discussed before on slashdot the problems with the privoxy and host file mechanisms.

AFAIR Privoxy needs to load the whole page before delivering to the client (that's expected, since it needs the whole stuff in memory in order to analyse it properly).

Anyways, if your problem is restricted to not displaying advertisements, you may try Ziproxy.
It's a transcoding proxy (recompresses pictures and other stuff) and it has a number of weird features, one of those being an option which may be used to replace only pictures from a URL list for empty ones. Not really an ad-blocker proxy per se, but it may be used that way.

I used to work on POESIA several times ago (I actually even initiated it as an R&D project). It is opensource (GPL). I don't work on it anymore, and I don't know if there is still some usable code. But one could try http://www.poesia-filter.org/ and more importantly http://sourceforge.net/projects/poesia/ My youngest child is 12 years old. I believe the most important filter is to have him surf the web in the living room. (He sometimes uses a netbook, but I disabled the wifi & ethernet)

I use IPCop with Cop+ addon. This is a linux based Firewall with content filtering on top which uses blacklists etc to block site, you also have the ability to add you own blacklists and also complete control over sites with execption rules. Been using it for many years and have not seen any porn in that time. Install IPCop http://www.ipcop.org/ The install the add-ons server 2.3b2 http://firewalladdons.sourceforge.net/ Then install Copplus 2.2-b3 http://firewalladdons.sourceforge.net/ I also use other add-ons like Nettraffic to view daily internet(Red) interface traffic across my home network.

I use IPCop with Cop+ addon. This is a linux based Firewall with content filtering on top which uses blacklists etc to block site, you also have the ability to add you own blacklists and also complete control over sites with execption rules. Been using it for many years and have not seen any porn in that time. Install IPCop http://www.ipcop.org/ The install the add-ons server 2.3b2 http://firewalladdons.sourceforge.net/ Then install Copplus 2.2-b3 http://firewalladdons.sourceforge.net/ I also use other add-ons like Nettraffic to view daily internet(Red) interface traffic across my home network.

The idea of running Linux on a PicAxe microcontroller must excite a lot of people... Every link to a project or explanation of "linaxe" results in 404 errors and more 404 errors.

For some reason the file gets bigger, when it actually works. I Googled for answers but didn't find much. My only guess is that photostory3 is doing something funky in the wmv file.

PhotoStory generates wmv files that are not really a video in the normal sense. It contains the still photos and the different effects that are applied to them, and the soundtrack. Think of it as being the vector art of videos. The decoder then does all the work in "rasterizing" the video. That is why when converting it to a real video format makes the file larger.

As for OSS DVD creators, take a look at DVD-Slideshow and 'Q' DVD-Author. There are other frontends to dvdauthor which are listed on the dvdauthor website. Or you could just use the command-line dvdauthor without a frontend to master the DVD.

For some reason the file gets bigger, when it actually works. I Googled for answers but didn't find much. My only guess is that photostory3 is doing something funky in the wmv file.

PhotoStory generates wmv files that are not really a video in the normal sense. It contains the still photos and the different effects that are applied to them, and the soundtrack. Think of it as being the vector art of videos. The decoder then does all the work in "rasterizing" the video. That is why when converting it to a real video format makes the file larger.

As for OSS DVD creators, take a look at DVD-Slideshow and 'Q' DVD-Author. There are other frontends to dvdauthor which are listed on the dvdauthor website. Or you could just use the command-line dvdauthor without a frontend to master the DVD.

For some reason the file gets bigger, when it actually works. I Googled for answers but didn't find much. My only guess is that photostory3 is doing something funky in the wmv file.

PhotoStory generates wmv files that are not really a video in the normal sense. It contains the still photos and the different effects that are applied to them, and the soundtrack. Think of it as being the vector art of videos. The decoder then does all the work in "rasterizing" the video. That is why when converting it to a real video format makes the file larger.

As for OSS DVD creators, take a look at DVD-Slideshow and 'Q' DVD-Author. There are other frontends to dvdauthor which are listed on the dvdauthor website. Or you could just use the command-line dvdauthor without a frontend to master the DVD.

.. always seem fun and then never seem to go anywhere. Anyone else remember psDooM? Blast away unwanted processes with a shotgun? Sounds great, right?

Well.. turns out, when you actually want to terminate a process, Windows Task Manager, or ps & kill are vastly more efficient, effective, and obvious tools to do the job.

A good idea for anti-patent people (and I have a few of these things and don't like them) is for the eff or somebody to create a easily search-able list of 'good ideas' top protect the ideas from being patented.

Done.

Disclaimer: I work in this industry.

To be blunt, CCHIT is among the least significant and cheapest of the regulatory considerations in healthcare software, particularly when you're talking hospital-caliber systems. Far more onerous are the FDA regulations and oversight (at this level, healthcare software is regulated as a medical device), and similar bodies in other countries. Software bugs can also create enormous legal risks; malpractice or wrongful death claims are never cheap, and bad code or human error does not get you off the hook. All of this means enormous testing and documentation costs, shared by both the software companies and the hospitals. (The VA, as an arm of the federal government, enjoys some legal advantages over other hospitals in this regard.)

Combine this with the enormous complexity and the domain expertise required to model what can occur in a hospital, and you have a market with a very high cost to enter - not the best opportunity for open source. Indeed, there's been several highly-capitalized and failed attempts to enter the market by tech giants ...

That said, most modern healthcare software contains and uses healthy quantities of open-source code, but generally not of the GPL variety. We regularly contribute to the projects we use, inasmuch as our employment contracts permit. However, generally speaking, these projects are not specifically healthcare oriented (though there are exceptions - hapi is a personal favorite.)

tively...

Screenshot of OpenEMR:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openemr/#item3rd-2

The resources that already exist in the USA can be brought to bear by offering these to as MANY doctors as possible. It will first requiring conducting info gathering on providers, their electronic systems, having some insiders in the many types of medical offices to come in and user-test/kick the tires on these apps, and get THEIR opinions as to whether the software is worthy of being supported. It appears that some of the open source software might be qualified to pass the end-user-suitability-test (for lack of a better description). If ANY of these apps are found to be half-baked, like many apps written BY developers FOR developers (rather than BY developers FOR end-users), then they should by all means be shunned so they are forced to be upgraded to suitability for the office. After all, if medical, dental, and other offices reject the software, why should regulatory and office personnel even *listen*?

But, again, some/most of these apps *seem* to have what it takes; they seem to be the survivors of the past few years that i've noticed their names (since, oh, ~2001/2003).

Beyond that, the biggest hurdle will be lobbyists/SIGs (Special Interest Groups) that could be working on behalf of defense contractor-named companies (your Lockheed/GE/ and others-- who, incidentally have their hands in ship passenger reservation/assignment software, too...) who want NO competition that would undermine their self-anointed positions of high income.

http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/

lol this was marked insightful?
Pardon me for sounding like a tool, but link please?

But on a serious note, imagine a game that required those specs... one could only imagine what kind of stuff would be going on.
Voxelstein 3D with graphics rivalling current Crysis?

Mac OS X drivers and Windows drivers are available for ext2. FAT is not absolutely necessary for cross platform compatible file storage hardware.

Mac OS X drivers and Windows drivers are available for ext2. FAT is not absolutely necessary for cross platform compatible file storage hardware.

From wikipedia:

"Van Eck phreaking is the process of eavesdropping on the contents of a CRT display by detecting its electromagnetic emissions".

Also worth checking: open-source Van Eck phreaking implementation.

I hate pdf. Is there anything that can prise the text out of them yet?

Try PDFTOHTML.

I'm straying away from the topic further but since we are at it, I'd like to recommend aria2. From the project's website:

aria2 can download a file from multiple sources/protocols and tries to utilize your maximum download bandwidth. It supports downloading a file from HTTP(S)/FTP and BitTorrent at the same time, while the data downloaded from HTTP(S)/FTP is uploaded to the BitTorrent swarm.

Last time I used it I was downloading the install disk image of Fedora 10. Someone at Fedora's support forum posted a list of URLs of the image hosted on a great number of mirrors. I tried downloading it from those mirrors and BitTorrent swarm with aria2 at the same time, and the performance was really amazing.

The 12kHz figure is from the low-pass filter, and that can be configured. I think default for LAME nowadays is around 18kHz.

Also, with modern versions of LAME 128kbps isn't all that bad, compared to 5+ years ago. You can still hear artifacts, yes, but 128kbps now is at least acceptable, IMO. As in, if I were to download a 128kbps copy of a song nowadays, I wouldn't try to find another copy unless I was ready to buy the album.

This coming from a guy who rips to FLAC and only transcodes to ~192kbps Oggs for the sake of his 2GB Rockbox'd Sansa. ;)

Shameless plug, while I'm at it: I wrote FlacSquisher to do that transcoding. I released a new version last week, which now uses NSIS to install!

Do you know is there alternative for MS Visio?

Choices include Dia, Kivio and Umbrello. See the other answers, too.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/geoip/

Cygwin is ok, but I prefer just to unpack unxutils to path.

Why not use LSTP?

Did you mean LTSP? http://ltsp.sourceforge.net/

Media Player Classic is not under active development anymore. There is a fork, MPC Home Cinema, that retains the same interface and adds new features like hardware accelerated AVC and VC-1 decoding on cards that support it. (Geforce 8xxx or newer and any Radeon HD) There are a lot of other improvements as well, see the changelog.

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

You can also find current development versions of the player on the doom9 forum.
http://forum.doom9.org/forumdisplay.php?f=15

I'm currently developing a Java fingerprinting library ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/jfooid/ ) and it's learned me if you want to fingerprint something, it needs a certain unique continuity. Fingerprints have that in their unique curves. Audio has it in the sound wave but I don't see how a piece of paper has that, let alone be able to distinguish a copy from an original.

It is interesting that his follows closely on the heels of the FAAC 1.28 Release and FAAD2 2.7 Release after an over 2 year haitus. On the other hand, the developer mailing list is quite active considering I get sourceforge-marked [SPAM] between 5-10 times per day.

It is interesting that his follows closely on the heels of the FAAC 1.28 Release and FAAD2 2.7 Release after an over 2 year haitus. On the other hand, the developer mailing list is quite active considering I get sourceforge-marked [SPAM] between 5-10 times per day.

But there isn't anything like ffmpeg for batch transcoding or even one-off transcoding. A lot of commercial apps even use ffmpeg for transcoding.

Yeah learning the command line switches are kind of a bitch, but once you do, you will know more about how audio, video and metadata are combined to create "media". That said, there are some good front-ends to ffmpeg--for example MediaCoder, which lets you feel the joy of transcoding.

I'll throw my recommendation behind this one. Quicktime's interface isn't bad but it's format support is terrible (and for things like WMV files you have to wait for a good amount of time where it does a mini-conversion before it plays). I *normally* find VLC a very usable player on most systems (Linux, Windows) but the Mac OS X version has always been really, really buggy for me. Mplayer Extended gives you essentially the Mplayer backend with a Quicktime-esque interface.

The only thing that still bugs me on Mplayer Extended (and it's often the same on many players) is that clicking in the tracking bar to a specific location in a video often puts you "somewhere kinda close to that point" rather than EXACTLY to that point. Minor quip though.

Honestly though, as much as people knock Windows, I've STILL not found anything on any platform that beats Media Player Classic for a simple, no nonsense video player. http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

Adn how long would it take me to SSH into 40,000 desktops to update Adobe Reader 8 to Adobe Reader 9, because there is some new feature that someone decided we just have to implement?

How long to copy the browser link to 40,000 desktops to comply with a mandatory ethics reporting plan we had to put in place? How long to patch 40,000 kernels for a security hole that must be resolved within 72 hours due to Corporate Information Security policy?

you guys that complain about heavy handed IT policies don't realize, that we don't even drive a lot of this stuff. If it was an IT idea, no one would ever give us the money we need to buy these tools. It's all driven from the top down.

Perhaps you've never heard of cssh?

I use it to patch and update ~ 15 linux machines at the same time--in about 3 minutes. Patching a comparative number of Windows servers takes 30 minutes and a reboot.

In all seriousness though, cssh might not work so well for 40,000 machines. You'd probably have to have a 70 inch monitor...

I am a teacher with a lab of about 20 workstations running Ubuntu 8.10.

I installed Webmin on the workstations and my computer and use the clustering features. I use likewise-open for AD authentication and Webmin for everything else.

You can create a policy template by configuring one workstation and copying the gconf.xml.mandatory to the administrators workstation. All you have to do then is use the cluster file copy in Webmin to push your xml file to your clustered workstations. It works for me anyway.

I also recommend Cluster SSH for some tasks that require a shell. CSSH works just like SSH but allows you to send a single command to every machine in the the group simultaneously.

Locking Down
Webmin
CSSH

HP implemented LinuxCOE as part of their solution to this problem - probably driven by the same issues that OP has: http://linuxcoe.sourceforge.net/

I like this version better: No system is foolproof, because fools are fiendishly clever.

The problem with making things idiot proof is you generate a better class of idiot.

As to the problem at hand, there are tons of things you can do to keep users out of trouble. Biggest one is, keep them from accessing sudo. Easiest way to do that is, create an 'admin' account on the machine before generating user accounts. Only the first user account on a Ubuntu machine has sudo access automagically. Additional users need to be added manually to the sudo group. Remove any and all software that you don't need. What those software pieces are would depend on your application. Then add the necessary maintanance scripting run as cron jobs, things like apt. Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list to restrict repositories. What I'd do then is, recut a master CD using Ubuntu Customisation Kit so you have a 'standard' install, and set up an inhouse repository for updates, fed from the inhouse server. Since the workstations only look at the inhouse repository, they should only be able to install from the local server. And if they're locked away from apt, that shouldn't be a problem.

There are several projects, like spu-medialib and mesa3d, which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU.

There's a narrative tutorial for installing the spu-medialib mplayer driver, with links to files, that plays video on the SPEs quite well, including 1080p HD videos.

The USB works fine, so an external HD should work fine. I don't know whether there are PPC (the Cell's application core) drivers for a USB tuner card, but you should try it. If it doesn't work, make it work with some programming. That's what Linux is all about :).

There are several projects, like spu-medialib and mesa3d, which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU.

There's a narrative tutorial for installing the spu-medialib mplayer driver, with links to files, that plays video on the SPEs quite well, including 1080p HD videos.

The USB works fine, so an external HD should work fine. I don't know whether there are PPC (the Cell's application core) drivers for a USB tuner card, but you should try it. If it doesn't work, make it work with some programming. That's what Linux is all about :).