Slashdot Mirror

OSSWin Games List

Take a look at the Platform and First Person Shooter games.

If your wi-fi card doesn't yet have linux drivers, you can always try NDISWrapper

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

I use PasswordMaker for my password stuff. I don't really see password management as the browser's job anyway. Convenience can be an issue with this, but fortunately there is a plugin for Firefox that helps.

Brain Workshop is an implementation of the Dual N-back exercise which trains your short-term memory; a psychological study has shown that doing it increases your intelligence.

See http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/ for more.

In South Korea, training your brain with Starcraft is for old people... ;)

What do I turn off to make TCP/IP over Firewire work?

What about my favourite XP extension?

I bought a laptop that was pretty high spec with Vista installed and didn't mind the performance so much as the lack of features I use every day.

I put XP on it, but if you can tell me, I may reinstall Vista.

(OK, you got me. That was a lie.)

And should you not like Wine (the non-native look puts me off), there's always K9Copy, which IMHO is a worthy alternative to DVDShrink.

You're looking for the Darwine project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwine/

As explained by other /.ers, running Wine on non-x86 architectures would require an additional emulator.

Darwine - a port of Wine to darwin/mac OS X, does indeed feature such an additional layer :
it uses a special mode of QEMU initially designed to run linux-on-linux (i.e.: not emulating a complete virtual machine with a full OS running on it, but just run a program alone inside the emulator and pass it calls to the actual OS outside).

The only problem is that now that Apple have moved to Intel hardware, the main incentive for Darwine has disappeared, and I don't know if there enough motivated owners of PS3 to keep the project alive or if the development has stalled.

Do any netbooks have a CD drive?

No, but you can use an external USB one.

I suppose you may be able to boot from a USB drive.

That's a definite "yes", not a "maybe". You just use something like unetbootin to copy the live CD to a USB stick, then boot from that. It's all GUI-driven, so it's pretty straightforward.

From what I've heard, OO.org actually already has pretty good OOXML support, even with all those nasty compatibility bits, largely thanks to Novell.

And yeah... Sometimes I even miss the CLI and the joys of mpg123, mikmod, vim, and making a simple Perl script to modify 1000+ HTML files in the blink of an eye...

Vim is available for Windows, both as a console mode application and native Win32 GUI. Quite a few programmers I know actually use it as their primary editor.

Perl is absolutely there. Don't bother with ActiveState, go for Strawberry Perl for maximum portability.

Regarding CLI in general, I'd suggest looking into PowerShell. MS is investing pretty heavily into it and seem determined to move all Windows admins to it (oh, those poor MCSEs!). It is in general pretty nicely done, and logically extends and generalizes the original concept of the Unix shell in a way that makes more sense for some use cases (raw byte streams are not always the best way of passing data around).

If you're just feeling nostalgic for bash and zsh, you have several options. The GNU-Win32 project provides native (MinGW-based) ports for a lot of Unix utilities, including bash. Cygwin is a popular alternative that provides more faithful emulation of Unix environment on top of Win32 - including fork(), symlinks, and so on. Finally, there's Microsoft SUA ("Subsystem for Unix Applications"), which is a WinNT POSIX-compatible subsystem. Note that, unlike Cygwin, it's not build on top of Win32 - it's another subsystem, working in parallel to Win32, directly on top of the NT kernel. It has quite a few Unix utilities ported to it, including bash and Perl. This one actually comes for free in Win2008, and also Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions.

Can Word and Oo.org embed LaTeX type inline?

OOoLatex is a set of macros designed to bring the power of LaTeX into OpenOffice.

That wouldn't be allowed at work, on the grounds that nobody could take over and edit the equations if I went under a bus.

There are things like the OOolatex plugin that provide a managed method for such image insertion, allowing you to simply select and equation, call up a dialog box with the TeX, re-edit, and re-insert the new rendering conveniently and easily. It's a very basic plugin for OpenOffice.org. I am pretty sure very similar things exist for Microsoft Word. At that point the only difficulty in someone else editing the equations is their inability to read and write LaTeX; and if they have any business writing and editing any number of equations they should know LaTeX.

Where do all you folks work, that you can choose the tools you work with? And how do they manage business continuity?

Any sane person who writes a lot of equations for a living will happily grab LaTeX, even if it is in the form of a plugin for standard word processors described above. Once you have an entire department/work group saying that this small free piece of software is going to have a very significant boost to their productivity very few companies say no. I doubt these people are getting to pick and choose thier softare completely, but they can request software that is going to have a large positive impact on their productivity, and they will often get it.

A decent Perl distro for Windows is free.

vim works perfectly well under Windows.

If you can't find a replacement for the others, look at cygwin to run many more *nix programs and utilities... including a real shell ("cli").

You can work around many Windows shortcomings and end up with something that works for you.

iirc, pdf is an open standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

And luckily, there exists software such as 'pdfcreator' (on sourceforce.net) that let you print from any windows program into a pdf file.

While you can, install pdfcreator on a computer that can still read those 'ms works' documents, and convert them to pdf.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

If you can't be bothered to do that for your old documents, then you most likely don't need to go out of your way to store them in any kind of super-safe way either, burning them to a dvd will do and when the dvd isn't readable anymore the garbage can will do fine...

Even if we move away from x86... there'll be x86 emulators.

I'm an engineer, I do a lot of computational work. As a student I was able to get a $100 student copy of matlab. I tried out free software too mind you, but nothing out there compares(octave doesn't compare, nor does scilab).

I think you are stuck with the wrong language. For me, Python using the SciPy library has been a true Matlab killer. Why limit yourself to a language that's optimized for math when you have an alternative that's just as efficient for scientific, mathematic, and every other sort of program you could imagine?

And if you don't want to throw away your Matlab expertise, Matplotlib has a compatibility layer that present a programming interface in Python that's similar to many Matlab functions.

And all that is Free Software.

Education also works well when you're doing something competitive! That's why I spent so much time learning to program in RoboWar back in elementary school. You built a robot, then program it, then set it loose in an arena against other robots. Competition winners from 1992-2003 are available for download, so there's lots of examples. It's open source, and has a Windows version...

Check out openproj

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=199315

This is so far down the list, it will probably be missed. I will say it anyway. I would suggest an interpreted language, such as MatLab. I have not used Octave, but it is free and mostly compatible with MatLab. You can easily set break points and watch the code as it executes. There is nothing that can be done in Basic that cannot be done in MatLab. Plus there is an extensive library of MatLab code available on Mathworks file exchange.

I've been running backuppc where I work for a while and am nothing but pleased with it.

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

It's web-based for file restores and I can grant permissions to inidividual system operators to restore files for only their systems. It connects using rsync so no other agent is required on the backed-up host. It's running on a 1-U server with 4 SATA disks in a software raid-5 and backing up 20 servers without difficulty.

Not sure if that would qualify as 'enterprise', but a good suggestion. I think this article would ALSO be popular on digg.

Check out the benchmark table at this informative link. On every cache miss, the CPU loads an entire cache line, typically 64 or more bytes. Cache miss rates are massively dependent on the probability that those extra bytes will soon be accessed. Since typical structures and objects are 64 bytes or more, the cache line typically gets filled with fields of just one object. Typical inner loops may access two of those object's fields, but rarely three, meaning that the cache is loaded with useless junk. By keeping data of like fields together in arrays, the cache line will be filled with the same field, but from different objects, often objects that will soon be accessed. This, plus the 32 vs 64 bit object references, and cache-sensitive memory organization (unlike malloc), leads to a 7X speedup in DataDraw backed graph traversals vs plain C code.

Understanding cache performance is critical for fast code, yet most programmers are virtually clueless about it. Just run the benchmarks yourself if you want to see the impact.

While I don't think that Assembly would be the best choice, it is not as bad as you imply.

The major problem with Assembly is that the programs they are likely to be able to write are too short and trivial to interest kids. But as complexity goes, Assembly can be very easy: it has almost no syntax.

Take a look at this:

http://jbit.sourceforge.net/doc/tutorial.html

Good point. With solid-state drives coming down the pipe, even that bottle-neck will be somewhat relieved for what most people do (lot's of disk reads, few writes). I write programs to help designers place and route chips. The problem size scales with Moore's Law, so we never have enough CPU power. I'm part of a shrinking population that remains focused on squeezing a bit more power out of their code. I wrote the DataDraw CASE tool to dramatically improve overall place-and-route performance, but few programmers care all that much now days. On routing-graph traversal benchmarks, it sped up C-code 7X while cutting memory required by 40%. But what's a factor of 7 now days?

PILOT and LOGO:

RPILOT is a FOSS version of Pilot. Here is a list of LOGO resources find one that works for you. Berkely LOGO or Star LOGO or Net LOGO take your pick.

Grade Schools and Junior Highs used to teach PILOT or LOGO or both on the old 8 bit computers when I was that age. It was fun giving a virtual turtle commands to draw shapes and solve problems.

I used BASIC-256(formerly KidBASIC), which was developed specifically to address this problem.

I found it easy to use and teach, and a good introduction for the kids, I would recommend it for an introductory language.

http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

Get the to create bots and compete, the language is simple, but can be quite complex as well. There are many samples to play with, and competition always gets the kids going!

FLAC and ALE (Apple lossless Encoding) are both lossless formats, so you won't lose any audio information on the conversion.

Looking for tools there is:
    - XLD: http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co.jp/xld/index_e.html
    - xAct: http://xact.sourceforge.net/

If there are any other please reply to this post.

I bought mine at Canada Computers, a 15 store chain in southern Ontario. It wasn't hard at all. I knew what I wanted to buy. The Cowon site listed authorized retailers. http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware lists a large number of devices that support FLAC. http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware lists devices that support Ogg Vorbis.

I agree that C++ GUI code (like Valve's Source engine) are better than the old C GUI libraries. C++ is a good fit for describing class hierarchies of GUI widgets. It's not all bad, but not all good, either.

While C++ works well for trees, consider graphs. Two classes, not just one (Nodes and Edges, rather than just Nodes). If there is a C++ database containing a graph, and you want to manipulate that graph, how do you do it? In C++, your life becomes harder than it should be at that point (do you attach void pointers to allow kludged extensions to database objects, or inherit from them directly and do copy-in/copy-out?). The only reasonable C++ graph library I've seen is the Boost Graph Library. If you care for a life of pain, make this the basis of your next big EDA project. Alternatively, if you store those graphs in a DataDraw database, your code is hugely simplified, while running far faster.

I do EDA coding for a living. Life as an EDA programmer is basically all about manipulating graphs. C++ and EDA have never worked out well together, but nor has Java, C#, or any other mainstream language. You need dynamic extension, like Python, but raw-speed, like C. Today, that means DataDraw.

http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

Here's my beef with C++. Average to less-than-average programmers will never understand virtual functions, templates, or (shudder) multiple inheritance. New code is normally written by super-smart programmers who use all that stuff. Then, the B-team takes it over and can't figure out what the heck it does. The code is then doomed to painful process of continuous decay.

C++ was written by PhD's for PhD's. It was never a good fit for the real world. Java is a huge step forward for the world, just not graduate programs. Personally, I have 100 other issues with modern languages, which is why I do all my programming with the DataDraw variant of C.

For example, imagine that you run a photo-sharing website and want to let your users touch up their photos without leaving your site. Today, you could provide this feature using a combination of JavaScript and server side processing.

Or you could write an application that downloads the photo into the browser and manipulates it in a Canvas. It's not like these APIs are any huge secret. You'd think that someone working for Google would know about that. I won't even get into using the ubiquitous Flash 9 plugin to accomplish the same goal.

As you said, their example is AWFUL.

It gets worse:

Frets On Fire

Trolling? I'll bite.

Free: http://pythonide.blogspot.com/search/label/spe
Free: http://die-offenbachs.de/eric/index.html
Free: http://docs.python.org/library/pdb.html#module-pdb (and included with Python)
Commercial, but excellent (my team uses it): http://www.wingware.com/
Commercial: http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/index.mhtml

If you really love Visual Studio for some reason: http://www.activestate.com/Products/visual_python/index.plex
If you love Eclipse: http://pydev.sourceforge.net/

And for the lazy, "import pdb; pdb.set_trace()" has always been my favorite way to debug python software. Add that line anywhere; get a breakpoint. Make it conditional with an if statement.

Not to mention introspection right down to the bytecode at runtime (there is even a Python module that lets you edit the bytecode at runtime, if you are sufficiently crazy).

In short, you have not used Python for more than 10 minutes if you really think the debugging isn't good.

IHBT. HAND.

Python is absolutely unusable on real world projects (any project where you aren't the sole developer) due to that indentation crap.

Would you mind repeating that? I don't think the guys developing the following projects heard you:

• A good chunk of Google
• EVE Online
• The majority of YouTube
• Freevo
• A bunch of KDE Software

I could go on... but you get the point.

If your software team is having problems with the significance of white spaces in Python, my bet would be that, no offense, the team was to blame.

The trick is to coordinate the "white space rules" between members of the team. If it can't pull that one off, I wouldn't trust them to write code for a production system anyways.

For example, some of the following: OCaml, Python, Ruby, C++, D.
But there are really lot of them available. What's best, depends on what you try to do and your taste.

You're right, the author is completely delusional about development costs, ground support, and a number of other things. I was speaking more to the general design problem, since the original article is so far off base as to not be worth much discussion.

Lox being heavy is a good thing. In general, tank mass is related to mass stored and pressure * volume. For pump-fed rockets the structural constraints are substantial enough that it taking less space (denser) doesn't help the tank mass that much, but it does make it smaller and reduce drag. More density Isp is always helpful. Also, LOX isn't particularly reactive. It will readily support combustion, but it won't corrode or oxidize or otherwise interact with most tank materials. You do need to build with safety in mind and not mix LOX and organic materials, but it won't react with your tanks like N2O4, nitric acid, peroxide, and some of the exotic oxidizers can. It's really quite tame in many respects. As for loading, companies like XCOR (who I've worked for) and Armadillo have demonstrated very rapid propellant loading of modestly sized vehicles.

Using cryo propellants probably requires no more ground support than the tanker truck you're filling from and a hose to connect it (LOX tankers are normally operated at modest positive pressure, so if you're willing to wait a little you can even avoid a pump; if you're not, order a tanker that comes with a transfer pump).

There's not enough publicly known about the Scaled accident to make informed comments in any detail. However, I doubt the specific tank technology had anything at all to do with it. I expect the problem was caused by plumbing errors (trapped volume warming up, for example), contamination (nitrous + oil can make detonable mixes), or something else similar. From a safety and operations standpoint, my personal opinion is that N2O is easier for small systems (eg, the hybrids I build and the Lynx RCS thrusters XCOR is building), and LOX for large systems. LOX is also noticeably higher performance.

Exact performance changes with altitude depend somewhat on gas properties. The easiest way to get good numbers is with a numerical solver program like cpropep (web version, be warned it's a bit finnicky to use). At 30kft you're at about 1/4 atm pressure, so you can operate with a nozzle that expands to about 1/4 the pressure of a sea-level capable nozzle. (In general, nozzles are overexpanded at ignition, since the higher altitude performance dominates the optimization. Flow separation at low altitude tends to limit exit pressure to ~ 1/2 ambient, or somewhat lower with work.) Towing to 30kft should be fairly straightforward. 40kft may be a little harder, but is unlikely to present any real challenges. 60-70kft is probably within reason if you have some reason to believe development costs are justified.

(For more perspective on general SSTO capability, it's worth noting that there have been stages built with SSTO performance levels, but never used as such. I believe the S-II second stage of the Saturn V is one such, though I'd have to look up details. A modified configuration of a Shuttle ET plus 6 main engines (3 don't provide enough thrust to get it off the ground) could make orbit with a small but nonzero payload. The reason SSTO hasn't been done (aside from 1.5 STO in Atlas) is not that it's impossible, but that there hasn't been a strong economic case for doing it.)

I use PeerGuardian to help protect MediaSentry from accidentally downloading any potentially copyrighted works from me. I'd feel awful if they inadvertently came into possession of illegal data on account of my negligence. Suppose I mis-named something that I copyrighted? I'd cry if I were forced to sue the fuck out of them for casual infringement.

So why did you buy your phones from a corporation that does that? You can very easily buy Symbian phones that aren't crippled. Your lousy consumer research has nothing to do with the security features of the OS.

There are plenty of really useful applications for Symbian. For example, people have been walking around with Vorbis-capable music players in their pockets for several years while Slashdotters kept making bad jokes about how they just want to make calls.

http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/

Which brings up why I love the way things are today: choice. I remember the bad old days when it was either IE or if you wanted to suffer the really crappy Netscape edition(4 IIRC) and now we all have so many more choices. In my family alone we have Seamonkey for my mom(who refuses to surf without her "blue bird"), we have Kmeleon for my sister(who loves its layout and speed), we have Opera for my oldest boy (who says anything after version 5 sucks and refuses to update) and we have Flock for the youngest(who loves social sites) and finally Firefox for me,because of Adblock+ and Noscript,along with FEBE and iMacros.

So IMHO it doesn't really matter who is the "best" as long as we have plenty of others to choose from. Because I can tell you that the way it was before really sucked the big wet titty. But thanks to free software and plenty of choices my family can each have their own browser that suits their personality and can stay the hell out of mine, which is always a good thing. That and the fact that I can have IE removed from the program list and blocked at the firewall and nobody in my family seems to care. So if any of the designers of the above browsers read this: Thank you. You have made my family very happy and made it easier for me to keep the peace. So thanks.

Adblock for Safari: http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/

Read.article. Most of your 'insightful' comment applies to Windows and piggy-backing on a Windows exploit. The other OS's you mention (ie: not Windows) would be exploited by ignoring the FF warning dialog about installing untrusted add-ons and installing it anyway (not so much an exploit).

That said, if you're done being cheeky: software is complicated. Bugs are a simple reality and inevitably lead to some kind of exploitability. But Linux and Mac (along with FF and numerous other open tools) get a bit of credit for implementing basic controls (accounts with privilege separation in the OS's) and responding quickly and proactively.

Windows is only now trying it, but their implementation is so cumbersome it's defeating it's own purpose.

Any Vista user out there that haven't already tried it there are several open source sudo for Windows implementations that make using non-privileged accounts more viable. I think I use Sudowin which seemed to work the best for me, but I'm not on my home computer.

Read.article. Most of your 'insightful' comment applies to Windows and piggy-backing on a Windows exploit. The other OS's you mention (ie: not Windows) would be exploited by ignoring the FF warning dialog about installing untrusted add-ons and installing it anyway (not so much an exploit).

That said, if you're done being cheeky: software is complicated. Bugs are a simple reality and inevitably lead to some kind of exploitability. But Linux and Mac (along with FF and numerous other open tools) get a bit of credit for implementing basic controls (accounts with privilege separation in the OS's) and responding quickly and proactively.

Windows is only now trying it, but their implementation is so cumbersome it's defeating it's own purpose.

Any Vista user out there that haven't already tried it there are several open source sudo for Windows implementations that make using non-privileged accounts more viable. I think I use Sudowin which seemed to work the best for me, but I'm not on my home computer.

Read.article. Most of your 'insightful' comment applies to Windows and piggy-backing on a Windows exploit. The other OS's you mention (ie: not Windows) would be exploited by ignoring the FF warning dialog about installing untrusted add-ons and installing it anyway (not so much an exploit).

That said, if you're done being cheeky: software is complicated. Bugs are a simple reality and inevitably lead to some kind of exploitability. But Linux and Mac (along with FF and numerous other open tools) get a bit of credit for implementing basic controls (accounts with privilege separation in the OS's) and responding quickly and proactively.

Windows is only now trying it, but their implementation is so cumbersome it's defeating it's own purpose.

Any Vista user out there that haven't already tried it there are several open source sudo for Windows implementations that make using non-privileged accounts more viable. I think I use Sudowin which seemed to work the best for me, but I'm not on my home computer.

There is also e2compr, which enables compression on an ext2 filesystem. I haven't used it much, because squashfs with unionfs does the job better I think, but it's an alternative.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=83758&package_id=86254

Here you go. Now, I'll be checking up on you guys in a week and I expect to be impressed.

... effortless installation ...

Package management wasn't invented yesterday, RPMs/DEBs are as effortless as ever to install and so are the countless common ways of installing stuff on Windows. Why do you think so many people use Firefox already despite it being so terribly hard to install, code for (cross-plattform) and even though MSIE is already preinstalled on all Windows systems? It's not too hard, look at all the spyware crap people can install all by themselves on Windows.

gmail...

Gmail is a fine Web application, yes. But it's not an example that can be generalized. Why isn't Winamp a web application? How about Irfanview or other image viewers? Heck, even Google Picasa is an .exe ... Gmail only exists because it's hosted where you *want your data to be kept*. It's a straightforward, unsafe way of managing your email that gets away with it because people don't really care. Ideally, we'd want to have our data in a safe place, accessible from anywhere with a proper UI (why did Google add IMAP to gmail?).

The web, as a delivery mechanism and operating paradigm, along with the web browser as the engine for interaction, is the immediate future. If you think this sucks, get busy replacing it now! In a couple of years it may be too late to replace it soon.

The web delivers compiled C applications just fine. It also handles configuration just fine (like e.g. your MUA - nothing is keeping your ISP from offering you a self-installing and -configuring MUA package that takes less effort to setup than Gmail [you don't have to enter another email address]).

tl;dr the web sucks but it's here, now and it's evolving to suck less

tl;dr answer: people gave up on writing portable apps because big players made sure the UIs weren't portable, now they are working on the next effort that big players will sabotage. Might as well go back to the older, more efficient path and build a portable C/C++/Pascal/other high performance language framework (like Lazarus if you can find people who still know Pascal) and use the web to deliver and configure apps.

Especially since one of the PC entries is Maxthon, which is just IE with a whole bunch of crap added to it. For those looking for alternatives in the Windows realm I would suggest Seamonkey for those who want an "all in one" complete with HTML editor, IRC client and Email client. For those looking for speed, especially with older hardware(works well on as little as 400MHz with 128Mb of RAM) or simply want a quick, no frills web browser I would suggest Kmeleon. For those who like social sites such as delicious and flickr I would recommend Flock. And finally for those that would like a tiny browser, one that takes up almost no space and can simply be dropped on a flash drive I would point out OffByOne.

Any one of these IMHO would be better choices than the ones given for Windows in this article. And Maxthon is IMHO just too dangerous due to the fact that IE is still the #1 target out there for malware writers and in XP and below IE is too easy to hit to make it a safe browser for everyday use. But if anyone here hasn't tried the above browsers, give them a go. I have used all of them at one time or another and they each have their uses.