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You can have something which is completely utilitarian, which is not a game. These programs exist: Iraqi culture simulations, reflex training programs, etc. You can also have something which has a sense of whimsy and fun. This is a game, and some of them have the potential to make you think or to awe you with their beauty.

Hey, or you can not rudely condescend to everyone else and inflict your lack of imagination and vision on everyone else.

How about this: You can have something that tells an engaging and meaningful story in a branching, linear, or emergent interactive environment. You can have something that something that makes a satirical or philosophical statement through its mechanics. You can have a game that elegantly tells a science-fiction story, simply and unpretentiously.

I don't know what the author is bitching about. He wants games without the fun, it would seem; games which take themselves as seriously as he does. Those just aren't games. He thinks games are a medium on the level of television. This is wrong. The computer is the medium. Games are merely a flavor of program, much as game-shows are flavor of television. Do you expect your game-shows to "progress intellectually" as you age?

So games are a genre (I think that would be incorrect? Are you saying the medium is inherently inflexible and vapid? Or are you saying that fun precludes maturity? Just what are you saying? Why are you so rabidly attacking a search beyond the status quo?

Fucking games journalists. Enough pretentious, bullshit opinion pieces. Get back to your fucking jobs.

And what thought out rhetoric! Truly you've won me over with your emphasis and shocking command of ideas. You know, like telling games journalists to get back to their jobs and... criticize and evaluate games? Perhaps you meant to imply that the jobs of games journalists are to parrot praise for every standard barely deviating example of the genre shoveled out by obliging companies.

For all your vi/Emacs flamewar needs, try http://wordwarvi.sourceforge.net/ Full disclosure, I'm the author of that game.

Agreed, thanks to Slashdot for raising the editing bar a few millimeters.

Now fix the fucking Show Tags bug!

The "nm" command is obscure but its saved me a few times compiling. If you are getting symbol errors and you dont know what library to link in, find it by running "nm" on all your *.so files.

How about exit codes? I run alot of scripts with || and && on the end to exit on failure

[ -f "/etc/config.conf" ] || exit

Bring the last two togethern with the quintessential "for" loop:

for i in `find /lib /usr/lib -name '*.so'`;do
nm $i 2>&1 | grep $LIB >/dev/null && echo $i
done

Sed One Liners

And my favorite "trick" in college:

ln -s /stand/vmunix ~/.plan

So I take it you prefer vi and dtach?

Try cfv. It has support for creating and verifying md5,sha1 and a bunch of other cryptographic hash functions. It can also recurse into subdirectories.

Of course, if the data lost is in the catalog so I can't even find my files, then things get much more complicated. But even so, I've had to use this system a few times (due to damaged DVDs mostly) and it's worked pretty well.

http://qpxtool.sourceforge.net - Linux program for performing low-level quality measurements on CDs and DVDs. It only works with some drive models, so check the supported hardware list.

Note that detach isn't dtach. detach detaches the program it starts from the terminal. dtach creates a virtual terminal and attaches the program to that, instead of to the terminal dtach was run from. You can then attach and detach from that virtual terminal (although, unlike with screen, dtach doesn't remember previous output from the command).

dtach and screen are for commands that produce output, where you want to go away and come back to see the output at some point, and for interactive commands, where you have to produce input.

detach is for things like daemons and X clients, where you aren't interested in looking at the output. If you want, you can redirect the output to a file. You can also provide a file to be used as input, but you can't interact with the program yourself. The program really is detached from the terminal.

Don't panic, just install GNU Utils, put it on your $PATH and try again.

HTH, D

Sounds like you have a better solution going, but I still wanted to turn others in your situation who *do* wanna run Windows on to btwincap -- the card is probably using a Brooktree chip.

This driver is usually much better than the included buggy/glitchy ones.

Dynebolic is a kick ass GNU/Linux distro for video capture and editing. It can also cluster just by running the liveCD on multiple systems.

So use dtach.

Why not use synergy? It works cross platform so you can control Windows and Mac OS machines as well.

How about setting FCEDIT to your favorite editor, and running fc on the command line, very very VERY handy when messing with long paths. (stupid java)

the script command is also your friend when creating pointless documentation people will never read.

another thing people never think of is the
nohup command.

sshfs is kinda spiffy if you want to mount things over an ssh connection.

I do HATE with a passion when the same commands on different OS versions (I'm looking at you here SUN) ouput different results.

Oh and don't forget stupid little things like aliases in your shell startup file. I just like typing l to do an ls -aF.

You can also write some nice functions for your startup files. and don't forget the logout files, you can have some fun there.

Also if you're old school command line and really bored:

http://nadvsh.sourceforge.net/nadvsh.6.html

there's tons of PDF-creating software on Windows as well.

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

It's a Windows printer that prints out your documents as PDFs.

It's that easy.

This is exactly what I do in Mac OS X. Virtually always, I just open the PDF with Preview.app (part of the basic OS distribution). On the rare occasion that it won't open or is a form or something, I'll right-click>open with>Acrobat.app. Not much of a pain.
I think it makes good sense to have a different app depending on what you need done. For instance, reading articles in PDF in Preview or Acrobat is a pain, and I'll use Skim.app for those.

That might work on some or most files, but there still is no replacement for Acrobat.

True, but we're getting closer. OpenOffice 3 now has a PDF Import extension, and of course for Windows there's PDFCreator (Gnome/KDE and OS X natively support printing to PDF).

They use dswifi, which is included with devkitPro (devkitARM). Yes, it is basically a homebrew driver/library. (It has been previously covered on Slashdot.)

If you look at DSOrganize, one of the most popular homebrew programs for the DS, you'll see that it can use either the wifi settings stored in firmware or custom wifi settings stored by DSOrganize.

Are there even any unhacked non-PC devices that play FLAC? Nothing against FLAC

FLAC is currently the most popular Lossless compressed format for hardware players.

High end living-room digital players usually support it. Some offer services where you send your CDs and when you receive your player it's pre-loaded with FLACs of your music (like Olive for example)

Several Jukebox also exist with support for FLAC, like in car systems from PhatNoise's.

Logitech's latest Squeezbox supports it too, for a more recent example.

For more detailed and longer list see FLAC's own list.

In addition to all these branded software, don't forget also about all the countless of no-name "multimedia-harddisk-case" (small box usually centered around some miniITX board running a small embed linux-based mediaplayer. Sold pre assembled in store and buy-your-own-harddisk in computer shops). Granted most of them DO use Linux and PC-like hardware. But they are sold as ready-to-use appliance, like your DSL/Cable modem and Wifi router (which is most likely to run Linux, too).

In short the fact the iPod doesn't play it, and Microsoft's "Play-for-Sure" logo forbids it in the USA, doesn't mean that the rest of the world isn't already using it.

I got quite a taste of a few Java frameworks from my last job (Hibernate and Tapestry, to be precise, and given my experience, I'm inclined to agree with the 'hibernatesucks' tag. If you had mentioned Tapestry I would have agreed even more with a 'tapestrysucks' tag, because Tapestry does suck, hardcore. Hibernate I can at least see being semi-useful in some situations).

My view is this: If you're making a simple project, implement it in a simple way. You've got to expect new requirements to come in, so don't go choosing *any* sort of 'framework' right off the bat.

<tangent> Unfortunately you do have to choose a programming language -- I'm not too thrilled with any of the offerings right now. PHP is hosted everywhere, but in 3 different incompatible versions. I use Ruby, but in order to ensure it works on whatever web host, you've got to use it with CGI, so hope your site doesn't get a lot of traffic! If you have a host that lets you run Java servlets and whatnot (despite my old job I'm not especially familiar with how Java applications get hosted), then I'd say Java's a good choice - not my favorite language, but it's fast and stable. </tangent>

Only when your program (/web site) actually needs to do complex things that would take a lot of time to implement (graphics libraries, hardware drivers, complete xml parsers come to mind) should you start bringing in external libraries. And note that I said "libraries", not "frameworks". 'Frameworks', in my view, provide 2 things:

• A standard set of libraries
• A standard way to structure your code

If you can use those libraries that you need without a framework, it's going to be in your best interest not to include the extra frameworky stuff in your project that you don't need (get to the why in a minute). Importing a standard way to structure your code from a widely-used framework can be useful if you're working on a project with several other developers who would otherwise either argue about what made-up in-house standard to use or follow no standards at all, but if you're doing this thing by yourself, you can probably fulfill the needs of your project more simply by doing it yourself.

Even when you're importing functionality that will be controlled by your program (a library), and not the other way around (a framework), I would encourage you to try to implement it yourself, first. You know the specific needs of this project better than the people who wrote any libraries, so you may be in many cases be able to write something vastly simpler that gets the same job done in a way that makes more sense to you (not to mention that many libraries are simply crap, such as the ruby-git wrapper I recently downloaded before writing my own version that bothered to escape arguments to shell commands). If you do this enough times you will find that things you thought were difficult to implement are not so bad, and will wonder why so many people think they need a library.

To summarize, I agree with the guy who said "It's knowing when". Also, for the most part, with Chuck Moore, even though I'm not a Forth programmer ;)

Sure, it's old, but it was designed for remote administration back when dialup was popular. Nowadays it's open-source and still highly extensible:

http://bo2k.sourceforge.net/whatis.html

There are plenty of encryption and authentication plug-ins and it does some of what you ask.

One more thing I forgot to mention. You said you were using Windows servers at the site. Install OpenSSH for Windows and on every box. That will give you a great command-line ability to list/kill processes, start/stop services, and generally do much of the Windows admin work in a script-friendly environment. The last thing you want to do is deal with a super-slow VNC or RDP session when you're just trying to restart a service.

EBML and XML are not exactly equivalent. EBML lacks an equivalent of namespacing, and an EBML-document is self-explanatory, since tag-names are integer-encoded.

IMHO, EBML with an extension to the standard to describe id:s used in sub-formats would kick so much ass. As soon as you make it possible to devise general editors for the format, all kinds of possibilities opens up.

I even took the effort a couple of years ago to jot up a SourceForge project for it, but as with most sourceforge-project I ran out of time soon after. :S http://runestone.sourceforge.net/

so if you slashdot their site do you win?

ah... found it on SourceForge

We at ADempiere FOSS project can relate to many of the comments in this story as we have our very own wars all the time particularly this present fiery one in our forum here.

3 off us due to disagreement and disgust at each other, resigned this week our benevolent positions but still work on the sidelines. I am not sure to cry or to laugh. I trust Eric Raymond's Cathedral and The Bazaar story.

Somehow when you adopt what Linus Torvalds did for Linux, you got a revolution, but you have to survive the egos especially your own. GNU was going ok, but ok is not enough to take on the world giants. Linus finished off the game via his attitude of giving and not caring for kudos back.

red1
ADempiere Bazaar
(evangelist/former benevolent dictator - September 2006 - Today)

That is just about the polar opposite of my experience. XP is showing its age because shoe-horning it onto an eeepc 901 was a horrible task. The installer is just dumb and can't handle anything but a CD-drive, which I don't have.

I then used the incredible unetbootin to try out a bunch of linux distros from USB sticks and even an SDcard, finally settling on intrepid. Unfortunately it didn't quite "just work" because of the wireless card. (Big surprise)

The netbook platform is unique I feel in not needing the usual windows baggage anyway.

But in the genre of cruel dungeon-crawls, I prefer Iter Vehemens Ad Necem.

There's nothing like bludgeoning a zombie to death with your own severed arm, then being forced to eat the arm to stave off hunger.

And even they suck when compared to open source/freeware alternatives such as Speedcrunch, Notepad++, and Paint.NET.

This post is somewhat redundant now but I have been wondering about the same thing and then I found out about NUMA:

http://lse.sourceforge.net/numa/

If you are looking for a NUMA machine running Linux have a look at this.

http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/

If you check out citeseer you might find that the name NUMA came up around 1989. I couldn't find it any earlier. So whatever a 256 core processor will look like, it doesn't have to be something new.

It seems like it should be possible to use already existing parallel architectures in those multi core processors. Although I could imagine that integrating multiple cores on one chip could support architectures which make use of that different type of platform. I don't know how this could look like, but I wouldn't want to rule out that we are going to see something new.

that supplies cd images online with their own mini boot os, updated monthly, that you download, burn, and then reboot into via cd

90% of users wouldn't bother. its just a giant hassle. but amongst the ultraparanoid, which you are if you know even just a little about what goes on out there, it would be a nice piece of mind guarantor

of course, this product probably already exists. in which case PLEASE TELL ME WHERE ;-)

Why not simply boot into a live CD whenever you want to do online banking or other such sensitive tasks if you're that paranoid? Nearly all allow for writing to the hard drive, so it's not a problem to save any data you want around after the task is completed like online statements, etc. If you're really paranoid, use Anonym.OS put together by Kaos.Theory Security Research and based on OpenBSD with hard encryption and use of TOR as defaults?

Download here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/anonym-os/

More information: http://kaos.to/cms/projects/releases/anonym.os-livecd.html

Cheers!

Strat

You must not have read the disclaimer I put between the parenz (or chose to ignore it to make your point), because if you go check the sourceforge software map for yourself, you'll see it's still called Azureus there, it's still #1, and as a result, it has enough name recognition among techies without looking like an obvious trademark ripoff to the public (which is what calling it Linuxus would cause... even a judge near Fort Worth might have the cognitive powers to see that!)

I admit the possibility that you may NOT be a techie and further may have no clue about what is popular in the open source realm. If you have managed to get Linux installed by some fantastic miracle of nature, it may never have occurred to you to download something beyond what is already included in your distro. In an attempt to do so, if you've visited sourceforge more than once you would recognize the name Azureus immediately. You obviously haven't.

BTW, I'm glad you mentioned OpenOffice as a name with high name recognition, but if you really want to cleanse your soul through servile obedience to your master you should have said OpenOffice.org, because representing that suite as OpenOffice by itself was the subject of another trademark dispute. Fancy that a product called Word is allowed to mimic WordPerfect at the height of its popularity, but if OpenOffice tries to do it to Office then some court magic ??? occurs and the decision flips in the other direction. Yet another data point...

And now for today's conspiracy quiz: why was Azureus renamed? Did someone not like frogs?

I'm not sure if this is still the case but back in the day using an exe packer (like upx) on a trojan or virus would prevent detection by most anti-virus software and as an added bonus the payload also becomes much smaller

Brain Workshop -- a free, GPL brain game (downloads available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux).

It could be called a memory game, mental challenge or puzzle. It's been shown in a peer-reviewed study to improve working memory and fluid intelligence (one component of "IQ"). This is huge because intelligence was previously thought to be static or immutable.

More research is currently underway at multiple universities to confirm the positive effect on fluid intelligence. You can see the results for yourself by practicing this game 20 minutes 4-5 times a week for a few weeks.

This could be hitting the front page of your morning paper in a few months once more research is published.

Anyone know of cross-platform serverless IM clients other than RetroMessenger which doesn't seem to have released anything since it's initial debut.

Apparently pentaho is even more slick.

Hey, that's an interesting package. I wasn't interested in reporting before, but this looks nice. Thanks for sparking my interest in the field.

Slashdot has a sister site where people various open source products are presented, rated, provided and supported.

This search for "reporting" should get you started. Apparently the JasperReports reporting engine is stable and well though of, and iReports is a popular interface to it. But I haven't tried them.

Good luck.

Slashdot has a sister site where people various open source products are presented, rated, provided and supported.

This search for "reporting" should get you started. Apparently the JasperReports reporting engine is stable and well though of, and iReports is a popular interface to it. But I haven't tried them.

Good luck.

There's a module in CPAN for this. It rips out the images and runs them through Tesseract. It's worked well the few times I've tried it. Certainly well enough for search engine indexing.

Also, my understanding of the "dark web" concept was that it refered to sites that had no links going to them, so no spiders are able to access them. I'm not seeing how any of this would fix the "problem".

The only news here is that Google doesn't already index form content in drop down boxes and selection menus. Seems that would have been a fairly obvious extension.

What Apple did with OSX, Microsoft did with Vista and Azure. But as I recall OSX Classic mode couldn't run all legacy Mac programs just as Vista's Win32 Legacy mode cannot run all Legacy Windows and DOS programs.

I recall Mac OSX had the Basilisk 2 emulator to run Classic Mac 68K programs that OSX Classic mode couldn't run.

Windows Vista uses VMWare or Virtual PC to run XP and under in Vista for Legacy Windows and DOS programs.

But it is ironic that Amiga, Inc. when it wrote AmigaOS 3.1 found a way to run the old 68K and PowerPC AmigaDOS/Workbench 1.X and 2.X programs under it without too many problems, and even gave legacy rights to a group to create an open source version of AmigaOS 3.1 called AROS Amiga Research OS that can run on i386 and PowerPC systems and have built in emulation for 68K Amiga code based on UAE with their own version of Kickstart in AROS with backwards compatibility.

Amiga got it right, Microsoft and Apple didn't, for solving Legacy Software problems.

SupraBrowser

It's a secure, threaded IM client (all socket communication 3DES encrypted with a zero-knowledge proof SRPP), written in Java, that runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It was developed for the hedge fund industry in Boston. I developed it initially, but it's mainly being maintained, not developed further because we don't receive any new feature requests.

Don't let the extensive features fool you. It's primarily a secure, threaded IM system. The other features were added (email gateway, auto-forwarding to email, embedded web browser with sophisticated tagging engine) based on its being used *very* heavily every day and requests coming from highly advanced users of the system.

There is also a Firefox plugin that integrates with it, as well as a pure ajax client written in the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform.

Feel free to contact me personally for any details or help setting it up. The release on sourceforge assumes fairly good technical abilities (building it from ant, getting xulrunner to work with javaxpcom) and is not a general packaged release. However, it is running many places in production.

suprasphere@gmail.com

David Thomson

While Windows (XP) will not have drivers for everything with the base install, it has never failed to install on whatever machine I've tried. It also BOOTS.

Man, you certainly didn't try to install XP on a SATA only machine.
Don't know how SP3 goes but SP2 is a MAJOR PITA in this respect. Finding which SATA driver actually works for the windows installer can be quite a challenge.

After failing to install XP, i did try installing ubuntu and it installed without a hitch.
That's when i realized that life can actually be easier by using linux. Quite a shocker when you haven't really made the jump yet.

That was like a year & a half ago.
Today the linux side is even better, as installing from usb thumb drive is like a thousand time faster than from a CD. Still possible with xp, but much more complicated than the 2 or 3 clicks required for the just released intrepid ibex (and for previous releases/other distros, there's still unetbootin: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/).

But then again, i'm writing this from my macbook :)
Only time i had to install osx was when i upgraded my HDD.
Still sucks that installing from USB isn't an easy process though.

wicd is your friend, I think it's in the Intrepid Repos now*, but if it isn't you can get it from here

http://wicd.sourceforge.net/

*I'm still using Gutsy for some reason...

Well,I don't know about him but I prefer the versatility of Gecko myself. When a customer comes in with older hardware or they only care about speed I can give them Kmeleon,if they are into the social sites I can give them Flock,the old folks that still like to download their mail I give Seamonkey,and for the everyday Joes I give Firefox. I have also started giving out Songbird,which is also based on FF,thus the Gecko engine,and so far folks are really liking it. If Firefox wants to know where the next "Firefox killer" is going to come from,IMHO they just need to look in the mirror. Their engine is so easy to customize that I wouldn't be surprised if the next big thing ran Gecko under the hood.

why couldn't you just have the software display a rectangle that you can drag across the screen that affects what is displayed within the rectangle
That's an excellent idea. We could even make it show dynamically an enlarged inset of the scene for closer inspection and give it a cool name like magnifyier.

I've been using SimpleID for a personal OpenID provider, but it seems to have problems with a lot of popular OpenID consumers like Plaxo and even Sourceforge itself (or more properly, they have problems with it, like ".failed to check_authentication(): failed to verify response"). I'd like the idea of a multi-user provider so that my wife can use it to. Any suggestions?

While browsing IDA Pro product
pages at http://www.hex-rays.com/idapro/idadown.htm
I noticed that there are downloads for two libraries that IDA seems to use:

  Linux TVision port for the IDA Interface - source code (updated 20/11/2007)

This download is password protected, but seems it is a copy of
Linux TVision - http://tvision.sourceforge.net/ which is under GPL.

Another and more obvious their problem is:

  Wingraph v 1.03: source code the Wingraph we use and modified (GPL).
(updated 25/08/2004)

Which is available for actual downloading and is nothing more than VCG library
A Visualization Tool for compiler graphs
Copyright (C) 1993--1995 by Iris Lemke, Georg Sander, and the Compare Consortium
Which is distributed under GPL v2

The sources also contain the following text:

  * WinGraph32 - Graph Visualization Program
  * Version 1.0
  * The WIN32 interface written by Ilfak Guilfanov. (ig@datarescue.com)
  *
  * This program is under GPL (GNU General Public License)
  * It is based on the VCG tool written by Georg Sander and Iris Lemke

Seems that IDA author (Ilfak Guilfanov) does not understand GPL terms.

I notified all related parties, as well as gpl-violations.org on March 21, 2008.
But nothing happened.

The only reply I got was from Linux TVision author, where he says IDA seem to use modified GPL code.

The Australian National Archives seem to think that its stable enough for long term archiving of documents.

Actually, the National Archives of Australia is using Open Document Format (ODF) to store wordprocessing, spreadsheet and presentation file formats.

They use proper openly specified file formats - https://sourceforge.net/projects/xena/?abmode=1 for more information

I know, because I work there (in the Digital Preservation area, actually)

As a non-OS bundled app, yes. I really like Virtual Dimension.

Did you know squid also has an adblocking feature in it. This way you don't need to setup client side blocking. The adblocking is actually not too bad only missing once in awhile and ive yet to NOTICE any incorrect blocking.

Adzapper does a fairly nice job. Setup a little cron script and it automaticly updates. Also if you have something like a WRT54GL or any advanced routing device you can setup transparent port 80 forwarding too.

This script works perfect on my WRT54GL running DD-WRT v23 sp2

Proxy Script
Simple enough ... effective and does not require any end user setup. Thus "transparent"

If you're referring to the file sharing application, it has had a name change, and is now called Vuze.

http://vuze.sourceforge.net/

[however, the project page is still at azureus.sourceforge.net]