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For really simple interactivity, I would suggest something along the lines of

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vnc-reflector/

Let one person do the application hosting and get your committee to VNC to that host. Then everybody can do everything, including applications that don't have shared edit features built in.

Google documents or Zoho or some other gratis (but typically proprietary) "cloud" solution might be reasonable.

If you're fine with text-only, you have a lot of options. VIM and EMACS both allow collaborative editing, you can share a screen session, or you can get a specialized collaborative editor (such as Gobby and ACE) or a specialized framework, such as DocSynch

If you need light-weight word processing, Abiword has a plugin for real-time collaboration.

Heavier weight word processing of DOCX can be done with Plutext.

If you need more graphical documents & the above doesn't seem to fit AND if you have a small group of friends who you trust, I'd just go "simple" & host with VNC or some other remote desktop protocol.

As far as other pieces, there is a lot of good F/OSS voice/IM/whiteboard software. Coccinella and ekiga are good examples.

Google documents or Zoho or some other gratis (but typically proprietary) "cloud" solution might be reasonable.

If you're fine with text-only, you have a lot of options. VIM and EMACS both allow collaborative editing, you can share a screen session, or you can get a specialized collaborative editor (such as Gobby and ACE) or a specialized framework, such as DocSynch

If you need light-weight word processing, Abiword has a plugin for real-time collaboration.

Heavier weight word processing of DOCX can be done with Plutext.

If you need more graphical documents & the above doesn't seem to fit AND if you have a small group of friends who you trust, I'd just go "simple" & host with VNC or some other remote desktop protocol.

As far as other pieces, there is a lot of good F/OSS voice/IM/whiteboard software. Coccinella and ekiga are good examples.

OpenH323 is basically Netmeeting, but OSS version. Mind you, it uses (surprise) H.323 protocol, and not all firewalls like it (since it requires connectivity to both directions).

http://openh323.sourceforge.net/

Personally I'm a big fan of JabRef which uses the BibTeX package in LaTeX.

There is a way to get JabRef working with Word 2003 but I've never tried it, I mostly stick to LaTeX.

JabRef is a nice little Java app, nice easy to use interface, smart search functions, runs happily under my xp and *nix accounts, and is open source.

Happy Days

True. But I see lots of folks at my university who are addicted to EndNote's buggy "Cite While You Write" functions that provide MS-Word integration. RefWorks has an analogous "Write while you cite" function, but still lots of people have accumulated libraries in EndNote and still have a love/hate addiction to CWYW.A lot of products provide "cite while you write"-like functionality. Zotero has CWYW-like functionality that can round-trip between MS Word and OO.o Writer. Bibus, another free/open source reference manager, also supports both word processors. Word processor support in other reference managers is detailed on Wikipedia.

Our library provides ISI Web of Science on-line....more open alternative will require freeing up all elements of the stack to include citation repositories.

Zotero plans to have a citation database that runs on a web server & plans to collaborate with the internet archive to provide storage of "open" publications (unfortunately, this excludes quite a bit of traditional content). Preprint/reprint servers, such as arXiv are a step in the right direction. Google scholar, PubMed Central, and other large repositories may help break the monopoly. If you'd like to help make your papers and citation information available to others, I encourage you to try out refbase or some other institutional repository software.

There are a wealth of APIs and standards to support this. I'm happy to say that refbase+zotero have adopted many of them. In addition to the citation style language, linked to above & which can create formatted citations form rich metadata, there is MODS XML, developed by the LoC, is a rich bibliographic format for exchange, unAPI makes it easy for websites to point to machine-readable metadata. SRW, also by the LoC, provides a uniform query language.

There are many places to follow this development, including OSS4lib, One Big Library, GCS-PCS, and many others.

I hoped that I kept the article summary relatively free of my personal opinion, which I will indulge in this comment:

Thomson Reuters has too many asshats.

Let us set aside the fact that academic software and those who develop academic software should embrace interoperability and knowledge sharing.

I'll even set aside that, despite the (rewritten) title, Zotero has many fundamental differences from EndNote.

The complaint is, in the words of Bruce D'Arcus, "a nuisance lawsuit designed to intimidate." Zotero's style repository contains no EndNote .ens styles and seems to contain no styles derived from those styles. CSL styles are created manually and through an online style creator. There is no way to get a new CSL style from an .ens file--the Zotero beta had mapped fields internally to allow .ens files to be used independently of CSL (but even this feature has been disabled in the trunk). Zotero thought about copyright issues surrounding this feature and came to the right decision--not to distribute .ens files or .csl files derived from .ens files, but to retain the feature to work with user-provided .ens files (similar to the way OpenOffice.org can open and save MS Office files).

I have decided not to purchase EndNote and I am asking my employer to do the same, unless the suit is dropped. I intend to donate at least as much as an EndNote license costs to George Mason University, the Software Freedom Law Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or any other applicable entity that both defends Zotero in this case and solicits donations. (I don't know any organization who has stepped in on this case yet, but I imagine that one of these organizations can provide some sort of legal support in the future.)

I encourage you to stop purchasing Thomson products too. There are plenty of reference managers for all platforms (some proprietary, some free/open source) that you can choose instead, not the least of which is Zotero.

Disclaimer: I am a developer of refbase, a free and open source reference manager that might be seen to compete with Thomson Reuters's EndNoteWeb. I have and continue to use many reference managers. While I have many technical complaints about the EndNote products, they aren't the worst technical products. Thomson may be the worst socially, though--in addition to inane and baseless lawsuits, they are very slow to respond to general feedback.

Yeah Linux + WINE will do that on Intel Macs and Intel PCs.

For PowerMac Mac OSX and Mac OS you can use Mac on Linux but there is no Intel Mac or Intel PC port yet. But for PPC Macs it works great.

Mac on Linux will run Mac programs under Linux.

Google is your friend!

or you could use Fire Fox's download helper to rip any song directly from the band's myspace page.

Or getmsmp3, which has apparently been abandoned.... Notice reads:

Sorry everyone, but MySpace has its own special music interests now, and this
program can't play nice with their new business model. It's going to be hard
enough for them to be profitable without some script out there that can grab
content without watching ads. So getmsmp3 is officially abandoned. Sorry!

• Try to keep up a good ratio of tests vs code. Tests make your code more robust and make it easier to change it without breaking anything - but most of all they force you to think about what you're trying to accomplish and they can serve as a spec for your code at the same time.
• Refactor often. This is a lot easier if you followed the previous point.
• Run a lint-like tool on your code now and then, e.g. PMD for Java or pyLint for Python. You shouldn't treat its output as gospel but it can be quite enlightening.

but that iDeneb project is way cheaper as it does not require a dongle.

Others have found a way to hack their BIOS to use the Apple OEM ID and do their own EFI to run Mac OSX to fool OSX to think it is running on a real Apple Macintosh. The nice thing about EEPROMS is that you can flash update them easily, and anyone who knows machine language can hack their own BIOS file into one that can easily pass for an Apple Macintosh BIOS.

As for people like me, we don't even need a dongle to make our Intel PC turn into an Amiga that is even cooler than an Apple Macintosh running OSX, and has a much lower memory footprint so it runs faster than OSX, and has an interface and look and feel like OSX or Vista, but is 100% free, 100% open source, and 100% legal.

For those who want to pirate OSX, get real, get AROS instead and support AROS developers to develop more AROS drivers and software. Why settle for a monopoly from Microsoft or Apple, when you can be free and use a non-monopoly OS that will run on almost any PC, Mac, Amiga, MIPS, PowerPC, etc system on the market?

You want an alternative to Windows? Wait until ReactOS is done. It will run Windows applications. If you want an alternative to Windows that does not run Windows programs get HaikuOS when it is ready as it is a free and open source BeOS operating system. Once OSFree is finished it will be a free OS/2 open source OS, but I heard they will make it run under Linux to run OS/2 applications. Support your favorite free open source operating system instead of pirating OSX. Who cares enough about bloatware to pirate OSX or Vista, they are both bloated and buggy! If you want a free OS, get a free open source OS as I listed above when they are finished and out of beta testing. If you can't wait join in their beta program and give them feedback on how to fix it, or join the developers to help them get done faster.

Boycott Vista and OSX, and get Linux instead and install a Macintosh skin on Linux instead of pirating OSX.

I've been disappointed with the lack of Python on these smartphone devices.

PyObjC

There's a simple POP-to-OWA server on SourceForge called OwaGate. You can get the source code tarball here. I use it, Thunderbird and Lightning. Works OK, not everything you might need. Could also use an SMTP-to-OWA component and IMAP-to-OWA.

The only Commodore incompetence was lack of advertising and marketing as Microsoft and Apple had done. The reports of the death of the Amiga were greatly exaggerated and it still lives on in Intel X86 PCs as AROS as a free open source alternative operating system.

Full disclosure - I am a founder of a startup that develops an open source automated trading platform targeted at institutional investors.

As was mentioned in above postings, there are a series of open source tools available to bootstrap your trading system development:

• QuickFIX and QuickFIX/J (I'm also a developer of QFJ project) - a C++ and Java open source implementations of the FIX protocol, the underlying standard protocol for connectivity between financial institutions. Think of it as the HTTP of finance.
• QuantLib - an open source risk analytics package
• Esper - an open source complex event processing engine
• EclipseTrader - Eclipse-based open source trading GUI that's targeted more at retail investors
• ActiveMQ and AMQP and Qpid for messaging (AMQP standard was initially contributed by JPMorgan)

And then of course there's my company Marketcetera - we build on top of a lot of the tools mentioned above and others (ActiveMQ, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, QFJ, etc) to provide the basic underlying platform that institutional traders (think quantitative hedge funds) can use to build their proprietary algorithms and start trading. After implementing a few trading systems in a row ourselves for various trading firms we realized that there was an obvious need for an open source trading platform so that people wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel and write systems from scratch every single time.

To answer the OP's question about which commercial firms use FOSS: - a lot of proprietary trading software is implemented on top of OSS - JPMorgan famously built their trading GUI [PDF] on top of Eclipse, and Progress Apama is built on top of Eclipse RCP as well.

Not surprisingly, most trading applications are very Windows-heavy (although quite a few companies have Linux clusters, and some exchanges run on Linux as well). Most of the apps that your broker will provide for you to trade with are Windows-only (such as Bloomberg, Goldman Redi, MicroHedge, etc), and a lot of the APIs available from vendors are .NET or COM components and nothing else. We implement our systems mostly in Java (including the Eclipse RCP), thought have connectors for some of the Windows-specific components.

We know that flexibility is at the heart of any powerful trading application, and we think the open-source model maximizes the ability of our users to control the application. Some think the open-source model is antithetical to the secretive finance industry, but we see it as the perfect fit.

For convenience, instead of using the CFFA's onboard CompactFlash slot, I'd get an IDE-to-CF adapter and connect it to the CFFA with an IDE cable.

Actually, that only works for documents that you can view/edit in Open Office. For general purpose use, you can always opt for PDFCreator. We use it at our clients' offices, and have excellent results.

There are a great number of tools, thanks for that recommendation for Windows. I personally recommend doing this at the gateway level using a Linux firewall or pfSense and bandwidthd.

While it's fine and dandy to monitor your own bandwidth, what happens when Comcast says you hit 250GB and bandwidthd is showing 150GB? With no official, transparent meter from the service provider the customer is never right.

I'm not gonna get into right and wrong here, cause they really should provide a tool (I know other ISP's with limits do), but there are (free) ways to monitor your bandwidth.

I recommend FreeMeter for Windows XP which has a Totals Log function that does exactly that. If you think you might cross the line on bandwith, download it.

but nothing free and easy to do something as simple, as, for example, print to PDF

I'm not sure what you are getting at, there.. PDFCREATOR is excellent and open-source. Someone at work showed me this app and I haven't used anything else since then.

One problem with Nano is its limited Undo/Redo. Perhaps a better option is JOE. I've never really used JOE, but it appears to be able to use a Pico (what Nano was originally based on) mode as well as an Emacs mode.

I downloaded that from the MS website some years ago. I've tried to use it with DOSEMU on Linux (which runs most DOS software amazingly well) but found that it (Word 5.5) won't save files onto my hard drive. It checks to insure that you have sufficient free space on the drive to save the file and gets an answer that overflows the variable it's using so it thinks there is insufficient space and refuses to save a file.
 
I remember seeing a TSR program back when "huge" 40mb hard drives first came out (remember the Seagate ST250 that sounded like gravel being rolled in a pail when it was in use) that would fake the return from the DOS interrupt that tells you how much free space you have so programs wouldn't do that, but I haven't found it again.

Did you know that Exchange performs like crap when you run low on local disk space to keep the data.

Why is your Exchange server running out of disk space? Don't you have automated monitoring of your server with something like Nagios? Aren't you using something like NagiosGraph to trend your disk space usage and plan upgrades before you run out of space? Aren't you setting quotas so that users can't dump 10 gigs of data into their email accounts overnight?

WICD works wonderfully for me, with zero issues...?

http://wicd.sourceforge.net/

Yeah.. it's great as long as you don't want to connect to an ad-hoc wireless network. From what I've been able to read on the matter, it seems that _no_ Linux distro can currently do this :s

I can't seem to figure out why some many people (usually MS haters) claim that Windows Mobile crashes consistently. I've had my phone for years and have only had to reset it about 12 times

Maybe because it CRASHES indeed?
EXAMPLE #1:
Open a big .pdf or image file with your favorite app. The app will grab all existing resources and make the device unresponsive/ultraslow.
This is totally unacceptable!! A decent kernel will raise a OOM (out-of-memory) and KILL the damn app!

EXAMPLE #2:
Maybe you don't need to change too much your wifi ip address, but the real fact is that it is required to soft reset the device everytime you do it.

I could stay all day here remembering really bad usability issues on windows mobile but Google is better than me.

Windows Mobile likes to keep apps open, but if you get MagicButton or any similar task manager, you can make programs actually close. This improves the performance and the stability quite a bit. And while I haven't done any heavy statistical analysis, I've found the built in Excel to be capable of meeting my needs (quick spreadsheet to track boxes of girl scout cookies sold for my daughter, a spreadsheet to help calculate loan costs of cars when shopping for a new one, etc.). Not a lot of need for Word and PowerPoint, so I can't speak to those.

Good for you that windows mobile fits your needs. But the truth is that it is not as pleasant as you said.
Again, I'm helping with the porting of GNU/Linux to the HTC Wizard.
http://linwizard.sourceforge.net/
Do you imagine how much people shows up on our official linwizard IRC channel? A lot, most of them asking how to put android or openmoko on it.
If you still don't believe, just google for the IRC logs.

Growing up with a C64 and then DOS of all flavors and even Windows 3.x, I'm used to limits of an operating system (and before you raise too many flames, how many programs can you run on an iPhone......). If those limits mean that I can't have 20 programs running at once, I'm ok with that. If you live within the limits, the OS is usually very stable and performant. Sure Windows Mobile isn't the worlds greatest OS, but I don't think it's as bad as the bashers like to claim.

You can't resume everyone as basher/microsoft hater. The truth is that windows mobile really sucks and there is little we can do to improve it, since most of problems are on the kernel or the UI itself.
That's why GNU/Linux makes sense:
- If you don't like something, you CAN fix it.

I don't own a iphone so I won't comment. But either way, please be aware the the HTC wizard is not so limited as you may think.

The truth is silly enough without my help.

Yes : Phoenix 2.0 and Closures in C

get bonus points ?

http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/

intel wireless chipsets are NICE. I bought a dell laptop with ubuntu pre-installed that came with an intel wireless chipset, I have no problems whatsoever.

the big thing for ubuntu would be to pressure other hardware makers to go the same route as intel, guess it hasn't been working out. as a customer I prefer to support intel and other hardware manufacturers that provide support for Foss drivers.

WICD works wonderfully for me, with zero issues...? http://wicd.sourceforge.net/

GLUT is just a bunch of convenience methods, and is decade old abandonware, anyway - use freeglut instead.

I'm surprized that no-one mentioned Grism yet: http://www.grism.org/

or Merchant of Venice: http://mov.sourceforge.net/

or Money Bee: http://uk.moneybee.net/

or Ntropix: http://www.johncon.com/ntropix/

There doesn't seem to be a shortage of these things.

A great lightweight IDE. I use it for pretty much anything, even for a regular text editor.

http://www.geany.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/geany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geany

I'm a "buy and hold on fundamentals" kind of investor, so kymoney2 works great for me. The project could use some work in the reporting section, but it keeps track of our small portfolio just fine.

http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-home.html

Getting more complicated than that is generally out of range for the average individual investor. Sourceforge lists a bunch. Maybe you can find what you are looking for there? http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=finance

I'm a "buy and hold on fundamentals" kind of investor, so kymoney2 works great for me. The project could use some work in the reporting section, but it keeps track of our small portfolio just fine.

http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-home.html

Getting more complicated than that is generally out of range for the average individual investor. Sourceforge lists a bunch. Maybe you can find what you are looking for there? http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=finance

http://jgnash.sourceforge.net/

get the jar file and run java -jar jgnash.jar (use the file name)...

EclipseTrader is probably the most advanced open source trading program. It interfaces with some trading platforms and intra-day data feeds. It has several hundred technical indicators. It also is very expandable and easy to write modules for (in Java). I wrote some technical analysis modules for the back-testing system and was fairly impressed with how well it worked as it is based on the very solid OSGI/Eclipse model. I'd say it actually competes fairly well with some of the proprietary trading platforms I have used, especially if you are a Java coder and want to add modules to it to aid in implementing your particular trading style.

....and i just remembered (actually, I cheated and looked on one of my very earliest burnt CD's).
Pueblo / Chaco.
and they are still around: http://pueblo.sourceforge.net/

From mainframe to PC. I used this language a lot: IBM REXX: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/rexx/ The Rexx Language Association: http://www.rexxla.org/ Regina Rexx Interpreter: http://regina-rexx.sourceforge.net/

http://pleac.sourceforge.net/

You mean besides Intel and AMD's websites? I think their specs cover just about everything, don't they? Nasm's docs do the rest.

I suppose there is linuxassembly.org if you want Linux / FreeBSD info.

Here's a bug report I filed a while back.

Sounds like reST.

Eclipse with PyDev work fine for me.

Seconded. Though I trade Kate for Vim with pychecker mapped to :make. I find Vim is just fine for this, except when I have to debug something, in which case the $60 I paid for Wing IDE are more than justified.

I tried both Eric and Komodo and I think they're perfect in every way (perhaps Komodo a bit more so) except for the fact that they're desperately slow on both Linux and Windows. Same goes for Eclipse+PyDev.

I've had problems using Eclipse on Ubuntu before, the problems you had with Eclipse may be related.

1. Don't use the repositories for Eclipse. Download the linux version directly from the eclipse website, and run it.
2. Eclipse has problems with the default gcj jvm for Ubuntu. Solution here

I suggest giving Eclipse another look. Download the latest ganymede, fix the jvm, add http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/ to your update sites.

How about Boa Constructor? I've worked it on Linux, but the screenshots on the project's site on sourceforge are from windows, so I'm guessing it's cross platform.
Pasted from the Ubuntu add/remove description
RAD tool for Python and WxWindows application Boa-constructor is an IDE oriented towards creating cross-platform applications built on top of the Python language and the WxWindows GUI toolkit. It features: * visual wxWindows frame design, * object inspector and explorer, * syntax highlighting editor with code completion, call tips and code browsing for Python code, * syntax highlighting editor for C, C++, HTML, XML, config files (INI style), * documentation generation, * an integrated Python debugger, * integrated help, * a Python Shell, * an explorer able to browse, open/edit, inspect and interact with various data sources including files, CVS, Zope, FTP, DAV and SSH, * an UML view generator. Homepage: http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/ This application is provided by the Ubuntu community.

The urge to write artificial intelligence software is more powerful that any concern about intellectual property (IP). I say, create the AI Minds first and let the Technological Singlarity sort it all out later.

A few days ago, I noticed in the Site Meter visitor logs that the U.S. Patent Office (USPTO) made a no-referral, single-page visit to the MindForth source code of free open-source artificial intelligence. Now, what does a stealthy visit from the USPTO mean? That somebody is trying to patent Mentifex AI technology out from under Mentifex? That the open-source AI project is a form of IP "prior art" when someone is applying for an AI patent? Should I even be worried about a visit from the USPTO? In the immortal words of ALfred E. Newman, "Quid? Me anxius sum? -- which precisely sums up my attitude.

And in case you want to implement least privilege in your PHP application but still provide access to high level database users...

phpgirder

A shameless plug ;)

With this and a virtual keyboard and mouse, you can carry your laptop in your pocket.

What, your laptop doesn't fit in your pocket? Would you settle for a cell phone running something like ThinStation and a cellular-internet hookup? Remember, "The network is the computer."

I have to be honest, I didn't even read the front page before I linked it here.
They do in fact have up to date releases (the latest 2.0 and 3.0 releases) but you have to follow the download link, which takes you to their Sourceforge page.