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The SADMS utility is a good alternative that uses WINBIND and makes it point and click easy. Winbind doesn't scale well due to a lack of centralized posix-SSID mapping, but it is quick and easy for just a couple of servers or laptops.

Actually, you might see a GTA clone some day. There is already an Elite clone (http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/). Development on Vega Strike is slow compared to commercial projects but there is a handful of hobbyists who keep the project going.

Now industry specific software is far less fun and enticing (read: boooring). In that case, I believe it will take real money in the form of salaries for the developers ;-)

I mean, it has a SourceForge page whose mailing list archives go back to 2001, fer cryin' out loud.

Now some of the "OpenHPC" stuff appears to be new, but not all of it appears to originate from IBM. For instance, part of it appears to be a repackaging of the SLURM batch system from LLNL. The one thing that looks like a genuine contribution from IBM is the "Advance Toolchain" stuff, but even that appears to draw heavily from existing open source code bases like valgrind.

Unless they have spent the last ten years working on the ELKS project and know that porting Linux to anything less than an 8088 could lead to total protonic reversal.

Then they would consider it to be quite a challenge, and would now wait for someone else to make one.

No, but lunix and contiki both do, and are both somewhat unix-like.

Try hereinstead. And yes, xCAT kicks butt if you want to run a linux cluster. More so, now that it's open source.

With synergy.

For USB, FreeDOS to the rescue I think.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedos

and 5 1/4" stuff can be imaged or converted to 3.5"

That is true and with that Pentium you could emulate an Apple II or any number of other old computers.

http://applewin.berlios.de/
http://kegs.sourceforge.net/

http://www.zophar.net/windos.html
http://www.zophar.net/linux.html

Maybe they should be using one of the many open source payroll applications that exist?

Sourceforge has a few:

http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=payroll

And now there's even an apt-get style package installation tool to make it extra easy!

http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/

This site will help you find open source replacements for your proprietary software (which is also handy for anyone switching to Linux):

http://www.osalt.com/

If you see something you want that's only available for Linux, no problem, install this and run them right alongside the Windows apps:

http://www.andlinux.org/

On my Windows gaming machines I use all FOSS (except some of the games, drivers and hardware config utilities, and Windows itself of course).

Dunno, but Linux can run the Apple ][

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openapple/

For one, *I don't CARE* about MITM attacks - they are 10000 times harder to pull off than basic wireless or ethernet snooping at a hotel, Internet cafe, or on a LAN.

Maybe so, but I don't have to, because someone else already has. Downloading Wireshark and downloading Airpwn are equally trivial. Implementing Wireshark is probably harder than implementing Airpwn, but that's really irrelevant.

And if your attitude becomes common, how soon before the same kinds of automated passive attacks are replaced with automated active attacks?

If I wanted to be treated like I'm stupid and prevented from doing things that I want to do because a browser thinks it would be better that way, then I'd use IE.

Major difference: IE won't give you a choice. If you feel so strongly about this behavior in Firefox, go patch it. Or, if you're not a developer (or feeling particularly lazy), file a bug asking for the ability to turn this off, or troll around looking for people willing to fork the browser.

For what it's worth, even SSH behaves like this. If you SSH to a host which is unknown, you'll get a big ugly warning -- and it will then keep track of that host key. If you SSH to a host whose key has changed, you will get a GIANT ERROR, which in BIG SCARY CAPS tells you that it's possible someone's intercepting your traffic RIGHT NOW OMG!

And there is no way to override it short of removing the key manually from the config file -- which is a good deal harder than four clicks.

I would think SSH is the kind of tool power users would be using for themselves. It's the kind of place you would expect people to be well-educated about this sort of thing, and where you'd expect people to not want their decisions made for them.

But they chose to make it difficult to be insecure.

Do you check the signatures on your browser every time you install it or update it to make sure the upstream source wasn't tampered with?

Actually, yes. Specifically, apt uses GPG to check them. Every install, every update -- of every app on the system. I therefore open myself up to a MITM exactly once -- when I download the install CD.

Do you check your keyboard plug every time you sit down at your desktop to make sure there isn't a logger on it?

Actually, I carry my keyboard with me. Not for security reasons, but it does kind of make this moot.

Do you cover your keyboard everytime you enter your password to make sure nobody is watching?

No. I do, however, use Dvorak, and type extremely fast. Someone would have to be watching very carefully, or recording it to play back at a slower speed. And that password is only used locally -- the passwords I use remotely, I mostly have my browser memorize, or they're keys instead of passwords -- so they would have to steal my machine in order to do it.

In the case of my laptop, they would also have to steal my USB key, or they'd have to very, very quickly perform a cold-boot exploit.

There are thousands of potential vulnerabilities that exist every time you use your computer

I don't see that as a reason to introduce more.

quit making it out like it's worthless without authentication - it's not.

Actually, it kind of is. Without authentication, it is security through obscurity -- you're basically praying that no one who is capable of sniffing your packets realizes that they could probably alter them, too.

Now, by some arguments, it's not completely useless. After all, neither is the "two-factor authentication" employed by most banks -- since it is theoretically possible that someone would collect your password, but not the answer to your security question.

But the payoff is so low, at this point, that I don't see why you'd bother -- and I think it's dangerous to support it at all, because it provides a false sense of security.

The article doesn't mention the rather well established tool PAR2, that is commonly used for forward error correction on usenet. It allows for an adjustable amount of redundancy (and therefore data loss). Typically, PAR-Files are build to restore 2.5% or 5% of the protected archive. PAR2 uses Reed-Solomon Code, and is rather slow. Does anyone know of an efficient open source implementation of Tornado Codes, which allegedly are 10000 times faster?

Excellent, I agree. But generation of Par2 files should be automatic. I don't mind having only 3.5 gigabytes on a DVD for data if the Par2 files are generated and tested automatically.

Par2 is apparently Reed-Solomon done in a more helpful way.

Quote from the Parity Volume Set Specification 2.0: "PAR 2.0 uses a 16-bit Reed-Solomon code and can support 32768 blocks."

I hope you are joking. PAR2 is nothing more than an implementation of RS codes. So how can RS codes be ancient compared to PAR2?

From the PAR2 specification introduction:

"The redundant data in the PAR files is computed using Reed-Solomon codes. These codes can take a set of equal-sized blocks of data and produce a number of same-sized recovery blocks. Then, given a subset of original data blocks and some recovery block, it is possible to reproduce the original data blocks. Reed-Solomon codes can do this recovery as long as the number of missing data blocks does not out number the recovery blocks. The design of the Reed-Solomon codes in this spec is based on James S. Plank's tech report at U. of Tennessee entitled A tutorial on Reed-Solomon coding for fault-tolerance in RAID-like systems. The tech report contains an error, so the design is changed slightly to fix the problem. PAR 2.0 uses a 16-bit Reed-Solomon code and can support 32768 blocks."

Poor usability? Is there really anybody who thinks that Internet Explorer 7's user interface is better than Firefox 3's?

Windows has 200 applications with the UI quality of IE7/FF3. Linux has... maybe 10.

Yes, Firefox has an OK GUI. Not a great one; an OK one*. That's because Mozilla is drowning in Google cash, and actually pays designers to design their product. Firefox is the *exception*, not the *rule*, in Linux-world.

I'm getting tired of hearing this over and over again. For example, in the past 7 years, GNOME has invested an insane amount of effort in usability. Go read about all those professional GNOME usability studies that Sun has funded.

I agree that many open source projects are getting better; I don't think anybody really denies that. But are they:
1) As numerous as the good products on Windows/OS X?
2) Getting better at the same rate as Windows/OS X?

The original blog post also brings up a relevant point here, that as long as open source projects simply copy features Apple or Microsoft have already developed, they'll never be *better* than Windows or OS X. Firefox has a good interface, but it doesn't have a single thing that Macintosh System 6 applications didn't do in 1994.

But what's the community doing? Instead of offering helpful feedback, perhaps mockups or even professional usability studies, they're flaming the developers.

Maybe that's because they've already tried, and been flamed by the developers. I've been flamed for even super-simple no-brainer bugs, like "control-A should perform the Select All function in the field the text cursor is in."

What's the point of even trying to help in an environment where the developers won't even acknowledge that the Select All shortcut should work in their app? Or where developers in the year 2008 are entirely unfamiliar with how long menus (perfected since 1985) should work: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1865630&group_id=95717&atid=612382

--
* A great UI wouldn't have tabs-within-tabs in the Settings dialog, and the Page Info dialog would update itself in real-time as AJAX-y websites do their thing. Also, what's up with control-mousewheel changing the page's zoom level when the cursor is inside a text field, but not doing it when outside a text field? That quirk gets me every time.

Not all OSS coders are that way. Put me to the test. Contribute to my project and see what I do with it. I'll bet that you will find it to be more along the lines of "thanks for the creative and the advice which I will get to work incorporating into the code" a lot more than "patches welcome."

Irfanview

Notepad++

CDex

FileZilla

Free or open source software that I use frequently have no usability issues. I know there are some horrific free and open source software choices out there. I just don't use the ones that don't lend themselves to ease of use. I stick with the stuff I know works.

Irfanview

Notepad++

CDex

FileZilla

Free or open source software that I use frequently have no usability issues. I know there are some horrific free and open source software choices out there. I just don't use the ones that don't lend themselves to ease of use. I stick with the stuff I know works.

Irfanview

Notepad++

CDex

FileZilla

Free or open source software that I use frequently have no usability issues. I know there are some horrific free and open source software choices out there. I just don't use the ones that don't lend themselves to ease of use. I stick with the stuff I know works.

If you want encryption guaranteed against major governments you have to go with a one time pad. Even then you've got to worry about Van Eck Phreaking or FPGA eavesdropping.

In general it's a bad idea to be confident in your encryption - if the Germans hadn't been so confident in Engima they might have done much better militarily.

Any provider like this can ultimately be compelled to cooperate with security services and you've therefore got to assume they are working with major governments to compromise your communications. Common sense really.

That said, something like Mixmaster is a good place to start. Makes it very difficult to be located by any legal process although (of course) it won't help if the NSA takes an interest.

Hushmail? Compromised almost as soon as it was set up I'd wager.

Or if you use git (bidirectional):

git-svn clone https://switzerland.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/switzerland -T trunk -b branches -t tags

This is going to change fast so it might be a good idea to download directly from the repository:

svn co https://switzerland.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/switzerland switzerland

Enjoy!

For the lazy: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=233013

I have the "sensors-applet 1.8.1" (Sensors-Applet) installed on my system.

Anything graphical pushes the temperature up from an average of 56C (reading slashdot) to 89C. Even having a defunct Acroread running in the background will have the system at 91C before shutting down, even when nothing else is going running.

I did have a problem with my fan some time ago. This seemed to be caused by a thick layer of dust on all the blades (which looked more like a lint filter on a drying machine than a heatsink).
After cleaning out the space and giving the fan blades a good rinsing, the system is quieter, but now sounds more like a hovercraft than a jet-engine at full throttle.

http://midori.sourceforge.net/

Windows can do what it likes, I got me a friend

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

Is EFI planned to replace BIOS in the non-mac world?

If you ask Intel, yes. If you ask the rest of the world, meh. I don't think anyone would argue that BIOS should stay, it's a crusty old POS that's been hacked on top of hacks over the years to keep supporting new things, but what should replace it is very debatable.

Can Linux bootloaders and whatnot play nicely with EFI?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/elilo/
http://refit.sourceforge.net/

The former is a Linux-focused bootloader for all EFI platforms, rEFIt is a generic loader built with Intel Macs in mind. I have no idea if it can run on other EFI platforms.

Heck, can Windows?

Yes and no. Windows has had an EFI loader for a few years now, as it's required for Itanium. That was finally brought to normal processors with Server 2008 and Vista SP1, x64 only. So if you're 32 bit or running anything but the latest versions of Windows, you're stuck with the BIOS.

If so, can one even BUY a motherboard that uses EFI? As I'm planning to build a system on which I can (hopefully) run both windows and linux, I'd like to try to avoid the whole MBR shenanigans.

It seems MSI is shipping a MB they call "EFINITY" and a few OEMs supposedly have started using EFI on their custom boards, but in the non-Mac x86 world it's still pretty rare.

Is EFI planned to replace BIOS in the non-mac world?

If you ask Intel, yes. If you ask the rest of the world, meh. I don't think anyone would argue that BIOS should stay, it's a crusty old POS that's been hacked on top of hacks over the years to keep supporting new things, but what should replace it is very debatable.

Can Linux bootloaders and whatnot play nicely with EFI?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/elilo/
http://refit.sourceforge.net/

The former is a Linux-focused bootloader for all EFI platforms, rEFIt is a generic loader built with Intel Macs in mind. I have no idea if it can run on other EFI platforms.

Heck, can Windows?

Yes and no. Windows has had an EFI loader for a few years now, as it's required for Itanium. That was finally brought to normal processors with Server 2008 and Vista SP1, x64 only. So if you're 32 bit or running anything but the latest versions of Windows, you're stuck with the BIOS.

If so, can one even BUY a motherboard that uses EFI? As I'm planning to build a system on which I can (hopefully) run both windows and linux, I'd like to try to avoid the whole MBR shenanigans.

It seems MSI is shipping a MB they call "EFINITY" and a few OEMs supposedly have started using EFI on their custom boards, but in the non-Mac x86 world it's still pretty rare.

here is my favorite.

Trying to pull a tough-guy face while sporting Tux on your arm just doesn't work.

Boot up Linux and all the stuff on your NTFS partition is read-only. The situation gets even worse when you boot Windows because that can't even see the stuff on your Linux partition. It's like having two seperate computers and no easy way to share data between them.

Not true; there are plenty of ways to read your Linux files from within Windows. For example: http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/.

Actually midori works great. I have hacked on it for over 3 years now.

http://midori.sourceforge.net/

It has been a embedded linux distro that Linus himself helped form for nearly 5 years now...

I see that microsoft has even started stealing other names, or they are fully embracing linux and OSS finally.

I don't suspect that there would be a problem with that. Just as it isn't a problem with the Microsoft brand of synthetic pillow material..

Drinks, pillows and operating systems are sufficiently different.

The Linux distro or the web browser are more likely points of conflicts. Something will have to give here.

I though Midori was an open source web browser

It's a linux distro

If you read any of my posts, you'd see that in nearly every one I admit that the feature does have its uses. I just don't want to give up my simple predictable address bar. The people who think that they are the arbiter of taste for the population at large are those devs who have not listened to the community, a large part of which does not like this behavior. There's really no reason we can't have both an address bar and an awesome bar, configurable at the users desire. It's arrogant, user hostile, arbitrary decision making on the part of the devs, and I'd really like to see a fork along the lines of FunPidgin.

Thanks for trolling though.

Midori Linux from Transmeta - Linus T.

Guess MS will just have to change the name....

You forgot to mention Insecticida.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/insecticida/

I agree entirely with this, if you want to be anal about exact positions of images and the like, then use something else. Otherwise, make sure the image is good quality and tell it what size you want it to be. If you're upset about typesetting, my mind boggles!

On windows, I use TeXnicCentre as an environment for working with LaTeX (MiKTeX). It automates things like getting packages that you don't already have from CTAN and has menu options for symbols that you don't remember the codes for. It also gives support when you're typing, like suggestions for autocompletion which is dead handy.

For precise typesetting I've never found anything better. For working with large documents, in my opinion you'd want to be insane using anything else. I'll keep reading though, I'd be interested in any alternatives that come up!

You're right that it isn't a trivial task, but have you seen "Lout"? It uses the same line-break algorithm as TeX and it arguably MUCH easier to use as a layout language.

What it really needs to catch on is a GUI built on top of it. Something along the lines of what Lyx does for LaTeX. It would take a lot of work, but I wonder if LyX could be adapted?

Obviously I wouldn't push OOo as a viable substitute for LaTeX

Have you tried OOoLatex?

Yes I use docbook. And the dblatex (DocBook to LaTex converter) to make PDF's With a makefile, and including each chapter as a separate file works pretty cleanly. IMHO, Writing in Docbook is a lot easier then raw editing of LaTex. http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/

Take a look at tbook http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net/

I don't think its what YOU want but it may be of interest to many readers.

Sam

I don't know if it is what you are looking for, but one alternative to LaTeX is "Lout". Here's the home page for Lout and the Wikipedia page, which provides a quick summary. I've only dabbled with it, but it might be worth a look and isn't on the list of what you've tried. Unfortunately I don't know if there is a GUI front end for it, so that part of your request isn't satisfied.

lout?

From it's homepage:
 

The system reads a high-level description of a document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript file which can be printed on most laser printers and graphic display devices. A plain text output option is available, as is a highly experimental PDF output mode (users are encouraged to generate PostScript, then convert to PDF using GhostScript instead.)

I've used the PDF output and definitely it's not that experimental.

I have similar issues; for the most part they really don't bother me: I essentially never use long tables; the number of times that float positioning has gone nuts on me are so few that (compared to other programs screwing things up) I can essentially ignore it; programming new classes is something I do very rarely, so the pain therein isn't too bad. That said, I would love to see something that made programming with TeX easier, or a replacement for TeX with more flexibility on that front (and better font handling for modern font formats). I was tempted by QaTeX, but the project is quite resoundingly dead; the principle certainly sounded nice. For font handling I rather like XeTeX.

that's:

http://kile.sourceforge.net/

(your link was broken)

But on OSX, we'd see non-ASCII chars simply garbaged with no obvious pattern.

My guess is you were using a codepage instead of Unicode. I've had issues with old MP3 files ripped over the years - for example Björk :). There are several converters for filenames (and ID3 tags). After switching everything to UTF8, all my systems (mac, win, linux) produced consistent results. Unicode is the future, convert now or die. :)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
http://unicoderewriter.sourceforge.net/
http://www.unicodetools.com/
http://www.linux.com/feature/58689

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

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout

It's a pity that this hasn't gotten more attention. Apart from the extensive use of @, the functional language that Lout uses seems pretty flexible.

And the good thing is, you can get LaTeX formulas even in OpenOffice: http://ooolatex.sourceforge.net/