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Yeah, you're not alone. I filed my first bug report with Filezilla a few years ago on how it handles (or, more appropriately, doesn't handle) certain file names. The official response was that I shouldn't be naming my files "improperly" as it causes problems and the bug was closed. This bug still exists in the new version.

What a great way to discourage feedback.

I use these coding standards; they seem to work well in practice. Others are possible too, but I wouldn't get too hung up over minor differences; consistency is by far the most important aspect. It also helps if you've got documented pre- and post-conditions for all functions.

You must be talking about this guy, and that's a pretty nice piece of software. And btw, it has been (kinda) ported to OS X, and the result is here.

There are several tools that can detect cut and paste code:

Simian: http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/products/simian/
PMD: http://pmd.sourceforge.net/
DuplicateFinder: http://www.codeplex.com/DuplicateFinder

And probably others

You are wrong on so many levels.

Legacy: The PC has been around for a very long time with constant upgrades and is still fully backward compatible with even the earliest games.

Library: The PC has the largest library of games compared to any console. If you think there weren't tons of games for PC before the Playstation, you are either very young or just ignorant. In fact some of the best video games ever made were released on the PC in the time before the Playstation. With PC games you can also create or download updates, modifications, total conversions or entire games, many of them for free. Free games or mods on a console? That's just laughable.

Multiplayer: The PC had networked multiplayer games long before any console did and provided the basis for all network code and gameplay used in games today. While console gamers were still taking turns playing Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog, PC gamers were playing Doom and Descent together.

Sound: The PC introduced digital sound and FM synthesis to gaming. While console gamers were listening to the simplistic triangle wave music and beeping sounds, the PC had much richer sounding FM synth and speech.

Graphics: The PC has always been in the lead here and was responsible for introducing photorealistic graphics and 3D video games. While consoles could display a mere 16 colours simultaneously, PC gamers regularly played games using 256 or thousands of colours.

Controls: The PC has had a lot more options for game controllers than any console. Keyboards, mice, joysticks, gamepads, flight sticks/yokes, racing wheels and many other unique controllers. While consoles only offered a digital gamepad, the PC had analogue joysticks for precision movements long before they became popular on consoles.

The PC isn't just a gaming platform, it's a gaming platform and much more.

Very interesting concept, and I'm surprised nobody thought of it sooner.

In fact, they did.
http://www.peercast.org/
http://p2p-radio.sourceforge.net/
http://www.streamerp2p.com/

The only difference here is the budget. Not to be a prick, but I don't see anything inovative here. Except maybe the bittorent roots (22m for a modded BT client with an embbeded media player ? who's to say that a bittorent type algo is better than a p2p algo specifically designed for the task of streaming ?)
This development will not change much. People prefer to have the files on their computer and build collections, not stream them. They want to move them arround to other devices not connected to the net.
In very a distant future (*), when a huge library of pirated/cheap material becomes available, and most mobile devices have broadband internet connections, and the streaming is so damn perfect and flawless that it's indistinguishable whether you play a local file or a stream, than maybe something like this becomes relevant.
For commercial online TV and the like, this technology it's still unproven, and I'm not referring to SwarmPlayer specifically, but to alternatives that have been available for years. As it turns out, the cost of the bandwidth is not that large. It remains to be seen if a p2p method comes close in reliability to a well provisioned CDN, until now it has not. Digital online TV has other, much larger problems, for example the fact that it's a nightmare for most ISPs, who have designed their networks so that each user is able to browse for an average of 100MB/day, and now for the same user to view 5Mb/s digital TV 10 hours/day they need to increase the capacity 200x.

(*) 2 years in internet time

ByzantineOS (based on Mozilla) boots quite quickly (at least it did last time I used it).

Core Distro doesn't offer tech support and doesn't hold your hand, but it's a lean, mean, fast CLI Linux.

eComStation is an update to IBM's OS/2. It will run all the commercial OS/2 applications. There are ports of lots of BSD, GNU, and other open source software for it. That includes OpenOffice. It comes with Firefox and a Java system. It also runs Windows 3.1 software, and has a WINE-like clone of 32-bit Windows APIs that runs some applications for newer Windows versions.

eComStation runs on a Pentium 133 or a dual-core Athlon. The minimum RAM for a CD installer is 48MB, but the installed system will run with as little as 32MB, with 64MB a recommended minimum. It'll support up to 4GB. As little as 500MB of hard drive will store the system, with 1GB recommended for a full installation. You can get a 20GB drive dirt cheap these days. There's no Bluetooth support and not all hardware has drivers, but a well-supported machine with this runs like wild cheetahs.

At $259 per seat for a non-upgrade version, though, it's cheaper to build a bargain basement new PC and put a free OS on it. There's a free eComStation demo CD, but it requires 160MB of RAM as it's a live CD.

You can always try turning off any motherboard features you don't use in the BIOS, disabling keyboard and video checks, disabling the memory tests, and switching to whatever your systems call "fast POST" or "quick POST". That'll cut down on the hardware's portion of the boot time.

If multitasking is the reason for not using DOS and you're developing your own applications, there are a few multitasking libraries out there for DOS applications. The OS doesn't offer multitasking support, but it doesn't get in the way of it either. There are also a number of alternative DOS versions which offer everything from multitasking and multiple users to built-in memory extenders and support for filesystems other than FAT.

CDEX works beautifully for Winders users. Nice and fast and ogg is one of the default formats.

I would continue with AROS if I was into the Amiga world.

The old Commodore and Atari boot-from-ROM machines usually started in 2-3 seconds or less.

Even the Mac Classic would boot in 10-15 seconds to its "ROMDisk" - it had a bootable disk image in spare ROM that could be activated with magic keystrokes.

ThinStation boots remarkably fast from flash but it's pretty bare-bones.

Darn... don't tell them AROS is a rewriting of AmigaOS. Now most people won't ever think about checking what it is, thinking it's an unstable toy OS intended just for nostalgic bearded gamers and demoscene wankers:-)

Truth is: AmigaOS was much more stable than any version of Windows (save maybe post SP2 XP) and most problems were due to programmers of third party software who didn't respect well established coding guidelines and wrote software in a way that it didn't run on newer processors' extended data/address buses. Heck! Some coders even used the upper part of address registers to store *data*. Just think what happened when the CPU went from 24 bit addressing to 32 and the extra data was interpreted as a different address.

Austrumi Linux, fastest by far, booting and running, of any of the mini linux distros I have tried, and will work on (not ridiculously, but modest) older hardware pretty well.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/ Boots quick and always leaves you lots of room on your HDD :).

LinuxBIOS is going to be _the_ fastest solution, but may not be the most workable: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fornix/linuxbios.ogg

You can program assembler on the java virtual machine as well. See project Jasmin if interested.

When I ran linux-PPC I used something called MOL...Mac-On-Linux

http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/

Not sure if it runs on INTEL, but PPC it does...

Ditto.
Since all names are really all about pretense, I set up mine on Gmail as "firstnamelastname@gmail.com" (Where 'firstname' and 'lastname' are my actual names.
I think there are only eight or ten other people in the US with my same spelled the same anyway. Regardless, I think Gmail's spam filters have only let a couple of false negatives into my Inbox.
*THIS* is why I use very different passwords for web mail as say, my banking or credit report service passwords, etc... If the password file were to be breached, I would only have one to change.
I suggest a good password management app such as this one: http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/

Why isn't anyone making systematic IP blacklists? I mean, after the usual kind of spam crap, you've just identified the attacker, or a piece of a botnet. Keep it all in a list and just deny those IP any access at all. (e.g. firewall rules) By sharing these rules, you nullify the effect of the botnets. Tough shit for the people with cracked computers. They should have been more dilligent in applying patches...

I do this with denyhosts which checks logs for ssh dictionary attacks and then blocks them. By sharing these lists, and cross referencing them between different hosts, you should have a very reliable list, and can remove the effect of IP spoofing which may be possible with some protocols/attacks.

I wrote, ahem, ported a Java Apple 1 emulator about a year ago to SDL and added a few of my own features. Haven't done much more to it since then. But for those nostalgic geeks out there, you can find it at the following link.

http://pom1.sourceforge.net/

Virtual Dimension - hasn't been updated in forever now, but it works, and at least has icons for each application window on the separate desktops - which is what made me hate Microsoft's virtual desktop add-on was I couldn't tell what was on the others without switching. Also, its free as in beer and speech, since I'd say its not worth it to pay for 3rd party software for something *nix desktops have long been able to do...

Want to install your Gtk application on Windows? Get ready to install Cygwin

Or not - GTK and Glade packages for Windows:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=98754

I know, it's retarded, complain
there, I guess.

Agent Based Modeling tools such as Repast, SWARM, and NetLogo are changing how social research is being done.

>What about Java? You've got AWT (which is old and ugly), Swing (which is newer and stands oWhat about Java? You've got AWT (which is old and ugly), Swing (which is newer and stands out on any desktop) or Swing (which generally looks native, but which would generally also require you to bundle the JAR with your app, making the download considerably bigger in a lot of cases).ut on any desktop) or Swing (which generally looks native, but which would generally also require you to bundle the JAR with your app, making the download considerably bigger in a lot of cases).

For Java you have at least in the GNU/Linux world the same options as for Mono:
- GNOME: gnome-java
- KDE: Qt-Jambi
- Windows&MacOS: You can use Qt too

Xine has supported hardware accelerated DVD video (MPEG1/2) decoding using EM8300 based cards like Sigma Design's Holywood+ and Creative's DXR3, since about 2000.
(But that was done using an ad-hoc module inside Xine, not using generic APIs like XvMC or the future Gallium3d video)

The Gallium3D Video API is a good news, because it'll probably be able to address shortcommings that XvMC has.

Welcome to the dreadful hack that is the Windows graphics overlay system. It allocates a very specific color that will be treated as a video area by the video card, so that it won't overlap windows that should be on top. It's clever, but XVideo in the open source world is much better. As usual.

A cheap shot.. The overlay compositing system is in no way specific to Windows, and in the early days it was the only possible way to render scaled video efficiently on a computer.

You can easily find players for Windows which don't use overlay for rendering today, such as MPC, which can output also using DirectDraw, Direct3D or OpenGL surfaces.

Overlay is also deprecated in "Aero" mode in Vista, which uses pure Direct3D for compositing all windows (like OSX or Compiz on Linux does with OpenGL).

This looks like they are going after people like me. I don't like buying CDs because the markup is absurd and I don't feel like contributing to that industry. When I like an artist, I will typically checkout things like their MySpace( or PureVolume if that is still going ) and listen to their songs. If I wanted to load that on to my computer or portable player, I simply fired up Audacity, selected the Mix as a source and recorded it as it played. Yes, I know that this will produce the lowest fidelity recording short of recording over a phone line, but for most of these songs I simply don't care. It is clear enough for my casual listening enjoyment.

Here is the kicker though; if I couldn't do that, I still would not buy the CD. On the contrary, being able to sample music like this brings me closer to caving in and buying a CD( but I typically only buy used CDs because I am more willing to pay the discounted, still marked up price when I know the profit goes to the small business, so suck on that secondary market RIAA ).

For meta data management (i.e. adding & searching), I find MaPiVi
most satisfying.

Author seems to be concerned in reproducing the workflow he has with Aperture or just looks for some general purpose all-in-one program for converting his raws.

Maybe that's why the article has no mention of UFRaw, which works standalone or as a plugin for the GIMP. It uses the superb dcraw as it's backend and reproduces camera white balance settings for my Olympus E-510 ORF files better than other raw conversion tools out there. It works fine for me as I use raw editors/converters only for adjusting exposure and white balance and then do the most of actual image manipulation in the GIMP.(right tool for the right job, eh?)

Photography is one area where Linux has many tools. So far I've tried LightZone (very slow and bloated), Rawstudio (promising, but has no clue of my camera white balance and is still somewhat buggy) and RawTherapee. Now all that I (and many others) still want is 16-bit per channel colors support in GIMP. I know about Cinepaint, but I would miss all the other things that GIMP can offer.

What I use to view my photos is http://gqview.sourceforge.net/

I personally prefer it greatly to e.g. F-spot. It's got more degrees of freedom and it's way faster. I think people should and will pick up the development.

> Qtpfsgui

Holy crap, how does one spell that? o_0

How did the author come up with this name? Did he smashed the keyboard with an enraged basement cat or what? Or is it "Cthulhu" reversed and triple-ROT13'd?...

Not exactly from the project website -
Qtpfsgui at sourceforge
Why this name?
Qt: the program uses Qt4 to show its graphical widgets.pfs: the main backend library and original sourcecode base.
gui: this stands simply for graphical user interface.

I don't know why the author thinks that Raw Therapee can't process JPEGs or TIFFs. Just go into the preferences screen, uncheck "Show only RAW files", and you're set.

Also missing from the comparison: Rawstudio and UFRaw.

If you're interested in RAW processing on Linux, there's an excellent blog called Linux Photography about this very subject.

1) Faster reads

Not necessarily. Sustained read speeds are still faster on (most) spinning disks (vs. most SSDs). They do have orders of magnitude better access time resulting in better random read performance, but that wasn't what you said.

To what extent does a typical desktop work load use random vs. sequential cluster reads, especially when it would matter? Consider for a moment that an SSD controller can stripe data across many flash chips, while a conventional drive can address only one platter at once due to head-to-head alignment limitations.

2) Lower power

Not necessarily.

I read that same Slashdot article from a week ago. I gathered from the comments that the faster random read of SSD caused more transactions to be performed per second, and that shortened the battery life as much as anything else.

I expect that 2-disk setups will become the norm: SSD for the OS, and HDD for data - which is what I've been doing in my own systems for the last 2 years (using CF->IDE converters)

Isn't the OS something that can be read sequentially, if you put the kernel, kernel modules, C library, and services in one big squashfs on the hard disk, like a less-extreme version of Puppy Linux's boot process? Then you get the sequential read speed advantage of platters for stuff that'll become resident in RAM anyway.

You have not experienced NetHack until you have played it in the original German.

The big difference is that a protocol buffer cannot be understood without the message format (.proto file). Now lets actually take a look at a real list, like say the developers for apache (as a list of {name:,email:} objects):

json: 1915 bytes

json.lzop: 809 bytes

What you see is precious little difference in the size of the data even though the json is self-describing. The lzop version is essentially identically sized, and compressing and decompressing with lzo is wicked fast. So size is not a reason to use proto buffers.

Maybe speed is? Instead of using lzo compression just create a JSON binary format. This is trivial, and provides essentially the same size and speed benefits as protocol buffers while still being JSON in nature.

The only advantage to protocol buffers then is that they generate access and verify classes for you in you favorite language (if that language is C++, Java, or Python). Big deal, again this is absolutely trivial.

To me what this demonstrates is premature optimization. Instead, first use a simple text format like JSON then if that is too large compress it. Then if that is too slow send it in binary.

Note: I approximated the size of the proto buffers based on the descriptions of the binary format since I haven't downloaded the code (it actually compresses less well since I did not vary the 'length' bytes in my test file).

libxml2 was used for parsing XML.

IIRC (it's been a while), the fastest parser library is still expat. There are various benchmarks on the net, but I wouldn't be surprised if expat is highly competitive speedwise with Protocol Buffers, simply because expat is a SAX parser that goes through the data exactly once with minimal memory allocation or data conversions. This sort of thing is always an order of magnitude faster than doing DOM conversion, wich is what many XML libraries, including libxml2, do.

Just to let everyone know.

So for anyone else looking for a FOSS alternative to PortableVault:

TCExplorer 1.6: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcexplorer
TrueCrypt 4.3a: http://www.truecrypt.org/pastversions.php
Eraser Portable: http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/eraser_portable

Because vim is only an editor, not a total environment. It doesn't have a compiler/linker/debugger attached.

It doesn't? I'm an Emacs guy, but even I can admit that Vim folks can do neat things with their cute little editor.

You mean like this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcexplorer ?

Hans has a black belt in judo, he'll survive better than another nerd might.
Well let's hope for his sake he knows the martial art rather than JUDO - the Java IDE for Children and Beginning Programmers!!

I'm sure a black belt in judo is the surest way to a gang raping in prison. Come on, it's judo. We're talking about prison.
Well going on the wikipedia description of Judo, it's possible that Hans might be the one using it to his advantage:
"...Its most prominent feature is its competitive element, where the object is to either throw one's opponent to the ground, immobilize or otherwise subdue one's opponent with a grappling maneuver, or force an opponent to submit by joint locking the elbow or by applying a choke. Strikes and thrusts..."

Still from a defensive pount of view Judo is good at throwing people off your back.... unfortunately though as he will soon discover you can't watch your back all the time particularly not when you've been asked to pickup the soap.... So maybe we will all be refering to "ReiserFS" as "ReiserForcedSex" where Hans is having his own file system journaled rigorously with lots of tail packing to reduce his own internal fragmentation. One thing for sure he will gain a new understanding of terms such as "open sourced", "shareware" and "public domain". I just hope for his sake that he's resolve his fsck issues otherwise he's seriously fsck'd!

I agree. I don't even let our programmers use pointers in C, except for specific cases where the language is limited (returning multiple values, and char * for strings). If you dump pointers to structures and use more abstract coding, just accessing properties of objects through object references/handles, everything gets better.

In fact, you can also get waaay faster.

See The Better String Library. Haven't used it myself, but it's supposedly very portable, high performance, and has good interoperability with normal null terminated C strings.

Try this for size: http://sourceforge.net/projects/brutalchess/ Not had a chance to see if it counts as decent, but it is GPL

About this http://lng.sourceforge.net/ much.
Unfortunately, it seems like it's been abandoned since 2004.

It happens I've been building a contraption for a similar purpose over the past few weeks, in my spare time. (My own project is scanning paper books so I can DjVu them to read on my V3 book reader.

The structure I came up with is a hinged wooden frame with a wooden surface on one side, and a glass surface on the other. It hinges open at the top to sit at exactly 90 degrees, and the open book sits astride that. This allows the camera to photograph almost all the way to the spine.

By chance I took some photos of the frame itself last night (the wooden side and the glass side). I didn't photograph the cradle, as it wouldn't have the camera in it... The mirror is so I can see the digital camera screen as I'm positioning the book.

The camera (actually my cameraphone) sits inside the structure in an adjustable cradle - you can see part of the sliding mechanism on the wooden face. And a long handle (very crude) allows me to press the shutter release button.

Anyway, this is a very cheap and cheerful solution. I manage about 5-6 pages a minute (turning the pages is slow). The only problem so far is getting even lighting on the page surface. When I'm happy with the results, I'll probably put up a tutorial about how it's built and the software I use.

See: http://darkradiant.sourceforge.net/

You missed my point. I was referring to people who must context switch constantly in a single work session between a paper medium and a white on black computer screen.

I didn't miss your point. You didn't make it very well (if at all). Then I'm suppose to read your mind to work out what you're trying to say, and when I fail to, you accuse me of taking it out of context.

Since you're the one asserting that the vast majority of all the content on the internet has picked the incorrect color scheme (a not generally accepted position), the burden of proof lies on you, the asserter.

That's your interpretation of my assertion. This isn't a murder trial and there is no burden of proof. This is a discussion on an internet board. You're the one who wants cited references from me. That takes time and effort. Yet you were unwilling to provide the same yourself. Now that you have

http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/survreslts.html

Did you even notice how close the results were for white on black vs black on white????? Are you trying to make my point for me? Go back and read what you wrote. Sweeping statements about almost no one (but basement dwellers) liking white on black.

http://www.office-ergo.com/setting.htm

Ahhh good old ergnomics theory that most office workers are forced to read so employers can avoid law suites when office work actually causes injury. All these things ever do is mix common sense with complete nonsense then force to in theory adopt the approach. In practice no one I know actually does everything that is required of their ergonomics training, and for good reason: If they were to take the general principles and apply it to their own situations, they'd find that they need to add a good dose of common sense.

You'll find there are people who'll have the opposite opinion

http://xpt.sourceforge.net/techdocs/misc/ce01-DarkBackgroundIsGoodForYou/ar01s03.html
"Light text on dark backgrounds is easier on the eyes than the traditional black text on white backgrounds. That is why the classic Windows Accessibility color scheme recolors Windows to have large light text on black backgrounds."

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_dark_background_vs_readability/ ( ...and we were doing so well. The other two were at least studies. This link is a rant by one individual about their own preference. It's actually worse as a reference than the Digg discussion.

In any case all I needed to prove was that there were other people who held similar views that light text on a dark background is easier for them to read. You asserted this was not the case. I've proven otherwise. (Hell you've helped me prove otherwise).

It's called a joke, as was spelled out in my original post. It's also a very common one on Slashdot. Since your account is older than mine and has many more posts than mine, I'd assumed you'd be familiar with it. I'd invoke the similar "you must be new here" joke at this time as well, but you might get irrationally offended by that too. ;)

In the context of your original joke, it was used to marginalize and belittle my opinion. That's why I was offended. Now you're belittling me for getting offended. You continually bring up these jokes while saying that you could reference them but you won't, as if that somehow means you in actuality haven't made the reference. This is no more than a bad attempt at what becomes a weak and childish attack. I suggest you either make the joke or don't make it.

I never suggested you were alone. I suggested you are in the vast minority. Which you are.

Your very own link proves that I'm not in the minority at all. You can state something as if it is a fact until you go blue, but when your own evidence points the other way all you succeed in doing is looking like a ranting loon.

Which proves what

Someone above has already mentioned Lyx, but if you (or anyone else reading this) are already using the KDE environment, there is also Kile which is a Latex front-end app similar to Lyx, but for KDE.

that do essentially the same thing with text summary (similar to Mac OS X's summarizer). There's an Open Source project that does this too called Summarizer - http://sourceforge.net/projects/summarizer