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You can use a template with a type parameter that indicates if the size is compile-time or runtime. Eigen takes this approach with matrices.

Agreed on the versioning madness. It's to where I think of them all as multipled by 10, or maybe 100.

User-agent changer (anything you want) and various other handy toggles:

http://prefbar.tuxfamily.org/

The one add-on I can't live without.

But it won't support Prefbar, which I rely on even more than NoScript, as for me Prefbar is what makes the whole Mozilla family usable, vs more of a PITA than it's worth. Thanks to Moz changes, Prefbar is being broken up into individual buttons ... yeah, that'll work.

Or, why I froze my SeaMonkey and PaleMoon installs at their current versions.

http://prefbar.tuxfamily.org/

Give us the "disable Javascript" checbox back already!

I was able to get PrefBar working on Pale Moon and the ESR release of Mozilla. Not sure how/if the developer can get it to work with WebExtensions dreck, but this may be of interest: https://prefbar.tuxfamily.org/

This article certainly does not reflect what I perceive are the best distros and certainly does not elaborate or go far enough to compare the different capabilities with an extended list of other distros in a matrix.

For me, the proposed comparison criteria would be:
-user able to create customized live thumb image with a reasonable amount of time
-user able to update the packages quickly and easily
-user able to find packages of interest quickly and easily
-user able to create own packages quickly and easily
-desktop agnostic. No default desktop. Users must choose themselves which one they want.
-user documentation up-to-date enough to most relevant and trending Linux Distros issues: security configuration for server and non-server alike, desktop, printer, network, filesystems, media player softwares, peer-to-peer softwares, digital-freedom and anonymity.

Arch IMHO is the best. It covers the above with archiso, pacman, yaourt, kde/gnome/other desktops, archwiki covers how to make packages easily and make them available through "Arch User Repositories"(AUR) and installing them through yaourt.
b2im tool for manjaro was the closest and fastest way to customize a thumb-image, but lacked support for customizing an image with AUR packages. archiso can be customized with AUR packages.
http://www.xcfa.tuxfamily.org/...

Debian Sid is equivalent, but I have classified it as second-best because it takes more time to create & customize a live thumb image especially with an extra persistent partition on the thumb itself. It should be straightforward to do and yet it still is not straightforward to do. live-build takes more than a couple of weeks to customize and it is complex procedure to succeed with both bios and uefi.

Antergos and Manjaro were inspired from Arch. Parrot, Backtrack, Kali, Ubuntu were inspired from Debian BUT ARE NOT DEBIAN. Dare I say a LINUX DISTRO is like a food to be prepared and consumed. If that is the case, which would you prefer depends on your personality. If you prefer to prepare your food yourself, you will go to a grocery store with fresh, unprocessed food products(i.e. Arch/Debian/Fedora), but if you are in a hurry/tired then you could possibly prefer something prepared for you(i.e. Redhat, Ubuntu, Parrot, Kali, Manjaro, Antergos.)

I wouldn't impose my opinion on others to use a particular distro, but I am of the opinion everyone would be healthier by preparing/using the fresh produce and straight from the source: Arch, Debian, Fedora. When you go with the faster food(i.e. Redhat, Ubuntu, Parrot, Kali, Manjaro, Antergos) there are always consequences/constraints, less-recent packages, vendor-lock-in/"take or leave it".

I use Prefbar which has a flash enable/disable checkbox.

http://prefbar.tuxfamily.org/

Prefbar and NoScript, are the two add-ons I can't live without.

The Chrony comparison page compares ntpd, Chrony and OpenNTPd. Another yet to be finished alternative is ntimed (which seems to currently be around 6000 LoC). On some Linux's if you don't care about accuracy or trying to weed out false time you can always use an client such as systemd-timedated.

Or chrony, which I just switched all my machines to.

Chrony is a complete working implementation of the NTP protocol.

You mean complete except for broadcast/multicast mode, or authentication based on public-key cryptography. Some basically it's a good client and a unauthenticated / inefficient (network) server.

It also makes some pretty misleading claims; Chrony can usually synchronise the system clock faster and with better time accuracy except it never explains how it can possibly achieve better time accuracy than NTPd.

Chrony does handle a number of client usage scenarios better than NTPD (namely non-permanent network connection, and laptop-like environments) as far as I know, but it does not achieve better accuracy for the usage scenarios NTPD was primarily designed for (e.g. network connected servers).

NTPD gets its knickers in a twist at the slightest excuse and sometimes ends up stepping the time even though it has perfectly good Internet connectivity and a reasonably good internal clock.

Yet chrony can't detect rouge or fix broken time servers. Beyond possibly having better handling for clients of dynamic clock frequencies (i.e. SpeedStep, and various other power saving features that modify one or more of the several frequency oscillators in a computer.). I say possibly because I am not certain of the state of affairs in the current NTPD code base, I know it was lacking when dynamic clock frequencies originally appeared in systems, but I am not sure that it still is naive about that.

Chrony keeps steady time even if Internet access is intermittent. It never gets confused and picks a falseticker pretending to be stratum one instead of a stratum 3 with correct time, unlike NTPD.

While it does appear Chrony has improved greatly from a simple SNTP client for intermittent network connectivity it was when I first heard about it, that is still its forté, and likely the best client for many end-users' cases. Still it is not a robust general purpose replacement of NTPD.

It even has interfaces to GPS clocks or other hardware clocks, so you can run your stratum 1 server on Chrony if you want.

And YouTube is full of people doing stupid, reckless, and/or unwise things too. That's perhaps too harsh, but that's those "features" are quite incomplete.

Having PPS (Pulse Per Second) optional support is a good start, it is not a comprehensive solution to running a quality stratum 1 server. I expect a stratum 1 server to have improved or at least quantified oscillator ("clock") parameters, such as ideally TCXO (Temperature-Compensated crystal Oscillators) or OCXO (Oven-Controlled crystal Oscillator) for the stratum 1 system's time-keeping. For commercial systems I would suggest looking at a professional NTP server network appliance, there are several vendors including Spectracom, Symmetricom, Meinberg, and others.

http://prefbar.tuxfamily.org/ could do that. ;)

That's way too much effort for something that was really easy to do before. Mozilla introduced a bug into Firefox by removing the ability to easily disable JavaScript without having to fuck with its about:config values, even if they're too fucking stupid and/or ignorant to acknowledge this.

I use PrefBar to solve this problem. http://prefbar.tuxfamily.org/. Single bar across top of browser to toggle Javashit, Flash, Cookies, proxies, referrer-ID, and moar.

PrefBar has lots of unanticipated uses. When Google Image Search changed its default behavior to "Javashit on, get infinite scrolling crap" and "Javashit off, click on thumbnail, go to the webpage that hosted the image (often the wrong page, or some long forum thread with a thousand posts in it)", you can tell it you're using Lynx. With Javashit disabled and a User-Agent of lynx, it reverts to two-pane view of a big frame that you can ignore, and a thumbnail, beneath which is the URL of the image you're actually looking for. You can pop that open in a new tab and have the desired image before the the irrelevant website even loads in the two-page tab.

And as long as I'm ranting here, I'll also chip in with a hearty fuck beta, fuck webdevs, and most of all, fuck Asa Dotzler and all his UX clones.

Easily fixed with libraries like Eigen ( http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/ind... ) and many others.

That's the problem. There's no one way to represent a multidimensional array in C++. There are many ways. Which means math libraries using different ones are incompatible with each other. The last time I did a big number-crunching job in C++, I had four different array representations forced on me by different libraries.

Because the compiler has no clue what those array libraries are doing, you don't get basic loop optimizations that FORTRAN has had for 50 years.

Easily fixed with libraries like Eigen ( http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/ind... ) and many others.

Most of the better "frameworks" out there come with their own proxy objects for multidemensional arrays (like http://libmesh.sourceforge.net... )

Multidmensional arrays haven't been an issue (especially in C++) for quite a long time...

Firstly... 10^-15 is WAY beyond what most scientific codes care about. Most nonlinear finite-element codes generally shoot for convergence tolerances between 1e-5 and 1e-8. Most of the problems are just too hard (read: incredibly nonlinear) to solve to anything beyond that. Further, 1e-8 is generally WAY beyond the physical engineering parameters for the problem. Beyond that level we either can't measure the inputs, have uncertainty about material properties, can't perfectly represent the geometry, have discretization error etc., etc. Who cares if you can reproduce the exact same numbers down to 1e-15 when your inputs have uncertainty above 1e-3??

Secondly... lots of the best computational scientists in the world would disagree:

http://www.openfoam.org/docs/u...
http://libmesh.sourceforge.net...
http://www.dealii.org/
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/ind...
http://trilinos.sandia.gov/

I could go on... but you're just VERY wrong... and there's no reason to spend more time on you...

You seriously need to look at the eigen project to understand that C++ with its templates can actually generate better numerical machine code than C. Yes, all with different math for different things. You demonstrably don't grok idiomatic C++. A whole lot has happened there in the last 13 years. Yes, admittedly it all reads like functional-style workarounds for stuff that was mostly a solved problem with LISP, but hey, at least it's a mainstream language that produces efficient assembly.

Explicit vectorization is indeed much more reliable than automatic vectorization, and it will always deliver better performance.

Interestingly, there seems to be quite a few abstraction layer libraries for SIMD. There are also at least Boost.SIMD (part of NT2 [1]) and Vc [2].
Several array-handling libraries (NT2 [1], Eigen [3]) also a leverage SIMD explicitly.
Alternatively there are plenty of languages based on C with explicit SIMD programming, like the Intel SPMD Compiler [4].

If you're interested in SIMD, there is also apparently a workshop being held soon on this subject in Orlando [5].

[1] https://github.com/MetaScale/nt2
[2] http://code.compeng.uni-frankfurt.de/projects/vc/
[3] http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
[4] http://ispc.github.io/
[5] https://sites.google.com/site/wpmvp2014/

[non](http://non.tuxfamily.org/wiki/About)
[lmms](http://lmms.sourceforge.net/)
[nama](http://freeshell.de/~bolangi/nama)

non.tuxfamily.org

Unlike Ardour it won't bring your system on it's knees.

The new ones hide means to control cookies, etc. from their UI. Wonder how many are in the same boat.

Whether you run Fx 3.6 or Fx 36, PrefBar is your friend. Single-click radio buttons to turn on/off Javashit, images, cookies, etc.

That said... WebRTC: "Capture camera or microphone streams directly from Firefox Android using only JavaScript (a feature we know developers have been wanting for a while!)" And NFC speaks for itself in terms of the possibilities for exploits.

Yeah, web developers may want that, but I sure as fuck don't. Is anyone maintaining a complete list of "all the shit that's been added since 3.x that needs to be turned off in about:config or needs an extension like Status4Evar to turn back on?"

Because that list just got a little bit bigger today.

Or Abine DoNotTrackMe, which I marginally prefer over Ghostery because the latter is run by the ad networks (of course, I'd prefer an OpenSource alternative...)

NoScript, Perspectives, Flashblock, BetterPrivacy and HTTPS Everywhere round out the package.

And occassionally PrefBar so I can change my browser UserAgent on the fly, just to mess with 'em...

For linear algebra and C++, there's nothing but eigen, IMHO. Yes, the error messages are incomprehensible, but at least it's documented, well designed, and works mostly as advertised.

Wait. Is this the same as send refer(r)er spoof method in PrefBar extension? If so, then I should use that and try it.

I've been doing a lot of matrix multiplication and rotates with quaternions lately, for satellite orbit and attitude calculations. Eigen, by the way, is a very nice library to do that stuff with in C++. Prior to this, not so much. Some degree of math aptitude has been helpful to me in many of my programming positions, but very few of them required a lot. My Logic and Analysis classes have come in handy more often, but I took those in high school, too.

Firefox is missing a key feature to make shutting off images useful. The ability to quickly fetch images for a webpage with a single hotkey. There are times I want to browse with images off, but on a specific page I need to see the image. There's no way to quickly just fetch all images for that page. The old netscape had this though.

I remember the "load images" button from Netscape 3.01!

The solution I found was PrefBar. One horizontal toolbar for systemwide (or per-tab) toggling of settings like image-autoloading, Javascript, Java, Flash, etc.

I typically browse with images off, but if I want to see the images, I can mouse over to the PrefBar, click one radio button to turn them on, hit F5 to refresh the page, and only that tab's images are loaded.

I don't think that developers of eigen would agree with you. On the contrary, their works shows how using C++ can and does lead to higher performance without sacrificing programmer productivity.

Since so many in this thread talked about ancient history, I'll mention one. Does anyone remember the option to browse without images, from back in the day? Sometime around Netscape Navigator 2? Used to be a rather prominent option, but somewhere along the line it was quietly dropped off the menus.

Try PrefBar. I've been using it for years (on 3.6.x) and found it behaves very well.

Single mouse-click to toggle images, colors, Javashit, Java, cookies, fonts, switch User-agent, and more. Arrange the items on the toolbar to match your needs.

Since so many in this thread talked about ancient history, I'll mention one. Does anyone remember the option to browse without images, from back in the day? Sometime around Netscape Navigator 2? Used to be a rather prominent option, but somewhere along the line it was quietly dropped off the menus.

Try PrefBar. I've been using it for years (on 3.6.x) and found it behaves very well.

Single mouse-click to toggle images, colors, Javashit, Java, cookies, fonts, switch User-agent, and more. Arrange the items on the toolbar to match your needs.

OpenNTPD just ignored the leap second

OpenNTPD has clearly been written by someone who doesn't understand NTP. For example, it advertises incorrect root delay and disperson values, which can cause clients to fail to achieve a majority vote, or to pick the wrong peer to synchronise against. (Earlier versions were even worse, they advertised themselves as being at stratum 0, which could cause synchronisation loops; this has thankfully been fixed, but it doesn't inspire much confidence in the authors' competence.)

I've also found OpenNTP to fail to regulate the local clock on dodgy hardware (it would oscillate wildly, with an amplitude of 3 seconds or so), in situations where the reference ntpd coped just fine.

Folks, do yourself and everyone a favour -- run the reference NTP, run chrony, heck, run some SNTP client, but please avoid OpenNTPD.

Take a look at cairo composite manager. In my experience, it is faster than xcompmgr and runs on any window manager.

Fire up 10-12 tabs and chances are you have multiple instances of Flash bogging down your computer

Nope.

NoScript is good. I prefer PrefBar. Single-click browser-wide (and in some cases, per-tab) activation/deactivation of images, cookies, Java, Javashit and Flash. Idiot webmaster does browser-sniffing based on User-Agent? Forge it with a single dropdown. Don't like some asshat web designer's choice of red text on a blue background? Heck, you can even turn off "colors".

I don't even blame Flash for the problems of CPU consumption. Flash gets a lot of hate but its really a victim of its own success. Any piece of code which had so many instances running would hog CPU.

True - but Flash probably is the memory hog here. I have an instance where I don't even have it installed (really!), and Firefox 3.6.20 has never taken more than 700MB even after weeks (!) of use with hundreds of tabs open.

The current session is about three days old, and currently uses 200MB, with 28 tabs open in four windows. Adding two image-heavy Fark photoshop threads and an 800-post hurricane thread added only 30MB to the total. Adding this extremely image-heavy 700-post Caturday thread temporarily bumped it to 400MB while rendering, but it stabilized at 300MB, and gave the RAM back when the thread was closed. Hardware is a core i7 with 6GB RAM, barely even hiccuped while rendering it. Only cheat I have is an ad-blocking proxy, and most of the time Javascript is disabled. PROTIP: If the site loads with Javascript disabled, enabling Javascript does not run the scripts on the site without a subsequent reload. That's not a bug, it's a feature: you can have dozens of tabs open to your favorite sites, and they will burn no CPU even when Javascript is temporarily enabled when you want to use something like Google Maps. Great for laptops!)

It was. Netscape up to version 3 had menu items that would turn JavaScript on and off, and images on and off. For NS4 those were buried in the settings dialog, and were therefore not easily switched on the fly.

PrefBar restores this functionality. Single-click control of images (for those not-necessarily-SFW threads), colors (for that asshat on FailSpace who thought that red on a green background was a good idea), and of course, Javashit, Java, Flash, cookies, referrer-sending, and so on.

I see alternating results: http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Benchmark Let's see it again in a couple of years and the result may be one sided. I hate C++ with a passion, but only because I avoid writing in FORTRAN at all.

Well, you mentioned GUI apps to be fantastic on the Mac. But I don't see any tools on the Mac I would actually want/need to use.

So I was thinking, what would I replace ? dig was just an example.

Well, Mac OS X does come with a 'GUI tool' for ping, whois, nslookup and netstat. But I'm a heavy user of dig and ping, I actually do need all the options for testing. So they don't solve what I need.

From all the tools I use I wouldn't know what to add to my toolbox or what to replace as an improvement.
For example I don't create such effect-heavy websites where I would need something like: http://tumultco.com/hype/features/
While http://meld.sourceforge.net/ is nice, I've hardly ever had a need to use it.
http://cola.tuxfamily.org/screenshots.html is nice, but I don't usually need to split up patches in git.

Thus as I don't need any GUI apps, I thought if the market seems to want to try and move us all into the browser, I might as well try it out. As an experiment.

Eigen is a great library for linear algebra, which has picked up a lot of momentum recently:
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

There is a similar library in boost (uBlas), but I much prefer the Eigen API.
Eigen is heavily templated (like boost), and also has an additional focus on performance.

The KDE C++ math classes are "eigen": http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
This is just a library (well actually a set of inline header files)

More generally, there are programs like "maxima" (symbolic manipulation, integration, etc) and "octave" (like mathlab).

I would love to see more work go into maxima :)

Hey folks!

Founder of http://opengameart.org/ here. I noticed the bandwidth spike, so I thought I'd take a look at the referrer link, and I'm glad to see someone finally mention us on Slashdot. Honestly, I'd love to have a *real* slashdotting. The server's hefty enough to handle it, and the publicity would be immensely helpful. :)

At any rate, one of our underlying missions is to help FOSS games move beyond "programmer art", and we do that by taking donations and then using those to commission artists to do art. I run the site mostly out of pocket, and with all the commissions, it costs me a good $500 monthly, in addition to the roughly $100/month in donations that we bring in (mostly community members with recurring subscriptions). Shameless plug: If you subscribe, even for $3/month, that's money we can use to buy art for everyone that will never go away. :)

One of our current projects is an art revamp for a Smash Bros. clone called Ultimate Smash Friends. ( http://usf.tuxfamily.org/wiki/Main_Page )

Here's are the first two characters we've commissioned:

Xeon: http://opengameart.org/content/xeon-ultimate-smash-friends
Awesome Possum: http://opengameart.org/content/the-awesome-possum-ultimate-smash-friends

It's a lot of work, and it's not cheap, but there's a lot of FOSS game code out there with a lot of potential, and I think it's worth it. Plus, all of the assets we commission are CC-licensed, so they're reusable as part of the commons.

Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions or ideas. If you have thoughts about the site interface (we're still working on it), there's a forum thread discussing planned changes for OGA 2.0. I'd love to hear what you think!

Peace,
Bart K.
http://opengameart.org/

http://swiftweasel.tuxfamily.org/ is your friend... failing for me on amd64 ubuntu karmic right now though

"An example case: I was really disappointed when I upgraded Ubuntu on an older computer (600Mhz Pentium III with 256M memory and ESS Solo 1 onboard audio, plenty good enough for OpenOffice.org and web browsing, even ran Compiz at very good performance on GeForce 2 MX =) and sound playback started to just plain suck, when it previously worked just fine with straight-up app-to-ALSA playback. The machine just wasn't fast enough to route stuff through an application, plain and simple."

Nope, not plain and simple. As I noted in other comments, this is due to resampling (it wouldn't happen if the audio in question didn't need to be resampled). The default resampling algorithm is chosen to give good quality on the vast majority of hardware (this is a polite way of saying you could pick a better system out of any given city dumpster :>). If you're running on extremely slow hardware, you can change the default resampling method with a fairly simple configuration file edit:

http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?title=PulseAudio#PulseAudio

I find xmoto is an excellent time waster ..

http://xmoto.tuxfamily.org/

I just tried it.

It's like someone made a game of jumping levels! I'd rather have a recreational root canal!!

I find xmoto is an excellent time waster ..

http://xmoto.tuxfamily.org/

Also I occasionally delve into the "flash games" arena .. there's actually some decent stuff now days! (And there's always the classics like "defend the castle" and "Champion Archer")

For being one of the most free-software-leaning discussion sites on the internet, the level of derision here for Software Freedom day is odd.

There is no requirement for Software Freedom day to pass out CDs or leaflets or get in anyone's face. It can be as simple as having a BBQ and inviting your geekiest friends. If you happen to print out some flyers like this or this or yikes! even burn a free-software-infested CD I don't think you'll be hurting anyone. If you do happen to have an event, take pictures...it'd be nice to see what SFD really look like rather than dwell on the fear posed by a burnt-CD.

Happy Software Freedom Day!

what about swiftweasel? http://swiftweasel.tuxfamily.org/

OpenArena is a violent, sexy, multiplayer first person shooter based on the ioquake3 fork of the id tech 3 engine. It has many game types beyond deathmatch and a lot of characters. Due to violent and racy content, it may not be suitable for children under 17.

The game is absolutely free and all development is done by the community, including maps, media, and running the game servers. IMHO, it's the only game worth playing that gives me exactly what I need - less BS effects, more fast-paced action and great flexibility at customization (settings, mods, etc). Also, it has a somewhat small but very unique community of players, server admins, and of course clans + n00bs.

Direct download link for release 0.8.1: here.

Download, unzip, customize your settings, and you'll be fraggin' away!

I vote for X-Moto. It's a 2-D motocross simulator game. Lots of fun and challenge from easy to nigh-on impossible, and very addictive.

There is also a simplified version more suited to kids.

For the debian based distros there is a package called swiftweasel32 which is exactly what you described.

No need to fork. You can use the non-branded versions (Iceweasel, Icedove) that are available in Ubuntu/Debian/et al. There are also other builds available for most platforms of Swiftweasel, which IMO has nicer branding than the non-official builds of Firefox and Thunderbird.

Compile it yourself.

Seriously, I tried the precompiled binary from Mozilla, and I found it rather lacking in speed. So, I got the source and compiled it with a few optimizations (-O3, -march=prescott, -msse3, -mmmx) and did a PGO build, and fired up the result--it was damn snappy.

Or, you might just want to look into Swiftweasel (Linux-only). It's basically the same, but pre-built.

One other thing I didn't try was building for 64-bit. After having this computer for a year and a half, I just yesterday realized the processor was 64-bit. :P

why not using logo language directly?
Here's a version http://xlogo.tuxfamily.org/ (Java, GPL)
An L-system based on guile http://bioschematics.tuxfamily.org/gallery.php (GPL) doing nice images, Linux only iirc
Knoscience a live-CD with many software on it http://knosciences.tuxfamily.org/doku.php?id=knosciences:software_list

why not using logo language directly?
Here's a version http://xlogo.tuxfamily.org/ (Java, GPL)
An L-system based on guile http://bioschematics.tuxfamily.org/gallery.php (GPL) doing nice images, Linux only iirc
Knoscience a live-CD with many software on it http://knosciences.tuxfamily.org/doku.php?id=knosciences:software_list

why not using logo language directly?
Here's a version http://xlogo.tuxfamily.org/ (Java, GPL)
An L-system based on guile http://bioschematics.tuxfamily.org/gallery.php (GPL) doing nice images, Linux only iirc
Knoscience a live-CD with many software on it http://knosciences.tuxfamily.org/doku.php?id=knosciences:software_list