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First page is nothing... how about one story between original and dupe?

There is a foss implementation of something like that.

That's not ridiculous... this is :)
http://www.dhiren.za.net/files/pictures/slashdupe.jpg

If you're interested, I updated the entry to make the *two* problems clearer (there's a much bigger than evercookie privacy problem on the iPhone) and what I think Apple needs to do to fix it. http://singe.za.net/blog/archives/1016-Killing-the-Evercookie-Part2-MobileSafari.html

I wrote up a blog post about using Sound eXchange (sox) to filter the sound here: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/linux-command-line-streaming-vuvuzela-filter , but the short version is this:

rec -d vol .5 equalizer 233 .1o -48 equalizer 466 .03o -48 equalizer 932 .02o -48 equalizer 1864 .2o -24 | play -d

or from a response to my post here: http://www.yusufk.za.net/?p=520

rec -d | play -d vol 0.9 bandreject 116.56 3.4q bandreject 233.12 3.4q bandreject 466.24 3.4q bandreject 932.48 3.4q bandreject 1864 3.4q

After testing, I feel the parameters could be tweaked a bit more - but these definitely make a difference.

-Russ

I had a brief look at the opinion piece on the JASA website, and its argument is basically "think of the children", which (according to them) trumps free speech:

Internet pornography is such a readily accessible evil for children, that the Constitutional Court, if the Bill were challenged, would be bound to hold that the section 28 obligation to protect at all costs the best interests of children would trump the rights to freedom of expression and privacy.

Section 28 of the Bill of Rights states "A child's best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child.". Previous court rulings have said that the state 'must provide the legal and administrative infrastructure necessary to ensure that children are accorded the protection contemplated by S28.'

The Bill of Rights also notes that 'The rights ... may be limited only in terms of law of general application to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom, taking into account all relevant factors', which include things like the nature of the right, its purpose etc. So, while they recognise pornography as free speech etc, they also "think of the children", which as we all know overrules any other concern.

We have decided that gay people shouldn't have equal rights as of yet. We'll get there one day, but for now they have to wait.

Natural rights ?

Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
STAN
I want to have babies.
REG
You want to have babies?!?!?!
STAN
It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
REG
But you can't have babies.
STAN
Don't you oppress me.
REG
I'm not oppressing you, Stan -- you haven't got a womb. Where's the
fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?
(STAN starts crying.)
JUDITH
Here! I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have
babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans',
but that he can have the *right* to have babies.
FRANCIS
Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have
babies, brother. Sister, sorry.
REG
What's the point?
FRANCIS
What?
REG
What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't
have babies?
FRANCIS
It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
REG
It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.

Life of Brian

Not exactly what you were looking for, but how's about a dupe with only one story between it and the original?

This one?

There are some nice instructions on how to do this here: http://www.jawug.za.net/ just click on How-to's. It is well explained with pictures (for dummies like me)

Google is asking for a way to disable the Windows Indexer, which currently can't be disabled.

Your BOFH link is dead. Here is another that points to the BOFH Doom story: http://bofh.rivera.za.net/?/10/4/

No big deal. Looks like the hard drive needs a Smoke Recharge.

WTF? That's the image that showed up when I followed your link.

clicky (13KB)

It goes far enough that you can even buy DVD's of movies there before the movie is released in theaters over here (not camcorder-made either) !

Just do a quick implmentation. Seriously its easy.

Pull down XAMPP and then uznip joomla into the htdocs directory. You could have the full technology stack and website contained in a directory. Fire it up and slap your corporate logo on the default theme.
It looks professional out of the box, just show it to the powers that be. The goofy name of the software should be irrelevant.

Also if you want to give a more in depth demo showing how to create content, install MOSCE and make it the default editor, its much easier to use than what mambo/joomla comes with.

With all due respect, I think developing an entire programming language is already an order of magnitude or two more complex than most OSS out there. That's certainly something you want to design portability in for, but that doesn't mean the same amount of effort is appropriate for all OSS. It all depends on your target audience.

To inject a bit of personal experience into the discussion, another scenario that I suspect happens frequently is that a program never intended for general use finds its way out for one reason or another. When I started developing IRC Services, I had only intended to use it on my local network, and thus I didn't even think about things like BSD/Solaris or endianness, much less Windows. For various reasons, a year or two later I ended up putting it out for everybody to use, but all the assumptions were already in there, and even figuring out what they were (much less getting them out) hasn't been easy.

Was it Fred Brooks that said that developing for others is an order of magnitude harder than developing for yourself? One can hardly be surprised that people would avoid putting such effort into programs they don't intend to release anyway.

Its not only detroit, Ive read reports Lancia are also going to use this. Lancia being the luxury part of fiat. This is scary for me a Linux and Lancia fan. What do I do? http://www.baldy.za.net/

I agree ogg is the way to go, but with must of my buddies car radios and ipods supporting mp3. I tend to think twice when I rip to ogg. Its painful being ahead of the masses. http://www.baldy.za.net/

If Rome taught us anything, its that small groups, no matter how skilled or courageous, will lose to an organised and capable foe with clear lines of communication under one leader.

C'mon, everything comes in cycles. Big guys will rise and fall over time. Think Psychohistory. Babylon fell, after all.

Once upon a time, the Roman empire was not the biggest, but one of many small ones. It's chance circumstances and personalities that make things happen. The situation may appear dire now, but a generation after Gates retires, MSFT will be pretty much like ORCL and YHOO and many other software companies.

Overall, I think it's a poor analogy. When we talk about Rome, are we talking about the aqueducts? Or the roads? Irrigation? Wine? Public baths? Keeping Order? Life of Brian Script. :-)

Well, believe what you want. I copied the code from this page and then deleted the semicolon afterwards as a joke, hence the "Oh yeah???" comment. I know you think I'm bullshitting, but there you go.

Well, Bluewall Linux uses NetBSD pkgsrc; though I don't understand why anyone would use it when there is the real thing.

Yes, to elaborate further in the comment in the story, the best way to establish this kind of 'identity' scheme is to make use of a set of services. Andy Church makes a very good IRC Services package which is available at http://www.ircservices.za.net which is more than capable for performing the task at hand.

You'll need an IRC daemon which is also able to be tightly integrated with services, and for that task, I recommend using Bahamut (available at http://bahamut.dal.net. As the URL implies, it's the same IRCd that DALnet uses. In particular, you're looking for a channel mode which restricts channel access to registered clients only. In Bahamut, this is the +R channel mode (which is different from +r.)

Services has a channel option known as 'RESTRICTED' which will only allow people who are on that channel's access list into the channel. Everyone else will be kicked and banned automatically by services. Thus, you can have reasonable assurance that everyone who's in the channel has A) identified to their registered nick with services, and B) is supposed to be in the channel, since they're on that channel's access list. Furthermore, the status of someone's identity can be checked by doing '/MSG NickServ STATUS ', where is the nickname you want to know the status of. NickServ will then tell you if the nickname is identified to properly (i.e. via a password.)

Some of the more advanced IRC options include replacing the ancient 'ident' system with something more modern. On IRC, anyone who isn't 'identified' has a tilde (~) prefixed to their username. However, since almost anyone can put anything in the ident reply these days, this has become practically useless (it used to be that you could tell, with reasonable assurance, what user was coming from what Unix box with ident -- not so anymore.) Instead, it's possible to setup an authorization scheme that makes use of IRC's 'PASS' command to also 'identify' to a unique username.

My Synchronet IRCd (http://www.synchro.net/docs/ircd.txt) makes use of this scheme by letting users be 'identified' whenever they provide the correct password and username that corresponds to the local BBS account (Synchronet is a very nice piece of BBS software for Linux/Win32/BSD/etc.) That way, a user coming online from a certain BBS without a tilde in their username is an indicator that they've identified correctly to their local BBS account. That's just one of the ways ident can be replaced to provide something more useful.

Im really looking forward to a proper moview of h2g2 . Does anyone have links to somewere to download the old BBC version? www.baldy.za.net

In fact, it would probably benefit technology and discovery more at this point to avoid standards between nations. Darwin's theories will go to work on a much grander (albeit unintended by Darwin) scale, weeding out the inferior designs and ideas, whether by minor failure or full-out destruction.

Very good point. As the developer of a fairly widely used program, I rely on just this principle to pick up ideas for new versions; there have been over a dozen derivatives of my program, and I keep watch on them and take the best ideas back for my own version. (And if I were Microsoft, I'd have /.ers screaming bloody murder at me for it, but that's another story.)

What I've found frustrating is the lack of adventure games available for Linux

Really? I've found that adventure game support for Linux is actually quite good relative to other genres.

There's an entire commercial seven-episode line in the LadyStar series.

Hopkins FBI was, I believe, the first commercial SDL-using game available for Linux.

Want to play older adventure games in Linux? ScummVM can run older Lucasarts adventure games. AGIL lets you play old AGI Sierra games, and FreeSCI old SCI Sierra games. TADS can run on Linux to let you play TADS-based text adventure games (it *is* true that there isn't an HTML-enabled runtime for Linux, but that hasn't turned to be much of a big deal), and Frotz lets you play text-based Z-Machine games on Linux. Both of these have massive libraries of games, some of which are very good (I dearly love Tower of Babel for TADS). There are runtimes for numerous other, less widely-used systems listed on ifarchive.

Finally, I realize it's not a fantastic solution, but adventure games that use DirectX are more likely to work with WINE than the latest 3d shooter because they tend to use fewer features. Riven, for instance, works this way.

But I wonder if the Linux gaming market isn't somewhat different than the Windows gaming market. Many of the people who run Linux are older professionals. We're often not runnng the latest and greatest equipment. Perhaps one explanation for the lackluster sales of Linux games is that they're targeting the wrong population.

I agree -- the best selling games for Linux have been Civilization, SimCity 3, Kohan...the games without high end system requirements on 3d cards or CPU. They tend to be less twitch games.

I wish adventure game developers would return to the VM-based approach that Sierra and Lucasarts used to great success. The portability and ease of debugging is well worth it.

Computers games for kids are dangerous!

You don't want to do it.
Check it out at http://www.rivera.za.net/research_project.pdf

How about our brick mod.

The transformation of an old (semi-brick) phone into a fully-fledged brick, complete with 3-prong plug!

Check it out at http://brick.rivera.za.net/ now that is what I call a mod!

Go to ZA.NET and check out their page.

If the goverment wants to take control of it, then let them!

People will just move somewhere else, leaving a dead zone.

It will be sad to lose my domains:

e.co.za and tbs.co.za though.

-sigh-

People have stopped palying[sic] FreeSpace about 3 years ago

That doesn't stop people from learning from the code and making neat projects with it.

Open Source isn't just about getting a free dinner...it's about getting to play around with code. We just covered Wolf 3d and Doom algorithms in our graphics course when covering older graphics techniques.

If you want direct, practical, non-developer benefits, it's led to Linux ports of neat games, such as Bungie's Marathon/Aleph One. It's led to improved games, like PrBoom. It's revived development interest in various projects, such as zsnes (still the only Linux snes emulator that can do Seiken Densetsu 3).

Besides, maybe you're the type that plays games for a bit, but there are also people (myself included) that don't play new releases much, but love going back and playing an old nostalgic game now and then. :-)

I guarantee you that people will be poking around at and playing with Freespace 2 much longer because of the source release. I suspect that most people would have forgotten about neat games like Abuse had it not been for its open-sourcing. The result of an open-source clone -- Exult has produced quite a bit of Ultima 7 playing again. The same goes for scummvm, the clone of Lucasart's engine used in Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max. Plus AGIL and Sierra's AGI system.

Open Source is generally a Good Thing. Please don't rag on people for doing good things like this -- sit back and enjoy it, or if you aren't yet interested, wait until someone hacks around with the code a bit. Then enjoy. :-)

I wanna know if this will compile under gcc.

Normally I don't reply to anonymous idiots, but I'm in a bad mood today, so I'll let you know that one of my programs just happens to be more or less a de facto world standard. And I graduated university two years ago, thank you very much.

This article shows clearly the power of releasing software under the GPL, it gives other people (BeroLinux in this case) the chance to say "redhat is good, but it could do with some improvements", and if those improvements are popular, redhat can then use them themselves in the next release, improving to product all round. (and I very much doubt Redhat will miss this very good idea!)

That said, having pentium or highr only binaries, could be a problem in some situations, if say, some of the directories are exported by NFS. So if Redhat give the option of installing pentium binaries, they'll have to havre some way of warning the user nicely that it might fail (I am assuming , of course, that binaries compiled for pentium instructsion won't work on lower chips (like the kernel))

Finally, one last minor quibble, on the berolinux Cd's page the author says that if you make money from berolinux cd's he wants a share. I think it would have been more accurate to say "he'd appreciate a share", as IIRC, under the GPL, there is nothing stopping someone else selling his CD's and not giving him anything.