LimeWire is open source, the pre-compiled binaries have banner ads, as noted in the article.
But usually, open source P2P clients have typically been fairly free of spyware. However, there have been a lot of cases where some people have taken the binaries, added spyware, then made it available for download. (At least Azureus got hit by that.) Nothing to do with coders, there are just people who want mess up the distribution somehow...
Dino's page has links to most of the remakes out there. The ones marked "completed" are the ones I was speaking of.
And the Ultima III GBC port - not in Dino's list due to the fact that it's being rebuilt and all - wasn't in any way commissioned by Origin/EA, and is in no way related to FCI, PonyCanyon, or any of those companies who were responsible for Ultima console ports. It's a non-commercial, freely downloadable fan remake. You can find the source code there too.
Don't get me wrong, I love and use firefox, but you won't get it installed on an old PI-233 with 32MB RAM.
I've used Mozilla 1.0 and Galeon on Pentium 166 with 32 megs (in Debian) just fine... the only snags are that they take a few minutes to start up. I guess Firefox would run too, if I asked it really nicely.
...there have been "finished" Ultima remakes. two complete Ultima IV remakes for Neverwinter Nights, even. Ultima III was remade for Game Boy Color. And Akalabeth has been known to be remade by programmers on their lunch hours. That's not to even count engine remake projects like exult or xu4...
Of course, uncompleted ones vastly outnumber the completed ones =)
You can already customize the OOo user interface in 1.1 - turn off unneeded toolbars and remove buttons you don't need. For example, all I have on function bar (the upper one, in the OOo2.0 screenshot) is new, open, save (as), export PDF, and stylist. For everything else, I use menus or keyboard. Well, usually for these as well... I tend to hide the function bar completely.
Bah. The actual appropriate quote, regarding small stars...
"Make him a star? What'd he want a star for?" "I didn't know you could make stars... I thought they were like, you know, stuck to the sky..."
"I think he meant to make him a star. You know, him himself. Turn him into a star." "How can you make anyone into a star?"
"I dunno. I suppose you compress them right up small and they burst into this mass of flaming hydrogen?" "Good grief!"
"Yeah! Is that troll mean, or what?"
I think there used to be a kernel ORB (korbit), but since Microsoft just had to come up with another IPC standard, we'll have to wait until someone writes a ksoap driver...
...or wait until someone does a kernel Java classloader or hope that Mono folks beat them (which would be most embarrassing for Java folks, I tell you)...
When the part one was published, I had severe problems getting Rails to work in Debian. There was a lot of really odd tools that needed to be installed and all that. Rails web page had tons of Ruby packages that I was pretty sure I didn't need...
On the Apple ][ there ws no MS BASIC. There was AppleSoft Basic and INTEGER Basic. The former was written by Larry Atkinson (IIRC) and the later by Steve Wonziak.
Both Commodore BASIC and Applesoft BASIC were originally licensed from Microsoft and then hacked further. Commodore and Apple got a relatively limited BASIC interpreter they both needed to extend pretty badly (I think Commodore was pretty lazy about that, considering how little they had progressed by v2 in Commodore 64), and Microsoft got slapped because they just took cash and demanded no per-machine royalties whatsoever. =)
At least with Fedora you can get the latest modern stuff...with Debian you get Eurocentric crap from the 90s that is a bitch to use.
<ramble>
Eurocentric *what*? In my case, in GTK+ file dialogs, folder/object names with UTF8 characters seem to get truncated. Yes, I am in Europe. Not eurocentric - anglocentric. I believe the Japanese have invented a nice euphonic term for screwed-up encodings, called "mojibake" ("ghost characters", I believe), but around here, we call this phenomenon, loosely translated, "it's 2005 and my freaking scandinavic letters still don't work, goddamnit". =)
(Not that it's any better elsewhere. Just last weekend my mother opened one document in Windows and complained that the letters were all wrong. Too bad I was too tired to give a throughout lecture on the pitfalls of misdetected character encodings...)
Honestly, I think it's just that X11 itself is so bad in regards to international stuff. A lot of work needs to be done before this gets optimal.
I've only previously needed to use Russian, and getting keyboard stuff to work was very very painful - but fortunately some applications (GTK+ apps, Yudit, and XEmacs) support transliterative input, which was better than what I expected but probably not very nice for people who speak the language natively. Note that this was application stuff. I hoped I would be able to just pick "Use Finnish 105-key layout" and then "use Cyrillic transliteration" and it'd work in any app. No such luck though. Hopefully there will be one day.
Seeksize's home page is here. It explains that seeksize "prints the disk head seek distance by process. This can identify whether processes are accessing the disks in a 'random' or 'sequential' manner."
In other words, it shows how much the program bounces around in the file with fseek() and other read commands. If it shows a lot of 0s, the program probably reads the files in order; if other values, it probably jumps around a lot.
The site is slashdotted and I could only get the first page from Coral, so I can't see the screenshot. I don't know what could be so shocking about bouncy file access; we aren't exactly in the golden era of tape-based storage anymore, random access files tend to be norm these days anyway. =) Maybe it is shocking in case where you don't *expect* program to poke around the file.
that they are only doing English movies. Where are the french movies damnit!
Hmm. What French movies I've seen recently, now let's see... typetypetype... movie:"le pacte des loups"...blammo! 52 reviews. Shows the English title too. Not bad.
Hell, it does even Finnish movies. movie:"mies vailla menneisyyttä"... blam. 17 reviews.
Okay, just two random tries, but still not bad for an American search engine =)
There's also single-operator prior art in the Scheme neq? operator.
And Common Lisp's eq function - in which (not (eq a b)) would be the idiomatic way to compare two objects.
It's in ANSI and the oldest reference for this I have at hand is CLtL2... I don't have historic Lisp documentation at hand, but it's such a fundamental function that it probably dates wayyyy back to earliest versions of the language.
Now we just need a Paul Graham Essay(tm) on "why Common Lisp's eq is more elegant than Microsoft's IsNot". =)
Also, if you're sporting the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) on your PC, descriptive text, dialogue text and user entered text are all color coded for ease of use!
Errrrrm... I'd say bunk. Zork III was a Z-machine version 3 file, and color support didn't come until version 5 (ref: Z-machine specs.
Besides, C64 version of Zork III, to my recollection, only had monochrome text and PC version (just tried on frotz) didn't do any of the text attributes (apart of reverse on status line).
Well, it's possible in theory, there was a vinyl-based video system called SelectaVision / VideoDisc.
Though, the discs themselves used read mechanism that was very different from LPs, and also had far higher groove density than LPs; if you store analog video on LPs, you probably get either a very short video or a very bad resolution.
A week ago I had problems getting Firefox to close.
Turns out some site had opened a popup window offscreen. I tried to adblock the contents from - wonder what it was - 888.com or something.
Thank heavens that it opened offscreen. Otherwise I might have actually seen the popup. (What's the point of opening popups offscreen anyway? I just got spam that was titled "Do not read this" or something like that.)
Um, Freecraft didn't have anything to do with Blizzard's authentication. It emulated non-Battle.net version of Warcraft II and (AFAIK) implemented its own network protocol. Heck, Warcraft II didn't even have CD keys or any other authentication stuff that plagues us today!
Still kind of understandable that Blizzard got mad about the name of the project. Though only kind of - I don't see exactly how this thing threatened them anyway. In any case, they haven't gone after Stratagus - same code, different name.
Plus, I was under the impression bnetd folks wanted to implement authentication, but Blizzard didn't want to do that...
Not really the correct analogy. I think Slashdotters would end up in a gigantic flamewar where one side would say that TCP/IP is a horrible no-good half-afternoon hack and we should be supporting OSI which was actually designed, while the other half would be going like "well, TCP/IP works for me, and it's easier to understand".
It's kind of like Java vs. PHP. Both are reasonably open standards, it's just that one is a commitee-designed monstrosity and other is an organically-grown weakling.
The cross-application automation is there. It's just not packaged in a nice non-geek box.
Basically, The Unix Way(tm) is there's tons of programs that do one thing and do it well. There's ImageMagick, netpbm, and other packages that are built on this way of thought. It's just that they don't have much GUI goodness. They can, however, be strung together in shell scripts or used through scripting languages.
Your scan example could be fairly easily done with SANE's command-line scanimage tool and ImageMagick. I've used scanimage, imagemagick and netpbm for mass-scanning previously, and I was surprised how easy it was and how "Ugly but Gets The Work Done" the user interface was =)
There's some stuff that tells about the great new Places menu that would duplicate the bookmark feature Nautilus 1.x had - only better.
Here's my only complaint of Nautilus: I really like the spatial view, but there's no bookmarks menu for it. I don't use Nautilus to draw desktop, so I can't exactly plop shortcuts to desktop, either. I start up Nautilus at computer:///, and it's an annoying special folder where I can't put any of my own bookmarks. I so hope bookmarks finally get there in 2.10.
Of course, with my luck, the Places will only appear on the damn desktop menubar, which I don't use either... but I hope Nautilus' Places menu will have same entries.
Slashdot Mirror
LimeWire is open source, the pre-compiled binaries have banner ads, as noted in the article.
But usually, open source P2P clients have typically been fairly free of spyware. However, there have been a lot of cases where some people have taken the binaries, added spyware, then made it available for download. (At least Azureus got hit by that.) Nothing to do with coders, there are just people who want mess up the distribution somehow...
Dino's page has links to most of the remakes out there. The ones marked "completed" are the ones I was speaking of.
And the Ultima III GBC port - not in Dino's list due to the fact that it's being rebuilt and all - wasn't in any way commissioned by Origin/EA, and is in no way related to FCI, PonyCanyon, or any of those companies who were responsible for Ultima console ports. It's a non-commercial, freely downloadable fan remake. You can find the source code there too.
I've used Mozilla 1.0 and Galeon on Pentium 166 with 32 megs (in Debian) just fine... the only snags are that they take a few minutes to start up. I guess Firefox would run too, if I asked it really nicely.
...there have been "finished" Ultima remakes. two complete Ultima IV remakes for Neverwinter Nights, even. Ultima III was remade for Game Boy Color. And Akalabeth has been known to be remade by programmers on their lunch hours. That's not to even count engine remake projects like exult or xu4...
Of course, uncompleted ones vastly outnumber the completed ones =)
You can already customize the OOo user interface in 1.1 - turn off unneeded toolbars and remove buttons you don't need. For example, all I have on function bar (the upper one, in the OOo2.0 screenshot) is new, open, save (as), export PDF, and stylist. For everything else, I use menus or keyboard. Well, usually for these as well... I tend to hide the function bar completely.
Bah. The actual appropriate quote, regarding small stars...
I think there used to be a kernel ORB (korbit), but since Microsoft just had to come up with another IPC standard, we'll have to wait until someone writes a ksoap driver...
...or wait until someone does a kernel Java classloader or hope that Mono folks beat them (which would be most embarrassing for Java folks, I tell you)...
My favorite Tim Rogers piece was in - on-topicly enough - Journalism: the Videogame.
Though, the only bad thing about that is how he babbles about how his Animal Crossing review was sooooo cool compared to that other writing. That article actually reminded me a lot about Doug the Eagle's anti-walkthroughs and silliness.
When the part one was published, I had severe problems getting Rails to work in Debian. There was a lot of really odd tools that needed to be installed and all that. Rails web page had tons of Ruby packages that I was pretty sure I didn't need...
But one thing has changed since then: Rails is now in Debian unstable!
Both Commodore BASIC and Applesoft BASIC were originally licensed from Microsoft and then hacked further. Commodore and Apple got a relatively limited BASIC interpreter they both needed to extend pretty badly (I think Commodore was pretty lazy about that, considering how little they had progressed by v2 in Commodore 64), and Microsoft got slapped because they just took cash and demanded no per-machine royalties whatsoever. =)
<ramble>
Eurocentric *what*? In my case, in GTK+ file dialogs, folder/object names with UTF8 characters seem to get truncated. Yes, I am in Europe. Not eurocentric - anglocentric. I believe the Japanese have invented a nice euphonic term for screwed-up encodings, called "mojibake" ("ghost characters", I believe), but around here, we call this phenomenon, loosely translated, "it's 2005 and my freaking scandinavic letters still don't work, goddamnit". =)
(Not that it's any better elsewhere. Just last weekend my mother opened one document in Windows and complained that the letters were all wrong. Too bad I was too tired to give a throughout lecture on the pitfalls of misdetected character encodings...)
Honestly, I think it's just that X11 itself is so bad in regards to international stuff. A lot of work needs to be done before this gets optimal.
I've only previously needed to use Russian, and getting keyboard stuff to work was very very painful - but fortunately some applications (GTK+ apps, Yudit, and XEmacs) support transliterative input, which was better than what I expected but probably not very nice for people who speak the language natively. Note that this was application stuff. I hoped I would be able to just pick "Use Finnish 105-key layout" and then "use Cyrillic transliteration" and it'd work in any app. No such luck though. Hopefully there will be one day.
</ramble>
(Note: I'm not a Solaris user. =)
Seeksize's home page is here. It explains that seeksize "prints the disk head seek distance by process. This can identify whether processes are accessing the disks in a 'random' or 'sequential' manner."
In other words, it shows how much the program bounces around in the file with fseek() and other read commands. If it shows a lot of 0s, the program probably reads the files in order; if other values, it probably jumps around a lot.
The site is slashdotted and I could only get the first page from Coral, so I can't see the screenshot. I don't know what could be so shocking about bouncy file access; we aren't exactly in the golden era of tape-based storage anymore, random access files tend to be norm these days anyway. =) Maybe it is shocking in case where you don't *expect* program to poke around the file.
Oh, somewhere around 1986. Keep waiting!
Hmm. What French movies I've seen recently, now let's see... typetypetype... movie:"le pacte des loups" ...blammo! 52 reviews. Shows the English title too. Not bad.
Hell, it does even Finnish movies. movie:"mies vailla menneisyyttä"... blam. 17 reviews.
Okay, just two random tries, but still not bad for an American search engine =)
And Common Lisp's eq function - in which (not (eq a b)) would be the idiomatic way to compare two objects.
It's in ANSI and the oldest reference for this I have at hand is CLtL2... I don't have historic Lisp documentation at hand, but it's such a fundamental function that it probably dates wayyyy back to earliest versions of the language.
Now we just need a Paul Graham Essay(tm) on "why Common Lisp's eq is more elegant than Microsoft's IsNot". =)
Errrrrm... I'd say bunk. Zork III was a Z-machine version 3 file, and color support didn't come until version 5 (ref: Z-machine specs.
Besides, C64 version of Zork III, to my recollection, only had monochrome text and PC version (just tried on frotz) didn't do any of the text attributes (apart of reverse on status line).
I know, I missed the point. Intentionally. =)
...and should have previewed. =/
Some corrections in first listing:
...
...
lda #<_msg
sta P1
And in second:
.proc helloslash
...
lda #<_msg
ldy #>_msg
Fairly brute force, don't you think?
Haven't really programmed C64 for a while, but here goes... haven't assembled it or anything...
.segment "CODE"
.import CHROUT
.import P1 ; that pointer in zeropage
.proc helloslash .ascii "hELLO sLASHDOT"
.byte 00
.endproc
init: ldy #$00
lda # sta P1
lda #>_msg
sta P1+1
ploop: lda (p1),y
cmp #$00
beq out
iny
jsr CHROUT
jmp ploop
out: rts
_msg:
Or, if you want to use BASIC ROM,
.segment "CODE"
.proc helloslash
lda #
ldy #>_msg .ascii "hELLO sLASHDOT"
.byte 00
.endproc
jsr $AB1E
rts
_msg:
Well, it's possible in theory, there was a vinyl-based video system called SelectaVision / VideoDisc.
Though, the discs themselves used read mechanism that was very different from LPs, and also had far higher groove density than LPs; if you store analog video on LPs, you probably get either a very short video or a very bad resolution.
A week ago I had problems getting Firefox to close.
Turns out some site had opened a popup window offscreen. I tried to adblock the contents from - wonder what it was - 888.com or something.
Thank heavens that it opened offscreen. Otherwise I might have actually seen the popup. (What's the point of opening popups offscreen anyway? I just got spam that was titled "Do not read this" or something like that.)
Um, Freecraft didn't have anything to do with Blizzard's authentication. It emulated non-Battle.net version of Warcraft II and (AFAIK) implemented its own network protocol. Heck, Warcraft II didn't even have CD keys or any other authentication stuff that plagues us today!
Still kind of understandable that Blizzard got mad about the name of the project. Though only kind of - I don't see exactly how this thing threatened them anyway. In any case, they haven't gone after Stratagus - same code, different name.
Plus, I was under the impression bnetd folks wanted to implement authentication, but Blizzard didn't want to do that...
Not really the correct analogy. I think Slashdotters would end up in a gigantic flamewar where one side would say that TCP/IP is a horrible no-good half-afternoon hack and we should be supporting OSI which was actually designed, while the other half would be going like "well, TCP/IP works for me, and it's easier to understand".
It's kind of like Java vs. PHP. Both are reasonably open standards, it's just that one is a commitee-designed monstrosity and other is an organically-grown weakling.
The cross-application automation is there. It's just not packaged in a nice non-geek box.
Basically, The Unix Way(tm) is there's tons of programs that do one thing and do it well. There's ImageMagick, netpbm, and other packages that are built on this way of thought. It's just that they don't have much GUI goodness. They can, however, be strung together in shell scripts or used through scripting languages.
Your scan example could be fairly easily done with SANE's command-line scanimage tool and ImageMagick. I've used scanimage, imagemagick and netpbm for mass-scanning previously, and I was surprised how easy it was and how "Ugly but Gets The Work Done" the user interface was =)
But at least that release won't be delayed because that'd mean Electronic Arts would have bought Sony to get dominion over everything sweet...
(I wonder why they haven't remade Skate or Die, or Ski or Die? Some of the few EA games I've really enjoyed... =)
There's some stuff that tells about the great new Places menu that would duplicate the bookmark feature Nautilus 1.x had - only better.
Here's my only complaint of Nautilus: I really like the spatial view, but there's no bookmarks menu for it. I don't use Nautilus to draw desktop, so I can't exactly plop shortcuts to desktop, either. I start up Nautilus at computer:///, and it's an annoying special folder where I can't put any of my own bookmarks. I so hope bookmarks finally get there in 2.10.
Of course, with my luck, the Places will only appear on the damn desktop menubar, which I don't use either... but I hope Nautilus' Places menu will have same entries.