Internet Explorer

How to Build a Better Browser 492

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'd-like-to-know dept.
TuringTest writes "Interface designer and IE ex-developer Scott Berkun writes an essay on basic principles of web browser design, moved by the recent presence of Firefox and Opera in the headlines. Gives plenty of design constraints and guidelines, some insightful, some debatable. Personally some features that I'd like to see in my browser include colaborative filtering (a.k.a. del.icio.us integration), a unified tool for history+bookmarks in a single list (filtered by keyword tags), and automatic generation of keywords for the bookmarked pages (something that Open Text Summarizer can do)."
GUI

3D User Interfaces 353

Posted by timothy from the stereo-au-means-solid-gold dept.
Martin Ecker writes "Two-dimensional user interfaces (UIs) have been around for a long time, and people are accustomed to using them. However, 3-dimensional user interfaces have not yet received as much exposure. Only a select few applications utilize 3D UIs, some with more success than others. The book 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice (published by Addison-Wesley) attempts to give a broad overview of the field of 3D user interfaces. It discusses the hardware devices and the software techniques required to build successful 3D UIs and gives a number of design guidelines to follow when having to develop new 3D interaction techniques for specific applications." Read on for the rest of Ecker's review.
Classic Games (Games)

BZFlag goes Platinum 196

Posted by Zonk from the you-don't-see-nearly-enough-tank-games-anymore dept.
morrison writes "A little over four years after moving to SourceForge at a current rate of several hundred downloads every day, BZFlag has finally "gone platinum". With over 1,000,000 SourceForge downloads, BZFlag looks to be the third game (following Tux Racer and StepMania) to go 'sf platinum'. While this doesn't include the many tens of thousands distributed prior to the project's migration to sf.net during the SGI days, it's a momentous occasion for open source gaming regardless."
Role Playing (Games)

New Open-Source Tabletop RPG 90

Posted by Zonk from the if-wick-likes-the-thing-it-can't-be-all-bad dept.
ClintonRNixon writes "A new open-source tabletop RPG has been released, The Shadow of Yesterday. People have been putting RPGs online for free for years, and Wizards of the Coast has their Open Game License, but this is the first time a game has been written and published using only open-source tools, and is published under a Creative Commons license. To make the online version, vi and Python Docutils were used; the published game was laid out using Scribus, The Gimp, and OpenOffice."
Handhelds

Cellphone Forensic Software Open Sourced 23

Posted by michael from the copying-jason-bourne dept.
Niek writes "The Netherlands Forensic Institute (part of the Dutch Ministry of Justice) has open sourced one of their high-profile software frameworks, TULP2G. With this BSD licensed framework, one can extract and decode all data from GSM SIM cards, e.g. called phone numbers and received SMS messages. This was previously only possible with commercial software. Dutch press release, Powerpoint presentation. Earlier this year, the Dutch government GPLed their online election software."
Media

Batch Converting Between Formats? 94

Posted by Cliff from the content-with-an-identity-crisis dept.
Yort asks: "With the Christmas season upon us, it's time to dust off the Yuletide music. However, I'm finding once again this year that I'm needing to re-rip all my CDs to fit the format-of-the-year. Ogg Vorbis for my portable, MP3 for the Tivo, WMA and AAC for sharing with co-workers... Argh! So, I've decided it's time to end the madness: Hard drives are cheap, so I'm going to rip all my music once-and-for-all to a lossless format (I'm choosing FLAC at this point), then just batch convert to whatever format I need. I know I'm hardly the first one to think of this, but I've looked around and haven't found much in the way of good OSS tools for this sort of thing. Any recommendations, or do I have to write one myself?"
Television

Open Source Gets Its Own TV Show 143

Posted by samzenpus from the must-see dept.
ChocLinux writes "A South African organisation has produced what it claims is the first television series dedicated to promoting open source software. The first episode of the show included an interview with Richard Stallman, who founded the GNU project, and Robin Rowe, who runs the Linux Movies Group, which promotes the use of Linux in Hollywood."
The Internet

Cheap Point-To-Point VoIP Through NAT? 35

Posted by Cliff from the conversations-over-the-link dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "70% of my phone bill comes from calls to a few colleagues. We all have 'broadband' internet access (at least 100 kbit/s upstream) and are behind NATs, so we can share our access with the rest of our house-mates. The OS most used is Linux. In order to lower our phone bills I'm looking for a Point-to-Point audio tool which enables you to pass relatively easily through the NATs. I've had a look at Speak-Freely, which is quite nice as it sports things like GPG-encryption. But it uses two UDP and one TCP ports which is a bit much and not very NAT friendly. I wouldn't like to use commercial tools with central servers like Skype. What would be ok is to use a webserver to serve as a kind of starting point where you would update your IP address and ports. But it should be possible to give your mom and pop webhoster to set up or even better just a cgi-script which interacts with the clients via http or https. The audio data itself shouldn't be routed over a server (what a waste of bandwidth). Thanks for all ideas."
The Internet

P2P Through Firewalls 220

Posted by michael from the file-in-hand-worth-two-in-the-network dept.
An anonymous submitter writes "A few stream-through-firewall applications have been announced recently. p2pnet has an interview with Ian Clarke about his new 'Dijjer' program, which promises to reduce bandwidth requirements from HTTP servers by transparently distributing the load. Slyck.com has an article about LimeWire's new version that offers firewall-to-firewall transfers (code here). [Both Dijjer and LimeWire are GPL'd.] There's also been a lot of discussion on the p2p hackers list about reliable UDP transfers."
Spam

Yahoo! Mail Now Using Domain Keys To Fight Spam 222

Posted by timothy from the also-makes-great-sushi dept.
scubacuda points out this CNET story, writing "In addition to beefing up its storage (100MB -> 250MB), Yahoo! Mail has implemented Domain Keys to find spam. The idea is simple: give email providers a way to verify the domain and integrity of the messages sent. Sendmail, Inc. has released an open source implementation of the Yahoo! DomainKeys specification for testing on the Internet and is actively seeking participants and feedback for its Pilot Program. Yahoo! has submitted the DomainKeys framework as an Internet Draft, titled 'draft-delany-domainkeys-base-01.txt,' for publication with the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). The patent license agreement can be found here."
Wireless Networking

Intel Linux Driver Version 1.0 For Centrino WLAN 30

Posted by timothy from the sansabelt dept.
Werner Heuser writes "Intel has just released Linux driver version 1.0.0 for the Centrino PRO/Wireless 2100 chipset. Almost two years, since the first Centrino generation with Pentium-M Banias has reached the market, a stable issue of a native Open Source driver has become available. The Wireless LAN driver for the current Centrino generation with Pentium-M Dothan and PRO/Wireless 2200BG chipset is still at version 0.13. This driver is intented to support also the third generation of the Intel miniPCI WLAN adapter named PRO/Wireless 2915ABG. Though Intel intended these projects to be community efforts, there are some possible working constraints. Mainly, no hardware documentation is available."
Graphics

Largest Digital Photograph in the World 318

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-a-lot-of-bits dept.
thrill12 writes "Dutch research institute TNO has unveiled what it believes is the largest digital photograph in the world. The image contains 2.5 gigapixels or 7.5 gigabyte worth of data. It is composed of 600 single images shot by a computer-controlled pan-tilt unit in 7 second intervals. Afterwards, all photos where stiched together (compare: panorama tools) using the capacity of 5 high-end pc's in about 24 hours time."
Games

Are Game Stats Important to You? 98

Posted by Cliff from the it's-all-in-the-numbers dept.
Nehle asks: "In almost every new multi-player game there is a way of keeping statistics about the games that are being played. Whether it's fan-based services or a service created by the game creator. Unreal Tournament 2004 can write nice HTML files for you, Bungie keep an insane amount of stats about games played over X-Box Live. For my favorite shooter - Enemy Territory, there is an application called Enemy Territory Teamstats and I wrote this little script to keep track of my games. Are stats any important to the average /. reader? Is it interesting how many times you shot 1337h4x0rg4m3r in the head, or is winning all that counts? Do you even want people to know if you lost 14 games in a row?"
Space

Go on a Virtual Trip to Mars 77

Posted by michael from the diy dept.
Jaroslaw Zachwieja writes "The Druantia Virtual Trip to Mars Project has made access to MOLA data simplier than ever. The data is served as 16bit PNG files. A bash script and interpolation program is available to automate the retrieving process. Druantia project (still a little baby in need of developers) aims to allow anyone with decent graphic card and broadband internet connection to explore Mars and interact with other participants connected. The data served is the highest publicly available set with one pixel for approx. 460 meters and (uncompressed) takes 2GB of disk space. Meet you at Olympus Mons? :)"
Databases

TOra Project Looking for New Maintainer 45

Posted by michael from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come dept.
cerberusss writes "TOra is a GPL'ed, QT-based Oracle/PostgreSQL client, one of the most full-featured for many years. The lead developer Henrik Johnson was hired by Quest Software to work further on TOra. After some time of inactivity, Henrik has put a request on the developer list, saying: 'I'm sorry for not being able to spend that much time on TOra as I should. I am now working full time on future versions of TOAD by Quest. (...) I am wondering if someone on this mailing list is willing to step up as a new maintainer of this project.' Also interesting is that the GPL'ed code base compiles for both Windows and Linux, but compiling for Windows is not allowed anymore because of the license of Trolltech's QT."
Graphics

Microsoft Patents The Broken y-Axis 20

Posted by timothy from the what-the-heck-it's-only-a-legal-monopoly dept.
theodp writes "Microsoft was granted a patent Tuesday for Displaying data containing outlying data items, covering the familiar concept of broken y-axis bar charts. Oddly, Microsoft's 2002 'invention' is described in detail in a 1999 listserv post and found its way into scientific journals and other sources before the patent's claims were disclosed. BTW, the patent's term was extended by 269 days, apparently the USPTO's way of apologizing for initially rejecting the patent."
BSD

OpenBSD Activism Shows Drivers Can Be Freed 213

Posted by timothy from the mindshare-will-follow dept.
grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)
Hardware Hacking

Water Cooling With A Car Radiator 282

Posted by timothy from the then-he's-gonna-kill-us dept.
sH4RD writes "Why go out and buy a water cooling system when you can do it with an old car radiator? That's exactly what One of The Twelve figured when he used the radiator from his brother's 1979 Toyota Corolla to cool his system. His Athlon64 3000+ can hit 2.5GHz smoothly now. Check out the original forum post complete with benchmarks."

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