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Television

Modded XBox The Ultimate Multimedia PC? 358

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-sure-think-so dept.
Anonymous writes "Can a modded Xbox running homebrew software really beat all existing designed-for-the-living-room multimedia devices hands down?! Tom's Hardware Guide seems to think so. They reviewed Xbox Media Center (XBMC) and say the free open source software turn an Xbox into The Ultimate Multimedia Center, the ideal home playback system for audio and video. (Apparently there is a PC software version available too: Media Portal)" The article also explains some of the more convoluted issues surrounding XBMC. But I definitely agree that this is a great system.
Microsoft

Microsoft Releases WTL To SourceForge 560

Posted by simoniker from the forging-on dept.
prostoalex writes "Microsoft's WTL (Windows Template Library) toolkit source code has been released to SourceForge.net [also part of OSDN, like Slashdot.] InternetNews explains that the toolkit allows a Windows developer to create quick GUIs in C++. According to the project page, WTL extends ATL (Active Template Library) and provides a set of classes for controls, dialogs, frame windows, GDI objects, and more. WTL is licensed under CPL, which is the license Microsoft chose for the SourceForge release of the WiX installer."
Music

Music Related Free and Open Source Software? 37

Posted by Cliff from the putting-together-your-own-tunes dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm going to a demonstration of some music software products tomorrow night. The music store hosting the event may be attempting to start a users group of music software. This seems like a job for open source advocacy! Anyone know of any good F/OSS for working with music and audio? I am already aware of Audacity and (Free as in Beer) Jeskola Buzz, but what else is there in the realm of sequencers and audio manipulation?" We did another helpful article back in 2001, and another from last August. What musical creations have you put together with any of this software, and others we may have missed?
Programming

What's the Right Way to Accept Donations? 46

Posted by Cliff from the a-difficult-issue-for-any-open-source-project dept.
Schapht asks: "Not long ago, SourceForge.net started offering users and projects the ability to accept donations. But there doesn't seem to be much information on the legal implications of accepting donations. Should open source projects start registering themselves as businesses? Would there be fines if they didn't? Are there any options for a project that can't afford the processing fees involved in registering a business?"
Media

More On The BBC's Codec 'Dirac' 278

Posted by timothy from the bbc1-bbc2-bbc3 dept.
TioHoltzman writes "El Reg is reporting about a new codec that is built on top of wavelet technology and seems to offer performance that is "roughly in line with the Video Codec 9" from Microsoft. The project has been released as open source on SourceForge. This looks like it might be really interesting." (Previously mentioned a few weeks back.)
Mozilla

Mozilla - From Browser to Desktop Environment? 68

Posted by Cliff from the gecko-promotion dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "A while ago OEone released a thingy called Penzilla which was basically a Mozilla desktop environment like GNOME or KDE. Everything was written in either DHTML or XUL and ran within the Gecko engine. Recently a new project, Robin was released that is basically a desktop running within Mozilla using XUL as well. There is NetWindows that attempts something similar for more interactive web applications. What advantages would a 100% Mozilla engine desktop hold and what are the disadvantages compared to much more complex environments such as GNOME or KDE? Is a Mozilla desktop possibly more elegant or efficient for the typical user? Is the XUL runtime environment more robust than troublesome C/C++ widgets? It seems like most applications could make the transition as the growing collection of Firebird extensions like ChatZilla and Gnusto and have shown."
Privacy

Winny P2P Software Creator Arrested 412

Posted by Hemos from the cracking-down-on-the-software dept.
News for nerds writes "The author of Winny, the Japanese P2P software with encrypted networking capability, similar to Freenet, has been today officially arrested for abetment of copyright violation, after the raid in the last December. He started its development in May 2002 and occasionally appeared on the web forum 2ch with his anonymous codename "47", but today turned out to be an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Tokyo in his 30s. Winny was so efficient and popular that it generated problems even at the Japanese police and the GSDF. As the Japanese police is the most advanced among the world in pulling P2P into criminal cases, outcry of users in Japan is expected."
Announcements

PowerPC Architecture Emulator Unleashed 124

Posted by timothy from the keep-handy-the-shredded-newspaper dept.
Sebastian Biallas writes "We have finally released version 0.1 of our PowerPC architecture emulator: PearPC. The emulator itself is (prepared to be) architecture independent but only tested on x86s (here you go porters...). It also features a must faster just-in-time compilation unit for x86 hosts. This means that you can now run your favourite PowerPC-OS on x86: Mandrake Linux (9.1), Darwin (6 + 7) and Mac OS X (10.3)! And the best things is: it's GPL'd. But be warned: it's experimental.."
Media

Dirac: BBC Open Source Video Codec 523

Posted by michael from the knowing-is-half-the-battle dept.
NickFitz writes "Need To Know this week has a piece about Dirac, a BBC R&D project to produce a video codec, which has been released as an Open Source project. From BBCi: 'Dirac is a general-purpose video codec aimed at resolutions from QCIF (180x144) to HDTV (1920x1080) progressive or interlaced... Our algorithm seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), its original target application. It has been further developed to optimise it for internet streaming resolutions.'"
Software

First Ten Programs on New Install? 1659

Posted by Cliff from the what-can't-you-live-without dept.
reddigitaldragon asks: "Some people re-install once a year, but if you're anything like me your machine is formatted at least once a month. After the OS is in, then come the favorite/must have/most used programs to install. My first installations for Windows (I use it; get over it): Trillian, Winrar, Firefox, Winamp, SmartFTP, Azureus, NMap, GKrellM, PowerDVD. What are your First 10 installed programs?" What are the first 10 programs you would install on a Windows machine? How about for a Unix machine?
Software

JOE Hits 3.0 519

Posted by timothy from the tap-tap-clicka-tap dept.
orasio writes " Joe's Own Editor , a unix editor very much like the old Turbo-Pascal 4 editor, or WordStar, used and enjoyed by us console freaks who still miss the old DOS days, and cannot finish understanding vi's modes, has been revamped, adding syntax highlighting and internationalization support after many years without new features. The Sourceforge project is open for contributors since a year ago, but this is the first major feature improvement, that brings new life to JOE as a neat console-based programmer's editor." Joe is one undervalued program -- less arcane than vi, less cumbersome than emacs.
Games

BZFlag Open Source Developers Interviewed, Honored 18

Posted by simoniker from the zone-of-battle dept.
morrison writes "BZFlag, a 'free multiplayer multiplatform 3D tank battle game', is the Sourceforge [part of OSDN, as is Slashdot] April 2004 Project of the Month, and the award page features details and an interview with the creators. Hopefully other well-deserving Open Source games will receive recognition down the road." The creators explain the game "runs on Irix, Linux, *BSD, Windows, Mac OS X, and other platforms", note: "There are about 53,000 players in the statistics", and mention plans: "We hope to build a karma system that enables the community to guard against cheats and abuses."
Communications

Best Weblogs for Personal Websites? 66

Posted by Cliff from the creating-your-online-diary dept.
herrvinny asks: "What is the best weblog script to use on a personal web site? SourceForge and Google show plenty of weblogging systems available, but I just need a simple, powerful solution. Movable Type has been recommended to me, but I've heard of problems with spam, exploits, and comment flooding. I'd like to have a decently good comments section, where visitors can reply to my ramblings and have a fairly large toolset in which to do so, i.e. smilies, some limited HTML (bold, italic, etc). A small Polling plugin would be terrific as well. Which weblogging systems do Slashdot readers use and recommend? Some complexity isn't a problem; I can work in Perl, HTML, C (among other languages) if I need to. Also, what do people think of adapting Slashcode for such purposes?"
PC Games (Games)

Is DOS Gaming Dead? 146

Posted by simoniker from the barely-functioning dept.
Thanks to Monster Hardware for its article discussing the problems of getting classic DOS games working on today's state-of-the-art PCs. The author discusses trying the Microsoft Program Compatibility Wizard ("After fooling around with a number of games I was able to get a few of them half-way working"), before trying the DOSBox freeware util "...not perfect: Some games run, some games don't." After "trying and mainly failing for the last several weeks to get a handful of old DOS games... to run on a modern PC", is this author's experience typical, or are there any other ways to get old DOS titles running easily?
Data Storage

Experiences and Thoughts on SHFS? 43

Posted by Cliff from the ssh-based-fileshares dept.
eugene ts wong asks: "I was looking over SHFS, & I thought that this seems like a very good software package. If I understand it correctly, then it should be the defacto way to mount shares across a network. I never heard of it till today, though. What do all of you think of this? What kinds of experiences do you have? I am interested in hearing some of your stories. I heard that NFS isn't secure. How do they both compare? Would you recommend SHFS for small, medium & large businesses?"
PC Games (Games)

Runesword 2 CRPG Gets Open Source Release 16

Posted by simoniker from the free-as-in-free dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out that CrossCut Games has released the source code and a fully unlocked playable version of RuneSword 2, a "[Windows based] CRPG designed to appeal to 'pen and paper' role-players. The game comes with two full-length adventures, a number of smaller adventures, and a completely flexible construction set." There's more information over at the CrossCut Games forums for the game, where it's noted that the developers "had to remove the music files", but "all the source code (and the unlocked version of RS2)" are currently available, with "another few hundred meg of 'unused' graphics, sound and many other tid bits" that may be released in the future.
Music

Free iTunes Over a Browser 287

Posted by michael from the release-the-hounds dept.
Ade writes "One may now listen and search for Apple iTunes music via this front end or any webserver running the perl script called iTMS-4-ALL, which was written by Jason Rohrer, programmer of the secure filesharing system MUTE who hopes the script 'helps revive everyone's ITMS interfaces.' Music activists Downhill Battle, who organised the Grey Tuesday protests for disseminating censored music, run a copy of the script and say 'this is a cute tool, but it has the potential to become a powerful weapon to fight the major record label monopoly' in the ways they outline. Playing the music requires QuickTime for the ~600kb downloadable MP4 snippets to be heard." Update: 04/19 01:41 GMT by H : Thanks to Aaron at Punboy for sending us a link to a faster server.
Robotics

Wi-Fi Security Robots? 107

Posted by michael from the ed-209 dept.
John Hering writes "It was bound to happen.... Security Robots that are "Wi-Fi" enabled and capable of enterprise-grade tasks. Details have emerged about a robotics platform that combines cutting edge security and wireless technologies and is capable of integration with buildings' central heating and cooling systems, security systems, air quality controls, wi-fi networks, and even lighting and power systems to provide valuable building services and emergency back-up. It can even greet guests, guide them to their destinations or lead building tours! Similar projects in the past have pushed these robotics technologies forward and spawned numerous new projects , especially amongst the linux community."
Games

Non-FPS Network Games to Play at Work? 56

Posted by Cliff from the something-to-take-the-edge-off dept.
lidocaineus asks: "I work at a small company with about 30 workstations. Two of us run Linux and three use Mac OS X, so on one of the servers, we installed Teg (both the server daemon and client). It works well since as a turn based game, the five of us are not beholden to it every second of the day, and can turn to it when we have a few free moments (and group chat all in one place other than through Jabber). Recently, some of the Windows folks have become interested in joining. Other than by using cygwin (these are serious computer-challenged types), are there any cross platform turn-based type game clients that work on Windows, preferably using the Linux server as a, well, server? Obviously we're not looking for a quake fest."

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