Johnny Mnemonic writes "MacSlash is reporting that the Gnu-Darwin ports project has taken issue with some of Apple's current policies, to the extent of: 'GNU-Darwin will not support or distribute any software which links to proprietary libraries, and that includes Cocoa, Carbon, CoreAudio, etc. There will be no native package manager from GNU-Darwin (pkg_add suffices). Second, we will be moving our operations to x86, and we are putting the ppc collection into maintenance mode.' Astonished reaction on MacSlash, and recognition of the Fink alternative. Is this a worthy principled stand, or is it more like Kruschev banging his shoe in the UN? Will this help or hurt Apple's adoption of GPL technology?"

Strog writes "We are securing our administrative network and one thing we decided to implement is allowing only known MAC addresses get an address from the DHCP server. The techs aren't very Unix-centric so we would prefer to keep them out of the server directly. A web-based admin tool is what we are looking for. I've used webmin for a while but it likes to give each host a nice little icon which wouldn't be so good once we get all ~750 machines entered. Dixie looks good too but leaves a few too many options for techs to look at. I'm in the process of hacking webmin into what I need but wondered if anyone out there has some good options to offer. What we really need is boxes for hostname, MAC address and apply button and a list of current entries and a delete button." This was recently asked on a mailing list, but so far, no answers have been given. Might someone here have experience with such software that they would like to share?

bergeron76 writes "It's been just over a year since the DashPC/Dashboard Linux project initially got jump started. Since then, the project has grown by an order of magnitude. The initial codebase has been released on freshmeat and sourceforge, and we're working with several other developers on integrating projects such as Linux GPS Navigation, wardrive mapping, and ODBII automobile interfacing. The potential is endless, considering just a couple of recent news headlines, and how we'd love to eventually bring them to both new and existing automobiles."

zonker writes "January 17th will be the first (annual?) meeting of the Spam Conference held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The informal meeting will feature Paul Graham, John Graham-Cumming, John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper among others (possibly including ESR though he hasn't yet confirmed). The free conference will consist of a number of talks about new ways to combat the growing spam problem, after which everyone's going out and getting some Chinese food. Should be an informative and fun meeting and a chance to meet some interesting people."

Steve Mallett writes "I've just posted an interview I did with Tim Perdue, former co-'head honcho' responsible for developing SourceForge. You'll either love it or hate the interview, but it's on his new project GForge, a fork of the previously open source code running SF, while he shares some insight in what seems like a miracle that SourceForge was built at all." Obviously Slashdot's parent runs SourceForge, so insert whatever mental disclaimer and conspiracy theory you want here.

unix-coder asks: "How can a small software company get to 'rent' accounts for short times on a wide range of machines running different commercial Unixes with different CPUs? SourceForge's compiler farms are great for open source projects (and besides, open source projects will get ported/tested/fixed on all the platforms that matter to the people that use them). But what about commercial projects where you want to port/build/test for a wide range of architectures and OSes (AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, ...) but don't want your several server rooms full of weird hardware of your own?"

axehind writes "There's a article on Newsforge about the conference titled "Linux Cluster: the openMosix Approach" that took place in Italy on Nov 28th. It's really interesting to see what openMosix clusters have been used for. From game clusters to scientific research . It includes links to the conferences slides and some of the papers."

PureFiction writes "Peer networks are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized search architectures and swarming distribution networks. Research has indicated that these decentralized networks are resistant to legal and technological attacks. The continued proliferation of broadband and wireless networking will ensure pervasive deployment of distributed peer networking infrastructure that will drive significant innovations in personal and community digital communications services."

Perlmonkey has written a summary on the latest Everquest Expansion, and Sony's efforts to thwart those who might wish to to tap into the packets and do things that maybe aren't exactly fair to other players. Or they just want a map that should have been in the first place. In anycase, hit the link below to read his piece on the subject.

Jagasian writes "The classic computer space adventure role playing game known as Star Control 2 has been officially ported from its obsolete mono-platform source code to modern multi-platform C++/SDL source code. The game is open source, and compiles and runs on Linux! The alpha release binaries are available for download now!"

Theovon asks: "One of today's hot topics seems to be SPAM filtering. I have wanted very much to make my own contribution to this, but I have been thwarted by a patent. Probably before Paul Graham began working on his Bayesian SPAM filter, I began work on a Markov-model based filter. Things were going well until I posted to the usenet about it, and got this Google Groups response. This usenet post describes a Mitsubishi patent issued in 2000, US Patent #6,112,021. One of the key aspects of my design was that I would train the Markov model with both positive and negative examples. This patent is spot-on what I'm doing, because it deals specifically with the idea of using negative examples in Markov models to filter, among other things, 'inappropriate web content.' Well, the patent looks like a good one, assuming they really developed this idea. I mean, of course, I would think it's a good idea; I came up with it too, and it works very well. (Then again, I also thought it was 'obvious')..."

descubes writes "A recent article asked about improvements in programming. Concept programming is a very simple idea to improve programming: program code should reflect application-domain concepts. What is amazing is not the idea itself, but how often we don't apply it, and how much existing tools and techniques can get in the way without us even realizing it. To be able to represent all concepts equally well, we need tools that don't force a particular, restricted vocabulary on us. The Mozart project is a Free Software project to implement concept-programming development tools. It includes the Coda universal intermediate language, the Melody persistent program representation, the Moka Java-to-Java extensible compiler, and a fairly advanced front-end for a new programming language called XL. In the long run, Mozart can give the Free Software community a foundation for something as powerful as Charles Simonyi's Intentional Programming."

proclus writes "A 40 gig Maxtor 3.5 inch, ATA/EIDE hard drive ready to go with GNU-Darwin OS pre-installed, plus GNU-Darwin Office, plus a full ports tree and select distfiles. This bundle includes Darwin-6.0.2, GNOME desktop, AbiWord, PyMOL, The GIMP, gdFortran, parallel computing, and much more. A triple CDR set is also included. Available now for ppc and x86 computers. The PPC version includes OpenOffice-1.0.1 and Mozilla-1.0. Compatibility is as specified for our OS installer CDs. Check out our updated ordering web page. (Mirror one mirror two.) You want it."

Kagato asks: "I'm trying to make my company's Unix boxes more mission critical in the area of job scheduling. Scheduling jobs in Unix has been around since the dawn of time. On most systems you have 'cron' and 'at' to provide most of your scheduling needs. But outside the basic world of 'do this at such time' there are a slew of commercial products that handle dependencies, failure routes, monitoring, dependent notification, etc. Commercial products of this type have been around for years. Is there anything like this available in the GNU and Open Source worlds? I've been looking at Freshmeat, SourceForge and Google. I've found the pickings for advanced scheduling are pretty slim."

An anonymous reader submits: "As reported on the OS News: BeOS 5 PE Max Edition is based on the original BeOS 5 PE with an additional number of drivers, add-ons, AthlonXP/Pentium4 patches and more software. It includes new development tools from the OpenBeOS team but you will also be able to select the old tools. This is an ideal way to install BeOS 5 off a bootable CD image, for all those who wanted to try out BeOS but they were unable to do so because of the bugs/drivers and patches BeOS 5 PE needs to have applied into it before it successfully run on or support most modern PCs. BeBits has an overview of the files included in the package, and downloads for the Be Max in parts or as a whole (all 213MB). Enjoy!"

Matey-O asks: "Having purchased a MiniDV camcorder for the impending arrival of my twins (I suspect a majority of camcorder sales HAVE to be bought by new parents), I also purchased the firewire connection kit. Based on the software estimates on how much uncompressed video can be stored on the harddisk, it looks like a 60 minute MiniDV cassette holds about 15 Gb. Since the PC can control the camera, and the transfer is billed as lossless, has any work been done on using MiniDV as a backup medium? One Cassette looks like it'd store ALL of my important info, and at $5 per, it'd be pretty economical too." Reading this definition, it looks like the submitter may be mistaken about the 15GB size, and the Backfire pages at Sourceforge indicate a more realistic figure of 12GB. Backfire itself looks like it might be the project the Matey-O wants, but the last update is from April of 2000. Has anyone taken up this idea and tried this particular backup path, before? Is it a practical alternative to your standard computer tape drives?

krazyninja writes "The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA), and the International Imaging Industry Association (I3A), have announced the release of v1.0 MultiPhoto/Video specs. This specifies a standard framework for storing and managing digital image content on CDs/DVDs. Companies such as HP and Roxio are involved in this development. Note that there is a similar spec for audio called MultiAudio, also from OSTA."

Zorton asks: "After switching to Mac OS X (10.2) for my primary work/play environment I started to customize the system as I would a Linux or BSD system. One of the first things I wanted to tackle was getting mail into the machine and enabling offline mail queuing (as this is a laptop that roams quite a bit). After installing Fink I was happy to see some of my favorite MTAs available. However I was disappointed to discover there seems to be no mechanism similar to /etc/network/if-up.d (or similar). I spent a bit of time poking and prodding the system but the best I could come up with where some library functions listed on Apple's Developer Connection website. Has anyone tried to configure offline mail queues under Mac OS X 10.2? If you have how did you handle telling the MTA to transfer the mail you have queued up?"

fieldmethods asks: "One area where Open Source and Free Software doesn't seem to have really taken off is Natural Language Processing (using computers to deal with human languages). There are a few projects that are open source, such as Festival (a speech synth system, now ported to Java), NLTK, a general-purpose NLP system in Python, and the Linguana project, a Perl implementation of a semantic network not unlike Wordnet (but better). Generally, though, there doesn't seem to be a lot of Open Source momentum behind the field as a whole. It's a challenging, difficult field that would benefit from collaboration, especially given the potential of replacing static corpora with on-the-fly corpora developed by search engines. Is anybody else interested in this?"

Eugenia writes "Mesa 5.0 has been released. It implements the OpenGL 1.4 specification." There's more information as to what's been fixed/added/changed on their SF.net project page.