Latest Posts from Download Squad

Ever wish you could go back to 1984 (and we mean the real 1984, no the other 1984)?

Now you can. Sort of. Run BASIC is a site that lets you relive those heady days of PEEKs and POKEs by giving you a place to run BASIC programs.

Actually, Run BASIC is based on Liberty BASIC, not the more familiar Apple or PC versions, so it only takes you back to 1992. But all your favorite command line and lo-res favorites are there, including hangman and HiLo. You can also write your own programs, or just dig out those old manuals.

This really geeked me out when I saw it. The thrill I got from flipping on our first //e, typing a few simple lines into the built-in BASIC interpreter, typing 'RUN,' and watching my programs actually begin to to something was what got me hooked on computers in the first place as a kid. Seeing how high the computer could count was always a favorite, as was anything that involved an infinite loop or GOTO sequence that left an END someplace other than the last line.

[via Chris]

The fourth annual Global Piracy Study, conducted by tech market research company IDC on behalf of the Business Software Alliance, was released this morning. The researchers estimate that again this year, 35% of all software on PCs worldwide is pirated. This is despite claimed advances in legitimate sales in traditional problem areas like China, where the government's decision to license operating systems and other software is uses on state-owned PCs has resulted in a 10% drop in three years (a drop from 92% to 82%, but still). Other developing markets, though, seem to be taking up the slack. Nearly one third of countries surveyed has piracy rates topping 75%, and while developing markets account for fully 30% of global PC sales, they only account for 10% of software revenue.

Perhaps the most surprising finding was that, despite the world's lowest piracy rate--21%--the estimated value of pirated software in the US is the highest on the list. IDC estimates that the US accounts for US$7.3bn in piracy losses. That raises a red flag in my mind: are we really buying (or not) that much more software than other countries, or are we getting ripped off paying for software that sells for less elsewhere?

Even taken with the XXL grain of salt BSA funding requires, these are big numbers.

A couple of prominent web design gurus have announced a mini conference on "Web Browsers, Standards and Interop" during XTech 2007 in Paris on May 15th. The idea is to get browser vendors, web developers and designers all in the same room to spend a day talking about about how to make life easier for each other and, most importantly for website visitors. Ultimately, the organizers want a return to "the original platform and user agent agnostic vision of the Web."

That may sound like pie in the sky, but the organizers have made a good start: Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software have already committed to attending. Hopefully, the Apple WebKit developers and the KHTML team won't be far behind. Ideally, of course, some standards organizations would be involved, too. And who knows? Since this is all happening in Paris, some members of ISO and ECMA working groups just might stop by.

Personally, I'm excited about this. This conversation is about twelve years overdue. I don't expect to wake up on the morning of May 16th and discover that Trident and Gecko render CSS the same way, but it's a good first step in the right direction.

Yesterday afternoon, Flickr announced the release of a new feature that hard core Flickr users have been clamoring for for a while now: subsets or sets of sets. Or, as Flickr calls them, collections. Users can now build up large collections of pictures from building blocks of multiple sets, and even other collections. To differentiate them from regular sets when you're looking at them in the sidebar, collections have icons that are mosaics, with a number of pictures from the different sets that make up the collection.

As you can see from the screencap below, there are a couple of quirks. First, collections can only be nested 5 deep. for most people, this shouldn't be an issue, but some power users may hit that limit fairly quickly. Second, any collection can be composed of sets or other collections, but not both. That means if you have a collection and you want to create a new collection with that collection plus another set, you have to put the set into a collection first. There doesn't seem to be anything to stop you from creating a collection with a single set, so it's no big deal, but it is an extra bit of hassle, and it potentially costs you a layer of nested collections.

Finally, drag and drop editing of sets and mosaics doesn't seem to have the kinks worked out in Safari yet. When I clicked on the icons to arrange the mosaic on my test collection, the icons floated around the window nowhere near the mouse pointer. And the finished collection never showed up, even though everything looked fine. Firefox seems just fine, though.

Internet security watchdogs at the SANS Institute Internet Storm Center are reporting two unrelated issues with the DST changeover on Windows platforms.

The first issue incolves isolated problems where clocks display incorrect times despite being patched for the new US Daylight Savings Time rules. Apparently the problem affects certain systems that were patched using directions from Microsoft the TZEdit.exe application or manual edits to the Registry. A patch is available from Microsoft here.

The second involves certain applications that rely on the TZ environment variable. a patch for that is available here.

• Only one in five federal agencies (21 percent) posts on the Web all four categories of records that the law specifically requires;
• Only one in 16 agencies (6 percent) posts all ten elements of essential FOIA guidance;
• Only 36 percent of agencies provide the required indexes of records;
• Only 26 percent of agencies provide online forms for submitting FOIA requests;
• Many agency Web links are missing or just wrong - one FOIA fax number checked in the Knight Survey actually rang in the maternity ward of a military base hospital.

The Departments of Defense, the Interior, and Veterans' Affairs, Homeland Security, and the CIA, among others, were particularly low-scorers. No shocks there. Bright spots, on the other hand, included "E-Stars" such as NASA, the FTC, and, surprisingly enough, the Department of Justice.

Anyone whose ever tried to get information from a government website probably won't be surprised by the results. The best results come from agencies who are either small or see their missions as serving the public interest. The worst results are from agencies who thrive on secrecies and/or bloated bureaucracies, which , unfortunately includes most of them.

The big buzz in the open source community this weekend had nothing to do with software. Instead, the talk was about developer Hans Resier--founder of Namesys and creator of ReiserFS--who found out Friday that he will be arraigned for his wife's murder on March 23rd.

Reiser's estranged wife disappeared this past September. Reiser denied any involvement or knowledge, but was later charged with her murder. What happened after that could have come straight out of a soap opera. Reiser was held without bail for several months, part of the time in solitary confinement. Nina Reiser's body was never found. It came to light that Mrs. Reiser Secretly obtained Russian citizenship for her children, and they were taken to Russia by their maternal grandmother after the son testified that he saw his mother get into her car and leave the Reiser house on the day of her disappearance, and that he and his father played video games all afternoon, contradicting prosecuters' allegations that Mrs. Reiser was killed in the house, and that Mr. Reiser later disposed of the body. Investigators did, however find traces of blood in Mr. Reiser's home and car. They also discovered that Mr. Reiser had removed the passenger's seat of his car, and the original could not be located. There was, however, no indication of foul play, and Mr. Reiser's lawyers requested that the case be dropped. This past Friday, though, the judge ruled that he could stand trial on the strength of the circumstantial evidence including--in a move that is sure set privacy advocates screaming--the disclosure that, at some point after his wife's disappearance, Mr. Reiser purchased a book on murder. Mr. Reiser's mother-in-law failed to return from Russia so that the son could testify on his father's behalf or be cross-examined.

Much of the speculation in the press and the community has centered on the future of Namesys and ReiserFS. I think, though, that situations like this are one of the areas where the open source model really shines. If the community is interested in a project, it will continue. And there certainly seems to be a great deal of interest in ReiserFS. ReiserFS has some strong friends, too. The core of the developers are full-time employees of Namesys, and a large chunk of the R & D budget for recent releases has come from DARPA, which is presumably still interested. Regardless of the future of Namesys, which Reiser looks to be selling to cover his legal bills, the ReiserFS project should continue strong.

Now that so many sites seem to be adopting OpenID, you might have decided that you want one. You may also have decided that you don't want it tied to your circa 1997 AOL screen name (I'm looking at you cyrano99). What better than to tie your online ID to your real identity and keep things nice and simple?

Enter FreeYourID.

The FreeYourID service combines a personal domain in the .name TLD with an OpenID provided by MyOpenID. since your OpenId will be tied to your .name url, it is theoretically good for life--or as long as you keep the DNS registry up to date--rather than your tenure with with AOL, LiveJournal, another service. And since it's based on your name you should have less compunction about using it in a professional context than, say hottl33gs.

In addition to the OpenID, FreeYourID also includes forwarding of both your .name email and url to addresses of your choice.

They're currently running a 90-day free promo, and membership is $10.95 per year after that. If you don't like it, you can transfer your .name domain to another registrar if you want to keep it.

So far, I've stayed away from OpenID, mostly because I haven't wanted to tie my identity to any particular url. The ability to easily combine the ID with a .name domain, though, may be what finally pushes me over the edge. It would certainly make life a lot simpler.

There is one "gotcha," though: I wouldn't use the service for any particularly secure application yet. Passwords can only contain upper and lower case letter and numbers. Attempts to enter punctuation or other characters result in an "invalid character" warning. That seems pretty short-sighted to me.

[via Phil Windley]

As long as we're talking about word processors that have come a long way since we last talked about them: Mac users should sit up and take note: NeoOffice 2.1 arrives on March 27th.

NeoOffice is a OS X port of OppenOffice.org by a group of developers who have thought from the beginning that the Main OO.o team was taking the wrong tack in offering X-11 support on the Mac. Early NeoOffice releases were all-Java wrappers for OO.o (and were known as NeoOffice/J); recent releases have been Aqua native and, as of version 2.0, included both Intel and PPC binaries. NeoOffice 2.1 will include all the features of OpenOffice.org 2.1, including support for Office 2007 XML documents and Virtual Basic (VBA) macros. And, of course, possibly the coolest icon of any app on any platform.

NeoOffice also includes NeoLight, a plugin that allows Spotlight to index both content and metadata of OpenOffice and OpenDocument files. Users of main openOffice.org distribution can download NeoLight as a stand-alone application.

NeoOffice releases are named for the OpenOffice releases they're based on. Since this isn't an official OpenOffice.org release but a project based on OO.o, NeoOffice releases tend to lag a little behind their official brethren, so NeoOffice 2.1 will correspond to OpenOffice.org 2.1, which has been out for a while. While that sometimes means not being on the cutting edge, the NeoOffice release cycle does have a couple of advantages for uses. The most important, of course, is that NeoOffice is a native app. A less obvious benefit is that by the time a Neooffice release is rolled out, it contains the first several rounds of bugfixes to the OO.o codebase.

For those of you who just can't wait, there is still a NeoOffice 2.0 version available for download, and an Early Release version of NeoOffice 2.1 is available to people willing to support the project with a donation of $25 or more.

I can't believe we haven't talked seriously about AbiWord here since version 2.0 more than 18 months ago. Shame on us. The 2.4.x releases (they're currently on 2.4.6) have seen major upgrades to nearly all the subsystems, and a host of new features including Open Document support, image handling enhancements, grammar checking, and equation editing, to name a few.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, AbiWord is a powerful, full-featured, cross-platform, open source word processor. It includes plug-in support for most document formats including Word, Open Document, Open Office Writer, Word Perfect, and even Claris Works, as well as an optional equation editor and LaTeX and DocBook support.

If this sounds a lot like OpenOffice.org Writer to you, you might be forgiven. But AbiWord's motto is "Word Processing for Everyone," and they mean it. Although plans for a full Office suite are in the offing, AbiWord is currently just a word processor and all their energy goes into getting that right. For those of you with older hardware or who are just concerned about performance, AbiWord offers efficient code and a small footprint: a complete XP install including the optional plugins takes up less than 30MB on disk and uses a correspondingly small chunk of RAM. And for you Mac users out there, AbiWord offers a native Aqua interface, so no more X-11 nonsense just to get your word processor running.

Edit: Thanks to C.K. for pointing out that AbiWord on OS x isn't a universal binary yet. It's fast and stable enough, though, that you peobably won't notice it's running in Rosetta. I didn't.