Topic: Freely available and legal software.

[Bonk]

The easiest processor to programme in Assembler, for an novice, is the 68000. The 80x86 is quite awkward due to its lack of registers, which was the main reason that 1980's amd 1990's Macintoshs were always superiour to the PC, as the PC had the inferiour processor.

That is consistent with my experience, that is where I started, assembler on the Apple II GS in high school in the late eighties. That's what they taught us. Never really did anything with it since as in the next two years the IBM ATs and XTs were what we used in the chemistry department at my university and oddly mostly as terminals on a VAX/VMS system. It was good to have that foundation of understanding from high school though. I've only programmed as a tool in my work and as a hobby for play so never got very advanced with any one tool but have experience with a wide variety of computing and automation systems.

Currently I'm switching my NSIS BASS.dll includes to a plugin written in C, as NSIS's scripting language could not comprehend floats or dwords or structs.. and was limiting my progress, so instead of writing bin/math libraries for NSIS I just moved to C. Once I finish moving it to C, I'm thinking of doing it in MASM just for the exercise and to compare the results (there is an example MASM include for NSIS plugins in the NSIS source).

[Panzergranate]

I always found that the lack of registers on the original 8 bit PC's 8088, the XT's 8086 and subsequent 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486, etc. infuriatinng.

It takes a lot of clever memory shunting and stacking to overcome the problem.... which leads to slower running software.

By comaprison, the Z80 had more than 3 times the instruction set of the 8088 and twice the registers to play with.

My XT had the Intel 80386 card fitted, which I still have.

Also only the AX / EAX register can contain the result of an ALU operation, port call,etc. where as the 68000 can use the D0 to D7 for the same operations.

I must admit that the dual core and quad core Intel processors are welcome. For those who don't do Assembler or Machine Code I'll explain....

On a normal processor any call to a subroutine results in having to stack the contents of the ALU otherwise it will be lost. Also some other registers,which might be holding binary data essential to your programme will also have to be stacked as calling BIOS (Built In Operating System) routines will corupt certain registers asit will use them.

In a dual core and quad core processor, there is a second ALU (dual core) and multiple ALUs (quad core) which activate and handle subroutines (branch instructions in Machine Code jargon).

On a quad core itis possibleto call a subroutine from a subroutine from a subroutine, which is a serious no no taught in coleges and universities all over the planet.

This is why the quad core is ever so special.... it has four ALU, the normal ALU plus three for handling subroutines, subsubroutines oand subsubsubroutines.

[Bonk]

Came across a free music software site not on out list. Looks pretty good:

http://freemusicsoftware.org/

[Bonk]

Handy utility I came across today, beats building mkisofs under cygwin yourself:

Folder2Iso just creates an iso from any kind of folder

http://www.trustfm.net/divx/SoftwareFolder2Iso.php

EDIT:
Well, it makes ISOs alright, but lacks much of the functionality of mkisofs. (in particular making boot images) I located Win32 Binaries for cdrtools here:
http://www.student.tugraz.at/thomas.plank/index_en.html
Go for the "Win32-Binaries (latest stable)" cdrtools package.
(which contains mkisofs)

[Javora]

I found this program today called DVD43.  Similar to AnyDVD except DVD43 is free.  Haven't tried it yet but here it is:  http://www.dvd43.com/

[Bonk]

Some more good stuff not on our master list yet:

Unlocker
(a handy tool to release unwanted file or folder locks, use with care.)


ImageMagick

ImageMagick® is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

The functionality of ImageMagick is typically utilized from the command line or you can use the features from programs written in your favorite programming language. Choose from these interfaces: G2F (Ada), MagickCore (C), MagickWand (C), ChMagick (Ch), ImageMagickObject (COM+), Magick++ (C++), JMagick (Java), L-Magick (Lisp), NMagick (Neko/haXe), MagickNet (.NET), PascalMagick (Pascal), PerlMagick (Perl), MagickWand for PHP (PHP), IMagick (PHP), PythonMagick (Python), RMagick (Ruby), or TclMagick (Tcl/TK). With a language interface, use ImageMagick to modify or create images dynamically and automagically.

ImageMagick is free software delivered as a ready-to-run binary distribution or as source code that you may freely use, copy, modify, and distribute. Its license is compatible with the GPL. It runs on all major operating systems.

GhostScript  (check out the company name: Artifex Software, Inc)

Ghostscript, an interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF, and related software and documentation.

Ghostscript is an interpreter for the PostScript (TM) language. A PostScript interpreter usually takes as input a set of graphics commands. The output is usually a page bitmap which is then sent to an output device such as a printer or display. PostScript is embedded in many printers.

(if you don't see a windows build for the latest release just check the previous release)


Clamwin

ClamWin is a Free Antivirus program for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003 and Vista.
ClamWin Free Antivirus comes with an easy installer and open source code. You may download and use it absolutely free of charge. It features:
    * High detection rates for viruses and spyware;
    * Scanning Scheduler;
    * Automatic downloads of regularly updated Virus Database.
    * Standalone virus scanner and right-click menu integration to Microsoft Windows Explorer;
    * Addin to Microsoft Outlook to remove virus-infected attachments automatically.

ClamAV Antivirus Native Win32 Port

Unofficial native port of the well known ClamAV Antivirus, this port is used in ClamWin Antivirus

EDIT: and the "official":
ClamAV for Windows

From here you can download a version of ClamAV for Windows. Previously only available for UNIX-like systems, the release of  ClamAV on the Windows platform marks a breakthrough in AV technology for Windows. This version is native, that is it was built using Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 and requires no emulation layer such as Cygwin.

...

Please note that ClamAV is NOT a desktop AV system, it is aimed to the server market.

KpyM Telnet/SSH Server

KpyM Telnet/SSH Server ( KTS ) is a free, open source telnet/ssh server for Windows NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista. It provides access to the host computer via the telnet or ssh protocol. Supports command line applications (dir, ftp, etc.) and full color console graphic applications (edit.com, tetris.exe, etc.). KTS accepts connection from any telnet/ssh client running on any OS.

PuTTY

PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.

[NuclearWessels]

FlashDevelop is a decent open source flash editor

GIT is an open source version control system  started by ol' Linus Torvalds

dave

[NuclearWessels]

The easiest processor to programme in Assembler, for an novice, is the 68000. The 80x86 is quite awkward due to its lack of registers, which was the main reason that 1980's amd 1990's Macintoshs were always superiour to the PC, as the PC had the inferiour processor.

Damn that brings back some memories!  My first teaching job, back around '92 or so, was teaching 680x0 for engineering students.

dave

[Panzergranate]

If anyone wants to learn to programme in the mistic art of assembly language, the 680x0 series of processors is the most user friendly to learn the art on.

There are quite a few tricks that a 680x0 processor can do that a 80x86 processor can't do which makes the user's life a lot easier writing code.

It is not a good idea to learn on a RISC based processor for a beginner as programming these can be very, very tedious in some cases if one wants to do something "clever" in coding up.

If you really want to be confused,try "register lipping" on the Z80 and Z8000 processors.

[Bonk]

I found a Windows SSH client that works better for me than PuTTY.

UTF-8 TeraTerm Pro with TTSSH2

UTF-8 TeraTerm Pro with TTSSH2 is TeraTerm 2.3 succession version and is being officially recognized by the original author. TeraTerm is open source free software terminal emulator supporting SSH2 and UTF-8 protocol.

It seems much more responsive overall.

[Nemesis]

FOG is a free open-source ghost-like imaging solution/rescue suite.

G4L is a hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tool.
This is a bootable CD with FOG based on Linux.  G4L = Ghost for Linux

g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs
This is a bootable CD with FOG based on BSD Unix.  G4U = Ghost for Unix

[Czar Mohab]

Last time I tried to post into this it didn't go so well... so, I'll try again:

CCleaner

Summary:
CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is a freeware system optimization tool. That removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space. The best part is that it's fast! (normally taking less that a second to run) and Free.

There was going to be another one, but apparently I might have downloaded my version while it was still "donations are nice, but program's free"... not free anymore, it seems

But CCleaner's free, and I didn't see it on your list.

Czar "Haven't tried it yet, but was highly recommended by coworker," Mohab.

[/color]

[Nemesis]

Gnash is the GNU Flash movie player

Gnash is a free SWF movie player. It is available as a stand-alone application or as a plugin for several popular web browsers. It supports playing media from a disk or streaming over a network connection. Some popular video sharing sites like YouTube are supported on a wide variety of devices from embedded ones to modern desktops.

[NJAntman]

Here is one for the graphics list: Daz Studio

http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/software/studio/-/?&_m=d

Its a 3d model manipulation program geared toward creating pics as the end product. Fairly easy to use and lots of user created support and materials. Had my 10 year old niece creating here own content of fighting dragons in less than an hour.

[Nemesis]

FlightGear is an open-source flight simulator.

The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.

[Nemesis]

Some of you may remember a program called Lotus Symphony.  The program is long gone but IBM has released a new (free) version derived from Open Office 1.x.

Link to site

I haven't read the license yet or downloaded it myself but I understand that it is closed source.  Windows and Linux only but localized in a significant number of languages.

[Nemesis]

NetRacer

Overview:

NetRacer is a simple racing game written to demonstrate the potential of multiplayer games over the Internet with the Commodore 64.  It builds on our earlier two-player effort Artillery Duel with realtime gameplay and the addition of a server.

The game was unveiled at the Cincinnati Commodore Computer Club Expo 2008.  Check out the Powerpoint presentation about the project and pictures of the event and setup.

I never was a C64 user but since there are some around I thought this might be of some interest. 

[Bonk]

Speaking of which, I'm not sure if this one is on our list:

CCS64

CCS64 is a Commodore 64 Emulator for PC and also in the future other platforms.

I've been using it to play Paradroid. 

[Bonk]

Microsoft has acquired Caligari and is now offering trueSpace for free download (must register though). 

trueSpace

trueSpace7.6 is a fully-featured 3D authoring package that will let you model, texture, light, animate and render 3D content. As well as traditional images and movies, you can also make 3D content for online shared spaces, and for Virtual Earth.

(Thanks Cyberkada and toasty0!)

[Nemesis]

I saw toastyo's post myself and was going to add it in.  You beat me to it.   

Going through his links I found that Google has a product that is in the same field though I lack the knowledge, skill and artistic talent  to evaluate it

Google SketchUp

Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create, modify and share 3D models. It's easier to learn than other 3D modeling programs, which is why so many people are already using it.

We designed SketchUp's simplified toolset, guided drawing system and clean look-and-feel to help you concentrate on two things: getting your work done as efficiently as possible, and having fun while you're doing it.

Windows 2000 and XP
Windows Vista
Mac OS X
Note:

    * A Linux version of Google SketchUp isn't available at this time.
    * Google SketchUp will run on multiple-processor machines; however, Google SketchUp will only use one processor. Google SketchUp doesn't support hyperthreading or multithreading at this time.

If not for toastyo's post I would not have found this one.

There is a non free Pro version apparently educators have an option to get it free.