In this thread, one of many on the DonationCoder forum where we are all screaming about the harm that lazy antivirus companies are doing with their false positives, I suggested that maybe we need to do something productive to encourage these companies to be more responsible about the alerts they show.

So today I want to begin that process by asking for your help in coming up with a short and clear list of requirements that would be worthy of our recognition for a new antivirus/anti-malware standard that is focused not on the number of virus detections, but on how users are told about alerts which may be false positives, and how well they deal with false positives.

Once we've got something I'd like to make an official web page about this, and then try to contact the antivirus companies and maybe get some other websites that want to join us in this movement.  And hopefully one day in the near future we will be able to give this award out to a company and lavish them with praise, recommendations, reviews, etc.

Let me start out with my first draft of requirements for what i'll call the DonationCoder "Superior Antivirus" Award/Certification:

When a suspected malware is found, the user must be presented with a dialog that clearly describes:

• The complete file path of the suspected file.
• A description of the suspected malware (not just some cryptic name), with an easy link to search the web for more info about this virus and the file found.
• A clear indication of the date that the antivirus signature matching the file was added, with a clear statement about the possibility that this may be a false positive, and telling the user some information about the confidence that the file is indeed a real malware vs a false positive.  this should be a statement like "this is a generic rule of thumb pattern that was recently added, so the chance that this is in fact a false alarm and not a virus is quite high."
• In the alert there should be a url to take the person to the antivirus company's forum where they can talk to others about whether the problem is real or not.
• The user must be given an opportunity to not delete the file.
• The user must be given an alternative to go to a page where they can report a suspected false positive
• The user must be given the alternative to upload the file to an online site like virustotal for a second opinion.

Thoughts? What am i missing? Anything here that is asking too much?

N.A.N.Y. stands for "New Apps for the New Year", and is an event where we try to get all the coders who hang out at DonationCoder.com to release a brand new FREEWARE/DONATIONWARE application to celebrate the coming of the new year. The NANY event is a celebration of software - it's not a competition and there is no winner. 

Who can believe that the 2009 Challenge was 12 months ago already? It only seems like yesterday we were celebrating the enormous success of NANY 2009... and now it's time to get down and make NANY 2010 an even bigger success!

The Challenge

• Pledge that you are participating well before the New Year (you shouldn't just wait until Dec 31 to reveal whether you decided to participate or not); DECEMBER 11 is our goal to have the pledges.
• Release the application on or before 31^st December 2009.
• Any type of application can be included: Windows, Linux, Mac, Web, iPhone, Android, Script, Plugin, etc., but it needs to be a new program that hasn't been released publicly before November 2009 (updates to existing programs don't qualify unless they are complete rewrites).
• You don't have to be affiliated with DonationCoder.com - you still get to announce it as part of the N.A.N.Y. Challenge: you keep all the rights to your software, this is just an event to encourage coders to release new free tools.

According to Google, I was a woman from 1997-2003. Wired magazine posts a guide on how to decouple yourself from Google.

http://howto.wired.c...i/Un-Google_Yourself

I fret about the business models i see succeeding on the internet.  The internet was supposed to let the masses compete with the big guys.. But when I look around it seems to me like just another example where the super giants are getting rich and everyone else is scrambling to get some attention without the slightest intention of coming up with a business model for profitability, and instead is just hoping to get enough press to get them a ticket to the lottery of being bought out by one of the big guys.

There has to be a better, more widely applicable model for open source developers to survive financially..

..To Ms. Kroes’s point, there is an open-source alternative, and usually a pretty good one, to just about every major commercial software product. In the last decade, these open-source wares have put tremendous pricing pressure on their proprietary rivals. Governments and corporations have welcomed this competition... Whether open-source firms are practical as long-term businesses, however, is a much murkier question... in the last decade, open-source software has become more of a corporate affair than a people’s revolution... The larger technology companies have tended to buy these one-trick ponies for strategic purposes.

http://www.nytimes.c...?_r=2&ref=technology

This has been driving me nuts.
I need a text editor that can do filtering of lines in view like dopus. If you have ever used dopus you know that you can filter the visible files by typing wildcard masks (e.g. *txt) ...etc

What I want is something similar but for lines in text files, using regex/wildcards/characters. Almost all editors (ultraedit, pspedit, notepad++) have this feature in find and replace, with ability to list output in separate window ...etc but none do it in place. 

This is basically useful for when i need to find certain types of lines in files and edit them. Visually narrowing the file from a bunch of lines to just a few entities that I'm interested in quickly to edit is very appealing and necessary!
Especially for log files, xml files ...etc.

The key difference is I want to have it in-place (i.e. in the editor window itself). The editor can collapse the other lines or hide them from view in another way, I don't care.
Similar to incremental search, but this is incremental filtering.
Similar to Find all, but this is in editor view
 

Does anybody know of  any text editor that can do this? I bet emacs can but I don't know how, I wouldn't mind using that as my default text editor if it did this!

/edit: an editor, not a viewer, I know grep and other viewers exist for filtering lines.

Its that time of the year and Martin at ghacks is going to have lots of sure to be useful giveaways.

Announcement a few days ago http://www.ghacks.ne...veaway-announcement/

I’m proud to announce that we will run another Christmas giveaway this year which will be even bigger than the last one. Not only because of the additional licenses and new software that we were able to get for you but also because of the participation of a partner site of Ghacks in the giveaway
...
The total price money of the giveaway is well over $20K.