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One of the nice things about PulseAudio's design is that it allows you to combine large buffers for some tasks with very low latency for others.

PA configures the audio hardware to the largest playback buffer size possible, up to 2s. The sound card interrupts are disabled as far as possible (most of the time this means to simply lower NFRAGS to the minimal value supported by the hardware. It would be great if ALSA would allow us to disable sound card interrupts entirely). Then, PA constantly determines what the minimal latency requirement of all connected clients is. If no client specified any requirements we fill up the whole buffer all the time, i.e. have an actual latency of 2s. However, if some applications specified requirements, we take the lowest one and only use as much of the configured hardware buffer as this value allows us. In practice, this means we only partially fill the buffer each time we wake up. Then, we configure a system timer to wake us up 10ms before the buffer would run empty and fill it up again then. If the overall latency is configured to less than 10ms we wakeup after half the latency requested...

Full biography

Robert W. Moffat, Jr. is senior vice president and group executive, IBM Systems and Technology Group. Named to this position in July 2008, Mr. Moffat is responsible for all IBM hardware offerings as well as the microelectronics division, which translates IBM research and development into semiconductor solutions for IBM systems and OEM clients. In addition, the companys integrated supply chain operations, which include global manufacturing, procurement and customer fulfillment, report to him.

Mr. Moffat was senior vice president, Integrated Operations. In this cross-functional role created in July 2005, he led an initiative to transform and integrate the companys supply chain and service delivery operations globally, leveraging new business process designs and advanced technology to achieve greater levels of efficiency while improving IBM's market responsiveness.

Prior to that, Mr. Moffat was senior vice president and group executive of IBM's Personal and Printing Systems Group, where he was responsible for worldwide sales, development, manufacturing and marketing of Personal Computers, Printing Systems and Retail Store Solutions. Before that, he was vice president, finance and planning for the Enterprise Systems Group.

Mr. Moffat has held a number of executive positions at IBM, including general manager of manufacturing, fulfillment and procurement initiatives for the PC business. He led the team that pioneered the Advanced Fulfillment Initiative, and channel collaboration initiatives, which were awarded the 1999 Franz Edelman Award, the highest recognition for achievement in operational research and management sciences, and supply chain management.

His other positions at IBM, since joining in 1978, included assistant general manager, finance, planning, and business support for the IBM PC Company in Europe, and vice president of finance and planning.

Mr. Moffat is a member of the IBM Performance Team and the IBM Corporate Operations Team. He serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for The Manufacturing Institute, an educational and research affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers. He is also a non-voting observer on the Board of Directors of Lenovo Group Limited.

Mr. Moffat is a graduate of Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a B.S. degree in Economics. He also holds an MBA in Management Information Systems from Iona College in New Rochelle, New York.

July 2008

Before Madoff was arrested, a Google search for his name pointed to many pages at Yeshiva University, which he gave a lot of money to. If you clicked on the Google cache, there were glowing profiles about him. If you clicked on the actual pages, his name had been pulled out of all those pages almost as soon as he was arrested, because I was Googling all of this the day after he was arrested. It's still all probably on archive.org

Well, it depends, though. Some people attribute the success of Linux to GPL. (see here, 3rd or 4th question) Obviously, the success of F/OSS isn't entirely due to Linux, but I'd wager it's helped more than not.

Linux might have thrived just as much under a different license, but that's not what happened. But beyond speculation, can you really argue that one anti-copyright-lawyer-shark rock would have worked better than another?

also:

Later, a full-force Bear Patrol is on watch. Homer watches proudly.

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]

(http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F20.html)
:D

good on you for posting here, I know whenever I mention Im vegan on american websites, that I'll get "OMFG!!!!1111!! PETA KILLZ TEH ANIMAULS!!!111!".

I recently donated to No Agenda, was mentioned on episode 138, John C Dvorak said "I dont know why a "vay-gun" listens to this show"

(direct download of the clip http://www.archive.org/download/JayWontDartNoAgenda138MentionVegan/Na138NzVeganJayWontDartMention.m4a )

Its just something we need to change over time, by coming across as reasonable people, if possible, try and seem MORE reasonable than the person on the other side :) Eventually, other people being vegan will be quite accepted by the mainstream populace.

looks like we've almost reached that point now. We've had Xeon 3.0GHz cpus for over 5 years now, and they're still coming out with brand new 3ghz processors. That's a long time to not see a jump in speed, what happened to "doubling every 18 months"? We should be around 24ghz by now.

Sorry, Performance != Clockspeed

I, for one, am glad Intel went away from modeling their processors after their clockspeed. They went to an actual model for this reason. If you want an example where they didn't, and lower clock speed processors kept up just go back and look at the 423/427 Pentium 4's vs the Socket A Athlons (XP, ect)

"so in 80 years my computers processors wont be able to get any faster"

looks like we've almost reached that point now. We've had Xeon 3.0GHz cpus for over 5 years now, and they're still coming out with brand new 3ghz processors. That's a long time to not see a jump in speed, what happened to "doubling every 18 months"? We should be around 24ghz by now.

They may want to change this page then. This looks like a promise:

Data is always synchronized and backed up

Danger-powered devices are always connected to the Danger service. All user data is automatically and securely backed up over-the-air, and emails, photos, and organzier data are automatically synchronized with a Web-based application. All changes that are made on the device are instantly and automatically reflected on the user's computer, and vice versa.

And if you're wondering, yes, archive.org does have a backup copy of that page.

http://web.archive.org/web/19981206065639/http://drudgereport.com/

The deepest Roguelike ever. If you aren't sure why you might want to play it, start here.

Get the Linux 40d16 version from this page

If you prefer graphical tiles to (nearly) pure ASCII (I certainly do) get the Mike Mayday tileset from this page and use the instructions to get it working.

Then watch the 40 tutorial videos to ease the neigh vertical learning curve. You will of course supplement the videos with lots of careful reading of the wiki.

This game is a time vampire, but lots of fun if you have a little patience and an attention span.

Rapidshare has been around in its present form for at least 3 years, and AFAICT hasn't been sued yet by the xAA. Yes, it's a single point of failure, but take a look at any recent movie release which has been spread out to rapidshare: you'll notice the movie will be uploaded in chunks, mirrored to several different hosting providers.

Here's a good example of a recent movie. Notice the spreading of identical chunks to multiple hosts, and the availability of two direct links to .avi halves from megashares.com -- you could start watching right away with a halfway decent connection.

I actually like Rapidshare and cousins for movies much more than bittorrent: you're not forced to share, so you're not uploading to god-knows-whom, potentially including xAA bots. And some providers (megashares.com, megaftp.com) even let you download files up to 1GB for free, at full speed. Not a whole lot unlike Usenet, actually, if you think about it -- just replace your Usenet provider(s) with these free hosting providers.

Yes, Rapidshare could be subpoenaed and forced to reveal IPs of downloaders, but that would probably take weeks or months (assuming these hosting providers even keep logs -- some of them explicitly claim not to), and then your ISP would still have to be subpoenaed as well for the xAA to get your info, by which time the ISP may very well have purged its logs. Plus, the xAA is usually interested in uploaders only anyways. (You don't have to register for accounts to use rapidshare or its brethren. It could happen, but I've never heard of such a thing, and it's far more hassle for the xAA than simply going after IPs on bittorrent.

Monopoly in the antitrust sense just requires a certain market share, I think steam probably have that market share, OFC now they need to abuse it to get this prize

It started all with work of the Goons (Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe) and there was somewhat of an explosion of comedy in the years of the Cambridge Footlights [...]

I was skeptical about the idea that it all started with the Goons, but I was just listening to some of this earlier British radio comedy, and there isn't much there but light sitcom, it seems: Old Time Radio - 1940s.

(Of course, there is the inescapable Marx Brothers to contend with...)

I'll keep an ear out for the Cambridge footlights

(And yes, the radio version of the Hitchhiker's Guide is really good. Actually, that's the only version I'm really familiar with. Neither the book or the TV show had much appeal to me...)

Can't any amount of power move the ISS just at a slower rate?

Kind of. It has to boost altitude, on average, more than 200 meters per day, just to keep up. Over and above that, yes anything will do.

There is also a scheduling issue. Currently they burn chemical thrusters every month for a couple hours. That means no "microgravity environment" for less than 1% of the time. That is OK, 99% of the time is good enough for experiments, etc. Now, if the fancy new vasmir can only boost 400 meters per 24 hours of continuous operation, then just to keep up with atmospheric drag, it absolutely must run 1/2 of the time, meaning you only get that fancy microgravity environment for 1/2 of the time. Also with respect to maintenance and reliability, that means it has to be operational about half the time or better. And finally, a 1% of the time activity means direct astronaut operation/intervention is possible, but there is not the staffing to baby sit a low thrust engine literally half the time, so it has to be highly automated.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080213164432/http://pdlprod3.hosc.msfc.nasa.gov/D-aboutiss/D6.html

"Reboost mode is necessary because the Station's large cross-section and low altitude causes its orbit to decay due to atmospheric drag at an average rate of 0.2 km/day (0.1 n mi/day)."

Sorry for the reply to myself. If you have never read "I have no mouth, and I must scream", it is very applicable. It is a classic of the science fiction genre, and a well written dystopian story.

This is the only link I could find. I know I have seen it in others...
http://web.archive.org/web/20070227202043/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/ellison/ellison1.html

I don't believe it:

Dimension X

Neither do I believe that broadcasts of stories like The Veldt have entered the public domain, as alleged by archive.org.

Destination X looked to stories like First Contact, Destination Moon, A Pebble in the Sky. You can't fault these choices for a hard core sci-fi series.

But The Twilight Zone mined very different ground.

Archive.org is free and has multiple location backup. Of course, you have to be happy with them sharing it with the world indefinitely -but that just provides more backup.

Nor is the U.S. led and controlled by a radically conservative theocracy with a demonstrated intent to export insurrection with the stated goal of complete domination.

lol!

I recommend The Power of Nightmares. Not a perfect documentary, but award-winning, and with respect for objectivity.

This BBC documentary is a free download, and describes some of the political history behind characters dominant in Republican politics. Do not watch this documentary if you've got no stomach to look in the mirror and actually see your reflection.

Reminds me of a very similar worm that hit myspace years ago:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060208182348/namb.la/popular/tech.html

Same thing, find a way of executing javascript and then have it self-replicate by posting itself all over the site.

Here's what happened: http://web.archive.org/web/20041128152958/http://www.voltsamps.com/

Following the link from the May 10 Slashdot...

That was May 10 2003, so it might be more clear to say the article from over 6 years ago. Also, this article has links to the web.archive cache of the pages in question.

Thanks for pointing that out. I always knew that NT was born from David Cutler and VMS, but I never had any idea how closely they resembled each other internally, until I read this:

Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story Is NT really new technology?
http://web.archive.org/web/20020503172231/http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4494

Wow. I guess you could say that NT was like VMS 1.5 with a bunch of APIs thrown on top so it could run OS/2, Windows 3.x, and DOS applications.

VMS was known to be pretty bullet proof back in the day in regards to security. Whatever went so wrong on the Microsoft end?

They did it before TV too. Have you ever seen the 1936 movie Reefer Madness? You can download the movie at the Internet Archive as it's in the public domain.

"Hastily taken down"? It was up there for about seven years. It listed the Dolphin as a possible platform when it was first written up and the only change was swapping out "GameCube" then killing the platforms list completely. You can hardly accuse them of an elaborate campaign of deception.

Elite IV has a much better chance of being made than DNF ever did, because Frontier hasn't been working on it. That sounds stupid, but a developer that's shelved a project for ten years and works on other things isn't going to go bankrupt.

for improving the quality of new hardware. Nowadays it seems a bit flimsy, isn't it ?!?

http://www.archive.org/details/doa_1949

Have you ever heard a CD that you would confuse with a live performance? Me either. I have heard LPs played on high end equipment that you would confuse with a live performance.

Maybe you need to buy one of these Intelligent Chips?

The last part was clear already from your nick.

Women worth pursuing enjoy classic science fiction.

For those who missed the dot-com boom, read this: "In the outer lobby and decadent smoking lounge, the top sales guys from VA Linux flashed their nametags in an effort to secure some immediate female profit taking from one of the most impressive IPOs of recent weeks. Elsewhere the women of Snowball danced with wild abandon and Dexter from Scent.com tried to sell me a unit that would include smell in my daily internet experience. As I quietly exited the scene, I caught view of a woman in a long dress being pulled off of the dancing cage for the second time..."

(SF Girl wasn't making that stuff up. It was real. I went to some of those parties.)

A free trip to the latest Harry Potter movie (which isn't even very good compared to its predecessors) is lame in comparison.

Then again, Microsoft is profitable.

a multi-billion dollar behemoth that likes to crush competition

To be more exact, they tend to half-kill things and then eat them.

I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to comprehending licensing and related issues, but as far as I can tell Microsoft's biggest contribution to the Open Source / Free Software Movement has been the continued tendency to obscenely restrict and retard peoples' ability to use their computers and software as they see fit (I'm thinking primarily of 'premium content protection' in Vista onward), thus waking more and more people up to the alternatives (by motivating them to look elsewhere).

Here's a link to an audio podcast of the article (actually starts at 5:52): Cost Analysis of Vista Content Protection by Peter Gutmann.
And the source site (please don't try to download the PDFs, the useful info all appears to be on the HTML page and the site seems to be speed throttled): HERE.

Zombies.

And by the way, my knowledge of biology is not from Hollywood. It's from the Internet!

Agreed. BTW, you can download "The Century Of The Self here. Worth a look.

How long until Facebook simply removes any item with a @@ in it? Or builds in a regex to strip any non-alpha numeric characters from info boxes or posts? Or strips any erroneous or "spam" looking stuff from their site?

I agree with everyone else. If you don't want Facebook knowing all your dirty little secrets don't post your dirty laundry online. Once its online it will NEVER go away... Google Cache, The Wayback Machine and other caching services will leave a digital trail of your stink for ever. Long after that nasty rash goes away.

I bet I am not alone who wants to see the Newton's books on physics e-published again and searchable.

They have been

I believe that there was a study done that found something like 40-60% of all sales of children's stuff happened because of begging done by the children. The ad agencies even did studies on how to increase begging.
 
If you haven't seen it, the documentary The Corporation is very illuminating. It's rather leftist, but contains some very interesting information about how aggressively companies advertise to kids.

Courtesy of the Compaq support people - FAQ2859

It did--- Slashdot's had a discussion system since the beginning (or at least very close to it). Pre-account-system comments aren't archived, though, it seems. You originally just entered a name and a comment and posted it, the way most blog comment sections still work today. Impersonation of well-known users was getting too common, though, so they introduced an account system in mid-1998, requiring that you either post as Anonymous Coward, or register an account to post as anyone else. It seems that the old stories only archive comments made after that switch, so the pre-mid-1998 comment threads are mostly in the bitbucket, except to the extent that the Wayback Machine got them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uexMYBkfCic

See also a longer written history that goes back farther (to Plato):
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance"
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

However, redistributing wealth towards families with kids is still a good idea IMHO, or in more general, a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

So, I part company with Propertarian-libertarians on that (many of whom would just eliminate schools as well as the wealth redistribution aspects, leaving families with children with no formal social support in an industrialized society now in the midst of "The Two Income Trap").
    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap

The makers of that video:
    http://www.freedomofeducation.net/

The more general issue:
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
   

I'm shocked by the amount of ignorance in the comments here about schooling and the reason for alternatives. I can only think the "Stockholm Syndrome" is in play. With that said, I did not understand these issue when I was in school, either, and I resisted accepting them even when they were pointed out once or twice back then.

Some links:

"John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ

http://www.school-survival.net/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/freeschool.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/faqabouthomescho.html

My writings:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy
Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early
Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by
other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early
Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the
anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores
began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young
children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They
presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency,
nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education
classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier
enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that
orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent,
with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were mentally
retarded teenagers - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced
children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical
western children, by western standards of measurement.[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made
at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results
that were cut short by enro

"It should be apparent that quotas have been scrapped as they cannot actually guarantee you can use the bandwidth speed they sold."

Not only that, but they've been offering "unlimited" bandwidth for at least 10 years, why is this news now? Quick google search reveals hundreds of sites offering "unlimited bandwidth". There's even a website from 2003 that explains what "unlimited bandwidth" really means, which is basically it's unlimited until we notice you and decide to cancel service because our TOS allows us the right to refuse service for any reason.

This sounds more like a press release. I've always stayed away from the "unlimited bandwidth" hosts because it's fake: "If hosting companies truly offered UNLIMITED bandwidth and hard disk space, why wouldn't Google just say, "You know what? Why have our own hosting data centers when we can get UNLIMITED bandwidth and hard disk space for $4.95 a month? We can't lose." It's really a very silly concept."

Ok, i'll find one with two buttons, then:

Metacrawler in 1996.

They even provide links, and the two buttons "Comprehensive Search" and "Fast Search"

Are reminiscent of Google's "normal search" and "I'm feeling lucky" mode.

I sometimes wonder if TV producer Bellisarius got the name "Quantum Leap" from Quantum Link. They certainly have the same "tone" to them.

As for charges, I was able to avoid them for the most post. There were plenty of free forums to chat with other people, and since it was nationwide the quality of the conversations was better than the local BBSes. The other stuff like games/newspapers didn't interest me, but it made sense you would have to pay for that content, just like we pay for it today (via advertisements).

BTW you can try Quantum Link yourself, and "feel" what it was like in the late 1980s, by going to this link. It takes maybe 15 minutes to setup the required software, and then you can start chatting with other people:

http://www.quantumlink.tk/
http://web.archive.org/web/20071206123549/http://quantumlink.tk/index.html

Funnily enough, the very first thing I thought of when I read the headline was "webcrawler"! I did remember it being centered, though, ...
and sure enough, a few months later than the version you posted...

http://web.archive.org/web/19961219104127/http://webcrawler.com/

Very "googlesque", I'd say.

http://web.archive.org/web/19971210060408/http://altavista.digital.com/

Exactly. They were the first ones to actually design an intuitive search interface. All of the other "intuitive" search interfaces afterwards were heavily based on this concept (remember when Yahoo attempted the same thing?)

This actually deserves some IP protection.

Could you elaborate on what you see as the major intuitive differences between Googles interface and what AltaVista had as the leading search engine for many years before them: http://web.archive.org/web/19971222163629/altavista.digital.com/? (remember this is very early web design time, Google didn't look so hot either)

Exactly. They were the first ones to actually design an intuitive search interface. All of the other "intuitive" search interfaces afterwards were heavily based on this concept (remember when Yahoo attempted the same thing?)

This actually deserves some IP protection.

Could you elaborate on what you see as the major intuitive differences between Googles interface and what AltaVista had as the leading search engine for many years before them: http://web.archive.org/web/19971222163629/altavista.digital.com/? (remember this is very early web design time, Google didn't look so hot either)

I'm sorry, in advance, for ranting and raving, but this is absolute lunacy. A web page design is copyright protected at best. What makes the central search box and a couple of buttons and nearby links a unique business process? Google's structure of algorithims, cache servers, and distributed search processing are (IMO) a patentable business process. In fact, I'd argue that there's an abundance of prior art out there against this patent. Does anyone remember the early Webcrawler page? It might not have been centered (but that's just formatting), but it had a very basic search box, a search button, and a list of category links below (from October 1996: http://web.archive.org/web/19961023234707/http://www.webcrawler.com/).

Google might have a relaxed and hip work environment, but some people in their legal and/or IP departments must be (IMO) taking some really bad trips. This is downright stupidity that does nothing to help promote meaningful patent reform unless Google uses this patent as an example of the type of schlock that is getting approved, and makes it the 'poster boy' for patent reform.

http://web.archive.org/web/19960512212113/http://www.infoseek.com/

What a load of bullsh*t! The patent office is completely incompetent. There is prior art. AltaVista for one http://web.archive.org/web/19961022174810/http://www.altavista.com/

You call that trying? I can tell you now the qualificatioons in the climate and earth sciences on that list dwarf those on the IPCC list. Including the IPCC authors who wrote dissenting opinions that were never published but they still got listed as authors on the report. that is of course until they threatened to sue the IPCC. but, I guess you wouldn't respect their opinions would you?

I certainly don't respect your opinion, especially if you think a bunch of Electrical Engineers, Computer Scientists, and Veterinary Doctors are qualified to comment on climate models.

Here's a quick list of the consensus on man-made climate change and here is another showing that the petition project is bunk.