Slashdot Mirror

I'd say that there were some directories, bridging the gap between word of mouth knowledge of domain names and search engines capable of indexing the entire WWW. Yahoo, for instance, was more useful when it was more useful in its early days than the search engines of the time, because it included a hierarchical directory of websites. I'm sure you had something different in mind, but similar nonetheless. It was the explosion in websites that made it untenable to maintain such a directory, though, and that's why Google was so perfectly timed.

Massive's agreement with Blizzard positions the firm as the sole advertising provider for Battle.net, the online Blizzard-only gaming service due for a significant relaunch upon the release of next year's StarCraft II.

I wonder what will be advertised in StarCraft. Maybe interstitial ads during loading.

One of my back-burner ideas is to write a video player that inserts ads whenever the stream isn't keeping up. Recognize breaks in the video, and buffer ahead until you have enough video locally to play to the next break. During idle periods, download ads. Whenever the player doesn't have the main stream buffered out to the next break, play ads until the stream catches up. "And now, a word from our sponsor".

I'm tempted to put this into VideoLan as a joke, and have it run 1950s drive in movie ads.

Also, I've seen this picture before. Two questions: one, is it real. Two: please tell me the steering wheel is to avoid computer crashes.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a "home computer" might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn't, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype "home computer." The picture is actually an entry submitted to a Fark.com image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on the U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo)

Mac address whitelists are a waste of time. Anyone who is competent can just monitor your network long enough to discover the mac address of a trusted device and switch his device to that address. Anyone who isn't competent isn't going to be able to bypass WPA.

If you want to get really paranoid you can back up your encryption with a non-permissive firewall that will only pass traffic for your device after you authenticate with it somehow. I used to do this back in the days when WEP was our only option. I ran my network wide open (since WEP is utterly pointless) but had a Linux box setting in front of it that refused to pass traffic unless I authenticated with it.

If you want to get creative you can program the firewall to redirect all unauthenticated http requests to goatse.cx instead of dropping them. That'll teach em to try and mooch off your network without permission ;)

It is already there:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071211102442/http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/Paperbak.zip

http://web.archive.org/web/19990429131245/http://www.aolsucks.org/hacked.html
Someone gave total.snafu.org primary dns for this domain.
He set the Admin contact as his own name/location.
Was fun having the ability to slashdot a site before slashdot existed.
The owner of the AOLSucks.org called my isp where I worked asking "what are you doing?!?! redirecting heavensgate.com to us?!?!"
Two weeks of email made for quite a collection of the stuff folks were spamming to postmaster@heavensgate.com.
Finally got internic to put it back.
All with a simple forged email. I think he changed .pinerc to just list his return email as postmaster@heavensgate.com
and they did not have a pgp setup.
Oh well those were the days...
Still have the irc logs of the whole event unfolding on freenode #linpeople/#natter.
 

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2005.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2006.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2007.

You agree that Google may access or disclose your personal information, including the content of your communications, if Google is required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Service and the general Google Privacy Policy.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2008.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2005.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2006.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2007.

You agree that Google may access or disclose your personal information, including the content of your communications, if Google is required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Service and the general Google Privacy Policy.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2008.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2005.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2006.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2007.

You agree that Google may access or disclose your personal information, including the content of your communications, if Google is required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Service and the general Google Privacy Policy.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2008.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2005.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2006.

Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2007.

You agree that Google may access or disclose your personal information, including the content of your communications, if Google is required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Service and the general Google Privacy Policy.

From the Blogger.com terms of service from January 2008.

i4i is not a patent troll, since they have a product called x4o since at least 2003: http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm.

Here is an archive from the same page in February 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20030207000848/http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm

It seems their technology began in 1998:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981206121641/http://www.i4i.com/

Extract:
S4 Toolkit for Microsoft Word!
A Head Start for your XML/SGML Development Team
Schedule a NetMeeting Demo Today!

Their first released product dates from 1999.
You can check the whole history here: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.i4i.com

i4i is not a patent troll, since they have a product called x4o since at least 2003: http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm.

Here is an archive from the same page in February 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20030207000848/http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm

It seems their technology began in 1998:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981206121641/http://www.i4i.com/

Extract:
S4 Toolkit for Microsoft Word!
A Head Start for your XML/SGML Development Team
Schedule a NetMeeting Demo Today!

Their first released product dates from 1999.
You can check the whole history here: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.i4i.com

i4i is not a patent troll, since they have a product called x4o since at least 2003: http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm.

Here is an archive from the same page in February 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20030207000848/http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm

It seems their technology began in 1998:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981206121641/http://www.i4i.com/

Extract:
S4 Toolkit for Microsoft Word!
A Head Start for your XML/SGML Development Team
Schedule a NetMeeting Demo Today!

Their first released product dates from 1999.
You can check the whole history here: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.i4i.com

It's not like they're providing diffs.

A propos diffs: it's interesting to note that PayPal also blocked the Wayback Machine via robots.txt, so it's not possible to go back and do a diff on their TOS, to see how they evolved over time.

Well how about the fact that the company is in Canada and the lawsuit is taking place in Texas. You gotta be kidding, you seriously think this is legit? This company is a parasite. Even its "product" is just some crapware which plugs into word and it's suspect that there is even a product, it looks like they made that page simply for the court case.

If they just made the page simply for the court case, they've been planning it for over 6 years... http://web.archive.org/web/20030207000848/http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm.

I don't really think they have a case, but a patent troll they are not.

They use customized Linux ([archived page with details]) and don't even bother to provide the source with each copy.

What's worse, they change copyright notices of existing programs to their employees and do not include GPL license text in their "distribution".

Is it a GPL violation? They don't distribute MSVS outside of MoD and its numerous branches (state companies) - you can't neither buy nor download the system. Is it Ok to do the aforementioned things then?

As a side-note.. wtf is with changing the name to "SyFy"?

Usually it is quoted as "SciFi", but in fairness, few television series, much less motion pictures do anything resembling "science" in these "futuristic dramas".

When what is seen bears so little resemblance to the writings of Hugo Gernsback, E. E. "Doc" Smith, and Lester Del Ray (much less folks like Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke), you can hardly call it science fiction.

Point being, SyFy seems to be just about appropriate in terms of the spelling in comparison to real science fiction.

BTW, if you want to see what some folks could do with some real hard core science fiction, check out the radio dramas of X-minus-one that includes dramatizations of some of the classic science fiction authors. If only something that good made it to television. Star Trek, on very rare occasions, can get this good (on a "best of" episode).

http://web.archive.org/web/20070227202043/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/ellison/ellison1.html

found for you here

I'd just like to point everyone to The Les Paul Show, available for free download on archive.org. Early stuff, just him, Mary Ford, and a drummer, and lots of showing off with overdubbing. Pretty good quality for such an old recording too. Give it a listen, hear the master at work.

I've had a Core 2 Duo E4300 running at 3.0 ghz for almost three years now and I haven't found a reason to upgrade. Friends with quad core report no increase in speed or performance, and the only thing that would encourage me to upgrade is a more smp friendly OS but the offerings from Microsoft (Vista and Windows 7) have been pretty poor lately.

So are we done with the mhz battle? Is ~3ghz the breaking point? We've had Xeon 3.0GHz cpus for over 5 years now. 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.

Just remember Ray Kurzweil's argument: once a machine can achieve a human level of intelligence â" it can also exceed it.

Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant computer scientist and brought us many improvements -- maybe even the invention of -- the electronic musical keyboard.

But that is not his argument. I laughed when I read that as the concept was presented to me in sci-fi novels before Kurzweil's time. The earliest I (or Wikipedia) can trace the intelligence explosion theory back to is Irving John Good who, in 1965, said:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

This was popularized by Vernor Vinge which is where I recalled reading about it. There are many reasons to celebrate Raymond Kurzweil. In my opinion, his is "work" in nutrition and his near-religion called futurology are not in those reasons. He has become a vocal proponent of a dream to become god-like. I do not share that dream and I wish him the best of luck in his endeavors. I just cringe every time I read of the "singularity being near" or the ability to live forever coming about. If it's going to happen, just sit back and let it happen. I feel he has done a great disservice to the field of artificial intelligence by promising unrealistic things in interviews to the lay person. Disappointment is a sure fire way to get yourself branded as a snake oil salesman religious nut.

Predictions for the future are for sci-fi books and movies, don't get into the habit of being a scientist in an interview with a reputable magazine or web site telling them what is about to happen. Example:

Kurzweil projects that between now and 2050 technology will become so advanced that medical advances will allow people to radically extend their lifespans while preserving and even improving quality of life as they age. The aging process could at first be slowed, then halted, and then reversed as newer and better medical technologies became available. Kurzweil argues that much of this will be a fruit of advances in medical nanotechnology, which will allow microscopic machines to travel through one's body and repair all types of damage at the cellular level.

And that's easily criticized:

Biologist P.Z. Myers has criticized Kurzweil's predictions as being based on "New Age spiritualism" rather than science and says that Kurzweil does not understand basic biology. Myers also claims that Kurzweil picks and chooses events that appear to demonstrate his claim of exponential technological increase leading up to a singularity, and ignores events that do not.

The links do not matter whether they are conservative or not. And you are an idiot if you think Al Qeada is the only terrorist group out there. I didn't say Al Qeada and Al Qeada not being included is not a disqualifies. Support for terrorist or terrorism is just that regardless of what name the terrorist take. If you are willing to ignore information because it didn't come from your favorite source, then will will always remain ignorant. If you are willing to supplant what was said with your own ideology leaning, you will remain stupid.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070605111535/http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/13jul20041400/www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/sec12.pdf Read the next two pages.

You can also find information at wikipedia which is cited by looking for Abu Musab al Zarqawi who did have links to Al Qeada before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was also offered and received safe haven while recuperating from injuries received in Afghanistan.

Hamas pays its bombers' survivors a permanent pension of $300 to $600 a month in addition to bankrolling the family's health care and the education of the bomber's children. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein also funds a one-time $20,000 payment for the families--increased from $10,000 about six months ago in a show of solidarity.

From the article:

Microsoft for the first time has named Linux distributors Red Hat and Canonical as competitors to its Windows client business in its annual filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Yeah, there are lots of pointless legal disclaimers in 10-K filings to cover respective companies' own asses.

It's not the first time that Microsoft has acknowledged Linux as a threat to their business model. It might be the first time they have put it in their 10-K report, but I don't consider legal disclaimers in an annual SEC filing to be newsworthy.

Has anyone read the Red Hat, Inc. 10-K report. Anyone take the time to count the number of competitors, listed by name, in there? Now ask yourself, is that newsworthy?

They didn't surrender, so the second one was deemed needed.

Have you ever seen the American casualty count just to take Iwo Jima and Okinawa?

Iwo Jima: 23, 573 Okinawa: 50, 000

Now extrapolate that to an invasion of Japan and you'll see why the US army is still using Purple Heart medals it minted for the planned invasion of Japan. They expected close to 500, 000 casualties to invade Japan and possibly more. Some planners expected it to be be between 1M - 4M American casualties.

Fact is though it was Russia's declaration of war that brought Japan to it's knees. Russian forces combined with American forces would eventually, but not easily, conquer Japan.

Citation needed. I say that because it appears the parent post has ignored the United States Army Air Forces' own Strategic Bombing Survey, which produced a report that stated, among other things, the following (boldface emphasis mine):

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion (of Japan) had been planned or contemplated.

Further, it is clear that leaders in the US had signs of this before the Strategic Bombing Survey was completed. Japanese codes had been cracked, and messages were being intercepted. The Allies knew that the Japanese ambassador in Moscow had been ordered to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had been talking about surrendering a year before that, and the Emperor himself had started suggesting in June of 1945 that alternatives to fighting to the end should be considered.

Since the parent post claims it was Russia entering the war that "brought Japan to its knees," I can't forget to mention the following interesting fact: the Russians had agreed to declare war on Japan 90 days after the end of the European war. The actual date of the end of the European war meant that the Russians were due to declare war on Japan on the 8th of August of 1945.

Oopsie! Damn facts get in the way of a good justifyin'!

Dilbert way:
http://web.archive.org/web/20011027002011/http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2001182781025.gif

no the true random number is 9

But, if you follow the footnotes (e.g., http://web.archive.org/web/20080213072335/http://www.losethetrainingwheels.org/default.aspx?Lev=2&ID=34 ) you will see that experiments have shown how insignificant those forces are.

Have customers just select a password for each account. Retailers would verify the password the same way they verify CSC numbers now,

Visa and Mastercard have already implemented this option. The only problem is the store has to be capable of handling it, and not all of them are, unfortunately.

https://usa.visa.com/personal/security/vbv/index.html?ep=v_sym_verified
http://www.mastercard.com/us/personal/en/cardholderservices/securecode/index.html

The account number is simply placed on the card, and authentication comes from physical ownership of the card. (PINs don't count because they are unfortunately verified based on machine-readable information on the card itself.)

This is wrong. PINs haven't been stored on the card for a long time (I'm not even certain they ever were for all cards). You can easily check this yourself with a relatively cheap reader, or you can build one yourself.

And just to help you all to do so:

Magnatune.com
Jamendo.com
LegalTorrents.com
Archive.org

If anyone has any other link, feel free to post them as well.

Aftermath very well explained in RULES OF THE GAME (a quick read)
http://web.archive.org/web/20060221022525/http://www.liddyshow.us/mustread11.php
by G. Gordon Liddy, as well as in ONE SECOND AFTER by William Forstchen
http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/0765317583/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248755961&sr=8-1

Yeah, they did.

So why the mod up to +5 with no working link to support the assertion?

Why the Fastest Chip Didn't Win" (Business Week, April 28, 1997) states that when Digital engineers noticed the similarities between VMS and NT, they brought their observations to senior management. Rather than suing, Digital cut a deal with Microsoft. In the summer of 1995, Digital announced Affinity for OpenVMS, a program that required Microsoft to help train Digital NT technicians, help promote NT and Open-VMS as two pieces of a three-tiered client/server networking solution, and promise to maintain NT support for the Alpha processor. Microsoft also paid Digital between 65 million and 100 million dollars.

Interestingly, throughout the 1990s, Digital introduced many NT features to VMS, and Microsoft has added VMS developments to NT. For example, VMS featured native clustering support in 1984, and 64-bit memory and system APIs in 1996. Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story [1998]

Digital began spinning off bits and pieces of the corporation in 1992 - the last remnants going to Compaq in 1998. Digital Equipment Corporation You could argue that when the VMS team abandoned ship, Microsoft was there with a lifeboat.

It happens in this business.
   

Okay ... so what about a taser that works by firing the "head" of the taser but without the trailing wires.

check out the Tetanizing Beam Weapon

For those interested, the very astute original writeup of the referenced slashodt article was taken down, but is still available here on wayback

I just recently picked up a 1906 edition of this book on Electricity and Magnetism. Having a scanned version available in no way diminishes the value of my hardback copy - in fact, it allows me to read passages that might otherwise be obscured by schmootz.

Please provide figures saying how long it would take to consume the existing supply of plutonium. The Wikipedia article about the IFR says 700 years for existing depleted uranium stores. Surely there's much more depleted uranium than plutonium?

You're right but it did say to power the whole planet for 700 years, I was only considering it as a U.S domestic consideration. As a technology the world could develop and use I think it would make a very powerful statement as to how serious world governments were about Nuclear disarmament.

Unfortunately the original EBR-II home page no longer exists and the web archive doesn't seem to have all the original data. So I'm sorry I can't find references atm. When I read an article by one of the EBR-II (later known as IFR) designers the projected rate of consumption of all pu-239 was 5000 years. Some have made that estimate 10 times higher, but a rough calculation based on the 0.3% burn-up rate of a PWR would suggest that 1500 years for pu-239 reserves would be a reasonable approximation.

The Wikipedia article says the waste would have to be stored ~400 years. You don't have to store the waste in the reactor, of course.

That is true, but don't forget the core of a IFR is going to contain activated isotopes we have never encountered before, the reason to design a reactor with such longevity is so when you finally do shut it down, core disposal is in place and is as long lived as the final fissile ash products of the reactor itself. The entire reactor facility would operate *inside* the spent fuel containment facility and when it is no longer required the entire facility is sealed up and allowed to decay.

Instead of having a building, a complex like Cheyenne Mountain illustrates that it is feasible and could contain chambers for transuranic, pyroprocessing, reactor and fissile ash storage facilities. An accident in one would not disable the entire facility and accident mitigation would be built in.

This link has some answers. Excerpt: "To be sure, in this era of diversity and sensitivity, a veritable cottage industry has sprung up to stamp out bigotry and intolerance. Many of those who have dedicated themselves to the eradication of bigotry tend to be Left-leaning, self-styled progressives. In researching this essay, I interviewed a number of these tolerance gurus. Interestingly, most had no problem labeling all Republicans "assholes." One prominent sociologist at a top university explained earnestly that he was no bigot but, of course, wouldn't want his sister to marry a Republican."

archive.org's Live Music Archive or http://bt.etree.org should get you where you need to go.

> It's not 2TB, it's only 3.2gb. You need enwiki-20080103-pages-articles.xml.bz2,
> from http://www.archive.org/details/enwiki-20080103

i recall reading somewhere the unzipped size of wikipedia was 1-2 TB... not sure about this file though

If you're not familiar with the process of binary diff (I wasn't) there's a paper linked from the article that explains some about bsdiff:

http://www.daemonology.net/papers/bsdiff.pdf

Wayback from 2007/07/09:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070709234208/http://www.daemonology.net/papers/bsdiff.pdf

Actually I found that. The earliest comment is from "Jan 09 1998" and reads: "Well, I just tested this modified patch on my NT 4.0sp3 machine. It's still standing."

What do I win?

At the time, I bragged 4 seconds (real application running) was the industry fastest with out gizmo, Blabbermouth

What I want to see is 0seconds using Flash. eg. run out of flash and just stop the clock! Then resume it. That has to work, right?

What happened to Winamp 4?
You're not imagining things. Yes, we skipped a version number for the following reasons:

• Winamp 5 combines the best aspects of Winamp 2 and Winamp 3 into one player. Hence Winamp 2 + Winamp 3 = Winamp 5!
• Who the hell wants to see a Winamp 4 Skin :P
• We think that a Fibonacci sequence for versioning might be pretty damn cool.
• We improved so much in Winamp 5 that we figured it warranted skipping a version. ;)

"Did I miss anything?"

You forgot reason Five, which is stated in the article: "we decided to create the ultimate RAID array, one that should be able store all of your data for years to come while providing much faster performance than any individual drive could."

If this is suppose to be storing data for years, why am I dropping $1,000 on it today? Why am I (or anyone) buying "the next several years" of storage all at once? Did I win a huge settlement from suing myself?. Did I win the lottery? Did the economy suddenly rebound?

And in several years when you actually use all 10 tb you're gonna be the douche with twelve old 1 tb drives while you're buddies are cruising along with single 5 and 7 tb drives that they spent $100-$200 on.

Wouldn't it make more sense to buy more when I fill what I already have? What's the point of having 10 TB with 95% of it empty? Spending a grand on storage that will sit largely empty for several years all the while burning up electricity to keep those drives running doesn't make sense. Might as well leave them in the box and lower the electric bill a bit for a few years.

Am I'm surprised they even bothered with testing RAID 0. 12 drives, no redundancy? Good way to lose 10 TB of data if you ask me.

Just for shits and grins I decided to look up what drive the $85 they spent on a 1 tb drive would have bought 5 years ago, to see how this article would have gone if it was July 2004. Looks like they'd have twelve 120gb SATA drives or twelve 160gb IDE. The IDE drives would be sadly outdated by now and the SATA drives would have given you 1.2 TB of storage all for $1,000. I imagine we'll be looking at this article 5 years from now and thinking "WTF were they thinking??"

"Did I miss anything?"

You forgot reason Five, which is stated in the article: "we decided to create the ultimate RAID array, one that should be able store all of your data for years to come while providing much faster performance than any individual drive could."

If this is suppose to be storing data for years, why am I dropping $1,000 on it today? Why am I (or anyone) buying "the next several years" of storage all at once? Did I win a huge settlement from suing myself?. Did I win the lottery? Did the economy suddenly rebound?

And in several years when you actually use all 10 tb you're gonna be the douche with twelve old 1 tb drives while you're buddies are cruising along with single 5 and 7 tb drives that they spent $100-$200 on.

Wouldn't it make more sense to buy more when I fill what I already have? What's the point of having 10 TB with 95% of it empty? Spending a grand on storage that will sit largely empty for several years all the while burning up electricity to keep those drives running doesn't make sense. Might as well leave them in the box and lower the electric bill a bit for a few years.

Am I'm surprised they even bothered with testing RAID 0. 12 drives, no redundancy? Good way to lose 10 TB of data if you ask me.

Just for shits and grins I decided to look up what drive the $85 they spent on a 1 tb drive would have bought 5 years ago, to see how this article would have gone if it was July 2004. Looks like they'd have twelve 120gb SATA drives or twelve 160gb IDE. The IDE drives would be sadly outdated by now and the SATA drives would have given you 1.2 TB of storage all for $1,000. I imagine we'll be looking at this article 5 years from now and thinking "WTF were they thinking??"

http://web.archive.org/web/20011211233332/www.rjh.org.uk/altair/4k/index2.html

Wow, floating point and arrays in 4K. That's actually quite impressive compared to Tiny Basic.

I still wish that the first environment for the Altair had been Forth. The Jupiter Ace tried, bless its silicon soul.

For your reading pleasure:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041010180516/http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=10127
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/X_Window_System

BTW, I use Linux/X/GNU/Fluxbox

Maybe they live in Michigan ?

I thought commercial software companies all died in the 2000 bubble. Except for specialist areas where nobody wants to copy it anyhow.

BTW http://www.archive.org/details/StorageD1984 :
At about 4 minutes in, an Interview with Alan Shugart, Founder of Seagate.
Some of his statements in there:
We will not see the Floppy Disk beeing replaced by semiconductor memory.

This is the part where it really relates to "Don't Copy That Floppy"-Video:
Question: "You see this size (3,5") replacing the 5 1/4 inch disks?"
Answer: "No I don't. I think there's a marketplace for the smaller size..., but I don't think that they'll ever replace the 5 1/4 inch mini floppy, because all those programms are written on mini floppies, and you'll never gonna be able to in your wildest imagination transscribe all those programms onto smaller disks. It isn't gonna be done.".

Or get it from Project Gutenberg - free, without ads. No way is even Amazon going to persuade a court that they own the copyright on Dickens and that therefore free versions shouldn't be available.

For the less well-known stuff that isn't at Gutenberg, start at Google Books, and Internet Archive which has a load of stuff scanned. And if you or someone you know has access through a University account, you can get to databases like Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, which digitize print material from about 1500-1800. Currently, I'm reading a scan of a 1798 novel on my Sony eBook. It's surreal, but very cool.