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A daily fix of news about crime and criminal justice delivered with a sense of humor. You can look through the old ones using the wayback machine. It's a little like what thesmokinggun would have been with real editors and reporters. They went under around 2002 but it used to be one of my daily browsing spots.

That and our own nofuncharlie, which went under not because of lack of funding (there never was any in the first place), but because we let some domain-snatchers grab the domain out from under us....

A daily fix of news about crime and criminal justice delivered with a sense of humor. You can look through the old ones using the wayback machine. It's a little like what thesmokinggun would have been with real editors and reporters. They went under around 2002 but it used to be one of my daily browsing spots.

That and our own nofuncharlie, which went under not because of lack of funding (there never was any in the first place), but because we let some domain-snatchers grab the domain out from under us....

This new program starts in D.C. next week. . .

Can you say Police State? The Examiner has the scoop on a controversial new program announced today that would create so-called "Neighborhood Safety Zones" which would serve to partially seal off certain parts of the city. D.C. Police would set-up checkpoints in targeted areas, demand to see ID and refuse admittance to people who don't live there, work there or have a "legitimate reason" to be there. Wow. Just, wow.

Some of the words used to describe such a plan by those quoted in the Examiner story include "breathtaking" and "cockamamie," but that hardly begins to scratch the surface. Interim Attorney General Peter Nickles actually said that measures of this sort have "been used in other cities." Which cities are those, Mr. Nickles? Warsaw?

Today's proposal appears to be a desperate attempt by the city to tamp down recent violence that has ravaged the city, especially in Ward 5. The "Neighborhood Safety Zones" would last up to 10 days. It's a struggle to think of words to describe such a plan other than authoritarian or ghettoization.

The full description of this plan from the mayor's press release is below.

The Neighborhood Safety Zone initiative has been developed to help increase security for those who live in high-crime areas around the city and to help residents reclaim their communities. The program will authorize the Metropolitan Police Department to set up public safety checks to help safeguard community members and create safer neighborhoods in the District by increasing police presence aimed at deterring crime.

The safety zones will be established only upon request by a District Commander where there is evidence to support the existence of neighborhood violent crime, such as intelligence, violent crime data, police reports and feedback and concerns from the affected community.

Potential Neighborhood Safety Zones must be approved by the Chief of Police, and will be in effect for a maximum of 10 days. Public safety checks will be established along the main thoroughfares of the established neighborhoods. Anyone driving into a designated area may be asked to show valid identification with a home address in that neighborhood, or to provide an explanation for entering the NSZ, such as attending church, a doctor's appointment or visiting friends or relatives. Pedestrians will not be subject to the public safety checks.

"The Neighborhood Safety Zones is just another tool MPD will employ to stop crime before it happens. The Neighborhood Safety Zone initiative will help residents terrorized by violent crime to take back their neighborhoods," said Chief Lanier.

Initiatives such as the Neighborhood Safety Zones have been accepted by federal courts as a legitimate law enforcement practice in keeping with the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. The constitutionality of the NSZ initiative has been reviewed by the D.C. Office of the Attorney General.

The NSZ will be launched next week in the Trinidad area.

Now, here's an article from 2002, New York. The original link is dead, but the Internet Archive had it on file. . . Notice the difference in intensity? The new version of this program doesn't include guys mowing your lawn. What will be the next step in the process?

Clean Sweep gets praise

the FSF doesn't own the letters 'LGPL'. They could stand for Llama Goober Porky License.

Take a quick trip to the Wayback Machine and you will see that not only did they claim "Ext is also licensed under the terms of the Open Source LGPL 3.0 license", but they linked directly to the LGPL on gnu.org. There is no unwarranted assumption being made here, they meant GNU's LGPL.

With Google, you get a simple, fast loading homepage with only a few links, a search box and the Google logo

remarkably like this:

http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/

It still does:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991012153204/http://goatse.cx/

I ran The Sync.com, an Internet video company that among other things helped to launch and hosted the Slashdot "Geeks in Space" audio webcasts. We had some angel money from folks involved in early ISPs (who did make lots of money). We started getting serious ad revenue from banner ad sites in 1998, but by the end of 1999 the banner market collapsed. In 2000, we were in talks for a few months to be purchased by a company in San Francisco. Tens of thousands of dollars of lawyer time into the contract process, they pulled out, we went under, and shortly afterwards they went under as well.

Towards the end of 2000, I ended up working at SkyCache/Cidera a satellite provider of USENET feeds and streaming media distribution. Unfortunately, after raising $75 million, they also had challenges, two layoffs with 50% staff cuts each time (one was originally scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001, but had to be postponed), and eventually went under.

So I left the Internet, and made the transition to broadcast television engineering (where it is all going IP anyway)...

I ran The Sync.com, an Internet video company that among other things helped to launch and hosted the Slashdot "Geeks in Space" audio webcasts. We had some angel money from folks involved in early ISPs (who did make lots of money). We started getting serious ad revenue from banner ad sites in 1998, but by the end of 1999 the banner market collapsed. In 2000, we were in talks for a few months to be purchased by a company in San Francisco. Tens of thousands of dollars of lawyer time into the contract process, they pulled out, we went under, and shortly afterwards they went under as well.

Towards the end of 2000, I ended up working at SkyCache/Cidera a satellite provider of USENET feeds and streaming media distribution. Unfortunately, after raising $75 million, they also had challenges, two layoffs with 50% staff cuts each time (one was originally scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001, but had to be postponed), and eventually went under.

So I left the Internet, and made the transition to broadcast television engineering (where it is all going IP anyway)...

I ran The Sync.com, an Internet video company that among other things helped to launch and hosted the Slashdot "Geeks in Space" audio webcasts. We had some angel money from folks involved in early ISPs (who did make lots of money). We started getting serious ad revenue from banner ad sites in 1998, but by the end of 1999 the banner market collapsed. In 2000, we were in talks for a few months to be purchased by a company in San Francisco. Tens of thousands of dollars of lawyer time into the contract process, they pulled out, we went under, and shortly afterwards they went under as well.

Towards the end of 2000, I ended up working at SkyCache/Cidera a satellite provider of USENET feeds and streaming media distribution. Unfortunately, after raising $75 million, they also had challenges, two layoffs with 50% staff cuts each time (one was originally scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001, but had to be postponed), and eventually went under.

So I left the Internet, and made the transition to broadcast television engineering (where it is all going IP anyway)...

Filing date: Oct 3, 2001
Issue date: Jun 20, 2006

Wayback machine: http://www.archive.org/

http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/

What's that? An image? Linked?!?! That is what one might call prior art.

Filing date: Oct 3, 2001
Issue date: Jun 20, 2006

Wayback machine: http://www.archive.org/

http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/

What's that? An image? Linked?!?! That is what one might call prior art.

Copyright has not done much for the arts. It has made a very few artists money but now works for big publishers who want to control your press. People who make paintings get no benefit from copyright because their work can not be mass produced, but the world is full of them. Patronage is nice, but most are independent and sell their works directly to the public through galleries. People were singing and dancing before copyright and will do so after copyright because they like to entertain each other. The ability to mass produce music and movies cheaply and then distribute them freely will make the world a much richer place than it is today. If top 40 music is enough for you, copyright is enough for you. The rich world of free music was well explained here and you can find something close here. There's more good music there than you can listen to in a life time, just like there's more good painting you can look at and more good plays than you can watch and so on and so forth.

Internets has it all :
Here

With all the history...

That time they really failed. They finally listened to rude but knowing people like JWZ, said "It became useless junk" and started rm -rf operations, shipped Phoneix.

As we speak about 2000s, I wonder what would happen if they (AOL) listened to CmdrTaco of this site right time before Netscape actually failed.

If you didn't know, there is a good surprise there (1998):
http://web.archive.org/web/19980113192359/slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=425

CmdrTaco is the guy who said GPL and open it. Imagine the difference if some suit from AOL actually listened it. That would make YEARS of head start. It wouldn't be "They opened source of failed browser". It would be "They finally figured it out"

Things would be really different if Real Networks started Helix years before too. The entire thing is open source now (excluding codecs) and people still wonder around saying it is spyware.

Are you normally an incomprehensible dumbfuck?

Thanks, Profane Mother Fucker

Here's archive.org's statement: http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=194217

The Internet Archive's scanning of public domain books was one of the efforts being funded by this, it got a passing mention in TFA. Both articles mention that Microsoft are removing 'contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content'.

Those restrictions were always a bit vague: http://www.archive.org/details/msn_books ... anyone know more? They had restrictions on bulk access and commercial use, but I understood that the books couldn't be indexed by search engines other than live.com.

Here's archive.org's statement: http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=194217

The Internet Archive's scanning of public domain books was one of the efforts being funded by this, it got a passing mention in TFA. Both articles mention that Microsoft are removing 'contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content'.

Those restrictions were always a bit vague: http://www.archive.org/details/msn_books ... anyone know more? They had restrictions on bulk access and commercial use, but I understood that the books couldn't be indexed by search engines other than live.com.

I agree about that. Here's a live shot of a (formerly) large-ish corporation encrypting their proprietary source code in the Symbol font. I mean, it was so encrypted, they could show it in a PowerPoint presentation in front of the public!

I agree about that. Here's a live shot of a (formerly) large-ish corporation encrypting their proprietary source code in the Symbol font. I mean, it was so encrypted, they could show it in a PowerPoint presentation in front of the public!

I think you misunderstand. One of the lines flagged did something worthless (add uninitalized memory into the pool or something I cannot recall) and the other did something important (add sources of entropy). The patch that fixes it undoes only one of the comments. The other has been argued to be of little consequence either way. Adding a fixed constant to an entropy pool doesn't make it less random, which is basically what it does since the memory's unlikely to have been touched by that program.

At any rate, this was definitely a case of an overzealous perfectionist removing memory debugger warnings, and an upstream that does a borderline practice without explanation in code or the FAQ.

40 years seriously is _fast_ in the computing business.

Just look at the GRAIL-system from the end of the 1960s. (It's somewhere in the 3rd 3rd I think, it has flowchart like graphics on the screen)
http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987
That old system is still more advanced than anything you can buy today.

40 years is essentially nothing in UI development. There are lots of usefull concepts to be explored. Like typed natural language interfaces.

Randi is a sad little man who cannot get the world's attention, even with a million dollars (a million non-existent dollars, by the way).

So is this (PDF file) and this fake? From the Million Dollar Challenge FAQ:

• 3.1 I heard the prize money doesn't really exist and that it's all just a scam.
  • The short answer: The money is real.

    The medium-length answer: The money is held in the form of immediately negotiable bonds held by Goldman Sachs, a highly respected investment firm. Anyone can verify that the money exists by requesting the information in writing from the JREF. They will in turn forward you the most recent account statement from Goldman Sachs.

    The long answer: The JREF is a 'tax exempt' organization, so they are required by law to have a level of financial transparency. That means that the public can request things like an annual report and copies of JREF's 990 (the tax return non-profits file). Go to http://tfcny.fdncenter.org/990s/990search/esearch.php (search for Randi, 2005 is here.) to look up JREF's 990. Contained within these types of documents is enough information to verify that the organization does indeed have special assets in a reserved account to cover the prize, should it ever be won. The contract between the claimant and JREF is binding enough that the JREF must pay the prize if someone wins it. This is a published, legal obligation, not just a casual offer. We have no choice in the matter. As a savvy applicant, all you need to do is verify that the organization has the funds to cover the prize. Also, if JREF were not able to hold up its end of the bargain, the IRS would investigate and pull the JREF's tax exempt status. It would mean severe penalties for the JREF, and Randi himself would also be personally liable and subject to potential incarceration. Rest assured: The money is there.

    Long answer, continued: The JREF prize fund is maintained in a way that is similar to an endowment fund. Non-profits often create reserves of assets called endowments to build up enough money to take care of the organization in the case of bad financial times, or to save up money for a project down the road, like building a new facility or starting a large new program that would require a lot of capital. Endowment funds are held in a separate Goldman Sachs account designated, "James Randi Educational Foundation Prize Account." This prevents the JREF from accidentally spending the prize money. It is never a good idea to just let large sums of money sit in a savings account for years and years, so most non-profits invest their endowment funds. The way they invest it is really not important. JREF invests in bonds, which is fine. If a claimant wins the prize, it must be awarded within ten days, as per the Challenge rules and the legally binding contract entered into when the application was signed.

    I know you are going to ask, "What if the bonds cannot be easily liquidated?" If the JREF did not pay a winning claimant in a reasonable amount of time, we would be open to a lawsuit for breach of contract. The claimant will be paid. The JREF states that the funds are held in immediately negotiable bonds so that a claimant can feel at ease about the ability of the JREF to pay. The fact that the JREF will do so is going above and beyond the requirements of the law and the generally accepted practices of good, responsible non-profits. It is an enormous act of good faith on JREF's part. The million dollars exist. Arguments to the contrary are utterly pointless, and they will not be entertained by the JRE

Sanford "Spamford" Wallace and Walter "Pickle Jar" Rines, together again, still spamming.

For some reason this picture just popped into my head.

The US DoD has a system, called MOCAS ("MECHANIZATION OF CONTRACT ADMINISTRATION SERVICES") that was originally brought on-line in 1958.

I'm not too familiar with it, so I don't know if the code has ever been changed -- I suspect the hardware has been updated periodically, probably various IBM mainframes -- but based on my experience with government systems there is probably a fair bit of original code in there that nobody understands anymore, and thus doesn't touch.

There is very little information about the system online; here is an Internet Archive page about it, that's as close to an 'official site' as I can find.

This was also the first thing that jumped to my mind. Also, the "Rite of Spring" sequence in Fantasia. The Archives at http://www.archive.org/details/education have a vasty array of stuff...

the front page may not change alot, but it changes, check the wayback machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.slackware.org

in each release Pat is removing the previous one...

but for those that really like slackware know that the real news arent in the front page, but in the changelog:
http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386

go there and you will see many news!!

in there you also see that managing a distro isnt fetching the packages and compile, it requires alot testing tweak up and vision... and the changelog only have the public things, Pat and many other people have alot of work behind the scenes

That would be true, save that your parent post was referring to original post using the phrase "quote-unquote" just before actually using quotation marks. This would be akin to one speaking the following while doing the air-quote gesture: the air-quote quick brown fox. You would, hopefully, give them a funny look for doing such.

Further, his use of apostrophes to indicate the plural of a symbol, from my understanding, is an acceptable use, though it seems that the use of apostrophes to indicate plurals on numbers, symbols, and acronyms has fallen out of favour more recently in academia. This is well evidenced by the following page at Purdue:
Now: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_apost.html
2000: http://web.archive.org/web/20000815222842/http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_apost.html

If you read the original complaint about Linux, SCO often compared the capability of Unix in general with Linux. Much about SCO's own Unix capabilities is laughable compared to Linux and other flavors of Unix. Eric Raymond from OSI released a paper on this back in 2003.

With our latest release, OpenServer provides support for up to 32 processors, 64 GB of memory, terabyte file sizes, and full support for multi-threaded applications. Linux is still young from an operating system perspective. I would challenge any kernel out there to match us head-to-head.

This is a perfect example. While Linux is younger, it has incorporated multiprocessor support in 1996 and scaled up to 32-processor support since 2000. SCO itself didn't offer any multi-processor support much less 32 processors until SCO Openserver 6 (2005) and the only way they did that was to incorporate the Unixware kernel(which was developed separately by Novell until it sold it to SCO).

The whole bloody thing is here.

I started learning HTML in 1996 and I miss some of the old days of web design. When you have to keep in mind that people are using 56K (or less!) baud modems you have to do more with less code or they wouldn't come back. Tighter code doesn't always make a prettier page, but it does make a better coder. Now people slap up all the obnoxious crap they want because they expect the user to have DSL/cable hookups. It hasn't been an improvement.

I finally had to hook my mom up to broadband--it wasn't just for speeding up the agonizingly slow file downloads. She had a hard time just surfing, much less shopping--the pages were taking too long to render. And forget trying to watch a video, even on "low bandwidth."

Back in the day, there was the 5K Web page award. (The prize for completing the winning page under 5K in size was $50 + bragging rights). It was interesting to see what people could do with so little code and I'm sorry that there doesn't seem to be any of the winning pages still up--the site stands frozen in time back in 2000.

If you want to see what the internet looked like before the rest of the world figured it out what "The Internet" even was, check out the Internet Archive Wayback Machine that has a cache of "85 billion web pages archived from 1996." Their section on the Web Pioneers is a good place to start.

And yes, Slashdot is there too! :-)

I started learning HTML in 1996 and I miss some of the old days of web design. When you have to keep in mind that people are using 56K (or less!) baud modems you have to do more with less code or they wouldn't come back. Tighter code doesn't always make a prettier page, but it does make a better coder. Now people slap up all the obnoxious crap they want because they expect the user to have DSL/cable hookups. It hasn't been an improvement.

I finally had to hook my mom up to broadband--it wasn't just for speeding up the agonizingly slow file downloads. She had a hard time just surfing, much less shopping--the pages were taking too long to render. And forget trying to watch a video, even on "low bandwidth."

Back in the day, there was the 5K Web page award. (The prize for completing the winning page under 5K in size was $50 + bragging rights). It was interesting to see what people could do with so little code and I'm sorry that there doesn't seem to be any of the winning pages still up--the site stands frozen in time back in 2000.

If you want to see what the internet looked like before the rest of the world figured it out what "The Internet" even was, check out the Internet Archive Wayback Machine that has a cache of "85 billion web pages archived from 1996." Their section on the Web Pioneers is a good place to start.

And yes, Slashdot is there too! :-)

I started learning HTML in 1996 and I miss some of the old days of web design. When you have to keep in mind that people are using 56K (or less!) baud modems you have to do more with less code or they wouldn't come back. Tighter code doesn't always make a prettier page, but it does make a better coder. Now people slap up all the obnoxious crap they want because they expect the user to have DSL/cable hookups. It hasn't been an improvement.

I finally had to hook my mom up to broadband--it wasn't just for speeding up the agonizingly slow file downloads. She had a hard time just surfing, much less shopping--the pages were taking too long to render. And forget trying to watch a video, even on "low bandwidth."

Back in the day, there was the 5K Web page award. (The prize for completing the winning page under 5K in size was $50 + bragging rights). It was interesting to see what people could do with so little code and I'm sorry that there doesn't seem to be any of the winning pages still up--the site stands frozen in time back in 2000.

If you want to see what the internet looked like before the rest of the world figured it out what "The Internet" even was, check out the Internet Archive Wayback Machine that has a cache of "85 billion web pages archived from 1996." Their section on the Web Pioneers is a good place to start.

And yes, Slashdot is there too! :-)

The worst thing to do to greedy RIAA asshats is to share really free music. There's more high quality music at that one site than you can listen to over the next 100 years.

This headline assumes that the pro-war faction brought onto the corporate so-called "news" were analysts to begin with and didn't just gain the "analyst" label by the fact that they were featured on the corporate news. They were not impartial experts. They were merely pundits, sent to lie to drum up popular support for an illegal and immoral war. As Peter Hart from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting explained on today's Democracy Now! (transcript, video, high-quality audio, smaller size audio):

One of the most shocking things in the story is that in early 2003, these guys got a briefing about WMDs, and the government said, "We actually don't have hard evidence right now that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Did any of them go on the air and say that? No. The Pentagon, I think, had total control and total faith that these guys would deliver the message that they intended to deliver to the public, and that's exactly what they did, and the media did very little to counteract this overwhelming propaganda campaign from the Pentagon.

What the Pentagon did is conspire with the media and over seventy-five retired military officers to spread lies about the invasion and occupation of Iraq; propaganda which continues to this day. The pundits weren't being manipulated, the public was. The pundits participated with their consent. Since one expects the Pentagon to get their story out (I don't excuse it, I merely expect it), one might wonder why the media didn't do their job and challenge those in power to justify their case for war? It would be far better to headline this story a failure of media to do their job as reporters. Again, Hart explains:

I think the extent of the briefings was somewhat shocking and the blase attitude from the networks. They didn't care what military contractors these guys were representing when they were out at the studio. They didn't care that the Pentagon was flying them on their own dime to Iraq. Just basic journalistic judgment was completely lacking here. So I think the story is really about a media failure, more than a Pentagon failure. The Pentagon did exactly what you would expect to do, taking advantage of this media bias in favor of having more and more generals on the air when the country is at war.

The New York Times didn't cover the media aspect of this problem probably because the Times was a willing participant in the lying. Apparently it still is.

This headline assumes that the pro-war faction brought onto the corporate so-called "news" were analysts to begin with and didn't just gain the "analyst" label by the fact that they were featured on the corporate news. They were not impartial experts. They were merely pundits, sent to lie to drum up popular support for an illegal and immoral war. As Peter Hart from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting explained on today's Democracy Now! (transcript, video, high-quality audio, smaller size audio):

One of the most shocking things in the story is that in early 2003, these guys got a briefing about WMDs, and the government said, "We actually don't have hard evidence right now that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Did any of them go on the air and say that? No. The Pentagon, I think, had total control and total faith that these guys would deliver the message that they intended to deliver to the public, and that's exactly what they did, and the media did very little to counteract this overwhelming propaganda campaign from the Pentagon.

What the Pentagon did is conspire with the media and over seventy-five retired military officers to spread lies about the invasion and occupation of Iraq; propaganda which continues to this day. The pundits weren't being manipulated, the public was. The pundits participated with their consent. Since one expects the Pentagon to get their story out (I don't excuse it, I merely expect it), one might wonder why the media didn't do their job and challenge those in power to justify their case for war? It would be far better to headline this story a failure of media to do their job as reporters. Again, Hart explains:

I think the extent of the briefings was somewhat shocking and the blase attitude from the networks. They didn't care what military contractors these guys were representing when they were out at the studio. They didn't care that the Pentagon was flying them on their own dime to Iraq. Just basic journalistic judgment was completely lacking here. So I think the story is really about a media failure, more than a Pentagon failure. The Pentagon did exactly what you would expect to do, taking advantage of this media bias in favor of having more and more generals on the air when the country is at war.

The New York Times didn't cover the media aspect of this problem probably because the Times was a willing participant in the lying. Apparently it still is.

This headline assumes that the pro-war faction brought onto the corporate so-called "news" were analysts to begin with and didn't just gain the "analyst" label by the fact that they were featured on the corporate news. They were not impartial experts. They were merely pundits, sent to lie to drum up popular support for an illegal and immoral war. As Peter Hart from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting explained on today's Democracy Now! (transcript, video, high-quality audio, smaller size audio):

One of the most shocking things in the story is that in early 2003, these guys got a briefing about WMDs, and the government said, "We actually don't have hard evidence right now that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Did any of them go on the air and say that? No. The Pentagon, I think, had total control and total faith that these guys would deliver the message that they intended to deliver to the public, and that's exactly what they did, and the media did very little to counteract this overwhelming propaganda campaign from the Pentagon.

What the Pentagon did is conspire with the media and over seventy-five retired military officers to spread lies about the invasion and occupation of Iraq; propaganda which continues to this day. The pundits weren't being manipulated, the public was. The pundits participated with their consent. Since one expects the Pentagon to get their story out (I don't excuse it, I merely expect it), one might wonder why the media didn't do their job and challenge those in power to justify their case for war? It would be far better to headline this story a failure of media to do their job as reporters. Again, Hart explains:

I think the extent of the briefings was somewhat shocking and the blase attitude from the networks. They didn't care what military contractors these guys were representing when they were out at the studio. They didn't care that the Pentagon was flying them on their own dime to Iraq. Just basic journalistic judgment was completely lacking here. So I think the story is really about a media failure, more than a Pentagon failure. The Pentagon did exactly what you would expect to do, taking advantage of this media bias in favor of having more and more generals on the air when the country is at war.

The New York Times didn't cover the media aspect of this problem probably because the Times was a willing participant in the lying. Apparently it still is.

Imagine trying to port GTA3 to the original Nintendo system and you'll have some idea how bad this game probably is.

You could imagine it, or you could actually do it.

I find back-ports of game titles from more to less powerful hardware to be fascinating -- paring down a complex premise into something more simple really exposes a programmer's cleverness, and it really does give credence to the idea that it's gameplay, not high-quality graphics or sound, that makes a game fun.

Given that no app is "100% compliant with the complete spec" wrt ODF (not even OO.o, on whose previous XML format ODF is based (according to xml.openoffice.org, as of 12/2006)), do you really want to go there?

A very important factor in CD/DVD longevity is the type of dye and reflective layer used. If you have a low quality disc it will have a limited shelf life even if you treat it like that reference kilogram sitting in a vault in France.

Thanks for that point. People seem to forget that product placement used to be the norm. It was also done in many cases in radio shows. Listen to the old Jack Benny show (you can find episodes at the Internet archive: http://www.archive.org/details/oldtimeradio). They mentioned the sponsor quite often in shows and even joked about it. I can't remember the show, but in early TV there was a detective who would often stop in a tobacco shop during the show and talk about his favorite brand of cigar or cigarette with the people in the shop. It was an ad, but done as product placement. TVLand did a service a while back by showing an original (yet updated) version of the original "I Love Lucy" pilot and during such shows the stars would often do the ads themselves or the ads were integrated into the show.

It's not new and it's tiring to see all these people that think it is.

Was archiving whitehouse.gov? AFAICS, archive.org still is.

• An IRP is an IO Request Packet. They absolutely were used in every version of NT, including 3.1.
• A DPC is a Deferred Procedure Call-- similar to the bottom half of an interrupt handler on Linux. Those were also definitely in all versions of NT. WDM just provides a wrapper over such functions.
• At no point did NT use 16-bit code in kernel mode.
• OS2/NT was being written from scratch, but then Microsoft and IBM parted ways and it became Windows NT.
• NT 3.51 didn't introduce a new driver model. It did introduce FastIO, which is a function call oriented alternative to issuing IRPs for certain synchronous IO operations (particularly those that can be done from cache).

Well, it's better than this.

NOT NameCheap. You can only leave a message when you call them, and they NEVER called me back. They didn't answer ANY of my many support tickets, except with irrelevant replies. They are an eNom reseller, and eNom seems to me to have become abusive. Absolutely the worst I've seen, for many other reasons, too. For example, their system refused to allow me to renew my domains with them. NameCheap.com is an eNom.com reseller, and in my opinion eNom.com has become abusive.

I too want to find a good domain name registrar. I have had very bad experiences with GoDaddy.com, NameCheap.com, and DomainSite.com.

A big problem with trying a new registrar is that they hide how they do business until you have a domain with them. For example, DomainSite.com email forwarding uses an "aggressive" block list that cannot be disabled. DomainSite.com also throws away all Catchall email.

ICANN is a TERRIBLY badly managed organization, in my opinion.

I'm keeping a list of stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date:
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26)
That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names. According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)
ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns (2008-04-08)

Any error or stories not included?

GoDaddy's reputation is not just one of a negative stories. In my opinion, GoDaddy tries to confuse non-technical people by offering services they don't need that are presented as valuable.

Here are some of the opinions of Bob Parsons, the owner of GoDaddy. He is pro-violence: Close Gitmo? No way!!

Seriously though, many of the items in there are possible with current technology, but not with current infrastructure/adoption (self-driving cars, hypersonic passenger planes, etc). Others are just way off (lol domed cities and plastic roads), and are probably the result of imposing 1960's mindsets on 2008. (Notice there was no mention of skyrocketing fuel prices or energy issues... probably as this was just a little before the gas crunch of the 1970's)

Still, I like to see futurist predictions... especially those past ones that cover where we're supposed to be today.

I also liked that Science Channel production "2057" where they tried to show the world as it might be then. The thing in that show that really caught my interest is the part on the human body where they talk about medicine... the ambulance crew arrives for a serious injury, and before they TOUCH him, they CHECK HIS INSURANCE. Damn, they really improved the "wallet biopsy" 49 years from now.

  As others have mentioned, future predictions are based upon taking cutting edge technology and theories to their logical conclusion, and may get the tech part right without really being able to predict the societal impact or the impact the technology has on the society. For that kind of prediction, I honestly thing that rather than smart pills we're more likely to end up in an Idiocracy.

-- I for one WELCOME our dumbed down idiotic overlords

(Ok, not really... I didn't actually vote for Bush)

http://kerneltrap.org/node/2450/7217

"The Problem:

So, the basic problem here is, the kernel ( 2.6 ) can just address 1 GB of virtual addresses, which can translate to a maximum of 1 GB of physical memory. This is because the kernel directly maps all available kernel virtual space addresses to the available physical memory."

"Solutions:

http://web.archive.org/web/20020313185718/http://strasbourg.linuxfr.org/jl3/features-2.3-2.html

"Originally HIGHMEM was called BIGMEM and BIGMEM seen the light in kernel 2.3.16."

This is the Kernel patch I was talking about. The IA64 Kernel, that Alan Cox was the maintainer for SGI was nothing less than a brilliant peice of work, however it left the IA32 world behind, and a few linux vendors were left with the HIGHMEM patch, which slowed the machine's down due to having to use a segmented (1GB segment ) address space. It easily trimmed off 30% of the horsepower, but since it was running SAP, most of the horsepower was wasted anyway.

The problem will be back when, for IA64, when the SAP database requirements grow beyound 16GB, and the MMU chips will need a diffrent type of patch.

Dont think for a second, that both Alan Cox's work on the SGI/IA64 port was anything less that brilliant, nor that Andrea Arcangeli's work was anything less than brilliant either. It was an enhancement that came at a cost.