Slashdot Mirror

In case anyone can't see why, check out the headline from News International's British tabloid, The Sun, on Saturday.

http://fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/2011/07/sun-blames-al-qaeda-for-norway.html

Yes, that's right, they actually use the phrase 'AL-QAEDA' MASSACRE above the headline NORWAY'S 9/11. Now that it's a right-wing extremist, he'll just be a lunatic instead of it being a plot.

I've done just that. Here's the message I left with Google in their "we're sorry to see you go, please leave a message" box:

---------
Hi there.

I've heard about a lot of problems with Google plus, for instance:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-deleting-accounts-en-masse-no-clear-answers/567

I don't want to use my real name online, for privacy reasons.

And at the same time, I don't want to have my gmail account (that I use a lot), blogger, or others be deleted because of a TOS violation in Google+ (that I barely use).

I'd rather use Facebook or Twitter instead of Google+, and risk a TOS violation there (due to using a nick rather than my real name, or other issues).

At least in that case I won't lose access to all my email, blog posts, etc at the same time.

I wrote more about this problem on my blog over here:

http://chmmr.blogspot.com/2011/07/concerned-about-google-identity-policy.html

And I'm sure you're aware of many other people complaining about this.

I was really interested in your Google+ service before, and was encouraging others to try it out, but your recent policy of deleting accounts has me very concerned, so I'm not going to bother with using Google+, and I'm recommending to other that they be really careful about signing up with Google+.
---------

Also I made sure that all my Google-related backups are up-to-date.

- Blogger - using their export function each week to save a backup to XML.
- Gmail - I'm using a mail client (kmail) in offline IMAP mode to slurp all my mails.

Google also thankfully has some other exporting services, if you're paranoid about losing your account with them.

More problematic is losing access to my gmail email address, but it's too much trouble/I don't know how to setup my own domain, email server, dns records, etc, so I'll take that risk for the time being. I'm also keeping track of all my logins/passwords/etc in a separate secure location, I don't rely heavily on websites "reset forgotten password" functions.

Even better is nVidia's FXAA, which was inspired by MLAA.

You would need a consensus-seeking election method, like approval voting; then centrists are practically guaranteed to win.

http://botaday.blogspot.com/2011/07/retired-shuttles.html

So much for Google's blog post in February, "The freedom to be who you want to be..." which extolled the "great benefits" of pseudonymity. http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be-who-you-want-to-be.html

Other recent suspensions:

• * A guy who used a pseudonym on Google+ ("Thomas Monopoly") claims to have lost his entire account including "approximately 7 years of correspondence, over 4,800 photographs and videos, my Google Voice messages, over 500 articles saved to my Google Reader account for scholarship purposes all of my bookmarks, having used Google bookmarks my Docs account with shared documents and backups of inventory files my own personal calendar of doctors appointments, meetings, and various other dates collaborative calendars, of which I was the creator and of which several man hours were put into creating, community calendars my saved maps and travel history medical records and a variety of very important notes [and] My website, a blogger account for which I purchased the domain through Google and designed myself": http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/why-you-shouldnt-trust-google-or-any-cloud-service-with-your-data/13860
• * Daynah (a Senior Editor at Beatweek Magazine and a blogger at Cali Lewis' GeekBeat.TV) was suspended from Google+ on Saturday, presumably because her Google+ name was "Daynah .net" (she never shares her last name online due to privacy and safety concerns). I believe it was just her Google+ account that got suspended, not her e-mail or access to other services. Her profile is still suspended as of when I'm posting this.
• * I was suspended from Google+ on Friday, June 15th through Wednesday, June 20th, presumably because my Google+ name was "the JoshMeister" (which is how I'm known to almost all of my friends and followers online, on my podcasts which have been downloaded over a million times, including at my employment at MacTech Magazine as the Podcast Producer and Host). I tried changing my name to my first and last name with the JoshMeister in parenthesis after it, but that was also rejected, so ultimately I had to settle for using just my real first and last name. Unfortunately, my name is fairly common, and there are already several people with that name on Google+, making it significantly more difficult for people to find and recognize me or + mention me. I did not lose access to Google services other than Google+ and Google Buzz, although I did have to log in again to my e-mail and other services because Google claimed there had been "suspicious activity" (although I confirmed that nobody had accessed my account other than me). More of my story: https://plus.google.com/114936727752666468558/posts/5nHEHFsWCTx

Lists of suspensions:

• * Robert Scoble (linking to Skud's link below) inadvertently began compiling a public list of suspended Google+ accounts here, along with some good discussion of the topic and links to other lists: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/YnzXfbpe9Nj
• * Skud is compiling a private list of suspended Google+ accounts here: http://is.gd/nonplussed (redirects to Google Docs form)

Examples of Google's double standard and inconsistency:

• * Some people such as "Soulja Boy" (a recording artist) and "Violet Blue" (the author of the linked ZDNet article) get special treatment and have not been suspended for using their pseudonyms on Google+
• * "Die Ennomane" (die means "the" in German) was suspended but then was allowed to keep the pseudonym after German media coverage
• * Google has turned a blind ey

It is really difficult to have enough contempt for this man; Glenn Greenwald's "The Tom Friedman Disease" is a good example of the kind of half-digested pap he routinely emits. Instead of looking at this gimmick and calling it a gimmick, he pats himself on the back with this unbearably asinine summary:

What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life — remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in. Watch out.

So, um, Tom, shall we ask a few slightly important questions, such as, how does this party hope to get candidates on the ballot when they aren't even registered as a party in the many states? Politics are nothing like distributing books or drugs. The fact that he glosses over this entirely is why I hold the man in such low esteem.

He is a thirteenth-rate thinker who, for reasons that are entirely unclear, has been drastically wrong about a very great deal and yet continues to hold his position on the New York Times' opinion pages.

Try this:
http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/

It analyses why most of that Randall's jokes aren't funny.

Without having read TFA I would imagine that this is aimed more at people who pirate music and sell it as genuine. Their customers think they're buying from a legitimate source.

So in a way this is a good thing, but is likely to be the thin end of a wedge where once people accept PayPal policing their users in this way then you'll start to see people having their PayPal accounts disabled for unrelated activities that someone or other doesn't approve of.

Ya, i came across some sites like that.

Was looking for flac recordings of Chris and Cosey, and from some sites that "sell" flac copies of the song.

While I know they are doing something illegal, I'll bet most people don't realize it.

Yes, of course I found a place to download them for free. http://welikeitlossless.blogspot.com/ (no, i have nothing to do with that blog, nor do they know i'm sharing their info here)

And the only reason i can think that paypal is doing this, is they are getting more money for the music industry to do this then they are earning from the peeps that are selling illegal music.

Then why not design so that maintenance is easy. Like making sure that the setup is not rigid but can be easily hauled up, cleaned and submerged again.

Like in this example: http://thefirst12.blogspot.com/2009/02/effective-way-to-harvest-power-of-ocean.html

You will do well to read the monkey-banana-cage-water story. Religiously biased are like those monkeys.

The religious bias might have an advantage, or might have had an advantage, or could be random. If you follow them simply believe them because they are religious, you will not tend to analyze whether they are still relevant, or even if they were ever relevant.

Metallca's album "Distortion Maximum" (or was it Death Magnetic? I can't remember.) and how absolutely terrible it sounded.

Luckily, somebody at Guitar Hero managed to get a non-distorted version of the album for GH:Metallica, which was promptly ripped and released online.

Great example of when a "pirated" version ends up being far superior to the retail release.

This blog post has a nice graphic showing the difference in dynamic range between the retail album and the GH version.

I'm trying to picture what ALOT of factors looks like, but it's a bit more abstract than other types of alots.

The attack was on a government office, so it's still too early to say whether it was an act of terrorism or war.

Al Qaeda and the organizations allied to it in "the Resistance" are the most obvious suspects, being that they are at war with everyone else in the world and they have the talent and desire to do it.

The attack could be in response to the recent filing of charges against Mullah Krekar, leader of Ansar al-Islam which was one of the first groups to rename itself to "al-Qaeda in Iraq" after the US invaded.

The motivation could also be the Jyllands-Posten cartoons that were published in a Denmark newspaper. The Muslim Brotherhood and Hizbut Tahrir encouraged attacks on Norwegian embassies after the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet republished the cartoons.

Norway has been active in the bombing of Libya. The attack may have come in retaliation from the Libyan government, which has pledged to strike back at its attackers any way it could, or it may have come from unaffiliated right-wing Muslims who see the attack on Libya as kaffir invading the ummah.

It could be someone else. Remember that the Oklahoma City bombing was a couple of white ultra-Christians. Everyone thought it was Hezbollah at first. The attack could have come from Jews who are pissed off about European spy agencies funding the the NIF, B'tselem, Peace Now, Human Rights Watch, and all the lies they tell about Israel. It could have been a nut from an opposing political party or a farmer with a grievance about a change in subsidies and the knowledge to make a fertilizer bomb. The only thing we truly know is that we don't know yet, so wait a day or two for the investigators to do their jobs.

Here's Reuters's speculation.

Captcha: compute. If anyone was complaining that this was not news for nerds, it is now.

Cisco --- No Services

So much more funny as a picture...
... or this one... or this one or this one

Interestingly, these seem to be different locations as well (different exit number, different landscape, different design on sign), do we see a pattern here?

Except other currencies have been relatively stable with the dollar.

And before you start saying "well, they had 200% inflation too!", they didn't, because the prices of non-gold commodities didn't go up by the same amount. Gold is in a bubble.

Bullshit. How about oil? And how about industrial commodities? Have you compared the price of gold over time to the price of wheat?

I also suggest you take a careful look at the stock market, which the "experts" in Washington and at the Fed claim is indicating a recovery. In fact, the stock market prices simply reflect the first place where the devalued dollar starts to show large price increases. Check out the indexes vs. the price of gold, and you'll notice that the market is still depressed, and the only thing that is failing is the fiat "money" that the elites are fooling everyone with and using to rob the lower classes.

Yes.

A currency based on valuable commodity is much more foolish than one based on un-payable debt, sustained only through inflation and growth-for-growth's-sake.

I fail to find any intellectually sound argument that can establish the difference between a fiat money that is valued by debt, and a Ponzi pyramid, other than the differential factor of inflation.

Every economist who has looked at the mathematics of compound interest has pointed out that in the end, debts cannot be paid.

Every rate of interest can be viewed in terms of the time that it takes for a debt to double. At 5%, a debt doubles in 14.5 years; at 7 percent, in 10 years; at 10 percent, in 7 years. As early as 2000 BC in Babylonia, scribal accountants were trained to calculate how loans principal doubled in five years at the then-current equivalent of 20% annually (1/60th per month for 60 months). "How long does it take a debt to multiply 64 times?" a student exercise asked. The answer is, 30 years -- 6 doubling times.

We Have Forgotten What the Ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, the Early Jews and Christians, the Founding Fathers and Even Napoleon Bonaparte Knew About Money

Money As Debt - Full Length Documentary

Sure, some solutions are faster than MySQL out of the box by skipping much of the language parsing and stuff that any SQL solution has to do. But that's not to say that they are actually more efficient at key retrieval.

For example, one developer found that the best no-sql solution was.... MySQL, which excels at simple key retrieval. He was able to best MemCached by a factor of almost 2.

Use the right tool for the job.

in total three "meetings". and - history repeats itself - the same problems with Firefox in enterprise environments:

* Packaging (MSI)
* Settings Management (GPO)

And the blog with the meeting notes is deleted. as I expected: This was a _really_ important project for Mozilla...

Example 1
Example 2
Viewer Discretion Advised

Example 1
Example 2
Viewer Discretion Advised

> blowing more stuff up on foreign lands
or having fun trips abroad.

. . . is this:

We’ll continue to push speed and innovation—the driving forces behind Google Labs—across all our products, as the early launch of the Google+ field trial last month showed.

It's a lot faster just to read the orig.

Who on earth needs to read a whole stack of marketing BS. They're doing a bad thing for short term profit. It's that simple. All the doubletalk is meaningless and only serves as a rationalisation or explanation for morons.

For those who want to see the criteria for an administrative search to be legal, see my blog

There are two distinct claims in the Jesus story:

1) There was a guy living around that time who did some preaching and had a following.

2) This guy performed miracles and such.

You're arguing that because #2 is highly unlikely and has no evidence for it that means that #1 is also highly unlikely and has no evidence for it. That's a logical fallacy. You may want to read http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2011/05/nailed-ten-christian-myths-that-show.html for a slightly longer discussion of the subject, but the short story is that Occam's razor suggests #1 is probably true, while #2 is probably false.

The reason that our space program is dead in the water is that we are pathologically afraid of the risk of anyone dying. If there's an accident, the entire program shuts down.

There are shedloads of astronauts; if a crew was hit by a bus it would be replaced very quickly. What you can't afford is to lose a space shuttle when you only have three of them and can't make any more; that is why the program stops for years every time one is lost.

Agreed. Heck, just polling the slashdot readership, you could probably come up with enough qualified people to crew a couple of dozen flights at least (qualified = meeting basic health/skills requirements to complete astronaut training).

Remember, there are only so many astronauts because they only have so many spots, because they only have so many Orbiters to launch. The launch vehicle is the choke point in the chain.

On a slightly related note. Just happened on this:
http://filkertom-itom.blogspot.com/2007/07/bonus-track-hope-eyrie.html Hope Eyrie.

Sung by Tom Smith, (Originally by Leslie Fish)

Hope people give it a listen.

Hope Eyrie
Words and Music © 1975 by Leslie Fish
Copyright assigned to Random Factors
All rights reserved - used with permission

Worlds grow old and suns grow cold
And death we never can doubt.
Time's cold wind, wailing down the past,
Reminds us that all flesh is grass
And history's lamps blow out.

But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

Cycles turn while the far stars burn,
And people and planets age.
Life's crown passes to younger lands,
Time brushes dust of hope from his hands
And turns another page.

But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

But we who feel the weight of the wheel
When winter falls over our world
Can hope for tomorrow and raise our eyes
To a silver moon in the opened skies
And a single flag unfurled.

For the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

We know well what Life can tell:
If you would not perish, then grow.
And today our fragile flesh and steel
Have laid our hands on a vaster wheel
With all of the stars to know

That the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

From all who tried out of history's tide,
Salute for the team that won.
And the old Earth smiles at her children's reach,
The wave that carried us up the beach
To reach for the shining sun.

For the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

We’ll continue to push speed and innovation—the driving forces behind Google Labs—across all our products, as the early launch of the Google+ field trial last month showed.

It's a lot faster just to read the orig.

Same joke, new company: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_h3hrn_XGM8o/Ra4T4ZdHrKI/AAAAAAAAAE4/TwLeWrgzOZw/s1600/BMW%2Bshit.jpg

Technically they don't break any of Google's rules. Google's First Click Free initiative is designed to allow paywalled content to be crawled and indexable, subject (among other things) to guidelines like:

- All users who click a Google search result to arrive at your site should be allowed to see the full text of the content they're trying to access.
- The page displayed to all users who visit from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to Googlebot.

Now, these are true for EE, but the page which is shown to both Googlebot and users who've clicked through from Google is very obviously geared around making you think you have to pay to see the answer which is at the bottom of the page.

Also, Google only requires that click-through users see the same content as Googlebot. It doesn't require that a casual user sees the same content. Experts Exchange is in effect a paywalled site and you should think of it in the same way you think of other paywalled sites.

The whole hype that laptops must weigh next to nothing is silly. If the laptop is your mobile office, and if it is important for work, then 4.5 kg is a tiny amount.

Given the amount of physical exercise nowadays, I'd say 4.5 kilos isn't enough. But maybe I'm wrong (safe to click)

Probably because only Republicans are associated with this kind of behavior.

Actually, something rather like homeopathy's ridiculous dilution does work for some food allergies. You start by taking a tiny bit of whatever it is you're allergic to. Then you take a tiny bit more. It's called oral immunotherapy.

Oral Immunotherapy and Homeopathy are nothing alike.

Why? Because as you say the former involves taking a "tiny bit" of something that you are allergic to and slowly increasing the amount and thus "training" your immune system.

Homeopathy on the other hand requires you to dilute the substance to such a degree that all is left is solvent (water, alcohol, etc.). There is none of the original material that is being dissolved left!

In other words. Your "tiny bit" of food is an absolutely massive amount in comparison to no food at all and even if the homeopath decides to not dilute to the point to which they claim to do a "tiny bit" of food will probably amount to a few grams vs the femtograms left over after a series of dilutions.

Actually, something rather like homeopathy's ridiculous dilution does work for some food allergies. You start by taking a tiny bit of whatever it is you're allergic to. Then you take a tiny bit more. It's called oral immunotherapy.

From a recent CBO report http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/98xx/doc9884/12-23-EffectiveTaxRates_Letter.pdf, here are effective tax rates (total taxes divided by total income) for 2005, the most recent year available:

Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent
Second quintile: 9.9 percent
Middle quintile: 14.2 percent
Fourth quintile: 17.4 percent
Percentiles 81-90: 20.3 percent
Percentiles 91-95: 22.4 percent
Percentiles 96-99: 25.7 percent
Percentiles 99.0-99.5: 29.7 percent
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 31.2 percent
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 32.1 percent
Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 percent

For state and local taxes,http://www.itepnet.org/whopays3.pdf shows that lower income pays a higher tax rate (11%) than higher income (7%).

You may waste a lot of hours and money form your life to increase your page ranks and also popularity of your blog.You may searched in google for tips and browse thousands of websites for tips but you can get 10000 tips form one site here is its link. http://tipstomakeblogpopular.blogspot.com/

when your server is hacked and people are cheering. It is all part of the fall of the house of hubris.

I think that this time News Corp will be held responsible. No need for vigilante justice. http://technoflak.blogspot.com/2011/07/fall-of-house-of-hubris.html

errr - that's not a tardis (hope this isn't a "swoosh" moment, it's a regular old-style public phone box (booth). You don't see them about much, although a while back an enterprising sculptor put a dozen together like this and flogged it to my local council for several tens of thousands of quid.

The tardis is supposed to be a police telephone box, which has a different design and colour like this. These boxes also contained equipment other than a phone - such as a first aid kit and an incident book.

On a last pedantic note, there were red police boxes in Glasgow, Scotland, for a time.

There were Red Police Boxes, everywhere in Scotland and not just Glasgow. Being born and bred in the " beautiful green place " I feel another correction is in order, in Glasgow there were no Police Boxes at all , they were called " Polis Cubbies".
P.S. The real location of Torchwood is in Glasgow Green, but you have to close your eyes to see it.

I've done a few blog posts on this, a number of my friends researched the heck out of this issue.

http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2009/12/solar-heat-number.html
http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2010/09/notes-on-heat-reduction-on-roof.html

I will post the highlights here:

For most materials absorption and emissivity of IR is usually the same for any given frequency.

Paint: Krylon, flat white #1502 @ 3m wavelenght = 0.992 emissivity
So weirdly enough this one specific "Visibly" white paint has one of the highest emissivities, and would absorb and reflect a lot of heat almost the same as the black paints!!!

What you really need is a Selective Coatings

I've done a few blog posts on this, a number of my friends researched the heck out of this issue.

http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2009/12/solar-heat-number.html
http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2010/09/notes-on-heat-reduction-on-roof.html

I will post the highlights here:

For most materials absorption and emissivity of IR is usually the same for any given frequency.

Paint: Krylon, flat white #1502 @ 3m wavelenght = 0.992 emissivity
So weirdly enough this one specific "Visibly" white paint has one of the highest emissivities, and would absorb and reflect a lot of heat almost the same as the black paints!!!

What you really need is a Selective Coatings

Also obligatory: GetOuttaMyFace-book

That's already been created: GetOuttaMyFace-book

No, but Kismet in conjunction with appropriate hardware could. http://synjunkie.blogspot.com/2007/12/bypass-hidden-ssid-mac-address-filter.html

errr - that's not a tardis (hope this isn't a "swoosh" moment, it's a regular old-style public phone box (booth). You don't see them about much, although a while back an enterprising sculptor put a dozen together like this and flogged it to my local council for several tens of thousands of quid.

The tardis is supposed to be a police telephone box, which has a different design and colour like this. These boxes also contained equipment other than a phone - such as a first aid kit and an incident book.

On a last pedantic note, there were red police boxes in Glasgow, Scotland, for a time.

I can't ever trust Verizon with handling a bill. Does anyone remember the Verizon math episode a couple of years ago? If not you should check it out at http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/ . In short, there was a customer who was going on an international trip. He asked what the cost of data would be. They quoted him at .002 cents / kb, but later charged him .002 dollars / kb. It took him over 2 months talking with and emailing many customer service reps before someone understood the difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents. He recorded the phone calls and it is quite entertaining to listen to how dumb people are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdKwRdWocco
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp6ccIiZp1Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=

http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/

The only meaningful piece of data the blog post presents to support the claim that developers get "better" with age is that upvotes per post on Stack Overflow is essentially constant as age varies. Of course, this doesn't support the conclusion at all--it refutes it. What a piece of garbage article. The blog post's title, "It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer." is catchy, but wrong. The blog post says it best:

So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality.

Is a person who asks fewer questions and answers more a higher quality coder? It's unclear--and the blog post doesn't even discuss it.

[There are other warning flags. He calls something "a textbook example of a bell distribution curve", but I hope no stats book would ever use it as such: the tail on the right is way too long. "A 40-year old coder provides about 100 answers, roughly double the answers of his half younger colleague": yes, but there is a peak at 40 years, and a dip at 20 years, so this is a poor example to give. It equates posting on Stack Overflow with being a professional developer, and in general assumes that it has a representative sample, which is far from certain.]

Many of the things that pulseaudio provides:

• When I log into GNOME I don't have to have the same volume as the last user who logged into GNOME- it's restored on a per user basis
• Simplified volume interface. Pulseuadio multiplexes things like the Master volume and the PCM volume into a single control thus allowing better granularity than the Master volume alone
• When I plug a USB webcam in, pulseaudio now remembers that I prefer it as my default microphone and applications switch to using it rather than the built in one without forcing programs to be reconfigured
• The per app volumes are also useful - sometimes a Flash app in the browser doesn't have a volume control but I can use pulseaudio to make it quieter
• esd has been allowed to retire
• Using pulseaudio allows the kernel to sleep longer when audio is playing by sending a bigger buffer when possible. When not possible (because a quicker response is needed) it sends a smaller buffer. This enables power savings to be made.
• Easier to apply volume boost (artificially making quiet audio "louder")
• Easier to switch between audio setups (e.g. from stereo to 5.1)

There were introductory issues too:

• When it was introduced most programs didn't use pulseaudio directly. Some programs still wanted to use OSS. Pulseuadio can emulate a subset ALSA but some programs were using more than that subset
• Not all distributions enabled ALSA emulation when they first enabled pulseaudio. This created fights between ALSA using programs and pulseaudio using ones
• Bugs in audio drivers were uncovered. Like a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it, you can create a philosophical debate as to whether a bug is a bug if no one hits it. Regardless, the result was pain for some users.
• Bugs in the userland audio stack. Bugs in gstreamer and pulseaudio have caused issues like the volume going to 0 every time a track was changed or huge CPU usage that caused pulseaudio to be killed off.
• Choice of audio mixing methods which make use of floating point

These issues seem to have been mostly solved with time but caused a lot of heartache along the way. The problem is whether it was a chicken and the egg issue where these issues wouldn't have been uncovered until people started testing these things but you can never get enough testers so...

Then there are issues that are still with us. If you have a creative sound card your life is going to be difficult. Pulseaudio doesn't make use of hardware mixing so if you have such a card, you may have noticeably higher CPU usage than ALSA alone (even though the audio mixing is no better). Two steps forward, one step back?

ALSA was never going to be able to introduce all the features mentioned in the first part of this mega post, mainly because it is too low level. Even OSS on the BSDs doesn't present an easy GUI for all those features (it does do mixing and per program volumes) yet Windows and OS X have many of these features. The big picture is that I can do things that I couldn't before and sometimes a lot simpler (remember esd and artsd?) but there was a cost. You may not find the cost was worth it but my feeling is that it will be around on "big" Linux (e.g. machines similar in power to desktops) for the next 10 years.

And the patents (from http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/07/itc-judge-finds-htc-in-infringement-of.html) are:

U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a "system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data" (in its complaint, Apple provides examples such as the recognition of "phone numbers, post-office addresses and dates" and the ability to perform "related actions with that data"; one example is that "the system may receive data that includes a phone number, highlight it for a user, and then, in response to a user's interaction with the highlighted text, offer the user the choice of making a phone call to the number")

U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263 on a "real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data" (while this sounds like a pure hardware patent, there are various references in it to logical connections, drivers, programs; in its complaint, Apple said that this patent "relates generally to providing programming abstraction layers for real-time processing applications")

I think I violated these patents just reading this article.

That's how they got it running so fast, like they do with Bing