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http://jwz.livejournal.com/1100218.html

They have ALREADY said they're working with the developer and that it's okay that the source is available.

In private email, they did. And if you TFA (and the blog post), they said that "it's okay" before they released a new version of SDK, the license agreement for which explicitly states that it's not okay (which is the one linked from GP's post). So their position is at best unclear, and at worst - if you consider chronological order - they've rescinded their earlier words.

jwz: My ongoing Kafka-esque nightmare of dealing with Palm and their App Catalog submission process.

Bonus: Ben Galbraith: Thoughts on Palm and Jamie Zawinski (Ben and Dion just moved from Mozilla to Palm).

http://www.alcor.org/ . My wife and I are both signed up for cryonic suspension. Even if the chances of success are low, they beat the pants off of the alternative!

Also, if I may tout my own unofficial FAQ: http://datan0de.livejournal.com/144534.html

You're ignoring the point. This is something that used to work that doesn't now. I used to be able to put an app on my site, with full sources, and people could download it. I didn't have to have a PayPal account, I didn't have to sign my life away to Palm, and I didn't have to wait for Palm to "approve" my app. Plus, when you get the SDK, you agree to a clause that states you CANNOT give away your software either in binary or as source, through any Non Palm App-Store channel. If Palm wanted to be jerks, they could enjoin all the people distributing homebrew apps.

So now someone wanting to give away software for free must open a checking account so they can have a verified Paypal account, pay Palm to become a developer, set their version number to sub-1.0 (even on software that is 25 years old), agree never to distribute source to anyone (making it Non Free).

Fuck that shit, it's easier just to go develop for Android.

Instead of understanding that there are regular, non-power users outside of /., who don't want to have to know about 3rd party installers and how to root their phone, you call me a retard and JWZ an asshole in no uncertain terms. All because he wants to make software and give it away for free, you're right, he's such a dick. Thanks for pointing that out.

Here's another specific cite of The Issue.

Nope. You need to have a 3rd party installer to do that, thanks for playing though.

If you could simply post a .IPK and have people directly run it, he wouldn't have posted his rant. In fact, he says so, RIGHT HERE. I've been following that thread with great interest since yesterday afternoon, and have been reading similar items for the last few weeks.

Why yes, I do have a Pre, why do you ask?

My girlfriend and I were wandering around Seattle in 2005, when he ran up and did his thing:

http://periluna.livejournal.com/35935.html

Haha, awesome. I can totally testify that he really really likes piggy back rides.

Jeff Minter ... http://stinkygoat.livejournal.com/ ... has a good blend of coding and goating.

They're not over at Pixar/Ghibli telling them what to put in their movies, they just slap their names on the boxes

To be fair, Disney has had a direct hand in the casting for voice-over dubbing of the Ghibli classics. Most to rather surprisingly good effect.

A food blogger posted a variation on a potato salad recipe that she liked. She attributed the original source even though the recipe was altered. The source of the original recipe (Cook's Illustrated/Cook's Country) countered with a cease and desist notice claiming "no modifications allowed. Our recipes are tested up to 100 times for a reason (i.e. because they work)."

So let's say you get a really good pasta recipe from Cook's but you don't like the broccoli that's in it. You can't replace it with snow peas. After all, they tested their recipe and it is perfect so you can't improve upon it. Or if that "perfect" recipe calls for sausage and you're a vegetarian. No leaving that sausage out! Cook it the "Cook's perfect" way and like it! And Flying Spaghetti Monster help you if you post a variation on that pasta recipe, even if it is radically altered.

Here's a blog post about the incident: http://maurarose.livejournal.com/tag/cooks+country It looks like the original blog has gone invite only (possibly in part due to Cook's threatening to sue if they posted any modified recipes). I'm not sure what happened with the cease and desist notice.

To be precise: Obama voted for all amendments opposing telecom immunity and against all of those supporting it. He voted for an omnibus bill at the end of the process that included telecom immunity but also included too many other measures for it to be fair to suggest any voter was "supporting" telecom immunity specifically.

Stories Slash Boxes Comments Slashdot Search News for nerds, stuff that matters * squiggleslash * Help & Preferences * Subscription * Firehose * Journal * Tags * Bookmarks * Logout * Customize Sections * Main * Apple * AskSlashdot * Book Reviews * Developers * Games * Hardware * IT * Index * Interviews * Linux * Mobile * Politics * Science * Technology * YRO Site Info * FAQ * Bugs * Code Stories * Old Stories * Old Polls * Hall of Fame * Submit Story Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 2 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator. Reply to: Obama will not allow it * Obama will not allow it (Score:2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on 2009-09-18 18:57 (#29472513) Obama initially opposed the retroactive immunity bill, but switched his stance before the vote (and received contributions from the telcos for it, just like all the flip-flopping congressmen did). Having been bought, he won't risk buring any important bridges by biting the hand that fed him. Expect him to veto this bill (if it ever gets to his desk, which it probably won't, for the same reason given above). Reply to This Post Comment Preview Comment * Re:Obama will not allow it (Score:?) by squiggleslash (241428) on 2009-09-18 21:07 Homepage Journal To be precise: Obama voted for all amendments opposing telecom immunity and against all of those supporting it. He voted for an omnibus bill at the end of the process that included telecom immunity but also included too many other measures for it to be fair to suggest any voter was "supporting" telecom immunity specifically. -- My moved journal [livejournal.com] Edit Comment Name squiggleslash [ Log Out ] URL http://squiggleslash.livejournal.com/ Subject Comment

To be precise: Obama voted for all amendments opposing telecom immunity and against all of those supporting it. He voted for an omnibus bill at the end of the process that included telecom immunity but also included too many other measures for it to be fair to suggest any voter was "supporting" telecom immunity specifically.

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I am doing exactly what the OP wants to do. I've been living in my RV (29' 5th wheel trailer) for 6 months, and I'm typing this post over my satellite connection from the northern Cascade mountains in Washington. Here is what I have learned:
1) Satellite is the only way to go when you get out in the boonies. When we started this trip, I had an Openmoko phone as a backup ISP, but I dropped the data plan 2 months later because I almost never had connection.
2) Hughesnet is the only affordable satellite provider. Some other companies resell Hughesnet service. I use Motosat, which caters to the RV market. You will probably have to use a reseller, as Hughesnet's own TOS doesn't allow mobile use and they don't want you as their customer.
3) You can get an ordinary residential Hughesnet dish and mount it on a tripod, but aiming that dish is a royal PITA. www.maxwellsatellite.com sells dish, tripod, and pointing gear as a combo for IIRC $500. But it's still a PITA to point (the record holder from their user's group did it in 5 minutes), and vulnerable to theft. I wouldn't consider it an option if you are going to be moving frequently. A better setup is a roof mounted tracker, like what Motosat makes. Their motorized, and usually acquire the satellite in under 5 minutes with no help from the user. But you're going to have to pay: new systems cost $5k. I got mine used off eBay and installed it myself for $2k. Soldering Iron not required, but expect to cut and crimp a little cable, and of course you have to do the roof mounting. The hardest part was lifting the dish up onto the roof, because it's 80lbs with mount.
4) Contrary to what some other poster said, these dishes are NOT comparable size to TV dishes. They are larger, because they need to transmit info back to the bird. They start at 0.74m diameter. This means that pointing them is harder than pointing a TV dish, and they absolutely cannot be used while in motion.
5) Do not buy an RV with a rubber roof. Just don't.
6) Are you using solar power? I do, and it's worked out quite well. I could give you some tips if you want.
My recommendation would be Hughesnet with a motorized tracker, and a 3G phone if you need connection while moving on the highways. You can learn more about my experiences with the technomadic lifestyle at http://lauralan.livejournal.com/

Don't fall into that trap. The future of that driver is very much an unknown at this point in time. It is unclear if Intel intends to support it, and "clusterfuck" is the word xorg developers have used to describe the project handling so far...

Summary: Do not buy Z series before a proper driver appears, unless you're happy running a specific version of Ubuntu forever, or vesa is good enough for you.

In an application where you need to ensure data is written to somewhere physical on commit the database will call fsync(). This can only be done 250 times per minute on a 15k rpm disk drive. That limits the database to 250 commits a minute. Battery backed or flash cache increases performance here - "The really enormous performance increases that have been found for update-heavy database loads come from another hardware enhancement, namely the RAID controller with battery-backed cache.... On a test involving a workload heavy on updates, with transactions involving relatively few updates, the introduction of this cache increased performance by a factor of 20."

Doesn't look like it at the moment. It's a new feature in glibc 2.10, which isn't yet in Debian (not even unstable, though there's a version in experimental) or in the latest Ubuntu, though it looks like it's in the dev versions of the upcoming late-October Ubuntu release.

The claim "it's just a website" is often trotted out, but it's untrue. It's a website set up to function deliberately as a linkfarm,

How are you defining "linkfarm," here? Wikipedia cites a great deal of Web-addressable information, but when I hear "linkfarm," the primary connotation that I have implies a lack of contribution on the part of said farm in terms of original content or organization. One thing Wikipedia has going for it in spades is organization.

I suppose you could also call Wikipedia a "book citation farm" or a "free image farm" but I'm not sure what these labels contribute to any meaningful conversation other than a cheap putdown.

which has search engine rankings far above what it should have if it were treated like every other linkfarm out there.

Can you please list any one linkfarm which contains a tenth of the information available on Wikipedia?

It's full of inaccurate, possibly libelous, or outright harmful (in the case of many articles regarding drugs/herbs/"homeopathic remedies") statements in most of the articles.

Excellent. This sounds like an opportunity for you to contribute. Excellent idea!

As a "first stop" for "information" for many searchers, it has an amazing ability to influence thought processes,

I'm sensing crazy territory, here... I want to believe that you're a level-headed guy, but any time someone points at a large Web service and starts talking about "influence" on thought processes, you have to expect the hairs on the back of the necks of those of us who have been around the block a few times to come to attention.

and as such is a breeding ground for fights and control-freak behavior from people trying to bias a topic their way.

Yes, absolutely! Wikipedia is full of competing forces trying to bias it toward their personal (sadly, not even that most of the time) views. Sure.

The goal of Wikipedia is to allow all of these parties with competing views of history and knowledge to come together and hash out what the consensus is. It's not a repository of "absolute truth," any more so than a bookstore is. There are true things in bookstores, but there is also a great deal of misinformation, inaccuracy and simple errors. The hope in both cases is that producing this information in a public way will allow us to have the conversation about what we believe to be true about the world around us.

The regulations have already gotten too arduous. Most of the good administrators jumped ship long ago.

Not to be snarky, but I have to ask... do you have some source for this assertion or is this just a guess?

Some have turned around and exposed the ongoing problems.

Sure, there are certainly some with an axe to grind, and certainly there are even going to be some who were actually mistreated. You can't create a large community of people dedicated to gathering information without creating some drama. It's human nature. The fact of the matter is, however, that Wikipedia has succeeded in fulfilling the dream of a hypertextual Web more so than any other site short, arguably, of the larger search engines.

Most simply gave up in disgust. The result? A biased, horribly squished encyclopedia.

You're assuming that there has been an exodus on only one side of any given issue. I don't see any issues where that's the case. Perhaps you do. I don't doubt they exist, just that they're not the norm.

Well-written entries, such as one on PSP homebrew software, were nuked to oblivion because of admins and cliques with an agenda against the topic.

But there appears to still

The claim "it's just a website" is often trotted out, but it's untrue.

It's a website set up to function deliberately as a linkfarm, which has search engine rankings far above what it should have if it were treated like every other linkfarm out there. It's full of inaccurate, possibly libelous, or outright harmful (in the case of many articles regarding drugs/herbs/"homeopathic remedies") statements in most of the articles. As a "first stop" for "information" for many searchers, it has an amazing ability to influence thought processes, and as such is a breeding ground for fights and control-freak behavior from people trying to bias a topic their way.

The regulations have already gotten too arduous. Most of the good administrators jumped ship long ago. Some have turned around and exposed the ongoing problems. Most simply gave up in disgust. The result? A biased, horribly squished encyclopedia. Well-written entries, such as one on PSP homebrew software, were nuked to oblivion because of admins and cliques with an agenda against the topic. Articles that at one time were well balanced have been completely destroyed when counterbalancing interests saw only one side run off the encyclopedia, and the other side now rules the articles with an iron fist. Look back into what happened to the Falafel article when a bunch of organized arabs decided to try to eliminate any mention of Jewish influence (or of Jews or Israel in general) on the dish.

Wikipedia exists, but does not function anymore. And the only way to fix it involves getting rid of the entrenched assholes, whereas the proposed change gives entrenched assholes even more power.

The reason for your dislike of Twilight.


RAINBOWSPARKLE

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?

SELinux is currently weaker in this area for local users. It is stronger in this area for remote network facing daemons. See http://eparis.livejournal.com/ for all the details. Blanket statements in either direction on SELinux and NULL ptr exploits are wrong.

No kidding.

The problem is the incestuous "culture" - or more to the point, the haves-and-have-nots attitude of the majority of their administrators and so-called "respected users" - that works on the basis of gaming the system.

Words by a former wikipedia administrator that showed me how their system really works. And then of course there's scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal (the last one is incredible fun, too... if you think that's the only secret organizing list for abusive wikipedians, admin or no, you're delusional).

Wikipedia doesn't work. It hasn't worked for a long time and I don't think it ever really did. It has horrible bias against anyone who is a verifiable expert in their field. It has MASSIVE problems with cliques going around pushing their agendas and claiming that anyone new coming to an article or set of articles on their favorite topic (global warming, middle eastern conflict/culture, scientology, etc). If you show up with well-researched refutals to the crap that is 99% of wikipedia, you are labeled a "troll", or abused, or targeted by one of their throwaway accounts so that a friendly behind-the-scenes admin can slap an indefinite ban on you. This is deliberate: 20 newcomers to an article might be able to outweigh the morons pushing bad information, but as long as they can pick them off one at a time, they "win" in the wikipedian system.

A few wikipedians have been there "Forever." They'll never go away. More have been there "A very long time" and have developed incestuous, corrupt relationships with each other and with the "forever" types. Meanwhile, anyone new coming in is instantly accused of being a "sockpuppet", "meatpuppet", or whatever other epithet can be thrown at them.

It's no coincidence that the "Checkuser" tool, which was originally ripped out of David Gerard's corrupt grasp after a series of false-attack incidents (privately hushed up, naturally) has on en.wp been removed from the ability to "prove innocence." The accusation of "sockpuppetry" is an abuser's tool of force, pure and simple. In the Wikipedia "judge, jury, and executioner" administrator zone, any tool that could prove someone is innocent is to be neutered as soon as possible.

The statistics on blockings/bannings and responses to them are likewise hidden. Why? Because analysis of these shows what really goes on. Most administrators don't bother to communicate with users when placing a block. They drop indefinites immediately with no remorse, using wikispeak code rather than plain language. The "appeal" process is a laughable joke as well, with maybe 5-8 active "reviewers" who basically use it as a stress-relief tool, beating up on people who are helpless (because they don't have the admin bit) to begin with.

Face it. Wikipedia is worthless with the current "leadership." All the good editors and conscientious administrators were driven away long ago.

http://lol-comics.livejournal.com/63218.html

my blog was under DDoS atack, I replace it to http://cyxymu1.livejournal.com/

Obviously this user is used to DDoS and is quite aware of being at the wrong (could say both sides are wrong) end of them.

Let's not let the facts get in the way of rabid fanboyism! After all, Linux is 100%, completely secure! There are magical GPL fairies in the kernel that protect it from any and all attacks, even when the app in question is from a 3rd party.

Maybe not fairies, but you do have mechanisms like SElinux - which can run web browser plugins in a confined mode.

First a quick clarification: Intel X25 series SSDs do not use their RAM as a data writeback cache. Intel ships racks full of both M and E series drives, with those drives living in a RAID configuration. They couldn't pull that off if the array was corrupted on power loss.

While it would be nice if this were true, since Intel's FAQ references a write cache and database-oriented tests like the one I referenced show data corruption, the paranoid (which includes everyone who works on database and similar enterprise apps) have to presume there's still a problem until some trustworthy studies to the contrary appear. Please let me know if you're aware of any. Your argument of "they couldn't pull that off" is not a data point, because millions of hard drives with a lying write cache are shipped every year to people who think they're just fine, and who don't experience corruption on power loss. Those same drives show corruption just fine if you do a database-oriented corruption test on them.

Until I see SSD vendors giving very clear statements about their write caching and they start passing tests specifically aimed at discovering this type of corruption, you have to assume that the situation with them is just as bad as it's always been with regular IDE or SATA disks--drives lie. The only such test I've seen so far using the Intel drives is from Vadim, the X25-E failed. It would be great if the coverage you were doing at PC Perspective, expanded to cover this issue fully; write-cache enabled?, diskchecker.pl, and faking the sync have good introductions to this issue and how to run such tests yourself.

First a quick clarification: Intel X25 series SSDs do not use their RAM as a data writeback cache. Intel ships racks full of both M and E series drives, with those drives living in a RAID configuration. They couldn't pull that off if the array was corrupted on power loss.

While it would be nice if this were true, since Intel's FAQ references a write cache and database-oriented tests like the one I referenced show data corruption, the paranoid (which includes everyone who works on database and similar enterprise apps) have to presume there's still a problem until some trustworthy studies to the contrary appear. Please let me know if you're aware of any. Your argument of "they couldn't pull that off" is not a data point, because millions of hard drives with a lying write cache are shipped every year to people who think they're just fine, and who don't experience corruption on power loss. Those same drives show corruption just fine if you do a database-oriented corruption test on them.

Until I see SSD vendors giving very clear statements about their write caching and they start passing tests specifically aimed at discovering this type of corruption, you have to assume that the situation with them is just as bad as it's always been with regular IDE or SATA disks--drives lie. The only such test I've seen so far using the Intel drives is from Vadim, the X25-E failed. It would be great if the coverage you were doing at PC Perspective, expanded to cover this issue fully; write-cache enabled?, diskchecker.pl, and faking the sync have good introductions to this issue and how to run such tests yourself.

I'm so sick of your pro-chechen propaganda. Oh yeah, evil Putin's militia kills history teachers. Do you seriously believe this crap? Just think one minute why Putin would ever need it. On the other hand, chechens and other "oppressed" minorities commit murders and other lesser crimes even in Moscow and are being set free on regular basis.

take this
http://www.lenta.ru/articles/2009/04/27/race/
(in short: chechens drive several cars on Moscow central streets, firing traumatic guns at random people and cars, seized and was releazed with no charge)

or this
http://pioneer-lj.livejournal.com/1221802.html
(in short: chechens kill some russians, the police doesn't interfere, people create meeting to make the police arrest the killers, was severely suppressed. The chechen criminals are not affected)

Both articles in Russian.

and so on, and so on...

Posting anonimously because you are brainwashed by anti-putin propaganda and unlikely to even check the facts. I myself don't like Putin or Medvedev but for exactly opposite reason than you: chechens are killing russians and Putin doesn't do anything to make it stop.

I totally called this, back in 2007, when LiveJournal started to use SpinVox's services.

I was suspicious at the time, and started to look for information. What I found made me absolutely sure that at least part of it wasn't actually as automated as it was made out to be, and in fact, gave me the distinct feeling that it was mostly manually done by humans.

I started to write an article on the subject that I was going to publish in the LJ community "no_lj_ads". Being a Support volunteer, I had access to the feature before it was released for general use, and I was able to make some observations. However, although I made good progress on the article, it was never finished. There were lots of points to make, and it wasn't long after that that LiveJournal was the subject of a controversy known as "Strikethrough". The article got buried on my computer and forgotten about, half-finished.

In 2008, I dug up the article again, completed it using notes that I had left, and reposted it to my LiveJournal. I'll reproduce it here, too, because I think people will be interested.

Remember, this article was originally made in 2007. Because of that, some of the links are now defunct. The article has been slightly edited in places in order to note where this is the case; these edits will be noted [2008: Like this!] or [2009: Like this!], depending on whether I noticed it in my 2008 reposting, or in this 2009 reposting.

On to the article!

The Problem of Logistics
First, let me address the obvious problem of logistics. Yes, logistics are a big problem. LiveJournal has tons of users, to put it mildly, and SpinVox already has quite a lot of clients, I believe. If SpinVox weren't fully automated, how could they solve this problem? Is SpinVox some sort of sweatshop?

To tell the truth - I don't know how SpinVox solve that. It seems like for that reason alone SpinVox would be an automated system, and I'll be the first to admit that it's a good question that deserves an answer, and a good reason to believe it's automated. On the other hand, though, I believe I have evidence that shows pretty strongly that all is not automated. I'll be covering that evidence here.

The Evidence
Well, let's get started with some obvious points. The first thing to do is to look at some random people's journals and check out the quality of the transcription for yourself, so go check out the post in paidmembers and click to some random commenters' journals. Chances are, most of them will probably have made a voice post by now to test the system, and auto-transcription only occurs on public entries, so you have a good chance of finding some. Heck, some commenters link to their posts for you. Go check them out. I'll be here when you get back. (If you want, you can also try this Google Blog Search search for recent voicepoists too, but not all of them will be from paid members, and Google doesn't pick up all of them.)

Okay, you're back? Cool. You've probably noticed that the quality of the transcriptions is really pretty good, but obviously it still makes mistakes. That's okay - it's to be expected, from an automated system, right? And yes, it *is* to be expected. No automated system is perfect. Mistakes will always be made. I encourage you to bear this in mind and be skeptical about what I have to say. Analyse it for yourself; don't let me brainwash you. Be skeptical, it's healthy for you.

Pros
Having said that, however, SpinVox is still very awesome, if we consider it to be automated:

1. It understands a wide variety of accents.
2. It understands when you speak quickly.
3. It works over the phone.
4. It doesn't mind background noise, or quiet voices.
5. It knows when and how to

I totally called this, back in 2007, when LiveJournal started to use SpinVox's services.

I was suspicious at the time, and started to look for information. What I found made me absolutely sure that at least part of it wasn't actually as automated as it was made out to be, and in fact, gave me the distinct feeling that it was mostly manually done by humans.

I started to write an article on the subject that I was going to publish in the LJ community "no_lj_ads". Being a Support volunteer, I had access to the feature before it was released for general use, and I was able to make some observations. However, although I made good progress on the article, it was never finished. There were lots of points to make, and it wasn't long after that that LiveJournal was the subject of a controversy known as "Strikethrough". The article got buried on my computer and forgotten about, half-finished.

In 2008, I dug up the article again, completed it using notes that I had left, and reposted it to my LiveJournal. I'll reproduce it here, too, because I think people will be interested.

Remember, this article was originally made in 2007. Because of that, some of the links are now defunct. The article has been slightly edited in places in order to note where this is the case; these edits will be noted [2008: Like this!] or [2009: Like this!], depending on whether I noticed it in my 2008 reposting, or in this 2009 reposting.

On to the article!

The Problem of Logistics
First, let me address the obvious problem of logistics. Yes, logistics are a big problem. LiveJournal has tons of users, to put it mildly, and SpinVox already has quite a lot of clients, I believe. If SpinVox weren't fully automated, how could they solve this problem? Is SpinVox some sort of sweatshop?

To tell the truth - I don't know how SpinVox solve that. It seems like for that reason alone SpinVox would be an automated system, and I'll be the first to admit that it's a good question that deserves an answer, and a good reason to believe it's automated. On the other hand, though, I believe I have evidence that shows pretty strongly that all is not automated. I'll be covering that evidence here.

The Evidence
Well, let's get started with some obvious points. The first thing to do is to look at some random people's journals and check out the quality of the transcription for yourself, so go check out the post in paidmembers and click to some random commenters' journals. Chances are, most of them will probably have made a voice post by now to test the system, and auto-transcription only occurs on public entries, so you have a good chance of finding some. Heck, some commenters link to their posts for you. Go check them out. I'll be here when you get back. (If you want, you can also try this Google Blog Search search for recent voicepoists too, but not all of them will be from paid members, and Google doesn't pick up all of them.)

Okay, you're back? Cool. You've probably noticed that the quality of the transcriptions is really pretty good, but obviously it still makes mistakes. That's okay - it's to be expected, from an automated system, right? And yes, it *is* to be expected. No automated system is perfect. Mistakes will always be made. I encourage you to bear this in mind and be skeptical about what I have to say. Analyse it for yourself; don't let me brainwash you. Be skeptical, it's healthy for you.

Pros
Having said that, however, SpinVox is still very awesome, if we consider it to be automated:

1. It understands a wide variety of accents.
2. It understands when you speak quickly.
3. It works over the phone.
4. It doesn't mind background noise, or quiet voices.
5. It knows when and how to

It is a botnet that happens to include key logging and other phishing features. It even features an EULA:

http://jabolins.livejournal.com/16538.html

The same model worked for Wolfgang Baur and creating RPG modules (http://open-design.livejournal.com/).

I searched articles in that group for that day and it's been deleted.

It wouldn't surprise me if it got swept out in an automated song-lyric purge. Copyrights, you know. The irony is my posting here in 2004 got the explicit after-the-fact blessing from Higgins. See http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=114837&cid=9760539, http://slashdot.org/~beamjockey/journal/61635, and http://beamjockey.livejournal.com/.

Not really, keep doing it like that. for how to do that read this: http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html

I'm kinda a 'option 1' guy, but stuff that's really important, I just burn on to DVD every so often.

The other option, now that most folk now have halfdecent connections is to set up an rsync to a buddies machine, (and reciprocate) , using encryption, you now have an automatic off site back up.

Good point. Bram Cohen made a relevant post today about Ludology in City of Heroes:

Consider a game with the following semantics: You sit, unmoving, for two hours, with no user feedback, no buttons to push, nothing, completely passive, while the game plays out in front of you, exactly the same way as it would for anybody else. This sounds like a terrible game, but it's exactly what movies are, and movies are very popular and get little criticism that they're terrible games.

The first thing to learn about RAID or any other technology that you're using for enhanced reliability: If you use it without first testing it in failure scenarios you might encounter and figuring out exactly what you need to do to fix it (e.g. How do you tell which piece of hardware has failed? How will you know to respond if the automatic failover doesn't work? etc.), you might as well just pretend that instead of spending your time and/or money on a redundant solution you just took a vacation and/or lit the money on fire because that's effectively what you will have done.

With that in mind, although I tend to think I know what I'm talking about, you can take the rest of my advice as help brainstorming those failure scenarios and hints about answering those how-will-I-fix-it questions, but it's no substitute for knowing and testing your own set-up and checking the answers yourself. Okay?

Good.

After having been burned by a not-so-cheap, dedicated RAID controller, I have been pointed to software RAID solutions

Gross generalization for the short attention span crowd: RAID 1 seems simple, but there are lots of options and lots of details to get right. And if you've run into the limits of your knowledge dealing with RAID 1 on a dedicated RAID controller, then going to a software RAID 1 solution (which often doesn't secure against all the same problems and gives you more things to troubleshoot directly when things go wrong) may not make your life simpler...

In particular, remember that although your RAID 1 array stores some metadata, it probably doesn't keep track of which disk has the most up-to-date copy of each block, so if you manage to get two working but out-of-sync disks, take care when you're deciding which disk to restore the set from. Also remember that as we approach 1 unrecoverable read error per disk territory, the same wisdom about replacing RAID 5 with RAID 6 also applies to 2-disk RAID 1.

Moving on... =)

In the world of always-busy transactional databases and server systems, RAID is seen as part of complete breakfast of 100% storage reliability, and people want it to guarantee that whenever a program's explicit request to sync a disk write goes through, the data is definitely going to make it to disk despite a power or equipment failure. This means:

• Using journaling file systems
• Turning OFF all disks' on-board write caches (i.e. disk write buffers)
• And usually for decent performance, a hardware RAID controller with a long enough battery backup of its cache, or long enough UPS + generator coverage, or both)

You can test that syncs are working properly by doing plug-pull tests (e.g. see http://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html)

If uptime is important, they'll also have:

• Disk/RAID controllers and drive module/bays that support for hot swapping
• Software tools on the system for controlling the hot swapping/recovery
• Monitoring/notification software to tell someone about the failure so that the dead drive can be swapped before the other one fails too
• Spares on hand
• Perhaps also hot standby drives in place

At the other end of the spectrum, RAID 1 is sometimes used on desktop PCs as a real-time 'backup' solution for people who are too 'busy' (i.e. lazy) to make real backups.
In the world of single-user PCs, the conventional wisdom is that most applications operate on documents in RAM (where they are vulnerable to power failures anyway), and only write them to disk occasionally when the user explicitly asks for it, so it has become common practice to leave disk buffers on for better write performance at the risk of data loss if a file is being written during a power failure. Application-level recovery features and journaling file systems have allowed this approach to survive into the era of PCs with modern multitasking operating systems. If you're willing to take the performance hit, you

May I be the first to welcome our new Tuna overloards...

No you may not.

May I be the first to say you can tune a filesystem but you can't tuna fish. Oh wait, someone beat me to it.

I'm afraid I found this article quite shallow when it comes down to it, although a lot of that is because last year I wrote a piece on this subject that was published in The Escapist as "The Anatomy of Violence." It covered why some people call first person shooter games "murder simulators," what the psychological underpinnings are behind the theory, and what impact it can have in the real world.

There are two versions - the one The Escapist published was edited down a fair bit, and can be found here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_153/4960-The-Anatomy-of-Violence

The "extended" version - the one The Escapist didn't edit down - can be found here: http://garwulf.livejournal.com/38455.html

Not to put down the author of this article, but I think mine is really worth looking at here, and adds a lot that is missing (the SLA Marshall link is what makes the "murder simulator" theory make sense, among other things).

Of course, the real discussion around including Mono by default is not about Tomboy. If they donâ(TM)t want of it, the debian-installer team just has to include GNote in the gnome-desktop task to get it by default instead of Tomboy; note that this is possible since I added an or dependency, precisely as you suggested. No, the applications that are going to make a difference are things like GNOME Do and F-Spot. If we want to include these cool applications that have no real alternative (even proprietary), this will include the Mono stack as well. And there are no stripped down C++ versions of those.

and..

The reason why Tomboy was not included in the default Lenny installation is not because of stupid software patents. If we gave a shit of inapplicable software patents, we wouldnâ(TM)t be shipping MP3 decoding software by default. If we gave a shit, we wouldnâ(TM)t ship Mono in main, regardless of what is in the default installation. We donâ(TM)t give a shit of where is Mono coming from, as long as it is free software. As Jo explained, we donâ(TM)t even give a shit of what Mono is, it just happens to be a dependency for Tomboy. No, the reason why Tomboy was not here by default is simply because its dependency stack was too big for some installation media. Now, the Debian Mono team managed to reduce a bit the installation size, and the availability of GNote as an alternative is giving a last-resort choice that will be much smaller.

(/. mangled my last paragraph)
http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/?p=124 irrational?
http://np237.livejournal.com/24065.html zealots?
http://robertmh.wordpress.com/?p=12 hm, this whole argument was blown out of proportion by the GNOTES DEVELOPER. Sounds more like a whiny developer pissed that his package wasn't included rather than a real issue.
"These are *APPLICATIONS* and forcing me to install them is, to my mind, antithetical to the open source ideal." No one is forcing you to install anything. Every reasonably competant debian user knows NOT TO INSTALL THE METAPACKAGES! Anyone else should run Ubuntu.
"Evolution serves no useful purpose in today's world" huh? Right, so the only thing that is going to ever get GNU/Linux accepted as a replacement for MS Windows in corporate settings is useless?
"It's just like Wine and DOSEmu: a gateway to viruses that originated on Microsoft platforms." ...what? It's not a fucking interpreter or an emulator, it's a compiler for Christ's sake! Read your fucking code before you compile it if you're that scared of the "M$ BOOGY MONSTER."
Altogether, this whole argument just goes to show that users, even GNU/Linux users can be grossly uneducated on topics, hearing Microsoft, and jumping on the attack. We should mysteriously drop F-Spot and GnomeDo and Evolution and see how these morons react.

And ubuntu even threatening their users to install a lower quality Mono-dependent music player to replace Rhythmbox just because the Mono zealots are very, very loud about how they want to push this MS technology on everybody using free software.

Almost as loud as the people opposed to "MS technology," developed before Microsoft had anything to do with Novell or any other GNU/Linux.

I like bashing Microsoft as much as the next guy, but only when it's necessary. If anyone on /. actually kept up with the Debian blogosphere and Planet Debian, they'd see that there are two sides to every issue, and those sides aren't always political.

http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/?p=124 http://np237.livejournal.com/24065.html http://robertmh.wordpress.com/?p=12 "These are *APPLICATIONS* and forcing me to install them is, to my mind, antithetical to the open source ideal." "Evolution serves no useful purpose in today's world" Altogether, this whole argument just goes to show that users, even GNU/Linux users can be grossly uneducated on topics, hearing Microsoft, and jumping on the attack. We should mysteriously drop F-Spot and GnomeDo and Evolution and see how these morons react.

See this one? Decapitation, 1993

These two are anime / sci-fi podcasters, whose show is called the Ninja Consultants. They discuss their wedding plans and how they're pulling it together in an April episode. They're pretty cool people (I met them at Anime Weekend Atlanta a few times): Erin worked on a couple of animated series and writes for Otaku USA.

These two are anime / sci-fi podcasters, whose show is called the Ninja Consultants. They discuss their wedding plans and how they're pulling it together in an April episode. They're pretty cool people (I met them at Anime Weekend Atlanta a few times): Erin worked on a couple of animated series and writes for Otaku USA.

Fedora provides an SELinux restricted account that doesn't need a password when running SELinux in enforcing mode. See:
http://magazine.redhat.com/2008/04/17/fedora-9-and-summit-preview-confining-the-user-with-selinux/
http://magazine.redhat.com/2008/07/02/writing-policy-for-confined-selinux-users/
http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/11913.html

lol, wut?

"Veteran" is a word that has always referred to a person who has served in a military, especially during wartime, at any point during their life.

I, for example, served in the Air Force for four years, spent Four months in Baghdad, and another Five months in Afghanistan, and am now out of the military and going back to school. I am, nevertheless, "a Veteran of the Iraqi and Afghani wars".

I spent most of my time in those respective areas as a technician, on base. I did, however, get the chance to go off base from time to time, and even, yes, speak with some civilians. As a result, I'm quite familiar with the living conditions over there.

Now, "A veteran of the colonial wars from 1709" spent longer on a ship, sailing to wherever it was he was going to be fighting, than I spent in the desert, total. The tour was longer, living conditions were harsher, food was worse, and you were MUCH more likely to end up dead, whether from direct combat, drowning, disease, malnourishment, or any number of other horribly lethal things I was much less likely to fall victim to.

Lastly, even if we WERE referring to civilians, the number of civilian casualties is entirely a function of the victorious army's plans. For example: The Native American population was damn near wiped out as a result of colonial-era wars!

-----

What's my point here? War is a very dangerous place. If a particular army wants you dead (whether you're in an existing army, or a civilian that just happens to be in the way) - chances are you'll die, or come close to it.

If a particular army does NOT want you dead, but you get injured anyways, your chances of surviving in the modern era are much higher, due to advances in medicine, antibiotics, etc.

lol, wut?

"Veteran" is a word that has always referred to a person who has served in a military, especially during wartime, at any point during their life.

I, for example, served in the Air Force for four years, spent Four months in Baghdad, and another Five months in Afghanistan, and am now out of the military and going back to school. I am, nevertheless, "a Veteran of the Iraqi and Afghani wars".

I spent most of my time in those respective areas as a technician, on base. I did, however, get the chance to go off base from time to time, and even, yes, speak with some civilians. As a result, I'm quite familiar with the living conditions over there.

Now, "A veteran of the colonial wars from 1709" spent longer on a ship, sailing to wherever it was he was going to be fighting, than I spent in the desert, total. The tour was longer, living conditions were harsher, food was worse, and you were MUCH more likely to end up dead, whether from direct combat, drowning, disease, malnourishment, or any number of other horribly lethal things I was much less likely to fall victim to.

Lastly, even if we WERE referring to civilians, the number of civilian casualties is entirely a function of the victorious army's plans. For example: The Native American population was damn near wiped out as a result of colonial-era wars!

-----

What's my point here? War is a very dangerous place. If a particular army wants you dead (whether you're in an existing army, or a civilian that just happens to be in the way) - chances are you'll die, or come close to it.

If a particular army does NOT want you dead, but you get injured anyways, your chances of surviving in the modern era are much higher, due to advances in medicine, antibiotics, etc.

No its more along the lines of "Bing back the Bling" this is just a money train on a crash course. http://pics.livejournal.com/bingbackdabling/pic/000011se Hilarious.

Ahem,
http://rdieter.livejournal.com/14133.html

Enjoy. :)

Yes, people are still having Zune... hopefully they are now using condoms.