Since the objective is to recover disk space, the smallest couple of million files are unlikely to do very much for you at all. It's the big files that are the issue in most situations.

Compile a list of all your files, sorted by size. The ones that are the same size and the same name are probably the same file. If you're paranoid about duplicate file names and sizes (entirely plausible in some situations), then crc32 or byte-wise comparison can be done for reasonable or absolute certainty. Presumably at that point, to maintain integrity of any links to these files, you'll want to replace the files with hard links (not soft links!) so that you can later manually delete any of the "copies" without hurting all the other "copies". (There won't be separate copies, just hard links to one copy.)

If you give up after a week, or even a day, at least you will have made progress on the most important stuff.

Theresa May has not said "NO" and indeed has not responded at all. The report quotes a press release that was issued before my petition was even launched. There has been no response to me at all so far.

Every signature counts as they are clearly feeling the pressure.

Jimmy Wales

For the record: I really thought that champagne cooler was empty.

In 1997, right after Chips n' Dips had faded away, to be replaced by the enigmatically named http:///..org, all of us free software nerds hung on its every story, comment and poll like it was carved on tablet and flung from a burning bush. A year later I had started at hardware maker VA Research and /. was falling down for lack of machinery, so we rummaged through our returns piles and sent Rob and Jeff some 2u servers to help out. That was for me the beginning of some of the most important friendships in my adult life.

Its hard to explain how important Slashdot was to all of us 10 years ago. Indeed, without it it would be hard to imagine HN, Reddit, Digg, Fark or any of a thousand lesser sites. The editorial perspective of Rob and the other editors of /. is what kept people coming back and for a long time that perspective was Rob's, then Rob and Jeff and a bunch of us (some, like Timothy and samzenpus, still around!), but then Jeff left, now Rob. In some way I see this as a passing of an era in free software.

Throughout, while some have left for those greener shores, slashdot abided even while buffeted by the markets and the de/evolving internet news world, and it has remained a default tab in my and many others' browsers.

I didn't mean this post to be about Slashdot though, but about my friend Rob. I'll only say that while the site will be the lessor for you leaving, I firmly believe that computer science will gain my. While this note reads like an epitaph or the last pages of a book, it is really no more than a thank you note from me and many I know to your for your decade+ of work on the site. So...

Thanks.

Sorry, but Theora is still not as high quality as later codecs. That hasn't changed. But I was very happy to fund this work out of my group.

Hey, the fellows in netops asked me to clarify for you folks here's the story:

1e100.net is a Google-owned domain name used to identify the servers in our network. Following standard industry practice, we make sure each IP address has a corresponding hostname. Starting in October 2009, we started using a single domain name to identify our servers across all Google products, rather than use different product domains such as youtube.com, blogger.com, and google.com. We did this for two reasons: first, to keep things simpler, and second, to proactively improve security by protecting against potential threats such as cross-site scripting attacks. Most typical Internet users will never see 1e100.net, but we picked we picked a Googley name for it just in case (1e100 is scientific notation for 1 googol).

So there you go!

If you head over to LWN, we've already gone back and forth on this a bit. http://lwn.net/Articles/372419/. The short form is that if they don't like how we use the kernel, we're unlikely to be accepted upstream. It's all still released as source code to the world, but the mainline is not interested in most of what we've with to the kernel.

This is good advice, and gives me an opportunity to speak to the community at large: some of us who go to cons and are in a position to shake tons of hands politely decline. It's not because we're being dicks, it's because we know it's a good way to substantially decrease our chances of catching and spreading any germs.

I played the PAX Pandemic game, where the Enforcers handed out stickers to attendees that read [Carrier] [Infected] or [Immune] (There was also a [Patient Zero].

I got the [Immune] sticker, and by the time I got home on Monday, it was clear that I had the flu. I've had a fever between 100 and 104 all week that finally broke last night, but I'm going to the doctor today because I think whatever I had settled into my lungs. I'll tell him about the H1N1 outbreak and get tested if he wants to run the test, but at this point I think it's safe to assume that I was [Immune] to the Pig Plague, but definitely [Infected] with the damn PAX pox.

Even though it's been a week of misery, it was entirely worth it, and I don't regret going to PAX for a single second.

Hi, Eric Heimburg here (quoted in article).

I just wanted to clarify that although I was the producer for Asheron's Call 2, and have been lead engineer/lead designer for other MMO titles, I'm not affiliated with the upcoming Star Trek MMO. I worked on an earlier incarnation of the Star Trek MMO, when it was being made by Perpetual. (They went bankrupt and lost the license.) Somehow wires got crossed in the Wired article, and then they got crossed here, too.

This detail would be irrelevant and not worth mentioning, except that the company making the new Star Trek MMO is also making the superhero MMO "Champions Online" -- a direct competitor to CoH.

So there's been a meme of "he's a shill for the competition!" going on at Wired.com, which makes me sad. I am not a shill for any major MMO company... at the moment.

However, I am hyping my amazing blog at http://www.eldergame.com/ but a link to it always seems to get omitted in the article coverage...