Agreed. I enjoyed listening to him at the Perl Conference 1997 and his "Cathedral and the Bazaar" and, to a lesser extent "Homsteading the Noosphere", essays were useful. I used fetchmail when I had dialup. Everything he has uttered since has been unenjoyable.

Thanks for the links, especially the SIAM one. Some of those ideas I touched on in my Honours thesis as my project was directly affected by the issues of lost programs; old media storage where was were parts of programs found; a paper with an idealised function only described with a graph; incomplete mathematical description of a model component. I have begun planning future research along with a methodology to avoid a lot of the above issues.

Tridge started Samba.

I open up emacs and update my "file-of-notes-on-topic-x"

That would be non-avian dinosaur feathers.

Are you sure about those records?

From NOAA's National Climate Data Center list of temperature records in July 2011: "Out of a possible 173,311 records: 1,564 (Broken) + 1,086 (Tied) = 2,650 Total"

I heartily agree. Many Slashdot commenters are indistinguishable from Youtubers.

I saw a lot of cheating in labs and in the study rooms when I did Computer Science in the late 1970s. Sharing code printouts was the most common. [I justified my poor marks to myself that I did not have enough friends in Computer Science. It was more like I was easily distracted]

This post should be Moderated "Ungrateful sod". A bunch of volunteers pull out all stops to put together a conference against some daunting odds and you expect someone to type up a transcript for you? How much are you going to pay for it?