Poll
What topics would we like to see here?
Operating systems
35 votes (13%)
Gadgets, hardware hacks
30 votes (11%)
Security, espionage, encryption
34 votes (13%)
Politics
7 votes (3%)
Biology, chemistry, physics
24 votes (9%)
Astronomy
27 votes (10%)
Tech company news
23 votes (9%)
Cloud technology
14 votes (5%)
Mobile, Android, iOS, etc.
23 votes (9%)
Online rights, etc.
30 votes (11%)
Gaming
17 votes (6%)
Other (explain in comments)
5 votes (2%)
16 comments
269 votes
Reply 15 comments

Alternative OSes (Score: 3, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-12 11:08 (#22A)

I might be alone in this, but I find articles about non-mainstream OS advancements interesting too. Sailfish mobile OS, potentially the Firefox and/or Ubuntu mobile OSes, and all that other stuff like SkyOS, the lesser known BSDs, Plan 9, VMS, etc. That kind of stuff - what are the alternatives to the status quo, since I get bored with "normal" so quickly?

Software and GUI advances (Score: 2, Interesting)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-12 11:10 (#22B)

I have discovered tons of interesting software - for Linux and other OSes - by reading Slashdot over the past years. People write in with "how do you solve this problem" and the others respond with software I never knew existed. I discovered Puppet this way, for example. I love this kind of article - not sure if others like them too. I'm also keen on the latest news on what KDE, Gnome etc. are doing - but I find people seem to be getting this information elsewhere these days, so maybe it's not a popular topic.

Pipedot feed (Score: 2, Informative)

by hyper@pipedot.org on 2014-06-12 12:28 (#22M)

The Pipedot feed is a good starting point for the day

No iOS/Android crap (Score: 1, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-12 12:31 (#22N)

A mix of LWN, OpenBSD Journal, Ars and Physorg is fine. But cut down the mobile section, I don't want to see yet another site that does 50% Android/iPhone "news" that doesn't interest anyone.

Can't Vote (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-12 13:27 (#22P)

'cause I'm an anonymous coward, but glad to see that Politics has zero votes so far. The rest of the current tally is more or less in line with my own interests, minimal gaming and maximum tech, maybe some general science. I don't mind mobile news at all.

That "feed" link is quite helpful, showing tech news from various sites. I didn't know about it. I think we should be discussing various stories from that feed directly on this site, without waiting for one to be reposted to the "Pipe".

Re: Can't Vote (Score: 4, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-12 14:49 (#22S)

I happen to agree with you about the politics. I get really annoyed when I go to tech sites expecting a break/relief from that kind of news, and find it on the tech site too. I hate politics, don't want it on my tech sites, which are kind of like a refuge to me. Exception only if there's a tech angle, like busted Diebold machines, or something like that.

Re: Can't Vote (Score: 1)

by computermachine@pipedot.org on 2014-06-12 15:17 (#22V)

I agree with everything in the above post. Some political stories fit in, but politics isn't why I come here.

Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 1)

by koen@pipedot.org on 2014-06-12 16:28 (#22Y)

At this point 101 have voted, the highest count is "operating systems" with 14%

I'm a bit surprized, I would expect it to be far over 50%, the same goes for some of the other categories.

I added the percentages, they add up to 99%, which is not even 100% - I would expect a sum closer to, say, 200%.

Why come to this iste if you're hardly interested in the subjects discussed around here?

The only explanation I can imagine is that voters do not realize they can vote for more than one option (or even all of them) - maybe that needs to be made clear in the header. Or is the |. approval vote system bugged?

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-12 17:47 (#230)

The article on the front page makes it clear how to participate in this vote.

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 1)

by axsdenied@pipedot.org on 2014-06-13 04:36 (#239)

I don't know how and why you would have 200%. That makes no sense at all. We are talking about percentages and not about individual votes.

The votes are normalised so that the total is 100%. The sum of 99% that you see is probably the rounding error. 14% of the total votes is "operating systems'.

This is what you would expect and this is the usual way of representing similar data.

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 1)

by koen@pipedot.org on 2014-06-13 07:46 (#23D)

I guess you are right.

I had interpreted the "number of votes" as "the number of voters" (actually: I considered filling in several boxes as one vote, but that has the same result) and assumed the results were normalized over the number of voters.

It would be nice if the results would also show how many voters there are.

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 1)

by quadrox@pipedot.org on 2014-06-13 08:01 (#23E)

But it would be interesting to see how many percent of individual voters are interested in one topic or another. Right now there is no way of knowing if every voter is interested in only a single topic, or if every voter likes several topics - the number here would look the exact same, but the meaning would be vastly different. The current format gives us no way of knowing which scenario is true (or closer to the truth).

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-13 10:24 (#23G)

So far, we're seeing pretty even interest across all the topics, and not many write-in options. I'm not sure we're learning a huge amount, here.

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-13 15:17 (#23H)

No offense intended, but are you really surprised the numbers are low? I don't have access to your logs, but from what I can tell, hardly anyone is visiting Pipedot.

I'm one of the more frequent posters, but always anonymous, and so I couldn't even vote.

At this very low sample size, averaging might be expected; I don't know that one could really determine anything from the poll yet.

I hope this is just pessimistic and that Pipedot's audience is increasing; its design, thoughtfulness, and editorial quality deserve it.

Robotics (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-13 20:58 (#23K)

I would like to see some articles specifically related to robotics.