Recent Comments

Needs more JavaScript to really be 2.0. :)

BBS + Google Analytics + rounded corners = BBS 2.0?

But then only the admins know. It's cool when we as a community all have a sense of who we are and where we are. Like the good old BBS days.

This is what google analytics is for.

Yes, except that they actually did.

The language as a whole gets bigger because it maintains backwards compatibility. This is good.

The part of the language that you actually use on a daily basis gets smaller. This is also good.

The code you write today is simpler. The code you wrote 10 years ago still works. That looks like success to me.

There are probably other ways, but remember zafiro17 is a lowly editor, not a server admin :) And anyway, the honor system is probably more appropriate to a friendly bunch of techies than an invasive HTML trick. I happen to dislike webpages that request my location and refuse to grant it. If I visit Google to look up a question and they want to know my location, I feel like Google can just piss off - since my location doesn't affect either my question or the answer. (unless I'm googling for the closest brewpub or something).

24 hours, perhaps? Actually probably a few days since there are probably readers who don't check Pipedot every day.

I'm a little surprised they didn't just geolocate the IPs of the posters and produced a graph from that, although it could be interesting to do compare the results of that with the results from the poll.

Given that half our users are probably asleep :)

For what it's worth, here is a map, if you aren't sure: http://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/

To those of you reading Pipedot from the international dateline who are conflicted about whether to choose the GMT+12 or GMT-12 option, you'll get no sympathy from me because you are probably living in an island paradise and have too much free time on your hands!

"Fire one-million. You heard me. One million!"

Feels like innovation has been replaced with acquisition. Things have a way of slowing down when all the little guys become parts of the big guys.

Complete bid history is available. The usernames are obscured, but there's enough to see what you want to know:

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&item=221509460160&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2565

Bids over $1000 were places by more than 10 different accounts! There were 15 total. Now, whether those accounts are legitimate or not is another story.

Verizon has it's own history that predates AT&T. I don't mean to argue with what you say, which is accurate, but Verizon wasn't sprung from the forehead of AT&T fully-formed, so to speak. They were GTE, which dates to Hawaiian Monarchy in the 1800's. Eventually they were rolled up into the giant that was AT&T, and then later split back off.

I think it's an important distinction. They are not AT&T, AT&T is still around competing with Verizon. They will never recombine, as GTE isn't the small regional company it once was. So the breakup, while not lasting at the level it once did with many small regional telephone companies, has at least created two behemoths that will always fight it out. The battlefield is also changing, as they aren't fighting over POTS maintenance anymore, but rather cellular, television, internet, and digital voice. Each of those areas has multiple large competitors, such as Sprint, DishTV, Comcast, and Vonage in that order.

So I disagree with speculation about how AT&T is recombining into the monopolistic super-power it once was.

Verizon has had issues for a number of years now. There are simply not enough people that WANT copper to support the weight of their infrastructure. Yes, I know it is subsidized, but Verizon is a BIIIIG company, and there is a reason they qualified for those subsidies. (Yes, they actually do qualify, it's not simply a case of "senator so-and-so in my back pocket" though I'm sure that helps)

Before Fios came out, there was talk about further separating their successful wireless business from their failing (yup) landline business. Fios being part of landline, many in the company have looked to it as their Savior. Not surprising that they want people to switch. Fios is profitable, copper is not. If they can get enough people to switch, they can try to make the case that there isn't enough customer demand for the aging technology, and maybe, MAYBE they won't have to keep supporting it. Dumping that piece of the business would probably even give them the leverage over the unions they'd need to scale back the northern workforce (In the south, it's all contractors) It's a big deal for them.

Without copper they would likely lose their government subsidies, so is there a reason to INSIST that they support a part of their business that they no longer want to support? Yes, there are some people that want to keep copper wires because they can be more reliable.. but I've known people in my life that wanted to keep their outhouses because the new-fangled replacements weren't appealing to them, weren't as simple, relied on running water (which like HSI might not be available in a disaster/storm/lapse in payments) and yet most would agree that the advances outweigh the potential pitfalls. I haven't heard anyone in the last few years advocating outhouses.

Will cellular/digital phones vs copper be all that different in 10-20 years?

What a well thought out and accurate description of the grill, thanks for the write up!
One minor point; most releases are still based on Debian sid.
The ubuntu release was more of a response to 'ubuntu is so bloated' - maybe the main edition, but hand pick your packages and it's fine, that release makes it simple.
I've been running one of the older releases for over a year now and due to the grillmeister mixing his sauce to perfection (leaving out gtk3 helped) haven't had any hideous problems at all.
The forum is a top place too, packed with as many scripts and wise linux veterans as you can hope for.

I wish. Somehow, though, I think they've found yet another way to misuse the token <. It's what they do.

Thought about it, but it seemed so irrelevant compared to the others - not just in its dollar amount, but in what the purchase really entailed. Other purchases/acquisitions seemed to bring in big, new areas to existing corporations. Dice bought itself a dying web forum, a dying collaboration platform, and a now closed-and-out-of-date software information site. A fool and its money are soon parted, I suppose.

haha, good one!

When you see the poll on the side bar of the front page, the poll box will automatically toggle between the vote page and the results/comment page depending on if you've voted already.
Unfortunately, the Monday Poll article had the link set to go directly to the results/comment page.

I changed the link in the article to point to the vote page instead.

I bet they simplified stuff, right? :-)

Just put Sir Elton John on the other side. That way they could have two Queens.

You forgot Dice buying Slashdot, SourceForge, and FreeCode/FreshMeat for only $20M.

Seems almost insignificant with all the recent acquisitions being in the Billions.

That would be perfect :-)

None, however, mentioned the announcement made in April that, come 2016, all historical figures on our banknotes, barring the Queen, would be men.

The queen would still be on the notes. That's just not good enough for the CCP.

Yeah - that one.

Good point: something like "Cowboyneal/crack cocaine ($3M)" might be the right level of sense of humor.

I can't vote for any of these...

Yay, glad to see another konqueror user. I still use that browser for simple stuff (FreeBSD's manual pages, for example). It gives me trouble with stuff that requires much javascript or other complications.

To be fair, I was a bit harsh on iphones. But I was feeling righteous anger. :p

Ah, clicking the "N votes" link allows you to vote. That's not very obvious.

How do I vote? There is nothing clickable in my browser, which is Konqueror rendering using WebKit.

When I want something to wash over me in the background, NPR on the radio is usually my first choice in America. Good quality programming, interesting interviews, and good reporting. Also: relatively non-obtrusive.

Har, har, since there is no limit on mod points around here, I've just modded them back up. Mod war: go!

I agree that article was probably expressly provocative and vaguely insulting. Inaccurate too, since high - end android phones are often more expensive than Iphones.

45 bids is interesting. I'd love to know how many bidders there were - was it a bidding war between two people or was there serious competition among many?

Also a lot of those auction winners will never actually pay.

Hey folks, please stop downvoting every post you disagree with. It's so childish and makes the registered users of Pipedot seem like the ones who are trolls. (This is significant only because it makes the posts invisible to other registered users.) Half the posts in this thread have been downvoted, even though there was nothing untoward about them.

Try responding to people instead of knocking them on the head.

Yeah, this is a crappy article about a crappy story. For the curious, the 8 things - and my comments are:
* SD card support for extra storage - never happen; true
* NFC for mobile payments - can't say I miss it. Whatever.
* An improved texting solution on the keyboard, like Swype. - next release; next month?
* A 128 GB option - yeah, I'm sure they'll never get more storage...
* Non-proprietary dock connection (usb) - maybe with USB-C
* A micro-HDMI port - my guess is the number of people who miss this is small enough it'll never happen
* Replaceable battery - never happen
* While we're at it, better battery life! - I guess they'll do what they can

I'm a 45 year old man and for most of my life I would have disagreed that a woman could overpower a man until a drunk 21 year old woman at the bar mistook me for someone else and started fighting with me a few months ago. Unfortunately I havn't worked out in years and I forgot how strong 21 year olds can be...needless to say the woman schooled me, owned me, and actually sent me to the ER. We live in a day in age where women, especially young women, workout, a lot. I can attest I learned the hard way that a guy who doesn't work out is going to be weaker than a woman who does. I've since started working out and doing some weight training however I am in no way advocating hiting a woman although I think it's equally wrong for a woman to hit a man assuming he can "take it." In my case the woman pushed me up against a wall and I wasn't physically strong enough to stop her. I could tell by the smile on her face that she even realized this. She even asked me how it felt "to get owned by a girl" once she had me pinned against the wall. Unfortunately she punched me before I could try to talk her out of doing anything more which kind of took me by surprise. I went down with her second punch. Sadly the woman still didn't think that was enough and kicked me in the face when I tried to get up. Fortunately she had barefeet so it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but after that kick, I was out. Not a spot I ever want to be in again. Having been in this spot though, I don't see any problem with a guy reasonably defending himself (if he's able) but only to the point he can get away and prevent a woman from beating him to a pulp.

You may be able to show that more people with lower income buy Android phones, which is obvious considering that there is a wide range of Android phones and only a few (overpriced) iphones. I also think that, for some reason, owning an iphone is viewed as a sort of status symbol by certain people (despite equivalent phones existing for Android). So yes, there are reasons which explain that you may find more people with higher income throwing money at Apple.

Coming up with this statistic is one thing, but to then go and say that Android phones are "for poor people" is ludicrous. All kinds of people use all kinds of Android phones; it's an open platform after all. The article seems to acknowledge this a few paragraphs down, but they seemed fit to include this clickbait of a title. For shame.

I also think there's something vaguely insulting about describing certain items as being for poor people, honestly.

The Internet is full of one-off examples of silly over priced auctions and purchaces. This doesn't nessesarily mean that such an item could command that price again, but more like some fool with too much money decided to blow some of it on something they thought would be funny, or would give them the impression of novelty.

• Potato Salad Kickstarter ($55,492)
• Pretty much any posting on Rich Kids of Instagram ($168k bar tab?)
• Marilyn Monroe's "Happy Birthday Mr. President" Dress ($1,267,500)
• Lock of Elvis Presly's Hair ($115,000)
• Any painting by Jackson Pollock (or any number of other "artists")

And so on...

The more stupid and ugly something is, the higher price it will go for. This is not to say that there are not insightful and beautiful things that are also expensive. It is just that you can always find something worse selling for more money.<P>Is it a general rule that anywhere you see a non-monoticity in a value-price curve, there's a point of attack?

Ah, well "Verizon" was once properly part of an even larger and more carefully regulated monopoly, AT&T a.k.a. Ma Bell a.k.a. The Phone Company, but was broken up into "Regional Bell Operating Companies" during one of our periodic bouts of deregulatory conservative fever dreams. They've been reassembling like Voltron ever since. (Verizon itself was not an original but rather was a rejoining of several split RBOCs; I'm still not clear how that was allowed to happen so soon after the breakup.)

The US has a somewhat hilarious aversion to nationalizing the things that should by any reasonable estimation be nationalized. Look at the tooth and claw fighting against anything (remotely) resembling universal health care. But I digress.

Verizon's excesses are in any case always paid for by the public, whether by local tax, federal tax, or subscriber abuses.

Except of course that the NBN is backed by the Australian government paid for by the Australian public

Case in point -- Apple drones were finally getting around their brainwashing to notice that everyone else in the world had phone screens bigger than a business card, going on 5 years. Now at long last Apple's poised to introduce a decent size screen, maybe, in September. Of course it's got to be made of something expensive though. http://online.wsj.com/articles/new-iphone-a-sapphire-screen-and-a-higher-cost-1408042296

It's really funny to watch. Unfortunately now that the reality distortion field has been buried, Apple's a lot clumsier and more and more of their wealthy drones are waking up to reality. I think the jig is up by the end of the decade...

But that's what I mean about finding a decent niche channel and leaving it on. That simple pleasure is actively denied by the always-creeping generalization of channels (which is what I assume your link is about without RTFA). Before it turned into the freaking reality TV gameshow network, you could leave Food Network on all day and learn about cooking or simply enjoy it in the background. You can still get away with leaving on cartoon channels and some niche rerun channels.

But yeah ever since MTV decided to hate its own reason for existence, turning every channel to undistinguished crap has been the TV executive's primary mission. So serendipity is harder and harder to come by.

iOS has become the ghetto for the stupid people.

We kind of laugh and pity them. They are, however, a very reliable revenue source for the time being.

Of course, more seriously, it's good that at least we're avoiding monoculture for now. It would be better, of course, if both Microsoft and RIM weren't completely incompetent, but alas they are.

TOP MEN!

We live in an Internet of things already. I hope it doesn't come as too much of surprise to the top men. We'll be fine.

This might have something to do with it: http://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2drrof/american_cable_channels_have_blended_into_an/

I was just in Miami at a friend's place; he's got DishTV with hundreds and hundreds of channels. And we had one hell of a hard time finding a single thing worth watching. Ridiculous.