Recent Comments

The roboticists want the robots to win against the human team.

I'm skeptical though. They might be on the right track but development seems too slow to make it until 2050.

Also, unless we allow the robot team to be remotely controlled by a single machine, a victory might require human like intelligence. And that might require a real break through in AI research.

Then there are the mechanical requirements. For a robot to move like a human player we will have to create a lot of new technology; artificial muscles and such. Then there's the problem with cramming enough energy into a human sized machine for it to run around up to 120 minutes.

And while it's nice to see the progress in the RoboCup games, the main advancements seem to be in gameplay instead of actual robot construction. I'd rather see better robots than better gameplay algorithms.

Anyway - it's progress, it's fun. Keep going! :)

You put a lot of work into a post that makes absolutely no sense to me. What does this have to do with hacking hardware? (Looks like a good episode though - maybe I'll try to get a copy of it)

I totally agree. I went to SN when /. became unbearable but the choice of articles on SN is just not good. It often feels like half of them are trying to be subtle political articles without being overtly political and that really really annoys me. The other half don't feel at all related to anything nerdy, geeky, or technical. It was at some point a few weeks ago that I decided I couldn't take less than 10% of the articles being decent any more and left for |. The rate of articles posted here might be a tad slow at times but they are quality posts like we used get on /. waaaaay back in the day (for reference, my /. user ID is low five digits and I already been lurking for more than a year when I finally created an account). I have been around /. for a long time so I've had plenty of time to figure out what I like and |. is way closer to that than SN has been and the trend is continuing in both directions for both sites. Sad really that SN seemed like it was going to be like the good old days of /. but their choice of "news" is just not nerdy enough.

This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28TNG_episode%29

Is Where: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Game_%28episode%29

We Are Headed: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708798/

Never Forget: https://tinyurl.com/poorwesleycrusher

They want control of your mind.

This isn't about entertainment at all - the end 'game' is the battle for your mind!

The Mind Has No Firewall | by Timothy L. Thomas. Parameters, Spring 1998, pp. 84-92.
http://pastebin.com/JdkqxBAa

I can speak for myself, assuming I am AC.
But what you mentioned pretty much sums it.
The layout feels clunky and doesn't seem to look as good as \. classic on my monitor.
These are a few points I can make in this instant, but I'm not sure fixing those alone would make it more usable.
1. When clicking a folded title I end up with the comment page rather than unfolding it (+ button does this). Where as on /. it just unfold that comment.
2. Folded comments seem to take too much space (Is space lining set to double?) and at times they span over multiple lines.
3. There is blank space under the article before the comments start, which at times can be quite big.

Another great quote from http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/ (I emphasized the good part)

Yet as I read some of the GNOME developer comments below, I was given to believe that this breakage stems from a Microsoft-like climate of preventing users from customizing their systems, and deliberately breaking the work of others so that your 'brand' is the best. Anytime I hear the word 'brand' being used in Linux, I know something valuable is being poisoned.

I love the guy who starts out this post (http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/gtk-3-10-drops-menu-icons-and-mnemonics/) with "At the risk of turning this into the 'bad news blog'." That's telling right there - most of the news and changes in the world of GTK/Gnome involve taking things away that used to be there. They're driving that car right over the cliff, despite warnings to the contrary, and with an apparently even stronger suicidal zeal.

See ya later then. I was never a fan of Gnome after Gnome1, although I concede it was always the nicer looking system, visually and graphically. Gnome 1 was still a hacker's paradise, with the Sawfish window manager and tons and tons of configurable hackability. That's what I like in a DE. But I've always been a KDE guy, for other reasons (and still kind of prefer KDE3 to KDE4, actually - go Trinity!).

Sorry to see the GTK project get hijacked by the crazies over at Gnome. They sure made a mess of the Gnome desktop; too bad they're going to take GTK down with it as they sink the ship. The post I linked to above really is telling. They've lost all touch with reality and/or user needs. Meanwhile, QT is pretty cool, professionally managed, and although it's strongly tied to KDE, it hasn't been taken hostage by it, which means even if KDE screws the pooch there's hope the QT toolkit will remain useful and functional. If I'm not mistaken, too, it's getting faster and lighter weight/lower memory intensive. That's all good.

I've got other problems with the KDE desktop (like Akonadi and Nepomuk and their perpetually sucky rewrite of kmail) but the toolkit isn't one of them. Secretly though, I really wish the Etoile people would ramp it up and give us an interesting, third alternative. Meanwhile, I'm interested in checking out the new LXDE and the QT-Razor or QT-Light projects (or whatever they're called now, I forgot).

If I was in the same situation as these developers, I'd choose a 'Desktopless' toolkit. So-called 'Desktop Environments' are a total failure in Linux. Both the KDE and Gnome guys are trying to implement an operating system solely in userspace and it doesn't work so well.

Take the basic task of automounting for example. On my Gnome-based system (XFCE, which somehow makes use of GNOME daemons), it never works right. Sometimes it doesn't mount at all, sometimes it immediately mounts something I just unmounted etc. Come on man, it's 2014 and we're still dealing with this?

Since this stuff doesn't work so well, it changes constantly and you have to chase the GNOME/KDE guys just to make your application compile.

Tying your application to a desktop environment is a sure way to kill it. Now they're complaining about the GNOME stupidity, who knows KDE won't do the same thing? Money-backed big projects tend to attract tons of hippies and they really know how to mess up a good system. See firefox, gnome, systemd, chrome, etc.

GUI toolkits are a done deal. There is nothing left to be discovered with the current hardware. You can port them to newer features of graphics cards or X11 extensions but that's about it. The endless tail chasing Gtk+ and Qt does is nothing more than make-work. Come to think of it, if I just want to display some dialog and get some input, what drastical change has occured since the year 2000? Why can't we just use something done at that time for these basic tasks? Where is the need for updating the button-drawing code for the n-th million time?

I'd definitely go for a desktopless toolkit. There is nobody to mess it up and my program is likely to compile for a long time. There are tons of these: fox, fltk, wxwidgets, even java swing is a better choice than gnome+gtk. If you want advanced features like video playback or HTML display, it's a different matter but for an application which only needs standard controls? I'd never touch GTK or Qt.

While I respect your opinion, I believe the same sentiment was shared by some members of society about computers back in the day. If we had stopped using them or trying to innovate when computers still relied on vacuum tubes, where would we be today?

I guess I don't think there are any real parallels in that analogy. There were very very few naysayers about computers. It was clear to just about everyone that they would serve a purpose. There was a lot of doubt and terrible guesses about how much they would do or what they would be used for.

SolarRoadways solves exactly 2 problems:
* something to drive on
* power
It's hard for me to imagine them solving any more [real] problems. Like -- really hard. I mean, those are the goals, right? Those are the end goals.

There exists N solutions for those 2 problems, for example:
* asphalt
* solar panels (on roofs, over parking lots, etc)

There is no way, at all, that SolarRoadways will ever be price or performance equivalent to either of those. Ever*. By orders of magnitude.

We should invest time and money into existing solutions rather than this non-solution.

* nano-tech will change everything in unpredictable ways. We would do better to invest in that research, for example.

And that's a fine idea, but I don't think it serves the general purpose of giving a site a reason to exist. I don't think "post whatever you want" and let users filter out the crap is a good plan. I think a site needs a focus to be useful to anyone.

And sure, there will be topics around that focus that people will want to filter - but I'm pretty sure that there already exist plenty of sites that cover everything and make users do the filtering.

Thanks for the response - I can understand that currently the balance is in slashcodes favor. I wish I had the time to get involved myself.

There's a false assumption that we couldn't work on all of these (as well as new smartphones) at the same time. Scientists should have the ability to work on things in their field that interest them.

This.Palemoon is now my browser of choice in place of Firefox. Pity Opera has gone down the path of stripping out features.

To me it looked like GNOME2 had better polish in both themes and apps, while KDE3 had better underlying tech (Qt, KIO, DCOP, KParts etc). It would probably be less of an effort for GTK theme writers to build a good looking Qt theme than to keep a themable GTK library alive, since the GNOME3 developers seem hostile to the very idea of theming the desktop.

I don't think the GNOME3 developers are necessarily wrong: you can't have a highly customizable desktop that also provides a consistent and instantly recognizable look and feel. KDE chose customization and accepted that not every combination of settings works equally well and that every distro's and person's KDE desktop looks and feels slightly different. GNOME3 seems to choose the other option, but doesn't go all the way and keeps a bit of customization limping along. In my opinion it would be better for everyone involved if they would just cut out the theming functionality altogether: the GNOME devs get to build their single consistent user experience while the theme authors would be spared the frustration of their themes being broken in every new GTK release.

Around the year 2000, a big reason GTK became popular was licensing issues with Qt. But Qt has been licensed under LGPL (same license as GTK) for 5 years now and under GPL for a lot longer.

More language bindings has been mentioned as a reason, but are there languages one would want to write a GUI in which lack Qt usable bindings and do have usable GTK bindings? I once tried programming GTK in plain C, but trying to use objects using library functions and macros instead of using an OO language just felt awkward and led to hard to understand compile errors. I must say that I found PyQt a bit awkward as well, since it never really felt like you were programming Python: it was always clear it was Python code talking to a framework written in a different language. So it made me question the usefulness of GUI toolkit bindings in general.

Qt has better cross-platform support than GTK. The last time I used a GTK app (Inkscape) on Mac OS X, I had to run an X server and it looked really out of place; a quick web search suggests the X dependency is gone but integration with the native desktop is still minimal. GTK on X-less (framebuffer or EGL) embedded Linux is unmaintained as far as I know. I don't know the state of GTK on Windows because I haven't seriously used Windows in a long time.

Qt has a strategy for supporting touch devices (Qt Quick), seems to be on track supporting Wayland and is adapting its drawing model to better fit modern graphics hardware (scene graph instead of immediate drawing). GTK could be forked to keep compatibility with themes and non-GNOME applications, but it would require a lot of effort to keep up with current trends (not all of which are hypes that will blow over).

Another thing Qt has going for it is that the KDE libraries are being modularized, so instead of one big set of kdelibs there will be a lot of smaller libraries, some of which depend only on Qt and some which are connected to a whole lot of other KDE libraries (there are 3 tiers for different allowed dependencies). This means that some of the functionality developed in the KDE project becomes available to Qt applications without those applications having to tie themselves to the KDE desktop.

I agree with the GNOME sentiment, but one of the strengths of the GTK+ toolkit was that it wasn't limited to just GNOME - it was a standalone library that an alternative DE could easily use. XFCE and LXDE are example desktops, while a rather large majority of GTK+ applications didn't touch the GNOME libraries at all.

Seamonkey's pretty good. I use it on all my machines, even though it shares the memory leak issues.

Here's the thing -- even with its included e-mail and HTML editor features it's often SMALLER in footprint than Firefox or Firefox + Thunderbird! (One of many reasons I've always disliked Firefox; it's a wasteful bloated piece of software compared to the regular old suite.)

Even if you choose to use something else for e-mail, the overall resource hit/waste is minimal to non-existent. I think you can also omit the e-mail components if you really want.

All that said, I'm thinking of moving on from Seamonkey, 'cause it still has Mozilla's problems. But I don't like Chromium/Chrome, and Opera's not open source. So I just don't know.

None of us like Perl, but the general feeling is we loose too much ...

One gets the feeling neither perl nor English are among your core competencies.

In my opinion of course. GNOME has always, even through the drama of KDE4, seemed klunky and inferior.

I suspect it's just that KDE's early pre-GPL licensing problems gave it a bad taste in people's mouths, even though it's always been a superior environment.

So from a sports-team point of view this is pleasing, but from a real person point of view it sucks to hear that 3rd party GTK applications are being strangled.

MATE does seem like the appropriate forking point, but are those developers really interesting in taking on that big a challenge in addition to simply maintaining a UI?

An even longer video, by EEVblog doing the maths.

His conclusion: under ideal circumstances it is not feasible, and circumstances will not be ideal.

Scientific progress on producing energy is already a relatively solved problem. Our major hurdle now, is storing energy.

If every building covered their roofs with solar panels, we'd have plenty of free renewable energy. At least until the sun went down or a cloud comes out. We desperately need a reliable and cost effective way of storing surplus electricity to cover these coverage gaps.

The code is easy enough to fork, but the trick is to have an active developer team that can then continue its development. GTK has traditionally been developed by paid Redhat employees who also work on Gnome.

Mate is a project to maintain and continue development of Gnome 2 (including GTK2) and seems like the most likely place for such a task.

I can't speak for AC, but for myself there's no one big thing that makes SN difficult to use, just a bunch of little annoyances that add up. Basically, identify any look-and-feel difference between |. and SN, and if you want to make SN better, make it more |.-like. This is not to say I don't like SN. I do! It's just that on SN, I put up with the interface to get to the content, while on |. the interface is a pleasure in itself.

I can't say I know all that much about graphical toolkits, but could we just fork GTK, using GTK2 as the base? Most of my applications use GTK2 and I'm pretty happy with this state of affair. The GTK3 ones tend to break things. But I really prefer the modular nature of GTK. When I need to use other toolkits, it tends to pull 50 libraries...

Hey, so maybe it's not (yet) suitable for entire roadways? Who cares? Maybe the tech will evolve, maybe the economics will keep it feasible for smaller-scale projects - who knows?

I think few rational people will argue that there would not be benefits from that research. Rather, that there are other areas that would provide a better return.

Never heard of it. Thanks, I'll check it out.

A useful feature for both SN and |. would be to let users filter the stories shown on the main page by topic, like you can in /.
I intend to add this feature to squte.com - letting people 'subscribe' to groups and then only see posts made in those groups, it's already implemented for email notifications.
This would make the site more focused on your interests.

The 'frontend' to a web app is things like the html, css and javascript. The 'backend' is the database, and the logic in between.

Have you tried Pale Moon? It started off as a Windows-optimized version of Firefox, but is developing into its own fork, as the devs increasingly reject the annoying UI changes in Firefox. The community has recently ported it to Linux, and, as it is firefox-based all of my favorite extensions work with it.

As a long time Opera user, I've been looking for something to use when 12.x becomes too unstable. I've really been disappointed by everything, and I've tried a few of them (from memory:New Opera, Firefox, Chromium, Maxthon, Midori, Otter).

I was happiest with Chromium. I've only found one or two pages that it didn't work with. Every ad blocker or privacy extension can be had by using the Chrome version. Flash doesn't work out of the box, but I haven't even tried to get it working. That's no great loss to me.

See also http://pipedot.org/poll/15

Ever since the update which added the menu button at the right, I've been meaning to make the switch to another browser. The seamonkey project looked interesting, but they're integrating browsing with email, and I'd rather keep things seperate. Anyone had luck finding a good replacement? I only care about speed, compatibility with web standards and ad-blocking. And an interface that doesn't suck, I guess, but that's pretty much the easiest thing to get right.

I think the drama has largely died down. Current issues are that the posts are all over the map, and the quality of the comments is a bit weak (too much one-off snide remarks; a white bread sandwich with no meat if you know what I mean). That will change over time. I find Slashdot comment quality degrading as well. If they keep it up it will be Reddit with a shittier comment system over at /. if they don't do something.

I'm a volunteer. Bryan codes the site and I'm just doing what I like to do (and when I'm tired of doing it, I'll stop!). If we had the luxury of a stream of stuff in the Pipe I'd be more selective, but for the moment I'm more than happy to take privacy articles too. It's not my opinion that counts, it's the rest of the readers (all of us). If it seems clear no one likes that stuff, we'll stop posting it.

Ideally though, let's stay away from the borderline paranoiac stuff and the unfounded conspiracy theories. But to the extent it's tech related, I'm game - i liked that stuff on /. and often learned quite a bit from the discussion.

+1 for gandi. I've been using them for years. Never a problem, so I don't know anything about their customer service because I never needed it.

That sunglass article is just shameful. This is the kind of thing that I expect on my facebook feed. I don't read my facebook feed.

The day I quit soylent for slashdot (yes, we can say it, it's not Voldemort) is when I went back on slashdot, just to check, and saw a really insightful story about apple becoming one of the world's leading producers of saphire. I compared it to the content of the SN frontpage. Right click > delete bookmark.

Are you in favour of articles about personal rights/privacy issues? These make a lot of waves on slashdot, but the discussions there predictably devolve into people shouting at each other since the audience is so big. Or are we keeping this purely tech related? I was hesitating to post articles earlier since I haven't really seen that kind of subject end up on pipedot.

Are there still drama posts every day? That's when I quit.

Happily went back to slashdot, and I'm reading pipedot on the side.

That said, where else am I going to share photos of my kids with old friends? Can't do that on Twitter...I only use Twitter to express faux indignation and convenient morality concerning trending causes. Looks like I'm stuck with Zuck.

Awesome stuff. I see where Twitter is useful, but I think he's right about this one.

Hey, so maybe it's not (yet) suitable for entire roadways? Who cares? Maybe the tech will evolve, maybe the economics will keep it feasible for smaller-scale projects - who knows? I'm still glad to see people thinking about the future.

I've spent most of the last 20 years living and working in developing countries. Life in most of these places consists of:

• poor power reliability, usually generated by burning diesel - the single most expensive and ecologically unfriendly solution out there
• concrete buildings (houses, offices) with zero insulation, with window A/C units to keep the temperature down: huge energy consumption, and concrete has no natural insulation properties; it's ridiculous
• water pollution, total unreliability of the water quality and frequent water shortages
• ecological catastrophes in the making, especially decimation of fisheries or deforestation
• douchebag politicians insisting this is the fault of (a) colonial powers or (b) regional superpowers
• same douchebag politicians putting their full effort into getting internationally funded 'donated' projects to cure their ills.

Get smart, people! There are technological solutions to these problems! This is the kind of thinking that gets us places.

Wondering what happened? Offhand, I'm imagining:

1. guy forgot to renew his domain name
2. Doteasy stopped it, canceled it, whatever
3. Guy tries to get the name back
4. Doteasy requires some ridiculous, expensive "reactivation" process
5. Guy decides, fuck it, I'll just buy the DotOrg and be done with it.

I used Doteasy back in the day. Free Hosting (OK, but you pay like $25/yr for the domain name, so that's where they're making their money). It was no hassles. Pleasantly surprised to see a site i read fairly regularly was also housed at the same provider. Granted, I never used whois/dig to check it out.

There is a stupidly long video on youtube about the infeasibility of solar roadways. Although there are a few good points, I'm not really sure why the video goes on to poo-poo the idea for 30 minutes. Or why the dissenters insist that it's a project to convert every inch of asphalt in the world to solar instead of just a few private parking lots. Or why they don't give constructive criticism instead of essentially calling the creators idiots.

Regardless, I can see why people have such a negative view on the solar roadway fund-raiser after sitting through that video.

It's true I've got a NYT membership, for which I pay. That is something I hadn't considered. But I'm also living in Senegal (see http://www.therandymon.com) so I've got an African IP address. You wouldn't believe what kind of trouble that gets me. A lot of sites - American consumer sites, mostly - are totally off-limits to me. Netflix, for example: I can't even get past the front page. A lot of Youtube/Vimeo stuff too: "This video is not available to your region." What the fuck? This isn't what the Internet was supposed to be all about.

I'll take your comment as a compliment then - I think editorial focus and the like tend to be the effect of the editors' work and the quality of the submissions. The selection of articles you see is basically the result of me putzing around on the web and choosing stuff that interests me that I think would be interesting to discuss. If you wish we were discussing other things, I'll do my part if everyone else submits quality articles.

This is also, I think, the result of being able to build up a user/reader base from the ground up instead of inheriting a bunch of Slashdot refugees and trying to make everyone happy. I don't envy NCommander and all they've had to do over there to keep everyone satisfied without the ship's crew mutineeing. In fact, they're doing great work given the circumstances.

0-5 articles per day about tech stuff isn't hard to do. Let's pitch in!

an expensive pipedream distraction, not a solution.

While I respect your opinion, I believe the same sentiment was shared by some members of society about computers back in the day. If we had stopped using them or trying to innovate when computers still relied on vacuum tubes, where would we be today?

just in case any new pipers haven't seen it, or maybe you just live under a rock or in your parent's basement:

Or marybe you can do math.

Look, you want solar power? (and you should) Put panels on your roof.

Want solar parking lots? Put panels OVER the parking lot.

Both of these are easy, cost effective, and not experimental.

Solar roadways is an expensive pipedream distraction, not a solution.

I've had good luck with Gandi.net, based in france. they have a 'no bullshit' motto, and good customer service from my personal experiences.

As I mention in another post: real geek articles, and not too many. Not the crap that spouts on /. or SN.

I like pipedot because it seems to be tech focused and real.

I dislike soylent because it seems to be random. Seriously, TSA articles and (from today): "Why Does Everyone Look Hotter in Sunglasses?"

I don't want 20 stories/day about crap. If I wanted that, I'd read . I want 0-5 stories a day about real geek stuff.

Glad to see all the people chiming in with support for Pipedot - as Bryan says, this isn't the end of Pipedot, but he's apparently going to put his time and energy into the coding, and that leaves it up to us to make it a good place.

Good time to ask again what kind of articles we should be posting here. There are so many forums out there, and it's annoying to see the Pipe so frequently empty.

Or, if it's a matter of additional site functionality, what would it be?

I dig Pipedot because the software makes the site hugely readable and useable on my smartphone and tablet, and great on the desktop, too. I like the comment flow, the fact you can stay anonymous at will and on any given post, and that users can have a feed. Some of the social networky stuff isn't my cup of tea, but it certainly appeals to others.

In sum, no reason we can't keep this site going. But let's keep a steady stream of interesting articles flowing through this site. We've got a great interface but a small community. SN has a great community but an interface I don't like. Help get the word out, invite your friends, link to your blog posts, whatever. Get people coming here and the place will build.