Recent Comments

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.

Yeah - conspiracy theorists would probably go nuts with theories that Mozilla signed some secret agreement with Google in which they let their browser languish in exchange for millions of marketing dollars from making Google the default search engine. That's certainly a more palatable and intriguing theory to cling to, because it's more fun than the more probable and obvious one: they just suck.

Innovate, you lazy bastards! And learn how to code! And stop F-ing with the interface! I'm tired of UX/UI changes being touted as progress. It's just shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic!

Oh, and please take NCommander up on his offer to mirror the SN feed! It's a great interim compromise solution, and will keep Pipedot from dying off.

I, for one, would much prefer using this site to comment on the articles from SN.

I love it, semi-official confirmation that phatfil is the resident Pipedot troll. :) This is of course a NYT problem, in that they restrict access to articles based on IP address and cookies, and apparently ignore their own policy about allowing 2nd party inbound links to work (maybe there's a whitelist now) --

-- but at the least they STILL show you a preview of the article and a login prompt. So fatty is still out of line / lying / way out there.

"I'd suggest everyone reading Pipedot to look at Soylent News for daily news and discussion."

I try, but Soylent makes it hard. It's just an ugly, big text, and poorly formatted site, with less usability and less information density than Pipedot or even EITHER version of Slashdot.

Yes, that's even after the "improvements" (which as far as I can tell consist of awkward "+" buttons to optionally expand the bad default threaded display).

I appreciate what they're trying to do from an ethical and communal perspective, but the current presentation and interface is just NOT good. If they would completely adopt Pipedot's front end and do away with their current horrible interface I would be SO happy. Obviously the feed there is jumping and the audience is a bit larger.

I don't know if Bryan and NC have discussed a real merge, but they should. :)

In spite of their best efforts to do exactly nothing, Mozilla still has the better browser engine with better plugin support.

Its perennial and terminal memory leaks, however, go on and on and on. One cannot leave any Mozilla browser resident for much longer than a couple of days before memory use becomes freaking ridiculous, leading to inevitable reboots (on ALL platforms, Win, Lin, and Mac).

I would have stuck with Chromium, but it really sucks -- pages load strangely, caching is just weird, and most importantly the plugin architecture doesn't really work. If you care about blocking ads smoothly and effectively, you're not using Chrome.

It does not surprise me, at all, that Firefox is declining. They've done NOTHING over 15 years except (a) suck Google's teat, (b) relentlessly and poorly copy Chrome, (c) reduce features again and again, and (d) IGNORE and deny and FAIL to address their chronic memory leaks.

It doesn't help that Google scummily (via malware-ish bundling) pushed Chrome down people's throats and that people let them do it, 'cuz Google.

Mozilla Foundation has been an abject failure as a force for good open source software. Firefox itself was a mediocre idea, poorly executed, and their purposeful burying of both MozSuite/Seamonkey and Thunderbird is just shameful. They have proven they don't deserve the eyeballs. Oh yeah, and they really really really like promoting bigots; that probably didn't help either.


It's freaking sad that Mozilla has let Google eat its lunch so completely, from mindshare to technology lead. It wasn't for lack of (criminally squandered) funding.

I for one have never been impressed by the extension support in Chrome/Chromium, and in my experience, this is often the reason die hard Firefox users remain unwavering. Chrome has definitely snatched up a lot of the low hanging fruit, as webkit does tend to be faster than gecko, and when it comes to Flash, things tend to run more smoothly (my take on that though is that if a site is running Flash, things are already broken...my day to day in 2014 finally includes 0 use of Flash).

Chrome's existence isn't something I worry too much about, as long as open standards in web development are maintained and Google doesn't pull a Microsoft and just steamroll the open web (or try to anyway). Chrome represents the competition that really forces the Mozilla devs to take performance seriously, and avoid some of the more egregious memory leaks and other issues that have come up in the past, because as we've now seen a few times, those come with pretty drastic user migration in many cases. On the other hand, Mozilla is a non-profit, Firefox is an open source project, and they do not have any good reason to sacrifice on core goals merely for the sake of acquiring more users than the other browsers out there. This, I think, is its strength, which Netscape did not have the luxury of.

I personally keep both browsers around, but Firefox accounts for a solid 95% of my web browsing, and will continue to do so. Webkit and Gecko are different enough that both should have a place in the future of the web, just as SUV's and sports cars both have their role in the world of automobiles.

Very cool. My money is on water and energy research - two things we're going to run desperately short of sooner rather than later. Land, too - there's enough of it but this planet is increasingly an ecological catastrophe.

Informal unsubmission!

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internet-free/68294/

Just an intresting read for all you intesting people. Thanks to Bryan and both leaders of SN so far, it is an important and wonderful thing that you have been able to do. Now about those SN themes....

Kudos guys.

-- A /.er since the 90s.

Pretty much what I voted for. Also what I donate to...And just in case any new pipers haven't seen it, or maybe you just live under a rock or in your parent's basement:

http://www.solarroadways.com/donations.shtml

Define (SN) "frontend skills a bit lacking" please?

Care to be more specific?

We do take usability bugs pretty seriously (though our frontend skills are a bit lacking on dev ATM).

I wrote a very lengthy reply on this subject on SN when Pipecode was released (http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1694&cid=40296). I haven't looked recently to see how it looks under the hood, but there are quite a few reasons beyond those I listed to keep Slashcode

For instance, slashcode uses *extensive* use of memcache to prevent database access by storing a ton of information on every database load, this prevents us from hitting the backend at all when loading comments. The codebase is known to scale, and scale *stupidly* well (it does power slashdot.org afterall :-)).

I won't mind retheming SN, and we'd discussed the possibility of doing a constest to do exactly that, since we now have the technical ability to have multiple skins active on the site at once (which was suprisingly trivial to do, which really gives beta no excuse)

As for the perl bit, join the club. None of us like Perl, but the general feeling is we loose too much by dumping slashcode :-/

NComander, I am wondering if SoylentNews should/could adopt the pipedot source code? I really love the clean design, and that it is not based on perl. This hopefully makes the codebase easiert to maintain.

Now, I have not seen either the slashcode nor the pipedot source code so I might be talking out of my ass here - but I think it would be good do have something truly our own and without tons of baggage and history attached.

FYI, I will continue to post articles here. But the submit button is at the top right, and I'll make an effort to ensure anything submitted makes it to the front page for discussion. I'm not giving it up. Keep Pipedot on your RSS readers and keep reading!

Very impressed to see such gentlemanly cooperation between sites. I think it's natural and awesome that two spin-off sites will each head in different directions and will essentially complement each other. When it's simply nerds interested in good communication and information sharing, it doesn't have to be a winner-takes-all battle to the finish, and when it's not a commercial entity desperate for ad-clicks in order to justify its existence suddenly all the pressure is off.

I will continue to contribute to both sites in hopes that both thrive, each on the basis of their own merits. No reason these two parallel experiments can't continue to advance, being inspired by and challenged by the other. Long life to Pipedot, long life to Soylent! Long life to Usenet! Rest in Peace, Technocrat!

I'm a SN and |. /. reader. Where as /. ignores you both it is good to see you both co-operating to build on each others strengths, there is enough room on the net for all. I predict good things for both sites and wish you both well.

Indeed. I can't seem to stand SN as it is.

Captcha:
What is the 3rd number in the list 34, one, 39 and 39?
39 or 39?

The site is so much cleaner and faster than SN (or That Other Site) that there's no comparison. I understand and approve of |. and SN not trying to be the same kind of site and directly compete with each other, but I really hope |. keeps going as a good discussion site in general.

So, NCommander here from SN. I've always considered Pipedot and SN to be sister sites, with Pipedot going live a few days before we managed to get /code running fully, and much closer in spirit to the original Slashdot than we are, since Slashdot essentially stated as one guy writing his own CMS, and posting articles submitted by the community that he found interesting. If memory serves, Pipedot's genesis actually predates the "Fuck beta" protest since I vaguely remember comments on the Beta journal about forking off from Slashdot, and the very beginning of was basically the original Pipedot logo plus "Index goes here" and some test content" when I first checked out pipedot.org

For those who weren't with us at the beginning, the "Fuck Beta" protest essentially caused users to go in four directions, SoylentNews, pipedot, technocrat (which appears to be dead), and the comp.misc newsgroup. Of these four, SN is the largest, likely since we were able to harness the existing legacy slashcode codebase and managed to launch with a (mostly) feature complete site. This is not to knock bryan, I'm *hugely* impressed on what he accomplished as an essentially a one man team; writing something as complex as a /code replacement should not be understated; to put this in context, the protest was a week long boycott of slashdot and building anything as complex in such a short period of time is extremely difficult.

The fact is, in a broad sense, SN is going down the road different to Pipedot. We've got a mission, and we're doing our best to fulfill it one step at a time; we're not Slashdot, and we're not Pipedot, while we have common origins, and common ground, we both intend to make sure we listen to our community, and not become what /. became. Bryan's comment on SN about how he felt about adversing was enough to make me write a *large* section about it because I see Pipedot as the model of what Slashdot was at its best. I even read much of the bitching of SN here! (and yes, we've fixed some issues from said bitching).

The fact is our end goals are diferent, pipedot intends to be a better slashdot, SoylentNews intends to be a source of journalism, and we're slowly (and in some cases, http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/07/06/1553235, unexpectly) getting there. If we ever manage to get an API for our database coded, I don't think the staff (or I) would have any issue if you spooled in our articles directly (obviously, we have to get a license on new content hammered out before you could do that, but that's on our TODO).

I'll be very sad if Pipedot closes up shop, as it is the closest of the Slashdot spinoffs to the original. Pipecode makes it possible for mere mortals to run a slashcode-like site without making the necessary blood sacarifices required to get /code going, and I hope you the best success on continuing your dev project and keeping your community engaged and involved. Keep fighting the good fight, and I'll be rooting for success all the way :-).

Well said regarding giving Zafiro a break. I am too used complaining about editors on the other and the old site. My apologies to him/her.

Regarding your comment about upgrading CPU/RAM, in lots of cases it would be much easier to upgrade parts than a whole device. I have a RasPi running as a control device for machinery. Swapping it for anything not 100% compatible would mean lots of work. It would be much easier to put a RAM stick inside.

Also:
- Why do you think so many people run their RasPis overclocked? Because the CPU is slow as a dog.
- Why do you think they released a new revision with 512MB RAM? Because I cannot even upgrade packages on my 256MB model without having a swap partition on the SD card.
If I could I would add RAM straight away, I would not wait several years. And if the replacement RAM was standard, me and lost of other people would have piles of old RAM kicking around. Free upgrade.

And the maker does not agree with you.
1. They CPU/RAM is upgradable. If they agreed with you why would they offer this?
2. They are simply selling three different models. The difference is not only the CPU/RAM but also addition of USB ports, PCI express, SATA etc.
3. I am guessing that the upgrade parts/modules are coming. Otherwise having upgradable parts does not make sense (unless they are standard off-the-shelf components).

First, give old Zafiro a break; he or she is spinning the plates here as fast as he can, kind of a one man band trying to keep this site alive. And frankly he did cite the most tangible improvement over the Pi.

People can't cost-justify upgrading CPU or RAM in $2,000 PCs after 3-5 years -- how the heck is it cost justified to replace a CPU or RAM module on a 2 year old $45 board? The whole idea is rather stupid. Devices this size practically beg to be replaced wholesale when they need to be upgraded. (And apparently the maker agrees with me, since rather than offering the tiny replacement CPU/Eth/RAM modules they're really just selling 3 different models of board.)

Agreed that the quoted sales blurb was remarkably useless.

Again, Facebook did nothing wrong legally, morally, technically, or contractually. If people want to introduce legislation on how companies mine their own data, let them do so. For now, simply exposing FB as an evil festering pile of dung us sufficient.

I can't believe that the summary mentions only powered USB ports as an advantage to the RasPi. This is probably the least exciting difference.
And the useless sales pitch does not help much.

How about mentioning faster CPU to start with and then swappable CPU/RAM, optional Gbit Ethernet, mSATA, PCI express... and that it fits in the same cases as RasPi.

We have plenty of laws in place to protect people from their own idiocy. It's not always such a bad thing because while you may not feel empathy for them, it's probably best not to reward companies for exploiting others. Because you might end up being their next target.

The "Submit" button is at the top-right, pal. Go to it.

I barely have enough time to post and edit stuff for this site, much less worrying about who's likely to have or lack cookies, and at the risk of freetards insulting my intelligence. Pipedotters may or not have surpassed the IQ of Slashdotters, but the troll factor seems to be about the same ...

You've got a good point, sort of. You mean they didn't put all this hardware and software on line for my benefit only, so I could share pictures of my kid vomiting with friends and family?

There's a good XKCD about it: http://xkcd.org/1390/ "Research Ethics"

There are already a few operating Maglev trains, and there was many tests in the past. This system is different because of its "individual" vehicles, not because of Maglev.

It was proposed to the city of Toulouse, France, a few month ago. The project did not look very serious, but well, let the israelians deal with the teething troubles, and see if this system can prove operational.

Am I the only one who approves of what they did? Of COURSE their users are fodder for whatever data experiment Facebook deems fit. What the devil did people think the arrangement was about when they were stupid enough to record their real names, relationships, and activities on somebody else's web site? It's GOOD that FB is trying to be intelligent about how they milk the base. Do you want your keepers to be stupid?

FB owes its users nothing, and good for the users if they ever manage to figure that out. Their accounts exist for only one purpose, to make money for Zuck and shareholders. Schmucks.

Presumably you have historically signed in to their website, and have a cookie that lets you get past their block. I have not, and therefore do not. Even people on /., the IQ level of which I was hoping |. would exceed, understood this. Do you really not remember the annoyance that NYT links used to cause? Often, someone would post an alternative URL with whatever affiliate/partner field in the query was sufficient for getting past their block. Alas those parameters were whack-a-mole.

You're thinking of Cro Magnon. The movie Bruce Lee's son was working on when he died.

Wrong, of course they are. They are trying to convince us this is notable/unique footage of a real phenomenon from a remarkable perspective. If it's just manipulated and sweetened to the point you don't know which streaks are real and which fake, it loses all possible value. Firework streaks are trivial to animate/mirror/replicate.

And running the footage BACKWARDS? There's no possible valid reason to do that. It's a dreadfully lazy 1920s era special effect.

How can I be impressed by something when I can't reasonably believe it to even be real?

I believe for now a drone was used, but I can't trust any particular segment of that video to be an accurate depiction of what the camera captured.

My point was that the producer did a real disservice to the entire concept by overproducing the presentation to the point it's indistinguishable from a really bad segment of Disney's Fantasia.

...was that super-duper Mossad hand to hand unarmed combat technique?

From TFA comments: Create a mygov account, link ato, submit tax using etax, delete mygov account.

Good point. Also, the Israeli coffee. I think they are a culture that goes for those little black coffees that are so strong they actually rot out the bottom of your cup/stomach. This news site reads vaguely like a press release. Hoping this is really news and not just creative publicity, but I wouldlike a ride on that MagLev.

For me, it was some pretty great footage. I can see why not everyone would like it, though. Didn't realize there was any music to it - I usually have my laptop's speakers muted. I spent the whole video waiting to see if one of the final blasts would actually nuke the copter out of the sky. Realized afterwards I was kind of disappointed it didn't happen. Stay tuned for drone's eye video of the American military blasting a picnic of Taliban generals wedding party into the hereafter!

Actually, that footage probably exists somewhere, but getting it can land you in Guantanamo.

You are absolutely right. I've fixed both of them. Thanks.

What would have been wrong with natural audio?

You can't hear much of anything over the rotor wash and wind. As much as you don't like the music, a few minutes of this might be more obnoxious.

And what do you mean by trust? It's not like they're trying to convince you of something.

It's not the speed that would make it hard to drink a cup of coffee on the train, it's the acceleration.

But I kind of hated it. It was extremely manipulated, even REVERSING footage towards the end for some godforsaken reason (explosions clearly going backwards). And the musical choice was really obnoxious. What would have been wrong with natural audio?

There's no reason to trust any of it.

Good idea, but I hate whoever produced this.

Nevermind. Removed all of the blocks for facebook and googled it. That is absolutely disgusting behaviour by Facebook. So glad I left.

How is Timeline being manipulated?I left FB when timeline was introduced..