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If they can replicate Wikipedia and get good quality contributors for free, they can finally fire everyone they want and more than recoup the investment. Why they wouldn't do that via a download of Wiki code and a $100K consulting contract is beyond me too.

For 4 millions and 2 years, it will have to be muuuuch better than the dozens of existing systems. I lack imagination so I fail to see what great improvements can be brought to a system that fondamentally relies on the quality of what is posted. I fail to see how it may change the fact that most people commenting on newspapers websites cannot read and understand the articles, cannot spell and write coherent ideas, and/or continuously spam with their political obsessions, not caring how unrelated to the topic they are.

I'll explain simply where the hatred comes from -- they're taking something away. People tend to resent that, whether it was a free lunch or not. Raising the price from "free" is never a popular move.

In general people do NOT hate the Wall Street Journal or scientific periodicals for their paywalls, simply because those paywalls have ALWAYS been there. But the NY Times has created and then progressively tightened its paywall over time, going from a site that was all-access and ad-supported for the general public to a closed site that will allow the public to read 2-5 articles before throwing up obnoxious blocks. It also greatly reduces the Times' value as a news source on the web.

We (the nonsubscribers) have lost access to something that was once available to us, simply because the NYT decided it couldn't make advertising work. It's sad, but not sad enough to make me comply with their demands to pay them...

In any case, it was only a small tangential remark about how neither Mozilla nor NYT are doing the right things, for themselves OR their users.

I haven't used it recently, because frankly I'd forgotten about it. But I used to regularly go there to discover software. Search for "project management," "spline editor," "graphing package," etc. always turned up software I'd never known about - that was fun. Google could do it, but it's nice having a dedicated resource and community committed to contributing to it. It doesn't all have to go to Google, the relentless, omnipresent monopolist. (exaggerating, a little, but you've got to admit Google is freaking EVERYWHERE).

I've never understood all the hatred around paying the NYT to read their articles. Journalists cost money - I have a couple of journalist friends, and their kids need shoes too. I pay the NYT for a subscription that lets me read it on the web - $8 a month or something, not much considering what I pay for coffee in a month, and the quality of the reporting is good. You want free? Go to CNN or Washington Post, but you get what you pay for.

There's a whole generation that insists on its right to reading news for free on the Internet, forgetting that it costs money to get the news, write it, edit it, and run the servers.

Why the downmod? Perhaps you could actually say something and CONTRIBUTE to a discussion rather than trying to "disappear" the one person who bothered to construct a comment (the only current post on the thread)? What a bad person you are.

I used to use freshmeat a bit. I guess back in the .. 90's? But searching improvements (google, etc) and distribution packaging improved immensly in the past 15-20 years.

Sad to see it go - but just for nostalgia reasons.

Is there anyone around here that'll actually miss it, functionally?

Failing upwards. Great, the irresponsible maintainers of a second rate web browser get millions for something they have ZERO experience or expertise in, and reinventing a wheel that's available EVERYWHERE already via everything from phpBB to BuddyCloud and identi.ca etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking

Nice grift if you can get it. Do-nothing Mozilla and "don't you dare read our web site" NY Times deserve each other. A conjoined failure spiral.

Good one - I still wish someone would screen scrape that site, fork it, and open it up as a community project. Remember Themes.org? Same thing - that place went through at least 3 iterations. Actually, criminy, I just tested that URL and it redirects to f*cking freecode.com! Dammit!

I was thinking the same thing. Slashdot isn't dead by any measure - their current poll about what time you get to the office has received 17,000 votes, for example while ours has received 16 :) But increasingly the articles aren't great and the comment quality is on decline. I was looking around for new things to read even before the Slashcott, and so are probably the better commenters. They might not be on the chopping block yet, but they're not far away, and it's clear Dice bought things expecting them to generate revenue, and will act if they don't. That's the way business works.

It's a reminder then that these kinds of sites are best run as community projects or by small, non-corporate entities and last longest if they resist the opportunity to sell out. Cycle is always the same - generate something cool, sell to corporation, corporation ruins it and then sells it off, and everyone loses. The Gracenote database is a spectacular example of this - a user-generated database of song titles and albums got sold to a corporation who immediately restricted access to the information. Screw you, consumer!

No regrets for jumping ship. Dice Media can go get **cked.

Totally agree with this. I don't expect it won't be long before /. gets the axe too, which is why I've moved over here and to soylent. /. is pretty much just a shill posting site now, "I've used windows 8 for 10 years and it's so easy to use my unborn child is creating super HD video of THEIR OWN BIRTH with it!!!!11!!1!1111"

Also agree with the souceforge comment. I used SF for a few different projects and to find some really great software, but now it's just a big ad fest, and a deceptive one at that. I've moved over to Github, and Git is really good. I use both SVN and Git for development, each has it's place. I find Git is much better for collaborative projects with large teams where as SVN is really good for individual or small team development.

But I digress, that's what happens when community site get sold to corporate interest. Dice paid a lot of money for the brand /. had built up because they wanted to monitorize it, which means exploiting the community.

Your RPM installation failed... Sorry about that Chief!

I guess this also means that Dice will trim off Slashdot when the page views get too low. The comment counts of Slashdot stories have been steadily dropping for the past few years, even before the beta and alt-slashdot thing from earlier this year. One could probably plot a graph and get a pretty good end time estimation.

SourceForge will pass the mark first, though. Ever since they've allowed obnoxious ads that look like download buttons on their download pages and malware to their hosted packages, that site seems to be universally hated. Most sane projects have moved to GitHub and I expect that transfer to continue.

Code, ready to eat

Interesting commentary here, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7912647

Google sells you a device so they can show you an ad encouraging you to buy a rake. In turn Google gets a sliver of the profits from selling a rake in the form of ad revenue. Amazon sells you a device so they can show you an ad encouraging you to buy a rake. Amazon sells you the rake, has it delivered in 2 days, and makes 100% of the profit. It's not that people will actively look for that integration, but that it exists gives Amazon a significant advantage imho.

Yeah, I'm skeptical too. They're either thinking "this can be a white box, generic phone sold by a company people like to buy from," or they're thinking "this will increase sales of Amazon products." If it's the latter, the obvious question is, "why not just an app anyone can run on their existing phone?" More likely, this is going to try to position itself as a media consuming pipeline between your pocket and Amazon's cloud services, providing easy access to movies and music, kind of like a "KindleFireTV for your pocket."

I'm not bullish on this one, though.

[sigh] I remember when the Internet was an open platform, level playing field. Now between Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, you scarcely have any reason to visit anywhere else on the web whatsoever. Oh yeah, Facebook [yawn].

Actually a lot of companies used to use US based cloud services. I know a lot of companies that pull back to in-house solutions or at least cloud services based in their own country. Pre Snowden everyone speculated if your data is secure in the cloud, now you know it is used for industrial espionage on a massive scale. We don't trust anything US anymore.

Here is one of the eternal truths of the infantryman's life: the brass always wants to load you down with more crap, and if you're smart (and you have a platoon sergeant who's not an ass-kisser) you get rid of as much of it as you possibly can as soon as you possibly can. Unfortunately, the REMFs keep shoveling it out just a little faster than you can get rid of it, which is why the total combat load has gone from ~40 lbs in WW2 and Korea, to ~80 lbs back when I was a grunt in the 1980s, to well over 100 lbs today. And I am deeply skeptical that any kind of power assist they come up with is going to make up for the increased weight and complexity.

We already have machines designed for battlefield use to do what human bodies can't: they're called tanks, and after almost a century of development they're pretty good at doing what they're supposed to do. You want more effective infantry? Take away the non-essentials, put the R&D effort into making the rest as light, simple, and durable as possible, and let the grunts do their job.

1. Monocultures are bad, whether it's proprietary software with IE 6, or open source with OpenSSL. When one software product has 90 percent market share year after year, be afraid.

2. "With a million eyes, all bugs are shallow" turns out to be BS when it comes to complex code, which certainly includes infrastructure that implements cryptographic and security protocols.
Bugs in the TFA and TFS at Slashdot/Soylentnews/Pipedot, OK, the crowd can be counted on to point out those.

3. Open source might be even *more* vulnerable than proprietary software to security vulnerabilities, because the source code is so easily obtainable in readable form, no reverse engineering necessary. Just as door locks keep the casual thieves away, "security by obscurity" raises the acquisition costs for potential attackers. This just means that the open source community has to be more vigilant than their closed source counterparts, not less.

For real. Many projects are still stuck in cabal mode, where the maintainers pay only lip service to community contributions. Often but not exclusively projects doing "open core" models.

When a project is really open to outsiders, it can encourage more eyes who (a) give a damn about the code quality and (b) are empowered to do something about it.

Oh, and document the thing.

Yeah, doesn't seem like an iPhone killer. And if it can't kill and iPhone, it certainly can't kill other Androids.

That "field" was shown to be crap the first time some genius decided to eliminate pull down menus. Office and e-mail and now OSes have been turning into "poke every pixel on screen and hope something happens" monstrosities ever since. I don't know how anyone can even stand to use GMail or whatever they call Hotmail now (Outlook.com). (GMail came up as "FMaul" on my phone.)

The only "distinguishing features" worth a damn are big screen, long battery life, Android/CM/etc., cheap, and sturdy.

Smartphones are commodities, whether Apple and Amazon have realized that or not.

$650 and they throw in some cloud storage. FSM on a pogo stick that's missing the market.

I wasn't aware they were even doing any useability research. That's frightening, actually, to know they're making an effort and still not getting it right.

It's $200 on contract, which isn't terrible. But between being carrier restricted, and the lack of useful distinguishing features, I don't see this selling well.

Ah yes, I see it - never used it before. Thanks. How useful!

And only runs on AT&T, the least loved GSM provider.

That's a ridiculous price when stuff like Motorola G / X costs half that. They're even higher than some of the high end Androids.

WTF Amazon? I thought they were going to go free/ad subsidized on this.

Has Bezos lost his way?

That's pathetic, actually, but par-for-the-course with modern American media. Personal lives of leaders should have no interest at all. Show me if he knows how to run a company, has a vision for tech, or can create compelling products and services. Then let him go home and spend time doing whatever he enjoys doing.

Same goes for politicians, actually.

There is a slider for "hide". You can move it to show or hide comments of a certain rating (move it down to -1 to see top level comment)

Unfortunately that's baloney -- the memory problem, if anything, has gotten worse again lately. A dozen tabs or two open up for a few days and you've got TROUBLE.

Since cleaning up the original code and then crapping on the suite, the Mozilla Foundation has accomplished so little over a decade that it's scary. They're good at taking money though.

But, when they work, their browsers and plugins are still a better experience than Chrome/Chromium.

Oh, also, Google DID each their lunch already as far as I can tell. Pretty much everyone is using Chrome (and cool stuff like WebRTC works on Chrome best and first), while only aging geeks even care a whit about Mozilla any more.

Actually Chrome has been making use of Firefox's own usability research ahead of firefox.

Seconded. I just took their advice and created a bookmarklet. There are a few egregiously offesnive sites that specialize in these stupid slideshows, and finally I can read some of them again. I'd been avoiding them so they can't charge for 7 ad impressions for the price of one, greedy bastards.

Actually, you don't hear much about the chumminess anymore. I think it mostly went away when Novell sold SUSE to Attachmate, ("attach-meat" ha ha), who has done a great job of selling SUSE on its own merits. To listen to the recent press releases, I think their new "lover" is SAP. They're making a lot of noise about SUSE being the best platform to run SAP on. I don't know much about SAP but I get the impression it's not fun.

Well, the Register beat us to the punch with a title/subtitle that beats mine by an order of magnitude:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/17/critical_barrier_to_interstellar_travel_removed/
"Good: Espresso machine in SPAAAACE. Bad: Full of URINE
Tomorrow's coffee - made out of yesterday's"

Damn, those guys are funny. I know they take a beating sometimes, but I find their journalism and their sense of humor refreshing, given the likes of stodgy American press like ITWorld and the like.

And now, via the bitching, we'll see who likes Linux because of its 'classic Unix goodness' and who wants to see radical innovation. I'm currently not sure which I prefer. A lot of recent changes have kind of annoyed me. Systemd doesn't impress me that much because I liked the original init.d architecture, I understood it, and it works. That said, it's nice when I boot up a Mac and am at a log-in screen in just a few seconds. Can't have it both ways, and part of the problem is expectations - I don't expect my Linux box to boot up quickly, so it doesn't annoy me if it doesn't. If Linux keeps getting radical this way, I might just switch to FreeBSD on the desktop though (PC-BSD is awesome: nice way to get BSD on a desktop, though it's wonky on laptop hardware). BSD has no pretentions of doing this radical sort of stuff, as far as I can tell, making it more suitable for those of us who like *nix the way it is. Or something like that.

Are they potentially hiring tons of coders to improve the software? I understand they've largely fixed the memory leaks problem. I don't happen to use Firefox - I prefer Opera (and am one of the few who do, apparently). What they have not fixed however is the plugin architecture where each time you upgrade the browser you have to worry about even your themes no longer working. That's highly annoying and at least one area where Chrome is doing better work.

Their big problem is that you can't just throw money at a problem - you need vision, inspiration, and good, qualified people. It's obvious they're just aping Chrome at the moment, and it's pathetic. How about innovating and making a better browser? How about diversifying your revenue stream from just sucking at Google's tit via default search? If I were on the Board of Directors, I'd be shaking management's cage - they're swimming dangerously close to the edge of extinction, which is pathetic considering how truly awful IE10 is. If Google eats Firefox's lunch, it's a bad day for all of us, simply because competition over the past decade has led to some remarkable improvements in browsing.

No worries - and you were absolutely right to correct my error.

Incidentally, your post seems to have disappeared, or at least I can't see it. Can you now delete your own, previous posts? I'll have to check into that.

Seems like it's pretty obvious, but it's been a long time coming. Nice.

For example, you may search photos of their new office in Paris. An 18th century mansion with golden walls et ceilings. Over 1000 m² in center of Paris for 20 employees...

That is free software 2014. Free software 2014 makes me sick.

Pretty much the same idea I had a while back: http://nooplinux.org (although I use it for development too).
Interestingly enough, I'm never going to go back to using another distro, not because noop is 'better' (far from it),
but because I know exactly where everything is, and how everything works, it's really nice.
I see that they use pacman? I've been debating changing my package manager to something ... cleaner.
Although, the way it is now is extremely 'Unix-y', all data are in files, and the 'package manager' is a shell script haha.

TL;DR Great to see more KDE distros! Building a distro from source is not quick and easy.

pardon the tone, no personal attack was intended.

I realize that hosting a web site that serves millions of hefty downloads costs money, but I would think it could be done for far less than $300 million/yr. What has FF been doing with the rest of Google's money?

Sorry, I didn't present my idle thought fully enough. A sometimes seen enhancement to a sci-fi suit is to make a peson faster. Let's say it's helping to move the legs faster? It couldn't be too much faster and even then the body would have to get use to having the faster advantage. How about aiming (hand-eye) speed, seems like a suit could help a person keep a heavier weapon steay.

But then again, nothing more than an idle thoughts. But could the brain and the various body systems keep up with what a suit could provide?

Would've been great if the author had spent some more time on the Google money issue. Google has been very happy to be the default browser on Firefox. If Google no longer wants this, then what kind of money could Firefox get from MS/Bing? Is there some other alternative? It's been a while since I've seen an analysis of this issue but I've never seen it presented as an all or nothing scenario like in this article.

Easy there, A.C. The issue is sloppy editing by yours truly, not cherry picking of facts. I've fixed the summary and will flog myself as penitence for not being more accurate.

Glad to help! I stayed away from Suse mostly because of the MS chumminess, but it does seem to have retained its fan base and seems a bit more exciting than Redhat.

I had very high hopes for Mint but they don't lavish much attention on KDE and their upgrade policy is medieval. There are several nice little obscure distros -- PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Sabayon, Chakra -- but after trying most of them I ended up with Kubuntu because it worked better.

Just to be clear, he was anti-gay-marriage , not anti-gay . there is a huge, ignorant, difference.

Pipedot will do the community no service propagating slanted or cherry-picked facts; Particularly when slandering a living persons name...

The new Firefox OS is actually pretty neat, development wise. Instead of having to learn custom languages and tool kits, they use standards-based web technologies. Anyone familiar with current web development will immediately go: "Hey, I know this!" when looking at how to make an app for their new phone. Or, at least that's how I felt when I thumbed through it.

You know, for a nice change of pace. Firefox has turned into everything they SAID they hated about the Netscape suite - bloated and creaky and unstable. (Fittingly, the Seamonkey suite sings by comparison).

They abandoned Thunderbird (more or less).

They wasted resources on yet another mobile phone platform, their own. Meanwhile their Android Firefox sucks eggs and can't render properly.

They've done nothing but chase Google's money for years and years. I don't care who their CEO is. Their choice of a bigot was just the latest bad decision from an org with no soul.

Wow - thanks for the post. I just checked out soldkx and discovered some software I'd never heard of, packaged as part of their "back office" product:

Internal information streams with SeedDMS.
Employee management with OrangeHRM.
Customer relations, and leads with Zurmo.
Build and manage a professional site with Typo3.
Invoicing with SiWapp.

Wasn't aware of any of these - will be checking them out! That's what I love about sites like this.