Recent Comments

Let me see if I can work some magic. I really want to encourage people to post articles and anyone who takes the time to do so clearly feels it's a worthwhile thing to discuss. When editors start deleting articles, readers stop taking the time to contribute and the sense of cameraderie takes a hit.

Yes, you're quite right. :) But at least this one is real, involving someone who really did (it seems) get pressured by the feds.

Still, please don't publish it if you don't like it / think it's worthy. No skin off my nose. I'd rather see this place keep good editorial control. I was mainly impressed by the crypto angle. Delete away!

Lavabit? Man, isn't that only one step removed from the NSA and Intel snoop chip stories? I'll post it a bit later tonight.

Yes, but for a different reason. It's quite reasonable to not consider a brand for perceived quality. It's a bit ridiculous that you need to not consider a brand because of regulations imposed on them.

So what good can this embedded 3G chip do when the rest of the computer is shut down? Can it even get a signal inside a typical PC case?

For a lot of people that's exactly how the car market has worked for the last 20 years or so. American makes are immediately crossed off the list.

Thanks, I did one. :) Hasn't made it to the FP yet.

I see a lot of Fahrenheit 451 in society already.

Editor here: your point is well taken. I paused, but thought it would be worse to not submit a link an author had taken the time to post to the pipeline. Hopefully, when we get more submissions coming in this will be less of an issue. I too would like this to not be a site that simply mirrors the infowars site (or any other site, for that matter). But today, that's what the pipeline mailman carried in.

Would love some of your article proposals, by the way - we're trying to publish just about everything that comes in that is serious.

I'm wondering how long until we see products advertised with "Proudly NOT made in the USA". There are several people I know who are interested in buying grey market versions of electronics, though I'm the only one crazy enough to do it.

You mean like seeds genetically engineered to stop growing after a generation? Yeah, we do that.

"Common core" is also destroying modern US education. (It essentially requires that every child be a theoretical mathematician rather than learning how to multiply as we've learned for a thousand years, ensuring failure for most.)

We finally get somewhat reasonable health care just as everything else turns to crap.

No, no, I meant this was the second such link after the preceding Intel VPro article, which was built around Infowars crapola.

The link in the summary doesn't work as it has put a ] on the end.

And if given a choice(which most companies have) they won't produce anything here, either. It started with encryption export restrictions: This made sure that all relevant encryption would have a tendency to be developed outside america.

Now we've made everything "Made in america" completely insecure. We export our skillsets, we destroy our own education.(FCAT, seriously?) America already only produces two things: Drugs, and Computer chips. This is an attack on half our production. America used to produce three things: Dollars(as a export), drugs, computer chips, and education. We've significantly eroded 2 of the 4 already.

I suppose we'll find a way to legislate destruction of our medicine exports next. Perhaps we can backdoor them?

Who can forget the Deathstars?

From >Wikipedia :

nickname of IBM Deskstar hard drives, particularly the unreliable 75GXP and 60GXP models

This is good news for me as I get older. Now as dementia sets in with people saying "you're in a fog", I can claim I'm just doing my job.

I use screenshots from games I play. I may subdue the colors and blend it with a texture.

That's two Infowars links in the same day, guys. Are you trying to turn away what little intelligent traffic we're getting here?

I really like it here, but if this is going to be a conspiracy site I'm not going to stick around.

TOTALLY! Glassholes. Punch.

Glassholes.

The 3G support works only if the computer includes 3G hardware.

We've got enough real security concerns without conspiracy bull polluting discussions.

Discussed at http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1219245 and other places.

Infowar? Really Pipedot?

I suppose we now beat on hipsters the way we used to beat on nerds? So, anyone caught with a mechanical typewriter in Starbucks, or riding an ancient big-wheeled bicycle? That sort of thing?

I had a Rotronix Wafadrive. It wasn't any better than the microdrive. Most the carts seemed to fail after about half a dozen uses.

I bought a second hand QL at a fair (for £5) in the late 1980s, and the microdrives on it were actually surprisingly reliable and I never had a cartridge fail on that machine.

When zip drives were a thing, floppies were pretty reliable. It's only more recently they got very unreliable (in around 2001-2002, it was pretty common for floppies to work for a single use only). Older drives are still fine, I have a Tektronix digital storage scope with a floppy drive (and I keep a computer with a floppy drive around), and if I ever need to transfer a screen grab off the scope the drive always works, and captures I grabbed 3 or 4 years ago are still perfectly readable using the older 3.5in drive in the computer.

"Pitchforks and torches, now!"

Spread cheeks/coughing and partyvans, now!

I get the impression everyone is loudly complaining that the "other guy" is doing the same thing the complainer is. Yeah, it's easy to point the finger at Huawei, but the US is apparently doing it too. There's only one guaranteed loser here: the consumer.

Pitchforks and torches, now!

Seriously, we already banned US network gear here, but it seems like you need to fully avoid anything US tech related to be sure they don't spy on you. No wonder the US hates Huawei so much.

I would have taken a new photo with pipedot in the background, but that would have required me going to one corner of the room to pick up the box of floppies, another corner of the room to get my camera, and all kinds of hard work like that. Ain't noone got time for that shit!

http://fatphil.org/images/floppy_pipe.jpg

Yes, awesome idea. Wish we'd added Aldous Huxley; he was a genius and I almost wonder if he won't be more correct than Orwell was. Worse, we're probably headed to a place where a little bit of both are the norm. Worse, unlike Sky Captain, no Gwyneth Paltrow in thigh-high stockings.

Earthporn is a good idea. There's some great earth porn type stuff on Google Plus these days, but I'm getting nauseous over the new trend for highly/over-saturated colors, pink skies, etc. Real life is good enough for me; don't need my artwork to all look like the onset of an acid trip.

Everything old is new again. With added bling (read "bloat") for the masses and/or PHBs!

Excuse _ME_, I use _METRIC_ units, thank you very much.

Well, I _do_ make that stop. Plenty of programs I open and never think to close until I have to minimize 35 other windows in front of vlc playing an annoying chiptune. _I_ also like to take a breather and look at a nice image instead of twelve _terminals_ of code.

IDEs are for the weak.

10ft x 30ft? Or are you just wallpapering a bathroom?

The audio fidelity noticeably deteriorated within a dozen playbacks, and the tape frequently snarled or snapped, often winding itself around the playback mech so you'd have a nice little task extracting the now-worthless tape from your cassette player so you could throw it out and play something else.
The only thing they were good for was for Sony Walkman's, which was the signature device of the Yuppie era (as in, "damn, I think I left my Walkman at the sushi bar...")

Bring on the mists of Avalon computing.

reddit.com/r/wallpapers
reddit.com/r/earthporn

I was using Variety under Ubuntu to download and switch wallpapers automatically, but got sick of it. It's a nice program though.

Now that I finally read the freaking article, I see that what they're proposing is local storage AND processing of Internet-Of-Things data. So they've embedded a subset of Raspberry Pi style functionality into some of their low-to-mid-range routers.

I hate to say it, but there's a market opportunity there, for businesses who'd rather not build and string the Pis together themselves. It's basically an offshoot of what people have been doing with the WRTs and similar Linux routers for a VERY long time.

Cisco is playing catchup but also legitimizing this approach, of treating the router as a legitimate computing device...

+1 for brave new world

I think that we've all been doing this for a long time with local-hosted servers at home. Our laptops and mobile devices don't have enough storage on board, so we all have external HDDs or NAS's that we all connect to. Not news, just opportunistic buzzword-bait.

Brave New World seems to be missing?! I'll settle with 1984 then. It is probably the scariest and one of the least far-fetched.

I've lived in malarial countries for well over a decade, so malaria is on my mind. I check the kids' room twice before going to bed to make sure no mosquitos are in there. But this thing isn't great. A bubbler that you have to put in each and every source of still water? Why not dump out the water? How many would you need? Maybe if you have a water fountain or something, but in most of the malarial south, this wouldn't quite do it.

Scientists posit malaria is the single strongest evolutionary force on the human genome at the moment. After nearly nine years in West Africa, I'm convinced it's true.

Yez, u can haz funy pointz

Seriously, that was very funny and clever sir. I tip my hat to you AC.

Is that your own photo? If so, it's brilliant. Slashdot in the background is the icing on the cake.

I used to play things like card games on IRC back in the early 90s. That seemed to be more popular than MUDs as it was social as well as competitive.

One single continuous piece of tape, no spool, all zig-zaggy inside the case, that was quite literally shoved back into the cartridge as fast as it was being tugged out. 85KB capacity, IIRC. Innards of the drives visible here: http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/scripts/picshow.php?image=qlmicrodrives.jpg&folder=/Museum/Sinclair/ql&back=/Museum/Sinclair/ql/index.php . Although initially developed for the BT Merlin and the Sinclail QL, I had one on my ZX Spectrum as I splashed out on Interface 1.

Dire is the only word for them.

However, the drives were significantly lighter than the 40kg unit which I used to read these: http://fatphil.org/images/im_floppier.jpg

Hey, I saw the new Godzilla movie and Walter White's collection of Zip disks survived an earthquake, an EMP, a nuclear meltdown, and 15 years of neglect in an evacuation zone!

Because, you know, everything you see in movies is absolutely correct.

Pick a good plain color background. This used to be a much bigger issue when you had a 133Mhz CPU and 16MB of RAM, but performance is still important for low-end systems, like atom. Although your chosen photograph may be JPG, the desktop will likely have to store the full uncompressed 24 bit color data in memory. For 1920x1080 this is at least 6.22 MB of wasted RAM + enough memory bandwidth and CPU cycles to composite the image to the screen all day.

Goo. Damn autocorrect.