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Soylent just linked to an interesting article published at Slate: the emacs vs vim flamewar, 40 years on. Interesting to think how old both pieces of software are, at this point!

Ha ha - I use that one too. I only wish it didn't default to hardwrap. You can get to it fastest by running it as jstar (jstar, jmacs, and joe all run the same binary but with different menu and keystroke configurations - a very cool idea).

That I was going to mount in my car, however then I discovered chromebooks won't run android apps..so I passed and chose a Nexus tablet instead. I think one limiting factor(certainly for me) is that the chromebooks lack the rich app world Android offers.

Why not just use my phone? Honestly--privacy. I can toss all kinds of handy apps on my Nexus without regards to what they are doing with my contact information. Even though my phone is rooted and thus firewalled, it's a lot of trouble managing all that. The bigger screen is handy as well :)

I've understood that the ARM hardware in many of the affordable chromebooks are not performance competitive even with older Core processor based laptops. Is this a misconception on my part?

I currently use https://www.linode.com/ (Linode) for webhosting, anybody have any recommendations over whether it is worth considering a switch to any of the top 10 given in the parent article?

... download files?

It must be said: Windows XP! :D

Okay, not for me personally, but a large portion of the Windows-using world is apparently still enamored of it.

I enjoy using vim too, I especially enjoy the powerful copy and paste functionality, multi-file split screens, accessible regular expression searching, and so on. I actually haven't invested in learning custom syntax highlighting though, probably because I tend to script/write in languages that appear to come with builtin highlighting (Python, Perl, Bash, Latex, ...), but your post has got me intrigued... that's the other thing about vim, every three years or so I bother to learn something new that adds to the fun...

Civilization 3 is not that old, but this is still my go to game of choice, at least when circumstances allow my wife to "tolerate" a game play session (which always lasts too long), otherwise I still get a kick out of pacman for the 2-minute game play sessions that popup once in a while.

Is the function available to anonymous cowards?

I actually enjoy using vim, so when it came to writing I stuck with the tried and true. It's convinient that I can use it locally, or remotely. Setting up custom syntax highlighting is something I've taken to as well. I'm a very weak writer, and I've tried to avoid certain words I'm prone to overusing by highlighting them. Word completion is a surprisingly useful feature too.

You need to use what you're comfortable with - which could even be a typewriter. Clippy offering to fix your purple prose does you no favors in staying focused and immersed. I find it really sad how so much software has become fustrating to use. I see so much productivity lost compared to many of those old school DOS applications focused on getting things done.

Although sometimes you just need to let go and move on. I still use Paint Shop Pro 5, but I realize some tasks take a huge amount of effort when they really shouldn't (if I used something more advanced).

Why not just load linux on the chromebook? Elementary OS works great (sans trackpad on toshiba, but someone just need to fix ubuntu bug 1296534 for that). I hear Linux Mint works well too.

This is probably the most amazing thing I've seen in a very long time. I just watched the YERT video, and if everything they stated is accurate, I'm sold. We need to invest in this.

• Prevents icy roads with built in heaters
• Eliminates fading road paint which can make it difficult to see at night along with the waste of money and chemicals to create and reapply said paint
• Eliminates a large dependancy on petrolium for use in asphalt
• Enables us to harness energy from the sun to do all of this while giving us the possibility of powering the entire country via our roads...things that just sit there year after year and cost us money can now pay for themselves and offer us energy in return!
• Reduction or elimination of Coal/Nuclear power for something clean

They have an Indigogo campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways , and I am contributing. Why can't we have more selfless, forward thinkers in our society? We are too focused on our immediate self gratification and pointless desires rather than making an effort to help the rest of the world and future generations.

apt-get install joe

The keybindings embedded in my muscle memory still work!

Ok, definitely need to preview next time before attempting the WYSIWYG linking :c

You COULD have an army of lying death machines, or you could have an army of flying https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HnwhGgsgXc">cats !

Indeed! I wonder how I failed to notice it.

I've been thinking that a 3d printer might be the essential cool toy for kids these days to really get their creative hat on. Any recommendations for the best gear or setup for a basic home lab?

The price and look of the Chromebooks are very attractive, but I have held off prefering Linux on a "regular" laptop: ebay has good deals on older Dell Precision, for example, that are price competitive with Chromebooks. I'll probably get a tablet at some point for the casual or ultra mobile use cases.

It's not the text color that changes, it's the title bar for each comment.

BTW, maybe you'd have been better off with a Raspberry Pi running openELEC and XBMC? That's what I did as an alternative to Plex. Total price less than $100 including cables etc and if you are a bit more clever than me you can bring the price down even further. Boots in < 20 seconds, connects to your NFS NAS or equivalent (AFS, Samba also supported out of the box), and pumps video goodness over an HDMI cable. Cheap and easily replaced. Plus you've got a Raspberry Pi to play with, which means like me you'll start disconnecting it from your TV and playing with it, changing, reconfiguring, trying different distros, etc. - all until your wife tells you to knock it off and hook the damn thing back up so she can watch her show. Good times.

I am happy to have learned vim and use it to this day for many scripting and general writing tasks.

Plex transcodes - it's kind of its claim to fame. You mean you accessed your Plex media server over the HTTP connection and weren't happy with it? I did the same and thought that was good enough for me. I was planning on nuking ChromeOS and installing Linux but I'm going to keep Chrome around just a bit longer while I play with it. I'm already kind of frustrated with its limitations as an OS, but I concede this is probably what the future looks like, and it's better than I thought it would be. The HP14 is nice hardware, actually, with a very useable keyboard (once you accept it's almost impossible to get a machine that doesn't have that blasted chiclet keyboard these days).

Yes, I also need to get to an NFS share though, and it's probably the straw that will drive me to nuke Chrome and go ahead with the full Linux install.

I had to look that one up: https://www.google.sn/search?q=amstrad+PCW&es_sm=122&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Cj9zU8fDH9LLsATQtIC4BA&ved=0CDIQsAQ&biw=1008&bih=911

Pretty sweet looking old 8 bit machine. I could put one of these things in front of at least some of my staff and their productivity would rise, that's for sure. Screw always-on internet connections in modern offices: it's a joke. I'm posting this from work, for example, instead of actually doing my job :)

I heard somewhere about a guy running a database and his billing off a Commodore64. It was a small mechanic/garage or something, and the guy said, "it does what I need and there's no reason to change it." Awesome.

I don't use one, but every so often someone in one of the retro forums I frequent will find an Amstrad PCW that someone still uses every day. (Amstrad made these in the 1980s as basically wordprocessor appliances - they were inexpensive all-in-one machines supplied with a daisywheel printer and word processing/spreadsheet software. The screens are green phosphor monochrome, and capable of MDA-resolution mono graphics but the word processor software was entirely text mode. They were Z80 based and also ran CP/M, and people even wrote some games for the system).

Probably for the same reason. They are straightforward, robust, free of distractions and if all you need to do is type letters and perhaps do the odd spreadsheet and other things that a small business might need to do, they may still be enough.

I visited the discussion for this article yesterday, when there were only a couple of comments posted. I revisited it today; they were more comments, but they were all in black letters. Am I missing something?

I got a $180 ASUS ChromeBox for use as an HTPC. The native video player can play all the bluray quality files that I've tried. Now if I can just figure out how to use a network share (CIFS or NFS) it would be nearly perfect.

I've tried to stream over HTTP using Plex and Synology Video station, but they both insist on transcoding the video. Anyone know of a good video library app that streams the raw source file using the HTML5 <video> tag? I created my own php project as a test to make sure it worked, but surely there are premade apps for this purpose.

This is a common issue people have with Usenet - each reader keeps its own list of read messages. The usual suggestions are to either ssh to a command line newsreader (eg slrn), or use a web based one. Another possibility is to use a Usenet to mail interface and an IMAP mail server.

another nice feature would be to show the number of new comments in the summary i.e

n comments (m new)

Fixed in the edit.

built by Indiegogo

Indiegogo is a crowdfunding site (like Kickstarter) The devices would be built by the "Solar Roadways" people.

Ill be putting solar panels on my place next year too

I would recommend any homeowner do this. It is one of the best investments I have made to my house, and you have to love getting a negative electricity bill every month. Forever.

Just tested and as suspected, the colors follow you as you access from computer to computer. That tops Usenet, and is highly useful. Wowzer.

For a president focused on green energy and the like, taking this long to get a system in place is pathetic, to say the least. Obviously the White House had security issues to deal with - imagine some rogue state putting listening equipment in the panels and having access to a great listening opportunity - but still, those problems have solutions and this is ridiculously late in Obama's presidency. It comes across as an afterthought.

Anyway, better than nothing. I'll be putting solar panels on my place next year too, hopefully. I'd like to do it while there are still fancy tax credits on the offer.

(a) It's being distributed by an idiot, as zips are unable to preserve important file-system-related information (such as file permissions, including executability). Tar exists for a reason, and in fact predates zip by pretty much a whole decade. The fact that the instructions for use include a preparatory "install a package which will help you cope with our bizarre distribution medium" step is a tell-tale sign that it's not been designed particularly sensibly.
(b) actually, I don't hate to be a unix snob, I revel in it.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and in the Unix(-alike) world, people who started a while back are justifiably notorious for treating people who started more recently like shit.

I don't think anyone was treating anyone like shit, but saying so is of course an easy way to avoid answering the question. What's the problem?

I also just install a minimal systems and install extra packages when needed and I have no idea why I would ever think it would be "easier" to download a .zip (A .zip file? On Linux?! WTF?!), install unzip , extract the zip file (Seriously WTF?!) and run some third party (and totally unsupported by my distro of choice) scripts instead of just installing the package I really need.

I did try to look in their FAQ yesterday, but I couldn't find any reason why they decided to use a .zip file instead of a .tar.gz. I can't remember a single distro where unzip is installed by default, but I'm pretty sure most distros has tar by default. Why are they trying to make it harder for people to use their scripts?

Pipedot now has more features than soylentnews despite having a fifth of the developers

Also, in < two months, Pipedot now has an interface that a recent scientific study concluded is 500,000% better and more useable than Slashdot Beta (F it! Buck Feta!)

Which reminds me - I look forward to the NNTP interface ;-)

Oh man, that would be like tech nirvana for me. Id probably never turn off the computer again if that happened, and slowly lose all contact with the outside world ... I spend a lot of time on comp.misc and really love Usenet in ways the WWW has never really re-implemented (for better or for worse).

The problem is that nowadays TV sports reporting (such as I know it, which is a whisker-thin slice - basically only Formula 1) seems to be more concerned about how people *feel* about their victory or second place, and not about the technical aspects of the event itself. They don't want sport for sportos/stattos/fans - they want sport dumbed-down and emotived-up for the huge bottom layer of the pyramid. Blame marketeers. (And you may read into that sentence the obligatory Hicksian "... who should kill themselves".)

So gays have no hope in that jungle. It's going to be "did you carry an extra pack of pink frilly hankies with you, in case a hard tackle made you cry?" all the freaking way, at least on some channels, and it's going to suck for *everyone*.

This is one reason I like sports "personalities" like Kimi Raikkonen (on a keyboard with no diacriticals, pretend they're there, please). If someone asks a stupid question, he'll give the shortest dismissive answer which almost always makes the interview look stupid. And of course, Kimi was a big fan of James Hunt who had his moments too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tjSvfgA6tk

Does anyone know of another site offering this functionality?

squte.com (my site) does this with a 'new' word in bold next to the comment, I used to show the whole comment title in bold, but found it distracting.

This is a standard option in Drupal, so I expect a few sites do it.

There are other possible similar features, e.g. have comments by the author of the story shown differently, comments by the user viewing the page, anonymous comments, etc, but most of them become more distracting than they are worth.

ISTM Pipedot now has more features than soylentnews despite having a fifth of the developers

However, there's a bug :-(

If you reply to a post at the top of the thread, before reading the whole thread, then when you return to the thread after clicking "post", all those things you've not read are greyed out.

I presume this is just timestamp-based? If so, perhaps don't commit the "thread last rendered" timestamp until some affirmative thread-leaving action is performed. Posting a reply would not be classified as a thread-leaving action. This might require some significantly trickier smarts to implement than just the naive situation we have at the moment.

Simpler Workaround: middle-click the "reply" link to get it in a new tab, and then just close after posting.

It's totally freaking awesome!

Of course, it's been seen before in the environment called "Usenet" (and also "email"), but on something that's a web-forum, it indeed does seem to be new.

Which reminds me - I look forward to the NNTP interface ;-)

Nice addition, as it didn't break anything that I'm familiar with. (Namely being a non-JS luddite.)

KUTGWYSIWYG, Bryan!

Ha ha, your post reminds of this article at the Register from this morning: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/13/supposedly_secure_dogecoin_service_dogevault_goes_offline/ "Supposedly secure Dogecoin service Dogevault goes offline: Much worry. So familiar. Such losses"

Lets face it: this post was just a cheap pretext to try out the nifty new WYSIWYG editor.

I guess the editor is cached, because it took a second to load the first time, but appeared instantly afterwards on other posts. You know, ten years ago Id have said this is bloat, but increasingly I can no longer be bothered to do it the hard way. This is nice.

Nifty! This plus the limited Unicode support are a big deal and a killer combination. Thanks!

Agreed - this is very useful and is a huge improvement in useability. Im not aware of any other site on earth that does this. Does anyone know of another site offering this functionality? Has it ever been seen in the wild?

PC-BSD is my choice. But if I had to pick a Linux it would be Debian or Arch.

Puppet isnt anywhere close to the same thing as smxi.. Puppet is for managing configurations of multiple systems, and keeping everything in line. Once you get more than a handful of systems, whether desktops or servers, the only way to effectively manage them is with tools, whether that be with Puppet, or something like active directory group policy in the MS world. So with Puppet or other configuration managers, you would create "recipes" that would define the configuration for a specific class of your machines. Then either push that configuration out to them, or have an agent on the remote machines that would poll your server to see if there are changes to apply.

SMXI is simply a script to manage things (installing kernels, specific software, upgrades, video drivers) on a single desktop.

They are NOT comparable at all..

Rockin. Good on ya for adding this.

I do HTML every day[ish]. Doesnt mean I want to manually add tags in a comment.

Agreed. The parent post disappears after you hit Preview.