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Grr...the preview removed my </snark> tag from the end of the first paragraph. It was totally there before when I clicked preview, but the &lt; and &gt; tags got turned into < and > in the comment block. Also, double-quoting "the rich" in the subject also got removed, but I noticed and fixed that one using single quotes.

I personally prefer the less-colloquial term "the poor," or at the very least "those people." I also prefer them to remain altruistically and emphatically oriented, it makes them more sheep like and exploitable. When you don't care about being run over (gently of course, they need to get run over again next week) it's just making it easy for us rich to get richer.
Of course, as far as I can tell, this isn't actually saying the poor are either of these things, but rather those who are rich, but not super-rich, are.

I'm inclined to agree. I move frequently, even after marriage and kids, so every 2-3 year we are forced to do a sweep of our possessions, since we can't bring it all with us. Out with the old toys, clothes, gadgets, junk. No pack rats here - when you are forced to pay by the kilo to move things, you start drawing a much tighter distinction between 'need' and 'no need.' I see my folks in their house, stuffed with junk, and managing, organizing, rotating, and maintaining all that crapola becomes a job in itself. I'm happy to have a much simpler lifestyle, and as reward we are mostly free to go where we want to. If a great job came up on the other side of the world, it would be a no-brainer to accept it, because uprooting and moving there wouldn't be a big deal at all. 'Course, going digital has a lot to do with the simplified lifestyle: fewer physical possessions to haul around.

Also worth noting, just in case we have some nooblings around here in the dark, is that you don't NEED to have a version of ubuntu packaged with another window manager/desktop environment to use one; it's as simple as "sudo apt-get install ". I almost appreciate Canonical being this locked down with their default environment, as given how much they've done to discourage people needing to learn a thing or two to use GNU/Linux at all, it's nice to see them now encouraging people to learn a thing or two because the defaults, while functional, get uncomfortable fairly quickly. And if you don't want to learn, well, you still have a working system and won't be running back to Windows because the learning curve was too high.

Not as system I'll personally be using in the near future, but it does seem to have some pluses to it for its target userbase.

I feel your pain. I've got FF7 CDs somewhere I've not been able to use since I switched from 3DFX to Nvidia. :(

You're a dude, Bryan - many thanks!

You forgot the now obligatory: "Fuck Pipedot! All hail my new site, EqualsBracketSlash!"

I think my first computer was a TRS80 of some vintage and my friends had Commodore 64s. But, I really liked my second computer which was an Atari ST. It was great for Music and Midi. I suspect it would still function highly at this stage for that purpose, although I finally sent mine to the landfill about eight years ago.

Over the years, I have drifted from Redhat, Gentoo, Debian and finally to Ubuntu about five years ago. I just found that Ubuntu was a reference point for many project releases even if the projects also release source code as well. I guess the latest high profile version of this is Steam on 12.04. Anyway, aside from linking Amazon to search queries which I disable, my functionality and use of Linux has not (yet) been greatly affected by Canonical's decisions with its Linux distribution and Unity window manager. I guess I don't really care where various UI elements get put at the end of the day as long as I can find them. I quite like the Dash search.

That said, I remain puzzled why Canonical seems to care to fix UI elements to particular places in the first place? I am not sure what they gain from this?

PS: Sorry to self-reply, just something to keep in mind, is that I've been following Bryan(#1)'s comments about the site, and as I understand it there is a bit more to pipedot than meets the eye. He is talking about the codebase being able to connect to other sites running the codebase, to distribute stories and comments, and topics. Such an idea is really exciting as I think it fundamentally defuses the issue of monetisation. On top of this the source is open.

So perhaps in future what we will see is a plethora of sites running pipecode, each with a particular focus or topic. They are all linked, so a user can tweak what they see, or what is brought to their attention.

None of the sites would be particularly large, so the site/system can't be "bought out" by commercial interests.

The drawbacks would be around whether the sites are able to grow large enough to establish communities of their own. This will be the absolute kicker, since what makes communities form is difficult to understand, and even harder to control (look at "failed" efforts like G+) so really this is just going to have to be a "wait and see" situation.

It's a great little/big experiment and I am looking forward to following along. I don't know how many of the comments Bryan gets a chance to read, but I'm sure he'll post a follow up here if my musing/thoughts are absolutely wrong: I'm just responding to other posts I've seen him make, and I may have misunderstood things.

I know it's not easy, and I appreciate that you were brainstorming, as am I...

If the objective is to cover server and modest staffing costs then non-intrusive text-based ads with a subscription model to remove them does seem like the tried and true model to follow. Of course I'm no expert, so perhaps the revenue stream from such ads is insufficient.

Certainly, what I see on the internet at large is that when a high volume site (such as Slashdot) resorts to highly obstrusive, inline video/auto play ads, and other such BS, then it's a sign that the owners are trying to squeeze as much money as they can from the platform. So for their needs, text-only ads probably isn't "enough" money to make them happy.

If PipeDot is about building a self-driven community then I think those objectives will be fundamentally opposed to any major effort to monetize. Whether through obtrusive ads, or what I would call "agressive" subscription models, like the one you suggested. And again, what you suggested isn't bad, I just think it goes against the spirit of a community site that's built on community contributions.

At the end of the day (and I'm still brainstorming) the world seems rather topsy-turvy to me these days. With Facebook paying so much money for WhatsApp (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26266689) I can't possibly fathom how a user of an instant messaging program can be priced at $35..

So I'm sorry zafiro17 (and other readers) I've no solutions in hand...

Ah. I like the idea of being able to talk privately to other users that way.

Yeah, you didn't build this site to be an email host, so no worries there (was mostly wondering if my fearsome ability to break anything was at work).

I've been considering going to a ubuntu based distro, since there seem to be a lot of commercial packages that are supporting it. Xubuntu seems to be a nice alternative, I just need to take the time and figure out how easy everything will get along if I throw openbox and my crunchbang settings on it.

Thanks for posting this, your post has helped me finally get onto usenet for text posts.

Hasn't changed with this. The very first thing I do is dump unity:
apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-panel compizconfig-settings-manager and presto... I can use
gnome classic.

I like 14.04 LTS.. I've hated Unity since it began. Seems almost every new revision makes my list of things I
need to tweak longer.

Exactly. Given how easy it is nowadays to download a version of ubuntu that comes packaged with your favorite DE or WM, this isn't that big of an issue. They have chosen to remove customization because they don't want to support a feature they view as non-essential and possibly harmful to their interface, you can react to this by just opting to use a DE or WM that gives you power to customize it.

I remember putting together a Windows 98 machine from spare parts. That thing worked better than it had any right. ;-) That was also the last computer I owned that could run Ultima VII natively. Now we have Exult. Never underestimate the power of nerds with free time and an obsession. :-)

Even if using Ubuntu, one is not constrained to using Unity. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Cinnamon and others are available .

Kudos for opening the source.

I'm building a COSMAC ELF (with a 1802 processor from 1976) right now, for fun and to learn some esoteric machine code and Forth to wrap my mind around - and also because what I would really like to build is a spaceship .

I thought - with the exception of the word 'mess' - he was essentially gracious.

Well this AC thought the same thing and clarified what I suspect NCommander meant.

I relate because of bitter experience wrangling projects mixing PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS and javascript in the same files. Even more bitter experiences from wrangling projects where the original developer picked the templating language of the week (obviously written in PHP -- itself a templating language). Code I was employed to maintain where the original developers were storing and retrieving random javascript and html snippets using the database and every database table had a different character encoding with no validation or sanity checking other than the stupid strip slashes function.

Now, I thought pipecode was relatively clean but the writeln($html) brought back such painful memories as to make me physically shudder. It's just a style thing... unless you've had the nightmare of working with frontend developers on a mess of unmaintainable code. Then it does look like a 'mess' -- but I'm pretty much certain that word was not intended as disparaging to Bryan in any way.

They call their UI "Unity" for a reason - "Binary" would imply there is at least one other option!

Ncommander's response isn't surprising. I guess the question had to be asked, and now that it's been answered both sites can move on. I thought - with the exception of the word 'mess' - he was essentially gracious. So both sites will move on and complement each other and sometimes even overlap. Sounds like he/they have put a lot of work into upgrading the code, which interesting. Best of luck to our soybean cousins!

Since the restriction comes from the window manager, and Mint has its own window manager (well, actually two of them), I strongly doubt it.

99.999999% of humanity has no clue as to the severe limits of determinism in complex uninhibited systems i.e. the real world.

And 98.765432% of all statistics are pulled out of someone's ass.

Since Mint is based on Ubuntu, will their upcoming 14.04 versions also have this restriction?

It's not the only choice you get. You also have the choice not to use Ubuntu. It's not as if there were no viable alternatives.

I asked that question when this story got posted over there. NCommander replied with a pretty detailed explanation.

pipedick

There are fundamental problems with a payment/monetisation strategy such as this one, which seeks to directly derive payment from others for the posting content of the contributors to the site.

Of course any monetisation of the site is trying to do the same thing, but it's a little less direct than outright charging people to read what others have written.

You've got a good point! So what do you recommend?

I can't resist the C64 myself, but took my first babysteps into the world of computing on a second generation PET, which was like the most amazing thing on earth back in the day. To this day, I'm nostalgic about it.

There's a company that has built modern keyboards out of old C64 chassis. You get a USB connection and the works, but on a C64 keyboard. I'm strangely attracted to it.

TRS-80 Model III ... I picked up a ton of shareware games and other utilities at a local user group on 5.25" floppies. I probably still have them in a shoe box somewhere if my wife hasn't discovered them yet and thrown them out.
Commodore 64 ... I discovered BASIC and color!
Timex Sinclair 1000 ... Worst keyboard ever! I got the one with 2K of RAM and remember loading a flight simulator from audio tape. The refresh rate was about one frame per second.
TRS-80 Model 4 ... More user groups, more games, more utilities.
TRS-80 Model 100 ... Now this is the machine I wish I still had. I maxed out the RAM/ROM to 32K and got the 3.5" floppy drive. I also got a 300 baud modem and would read SarText as fast as the the text would download.

While I have plenty of past (and passed) loved ones (particularly a Sanyo 178^Hkg luggable /**had to leave that typo in lol**/) my "best" computer must be a relatively new eMachine 10 inch notebook. The little guy refused to stay dead (I killed it once by disassembling it and cleaning out some of the "goop" but after two weeks it came back to life). Of course the fan is long gone because I smoke two packs a day (and so does it) but it don't mind :D

Currently it's running the newest Mint and I use it primarily for small & rough Inkscape work. If it ever does die I'll still keep it.

What has this got to do with true retro computing? My point would be that a lot of the love for the old ones came from the fact that they were relatively accessible i.e. cheap, and "good enough". They could be a bit hit and miss but when they hit it was love :) "Making do" has plenty of charm on its own and there are still new-ish computers (not just awesome Raspberries & similar) that carry a lot of the retro legacy in spirit.

By the way I wonder how many used "butterfly keyboard" ThinkPads are still alive and well? Never used them but they looked damn sexy from a distance. I find it "easy" to love small laptops but perhaps it's that old Sanyo* forever leaving its mark on me :)

* I even changed the fuses on that thing several times! Fuses!!! Like those you can find in a dimmer lol! And my beard is only slightly gray.

.... just by turning up to work :p
COBOL lives!

In the mid-late 90's I found this beast for $5. It just continued to boot loop for no apparent reason, so I opened it up and tinkered with it. I was never able to fix it, though it helped me learn about the internals of a computer. I ended up taking the hard drive out and putting it in a 386. I kept the 80286 AMD processor as well. I think I still have it somewhere.

"Paid subscribers get to see more than the first 20 comments?"

There are fundamental problems with a payment/monetisation strategy such as this one, which seeks to directly derive payment from others for the posting content of the contributors to the site.

Of course any monetisation of the site is trying to do the same thing, but it's a little less direct than outright charging people to read what others have written.

So far I've trusted Brian to put together a very tidy site here, and I actually trust him to make some decisions about how to monetise, if indeed that's a direction he wants to go in.

The comment preview now shows an abbreviated tree (the comment + it's direct decedents.)

Click the story link for the full tree (obviously.)

The in-site virtual email is, for the moment, not connected to the traditional SMTP/POP3/IMAP mail protocols of the Internet. Instead, it is a mechanism to allow users to send each other private messages without giving away their "real" email address. It also allows the system to send you a notice when, for example, you get a comment reply.

Although I did create a tie-in of the system to my "real" Dovecot/Postfix email server, I have left it disabled for now. Potential problems of such a system include:

• Incomming Spam - real email addresses get lots of spam and, although my system piped the messages through SpamAssassin, some messages would still get through and cause some inconvenience
• Outgoing Spam - controls and limits would need to be made to prevent users from sending spam and adding to the global spam problem
• Heavyweight Service - Each user connected to IMAP creates a new Dovecot process. If several hundred users all set their mobile phone apps and desktop clients to use the IMAP service, my poor little mail server would experience some real resource limits.

I just spun up a quick debian wheezy VM to test it out. One or two tweaks to get it up and running, but a surprisingly smooth install overall.

Of course now I have my own pipedot it's only a matter of time until I burn my bridges, betray you all, and make off to my secret lair.

Pipecode is slick!

XOXO

(I tried to login, but couldn't. Not sure why.)

I had the same issues you did and I was wondering if my memory was crapping out on me. Then life threw me a curve ball and answered that question: I'm fine. I'm American, but my wife is not. We decided to move closer to her folks and I found myself in another country with a language I knew zero about. I took over a year off from programming and focused solely on absorbing the new language. I'm still a horrible language person, but I learned thousands (probably more like tens of thousands) of facts in an intense 7 month time frame. (If you want details, you'll have to hunt me down.) I'm back to programming and job hunting and I'm still learning the language. My programming skills are still just as sharp but I find my memory is a hell of a lot better.

I think the problem is spending too much time in the code instead of doing other things too. I'm not saying you should change what you're doing. You have to do what is right for you. Pulling up my roots to live in another country is the single hardest thing I have ever done in my life and it is not for everyone. I am saying that you can pursue other (social) hobbies and do things offline. I think that can help... probably not the extreme it did for me, but it can help.

I think more so than anything else, I just wanted you to know that you aren't losing your mind. It's just an "underused muscle" right now. Oh... and stay physically fit. That helps too.

-- Common Joe

Neither Google nor Facebook has my real name... and who's to say my real name isn't those two apparently-random words? I mean, seriously, yonder is the excellent example of Moon Unit, are they going to deny that as a real name?? Now tell me any other two words are not a real name, eh?

Good points. I also like Slashdot, Pipedot, SoylentNews for making it *painless* to talk to interesting strangers over the internet. It's not *work*. Facebook is such a pain to parse, such a poor work-to-gain ratio, that it's not worth the bother (I've regretfully abandoned a group that's fairly important to me because the group owner migrated us to Facebook, and I can't stand slogging through that mess every day). And I could deal with a little monetization if it didn't negatively impact me as a user, but this "like" everything in sight has diluted the concept to "barely noticed in passing".

Oh yeah... Howdy, stranger!

It's amazing how much better this site looks and feels compared to when I first came here maybe six weeks ago. And opening the source code just makes it that much sweeter.

Long live Pipedot!

Fancy meeting you here :)

I think you're right. These 'social networking' sites are just hangouts like any other, subject to fads and people outgrowing 'em. The Hotwheels and Beanie Babies of the internet. Before Facebook and Twitter it was MySpace and before that AOL and Prodigy, and before that it was BBSs, and before that it was snailmail clubs and round-robins. No doubt cavemen had their own hangouts, equally ephemeral.

Which radio stations? I *like* industrial sequenced synth shit. :D

Thanks for releasing your code (I am curious as to why you picked GPL3). I read the install/config instructions and sounds like anyone could get it working, starting from basic knowledge. Contrast to slashcode which works fine for the user, but (per the Chronicled Adventures of Soylent) setup is definitely not for the faint of heart.

The one feature I wish for right now on Pipedot is a daily mailer, or weekly if there aren't enough stories to warrant daily. Cuz otherwise I forget Pipedot exists. :( Usually I only remember to come here when someone mentions/sigs it on SN!

I just discovered the email doohickey, that's a nice feature ... gave it a try, but so far it doesn't appear to be working. "Sent" mail vanished into the aether, and what I tried to send myself here produced this bounce:

SMTP error from remote server after RCPT command:
host mail.zenbi.net[69.164.201.49]:
550 5.1.1 [reziac@pipedot.org]: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table

Dunno if that's useful but thought I'd report it.

Just for the record, I've had a paid Slashdot sub since... 2001, I think (maybe before) and it amounts to $5 every 3 years or so.

It's the ultimate 8-bit machine: 7 MHz (*1) Z80-compatible CPU, 512K main RAM, 128K video RAM, FM synthesis (OPLL), MIDI, adjustable speed autofire on space bar. Full specs here .

(*1) The original Z80 took 4 ticks for even the most basic instructions, more unless paired with fast RAM. The R800 in the turbo R can do them in 1 tick. So it's a lot faster than what the clock speed would suggest. For an 8-bit machine, that is.

While I still have it wired up, I must admit that I only really start it when doing research for the openMSX emulator. If I want to play old games, I do it in the emulator: it is just more convenient with save states, reverse, cheats etc.

We still have a fully-functional Commodore 64, along with the color monitor, disk drive, joysticks, several game disks and cartridges ... Most of sits in storage, though, with only the Commodore 64 sitting out, proudly, with our collection of obsolete technology (Lazer Tag, Coleco Electronic Quarterback, Microvision Game System, Arcade Defender, etc.).

Platforms? To network over the Internet with people? That's about ALL there is!

What isn't surprising is that these things are dying, it's that they ever got so damn popular to begin with. Facebook offers nothing that hasn't been around in free and open forms for years without locking you into a single company's walled garden. A list of features and corresponding preexisting services:

Messaging ->E-mail
Newsfeed/Wall ->Blog
Photos ->Webserver/FTP/various server applications for gallery generation
Groups ->Web fora, usenet...
Chat ->IRC, XMPP, and other often more closed forms.
Event Planning ->shared calendars (though I'll admit, Facebook did at least implement this in a more easily accessible way than most, at least when they first rolled it out).

Most of what Facebook has to offer is a UI slapped over a bunch of preexisting utilities, and the cost is that they get all of your data, and that as long as you're relying on their services you can't simultaneously easily network with people who aren't without using redundant services to talk to people on different platforms. Well, for one, some people (and I've no delusions that it's "most") are just simply getting fed up with their data being slurped up and used to sell ads to target at them, or worse, funneled to law enforcement/employers. For another, the simple fact that there are people you may want to network with that aren't on Facebook means you'll need to engage in some of these alternatives for the various services Facebook offers. THAT seems to be a big weak point for these closed private platforms, because it's what trains people who either never learned to use the alternatives before getting on Facebook, or who forgot about them in the frenzy to jump on the next big thing. When you realize you can have everything Facebook offers without giving anything up for it at all, and often getting what amounts to more freedom to craft your own UI to streamline it all if you choose to, it kind of makes you wonder why you would do otherwise.

For the matter of G+ specifically, I think it mostly just has a lot more competition in the form of Facebook than Facebook had in the form of Myspace, and that G+ doesn't really offer enough that significantly distinguishes it. Myspace, if we can all remember back, was an absolute mess of a site, and half the time when you came upon a person's profile, music would immediately start playing, there'd be flash elements strewn about, and often broken scripting due largely to just how much Myspace allowed users to customize their profiles. And beyond even the user-created mess, the site itself just never had a very friendly UI, and the privacy settings were all but not there at all. Facebook's arrival to your average Myspace user of the day was like the coming of the Messiah with how many fixes it made and features it brought, even if it was just yet another corporate walled garden. And also, if we can remember back to 2004, when Facebook hit the scene, it had no ads, it was only for college students, and only people at your school could see your profile at all unless you specifically messaged with them (or at least exchanged pokes). They gradually added the more and more insidious aspects of the site, and relied on the growing ubiquity of the site to keep people from bucking them off, and for the most part, it's been a winning strategy, though it almost certainly is unsustainable in the long run. Google+ has none of this to offer, and unlike the other alternatives for talking to people not on your social network of choice (email, irc, xmpp, etc), it's only useful for networking with people on Google+, meaning that you'll end up having your Facebook to network with most people, your G+ to network with people who somehow thing Google is great but Facebook is the devil, and STILL having to maintain an email account at the very least for those that don't use social networking. That's a lot of timeshare to expect from the average user, and it's just not going to happen. Google+ will continue to be used by nobody but Ingress players until they shutter it, and expecting otherwise by this point would be silly.

Tracking cookies are SO SO SO the least of the issues facing the plurality of home Windows PCs.

I would have been much more impressed if they took ClamAV and made it at least as good as the garbage from Symantec and McAfee. Right now it's still actually worse (particularly on Windows).

I haven't read the articles (of course) but so far this sounds like PR more than an actual valuable piece of software (because it's only going to be used by people who already know how to use Adblock, flush cookies, and maybe even subscribe to an additional block list in Adblock).