Recent Comments

Because I'm running with NoScript, I didn't even see the comment section. The page is obnoxious with JavaScript being pulled from 3 different sites to display the comments.

Can't log in tonight. System doesn't seem to remember my user name or email either.

The first comment below the story gives different numbers, like nearly $30 B in sales for the whole USA book industry. If you are going to read tfa, also read at least the first comment.

This really was a large update. Although I've gone back and tested pretty much every function of the site, I may have missed something. If you spot a bug, please be sure to report it!

15 Billion. That's the total net revenue that U.S. publishers took in last year. By some measures, it's a great deal of money-representing the hundreds of thousands of trade hardcovers, paperbacks, ebooks, and audiobooks that get bought and sold annually in the United States. By other measures, it's hardly a blip on the multi-trillion dollar economic landscape, a pittance of a percentage of the American GDP. To put it in perspective, it's about one-tenth of Apple's revenue and barely more than one-third of Apple's profit over the last fiscal year.

All U.S. book revenue added together = 1/10 of Apple's revenue is just a striking little fact to me. Either the value of books is vastly under-represented or the value of Apple is vastly over-represented. Probably both.

AFAIK the soft ocean "landing" is only intended as an experiment/demonstration, and that is its only conceivable use. As such it represents commendable progress. The reason I am confident that SpaceX does not consider ocean landing as an end in itself is (1) they have brilliant talent and surely recognize what salt water immersion would do to the thin aluminum alloy bodies and to the rocket engines, and (2) the fact that the vehicle extended landing legs clearly indicates the intent to work toward a soft touchdown on land.

Subject says it all...

I know that I, apparently erroneously, inferred from his statement just prior ("a forked Apache") to mean NGINX is also multi-threaded, though he did put "just" in quotes, so perhaps I should've read something into that.

Coincidentally, I was just skimming an article on Ars about Heartbleed when I ran across the following: "Note: all my experiments and the CloudFlare challenge are targeting Nginx which is single-threaded. It is possible that for a multi-threaded wWb server, more leakage can be observed."

he said:

*Apache's* model of thread/process-per-connection is simple and reliable ...

No, you're wrong, Nginx definitely does not spawn a thread/process for each connection.

s/point/points

Not to sell the other point short, but making a soft water landing (even if they had really lousy luck on the timing) strikes me as a Big Deal. Reusable spacecraft for far, far less than the Shuttle cost would be revolutionary.

Or less gently, as my Slashdot .sig used to say, "The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using 'correlation is not causation' as an argument is close to 1."

At this point the meme has so thoroughly permeated the culture that I really wish every mention of "correlation is not causation" (or "correlation does not imply causation," or any of its variants) came with a warning label explaining that in most cases, there's a whole lot more to the analysis than that.

Are you sure about that? I thought it was written separately as a reverse proxy application, at first.

... but iut's "just" a forked Apache. Apache's model of thread/process-per-connection is simple and reliable, but performance slides toward terrible as the number of concurrent connections becomes vbery large.

NASA has a pretty amazing history of accomplishments.

Absolutely, but pretty much ending in 1986. I'm much more impressed by SpaceX than NASA in the 21st century.

to flying spacecraft to the moon.

Lets just hope they can recreate that one some day :)

what can I say, I'm a Dad, it affects my humour...

these links reminded me of visiting the Air and Space Museum in the Mall in Washington, DC -- which was awesome. I can't believe all of those museums are free to the public. NASA has a pretty amazing history of accomplishments. Suffice it to say that it still blows my mind that we've gone from hunter and gather to flying spacecraft to the moon.

Over the past decade or so, I have come to think that published bad science is shockingly common. I have tried to ruminate on the reasons for this and, while it is easy to identify many contributing factors in the way scientific communities and institutions work, I think the main reason is that science has two completely different functions in human life that work against one another. On the one had, science can be about challenging our own preferred, learned, or expert hypotheses (a la Feynman: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" . On the other hand, science can be about presenting and defending our own preferred, learned, or expert hypotheses (a la Scientific American: Ask the Experts ). Both functions serve useful purposes in our lives at different times, but each can look bad from the perspective of the other. i.e., challenges to authoritative science can look bad and receive short thrift because we frequently have a lot of confidence in the authoritative accounts, but authoritative accounts can look bad when we stop prodding them for the ways they might be wrong or limited. Who gets to decide when it is appropriate to defend or challenge an authoritative account on some topic is a central issue. In my opinion, the commonness of published bad science is a consequence of spending too much attention focused on being right about nature and not enough attention focused on how we might be confirming our assumptions or biases.

I know of a few people that should really have this poster hanging on their wall.

Besides, for those that haven't seen it yet: http://xkcd.com/1053/

Please pipedot, we can do better than that.

Yeah, Alix boards are nice if you're handling traffic from 2000. Most of those boards cannot route my home internet connection traffic, let alone serious workloads. And serious workloads often need other stuff like proper link aggregation, and multiple default routes (all of these exist in OpenBSD now, but several years after FreeBSD). And for "serious workloads", pf was a limiting factor until recently, because of lack of SMP support.

I have an Alix board I never used for anything. An atom board with 2xGigE has >10x the same routing capacity, and its not much more expensive than an Alix. It will draw more power, sure, and it takes more space. But at least it can handle my home connection.

Well, most of those mitigations don't even make sense on a router box (no local user activity, a subset of daemons, no http-like stuff opened to the public, just plain old routing and NAT). And FreeBSD has a couple of other security features that - while not that relevant to routers - are absent in OpenBSD. This includes jails (and no, systrace doesn't cut it), ACL support, MAC, signed packages and port auditing. Even NetBSD's veriexec feature is still missing on OpenBSD. ASLR and SSP are nice, and they mitigate real threats, but this is not 1998 anymore. And the reason these techniques exist is because most kernel developers haven't bothered reading the actual x86 processor manual and implement a per-process, multi-segment architecture.

And yeah, I used OpenBSD for more than 10 years. I'd still pick it as a solution for VPN endpoints or small-time routing.

Notifications enabled.

Doing sequential refreshes on the respective home pages today, on my ANCIENT laptop on a middling cable modem connection.

Pipedot: Under 1 second, every time.

Soylent: 4.5 to 5 seconds, every time.

And I understand they have all kinds of caching enabled (Varnish servers, etc.) That's really pretty bad. (And let's not be silly and blame it on volume; both are hosted at the same place, they don't have that much traffic, and as noted they have an entire front end caching infrastructure in place.)

You're only hurting yourself sir.

This isn't really the type of comments that will grow the userbase.

FreeBSD just started to implement mitigations that have been standard in OpenBSD for years. For example, ASLR or SSP, last time I checked was 2013 and FreeBSD still lacked these very simple mitigations that are even available in Windows by now. This is just utterly ridiculous.

They're just sloppy in terms of security and they also accept horrible patches just because there is some performance benefit. OpenBSD plays on an entirely different level and is my only choice for infrastructure as critical as routers.

3========D OH MY!

Yes, development seems to be ongoing. There's a status log at http://pipedot.org/topic/pipedot

And I just read that whole little exchange without having to click once! This site works so much better.

i slap my ballsack in protest.

Duly noted.

"So the comments are relevant and on-topic, but I don't see SN being lambasted. SN simply falls short on many comparative elements."

i slap my ballsack in protest.

Huge Asimov fan here. I dug them all, starting with E.E. Doc Smith; through Clarke of course; Laumer; Lloyd Biggle; Heinlein was awesome; and so many others. But Asimov was da man. All that science fact writing as well as science fiction. I don't agree with the common opinion that Asimov's characters and their speech was stilted. I really enjoyed detective Lije Bailey's interplay with the robots he worked with. Extra-terrologist Wendell Urth was wonderful.

The Foundation series was absolutely unique. Nobody else even came close to that. The Robot series of short stories and novels were incredibly inventive and thoughtfyl. There were none better to me personally, in the New Yorker or anywhere else.

The bottom of the summary says ...

(Cross posted on Soylentnews)

So the comments are relevant and on-topic, but I don't see SN being lambasted. SN simply falls short on many comparative elements.

This. Notifications are essential. We can't be expected to go back and look at every single post to see if someone responded.

I'm not seeing a reason why SoylentNews is being lambasted when the story title is:

"Netgear Hides Router Backdoor Instead of Fixing It"

Grow up.

I agree, SoylentNews is a terrible name and hopefully gets replaced in the name vote, but Pipedot isn't that great of a name either. A good deal of the rename suggestions at the vote would be better than both current names.

IMO the biggest omission is the lack of a roadmap or clear declaration of intent here. Is development even still ongoing? (assumably it is, but too invisible for my taste) When will we be able to contribute? What's the 10k+ users support plan? What further features are planned?
We know that there will be likely no merging between pipedot and SN, but what's the outlook? I understand if Bryan has other priorities (job, family, ...), and it's perfectly fine if things go slowly, but to me all of this seems to be hanging in limbo too much...

Apart from that, yeah, it's a technically excellent site, some details are still improvable (for example this response I'm typing right now, would be nice if it were inline/ajaxed like on Slashdot), but from a users perspective (potentially) superior to slashcode and it would be my first-go-to place if there were more submissions (I'll bring the comments).

Nothing at all against OpenBSD, it is great, but do you have something of substance against FreeBSD? Why specifically do you think basing pfsense on FreeBSD is a negative? I may be reading too much into your comment.

Damn, even the threaded display is worlds better than Soylent. I can see all these replies so cleanly.

Perhaps one solution is to be unabashed about partially copying/mirroring good links from other sites, whether or not they are individually submitted by Pipedot members. People at Soylent are bitching at people who complain about old articles -- "why didn't YOU submit it then, big shot" -- but there's nothing wrong (ethically or legally) with using some links at another aggregator as a basis for discussion here. You can separate it into a "The Slashdot Feed" category if you must, though I wouldn't recommend that...

The idea is to use the same articles (everything at Slash/Soy/etc. is pointing to 3rd and 4th party sites anyway) as a starting point for discussion on a site that people DO enjoy using...

(Loving these text captchas by the way.)

More articles yes, but more importantly more comments. A lot of articles without comments won't make it better, you go to /. for the discussion mainly. Just go out and advertise this site.

The biggest thing missing here feature wise are notifications on a reply IMO.

I agree. This site blows Soylent out of the water.

A big problem I've noticed is Pipedot has very few articles posted. Start posting more articles and there will be more to discuss. With more to discuss, more folks will start coming, as I agree that this site is technically better than the other ones. Unfortunately, that technical "betterness" means nothing if you don't have the content.

Damn, even the URLs are better here! Instead of descriptive article names, Soylent's got datestamped numeric article numbers. Like 1995 all over again!

The OpenBSD project's fork of OpenSSL is now called: LibreSSL

I'm also not a huge fan of Science fiction. But, I do make an exception for Asimov. The foundation series, was pretty darn good, imho. The Science didn't come first, the human characters' reactions to it did. Even the robots were humanized.

Although, come to think of it. I would agree that his short stories weren't that great. Certainly not as good as those in the New Yorker.

It's such a shame that Soylent (horrible name) has so much more activity than Pipedot.

This site has better editorial control, a much better appearance, better article selection, and even seems to load faster.

I don't know if a Pipedot/Soylent merge is one of the choices in the Soylent name poll, but it damn well should be.

From my point of view the only big mistake Pipedot initially made was banning anonymous posters, but you seem to have fixed that.

In any case, no matter what happens, thank you for making such a strong effort!

Don't like to think too much, it makes me think too much,
It keeps my mind on my mind
Don't wanna see too much, it makes me see to much
Sometimes I'd rather be blind

All the things that they're saying & doing
When they pass me by just fills me up with noise
It overloads me
I wanna disconnect myself
Pull my brain stem out and unplug myself
I want nothing right now, I want to pull it out

Chorus:
Yeah, I want to pull it out, yeah
I wanna break it all down, hey, I wanna pull it out
Yeah, yeah, disconnect myself, disconnect myself
I wanna see it go down, yeah, disconnect myself

A thousand miles an hour going nowhere fast
Clinging to the details of your past
Talking 'bout your damages and your wasting my time
Wanna be the king of pain, stand in line
All the numbers and the colours and the facts
Backed by the rumours and the figures and the stats
I think I'm gonna download my mind

Chorus

Too damn bad if at the end of the day the only thoughts
In your brain are all the things that they say, what a waste
Too damn bad if at the end of the line you got no idea
What's on your own mind, you got no one to blame but yourself
Too much to know, too much to see
It might mean something to you but it's nothing to me
Its just another ad for someone's version of how they think it should be

I wanna disconnect myself, pull my brain stem out, unplug myself
I want nothing right now, I want to pull it out