Recent Comments

FFS, everyone knows notepad is the ultimate text editor.

Do you even realize that the CIA and NSA are different agencies?

Apples and Oranges. Try to remember that because somebody disagrees with you on one issue, they may in fact just have different views and may not be some sort of government robot.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the NSA, Snowden, or anything else you quote.

And there is no reason it would. This is about Congressional oversight of the CIA. I would hope everybody in Congress, regardless of their views on National Security policy, the Patriot Act, etc., would all agree that the CIA should not spy on and intimidate Congress.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Well, it sounds better than Daylight 5% off time, but those are some long hours you have on your planet.

My intuition would expect that an object at 60 C in a room with air at 59 C would cool slower than an object at 60 C in the vacuum of space.

If your server room's at 60 C, you need to invest in better air conditioning.

Quite seriously, convective cooling is so much more efficient than radiative cooling that for any realistic setup, servers on the ground are going to be much easier to cool than those in space.

Its been a while since my thermodynamics class in college, does the radiation given off depend upon the difference in temps? I mean, at some point a greater temperature differential would offset the loss of conduction, right?

My intuition would expect that an object at 60 C in a room with air at 59 C would cool slower than an object at 60 C in the vacuum of space.

Yeah, you end up expending a lot of resources in order to get the servers up there. Then they eventually fall from orbit and burn up. There's not even the chance of recycling/reusing the old parts.

Except that in space you only have heat loss due to radiation rather than conduction, which is quite a bit more efficient.
Add to that the cost of upgrading obsolete servers, and I don't (forgive the pun) see this taking off anytime soon.

Nice one Bryan, you're doing a great job with the site.

My own initial thoughts were: why not default to a non-JS page (flat html) and then use JS (if enabled) to "roll-up" the comments into the collapsed form. This way it works well for everyone.

But I realised after that my own ideas were a bit naive. If every visitor downloads all of the comments (as flat html) then it probably adds considerably to the load and cost of running the server. By using Javascript you are selectively reducing the amount loaded by most (non-logged in) users. So I did some more thinking and realised that it actually depends on how many comments there are versus how much Javsacript code there is:

- There are three basic ways to handle a page: flat html, javascript on top of flat html, javascript and ajax

- Logged in users can have preferences which are honoured, but it is also possible to implement similar behaviour for non-logged in users with cookies (ah ha, finally, they are good for something other than tracking) but you'd have to decide if that's worth the hassle.

- The draw back with ajax is that for pages with lots of comments (hundreds) then you've just taken your dozen connections (to get one page) and turned this into hundreds of connections, all hammering at the server. I'm imagining you want some kind of clever algorithm to allow you to balance the data delivered with the initial page load, and that with ajax requests afterwards. Have you considered encapsulating post data in the page, for laying out by the javascript at rendering time? This would relieve the load on the web server, but would make the DB server work much harder since each page load will still want to retrieve all posts from the DB. I was thinking they can be put in some JSON format and then gzipped and inserted into the page code at load time. To strike a balance between initial page load and ajax load you can specify the rules on what gets included with the initial load (all posts, first 100 posts, all +3 and higher posts, etc...). But those rules don't in any way affect what the user sees, just what content is sent on the initial load. Once in the browser then ajax takes over and will selectively load whatever remaining posts the user wants to look at. My own web work has lead me to believe that to keep pages fast and responsive you must reduce the number of connections to the server. My own sites use custom server side aggregation code that glues all my javascripts and css files together into one include, and I always use the css sprites hacks to ensure only one image file is loaded per page. I get much much much better performance this way, but on the other hand I'm working with much lighter load compared to what you must be serving here.

Anyway mate, I'm sure you've spent a *lot* longer thinking about these issues than I have, this was just my $0.02 (or less) worth.

Keep up the good work, your page is brilliant!

I'm with you, I think they actually ported their titles to OpenGL.

My impression is Valve is working hard to get other titles, eventually all of them, ported to Linux so they'll eventually work on their SteamOS. So the Translation Layer may just be a step to make it easier for publishers who might be willing to put a couple weeks, maybe a month or two, into development in order to gain a few thousand extra sales.

I've already spent way too much money on Steam games for my Ubuntu laptop, which I bought to do work on. Valve needs to stop before I go broke. That's a joke by the way.

The preview and post buttons seem to be broken for me at the moment. I'm just getting an "error invalid value". Apparently the ampersand sign for (amp)lt; to get the less than sign is causing the issue.

I'm glad to see Valve trying to push this further. Are they currently using this translation layer for their own ported titles like HL2, L4D/L4D2, etc? I thought they were doing complete ports to OpenGL. Perhaps the overhead is minimal to neglegent. Either way, they have done a great job. I think my games perform better under Linux than Windows. The only down side was losing a few titles that haven't been ported, yet.

Often it can be. But if the troll(s) is deliberately trying to disrupt the group, then they change their name and email often (nymshifting) to avoid killfiles. They can also copy the nym of another poster. Another trick is to post flame-bait to another group with the 'followups' set to the 'target' group. Naive users in the other group who respond have their replies sent to the target group, resulting in a lot of off-topic flames from new users.

And that's too bad, the site design on Pipedot is I think much more useful and it's based on a newer (and possibly more maintainable) codebase.

Yes. Goto your account settings page and uncheck the "Enable JavaScript" option. At the moment, the server-side rendering defaults to "expand everything" but the collapse logic will soon be available as a threshold setting there as well.

Done. The "Enable JavaScript" checkbox in your settings page is now honored across the board. The site won't use (or even download) a single line of JavaScript with the option turned off.

I really love that everybody can mod the comments here, and number of mod points is unlimited.

With the small community that we have currently this is the only way to do it, but my experience with Reddit is that this does not scale up. Frequently on Reddit I find myself wishing for the independent moderation of the old site - the fact that mod points are limited means that people think a bit before throwing them out, and the fact that there's a cap of five means that one viewpoint can't be voted up to tower over all the others.

Interesting, I always associated it with Calvin and Hobbes.

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/02/14

I heard they now have kickass.to option for that web-video.

Yeah I was never aware of this either. Time to convert the heathens!

Hello admins ...

Long time Slashdot user here.

Does pipedot plan to allow Classic mode where Javascript is not required, and comments can be browsed at various levels without Javascript?

I'm going with "yes" to both questions. So it's not only an "or", it's also an "and"!

Can't this be solved by the judicious use of a killfile?

"Is Senator Feinstein's outrage justified, or is she a a hypocrite as Snowden charges ?"

Yes. Or no, really. Does it have to be one or the other?

Doesn't prove anything, but starts off with a racial epithet. The proceeds to threaten a driving up the hosting cost. Might have done nothing but I'm sticking with ass.

pipebeans

Can't wait for the Daily Show and/or Colbert take on this. Could be tonight, could be very pointed (and/or funny). Unfortunately, I guess that outside the USA it's not easy to access the Comedy Central website for web-video.

Senator Feinstein's outrage is justified, and she is a hypocrite as Snowden charges.

Her mistake wasn't getting upset when they peeked under her skirt. It was justifying every other instance of spying (on us) as ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY OR OMG THE TERRORISTS ARE GONNA WIN!!!!

Meh, he's a serial tall-tale teller so I'm not sure that proves anything.

Nice turn of phrase. Soybeans it is. Then that makes us... pipeheads?

If you use the right PIN number you should be fine

Feinstein had given firm support for the NSA's phone call tracking program just last month while criticizing Snowden for being a runaway whistle-blower who could have instead turned his documents to Congress.

"What keeps me up at night, candidly, is another attack against the United States. And I see enough of the threat stream to know that is possible," Feinstein said at a Pacific Council on International Policy dinner in Century City.

"But the way we prevent another attack - and this is tricky - is intelligence," she said. "You have to know what's going to happen, because it's too late otherwise."

"There are all kinds of things that are going on. And for some reason, the fear of our government for a bona fide reason, which is to prevent a terrorist attack, raising this kind of concern, when there are only 22 people in our country who have access to this database and every one of them is vetted,"

All I can say is that, from a user's point of view, the site was better under John.

I disagree. John had Business in mind, which I have no issue with, but it's not what the community wanted and ultimately would end in the community being treated as consumers to advertise to (as was the case with the other site that shall not be named). So on one hand he was toting the site as being "for the community", but then wanting to turn it into a profitable business venture on the other hand. I think the site is in much better hands with NCommander who was actually the one that got the slashcode working, and probably one of the very few people involved that will be able to maintain, update and add enhancements to it. The best people to run the site are the ones whos ideas and views align with the community not the people that want to make money at the communities expense.

I did read NCommanders post and it didn't come of as vindictive to me. To me it was him stating what happened and his reasoning for doing what he was doing. He's a technical person and as such his post lacked the political bullshit and dancing around you'd expect from a non-technical person, which is how I prefer my info. Give me the facts and relevant information and let me decide what's relevant. There were IRC logs and form posts to back up everything he said as factual. If you're trying to foster a community orientated site and you expect the community to be actively involved then you have to make sure the community has the information required to form opinions and make decisions.

But, again I do feel bad for John and appreciate his efforts. He did a decent job ad-hock organizing us in order to get something up and running and I think he does diverse to get something for his efforts.

DNS was restored, site is back up. DDoS was just a read herring.

There was no DNS, people troll stuff like that in IRC.

This is the whole story, I can confirm.

Those changes are set to be pushed either later tonight or early tomorrow.

I really love that everybody can mod the comments here, and number of mod points is unlimited.
I really love to see pipedot take off, its just awesome in all aspects.

And good luck to SoylentNews as well of course.

And it also called Buck Feta ;-)

To all the Soybeans who looked at this site yesterday and cried "waaa, no anonymous posting," that little bit of functionality seems to have been fixed.

Ha ha - I saw an emacs vs vi post above, too. Anyone want to talk about whether GPL or BSD is the better license and therefore responsible for why either Obamacare or the Teaparty is responsible for the issue of why Windows 8 is a better user interface than Mac OSX? [puts on flameproof battle armor].

Any progress on getting this site to work without javascript like how it did a week ago?

You are greatly oversimplifying the situation.

NCommander's extremely petty and vindictive blog post where he attacked the previous owner was drama no one needed. He started the post by saying this was an "amicable" change of ownership, but as I read on, it was clear that if it was amicable before, then it would no longer be the case afterwards. Honestly, you should probably wait until you have full ownership of a site before you start trash-talking the previous owner. I'd say John's behaviour is very understandable. I'd be angry too if I had decided to take risks to start a site like that, and then everyone was turning on me. This wasn't part of a "transparent process". It was just mudslinging. There was no purpose to this other than to make John look bad.

I don't understand why the volunteers complained. John made if very clear from the start that this was a business for him. It was *his* business. If you still volunteer after that, then you have to accept the terms.

He also spent more than 1000$. Some of the stuff he spent money on ended up not being used, but that's completely irrelevant. He's selling his business, he's entitled to ask to be completely refunded for all expenses.

All I can say is that, from a user's point of view, the site was better under John. There was no drama that we could see, and there were frequent posts asking the community for input. I think if people had let the site just run for a while, as John wanted, it'd probably be better off.

"Not too much to see yet, but you can visit the landing page to sign up for the beta."

Fuck Beta!

>pitchfork-wielding nerds is no way to start a business.

It seems you are the misguided one. This isn't a business. "Businesses" and "members" (of a community) do not mix - remember Dice and slashdot?

>This DDoS ...

It seems you're now talking out of your arse. Sorry, I didn't mean to be impolite, I meant spouting bollocks from a position of ignorance.

When you pry FreeBSD from my cold dead installation CD!

That's not the full story. It's fun to speculate. Almost all speculation will be wrong at least in part.
All I'm saying is that it was one of my bits of advice that lead most directly to the solution. (But my other bits were useless, so it's swings and roundabouts.)

Yeah, way too much pointless drama over there. Changing the subject completely, I was meaning to ask if anyone here had any opinions on whether I should go with vi or emacs as my text editor?

I agree 1000%. All hail Pipedot!

Both sites are powered by the community, so submit your stories here.

Meanwhile, Pipedot seems to be relatively drama-free. How refreshing.

Does anyone want to talk about gun control?