Recent Comments

Ya, that s'qute site is pretty slick. I'd suggest everyone checking it out, if you haven't yet.

True enough.

Usenet is a great place for free, open, discussion. Unfortunately, it's got its share of trolls and spam.
There is an interface to Usenet that uses a karma-like moderation system here , which filters some of this out.

Well, it is hard to make drama on a mostly empty site. Expect things to get rougher once more people come (and I hope they will, this site rocks).

Everyone likes to throw around the word community. But to many, it means "I get what I want." We've seen some pretty appalling behavior on Soylent the past couple of days, and the drama has been unbearably painful to watch - embarrassing, really.

This DDoS is childish behaviour who has probably decided he is going to "punish" someone for the transfer of power.

The big take-away is that it is hard for a "community" to organize itself fast enough to do just about anything interesting at all. It takes leadership and dictatorial spirit to force people into organized behavior. Read the Dictator's Handbook if you don't believe it.

These things work better when some budding entrepreneur with a vision quietly builds his/her own thing, and then a community forms around it because they like and see value in it. Like this place, for example. I haven't heard any masturbatory "we're a community, goddammit" blather around here. Face it: A rowdy crowd of violent, pitchfork-wielding nerds is no way to start a business.

Final lesson: this stuff is, after all, a business. In the world of the WWW, someone has to host and manage the code, pay the server costs and the costs of the people who manage software and hardware, and pay bandwidth fees as well. If you want free, then chug down a reality pill and recognize that with the exception of a few vanity sites, the WWW needs to make money to pay for itself. Free means going back to the federated, ownerless model of Usenet, which remains an awesome place to meet and discuss tech with other nerds. And you can't DDoS Usenet, you can't whine about the new interface. You can only choose a Usenet client that suits you and suck up the plain-text goodness. No ads, no Flash, no bling, no images, even. It's Usenet: the worst you can do if you want to behave badly is crapflood, spam, and bitch about other people's posts.

Go get yourself an account on Solani.org Usenet provider and hook your newsreader up to start participating on comp.misc if you don't believe me.

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

Yeah...because Fuck Beta!

Pipedot looks like a better run site so far.

No doubt, but ultimately it's the community that make it, and they aren't here.

Ever since the change in ownership, there's been tons of drama. It's unfortunate. This site was better with the previous owner.

What an ass.

normal service has been resumed

subject says it all

Funny thing, I go to check on SN and get the resolving host then nothing. Try a few more times over some time and still down so I figure, let me see if anyone has news. I go back to /. (which i had not visited in a while) and what to my surprise, in my absence they switched me over to the beta. So okay I thought, let me try this out. Within a few moments I find that I really don't like the format. SN had a lousy color, but the format was clean and simple. I don't go to sites like these for fancy. Fuck Beta.

Since /. was a bust I came here and at the least find some news about Soylent. Such a sad moment that people ego's get in the way of providing a good product. Now in looking at |. it is better then /., but I still liked what Soylent was/is (community supported) and it's basic look and feel. Time will tell how it shakes out, but I fear someone really really really didn't want SN to succeed. Just curious who and why.

The reason they don't do this is because if they did, then the game they previously put out, which they are then making no money on (because they stopped making it, and stopped hosting it, and now have given to the fans in whatever fashion you desire) would end up competing with Latest Big Thing VII, their big block-buster premium new game of the summer. Be honest with yourself: if you had a choice between your personal #1 game from your youth, and the #1 game of its genre released today, which would you pick? For a lot of people, that answer isn't the modern one - Tetris is still good; Chrono Trigger and FFVI are amazing enough that they sell for major bucks at the reuse stores; and of the shooter genre, there are plenty of people still playing Counterstrike, Doom, and HalfLife.

Game manufacturers have a hard sell to make: first, they need to make a game as good as or better than what's still out there ; next, if they want to use the latest and greatest graphics/sound/whatever, they have to convince the gamers to upgrade , when many of them aren't in charge of their own hardware budget; and finally, they've got to make sure that what they output doesn't make it impossible for them to pull the same trick next time.

It's a tough market. Quite a few of those in it do the job well. EA is famously king of doing it shittily . It's honestly no wonder that they're looking for every single tiny scrap of advantage - they're competing on mediocrity in a race to the bottom, and the majority of their customers would leave them in a heartbeat if anyone else had the license to make games from the NFL player stats for 2015.

That said: if you're a game company and you're going out of business rather than being bought out, strategically speaking, releasing your well-loved game from server constraints is the best move you can make: it'll make competition for your enemies and maybe give you a new lease on life as people pounce on the new feature. (Heck, it might even open up a new line of business: tech support. "Sure, I can get that working for you - if you pay the fee, muahahahaha!")

Posting the source code, on the other hand, or turning it over to an awesome company like GOG, though... there's not much in it for them, if they aim to keep making games. Thank Zeus not everyone in this world is that fucking cynical, though.

Meh.

Looks like someone trolling the chat.

I haven't seen any clear explanation of what is going on. I'll wait on my outrage for a bit.

[hey, does this site have a profanity filter?]

Belgium.

Guess not. At least it doesn't block Scunthorpe like some sites. Sussex is blocked occasionally too, which is hilarious.

Holy cow. Some dude thinks that the result of the drama is soylant selling out. He's pissed because he's spent money and time working with them, thinks he should have a say in the drama. So ... his answer is to cause bandwidth costs to go up by flooding it with traffic.

Some people...

The current drama there is too much for me. Pipedot looks like a better run site so far.

Tis a sad state of affairs. I hope it is all sorted out or they migrate here. I like both sites. :(

I hope Linode doesn't charge the NCommander for all the DDOS traffic.

Looks like the story link's gone down already. Maybe next time get a permalink (if there is such a thing)?

Even a 503 error is better than beta.

Ignore this. Was in the logs, search for "40TB".

I can't find that in the logs anywhere. Am I missing something?

Wasn't there someone like yesterday promising ~40TB of DOS?

The linode site is down as well.

Let's get some popcorn...

In the IRC logs someone admits its a DDoS attack:
http://logs.sylnt.us/%23soylent/2014-03-11.html
The motivation is unclear

In the IRC logs Khyber admits he's carrying out a DDoS attack:
http://logs.sylnt.us/%23soylent/2014-03-11.html

That's true, but in many respects the interesting physics really does become 2 dimensional at that point. Conduction means electrons (or holes) moving through the material, and in that sense, there is one less degree of freedom to their motion. Even thicker materials can exhibit essentially 2-D electron behavior. So, while the materials are obviously three dimensional, the physical properties of interest are those of a 2-D system. (Weird, but then it's a quantum system so what do you expect?)

Consider it a test of your faith and/or the mod system...

Mod system: passed
Scott's faith: failed

Beware, for thou'rt strayed from the path, and thy UID mayest receive an additional digit if thou dost not reform thy ways.

How can we worship single-digit UIDs when you do things like that? You've shattered my faith.

You could always halve the capacity and double the reliability. Less storage, but more chance of recovering data.

are we seeing effects from this yet ? has this increased the size of the ozone hole ?

So, at 3 atoms thick it magically becomes 2-dimensional? I'm fairly certain at 1 atom thick it still has depth. That depth would be 1 atom in thickness, but that's still more than 0.

Likewise. When I read names of the companies behind this, first thing that popped into my mind was "Where's the DRM?"

If they're only 3 atoms thick, how wide are they? And how cheap. How do you say television wallpaper?

more breeding grounds for malware

That's all I have. That and thinner Google Shades.

Well, SoylentNews is down.

So I guess it's time to troll pipedot.

All your frosty piss are belong to us!

The site (including li694-22.members.linode.com) is offline now:

Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 1060599780
Varnish cache server

Thumb drives for portability, RAID for reliability. Between the two of these, I don't see any need for this disk.

Ya, I'd say wait until the SN staff post a formal response to the whole thing.

I like these polls, but would humbly suggest we find something other than the "insensitive clod" phrase, which is too tightly linked with another site that probably has more lawyers than we do, and which is getting tired, anyway. Suggestions, anybody? Here are some of my (lame) ideas.

X ... so pipe down, already
X ... and that's the way we like it!
X ... so get offa my lawn!
X ... and that's the facts
X ... YAWN
X ... ya hipster douchebag
X ... take your poll and shove it
X ... OMG, so bored
X ... because Wikileaks predicted it
X ... because the NSA is watching me.

I like the pipe joke, because it fits the site, but my heart is really set on the hipster douchebag joke, because everything is funnier if you add "ya hipster douchebag" at the end of it. And actually it's about time to start making fun of the NSA, just because it makes the current state of affairs easier to bear.

My humble suggestions.

They can make us change the clocks. We can show disrespect by messing with the terminology.

Some Windows Server 2012 users might find it a bit hard to press the power button when it's 1000km away. They could probably use the server's "iLO" stuff but that's klunkier - and often the group doing the shutting down (after software is made ready for shutdown) are different from the group starting it up (after hardware is replaced).

BluRay was still better than the alternative, HD DVD from Microsoft. At least BluRay was a collaborative effort by a bunch of groups rather than MS just owning the whole thing.

I read somewhere recently that the english language evolves, if enough people start saying one thing one way it becomes the proper way... so do nothing and wait long enough and you'll be wrong.

Whenever I see a 'standard' coming from Sony, my first instinct is to run. If they didn't have Playstation, even Blu-Ray would be in the long list of dead proprietary formats from Sony.

Even lowly prairie dogs (meerkats) have "words" for "large thin human with a green shirt" or "small thick human with a blue shirt".

At long last Windows is the same as Linux used to be.

"Once you learn these key combinations and these other things you be fine"

Perhaps it is the Year of Linux, if only because Microsoft have screwed up so badly

Well, with the size of all our collections of data these days, we've got to do something that's not just another hard disk, and is more reasonably portable without fear of dropping it on the floor.

Wait... hold it... you are supposed to shut windows 8 down using the power button? I thought that was a joke