Recent Comments

I agree - I attended a university where Sagan had taught, or taught occasionally, and the aura around the guy was supernatural. In fact, he was rarely around and seldomly seen. Good scientist maybe, but his reputation outpaced his abilities, I think.

"ings" - http://www.itworld.com/open-source/407290/wind-river-outfits-vxworks-internet-things

I think the link is missing a few characters at the end.

I think the link is missing a few characters at the end.

The cult of personality around Tyson irritates the hell out of me, just as the cult of personality are Sagan did then. Both of them deserve a lot of credit both for their science and their popularization of science; I just wish it were possible for people to do this without developing the kind of aura that causes people to treat everything they say, no matter how banal, as oracular wisdom. But this is a personal objection, and for those who don't share it, I hope the show is informative and entertaining.

Over on Soylent, someone pointed out that this story was published almost simultaneously there and on Slashdot as well as here, and didn't seem particularly happy about it. Guilty; I submitted the story to each site because I think it's an interesting and important topic, and I honestly didn't expect it to be published in all three places. Do people object to this? If so, I won't do it any more, but I'd like to know what our evolving community's standard will be.

Original Cosmos series on Youtube .

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Off-topic: posting a link (or any text) with an ampersand sign in it gives an error on PipeDot:

error: invalid value - method [post] type [string] name [comment] value [Original series on Youtube.]

Code will be on pipecode.org when it's ready.

Yes, the dropdowns do allow you to moderate a comment. However, they do not "disappear" afterwards like on the green site. You can freely change your vote (until the story archives.)

Barring actually running the servers themselves, the publishers should provide their customers a way of hosting their own servers. This should be baked into the code from the beginning; "if PUBLISHER_SERVER=DOWN, then ENABLE_LOCAL_HOST_SUPPORT". Or this functionality can be added by a patch held in escrow until the game reaches end-of-life.

Of course, publishers will never go for it. Aside from adding complexity to the code, they reap too many benefits from controlling the online server, not least of which is that it enables a forced obsolescence into their product. They don't WANT the customers to keep playing the same game year after year; they want you to buy the new model.

Publishers get away with this because the industry have managed to convince consumers that they do not OWN the product, but merely license it. Customers are merely paying for the privilege of temporarily using the product so long as the publisher allows it. More, they have been known to actively pursue hobbyists who try to add in this missing functionality. It's one of the great rip offs of 21st century.

I have games from 20 years ago that - with the correct hardware - I can still boot up and play. But some games that are only a few years old I'll never be able to play again.

Do you happen to be using IE? I can't reproduce this on Firefox/Chrome and I can only reproduce it on IE once per reboot. I've found a slight delay on the transition from HTTP to HTTPS in IE due to checking the CRL. After the first HTTPS navigation, future transitions have no delay. Also, unchecking the "Check CRL" option in the IE settings prevents the delay.

For now, I'm just going to move the entire Sign In page to always be HTTPS; instead of waiting until the POST for the switchover.

P.S. The "Bugs" link at the bottom of every page will get you to the bugtracker if you find any more issues.

Okay, I have to join the praisefest. Having found out about this site only today, I'm extremely impressed by the functionality. Everthing already seems to work the way I always expected from both /. and soylent news. You may have lost the PR battle, but you simply deliver.

Here's to hoping that the comunity goes on growing and that the site keeps up with it.

Thanks for doing this. It looks good, even better than soylentnews .
It's possible to automatically cope with javascript (JS) being off.
You have a link with an href that points to the comment on a page of its own. In JS you then set the onclick event to a function that returns false, and does your ajax stuff.
This tells the browser to not follow the link if the function runs. This then automagically does the right thing if JS is on or off.
You can also use the jQuery event.preventDefault() call.
This is what I do on squte and it's got good feedback so far.

'Cause there are this things under each comment that I think sort of work, but not exactly the way they do elsewhere, so I can't be sure.

Myself, I tend to use 'luser' as referring to the record itself, as opposed to the 'user', who is the actual person.

Exactly. The "user" field in the database is case sensitive so that people can have names like "SpallsHurgenson", but I didn't want another user to register "spallshurgenson" either. Nor did I want to constantly strtolower() the username when doing comparisons. Thus, I have two fields: "user" that is case sensitive and used for display, and "luser" that is the lower case equivalent and used for comparisons.

True. I think most users do, though.

I use YaVDR. It comes in a very great package with zero effort on my part and included XBMC. OpenELEC is a close runner up.

Very cool indeed, thank you so much for your effort!

'luser' is a word with quite a long pedigree. It dates back to the '70s at MIT and has since been adopted by IT professionals and hobbyists, especially by those who have to deal with users on a regular basis. Although it's tongue-in-cheek meaning has not changed, it has become less a comment on the users themselves and more of a shibboleth used within the community.

Myself, I tend to use 'luser' as referring to the record itself, as opposed to the 'user', who is the actual person.

Excellent work, keep it up!

record not found - table [user] id [luser="ausername"]

"luser". Classy, huh. Slow. Clap.

Inflicting OWA on your staff will certainly prepare them for the loss of Windows.
After OWA anything is good..

While the Red site may have more traffic for now, i think this one had great potential. These changes really make it enjoyable to browse here, and it works great even on my phone. Awesome job, keep up the good work.

Inertia cuts both ways. When android eventually offers a "windowed apps" mode (perhaps inspired by samsung's tizen os which has a similar feature), then people will suddenly realise they have a (linux) system they're familiar with, in their pocket, which they can plug into a screen/keyboard/mouse dock when necessary.

Then maybe they'll think twice before switching to a different computer when they get to work, especially if all they're doing is web pages, documents, spreadsheets, and emails.

"Javascript disabled."
Not necessarily true - in 2 of the 3 browsers I use regularly javascript isn't even a feature that could ever be enabled, and the 3rd one has NoScript enabled to the max except for things I depend on.

Forward steps, please. Not backward ones.

As I understand, the articles are limited by submission, unfortunately :(

Not karma whoring - mark as funny.

Btw, modding is very intuitive and great here. Love it.

Same here. Someone mod me up :)

Half the reason I joined was for a low UID. Yes, I'm petty like that.

A suggestion: since the stories are a bit lean, why don't you replace your story feed for the time being with some other feed? Say scrape the front page of news.ycombinator or something.

Then, as the site gains membership, slowly turn down the spigot of stories from other sites, and turn up the spigot on yours. (Alternatively, just weight stories that originate from the Pipedot pipe higher than from other feeds).

I don't know how to fix the lack of comments.

But that one point karma bonus only happens if the person who would get it allows it to happen.

Same. A cute black mid 2000's IBM Netvista with a spare dual core pentium running arch with XBMC, though in my case I just use a cheap remote instead of a kb/mouse combo.

You might want to consider recruiting more staff so that you can increase the number of articles getting posted. Technically, everything looks great.

Off topic, but...

When I logged in, the username and password fields blanked as if the page had reloaded, with no indication that I had been logged in (I had been). I didn't see a place to report it, so...

...Anyway - love the expandable comments. You all are doing great work!

By the way, each time I log onto this site, there's new functionality. Not sure how this new posting thing works, but it sure looks interesting!

Yeah, It's like /., only working right.--Anyone know if and where the devs are reposting the improved code?

Hold your fire on that one just yet, we know where they are but actually getting to them is going to be the tricky bit...

Yeah. As a biomedical researcher, I'm uncomfortably aware of how wide the gap is between what we do in the lab and what we can actually hope to bring to patients, but at least we don't have any overarching theory comparable to general relativity telling us NO, YOU CAN'T DO THAT.

The Slashdot standard is logged-in registered users at +1, Anonymous Cowards at 0. Registered users' posts also get modified by karma, of course, with good karma granting an additional +1, for a total of +2. Which isn't to say you should be bound by /. conventions, of course!

I just plugged an old tower into a TV. Got a wireless keyboard/trackpad that was about the size of a regular TV remote. That way you can use anything: torrents, Netflix, random dodgy streaming sites, games, youtube all right there on my TV. Of course, the mini-keyboard wasn't amazing for games but you have to sacrifice somewhere.

Comments by registered users at /. start out at +1, ACs start at 0.

Respect to what you're pulling off! Keep on going!

I'll be standardizing my petroleum-rich lifestyle by consuming only pre-packaged things wrapped in non-biodegradable packaging, because science will save my ass!

Hold your fire on that one just yet, we know where they are but actually getting to them is going to be the tricky bit...

I'm with you on loving this site. I've no idea how much will be here eventually but it's all so clean and smooth it's just great!

I was under the impression that slashdot started at zero as well. If you have good karma, however, you get a karma bonus of +1 added to your comment. The karma system here isn't finished yet.

Is post moderation starting from 0 intentional? If so, I'm curious why you chose to buck the slashdot legacy trend.

And now just need to be able to store the comment slider positions as a preference!

And now just need to be able to store the comment slider positions as a preference!

I really like the colours of this site and the collapsible comments are awesome too! Mainly I'm replying here to make it easy for people to see the collapsible comments in action.

The site looks great! The styling is very pleasing to the eye

Just discovered this an hour ago while posting on the Kepler article. Works well! But *thanks* for offering a script-free alternative too. I frequently browse from low-spec browsers and sites that don't work without Javascript usually don't capture me as a user.

Well, subject line says it all - I followed the settings link, and there were no settings to edit.

The BadAstronomer is a great site - I love almost everything they post. Way to go, kepler: find us some inhabitable worlds quickly, because we're trashing this one as fast as we can! While you're looking, I'll be standardizing my petroleum-rich lifestyle by consuming only pre-packaged things wrapped in non-biodegradable packaging, because science will save my ass!

By the way, each time I log onto this site, there's new functionality. Not sure how this new posting thing works, but it sure looks interesting!