Recent Comments

Let's see if it supports the UTF-8 Ellipsis

It doesn't! It crashes hARD!!!

error: invalid value - method [post] type [string] name [comment] value [Pipedot is my favorite slashdot! But it's so dead over here ;( Let's see if it supports the UTF-8 Ellipsis]

IT's 2014 already! You SHOULD SUPPORT UTF-8 characters! Particularly punctuation like the ellipsis. You certainly shouldn't crash the page on a single multibyte character!

Pipedot is my favorite slashdot! But it's so dead over here ;(

Right now it looks like a whole lot of green has been added to what they had the other day.

At least on my monitor.

Looks blue to me with a hint of purple. Still is better than the red over at soylentnews.org.

...is the blue here a lot greener than it was a few days ago?

And can I have the old blue if you're not using it anymore?

Why would I want to use this over Notepad++?

I feel a little like that about SublimeText2. It's very pleasant to use and everything, but it almost does *too* much.

or Raspberry Pi? or Beaglebone Black? my HTPC has to draw less than 10w at full load.

you need to ask the right questions: what sort of plastic do I need to put in to get cocaine with gold sprinkles out?

The nice thing about a printer that creates gold is the quick ROI. Beat that HP!

Not quite there yet.

I feel like if they had attempted the rescue with so many corners cut for expediency, they would have most likely lost 2 shuttles instead of one.

Maybe, maybe not. TFA makes it sound like it was feasible because of the launch schedule for Atlantis . In any case, I think this kind of "what we could have done" review could be useful in making safety plans for future missions.

I'm only 45 (eeeww, gross, that's like... so old), but seeing that makes me feel older for some reason. It looks to me like it's going too far in a lot of different directions. Overly complex, too many features, and probably capable of inducing near fatal cognitive overload within about 30 seconds. Maybe that's my ADD talking, or I've finally reached the old-man stage where all change is annoying.

I don't even have the energy to yell now, so I'll just sigh it... get off of my lawn... please?

No love for TiVo?

The channel topic on the ##atom IRC channel (freenode) is "Mac beta; Linux/Windows in the future; http://atom.io".

and legalize proper opiates already. It's some stupid equivalency game, opioids are the best treatment for chronic pain (until they find a way to get true endorphins past the brain cell barrier) but they're illegal because they make people feel good, so we'll create something that's close, it gets banned, rinse and repeat.

Protestant morals and fascist population control seem to go hand in hand.

Those were my thoughts as well. The Columbia crash was a tragedy, but there really wasn't enough information at the time to predict that outcome. It would have been very difficult to remedy had they known for sure. I feel like if they had attempted the rescue with so many corners cut for expediency, they would have most likely lost 2 shuttles instead of one.

(And if you absolutely must take opiates/opioids, for heaven's sake don't get drunk at the same time, otherwise you will pass out and die from respiratory arrest...)

I take tramadol daily for chronic back pain after an injury, have been drunk a few times, and haven't died yet, not even once. I am a bit of a lightweight though so my "drunk" is probably an Australian's "tidly"

I'm not sure why this is actually making such a splash right now. The investigating committee went over this, and while it was always a possibility, for whatever reason (probably good reasons at the time), no rescue was ever mounted, so it's a bit pointless to take this theoretical rescue plan and make anything of it. Maybe in hindsight the engineering committee's decisions were wrong, but we can only know that now in hindsight. And it's not at all clear that a rescue would have been feasible. So at most it's an interesting footnote to history. Nothing more.

It's sad that the shuttle program ended; it was a fantastic machine. But I'm excited to see companies like SpaceX fill the gap, and probably do things that NASA needs better and cheaper.

On the one hand, there is a good deal of abuse of these opioids. Their use needs close supervision to keep abuse down, and also trying to prevent accidental overdose.

On the other hand, drug enforcement laws enacted in the face of this abuse sometimes interfere with the legitimate treatment of chronic pain. There's a shortage of pain management specialists as they have to put up with more paperwork outside scrutiny and hassle since they have to prescribe such large amounts of opiates. A lot of young MDs make the decision to go into other areas due to that.

These are powerful drugs that should be available in the cases they are needed without causing difficulty for either the physicians or the patients who need them.

I have installed Xubuntu on several of my friend's and family's computer, non-technical people who are doing really well with it.

I am doing a 6-month min. trial of xfce for the first time (on Ubuntu Studio). I like it--it is simple, and sleek with minimal use of system resources. The only things (at present) that drive me crazy are the(click and drag) to copy/shift+click and drag) to move behaviour--I'd really like to switch those around--; and the lack of a built-in robust sub-folder-capable file search for thunar.

I'll need to try Xubuntu, as I am looking for a user-friendly distro to install on some old (XP) Public Access Computers at the library I run.

If I had bone cancer , or liver cancer , for example, I would be wanting access to any chronic pain medication I could get my hands on (although I'd probably be asking for fentanyl as first choice).

If the primary purpose of medicine is to reduce suffering, then I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with witholding drugs from people who need them because there's a chance they might be abused.

And if we want to extend suffering reduction to drug addicts and their families as well, then giving them access to measured doses would go a long way to helping reduce the chance of accidental overdose.

(And if you absolutely must take opiates/opioids, for heaven's sake don't get drunk at the same time, otherwise you will pass out and die from respiratory arrest...)

I'd prefer not just a single "winner" but several choices that are keeping competing with each other and keeping the other side in check.

-Sent from my iPhone while reading websites on my Android tablet

and changed the way NASA handles shuttle missions to this day

It looks like they "handled" shuttle missions by retiring them :)

"Developer Revenue Per Download is 5x Higher on iOS Than Android"

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-the-difference-in-developer-revenue-between-android-and-ios-2013-11

I see your point.

blockquote added added to the list of allowed html tags

How many fart apps do you really need though? iOS may have way way more, but Android's are of much higher quality.

Been on Soylent for a few days, and made an account here today. Things look rosy and nice there right now, but I wonder how long that will last before it gets infected by the bad mojo that took down slashdot (if ever). I think the nature of articles makes a huge difference in what kind of reader is retained, so it's quite possible soylent (or pipedot) may go down the same unfortunate path. If either one gets political I'll go to the other one.

Hi Koen - I made that example up, so it wasn't Xubuntu I was thinking of (which I would mentally group together with the other Ubuntu variants anyway). But I do remember several niche distros that really boiled down little more than visual styling.

Actually, Xubuntu seems to be more popular than ever now that many Ubuntuers have rejected the obligatory Gnome3 upgrade. Nice time to be XFCE!

I recall a study showing IOS more profitable to develop apps for by a wide margin. Has that changed? Android also has issues with vendors never upgrading their os version, while IOS users are almost always within the last two releases (good or bad).

Bit of a confession of failure, eh?

iPhones are still the must-have devices for the new-and-shiny loving opinion drivers. It makes sense to target an app at them first, and Android second.

"... is a distro based on Ubuntu with an XFCE desktop styled to look like a Mac." Really? We need a whole new distro with all that entails (quality control, package management, etc.) just for Ubuntu+DE+Theme? Those are the ones that seem to melt into the sunset.

That would be Xubuntu, which is actually a very good distro. I was a SuSE user for many years (1998-2008), but I'm very happy with Xubuntu now and I don't think it will disappear soon. XFCE is very customizable, I changed the layout/theme for my needs, not looking like a Mac in any way. It has the advantages of Ubuntu without the disadvantages (being: Unity, the Amazon Spyware, Ubuntu One - but that can be installed if needed).

I have installed Xubuntu on several of my friend's and family's computer, non-technical people who are doing really well with it.

Sure, the BB Bold is old as a moldy Model M, but I love it just the same. It's good to see BB is being its own style again and not a copycat, me-too producer.

Wasn't there a movie about that recently?

Any chance of a pipedot IRC or wiki?
Got a bug tracker?

Just checked in on it, because I used and liked the service in my pre-Google days. http://my.yahoo.com. Somewhat heavy on the eye-candy, but that's their audience these days. And it works pretty damned well!

Checking in on it made me notice their home page looks a lot better than before, and their search engine delivered better results than I was expecting.

Not sure what their new CEO is doing, but she's doing something right and I hope she continues to do more of it.

Given the fact that until a few years ago, smartphones were a luxury item mostly used in Europe and moreso in the USA, app developers quickly went for the "develop first for iOS and Android second" approach, leaving Android apps for later, and when they emerged they were frequently of sub-standard quality.

Now that the Android tsunami is overwhelming iOS maybe we'll see that change. I'd posit that Android's relatively more open ecosystem makes it more appealing for developers, and if other handset makers (Blackberry, I'm looking at you) continue to provide compatability layers that allow Android apps to run on their OSes, I think we'll see things swing in the other direction before too long.

McCracken's article isn't all that good over all, and I think again it's an attempt to conflate one writer's personal experience into an industry-wide trend that other statistics probably don't support.

openSUSE (and formerly SuSE) is my go-to distro usually, though I use Bodhi and FreeBSD a lot, too. I think SUSE has had trouble differentiating itself from other big distros like RedHat but still does a good job and not because of its distro manager but because it's been able to establish itself as an enterprise grade distro with good support and good reliability.

But have a look at Distrowatch and there are hundreds of niche distros that seem to offer little added value. "... is a distro based on Ubuntu with an XFCE desktop styled to look like a Mac." Really? We need a whole new distro with all that entails (quality control, package management, etc.) just for Ubuntu+DE+Theme? Those are the ones that seem to melt into the sunset.

Others are niche but provide either a new approach, a new technology, or fit a unique niche very well. PuppyLinux is a good example - awesome on low spec hardware. Scientific Linux brings in a lot of non-mainstream tools useful to a certain community. GRML tried to appeal to a small niche of ZSH lovers who prefer the console to XWindows, and when that sort of fizzled, tried to appeal in a different way (that doesn't seem to be taking either). There was another distro - now long gone - that decided to offer a very limited set of packages useful to businesses (office suite, RealPlayer, a couple of other things). Who wants to standardize on a distro that intentionally reduces your possibilities to do other useful things? I could use RedHat and get all that plus more.

Ultimately it takes a bit of branding and marketing, not in the "advertise the f*ck out of it" way but in the "show how this distro is different, serves a real need and/or fixes a problem you are currently experiencing" way. Not all distros do that.

Still, no matter what RAID level you use, a failed disk _does_ mean that you need to arrange its replacement. So less failures = happier life.

Apple is losing on the whole while Android gathers speed for handset sales.

Considering IOS kicked this generation of phones off you would expect far more.

On the security side IOS is losing. Privacy is becoming a key requirement. The apps of today are being viewed as untrustworthy data thieves.

I just added the first set of "editor" functions for publishing/closing submissions. I hadn't done a "Call-for-editors" yet because of the lack of such tools.

Scott has already volunteered to help with some content/submissions, and I'd gladly welcome others that have some time to contribute.

The name is hilarious.... just a little shift :)

So... where's the preferences/settings so I can be reminded the site exists? cuz without that daily mailer, I forget. :(

in Africa?!

Ha, what a brilliant description of Slackware... still my favourite distro, and so much better than SLS.

My girlfriend.

And yes, we geeks also do have girlfriends :-)

Slackware does both of these.

It lists some that have succeeded and some that haven't, but doesn't really get into what might distinguish distros in the first group from those in the second. To be fair, I'm not sure there's any way to do this. With any new type of product, there are usually a bunch of small players at first, and then it gets narrowed down to a few big ones with a few others coming and going around the fringes. Very often this process is kind of mysterious and there's no obvious reason why the ones that succeed and persist do so. (The people running successful companies, or OSS projects, or what-have-you, will of course tell themselves it's because they have special knowledge that others lack. They're almost always fooling themselves.) In any case, I suspect that the Linux distro world is fairly mature at this point, with the Red Hat and Debian families pretty well entrenched.

For your distro to last, you need one of two approaches:

1. one dictator who's such a tough son-of-a-bitch that he not only can defy ordinary counting sequences but also survives mysterious illnesses that every doctor misdiagnoses.
2. lots of people, and a sufficiently robust community governance model to make any of them expendable.

The distros that have followed one of these models have outlasted every distro that hasn't.