Recent Comments

>We are not allowed to post ampersands, or Unicode YET

FTFY.

I suppose getting shot at helps one develop armor?

Very slick look!

Chips and Dip

Hot grits and Natalie Portman

1. what syntax to use to format the submission?

Simple HTML. See #103

2. where to report bugs?

feedback@pipedot.org

For that, you'd use zfs snapshots, and send+recv. Infinitely faster than rsync on large files where only a small portion has changed, because the file system knows what has changed, while rsync has to read and compare the files.

The "Content-Type" header has been: "text/html; charset=utf-8" (as well as the equivalent meta tag) since the first day.

As for posting comments, I'm currently being "overly safe" and only allowing keys that can be typed on a US keyboard (minus the ampersand). The idea is that I eventually loosen the rules a bit for most western languages and useful symbols (like euro, pound, and yen.)

The full set is just a huge potential source of abuse with non-printing characters, right-to-left switching, and CJK characters. Within minutes of Soylent News adding it, for example, people where posting pages of braille and other crap.

Tags: a b i strong em ul ol li pre

Attributes are also cleaned, so, for example, the "a" tag only allows "href"

I have a WYSIWYG editor too, just waiting to get the user settings pages finished so I can make it optional and not scare off the no-script people.

Done.

My Dwolla email is bryan@pipedot.org

Also added a section to the FAQ for it.

If anyone wants to rewrite this, please go for it. I expanded his other submission quite a bit before posting it, but I'd prefer to code the website than do some major editing ATM.

Preview added.

Just like to say that I love the look. It is information dense but still amazingly clean. I'm not usually one to comment on the appearance of web pages or apps as I don't often think its that important, but you really nailed things here. Cheers, -WW

Me too, and I must admit my first reaction on conclusion was "I hope this overtakes Soylent News, because it doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out".

Cool, glad to hear it.

Saw someone post a comment about Pipedot, and stopped by to say this site looks great and feels very snappy. I agree with someone who said we don't need one monolithic website, although it would be cool to have the best of both worlds. I guess I'll check out both sites for the time being.

That's the way uh huh uh huh I like it uh huh uh huh.

When I looked at Pipedot a couple of days ago and it was all static I considered it vapourware. And now I come back to see it all in actual action! Very impressive indeed.

It also brought us no end of weed jokes too.

"Oh, yeah! Medicinal! Why, without it I could, uh, go even blinder, right?"

I like that idea, we had a discussion about that somewhere in the last couple of days.

The moderate button for SN is starting to grow on me. It actually does work really well on my phone too, which is nice. I found out can read a whole page of comments and chose options, then when I've spent my points I click the moderate button to apply them all at once. I like the idea of an undo button though. Maybe I've moderated something, but after a screen refresh I see something else that's more deserving of the points. Or maybe I'm just on the line about something and decide to go Insightful instead of Informative.

I'm mostly in agreement with you, de-duplication and large files do make tools like rsync quite efficent, but there is a lot of "enterprise" use that doesn't fit into those categories, mailstores being a good example..

Context-sensitive news, just as I'm wondering what to do about my lack of storage!

I've been using random 3.5" server drives with an external USB 3.0 dock for a while now. I've been really thinking about doing some kind of RAID setup with one of those 5.25"->4x2.5" backplanes lately, but if 6TB+ drives are coming out soon, maybe I can stop worrying and just wait a while more for the prices to drop.

I agree with the others - this site looks pretty great! I love SN's nostalgic style too, though.

Anyway, wouldn't it be awesome if you could go into some user preferences page and arbitrarily select a colour as a theme for the pages? Slashdot green, SN red, or this beautiful default blue - that'd be cool.

FSCK is mostly a thing of the past. Smarter backup tools can do instantaneous snapshots with deduplication and more. "dd" is the WORST way to read or write a hard drive, whatever you might be trying to accomplish. And hard drive throughput does keep getting faster as capacities increase, so it's not as big of a hit as you might expect.

If you've got a 6TB drive packed with a few large files (like Blu-ray or HDTV rips) and they don't completely change from day to day, a simple rsync over the network could still be extremely fast.

I don't know if having a few different sites is necessarily a bad thing right now. I'm currently looking at soylentnews, here, squte and I will try to check out technocrat tomorrow (as it seems a little broken righ now). There may be a couple of others which I'm not aware of.

I like the fact that these sitesall have their own look and feel, and I think it's possible over time that they will all organically find their own niches, and I might end up spending more time on one than the others, but for now, I'm happy enough to bounce around them all, and think it's too early to be worry about duplication of effort.

It seems quite clear that the 'beta episode' has spurred a lot of people into action, and with all these new sites coming to my attention, it sort of feels a bit like when I first went online (probably getting on for 20 years ago).

This is all only my opinion though... :)

At first I thought about this like a nerd -->frontends are window dressing! Tacking things together would make things potentially less successful technically so it shouldn't happen! What we as a community actually need though is a viable long term alternative (rather than competing alternatives), and I do think Pipedot has the best frontend... while Soylent has the benefit of a now working moderation backend. Would really appreciate knowing how you feel about this and/or discussing this in IRC.

I've just been talking to people on the SoylentNews channel. (I'm hoping this will format correctly):
A lot of people have done work eg. on completely alternative sites (technocrat.org), re-invigorating the old code (soylent) and a complete redesign (pipedot). There has got to be a way of gracefully merging everyones efforts. I'm sure noone knows the slashdot innards like the soylent guys, and the pipedot guy is a web design guru. Perhaps technocrat.org should become the new groklaw....
[DarkMorph] I haven't heard of this pipedot until now. It seems like an excessive division of effort. The only sensible need for multiple independent sites like this would perhaps be to cover different niches/genres..?
[mrcoolbp] he's independent
[mrcoolbp] built it from scratch too (more or less from what I gather)
[mrcoolbp] and he's a friend of the site
"The only sensible need for multiple independent sites like this..." is to rattle the Dice
[Popeidol] the more the merrier, if we end up with two or three slashdot-alternatives out of this the ecosystem will be healthier.
The problem was noone knew ahead of time who would come up with the goods... so replication of effort was inevitable. (Like workers from a bee swarm searching for a new home).
That was necessary.
(for collective success)
[Popeidol] if anybody should join forces it's pipedot and technocrat.
[weilawei] pav5088: definitely, i know i was hedging my bets between trove suddenly working, technocrat.net, pipedot, and SN
[Popeidol] pipedot has a beautiful interface but no mod system, technocrat has a mod system but little else
[weilawei] I may have spent the slashcott week mostly at fark >_>just for lack of anywhere else to go.
Replication was necessary so people could prove they could walk the walk, but now collaboration is necessary (IMHO)
...well, not necessary, but desirable
We all want the same thing after all... a successful alternative.
[mrcoolbp] "may have" lol
[DarkMorph] No moderation and no javascript. Interesting. Very, very clean structure using the modern CSS design approach. Slick.
[DarkMorph] It almost perfectly blends into my system's XFCE theme too. XD
Nerds are much better at doing their own thing than collaborating... BUT I think collaboration is desirable at this point. Perhaps I can talk to the pipedot guy...
[weilawei] pav5088: thats it, you're nominated as Head Cat Herder.
* pav5088 experiences much fear

This certainly is excellent work

It's the link to the far right of the grey "by" bar.

#75 in your case, linking to http://pipedot.org/comment/75

Re: disk failure -- my next NAS is most likely going to use a RAID 6 array. With 4 data disks and 2 parity disks, it should be able to withstand having one disk fail, and another disk fail during the time it takes to reimage the replacement for the first disk. Which means that your data is safe unless 3 disks fail within a 24 hour window.

My monitor is slightly too low - could you render the whole website slightly up and to the left please... ;D

I've always had the same opinion, let the early adopters be the beta testers.

Nah, I'd rather complain and have a whole website change rather than adjust a simple setting myself ;)

Thanks, I see it is underlined today, looks MUCH better.

It's very "Agile", LOL. Sorry, my boss is always throwing that one out there and this is probably the only time I've seen it actually used in the sense he intends it.

I don't see a way currently to link to the comment, but Bryan said above it would eventually be released as GPL.

Thanks for your work on this. Between this and SoylentNews, I'm happy that we have options.

How about an "undo mod" button?

Surprised that slashdot doesn't have one since posting on the thread seems able to undo your mods.

Hmm, maybe gamma up your display a bit?

There is an active group of slashdot refugees on Usenet at comp.misc .

You can read usenet through an account at eternal-september.org or aioe.org and then use a news reader like Thunderbird or Pan .

Alternatively you can get there through Google Groups or, if you want an interface which resembles Slashdot, through s'qute .

Here's an article about the /. refugees on Usenet.

--

Off-topic: Can we have a preview button on |. please? I hope the href tags work and that I did not forget to close any...

That is very true. I've never moderated on my phone so I hadn't thought about that.

Even with SATA and SAS 6G connectivity, you're still looking at a lot of time for file system verification, backups, even just using dd. I think they're fine for general usage, but the size of them is making a lot of the things I suggested earlier pretty time prohibitive..

Are you kidding? Toshibas are best of breed, besting even Hitachi, post WD buyout.

By slashdot's "moderation as soon as you pick the list entry" thing is a mega-pain when you're reading/moderating on your phone - it is far too easy to mis-mod without a confirm step.

Sounds interesting, but I think I'll wait a few years to let them improve on reliability. I hate disks failing.

Indeed, and even then it will likely be very expensive. Still, it is indeed pretty cool, and might save lives down the line.

Ya, eventually as GPL

But with prices as low as $165 for a 4TB drive on Newegg, it seems like $250 wouldn't be an unreasonable estimate. And now my 2TB RAID 5 array is starting to seem a little small...

[Btw, I was intending to repost the pricing link to Newegg from TFA in my comment, but the |. post box hates it -- which I think is because it contains ampersands...]

We are not allowed to post ampersands, or Unicode... :'(