Recent Comments

Not sure if this is a good idea. I never heard anything good about wikipedia. BUT hearsay. But I am also very often on Stackoverflow. The rights to edit, why edit, how to edit... I very often have the feeling it is more of a pissing contest. Ok, you get valuable points for edits there, so it might not be 100% comparable. Nevertheless, the problem is editing other peoples posts is some kind of power. And some people get high on that kind of power. Is the 'getting blasted' you mentioned above really a problem? Does this happen somewhere back stage, where I don't see it? Because I really don't see it.... much.

If you do this, I propose something like Stackoverflow: Almost everybody can edit everything, BUT up to a certain reputation (karma) edits won't show automatically, but must go through a review of higher-karma members.

My editorial style mostly comes from what I saw was horribly wrong with summaries over there... Far too many were superficial, inaccurate, one-side pablum, which resulted in the vast majority of comments being readers trying (much like Sisyphus) to correct the misinformation or slant of the summary on each story.

I've been considering a slight tweak to the pipe submissions and story edits to combine them and give them more of a "wiki" style. This would mean that pretty much everybody would get an "Edit" button and would be able to make changes to a story. Obviously, like a wiki, abusive edits would need to be easy to identify and revert but it could potentially alleviate some of the easy editing problems. Far too often, I see an editor get blasted in comments about a simple spelling error or a similarly trivial problem. Editors, like evilviper and zaffiro17, spend a lot of time and effort to create wonderful summaries and it's discouraging to see the first 10 comments quibbling about a spelling error! But what if users could easily fix it themselves? Would empowering users with editing abilities be more of a help or a hindrance?

Look at the recent Sourceforge Gimp article on Slashdot. The editor is attacked by the users for:

1. Being late at accepting the submission
2. Not editing the two merged submissions enough
3. Being part of a some type of cover-up or conspiracy
4. Slanting the story to favor the corporate overlord

Perhaps normal users wouldn't see themselves and editors as such distinct classes if everyone where more equal. Almost like promoting someone to their level of incompetence.

To be fair, I have no issue with watching trailers for new shows. It's a good way to keep up to date on what's coming out. I do think the best way to approach it is to have the trailer at the end of a show. That way if you've already seen it you can just start the next episode, if you're interested you can watch it, and it's not interrupting whatever you're currently watching. I don't like the idea of having the trailers at the beginning, there's only so many times I could see a trailer for Dare Devil before I'd get tired of it. And seeing as my wife and I watched six episodes of Glee yesterday, I'd get sick of it really quick.

Yet another basically user-friendly firm gets too big for its britches. Well, guess what, Netflix: the pirate scene is thriving, and it's totally ad-free. I don't watch ads, I don't.

Remember when DVD producers thought it would be profitable to start your DVD with 3 or 4 non-skippable previews etc. Then it got worse. Disney films are the absolute worst: before your kid gets to watch Aladdin you've got something like 10 other blurbs to get through.

Screw you, big media. I hope you and your adverts all choke on a bag of dicks.

Ok, I don't know how long I am member of /., I think it got worse, but it could be my imagination. Maybe I got older and less tolerant against b......t. Nevertheless, I gladly 'promote' |. wherever I can. :-)

As long as propaganda articles are filtered out, as it is done now, the less desirable parts of the /. community won't feel welcome here anyways.

To tell you the truth, it was turning into a cesspool before Dice. Probably started around the time when the politics section was created. When I go and look at stories back in 2004, it was not uncommon to see some of the top experts in obscure fields chiming-in, making insightful and nuanced observations about the topic, and getting +5 for the effort. It was truly awesome. Over the years, that dissolved into a "me-too" rant and ditto-fest, where mindless, feel-good but completely inaccurate comments were +5. Anything challenging the group-think was -1 Troll, no matter how accurate, which gradually pushed all the experts away.

My editorial style mostly comes from what I saw was horribly wrong with summaries over there... Far too many were superficial, inaccurate, one-side pablum, which resulted in the vast majority of comments being readers trying (much like Sisyphus) to correct the misinformation or slant of the summary on each story. Which is why it irks me when people (namely: editors at SoylentNews) use the number of comments that an article gets as if it's a series of up-votes, or otherwise valuable and necessary.

Ok. The problem I see is... on /. I am nothing more than an evil troll, who tries everything to burn his once excellent karma. Since /. was taken over by dice I have only contempt for this click-baiting cesspool and my posts show clearly show it. So I might not be the best |. 'ambassador' on /, ;-)

Sorry, my fault. Language translation temporarilly dissabled again.

Seems I borked the automatic language translation system again. I've disabled it for now and will hide these inadvertent double posts.

From time to time I drop the |. url on /.. Should I not doing this?

By all means, keep it up! Pipedot is pretty small with no current method to gain new eyeballs other than through word-of-mouth.

Sorry for the double-posts. Testing the (seemingly broken) language translation.

They pretty much have a 50/50 chance, right? I'd guess they're probably right. They can date specific mutations pretty well, I don't know if I'd risk my life on them being correct, but it sounds like it might be correct. It would be interesting to see their methodology applied against other migrations to see if that also confirms with what archaeology believes.

With any single study, a "that's an interesting result" is a fair response. Let other peers take a look at it and dissect it.

If the only evidence they have is the genetic similarities, then I certainly hope they're taking into account Egypt's close location and continual trade (and one presumes, cross-pollination over thousands of years) with the Mediterranean cultures. According to TFA, they "controlled for recent migrations," but does recent take them back 10,000 years? 1,000? 100? They themselves acknowledge the original migrations took place between 125,000 and 60,000 years, so recent is obviously relative. Color me skeptical.

Anybody know why we should care? I used to use cdbXP (on the rare occasions I was stuck using Windows) for a while, but ran into some problems, and found that BurnOnCDDVD was much better.

It rebooted and contact has been established.

However:
- Its exact position remains fuzzy, complicating two-way communication.
- The communication is not stable enough to apply the patch. So, they have to keep rebooting it regularly.

Sad story, and a neat project. I can only assume the engineers are frantically trying to figure how they can remotely do a Ctl-Alt-Delete.

I pity them, but I also fault them. Easy to armchair code, but it seems to me if you're building this kind of system, your operating policy must be that any error leads to a reboot under known good software conditions. I know, easier said than done, but ...

Quite often the only way to get rid of those people is to promote them to a higher level. That's why we have so many incompetent managers and, unfortunately, they do even more damage then.

seriously, there is no chrome extension for android for this? Kinda limits its utility if i cannot use it on my most portable computer.. and the ability to store the sound for replay later would be a nifty way to sneakernet long links to a machine in the next room.

Stop hiring the people I work with... or at least promote them to somewhere to a position to limit how much damage they can do

Excuse me for replying to an old thread like this one but I believe that I can't leave the above comment unanswered!

I don't know Robert Shingledecker but I have used his work (Tiny Core Linux) and for that I thank him. I found impolite the way his name was made fun of.

Anyway, I got here after trying to find something on a search engine. For those of you who don't know TCL try this interview first...
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090323#feature

Sadly, there are more duplicate posts from billshooterofbul out there than their should be.

If ANYONE ever deserved the "Redundant" mod...

Sadly, there are more out there than their should be. The consequences of such issues should be relatively minor. Maybe the program will crash or display something wrong. It probably doesn't matter fro most apps.

*yawn*

+1 hope he killed

I can see it now: rows of pimply-faced teenagers sitting through vintage videos of not car wrecks, but identity theft cases and pedobears, all while the teacher sat in the back thumbing through playboy (yes, still the print edition: driver's ed teachers/internet ed teachers are all the same).

Maybe not wearable cloaking devices, but certainly vehicle-mounted cloaking panels, and man-portable cloaking tents.

Even if the image display is one-sided, this enables all sorts of cool stuff.

Thanks, I hadn't read that and it appears that the problem is:

Computers traditionally accommodate leap seconds by setting their clock backwards by one second at the very end of the day

The "Time moved backwards by more than 1 second" error from dovecot now makes perfect sense. That this can lead to locking and concurrency issues demonstrates leap seconds are incorrectly implemented. As we are no longer in Nineteen-Seventy-Fucking-Nine; I stand by my original point!

Mmmh, I agree, in Google's case it seems more about synchronisation of their multiple machines across their multiple datacenters (and locking issues that go with it). But a bit of googling showed some other more crash-like reports:

http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/07/03/a-story-of-leaping-seconds/
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1203.1/04598.html
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=6b43ae8a619d17c4935c3320d2ef9e92bdeed05d
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/154713

In this case, the "2012 crash", it was kernel-related (something about a multi-CPU race inside the kernel that caused lock issues if I get this right), so not really a problem that you could do anything to avoid in userland.

Now if you're using *BSD, of course, you're most certainly safe ;)

I think that's actually kind of awesome. Sometimes I wish I hadn't given up playing back in 2008, then I remember how much time and money I poured in. It was a lot of fun, but at the end of the day I didn't have anything to show for it, which was just depressing.

Still kudos to those that stick to it, enjoying the game is what matters, congratulations.

Exactly what I expected: Minor problems with consistency: "Does email that comes in during that second get stored correctly?". Ok, for a service like Google this might not be a minor problem. But this is light years away from a system crash.

I remember reading that technical post on Google blog about problems they had with leap seconds and how they fixed them.

http://googleblog.blogspot.be/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping-seconds.html

The section "Why time matters at Google" might especially be of interest ;)

What programs?

Shit programs!

Time should always be stored and processed as a timestamp. Human readable date strings are meaningless to computers and should be used for display only.

...but I simply don't understand the problem.

It's possible that programs not equipped to handle the extra second could have an issue.

What programs? If the clock is not correct I might have a minor problem with builds. I might recompile more than necessary. So What? But crashes? Especially so boring systems like websites? Possibly "lightly" corrupt databases, yes. Perhaps the order of a few posts mixed up, yes. This should be all. I'd probably have think hard how to crash a program on purpose just because the time is one second off.

But then #you #couldnt be #like #twitter and put #hashtags on #everything!

FWIW, I think we could do without the regex entirely. A clever idea, but only extremely rarely does it come in handy. Even linking to stories and comments, people usually want link/alt text. And the false positives are significant. Probably lots of people wasting time wondering why would someone irretrievably link a serial number: Serial #87654321
etc.

Err, interesting, I was kinda expecting that link to get mangled as well since it contained a fragment. Seems it's only happens when the word boundary is preceded by slash, or similar character.

Drat! That crazy regex strikes again!

https://github.com/pipedot/pipecode/blob/master/include/common.php#L851-L852

i reported the bug the other day. see: http://bugs.pipedot.org/view.php?id=51

Can anyone else feel the idea of a licence to use the internet coming through? On the positive side, what scheme can't be bypassed or hacked given the incentive to do so. Some humans find that it is easier to do the impossible than the shameful.

There's no need to "hope". All the firmware/BIOS does is drop an EXE and DLL on the file system. Maybe if WINE gets better, Linux users will be lucky enough to get infected, too.

It is based on a Windows application, and needs a FAT or NTFS file system on the hard drive to infect it, so non-Windows users are pretty safe.

All modern UEFI machines nowadays have at least one FAT file system. So, let's hope this is not enough and really a Windows is necessary.

Thanks, just checked. My laptop has it, and yes it was enabled. Good to know it is there.

It's public info how this thing works. They're trying to sell it to IT departments, so lots of info is right on their site.

It is based on a Windows application, and needs a FAT or NTFS file system on the hard drive to infect it, so non-Windows users are pretty safe.

If you buy from one of the 6 biggest manufacturers, you almost certainly have it, even if you don't know it.

There needs to be a moderation option for "syntax Error"

unless you looked at the firmware for each laptop you can't be sure. a lot of big vendors put it on their boards* and some vendors just remove the options from the "BIOS Setup Utility" but it's still there.
* #5-scale-of-potential-problem" rel="nofollow">https://securelist.com/analysis/publications/58278/absolute-computrace-revisited/#5-scale-of-potential-problem

"Nearly every PC" has this crap? Come on now. First of all, it sounds like it's almost entirely restricted to laptops. Certainly my laptops don't have it, and it's for damn sure none of my many desktops and servers do.

Good question. How could we check it.. if we don't know how this module works?

Back when I used to manage Windows laptops (mostly IBM/Lenovo), it seemed that:

(1) the Computrace thing was only capable of "hacking" your Windows install; wipe and install, say Ubuntu, and Computrace can't do anything.

(2) the BIOS usually offered three settings, forgive me that I'm fuzzy on the exact same wording, Inactive (meaning it hacks you and phones home but pretends it doesn't), Enabled (hacks you, phones home, if you've paid you can track it), Disabled (doesn't hack you, but doesn't un-hack you if you already are). The last two are permanent choices, once you pick either of those you can never undo it. Flashing the BIOS has no effect.

Anybody know if these are still true?

After installing a number of HDTVs to the wall with complex (and expensive) mounting brackets, a simple magnet mounting mechanism sounds like a dramatic improvement. Just mount an iron plate (or a few smaller plates) to the wall and then the TV just sticks in place.

Although the panel in the picture is certainly flexible, it doesn't look flexible enough to roll up into a tube. Imagine how much cheaper shipping would be if your new "giant" TV came in a slender tube instead of a large rectangular box that needed 2 people to pick up.

62,000 hrs for blue OLEDs. Means 7 years 24/7 running. Means solved for my use cases. My TVs don't come even close to 24/7 runtime. If the OLEDs don't degrade when switched off, I expect a lifespan of at least 20-30 years for my devices. I never had a TV that long.