Slashdot Mirror

True, but it's generally good to build on the work of others rather than re-make the same mistakes.

There was another guy who made a modern forum system from scratch in the style of slashdot. I believe he made the source available as well. The forum is http://pipedot.org/ . The software is available at http://pipedot.org/ .

True, but it's generally good to build on the work of others rather than re-make the same mistakes.

There was another guy who made a modern forum system from scratch in the style of slashdot. I believe he made the source available as well. The forum is http://pipedot.org/ . The software is available at http://pipedot.org/ .

Yes indeed, I've been using the basic HTML GMail interface for years now, never liking their slow JS version that blocks every time you click on anything.

I've posted instructions to do so before:
http://pipedot.org/2TPQ

Specifically, Google Fiber is not a loss. Accountants put it on the books as a loss, but it's not. It's just an expensive investment in physical plant with a long payoff period. It may takes years, even decades, but it's not like people are going to stop using this new-fangled thing called the Internet.

I've canceled my cable internet and switched to cellular. I have FIOS in my area, too, but there's more competition in cellular, so us lighter users (not streaming Netflix) can get a better deal. It shouldn't be this way... DSL used to be dirt cheap, and some cable companies even had $15/mo plans, but reduced regulation in the US over many years has eliminated those cheaper options across most of the country. They've held the line better on cellular competition, but I'm concerned that won't last much longer, either.

In any case, Google Fiber isn't an internet monopoly ANYWHERE it operates. Saying it's guaranteed to profit is idiotic... There are always a half dozen competitors around who can undercut Google and steal their fiber customers. Your underpants gnome understanding of economics falls short. When you've got a few million to waste, build your own ISP and get back to us.

Even while people are cord cutting their cable TV, a smaller number are cutting their internet service, too:

http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

I'd rather surf the 'net with my desktop than my little phone display no matter how crispy it is. What are people thinking?

They may be thinking that an always-on device they have in their pocket that uses 1/100th as much power as running their desktop computer, is much more convenient for quickly looking-up information.

HTML is a markup language. It can be wrapped to any size viewport you wish, or at least it could if web "designers" didn't abuse it quite so badly. So a phone isn't necessarily inferior. In some ways its superior, as lower bandwidth pages without all the wasted bandwidth of ads, "You might also like", navbars, etc.

But personally, I greatly prefer RSS. I can plough through many times more information, in far less time on my phone with a flick of my thumb, than you can on the biggest multi-monitor desktop setup around.

If it wasn't for my wife wanting to watch The Bachelor the second it comes on I would have cut the cable a long time ago.

The Bachelor is on ABC, which is broadcast over-the-are to something like 90% of the US population. Depending on your location, getting it might cost as little as $20. I wrote an in-depth tutorial that really walks you through antenna selection and setup:

http://evilviper.pipedot.org/j...

I literally watch 3 channels and most nights not even that. I really can't stomach whats on TV these days

I've always been that way... That's why my favorite slogan is:

"PBS: Television for people who hate television"

You'll do better with an antenna, anyhow. Lots of sub-channels with old TV shows and movies, several of which don't even get carried on most cable systems.

Replacing Usenet with 8 million different web forums that I have to register with individually and use a different interface to read is not an improvement.

You don't have to visit any web forums to read them. Nearly every site has an RSS feed, and those which don't can be scraped and converted into RSS with something like Feed43.com.

I would HATE using my smart phone to read the news if it wasn't for RSS. /.'s mobile site is the single worst piece of crap I've ever seen. But with RSS I'm fortunately able to read any and every site out there, in a uniform "eBook"-like format.

You can read my RSS tips here:

http://evilviper.pipedot.org/j...

Site e-mail should work. I'm guessing it was just a typo. Try using this link. Just ignore that wrong-user error message after you send:

http://username.pipedot.org/ma...

You'll see your own e-mails in Sent, certainly NOT the "Outbox".

WebP support is nice, but pretty trivial. It's WebM (video) support that everyone has been asking Apple to add, for years now. You can bet iPhone users would like smaller YouTube videos, WebRTC video conferencing, etc., but Apple is holding-on tight to H.264 AVC as the only available video compression format. Any coincidence that they are among the companies earning patent royalties from patent licensing the format?

Apple is the one big hold out, preventing adoption of better, open and free video formats on the web. Though WebP is somewhat related, it doesn't get us any closer to WebM and the open web, which Apple is single-handedly holding-up. Absolutely every other major tech company has thrown their support behind the Alliance for Open Media.

See:

- http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

- http://pipedot.org/story/2016-...

WebP support is nice, but pretty trivial. It's WebM (video) support that everyone has been asking Apple to add, for years now. You can bet iPhone users would like smaller YouTube videos, WebRTC video conferencing, etc., but Apple is holding-on tight to H.264 AVC as the only available video compression format. Any coincidence that they are among the companies earning patent royalties from patent licensing the format?

Apple is the one big hold out, preventing adoption of better, open and free video formats on the web. Though WebP is somewhat related, it doesn't get us any closer to WebM and the open web, which Apple is single-handedly holding-up. Absolutely every other major tech company has thrown their support behind the Alliance for Open Media.

See:

- http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

- http://pipedot.org/story/2016-...

https://pipedot.org/

I fail to see how "charity shares" wouldn't devolve into "funding channels for them with the most gold". For that matter, we already have that with outfits like the Tides Foundation.

It couldn't have been much worse than what did happen. Nokia was a very strong consumer brand, a high quality Nokia Android could've been a success. At least they'd have been in control of their own destiny instead of being tied to Microsoft's own failed efforts.

You obviously don't know the story. Nokia was so deeply in debt that they couldn't survive without the huge cash infusion from Microsoft. Nokia was very lucky there was a bigger idiot they could trick into buying the company, saving their creditors and share-holders, and leaving Microsoft holding the worthless carcass.

Nokia's problems were deep and long-standing. They had all the opportunities and time in the world to make a successful smart phone, but failed miserably. Their Nokia Communicator could have been what iPhone was, but instead they constantly made mind-boggling decisions to cripple their products.

Never the less, you can expect Nokia/Android phones to come to market pretty soon:

http://pipedot.org/story/2016-...

Yes, aired April 27, 2014.

And discussed on Pipedot months ago:

http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

I can't imagine the level of stupidity required for Google to make such a request. Google's own reports (which they resist being required to provide) show quite clearly that human drivers are frequently a very necessary supplement to their autonomous systems:

"Between September 2014 and November 2015, Google said there were 272 occasions when a technology failure forced the test driver to re-take control."
https://ia.acs.org.au/news/goo...

And this request comes shortly after a Google car was found fully-responsible for crashing into a bus:

http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

And that's not a one-off... Google's small fleet of self-driving cars are getting in numerous accidents. 8% is the last figure I saw. Google spins it as the fault of everyone else except its own vehicles, but that claim is specious at best:

http://gizmodo.com/self-drivin...

There's ample evidence that self-driving cars do several things which (while they MIGHT be safe if all cars were autonomous) cause clashes with existing human drivers on the road:

http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

Even the much-simpler task, of drive-by-wire in existing automobiles has proven too unreliable to trust human lives with. Toyota screwed this up badly, and it has cost them dearly:

http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

It exists, and it's really good:

pipedot.org

Let's switch to PipeDot and try to rebuild something great there.

PipeDot is great. Clean layout, modern site engine, a trusted developer behind the wheel.

All it currently lacks is content and comments. We know how to get those, people simply need to visit the site and say what they think.

I can't recommend it highly enough, and here I am, a lowly grad student (still) who's been reading /. for fifteen years and has finally realized how totally abhorrent the place truly is...

Updating of OTA broadcast, I think, will find more people turning to it and away from shitty cable and satellite, which is already a trend.

People are dropping cable, and more are installing antennas, but TV viewership even on broadcast OTA networks is also falling, as people spend more time on mobile devices...

http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

I expect OTA viewership will take-off, and cable will really die, when mobile devices like tablets start including built-in TV tuners and antennas... Plenty of people with time to waste are away from home, and would like some entertainment that doesn't eat up their astronomically expensive data plan.

It has already been done... But once Apple gets the idea, everybody else will copy them, and the press will gush about how incredibly innovative they are...

http://www.amazon.com/RCA-7-In...

http://www.bonanza.com/listing...

Streaming over the Internet, I think, is just another 'pay TV' trap like cable and satellite, and as a matter of fact if you think for a moment, how is it really any different than cable or satellite directly connected to your TV?

Simple... Internet-based services don't hold a geographic monopoly like cable companies do. Lots of competition, versus NO competition.

Changing technology matters, too. Cable couldn't help but be linear, non-interactive a few decades ago. Now they can do things smarter, but many of their declining number of customers demand they maintain the old model, and their contracts with networks are equally difficult to substantially change to allow a new service model.

https://pipedot.org/

No more 50 hours of dialup! No more busy signals! "Unlimited internet" initially meant 24x7 connectivity; you're always online! It has never meant, "Go ahead and max out your download speed 24x7" except to people looking to abuse the fact that they weren't metering bandwidth.

Actually, it did. My cable company was happy to let me max-out my 384kbps connection, non-stop. If it looked like I wasn't going to use that much in the month, they'd double my throughput, but then they didn't advertise it as a 768kbps service to begin with.

What changed was ISPs wanted to advertise higher speeds than their competitor(s), so they ramped-up higher-speed plans, and charged higher prices. So they start offering "200 Mbps" services, with the fine-print stating that you only get a few seconds of "burst" at that speed, and discontinue all their lower-speed plans, charging your grandmother three time as much money every month, just to check her e-mail.

They just assumed the data usage would stay about the same, so their price increase would be like printing money... Instead people found ways to use more of that higher-speed service they had sitting idle, and now the ISPs aren't making as much extra money as they expected to. If ISPs can't afford unlimited 200Mbps they're forcing people to sign-up for, they just need to start offering lower-speed plans again... I'd be happy to switch to even a 1Mbps service, if the monthly fee was sufficiently low. And with that speed, it wouldn't even be possible to go over their data cap, so no need for metering. But that's too straight-forward and honest for them...

It's all about the advertising. Make no mistake, if they had some way to advertise 200Mbps service, while only delivering 1Mbps, they'd do it in a second. But they'd get nailed for that, so they're trying to sneak-in data-caps instead. They would rather really provide an unlimited service than have to honestly advertise their capped & limited plans.

The FCC has been very clear that "unlimited means unlimited", and comes down hard on "those broadband providers who fail to be fully transparent about data limits." I hope that will continue, and apply to these sneaky changes as well.

I previously looked-up high altitude balloons, and found figures of about $1 million every launch, with them only staying airborne maybe a week at a time.

What's more, this isn't the middle of nowhere. TFA says Indonesia already has a widespread cellular telephone infrastructure:

"in Indonesia, where there the number of mobile phones â" about 319 million â" outnumber people. But most of those phones donâ(TM)t connect to the Internet because users canâ(TM)t afford data plans"

And with the high ongoing costs of balloons, it seems that Google's toy will quickly cost more than conventional infrastructure upgrades already started:

"Telkom is building a fiber optic system connecting the provinces of Maluku and Papua worth hundreds of millions of dollars."

I'd call Elon Musk's plan (WorldVu/OneWeb/L5) with lots of LEO satellites infinitely more practical and viable:

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...

Personally, I don't see why one-way datacasting hasn't gained some popularity. Whether via local TV, AM/MW radio, or worldwide coverage with shortwave radio. It would cost next to nothing to modulate a data signal underneath the audio, and just start beaming the (compressed) full text of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and any other free content made available. Receivers would just need to add SD card slots, and include a very low-end processor (or piggyback on an existing DSP).

While long overdue, VOA has been trying it out with their Radiogram test program the past couple years:

http://voaradiogram.net/

It isn't what Google/Facebook want, as they can't datamine and sell ads on one-way broadcasts targeting these dirt-poor folks, it would vastly improve life for everyone off-the-grid and unable to afford satellite internet service.

Google selling targeted Gmail ads that look like emails

Google violating Russian antitrust regulations by bundling its services with Android

Many web pages load something from Google, so Google is tracking us wherever we go.

The Slashdot home page loads these from Google:
1) google-analytics.com
2) googleadservices.com
3) googletagservices.com

Google selling targeted Gmail ads that look like emails

Google violating Russian antitrust regulations by bundling its services with Android

Many web pages load something from Google, so Google is tracking us wherever we go.

The Slashdot home page loads these from Google:
1) google-analytics.com
2) googleadservices.com
3) googletagservices.com

The submission is a cut-n-paste sans formatting from a soylent news story.

Should I be offended that nobody thought to steal my Pipedot story summary, even though it predates both by several days?

http://pipedot.org/pipe/NZAB

Not everybody lives in a house. In fact, in some cities, very few people do.

For the past year in California, landlords MUST allow tenants to install EV charging stations... It doesn't matter whether you live in a house, condo, apartment, etc., you can plug-in your car.

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...

Anybody who thinks these petitions are worth the paper they are signed on and that the White House actually pays attention to them is deluded.

I generally agree, except it absolutely did work for cell phone unlocking. https://petitions.whitehouse.g...

The DMCA exception had even been removed by the LoC, and after the public outcry, they reinstated the exception, and went even further. Today, the FCC forces all carriers to unlock phones as soon as they are paid-for:
* http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

And that change was at least partially responsible for all major carriers recently ending their post-paid contract plans with big phone subsidizes.

That's one huge change that has apparently come out of the process.

How can the reader tell when a word is a Proper Noun, Trademarked, etc; or when it is an Ordinary Word? I've complained about this before

I Agree... Plenty Of Headlines Are Quite Difficult To Read With All Initials As Caps. They Try To Pack A Lot Of Info In Minimal Space, Which Makes Proper Capitalization More Important Than Elsewhere. That's Why I've Made It Policy To Do It The Right Way On Stories Over At Pipedot:
* https://pipedot.org/

When I Submitted A Story To /. The Other Day, The Only Changes Made By Samzenpus Were To Remove A Line On The Speed Of Comets, And To Capitalize Every Word In The Title For No Good Reason:
* http://science.slashdot.org/st...

I do my best. This one really isn't my favorite, but the other admittedly wasn't on slashdot:

http://pipedot.org/2V6P

So if you want to build housing for another million people, then I want to see somewhere in there that you've expanded water and power resources for an additional million people. And if it isn't on line... NOW... then I'm not zoning land for use by another million people.

It's already a California state law; on the books for decades.

SB 610 - The Water Supply Assessment Law

In 1995, the California Legislature enacted SB 901 (later codified in Water Code sections 10910-10915) to ensure that cities and counties would assess the adequacy of available water supplies to meet projected water demand prior to approving significant new land development projects. In 2001, perceived shortcomings in SB 901 compliance led the California Legislature to enact two further lawsâ"SB 610 and SB 221â"to tighten the linkage between water supply availability and land-use planning decisions. SB 610 focused on improving the Water Supply Assessment, or WSA, procedure previously established by SB 901. Among other things, SB 610 expanded the scope of development projects triggering the WSA procedure and expanded the informational requirements of the procedure, particularly with respect to groundwater supplies.

The WSA law requires that before cities or counties approve certain classes of projects (e.g., residential developments over 500 units) as lead agencies under CEQA, they must request preparation of a WSA by the public water supplier identified to serve the proposed development project. The public water supplier has 90 days to prepare and approve a WSA after receiving a request from a city or county land-use agency. The WSA must assess the supplier's projected water availability and the projected water demand in its service area over a 20-year horizon, including supply and demand projections in normal water years, dry water years and multiple-dry water years (i.e., in droughts). The public water supplier's WSA must conclude whether projected supplies will be adequate to serve existing demand, demand from the proposed development project, and demand from planned future uses.

After the water supplier's governing body (i.e., board of directors) approves the WSA, it must be submitted to the city or county land-use agency (i.e., the lead agency) for physical incorporation into the CEQA document being prepared for the proposed development project. The WSA law provides for the lead agency's CEQA document (i.e., an environmental impact report ["EIR"] or negative declaration) to evaluate the water supply and demand information in the WSA. Ultimately, the WSA law requires the lead agency to make a determination "based on the entire record, whether projected water supplies will be sufficient to satisfy the demands of the project, in addition to existing and planned future uses." (Water Code  10911(c).)

http://www.kmtg.com/node/1292

This is why we get brown outs, over crowded schools, over worked police departments, water shortages, and hellacious traffic.

Brown-outs and rolling blackouts were caused by stupid laws (deregulation) and fraud (Enron). Since those years, power outages have been quite rare. California has been investing huge amounts of money in renewable grid-connected wind and solar power sources. Name a huge solar power project, and it probably happened in California.

Over-crowded schools happened mostly from a change in tax laws, that cut-out cities/counties and instead requires them to beg the state for some of their own tax revenue back.

I have yet to see a water shortage. I turn-on the tap and water comes out. Golf courses remain bright green. etc. And California isn't remotely alone in handling water stress:

http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

Traffic is a very complicated topical all it's own.

Now her

What do you think provides the 220 voltage to the connector outside your house

Natural gas. Your WSJ article is a year out-of-date, and simply wrong:

http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

If slashdot does fail to get bought, and disappears, as seems all too likely, everybody go on over to pipedot. Heck, even if that doesn't happen, please split your time and spend some over there too. The site engineering is superb. All it needs is 10 or 100 times the user base.

You've basically just described SoylentNews, a Slashdot clone that appeared when the Slashdot Beta shit really started heating up.

SoylentNews never aspired to be anything like slashdot. Instead NCommander stated clearly "SoylentNews intends to be a source of journalism", which just resulted in it becoming HuffingtonPost with discussion, instead of a /. replacement.

The only direct replacement for /. that appeared was PipeDot. "pipedot intends to be a better slashdot". https://pipedot.org/comment/2C... Unfortunately, the word hardly got out, and readership over there is pretty low.

2. shameful attempt to ignore Gamergate (still not a single article on /. covering the journalism scandal

Pipedot had a pretty good GamerGate write-up a few months ago:

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...

Like Soylent News and Pipedot?

YUP, checking back here 24 hours later (now roughly midnight Sunday night in London) and the article has 68 posts and is at the bottom of the front page.

Nicely handled by the editors/admin of the site, well done guys.

But we know that you guys are playing games like this and it alienates us from you. Others have posted here a "thank you" for fixing the problem, and others pointed out that it's all crap they don't care and they just want the advertising revenue, which is further evidence of the bad will SlashDice is creating with the community.

Once the community is gutted of the people who "know shit" and "post iconic" and "invaluable" comments, the site will fall. Sure, enjoy your million page impressions per day and hundreds of forum posts from drooling idiots. Yay! But the heart and soul of the site will be gutted, and without the core contributors, the site will fall.

Interesting times! Digg failed years ago. Reddit looks to be well on its way now. And SlashDice is all but a shadow of its former self.

Who will fill the void? Soylent? Or my personal favorite (the dev has done an incredible job) PipeDot? Or something else...

I live in an apartment building and there is no wiring in the parkade. Nor is there any requirement (or incentive) to retrofit the building.

Law in California says landlords can't refuse to allow you to install EV charging infrastructure. You'll have to foot the bill, but they can't say no:

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...

Someone just needs to make a new website, and let this turd circle the drain.
How hard could it really be to duplicate and/or improve upon the site design, let alone the self-described editorial staff? Use the classic low bandwidth style, HTML/CSS only with only a tiny smattering of Javascript as UI sugar, and get rid of all the Web 2.0 garbage. Maybe even put in some God damned Unicode support, and rethink the karma system so good comments don't get buried under bad moderation. Design the site right and seed it with interesting (and timely) stories, and it will take off, while this place turns into a graveyard in short order.

They did all that already. Sadly your prediction of popularity didn't happen.
https://soylentnews.org/
https://pipedot.org/

https://pipedot.org/ has a lot of potential, but doesn't have the traffic of this site or Soylent.

I am very often here:
http://pipedot.org/

Sadly not too many articles, but we fought off several infiltration attempts from both 'gender sides'. Though the proposed anti-woman articles were that primitive that I suspect SJW sockpuppets.

Chris Katko, you can come here:
http://pipedot.org/

Not as many articles as here on /., but up to now we where absolutely able to keep crap like this out.

Was just reading where astronomers have seen a supernova event twice now due to gravitational lensing which allows the same image to take four different routes to our eyes.

This must be the same thing happening then, because I first read about the Kinshasa traffic robots on http://pipedot.org/ a full freaking year ago.

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...

I'd like to scream "Dupe" but rather I'll scream "Missed it by a mile." WTF, Slashdot, this is like archeology these days. This news dates back to March 2014.

Was just reading where astronomers have seen a supernova event twice now due to gravitational lensing which allows the same image to take four different routes to our eyes.

This must be the same thing happening then, because I first read about the Kinshasa traffic robots on http://pipedot.org/ a full freaking year ago.

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...

I'd like to scream "Dupe" but rather I'll scream "Missed it by a mile." WTF, Slashdot, this is like archeology these days. This news dates back to March 2014.

I was reading Soylent for a while, but there was some absurd drama among the people in charge and ridiculously long posts about all the bullshit. They forced out the guy who started it for some reason, then he wanted them to reimburse him for the money he had spent on hosting, etc... I'll take the slashvertisements over that.

On the other hand Pipedot, which is run by one guy, has been quite nice but doesn't have the volume of content to replace Slashdot.

In the meantime, why don't you come join us at https://pipedot.org/? It has both UTF-8 and SSL support already.

And for that matter so does Soylent News, which is even based on the same codebase as Slashdot!

Worry not, Comrade!

HTTPS will come to Slashdot after UTF-8 arrives and the Usable Slashdot interface is retired.

In the meantime, why don't you come join us at https://pipedot.org/? It has both UTF-8 and SSL support already.

Tried Pipedot and SoylentNews?

Fuck Slashdot.

Hit CTRL+U and browse the wonderful HTML source code ads.

Unbelievable that the site has stooped so low.

I'm off to Pipedot.

Fuck Slashdot.

Hit CTRL+U and browse the wonderful HTML source code ads.

Unbelievable that the site has stooped so low.

I'm off to Pipedot.

There's also pipedot.

...and Apple.

Slashdot is just non-stop Microsoft and Apple.

I'm sick of it here. I'm off to Pipedot.