Slashdot Mirror

The DonorsChoose fund drive page that redditors have been giving to in droves to get Colbert's attention.

Please also donate, if you can.

This reddit thread contains more links that indicate GOG is not actually dead: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dfzhe/rip_gogcom/c0zxgih

Personally I think they are going to change their service in some way, perhaps add a devoted client (like Steam) and perhaps introduce DRM.

If you're right GOG is gone. Adding DRM negates the advantage of buying from them. They'll become just another crappy publisher of old nostalgia games. At best that'd make it Zombie GOG.

This reddit thread contains more links that indicate GOG is not actually dead: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dfzhe/rip_gogcom/c0zxgih

Personally I think they are going to change their service in some way, perhaps add a devoted client (like Steam) and perhaps introduce DRM. If so, I will be angry at the lack of transparency; the whole thing smells like a publicity stunt. If this is the case, the game I bought from them last week will be the last.

At least for RFID, this would be much more fun:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/cyeiz/reddit_i_present_to_you_my_superfun_idea_for_rfid/

Edit: Found this on Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ddj5f/hdcp_master_key_pirates_1_riaa_0/c0zey2n

I bought it. I love it. I've been telling everyone who'll listen to me about it.

The reason the site contains so little information about the game is because there isn't much to tell – by and large, the game is the definition of a sandbox. For gameplay examples, you should look at some Let's Play videos; I recommend the ones done by mastatsan.

BTW, the reason it's sold so many copies is because 4chan's /v/ hooked onto it in a major way, and it's spreading quite quickly through Reddit. My point is, although the number of copies sold sounds huge for a game still in alpha, it's somehow clicked with a huge number of people. Also, whatever said this all happened in the last week isn't quite right: while sales have been rising steadily for the last while, the game's been purchasable for over a year now.

You may be interested in this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Wireless_Metropolitan_Network
I found out about it in an informative discussion on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a54yz/proggit_i_present_you_with_awmn/
Theoretically there's a similar project going on in the city where I go to university, but I've never seen a working node and attempts to get involved were met with no response :/ It's too bad that so few people are interested in participating in community networks like this.

This guy did not need the handout, the poster was more or less a joke/notice to let the many people that do know him they should come to his party. The very fact he knows so many people was the reason for the notice, it was the most practical way to notify the large number of people he knows.

If the guy was a "lonely old man with no friends left", do you think he would book out a town hall to hold his party?

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/d9zmp/dear_internet_on_behalf_of_the_lashua_family_i/

"He has 7 children, many grandchildren, and even great grandchildren. In his younger years he was a foster parent to dozens of foster children."

I can't help but think these donations and effort could have been directed to people more in need.

It only seems nice until you realise that William J Lashua's family specifically asked that random strangers do NOT show up. It was an event reserved for family and friends, and the internets basically gatecrashed what was supposed to be an old man's birthday party.

No, you're right. His grandson left a thank-you thread.
You can trace the threads back a few days, Reddit did a LOT more than 4chan in regards to being there IRL, and sending nice gifts. I'd bet it was quite a tiny, minuscule fraction of anon who did anything besides posting in /b/ claiming they were going to do something.

Reddit did it's part as well, example

TFA didn't link to the original Reddit article. The original one is here.

And that thread's comments have multiple serious discussions going on.

1. Caring / not caring about people pirating your work, and the emotions you go through.
2. How much of that are/are not lost sales, and how many of them wouldn't have bought the software anyway.
3. The practicality of spending time coding copy protection/checking, and the returns, and how much of them pisses off users.
4. That it's better to spend time developing features that paying users want instead.

And the discussions rival the quality found in Slashdot.

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/d33x7/reddit_is_hiring/c0x7aq5

I tend to feel the same way. I don't feel like developers who don't understand their production environment, or system architects who don't understand the code, can be fully successful. As a lead developer for a fairly high traffic site, I thought a lot about how the code and hardware interacted, and what the various limits were and how things degraded.

This was originally on Reddit yesterday: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/cwj3t/i_got_bored_so_i_jailbroke_apple_store_iphone_4s/.

Reddit already did all that and more.

This has all of the hallmarks of an urban legend - misogynistic and racist stereotypes, unlikely behavior, not much verifiability - I think it's all made up, myself, despite the news story.

The two people both exist & there are lots of pics of her on the net; here's the reddit link I posted above with a list of links: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/cv888/womans_nudie_pics_are_stolen_from_her_computer_as/?sort=top
The real question is if she's telling the truth.

First reading this article I felt bad for this woman. Even sending the guy the laptop, while extremely naive, seemed like something a person might do if they're petrified about their risque pictures appearing online and feel they have no out. Then I linked to the Reno Gazette article. I read this part, and well, she just doesn't seem like some innocent victim who was taken advantage of.

Indeed, she's computer savvy enough to be a cam whore, so certainly not naive. I think that this story has more to it than the news makes out.

I'd bet this is actually a case of jealousy.

My take is that she got jealous that her indian boyfriend fell in love with that blondie, then made all this crap up. Why? You can see a chat window where she was clearly talking to someone she had some sort of love (or at least close) relationship with. "I'm worried about you"? Is that something you'd tell a company's representative "helping" you with a tech problem?

So she got mad that he fell in love with someone else after "making" her send him a laptop, and made all this up.

I'm inclined to agree with this, after all her claim that she feels her privacy was "violated" is rather shallow once you see this list of links the woman's more of an exhibitionist than she makes out in the news story.

here you go: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/cv888/womans_nudie_pics_are_stolen_from_her_computer_as/?sort=top

Not an Open Platform?

If Richard Stallman recommends it then I think it's open enough to satisfy me.

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/cv888/womans_nudie_pics_are_stolen_from_her_computer_as/?sort=top

there ya go

So we decided to give you a hand...

Disclaimer: The reddit comment isn't mine.

Now with clickable hyperlink action! http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cmxm0/proggit_if_you_decode_this_i_will_love_you/

Free browsers are able to support H.264 without problems as long as they don't distribute the decoder themselves. Since most modern operating systems come with an H.264 decoder and you can easily install one on older ones (e.g. the Divx7 decoder on WinXP) there is no problem in supporting the format for the majority of the users as long as they use the system framework instead of decoding directly. Mozilla made a lot of weak excuses for not using system codecs and at the same time they had no problem implementing a gstreamer backend for Fennec so that H.264 could be played back on their mobile browser using the system's codec framework.
They even went so low as posting a Theora encoded video and a bigger H.264 encoded file on their site to show that Theora is actually better than H.264. The comparison was bunk of course. Upon closer examination it turned out that the H.264 file had been stuffed with hint tracks doubling its filesize. They also used Apple's H.264 encoder which is one of the worst when it comes to quality.

Saw a great post on reddit earlier today where a user goes through a bunch of Apple's own advertising to see how they've shown the phone being held.

About a third of all machines in the fleet experience at least one memory error per year, and the average number of correctable errors per year is over 22,000," the report states.

But also 93% of those with errors, have multiple errors. This permits a bit of number crunching, to conclude that 3% have single random errors in a year and 30% probably have bad ram or other hardware issues.

With this level of reading comprehension, you must be in serious contention for the position of slashdot editor. No-one called Poul-Henning Kamp a doof. GP was saying that Poul-Henning Kamp was calling OTHER people doofs (implicit/paraphrase), as indicated by preceding "article summary" and the quotation marks.

(On-topic:) This article headline was nicked from a reddit thread from yesterday (Poul-Henning Kamp has commented on this thread; or at least someone claiming to be him has).

It would have been nice if the submitter/editors here had read the article instead of re-phrasing the more-accurate "You're doing it wrong" headline. Poul-Henning Kemp is expressing his exasperation at the fact that no-one has noticed this optimisation technique in the ~40 years that it's been valid, and attributes it to a failure in the programing culture and programming education. conspirator57's summary may be a little ruder than the article (which is astonishingly un-antagonistic), but conciseness always sacrifices pleasantries.

Reddit is very current, and the comment system, while not as good as Slashdot, isn't entirely intolerable.

Not that anyone actually reads these things later but I got into essentially the same argument on Reddit. To recap:

The "sides" of this debate are talking past each other. One side is saying, Flash is already great and people are going to use it. The other side is saying HTML 5 is cool. Everyone agrees that Flash is more capable today, except for Scribd.

I think we should be able to agree that new and cool tends to get a lot more attention than stable and proven on the Web. It seems likely to me and most of the people in the HTML5 camp that great tools will show up eventually for it. But it doesn't matter if they do or not. 90% of Flash use on the web is to embed a video, to play audio or to have a fancy 2D interactive graphic. Obviously HTML5's <video> and <canvas> tags are aimed squarely at Adobe's jugular. This would be true with or without Apple.

A basic market fact: free beats for-pay. MySQL singlehandedly beat almost the entire database market. Raise your hand if you remember FileMaker Pro. You don't have to be better than the for-pay option if you're free, you just have to solve the average case. Look at Hypercard. Look at FrameMaker. Adobe is great at developing a chokehold on a market only to let it slip away with their arrogance.

Web fact. It takes a designer and a programmer to make a website. But if you can only afford one, you get a programmer. Programmers are the blue collar behind the web. If your designer really knows HTML and is cool and multipurpose like that, which tool are they going to reach for if they have both? A <video> tag or a Flash applet? The "Flash has better tools" argument is often put forth, but in practice there aren't a lot of websites out there that were put up singlehandedly by designers thanks to the power of Flash.

Adobe has to make better developer tools, or make Flash a technological contender again rather than the Cobol option, or they're likely to take their favorite market position: second-most easy-to-use for-pay tool in a market surrounded by free alternatives. HTML5 appeals to the workhorses of the internet: the programmers. Unless Adobe acts, they're going to lose their corner of the market. They're already in danger just because of the popularity of the iPhone and iPad. If they stagnate, they're fucked.

No, really. If Rachel Maddow is right this has happened before and continues to happen in the same way. All same players, all same tactics, all same outcomes.

Kinda WTF, but check this out:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/c8sqn/rachel_maddow_finds_one_massive_wtf/

One more link:
http://www.reddit.com/r/slashdot/comments/c84ms/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_was_posting/
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1529202&cid=30948726 (the original comment)

Two more links:
http://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/c84ip/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_was_posting/
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1529202&cid=30948726

Opt-out of Analytics using AdBlock was the topic of a Slashdot comment saying "(I work at Google, hence posting as AC.)", which I posted on Reddit, asking if it was really necessary: http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/bl2jn/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_was_posting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bk093/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_really/

Opt-out of Analytics using AdBlock was the topic of a Slashdot comment saying "(I work at Google, hence posting as AC.)", which I posted on Reddit, asking if it was really necessary: http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/bl2jn/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_was_posting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bk093/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_really/

Yes, thank you. It is the PR 2.0 age now. I try to almost always post non-anonymously using my real name partly because problems like this needs to be FIXED properly, and that as a 16 years old in high school who don't use Facebook and Twitter much (and that simply because I spend most of my free time doing research). In fact, I have been writing on Reddit that "HR needs to get in the habit of directly responding to postings employees make in public instead of firing (whether positive or negative)"

As a 17 years old that has been posting here and in other forums and blogs for years now and who don't smoke much pot or use torrents much anymore, I always have posted here non-anonymously using my real name partly because many of the problems with HR looking at personal lives deserves to be fixed properly. In fact, I have been writing on Reddit that "HR needs to get in the habit of directly responding to postings employees make in public instead of firing (whether positive or negative)" exactly to fix one of the problems. And the merge of personal and professional life isn't always a bad thing.

While we're doing that for the Supreme Court, maybe we should also do it for other random jobs. It's idiotic to check every Facebook a job candidate has ever made to see if they've failed to toe the line at all times.

Yea, I posted in this Reddit thread that "What's even worse, BTW, is being not hired over posts criticising a previous employer. That needs to be fixed too.": http://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/c4ds1/hr_needs_to_get_in_the_habit_of_directly/c0q3sos

Reminds me of these links I wrote: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1599322&cid=31666902 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1599322&cid=31667190 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1599322&cid=31667550 http://www.reddit.com/r/Employment/comments/blja3/hr_needs_to_get_in_the_habit_of_directly/ http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/bl2jn/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_was_posting/

Reminds me of these links I wrote: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1599322&cid=31666902 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1599322&cid=31667190 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1599322&cid=31667550 http://www.reddit.com/r/Employment/comments/blja3/hr_needs_to_get_in_the_habit_of_directly/ http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/bl2jn/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_was_posting/

See details here: http://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/c106a/keychain_from_pneumatic_hose_quickrelease_can_be/

Some people speculated that frozen methane on the seabed reacted with the setting concrete Haliburton poured some 20 hours before the accident. http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/byrqk/halliburton_completed_cementing_of_oil_well_20/c0p8hub

Reminds me of these links (but that is another mess altogether): http://www.reddit.com/r/Employment/comments/blja3/hr_needs_to_get_in_the_habit_of_directly/ http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/bl2jn/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_was_posting/

Reminds me of these links (but that is another mess altogether): http://www.reddit.com/r/Employment/comments/blja3/hr_needs_to_get_in_the_habit_of_directly/ http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/bl2jn/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_was_posting/

And they stole it from Reddit.

But I'm sure Jellybagel doesn't care, because whining about an obvious joke is fucking retarded.

Relevant reading on the work culture. Take with a grain of salt of course, it is anecdotal.

No joke
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bs2n5/so_you_mean_to_tell_me_you_were_able_to_see_parts/

Good thing that its posted AC. It's not an original work. But it has also been passed around a lot, minor refinements made, and without attribution since it was authored. The short essay is apparently originally titled I AM AN AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE SHITHEEL

It's at least as old as September 09, 2009.

Found an older reference at reddit around August 08, 2009.

And somebody attributed that likely the original author posted to the Laissez Faire subforum on Something Awful (Jul 24, 2009) as randomnoise. Some attribution also to a 4chan post (but nothing older than SA post was found)

But seems to be more less plagiarized or inspired (depending on your P.O.V.) by a short rant in July 2004. Also found at michaelmoore.com August 2004, by John Gray, Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican. But, I think the original author is generally unknown.

And then there's the Libertarian response in October 2004 to THAT titled Statist Joe by Gil Gullory, a Halliburton employee.

Please share this link with everyone you can find who cares about the Digital Economy Bill, because it is just too funny.

(Short version: In a written reply to another MP, government minister and leading proponent of the DEB thinks the IP in "IP address" stands for "Intellectual Property".)

In their defense (for defense sake, not that I am looking to justify their actions) the army did have a reason to shoot at the van, as is summed up by reddit user Deviltry:

"...They use vans to come up and pick up the bodies, but truth be told they don't care about the bodies, they come to get the weapons/rpg's. We have made it VERY well known throughout the country that they cannot even make it look like they are going for weapons. The problem with this situation is one i've seen personally on multiple occasions... The Van pulls up, takes the bodies of the men, leaves any children/women, and takes all the weapons. Then they take pictures, and blast them across the airwaves saying Americans murdered unarmed women/children."

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/bmooi/wikileaks_video_just_got_released_its_titled/

This was discussed before:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/12/17/1436257/Google-Says-Ad-Blockers-Will-Save-Online-Ads
And it reminds me of one of my AskReddit submissions where I mentioned a Slashdot comment about ad-blocking that mentioned that "(I work at Google, hence posting as AC.)":
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bk093/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_really/