Slashdot Mirror

https://soylentnews.org/articl... are you the last person to know?

https://soylentnews.org/articl... You must be the one person who didn't know by now.

SoylentNews is forked off Slash and supports UTF-8.
The downside is that SoylentNews doesn't include 5000 external JavaScript resources as a modern site should.

From the red site:

Windows 2008 Server (dropped in 2012) -- well into LTS.

Debian squeeze (dropped in wheezy) -- EOL.

Red Hat RHEL 5 (dropped in 6) -- LTS.

Suse SLES 11 (dropped in 12) -- well into LTS.

Gentoo -- long since unmaintained.

FreeBSD 10 (dropped in 11).

NetBSD -- long dead dev branch, never released.

Even HP's own HP-UX cancelled their Itanic port before release.
 

When a new story comes up, I have to look at a floating div ad covering a third of the page until I reload it.

This is not one of the things that made /. interesting, when I have to look at a new ad everytime I edit a comment I am going to post.

I know I could use adblocker. I don't understand why /. can't find revenue mode so that this sort of thing isn't needed? I don't know if it is just me, however I am increasingly getting a sense lately that the conversations here are being directed away from the stuff that really matters for commercial purposes.

The reason why I think this is because /. appears as a meta-site, if that makes sense, where ideas are torn to pieces and put back together by the combined reality of the people that post here to promulgate across the net.

I'm not sure if the people who run /. understand this and just see a cash cow, or maybe they do, and they are refining control over the meta-conversation so that censorship's role here is to guide the conversations away from the subjects that need to be meta-examined. Apart from anonymous trolls abusing the responsibilities of free protected speech they get here and promoting self-censorship to avoid mod trolls, I get a real sense that the conversation here is loosing it's teeth that made it interesting. Lately https://soylentnews.org/ has been getting a lot better and lately has been ahead of /. on many subjects.

I'm not ungrateful for them financing and making sure /. is available, I am trying to ascertain if commercializing the /. community in an effort to sustain it is destroying it. I'd really like to get an idea of who is on the board and where the money is coming from.

Maybe this needs to be an ask /.

More info here and here.

Most Linux users don't have a strong opinion on systemd either way,

Maybe not on slashdot, but you will probably find that people over at soylentnews have a different opinion. The systemd issue was a contributing factor to the creation of soylentnews.

Anyway, this shouldn't be on Slashdot. This place is becoming more like /r/politics than Tech News...

I agree. I go to Google News for politics, and Slashdot for technology news. I'm beginning to wonder if I might have to migrate to SoylentNews for technology news.

https://soylentnews.org

FYI, its soylentnews.org, not .com

They probably haven't even seen this:

https://soylentnews.org/articl...

http://www.nature.com/news/gen...

Lab experiments showed that the mutation increased in frequency as expected over several generations, but resistance to the gene drive also emerged, preventing some mosquitoes from inheriting the modified genome. ...

Resistance to gene drives is unavoidable, so researchers are hoping that they can blunt the effects long enough to spread a desired mutation throughout a population. Some have floated the idea of creating gene drives that target multiple genes, or several sites within the same gene, diminishing the speed with which resistance would develop. By surveying a species’ natural genetic diversity, researchers could target genes common to all individuals.

I hear they're coming out with Soylent Green in a few months.

No, Soylent Red. Slashdot Green.

The "whole point" of the electoral college is not to block a winner that the college doesn't like.

True. That's a BS claim created out of a misreading of Federalist 68, promoted recently by people like Lawrence Lessig and the so-called "Hamilton Electors." I'm not going to bother rehashing all of this here, because I already explained Federalist 68 in detailed historical context in a post here.

The main effect has always been to elevate the voice of lower population centers.

Well, that's partially true. But if that were the main concern of the Founders, they could have just had Congress pick the President. Or they could have just assigned a set of weighted abstract "votes" to states based on Congressional representation numbers. Instead they chose to have actual Electors. Why? Again, I already explained it before in posts here and here.

For those who need a TL;DR explanation...

Basically, the Electoral College was conceived by the Founders at a time when political parties didn't exist and they couldn't imagine consensus over any candidates extending much beyond state borders. So, they first thought of having people on the national political scene (e.g., Congress) select the President, but they were afraid of corruption. So they came up with this wacky system of the Electoral College which was both designed in very specific (and arcane) ways to make regional candidates "float to the top" (you'll have to read my previous posts to understand how) AND put that power of in the hands of Electors who held no government office (and thus were less likely to collude or be corrupted). They built in all sorts of safeguards to prevent this collusion among Electors, which is why (among other things) they meet in separate states instead of all together.

Anyhow, the entire system was basically rendered useless with the emergence of political parties in 1796. It served some vague function for the next few decades, but became completely useless by the 1820s when most states adopted "general ticket" party-chosen slates of electors, rather than independent free thinking educated folks selected by the states to choose the President.

All of these other more modern justifications for the existence of the Electoral College are post hoc and don't take into account the situation the Founders were originally in.

I find that after a couple of hours at a task I welcome a break whether it be to grab a cup of hot chocolate, I don't drink coffee, chat with a colleague, answer the phone or check the email's, or glance at Amazon, or https://soylentnews.org/ , or even this place.

Switch that to receiving a query is it done yet every 15 minutes, a request for a conference call every 1 hour and some technical query every 30 minutes.

And 15 automatic daily messages from project management software!

I find that after a couple of hours at a task I welcome a break whether it be to grab a cup of hot chocolate, I don't drink coffee, chat with a colleague, answer the phone or check the email's, or glance at Amazon, or https://soylentnews.org/ , or even this place.

https://soylentnews.org/

https://soylentnews.org/articl... Now they could pay the wages of the scientists and engineers too...

People moved to soylentnews?

Some people moved to pipedot, but not enough. Pipedot.org is okay, if a little slow at times.

People moved to soylentnews?

Forget Arse Technica - this should have been reported here instead?

too many M$ fanboys here. Try the red site:

http://www.soylentnews.org/

they even have Tor .onion hidden services.

Then why do you not have a little star next to your name on slashdot?

Because Slashdot hasn't sold subscriptions for well over a year. From subscribe.pl:

Please Note: Buying or gifting of a new subscription is not available at the moment. We apologize for the inconvenience.

During the Dice Holdings era, Slashdot instead experimented with giving a "Disable Advertising" checkbox to users with Excellent (25-50) karma to encourage them to provide and moderate comments. After Slashdot and SourceForge were sold to BIZX six months ago, this ended as well.

The subscription page for the red site, on the other hand, is up and running:

Your subscription ends 2017-07-03 UTC.
Thank you for supporting SoylentNews! We appreciate your contribution very much.

Parent didn't RTFA

Another technician's response.
Again it is not about the details of the implementation.
It is about the imprimatur of legitimacy given to the mindset.

We've gone from the principle of openness at the very core of the web to a principle of restriction and control. Its doubly worse that people writing the EME standard have specifically worded it to slot into laws like the DMCA to maximize rigid legal interpretation so that tinkering and innovation will be stopped before it even gets started.

If this story leaves you a feeling of dejavu, don't worry, it's just Hugh Pickens cross-posting on /. and SN again to attract more traffic to his site

Notably, SoylentNews did not screw this one up. Their summary accurately captured the tone and content of the whole article. The hell, Slashdot? Are you trying to make this unpleasant?

https://soylentnews.org/breaki...

I think you've missed it, but Uber wants to replace their drivers with AIs.

I'm glad to know the Apache attack copter thing has returned to obscurity or else was pretty obscure to begin with. Know your meme link. It was a ridiculous criticism of transfemale identities. (As usual, it ignores the existence of transmen.)

For a moment, I was afraid that Lyin' Ted had something that resonated with thinking people like yourself. Of course it doesn't. How could it? I mean, Lyin' Ted didn't invoke the "Apache attack copter" thing specifically, not that I'm aware of. I more use it in the context of those who would wish physical harm to anybody they perceive as using the women's restroom when they shouldn't. Granted, the image of a Boeing AH-64 appearing above one's backyard, perhaps while one is mowing the lawn, and firing is... intimidating... especially since I've seen intimations and threats of such physical violence myself against people I care about.

(Naturally, having an infiltrator model woman suit, I do not appear on their radar. I wish every transwoman could have a woman suit this good.)

I do wonder how MDC is doing living on the streets in Portland.

Well, see for yourself.

Is there any chance you'd consider gracing us with your presence at Soylent News? SN recaptures a lot of the magic of classic Slashdot, in my opinion. It started when a lot of people were over the top mad about Slashdot was being handled. I'm hoping that things are better here under new ownership, but I'm also hoping SN continues to flourish - it's been a great discussion site.

Thank you, you are absolutely right. I came from here which is where the missing ampersands apparently originated. Not fustakrachik's mistake at all. I appreciate you clearing that up for me.

Try S/N

I agree that nothing about this is worthy of the Slashdot front page.

Of course we should expect the iPhone to have security flaws. All software and hardware products likely do! That's just the nature of the beast! Yes, the developers will often try to fix these problems as soon as they're aware, but it's always going to be an ongoing problem.

And the shit about the song or music or whatever is totally irrelevant.

It disappoints me to see so many useless stories like this one on the front page lately when there are so many great stories in the Firehose that end up discarded. I can't find it any longer, but there was a really interesting one about how one of the Pale Moon developers alleged that Mozilla told the Pale Moon devs to "police" the Pale Moon forums. While Slashdot discarded the submission here, which was probably the wrong thing to do, SoylentNews did the right thing and put a similar submission on their front page.

i wrote a comment about this for the red site.

The FCC is essentially trying to create a software-based replacement for CableCard.

CableCARDs were an olive branch from the FCC to cable companies to let them still control the signal transmission protocol but have to have a standard interface for TVs (CableCARDs). Cable companies resisted the proliferation of CableCARDs so much that it killed them before they ever became a thing, just like cable companies wanted. The FCC seems to understand that cable companies are unwilling to act in good faith so now they are standardizing mandating the protocol that set-top boxes use. By mandating the use of a standard open protocol, anyone can implement the equivalent of a CableCARD. However, now that TVs are coming with serious processors in them, i think the new generation of TVs will be decoding this standardized protocol on their own. While a good thing, this also means a tighter integration of network based streaming video services which sounds good but has proven to be poorly implemented on "Smart TVs".

If you are skeptical about the effect this might have then you should just look at what happened with cable modems. Before the DOCSIS standard, cable modems were all ISP specific, expensive and slow which is what happened with the set top box. After the DOCSIS standard, things got faster, more compatible and far less expensive.

The site has been raided by SJW.

See you at the other site, pilgrim. Sadly, it's also starting to get flooded by the enemy.

I hear at least one spot in Alabama has great connectivity.

Remember, hey it was just last month, how Slashdot's new owner said they'd listen to us, and get rid of the problems that had cropped up with Dice, etc.?

Well, listen guys. This doesn't have a red bar or any indication that it's paid, but it's obviously a press release, it points to people we don't trust for file downloads rather than the people who make the software that is being discussed, and it contains obvious falsehoods (like OwnCloud's acceptance next to things like DropBox).

So, this is just an isolated problem that slipped through the cracks, right?

It's a shame there isn't an alternative we could use instead of complaining about the quality of Slashdot. Maybe call it technocrat.net? </snark> Seriously though, it seemed like you had a good start on an engine with technocrat.net back during the "fuck beta" period but then decided "fuck it, CSS and actual website layout stuff is overrated. Web 2.0? more like Web 0.2, baby!" and then it completely stagnated from there. Oh, and that asinine real name policy didn't do it any favors either, I'm sure. A shame, really; I kept watch for a while hoping it would eventually go somewhere.

Since you still don't like the direction being taken here, you could always visit the other side at SoylentNews Dumb name, sure, but the people running it actually give a damn about the site. They've already implemented things people were asking /. to add for years and still haven't shown up here, like non-retarded unicode support.

Over two hours later as well.

https://soylentnews.org/ does not have this.

Oh, you want me to believe I'm some kind of authentic woman programmer, but you will never grant me legitimate authenticity as a woman.

You won't go that distance! You won't give me the limb to stand on!

Actually, you've reminded me. The doctor has me on a 12 hour schedule for taking the blue pill. /me noms the estradiol!

What is up with this hatred? Previously, on the red site, I was role playing a fucking Chinese Amazon for a good half a year before I realized how fucked up it all was.

What will you do about the TERFs? What will you do about the assaults on your cisgendered hunnies as you attempt to engage in some ridiculous argument that I am all-men?

in their coverage of this story. Just sayin'.

The news seems to be something like this:
- GNU has a package manager. Didn't know that.
- The package manager is functional in many ways.
- Because it's functional in many ways, it also sucks in some ways.
- They managed to reduce the suckage, which is good for them.

What would be news for me is something like this:
- Why do I care?

It's a relatively new thing (2012) so I'm guessing most haven't heard of it. The GNU folks took an existing package manager, Nix and modified it to use Guile Scheme instead of Nix's own language for describing functions (packages). You're right that it's functional (in the functional programming sense), which gives it its own set of pros and cons compared to traditional package managers.

As for why you might care, this comment on SN briefly covers what it means to be a functional package manager, including some of the pros and cons of it. It's about Nix, not Guix, but since Guix is based on Nix the information should apply equally to both. It's kind of long so I don't want to copy/paste the whole thing here, but it focuses heavily on the "why should I care?" aspect so it's worth a read if you're seriously curious about what's interesting about Guix or Nix.

Not mentioned in the writeup is that, because they're so new, documentation can be difficult to come by and it's all command line. Might be a mood killer for some, but I've found it worth the trouble so far.

SoylentNews subscriber here. I also pay to host my own stuff on Linode and use Namecheap as my registrar. In addition, internet routable IPv6 at home.

Frankly, websites that exist solely because of advertising can die in a fire. Nothing of value will be lost.

All that needs to happen is some serious momentum towards IPv6 adoption and federated protocols such as XMPP. DNS might remain a bugbear, but it would be neat if an ISP wanted to offer either 6RD or native IPv6 and also allow me to set up say vel-ex-tech.customers.awesomeisp.com and give me some way to point that at 2600:1337:543:8A30::1 (or ::2 depending on how they're routing from my personal /64 if ::1 is on the ISP side). Not saying that will ever happen. Hey, maybe it has the side effect of giving people who know wtf they're doing with technology an escape from Eternal September.

(Also note: if I wanted to have vel-ex-tech.customers.awesomeisp.com point to my desktop, I'd add 2600:1337:543:8A30::10/64 say as an address and have the XMPP server bind to that address. Then for non-server traffic use IPv6 privacy extensions to generate a random address in the /64, so on the rare occasion I go to MyFace, one day I'm coming from 2600:1337:543:8A30::DEAD:BEEF, then next day 2600:1337:543:8A30::1234.)

Granted, another alternative is some kind of micropayment service. I want a way to direct my money towards websites that are doing actual investigative journalism. I feel the hidden danger of advertisement-based services is that the mainstream players like WSJ, WaPo, etc get all the pageviews simply for having a brand when what I really want is something like Breitbart or The Root (flame away, well aware of both sites' biases, just examples of the kind of detail in reporting I want). Sites that repost repost the AP and Reuters feeds don't need my money--I can go straight to AP and Reuters myself. (Hey, they deserve at least a few peanuts for cranking out short summaries of events in different parts of the world!)

http://phys.org/news/2014-03-w...
http://seclists.org/cert/2012/...
http://securityevaluators.com/...
http://securityevaluators.com/...
http://slashdot.org/submission...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://soylentnews.org/article...
http://secunia.com/advisories/...
http://secunia.com/advisories/...
http://secunia.com/advisories/...

APK

P.S.=> So much for your faith in routers alone stupid (225 in total, 15 posts with 15 items each)... apk

You can try SoylentNews, maybe. Community's much smaller and has its share of crackpots, but there's a good balance of dissenting opinions modded up instead of echo chamber mod-bombing, and so far no articles of this type have shown up. It's more technical and science focused for the submissions generally, with some breaking news stuff and an occasional flamebait submission that gets called out as such. Anything that even LOOKS like it might be a veiled advert gets called out and ripped apart by the commentariat

It's not perfect, but it's closer to the late 90s/early 2000s slashdot of old.

Slashdot has followed many internet companies in sacrificing efficient transfer of information in favor of superficial looks and clickbait. While not as bad as many sites, it is definitely a problem. One example is that in nested comments, the lines along the left side that show the nest level of the comments were pulled from Slashdot. There many other issues with the "new and improved" Slashdot. I'd be glad to elaborate, but I expect it would be a waste of time.

How about making Slash open source again?

I often wondered if they were ever going to release a newer version of slashcode. You likely know that what is available is several years old. Not to plug another site, but it is impressive - especially considering the age of the code - how much the guys at soylent news have accomplished with that code base once they forked it for themselves.

Fuck Beta. AltSlashdot. SoylentNews.

Check out our FAQ, if you have any questions drop me a line (my nick at soylentnews.org)