Slashdot Mirror

Aren't they imploding over some ego tantrums? You could check out, http://technocrat.net/, http://squte.com/ or https://pipedot.org/ if you're looking for a site that actually works.

Don't forget the other sites that have popped up post-beta as well: Technocrat and Pipedot Choice is good.

I wrote this up a day before that at http://technocrat.net/d/2014/2/20/6. I've known about it for a month or so, I don't know why nobody else was excited until now.

Try technocrat.net - Bruce Perens already closed it down twice due to low interest, but if /. really bites it this time it might stay up...

From Bruce Peren's http://technocrat.net/ ...

You've reached a web site owned by Perens LLC. We are moving to new servers and thus the content you expected isn't online yet.

To reach Bruce Perens, email to bruce at perens dot com, or phone +1 510-4PERENS.

Hot topics as I write this: Why doesn't Bruce resurrect Technocrat.net now that Slashdot is owned by Dice.com and stinks more than the last two times I've shut down Technocrat.net due to lack of readership? And while we're at it, we need to replace Groklaw.

Think it would really work this time? You've got my email and phone.

Perens shut the site down because there was not enough traffic to support it.

From http://technocrat.net/ ...

You've reached a web site owned by Perens LLC. We are moving to new servers and thus the content you expected isn't online yet.

To reach Bruce Perens, email to bruce at perens dot com, or phone +1 510-4PERENS.

Hot topics as I write this: Why doesn't Bruce resurrect Technocrat.net now that Slashdot is owned by Dice.com and stinks more than the last two times I've shut down Technocrat.net due to lack of readership? And while we're at it, we need to replace Groklaw.

Think it would really work this time? You've got my email and phone.

You are going to get sued with that name. Why not team up with Bruce Perens and try to reboot something that already existed?

"I like the proposal [of] giving away the back-up strategy if XP is rejected,"

`We should see how we can "target" the funds for the specific research .. a way to position this around MSFT willing to possiblt give MORE if they research on stuff that is mutually interesting'

`I think we should name our new open source license and romance its creation. "Education Open Source" or something like that'

`Remember that a key part of our strategy is to create a situatuion where even if Nick rejects us for philosophical reasons there is a long and visable history of our attempts to work with them and then we have to ask to get a license for the "open source hardware" and we will make our own offering on the commercial side' Craig Mundie Oct 2005 link

"The OLPC News website in the past months has build up a reputation for sharply criticizing the $100 laptop .. It turns out that one of the site's authors works on an Intel project that is competing with the OLPC. Oops"

Why Microsoft Must Control One Laptop Per Child

The process of teaching, in many areas (especially math) is so legislated and prescribed by administrators as to be nearly impossible to teach in any significant way.

Read " If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics... " to get an interesting view on how math is taught today.

1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.

Not a bad idea, in principle. Over the years, there have been several sites that slashdotters would talk about as good alternatives. I was active on the old kuro5hin.org site for a while, before they erased the whole database of stories and comments and started over again from scratch. A lot of those folks seemed to move over to hulver.com. Bruce Perens tried to do it with technocrat.net, which is now a redirect to his own blog because he gave up on it. There was also half-empty (what was the url?), which was cool for a while.

The impression I got in the cases of technocrat and the original kuro5hin was that they failed because of issues with social dynamics. Kuro5hin somehow lent itself to a cliquish dynamic, where tribes got more and more hostile to one another, and it also seemed somehow very vulnerable to trolls and sock-puppets. At some point there was an infamous incident where someone got a hold of a picture of Rusty's (the owner's) wife and photoshopped it onto a porn picture. I believe Technocrat somehow attracted a nucleus of crazies (right-wing survivalists types, IIRC?), who dominated the site.

Although slashdot is having some serious technical problems with slashcode these days, the truth is that they've accomplished something very rare. They've managed to reach a stable equilibrium, where jerks, trolls, and crazies aren't able to make things miserable for everyone. They've also built up the membership of the site enough so that on a lot of issues, you'll get comments from individuals who are experts on the topic. (Of course you'll also get 10 times as many people who think they're experts.)

In the past when I've looked at Slash's perl code, I was always very impressed by how clean it was. However, they just seem to have taken a wrong turn with all the CSS and javascript features, and they seem to have zero interest in fixing bugs like these.

What they really need is an option 3 to add to your list: admit they have a problem with maintaining slashcode, and open up the development process in the same way that X11 had to fork and evolve into x.org to keep from dying.

So you perjured yourself several times? Nicely done!

I don't allow ACs on my own blog. And perhaps that is part of the reason that the signal/noise ratio is much better than here. There are still "handles", and in the end the only thing I have to identify most subscribers is an email (which can itself be anonymous). But even that much reduction in anonymity seems to prompt people to behave better.

I was going to suggest that it's more likely that no one cares or has heard about your stupid blog, but then I saw your name and I actually had heard of you. Not your blog though :)

0, off topic, +1 mea culpa

I don't allow ACs on my own blog. And perhaps that is part of the reason that the signal/noise ratio is much better than here. There are still "handles", and in the end the only thing I have to identify most subscribers is an email (which can itself be anonymous). But even that much reduction in anonymity seems to prompt people to behave better.

Cheaper electric cars that *will* sell mass market will be coming from where all the other cheaper electronic devices come from, China. [ shameless plug for illustration purposes ;) ] As long as they are good enough for commuting purposes, range of around 50 to 60 miles, and they can keep up with normal traffic, they'll sell. And that will fund interest and more R&D and so on and they'll get better. And project better place is moving right along as well, with nissan/renault as the manufacturer. The electric car industry has passed critical mass when it comes to global interest, and is now in the early development and deployment stages. There's enough interest out there now and the tech is "good enough" to get going with it. You have to start someplace.

Technocrat reports:

The Bush Administration's Katrina report has an appendix called what went right, with praise for Amateur Radio:

Other organizations worked tirelessly to assist emergency responders that, due to the storm, did not have the equipment and means to effectively carry out their duties. Amateur Radio Operators from both the Amateur Radio Emergency Service and the American Radio Relay League, monitored distress calls and rerouted emergency requests for assistance throughout the U.S. until messages were received by emergency response personnel.

Ham Radio works because each it's a heterogeneous mesh network of intelligent agents using agile frequency hopping to provide connectionless redundant relay of messages. Yes, we do that!

Leigh/WA5ZNU

Boycott Novell has good information about this slimy deal.

Here's Bruce Perens' 2002 perspective. All of this was planned in advance. It is put together very well by a poster named LARS:

However, a licensing dependency injects a control and ownership over otherwise Free systems. What is happening to FOSS distros like Fedora and Ubuntu have been getting infected with Microsoft's licensing (e.g. Mono) could be a risk for Apache. The reminder from these HP memos from 2002 is that MS could just be lining up its shots for a future lawsuit by using funding to leverage injecting proprietary material into general projects like Apache, Ubuntu, GNOME, etc., which it appears to be doing, and then cashing in (assuming MS is still around). Think a case like SCO but where MS has had a few years to ensure contamination has occurred before calling in the lawyers.

Novell is a traitor to software freedom and things will not end well for them.

It already exists in the form of LORAN . It was recently announced that the LORAN system was going to be continued and modernized .

More discussion here . "GPS has become the navigation and location electronics of choice today, but that old standby Loran is making a comeback, for "just in case" emergencies. GPS can be easily jammed, at least at the local level, wheras Loran takes a a lot of sophisticated and powerful gear."

I wrote an editorial stating the case in greater depth here.

All technocrat really lacks is readers commenting. This may be a plus.

OLPC can go two ways: one of the two is enough of a threat to book publishers and Microsoft that there will be a lot of force waged against it. The other way is just good for world freedom and doesn't have nearly as much power on its side.

The purpose of OLPC is not to give third world kids a laptop. It's to give them books. You see, those third world countries don't have an annual budget of $100/student to buy kids textbooks. So, OLPC is an efficient means to deliver e-texts to those kids.

The Microsoft way to do this is to have pervasive DRM as part of the OLPC framework. Microsoft will partner with textbook publishers to make free or low-cost but time-locked and otherwise DRM-encumbered electronic versions of their textbooks available on OLPC. Thus, there will be less reason for the development of fully free e-Texts under licensing that permits redistribution and derivative works. This way, the markets of those textbook publishers in more developed countries won't be threatened by the presence of those free texts, and Microsoft won't be threatened by a large force of youth trained on Linux.

The Open Source way is to direct the efforts of academic communities toward the creation of fully free e-texts under licensing that permits redistribution and derivative works. This is already well under way. OLPC would run Sugar on top of Linux, and would not in general be a DRM platform. Open texts would become a main stream in education, as would Open Source software. This is obviously a threat to textbook publishers and Microsoft.

The good news is that OLPC is not the only possible platform, and we can keep working on this without them. The bad news is that OLPC has the mind-share, and that's going to be hard to fight, especially with Microsoft behind them.

Microsoft has just essentially killed OpenDocument. They have made it redundant as a standard and showed that people who lobby for its use lose their jobs for their efforts. They did whatever was necesssary to win, with much dirty fighting and no shame about it. The folks at ISO and national organizations didn't show any shame about the perversion of their process, either. Expect to see similar in this case.

Bruce

but you won't find those opinions reflected in broadcast news. Try fitting this or this into the "just like the tories" box. Want to bet neither of those two bloggers ever show up in blews? Blews, like broadcast media before it, represents nothing but the will of it's corporate masters. Readers are spoon fed shallow "stories" and false choices that drive public policy in favor of those pulling the strings.

All I have to say is this.

At least we would get a democratic filter between McMobileDisneySoft and questions of war and peace. As it is, the corporate world drafts a Project for the New American Century and it gets implemented regardless of public opinion. Romney's answers gave no indication of any departure from that scheme. Instead all the worst of the Bush administration would go on at top speed: H1Bs slavery instead of real immigration help, "Open" markets that are bound by US Patent and Copyright ownership, corporate bail outs and other predatory policies designed to make the US "Powerful" instead of Free.

Wealth, influence and power come from freedom and justice not the other way around. Countries that waste their efforts on raw power end up like North Korea.

It's not that "dark" they're running a RTTY signal around 137.5 KHz that might be SCADA leaking from power lines into the air. That might also mean that signals can be injected into the power-lines as well

It has historically operated over a primitive form of "BPL", analog or digital control signals transmitted over long-haul power lines, generally using a low-frequency signal. In Northern California, we can hear a RTTY signal around 137.5 KHz that might be SCADA leaking from power lines into the air, and the power companies have opposed the allocation of a ham frequency in that band becuase they claim it could interfere with SCADA. Bruce

Maybe on slashdot it is thin, but I cover it on Technocrat.net,(along with a host of other alternative energy subjects). The latest reference article I put up just a few days ago and discussion here Otec

...If he didn't totally trash it

The homebrew computer club was pretty close to the current Open Hardware movement.

You won't be the first to try. You'll might end up about like Technocrat, with most stories getting only a handful of comments.

P.S. I'll take the overs on the 'out by the end of October' part.

I feel that my OS X coexists with Linux quite happily. [snip] The world would be a better place if there was 6+ apple like companies that all supported the open formats.

If only Apple would start supporting open formats like ogg and odf, and stop wasting their time trying to sabotage their devices to break Linux compatibility, I would agree with you.

Good thing I can't afford to fly in the first place....

Technocrat.net

That's false, Bruce Perens already hypothesized a hypervisor-like solution.

If GPL3 is applied to the operating system kernel of a system, there are four places where you can put DRM in that system and remain within compliance with GPL3. Those places also happen to be the best, most secure and reliable places to put the DRM from a technical standpoint, regardless of the license:

In hardware: This would usually be an application-specific integrated circuit or a programmable logic array that interprets encrypted streams on the way to an audio or display device.

In a coprocessor: Most cellular telephones that offer PDA functions (and PDAs containing wireless devices) have two or more CPUs, generally an ARM9 running the user interface and applications, and an ARM7 that runs the wireless data-link layer or the GSM stack.

You can put the DRM in the processor that isn't running the kernel, and then the GPL component just talks to a well-defined interprocessor link to the external CPU that runs the DRM. The GPL obligations don't cross that link.

In a kernel under the kernel: Microsoft XP and Vista have used this architecture: the core of the DRM system lives in a microkernel called the "nib" that lives under the real kernel, and hosts the real kernel as the kernel would host a user-mode application.

In a user-mode program: The GPL obligations on the license of the kernel don't transmit across the system-call interface from the kernel to an application hosted by that kernel. http://technocrat.net/d/2007/3/22/16651

Only one slight problem with that plan- We already know how to make oil, we actually don't need to pump it out of the ground anymore.

Excellent! Stop your bitching here and come see me over on Technocrat.

No, I'm totally serious - it's crap like this that drives me away from slashdot towards more focussed and mature sites such as Technocrat.

Start submitting stories you want to see, and stories you want to involve others in. Please, write your own submissions, don't copy-n-paste the first paragraph of the story you're linking to. Write totally original content and post it. Link us to your blog so we can see more. You'll find the technocrat community a lot more accepting of user-submitted content...

So the cost of labour is the entire cost of manufacturing is it? No capital costs, no raw materials costs, no transport costs?

Capital costs, raw materials cost, and transport costs are often highly subsidized by the country of origin in an effort to attract new manufacturing. Countries that don't, get bypassed in the search for cheap labor.

If the cost of goods purchased is decreasing, how can there be inflation?

It isn't. It's a trick- they merely sell you smaller amounts.

Really!!! You have a magic process for producing oil above ground for $5 a barrel!!!!???? Please tell me what it is, I'm all ears.

This was front page slashdot just a couple of days ago- but I like my writeup at technocrat better. E-coli and yard waste- to the tune of 3% of America's land mass (swampland mainly) being used to create feedstock for the bacteria refineries.

Yes, but who would buy your overpriced commodities? Oh, that's right, you won't be trading with other parts of the world, so you are just going to take the increase in the cost of goods on the chin, but that's alright because you have 'good paying jobs' to pay for it.

Exactly. The people who really need to take it on the chin is the C-level executives- their lifestyle can't continue to be supported. And we need to return to anything over a 10% profit margin being called profiteering and punished by the FTC, like it used to be.

Are you talking about a profit margin or markup on the cost of goods? Walmart has 100-200% markup, but a 1-2% profit margin. Sorry, when you said 100-200% margin, I assumed you were talking about the markup, because Walmart certainly does not have a 100-200% profit margin, but they certainly do have a 100-200% markup.

Walmart would have a 200% profit margin if their executives were earning the same salary as the lowest associate. I consider executive salaries as a part of profit.

It is neither a religion nor a science. Economics is a collection of speculative theories (an Art, if you will), and business is an evolving methodology (an intellectual technology).

Art is religion. A collection of beliefs with no more fact behind them than any other myth. Same with methodologies.

Socialism has succeeded at times in Sweden, Norway, Britain,Australia and even Canada. Not raving-foam-at-the-mouth socialism, but quiet pragmatic socialism that most Americans don't quite seem to be able to comprehend.

Those aren't socialism- they're feudalism.

What good points? It has a resource intensive "shiny" interface. It has levels of DRM heretofore unseen in an operating system. It is claimed that it is secure, yet still has gaping security holes. It is claimed that it is safe, yet has to be made un-safe for users to be able to do anything with it. It is expensive, clunky, space consuming, privacy invading, insecure, unsafe, and is more interested in protecting the interests of major Hollywood distributors than its users.

Care to highlight why I'd want to use Vista?

though someone else quoted at $140 savings... details at http://technocrat.net/d/2007/5/24/20488/#L20498

Care to reference the source of your comment?

http://technocrat.net/d/2007/4/11/17806

Bruce

Okay, both of you out of the pool!

The first one knows what he is talking about, and the second guy apologizes for being a bit to harsh in a comment? This is Slashdot, folks. That sort of behavior just is NOT tolerated!

Head on over to Technocrat every now and then, will you?

  Charles

And by the way, first post :-) . OK, I'm a subscriber, I guess that's cheating.

Here is the Technocrat.net discussion of the same issue.

Bruce

YouTube.

What about Bruce Perens: http://technocrat.net/d/2007/3/22/16651 ?

Bruce

Actually, he probably meant draft-2 form. The current form didn't exist when he said that :-) .

Besides, specific objections are more helpful. Like he is against some DRM-related terms. I have gone over some of those terms here, you might find that useful.

Bruce

Oh darn, sorry wrong URL. Try here

Bruce

Perhaps you should move to a cave in a remote location so that you can stick your head in the sand and just ignore the rest of us...the world isn't going to change itself for you and you seem to be desperately unhappy with the life that you are currently living.

My ancestors showed me what happens when you do that- eventually somebody comes along and builds a dam and takes away your ancesteral hunting grounds.

What we really need is a way to fence off the cave, permanently.