Slashdot Mirror
How the Year Looked On Slashdot
Happy New Year! It's that time (as of now!) for the UK, and since the Slashdot backend operates in Greenwich Mean Time, that seems as good a reason as any to welcome 2012 now instead of local midnight for any of the various U.S. time zones. Everyone has a different take on how to rank the events of the last year; read on below for a few notes on some of the goings on of the past 31,536,000 seconds (give or take). The list is pretty arbitrary, drawn from the thousand-ish stories that hit the Slashdot page in that time; please say in the comments what news hit you the hardest this year.
Politics and all that:
Events in the Middle East dominated much of the news, including in particular the ways that governments have been tracking (and sometimes imprisoning or killing) opponents; California-based Blue Coat flatly denied selling equipment to Syria to help that sort of tracking before 'fessing up to it. (And in the U.S., the Occupy movement set about occupying bits of various cities, drawing both admiration and scorn.)
Related: The nuttiness surrounding Wikileaks continues.
Then there's the still unfinished story of SOPA; at least in some cases, speaking loudly seems to've caused businesses to change their public stances as defenders of the law as proposed; could this be called washing SOPA out with mouth?
On the tech front:
Donald Knuth published the 4th volume (or at least the first installment of it) of his ambitious Art of Computer Programming.
Netflix's management decided to couple a change that many customers thought was a stupid rate increase with what many people (customers or not) felt was a stupid name change; the company at least agreed on the name change, and reverted it.
HP seemed to do an interesting dance, both by shaking up its management structure , then announcing it was considering a spin-off of its PC hardware business before canceling that maneuver. HP sent a different but similarly mixed set of messages with a fire sale on its WebOS tablets (to the disappointment of those who praised and wished more success to WebOS).
Nokia also did some shaking in place. It's been a rough year for phone junkies on the whole, with Blackberry outages and privacy debacles both intentional and accidental from RIM, and no joy for those who'd expected iPhone 5, along with a handful of security issues for Android phones made it a rough year for phone junkies.
Meanwhile, the Linux kernel reached the magical number 3.0, and then 3.1 even though Mr. Linux himself, true to form, downplayed the leap from 2.x as basically just a number. Notably, the kernel suffered a persistent power-use regression, but also (Yay!) a fix.
On the GUI front, Gnome3 and Ubuntu's Unity generated lots of excitement, particularly from those who dislike the changes they bring. Forks and workarounds ensued — open source abides. We've seen also quite a bit this year about the Raspberry Pi, IMO the most exciting hardware news stuff of the year.
Questions of the stars:
Speaking of the Raspberry Pi, we were glad to have had the chance this year to ask questions of Eben Upton, as well as of William Shatner and Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, among many others. (And though it's sad, must also note rejections to our requests to interview Steven Hawking, Tom Lehrer, Freeman Dyson a distinguished list, at least.)
Endings:
Several of the biggest names in technology will sadly no longer be around for the years to come. After years of uncertain health and swirling rumors, Steve Jobs succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Less known outside tech circles, both John McCarthy and Dennis Ritchie died as well, both leaving rich legacies of software and inspiration. For all that he thrived on being a bad penny to both sides of the political spectrum, Christopher Hitchens, too, will be missed. On the other side of the "world changing" coin, this year also brought the end for Usama Bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, and North Korea's not-particularly-dear leader Kim Jong Il.
A different kind of ending: after a few years of life support, 2011 witnessed (with CmdrTaco's help) the final flight of the U.S. Space Shuttle. Everyone who had a chance to see a Shuttle launch will have a great story to tell their children.
Coming attractions:
Whatever the eventual fate of the other players in the phone world, 2012 will probably mean the end of the road for Symbian phones.
It's time for a reality check on the space hotel that was predicted for 2012; I'd place my bet against. Less happily, the continuing push for surveillance and tracking means I wouldn't bet against the projected nationwide trials in the coming year of face-recognition and tracking software from the FBI.
Finally: the end is near. That is, the actual end of the world (versus this recent contender), as predicted by the Mayans, as interpreted by various non-Mayans, and massaged to give us a few more years (or at least a few more months). Or, you can choose to rotate your tinfoil hat one quarter turn clockwise and take NASA's word for it — whatever the fate of humanity, Earth itself will probably keep right on going; we hope you'll stick around for the rest of the story — we're still waiting for The HURD
Politics and all that:
Events in the Middle East dominated much of the news, including in particular the ways that governments have been tracking (and sometimes imprisoning or killing) opponents; California-based Blue Coat flatly denied selling equipment to Syria to help that sort of tracking before 'fessing up to it. (And in the U.S., the Occupy movement set about occupying bits of various cities, drawing both admiration and scorn.)
Related: The nuttiness surrounding Wikileaks continues.
Then there's the still unfinished story of SOPA; at least in some cases, speaking loudly seems to've caused businesses to change their public stances as defenders of the law as proposed; could this be called washing SOPA out with mouth?
On the tech front:
Donald Knuth published the 4th volume (or at least the first installment of it) of his ambitious Art of Computer Programming.
Netflix's management decided to couple a change that many customers thought was a stupid rate increase with what many people (customers or not) felt was a stupid name change; the company at least agreed on the name change, and reverted it.
HP seemed to do an interesting dance, both by shaking up its management structure , then announcing it was considering a spin-off of its PC hardware business before canceling that maneuver. HP sent a different but similarly mixed set of messages with a fire sale on its WebOS tablets (to the disappointment of those who praised and wished more success to WebOS).
Nokia also did some shaking in place. It's been a rough year for phone junkies on the whole, with Blackberry outages and privacy debacles both intentional and accidental from RIM, and no joy for those who'd expected iPhone 5, along with a handful of security issues for Android phones made it a rough year for phone junkies.
Meanwhile, the Linux kernel reached the magical number 3.0, and then 3.1 even though Mr. Linux himself, true to form, downplayed the leap from 2.x as basically just a number. Notably, the kernel suffered a persistent power-use regression, but also (Yay!) a fix.
On the GUI front, Gnome3 and Ubuntu's Unity generated lots of excitement, particularly from those who dislike the changes they bring. Forks and workarounds ensued — open source abides. We've seen also quite a bit this year about the Raspberry Pi, IMO the most exciting hardware news stuff of the year.
Questions of the stars:
Speaking of the Raspberry Pi, we were glad to have had the chance this year to ask questions of Eben Upton, as well as of William Shatner and Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, among many others. (And though it's sad, must also note rejections to our requests to interview Steven Hawking, Tom Lehrer, Freeman Dyson a distinguished list, at least.)
Endings:
Several of the biggest names in technology will sadly no longer be around for the years to come. After years of uncertain health and swirling rumors, Steve Jobs succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Less known outside tech circles, both John McCarthy and Dennis Ritchie died as well, both leaving rich legacies of software and inspiration. For all that he thrived on being a bad penny to both sides of the political spectrum, Christopher Hitchens, too, will be missed. On the other side of the "world changing" coin, this year also brought the end for Usama Bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, and North Korea's not-particularly-dear leader Kim Jong Il.
A different kind of ending: after a few years of life support, 2011 witnessed (with CmdrTaco's help) the final flight of the U.S. Space Shuttle. Everyone who had a chance to see a Shuttle launch will have a great story to tell their children.
Coming attractions:
Whatever the eventual fate of the other players in the phone world, 2012 will probably mean the end of the road for Symbian phones.
It's time for a reality check on the space hotel that was predicted for 2012; I'd place my bet against. Less happily, the continuing push for surveillance and tracking means I wouldn't bet against the projected nationwide trials in the coming year of face-recognition and tracking software from the FBI.
Finally: the end is near. That is, the actual end of the world (versus this recent contender), as predicted by the Mayans, as interpreted by various non-Mayans, and massaged to give us a few more years (or at least a few more months). Or, you can choose to rotate your tinfoil hat one quarter turn clockwise and take NASA's word for it — whatever the fate of humanity, Earth itself will probably keep right on going; we hope you'll stick around for the rest of the story — we're still waiting for The HURD
Both from the first week of December, so admittedly I may be forgetting a lot of interesting stuff from the first 11 months of the year:
Institutional Memory and Reverse Smuggling, a tale of document-management woes, corporate management foibles, and engineering archaeology
Physical Models In an Age of Computers, a nice write-up of a large-scale physical model of the San Francisco Bay built in 1959 built to test some theories about how it'd behave if various proposed modifications were made
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
i can think for example of the revelation that Microsoft made a deal with the dictator of Tunisia to allow the regime to stick it's own certificate authorities into IE's auto-approve list.
MS's argument was that Tunisia was buying a lot of linux computers, and then wiping them and installing MS. the whole purpose of the document (leaked on the net, signed by Bill Gates) was to destroy linux and get the business of a corrupt, violent dictator.
thats just the tip of the iceberg.
I took a few years off Slashdot and only logged on because of boredom a few months ago.
Here's my 2 cents worth on some of the issues that have surfaced in that time:
I actually liked the Stuxnet saga and how the Iranian scenario was investigated and collaborated around the world. This is one of the first tech conspiracies of importance and those responsible for it have not owned up (yet). It also made me think of other digital servo equipment that are vulnerable in industry and consumer grade products.
Flying copters with wifi/drones also interested me as the technology can now be bought/assembled for a few hundred dollars. A great at home project with lots of possibilities. On that, there was an assumption that Iran could not reverse engineer the captured drone, something I feel unlikely as their engineering and research faculties are quite well developed.
US Bashing: I'm not a US citizen, but this should stop. Most of us are aware of US policy and the incredible problems that the US faces in their federal system. I think that most US Slashdotters are aware of the shit they are in. The fact that the whole world blames the US for bad economic policy and ineffectual wars and an idiotic congress that has hamstrung change makes them a laughing stock. OK, we get it. Now let's move on and maybe give some support.
Atheism vs Religious beliefs: The problem here is to be one or the other, you have to accept the whole mindset/weltanshaung/worldview without exception. For example you cannot be an atheist and hope to argue successfully the mitochondrial Eve, pre-Big Bang and for that matter, the cause of it all which is consciousness. The same goes for religious beliefs. God MUST be involved in every part of life and history. Sometimes that is a pill too hard to swallow. Gnostic or agnosticism maybe an alternative as most proponents of religion do not follow the precepts of their god without exception. Personally, I just don't care. Richard Dawkins argues that rational thought can be a basis of ethics of morality without the need for fundamentalism. I tend to agree with that. Religion has too much baggage.
Freedom of Speech: Wikileaks, filtering, bloghate, tweets, FB and whatever is supremely important. Freedom of Speech is a right that should have personal responsibility attached to it unless you want to be an anonymus coward.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!