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
2012 will be the year, Linux finally comes to the desktop, I heared
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$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What so this is a US site now?
Where is the .us domain on the end then?
Pfft, I'm off to Bunnings it's 10am here already and they've been open for hours already, blink and you might miss 2012.
please say in the comments what news hit you the hardest this year
Of the news reported on Slashdot I think SJ death hit me the hardest. I don't follow Apple or Jobs news so his death came out of nowhere. Didn't know he had cancer or that he was dying from it.
/. posts on the nuke plant, so I guess that or the earth quake wins out of the non-geek news.
If the Japan earthquake was reported here it wins by a huge margin. Well, there has been a lot of
i can think for example of the revelation that Microsoft made a deal with the dictator of Tunisia to allow the regime to stick it's own certificate authorities into IE's auto-approve list.
MS's argument was that Tunisia was buying a lot of linux computers, and then wiping them and installing MS. the whole purpose of the document (leaked on the net, signed by Bill Gates) was to destroy linux and get the business of a corrupt, violent dictator.
thats just the tip of the iceberg.
It's common to run servers on UTC rather than in a local time zone, which is basically equivalent to GMT.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
2011 was a year where I heard the term x-killer less than usual. In the past the iPod-killer, the killer-app, etc. seemed to used every time something 'new' came out, and I was happy that the term didn't seem to show up as often.
Nokia shifting to Windoze is my pick of the news. It will keep Nokia in the marketplace and it means that MS gets a foot in the door without a lot of development dollars being spent on hardware.
The other memory 0f 2011 are the changes to the interfaces of MacOSX and Win8, both working more like an iPad but still retaining the old GUI under the facade. I'm including Win8 because of the Dev preview, which I count as a release (limited as it may be).
It is also the year that I decided that computers are not interesting any more, having been doing this stuff since 1978, it has all become as exciting as a new toaster.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
The Occupy protesters have a lot to learn about how to present their arguments to the public, how to convince people who don't agree with them, and how to explain themselves to people who have no idea what they're talking about. Their dreams of changing the world won't happen without those skills and years of dedication.
But they sparked a movement and made people aware there are issues. The question is whether they can stop their self-righteous whining about their "rights" and see themselves as the public sees them, so they can face up to facts and work on their public perception problems.
No one shot at you like the Arab Spring protesters. You weren't under military guard like the Palestinians. You didn't spend decades fighting for the right to use effective medication without being arrested for it by the DEA. You weren't systemically abused like the black community before the civil rights movement.
You spent over TWO MONTHS squatting in public parks without effectively delivering a message to the PUBLIC instead of amongst your own faithful at the protests. When there were conflicts with the police while you were being evicted, you were only maced and shot with rubber bullets. No one was killed. You had to scream in the faces of the officers for TWO MONTHS before they'd even go that far to get rid of the camps.
Freedom of speech rights my ass. Occupy doesn't know what their rights are and what they mean, how to deliver a message, or how to work for change. Instead, they come across as a bunch of posers and whiners squatting in the parks and demanding the right to squat there for the rest of their lives while they wait for the world to change itself just because they discovered the world isn't fair.
Despite that, Occupy was the news story of the year to me. It was a brief spark of hope dashed by the incompetence of self-styled "victims" who insult those who know what actual oppression is.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
No it doesn't - in the UK we switch to BST in the summer (British Summer Time). There is not daylight saving in GMT.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Just sayin'.
One of the universal rules of happiness is always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual
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!
Of course, there's the Kindle / Kindle Fire / Mechanical Turk ...
Nowadays, it's nearly as easy to say that "no one's a tech company" as it is that "everyone's a tech company." (Starbucks is one of my most regular ISPs, really ...)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I thought CmdrTaco retiring from Slashdot is worthy of mention.
What code are they using to crash IE6?
HTML code
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
The tsunami & meltdowns were a story that went from incredibly, indescribably bad to worse and worse and, impossibly... worse.
Left me with a sick feeling that wouldn't go away.
One of the worst parts (as someone not directly affected, and bringing a technical angle into it) was reading in El Reg stories by their resident pro-nuke shill about how "radiation cannot escape even the fence surrounding Fukushima's property". Written *before* the first explosion.
And a full page of "yeah! Greenies want us to all live in caves and freeze in the dark" comments getting way more thumbs up than down. I'm pro-nuke myself, but this ignored the reality of the problem as much as the worst "greenies" do in the opposite direction.
This was followed by more nuke-shill posts doubling down on the stupid after the explosions, *never* acknowledging the seriousness of the situation, including the bravery of the guys on the ground working to fix the problems.
So, on top of the incredible sense of loss I felt as a member of the human race, I also felt loss at the stupidity of highly educated, technically aware people whom I figured should've known better.
To top all that off, my best friend I've ever had took sick, was hit by a vehicle, then, a week later (two weeks post-tsunami) died. I should add, this best friend ever was my dog. I didn't know how true the old cliche is; A Dog is a Man's Best Friend.
The losses seemed to keep piling up and I was depressed for a long time.
Yeah, fuck you 2011, buh-bye.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease
just read the wiki, you'll see he was a big player, worthy of being mentioned.
I didn't know him or even *of* him until this year, myself. but I can see he qualifies as 'greatness' by my standard, at least.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
hmm, the wiki actually is light on info about mr. pease.
here's a better link: http://www.national.com/en/corporate/remembering_bob_pease.html
tl;dr: he designed the lm331 (volt to freq converter) and lm337 (negative compliment to the famous lm317 voltage regulator chip). and many other things.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Where's the tidal wave and SIX nuclear power plants in Japan about to do the China Syndrome stories? Or is it because Godzilla didn't put in an appearance? I mean, really, this is a tech failure that literally put hundreds of millions of people at risk, forced several countries to change their energy plans to depend more on greenhouse-gas-emitting power, and it's not even half a sentence?
Seems to be true. The wikipedia article could use some clean-up, but google found lots of other stories that substantially confirm the OP's claims.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Hmm, I would have thought that Google successfully having a fleet of autonomous vehicles roaming about in California without the public even noticing bests Watson. Fast natural language search vs Self Driving Cars. Yeah, I'm going with the cars...
but no one's told them what to be righteously angry about.
If I had an audience with the protesters, I would point out the difference between a dollar bill and a dollar coin. Dollar bills represent money that the banking system (the Federal Reserve's shares are mostly owned by banks on Wall Street) has lent into circulation, and is collecting interest on, whereas Dollar Coins are debt-free money created by the government.
This Bill was BORROWED from Wall Street.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Many horrible things worldwide happened in 2011, but most striking positive thing for me was Kepler mission, the stars of the galaxy are full of planets of all kinds. It won't be long before we're taking spectrographic measurements of atmospheres of worlds in "goldilocks zones"
No mention of Duke Nukem Forever?
Man: You sit here, dear.
Wife: All right.
Man: Morning!
Slashdot: Morning!
Man: Well, what've you got?
Slashdot: Well, there's last week's news and last month's news, last week's news political trolling and last month's news, last week's news and dupes, last week's news last month's news and dupes, last week's news last month's news political trolling and dupes, dupes last month's news political trolling and dupes, dupes last week's news dupes dupes last month's news and dupes, dupes political trolling dupes dupes last month's news dupes tomato and dupes, dupes dupes dupes last week's news and dupes, dupes dupes dupes dupes dupes dupes flame wars dupes dupes dupes or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried last week's news on top and dupes.
Wife: Have you got anything without dupes?
Slashdot: Well, there's dupes last week's news political trolling and dupes, that's not got much dupes in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY dupes!
Man: Why can't she have last week's news last month's news dupes and political trolling?
Wife: THAT'S got dupes in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much dupes in it as dupes last week's news political trolling and dupes, has it?
Wife: Could you do the last week's news last month's news dupes and political trolling without the dupes then?
Slashdot: Urgghh!
Wife: What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like dupes!
Slashdot: You can't have last week's news last month's news dupes and political trolling without the dupes.
Wife: I don't like dupes!
Man: Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your dupes. I love it. I'm having dupes dupes dupes dupes dupes dupes dupes beaked beans dupes dupes dupes and dupes!
Slashdot: flame wars are off.
Man: Well could I have her dupes instead of the flame wars then?
Slashdot: You mean dupes dupes dupes dupes dupes dupes...
Vikings:! Lovely dupes! Lovely dupes! Lovely dupes! Lovely dupes! dupes dupes dupes dupes!
(with apologies to Monty Python)
You are also quite mistaken about how the Occupy protesters "have a lot to learn" about messaging, organizing, persuading others, etc. New York is the worldwide capital of advertising, fashion, and image making in general and those industries were heavily represented at OWS. How do we know? Well, you heard about OWS for months; when was the last time you heard about traditional, take to the streets protests? Hint: it's not because the latter don't happen all the time but because the powers that be have grown quite expert at ignoring/dismissing/hiding them. But OWS got your attention precisely because they are expert at communicating.
You're also mistaken about their goals. You did not need to look much farther than the Wikipedia entry to find them, but it is easier to get your information from Glen Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Fox News than to do a little independent checking.
What is a legitimate question is to ask, what's next? Occupy Wall Street represents a different approach than the traditional approaches that the 1% have become past masters at pigeonholing/deflecting/defeating/ignoring. That's why they have gotten as much coverage as they have, because it's different. But how to take it to the next level is an open question. It will, however, be taken to the next level because the underlying issues have not been addressed and the government has not even started to pretend to address them. They're doubling down on tired forms and bankrupt memes.
I hope OWS and the Tea Party forces team up; they differ on the margins but share the same core concerns--the system doesn't work any more for the vast majority of the American people. Crowd-sourced surveillance and expose of the 1%, the way they are trying to monitor and control us, I believe will be the straw that breaks the camel's back of the status quo. The 1% can only succeed under the cloak of night and in the comfort of their backrooms and private clubs. If we rip that cover away, the public revulsion will be instant and universal and ineluctable.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
What so this is a US site now? Where is the .us domain on the end then?
Despite the "global" moniker that's been lately added, when first created, the three-letter top-level domains were US-centric by virtue of the fact that the system we now call "the Internet" was a US-centric project. Same reason .mil is US military. Jokes about Al Gore aside, the US created the Internet, and thus there's a US-centric focus in some places -- such as the original top-level domains. If you dislike this, you're welcome to create your own global network project. Good luck with that.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.