Love this site, and thanks to EvilViper we've had lots of content to read and appreciate. But when EvilViper doesn't post, write, edit, and submit articles, the pipe is otherwise mostly dry. That's this site's single weakness - on the technical side, it's unsurpassed.

If we could make it easier for people to submit articles we could fill up the pipe, get interesting content, and build the user base. But sitting down at a keyboard to write and submit is too much of a hassle, which explains why so few people do it. I'd even say it's a limited risk at this point to establish an email mechanism where you could establish a pipedot whitelist, establish an inbox that routes messages into the queue, and go from there. Point is, we've got to make it easier for people who like |. to populate it with interesting content. When you've got editors writing, submitting, and posting all by themselves, there's a problem.

Would like to reiterate my appreciation for the fact that this site remains focused on science and technology. I still read and like Soylent, but their content is increasingly wandering into social or even political topics that don't interest me at all.

Congrats Brian on a great platform - love the functionality of this site, and it's the only one I can stand to read on a small screen.

Agreed - |. gets high points for usability.

Imagine a world with no capitalization or punctuation ... it's easy if you try!

:)

I agree with you. From Pipedot's earliest days, I thought it was important to keep this place focused on tech, and avoid a lot of the crap that seems to be invading other sites.

You've done some awesome work here over the past year (even longer than that!) The fact that Pipedot has had such high quality subject matter is attributable largely to your hard work and perseverance. Many thanks for it. You just have to glance at the history of the pipe to see who has kept this place alive. Thanks for all the good reads.

I'm not sure I agree with you. As I remember it, Opera had tabbed browsing since the earliest days I used it, maybe 2001? Firefox added it after Opera, and IE added it many years after that. Opera had the "speed dial" feature first, Firefox added it afterwards.

Might be the early-onset alzheimers, but I am almost certain Opera was the innovator here. You mention a 'second, entirely different method of adding tabs.' I don't remember that, or don't know what you mean.

Vivaldi is where I'm putting my hope. After Opera 12 the management team changed, and the new team decided to just copy Chrome badly and strip out whatever innovative features Opera ever had. Pathetic.

Used to be where I could install a Linux distro, add mutt, slrn, and opera, and be good to go.

Forgot to add this:

http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/

Others are watching this project with suspicion, too. Check out this excellent rebuttal on the DarknEdgy blog, which suggests, among other criticisms, that the Mach microkernel is an anachronism.

It's an infrared image of a colon polyp ... I think. Of course, give them credit for choosing something non-dramatic instead of the alternative, some scare picture of houses under water or something.

I've got the Note 3 and love it, too, and yes, the microSIM and removable battery are important. I was able to get a huge microSD card and put my entire itunes collection on it; I now have my entire music library on the phone. Looks like the new one wouldn't let me do that.

Samsung is struggling for marketshare and revenue these days - hard to explain why they'd take an anti-consumer move like this unless it helped them reduce price so significantly it facilitates them in some other way.

Bring back the hottie! She brought meaning to my dreary working day :)

Kidding.

This looks like a clever design, and if the keys are as good as they are said to be, I'm tempted. I'm currently rocking one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16875982435 Nice enough keyboard, and for the $30 I paid for it, I can't complain. A bit too big to pair with a smartphone though; I use it almost exclusively for taking notes in meetings on a tablet. For a smartphone, something like this LG product might be just right, and hopefully durable as well.

I agree. At my last employer I was issued a company cellphone. I maintained total separation of personal and professional lives, and that meant carrying two cellphones around, which I truly disliked.

Now I carry just one phone, but that means my personal and professional number is the same, and I've lost the ability to shut off the work phone on weekends. I dislike that too.

My company toyed with the Good app for ipad and Android. It was basically company email and limited document storage. It wasn't great as an app, but it did help maintain that mental separation between personal and private. Not sure what the solution is here. But I do know that when my office gave up on Blackberries, they mandated Windows phones for us (Nokia Lumia), and that was truly a lousy device and OS. At least now I get to choose the device I like, which is a Samsung Note.

Just looked into the math, and had a flashback to when I was 17. So if you have N choices, your top pick gets (N) points, second pick gets (N-1), third gets (N-2), etc. The total number of points possible is the sum of all consecutive from 1 to N, which is equal to: [N*(N+1)]/2. For a poll with ten options, a total of 55 points are distributed (10*11)/2 = 55.

Not sure how it works if you don't assign a choice to each of the ten options, but the fact that the current total of points, 677, isn't divisible by 55 evenly says to me borda polls must only assign a total number of points equivalent to the sum of N, even if N is less than the total number of options.

Yay, math. My brain hasn't totally atrophied (although it seems well on its way).

You have a point. But my ignorant response would be, "why would you ever need to update the BIOS on a machine when its role is reduced to something so simple?"

All the praise for the great feedreader makes me wonder if adding a connection between feeds and the pipe would be the missing link that gets us more submissions. It was suggested once, earlier this year.

Agreed, let me see if I can figure out how to do it ... I'm simply linking to the poll's URL.

I'm surprised at the results already. We're at 300~ points and "mobile friendly" is only in 5th or so place! I thought for sure it would be higher. For me it's one of Pipecode's best features. Pipedot is awesome on a small screen, and both Slashdot and Soylent are very hard to manage on my smartphone. That means I participate more at Soylent when at a desktop and on Pipedot more when I'm on a phone. Interesting!

Elsewhere I run a Simple Machines Forum (SMF), and while it was awesome in the days of desktop, the fact that it's hard to use on a mobile really frustrates me (they're working on responsive frameworks, but they're not there yet).

Glad to see the quality of the articles has risen to the top though; I tend to agree! It's the basis of any good site - the content. Kudos to evilviper and others for keeping us going with a steady stream of great stuff to read. I haven't done a great job of submitting things over the past couple of months - life got in the way.

Hmmm. You are quite courteous. I'd add, bitterly, "you showed us that any open source project, once sufficiently addicted to money, can drive the car right off the cliff." Mozilla was more fun when they were broke and staffed by struggling but passionate advocates for an open web. Once they got drunk on Google money, staffed up on all sorts of overhead, management, and non-technical (parasitic) staff, things started to go down hill.

Putting my hopes on Vivaldi at the moment, as a longtime Opera advocate who only moved to FF reluctantly when Opera's new team screwed the ole pooch sometime after v12. Vivaldi is a return to the roots. The only thing I'll miss as I ditch Firefox is the "it's all text" extension and the Overbite extension that allows me to use gopher.

In my opinion, Firefox has been a pile of fail slowly circling the drain for the last few years - five maybe? Maybe more? But I'm no fan of Chrome, either.

Credit goes too, to groups like Intel, who have steadily increased the 'power' and 'utility' of the BIOS to the point where it is now a fun attack vector. All this 'management code' and such - I can't be specific because I scarecely understand it, myself - is frightening.

BIOS should check the hardware, hand things off to the boot loader, and then "peace out." Make any code complicated enough and begins to become a target; I think that's exactly what we've got here.

This is a somewhat misleading article by Forbes. It's poking holes in Tor, but it seems these vulnerabilities would affect anything at all. It's hard to protect yourself from an attack at the BIOS level, unless you swallow Microsoft's SecureBoot strategy, which a lot of us find distasteful.

I can dig it - there seems to be interest in gadgets around here.

That works too, I think: just assign 1, 2, 3 and leave the rest blank. You don't get points, exactly. I was the first to submit my opinion and my first choice immediately rocketed forward with 55 points or something large like that. Wikipedia has a decent article on Borda polls. It's essentially just rank order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count

Why not just call a spade a spade? By buying a WindowsPC you are essentially acquiring a rental, in which you bear all the costs as well as all the legal exposure, while Microsoft allows you to do what they would like you to do (pay monthly for subscriptions to their different cloud offerings) and not much more.

You might like to think it's your computer. And in some ways it is. But in an increasingly list of ways, it is not.

This reminds me of the Torch, the last slider I think they made, around 2010 or so. It was a really thick/heavy phone to hold or carry in your pockets, and a lot of people who were assigned one at work were envious of teh lighter candybar formfactor. I still root for Blackberry, but I don't find this device form very appealing. Samsung is going to release (in Asia only, sadly) a flip phone Android device, on the other hand, and that interests me a bit more (not sure why, but I really loved flipphones, if only because when closed they provided natural protection for their screens).

Secondly, for what it's worth, when I heard 'slider' I got excited, thinking it would be landscape mode, not portrait mode. I always liked those side-sliders that came out in the early days of Android.

On the grounds they can be considered, simultaneously, a security threat AND a nuisance to commerce, I can imagine there would be decent support for a policy that allows law enforcement officers to blow them the fuck out of the sky with superior firepower.

You've currently got douchebags flying their drones around supposedly sensitive public monuments etc., filming their neighbors having sex by the pool, and getting in the way of air traffic. Inconsiderate drone operators are going to very soon spoil the party and cause government to open up the can of whoop-ass.

If the 'solution' doesn't involve a cool app for my new smartphone, it doesn't count as progress :)

... kidding.

I'm with you on that one. The USG could/should be providing better data in more usable formats, offering more online services, and being much more creative. Unfortunately - and I can say this as a former USG employee - the governemnt (maybe all governments) seems to better attract mild-mannered, "follow the rules" types focused on implementing someone else's decision, than really being creative.

CATO has a lot to say about this - have a look at http://cato.org if you're curious.

Actually, over the past two years, |. has experimented with a couple of poll types other than the simple "pick one" method at /. Check out the list of past polls for a taste of what's happened. Probably room for growth here. This is one of my favorites: http://pipedot.org/poll/2014-07-14/moderation-schemes-i-like

Wasn't able to respond earlier. No, no response. But the word on the street is that B&N is in a deathspiral anyway, so who cares? They've closed their European store abruptly, leaving a lot of European book buyers essentially in the lurch. The ebook/nook division of B&N seems to be losing money fast. They've just reworked their website and it's been getting a lot of complaints of serious interface problems (they offer you a link to rebuy a book rather instead of something else, etc.).

Hate to see Amazon lose what little competition it has, but B&N seems to be having trouble getting it together. Too bad for us, the consumers.

I hadn't thought of that, but what you say makes sense. It's easier to negotiate salaries up than down, in general. There's a perception aspect to salaries anyway, especially when the economy is doing well. You don't want to lose people to competing firms, so you try to pay a little higher. Everyone else does it too, and suddenly everyone is overpaying for relatively shittier quality personnel.

Not sure what your concern is? It's a widely advertised and public conference held in a big, Las Vegas hotel. These are PDFs.

You're afraid that if you open one the NSA will beat your door down? These PDFs don't show you how to hack the White House, they discuss the state of security systems. Likely the NSA attended the conference.

Happy reading.

I almost dropped this article from the queue - huge list of PDFs was a pain in the *ss to format. But then i started reading them. Neat stuff.

Check out the internet facing PLC systems one at least - stuff like Stuxnet, SCADA. Also interesting to me to see the German guys must have done their slides using LaTeX and the beamer package - awesome. Other presentations are so glossy they almost take away from the content (like the social engineering one). Last one I liked was about the smart cards - with application not only for printer cartridge manufacturers but that technology's push into the impending Internet of Things.

I have and use FreeNAS, and unless I'm gravely mistaken, has no firewall capabilities whatsoever. It's a file server, not a firewall.

Jeez, that's some interesting stuff, but who's got the time and energy to format this mess?

That's my opinion too. If it does no more than provide free juice for charging your gadgets while you drive, hey, it's a win, probably. Same goes for skyscrapers: as long as their sides are just sitting there providing no benefit, hey! Go for it. Run a little cost-benefit analysis to see how it works out, and go.

Editor here: as submitted, this was probably a blatant product pitch, but I worked it a bit and decided to publish because the subject matter of innovative approaches to solar interests me (and because the link goes to National Geographic instead of some corporate site).

Solar is cool.

I was thinking the same thing. TV technology seems to be changing fast, and yet what it delivers isn't all that different than it was in the 70s. How many times do they think I'm going to rebuy a device?

I'm sporting a Samsung note 3, but to my surprise I'm really tempted by that Kyocera! I really like that form factor, not sure if it's nostalgia or what.

Looks interesting and thanks for the link, but Opera fit me like a glove from 2001 til about 2014. Then new management drove my favorite browser like the Costa Concordia along the Italian shoreline. Really looking forward to Vivaldi and just hoping FreeBSD's Linux emulation allows me to run it on FreeBSD, since that's my current OS.

When I changed jobs earlier this year I lost access to the Blackberry and the Winphone I'd been using. Believe it or not, I miss the BB a slight bit, but the Winphone not at all. Wife's got an iphone, but I vastly prefer my Samsung Note 3, stylus and all. Android Jellybean, nice fast processor, and apps I like. Yeah, Android has got its quirks, but I wouldn't trade it for an iphone at this point, no way.

Very curious about Jolla/Sailfish these days though. Ubuntuphone and Mozillaphone (or whatever they call it), not so much. But it would be nice to see something shake up the system. Feel like Google and Apple could use a little more competitive pressure in the ecosystem. See where tablet sales have plateaued? Anyone who wants one has one, and there's not a huge incentive to go get a new one, really.

I can understand Mozilla and crew feeling upset that Microsoft has done essentially what they did back in 2003 or so (and gotten punished for). And I can understand Microsoft feeling so proud of their new browser that they want to show it off. But it's a kind of dickish move on both sides.

Microsoft got taken to the courts for changing or limiting browser preferences about ten years ago, and though the American DOJ had a sudden burst of gonadis-evaporitis when it came time to punish Microsoft for monopolist behavior, the European Union stuck it to them. This isn't that different, though the market has changed a bit.

As for Mozilla, I'd feel more pity for them if Firefox weren't such a heaping pile of fail these days (and I should know, I'm posting from it). These recent innovations like force-installing Pocket and so on have made it pretty damned clear they're whoring themselves out for the money at the moment, and will install whatever you want them to if a hefty payout is attached to the request. Firefox is really testing my patience, and the fact that they're simply aping Chrome's interface is pretty damned telling, if you ask me.

Currently pinning my hopes on Vivaldi, though Palemoon and Seahorse remain semi-usable. Given the importance of a decent browser these days, we need alternatives to Google and Webkit. Konqueror is all but abandoned, Opera (my former favorite) sucks donkey balls, Firefox needs a change of leadership and a new development team focused on technical - not financial - goals, and Safari: meh. Wish we had more vibrant competition in the browser space instead of a contest of how much each can mimic Chrome. The one thing I really do like about Firefox is the "Its all Text" and "Noscript" plugins, and the Overbite plugin since I'm a recent fan of gopherspace. But can't we have that plugin system without all the rest of the crap that Firefox now dooms you to?

Switched to PC-BSD from openSUSE earlier this summer and have no regrets. It wasn't a blind install - I've used it before and like it. But PC-BSD gets you a working FreeBSD install with minimum fuss, and unless you have the bad luck of hardware that FreeBSD doesn't like (laptops and wifi cards can be a hassle), you've got a sweet *nix system that does everything your Linux distro did, and no systemd. A lot of other conservative choices, too.

I'm not writing to gloat. Just pointing out: if you don't like systemd, switch your operating system. Pretty sure Slackware also avoids systemd. Vote with your feet, people.

I don't think they're giving Win10 away because Win8 tanked. They're giving it away because that's what Apple is doing now, and because their MBAs have decided it's a better business strategy to push users into subscription models for other services like Office 365 and Cloud services, etc.

Yes, Win8 tanked, but I don't think this is an issue of cause and effect.

Here's a classic infographic illustrating the difference between watching a legitimately paid for video, vs watching a pirated video. Hint: watching the illegal video is a hundred times easier because all the consumer-antagonistic stuff has been stripped out.

http://boingboing.net/2010/02/18/infographic-buying-d.html

Guess Netflix never saw it then, or were blinded by the glare of gold bullion glinting off their lawyers ...

Yet another basically user-friendly firm gets too big for its britches. Well, guess what, Netflix: the pirate scene is thriving, and it's totally ad-free. I don't watch ads, I don't.

Remember when DVD producers thought it would be profitable to start your DVD with 3 or 4 non-skippable previews etc. Then it got worse. Disney films are the absolute worst: before your kid gets to watch Aladdin you've got something like 10 other blurbs to get through.

Screw you, big media. I hope you and your adverts all choke on a bag of dicks.

Sad story, and a neat project. I can only assume the engineers are frantically trying to figure how they can remotely do a Ctl-Alt-Delete.

I pity them, but I also fault them. Easy to armchair code, but it seems to me if you're building this kind of system, your operating policy must be that any error leads to a reboot under known good software conditions. I know, easier said than done, but ...

The trouble with flying business or first class is that you can never forget it. Coach class sucks.

we're getting to the point where cargo of any sort, not just dangerous cargo, is going to simply have to go on a dedicated flight rather than on a flight with passengers. And for that matter, we're not far away from the point where you are going to go the airport, have a full body cavity search, step into a hospital gown, and be tranquilized into a light stupor before the plane takes off. Only way to thwart those terrorists, and as a happy side effect, nearly-comotose people don't need to watch movies, make filthy messes of the bathroom, or demand snacks and drinks. Win-win!

Got it. Here's a quote from about halfway down this interview: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interview-with-patrick-volkerding-of-slackware-949029/

LQ) Right now, there are a number of potentially intrusive technical changes coming to some of the major distributions. How do you feel some of these will impact Linux in general and Slackware specifically? Are there any you would considering merging into Slackware? (55020 & tuxrules)

volkerdi) Yeah, I see a few things coming down the line that may cause a shakeup to our usual way of doing things, and could force Slackware to become, well, perhaps less UNIX-like. I guess the two big ones that are on the horizon are Wayland and systemd. Whether we end up using them or not remains to be seen. It's quite possible that we won't end up having a choice in the matter depending on how development that's out of our hands goes. It's hard to say whether moving to these technologies would be a good thing for Slackware overall. Concerning systemd, I do like the idea of a faster boot time (obviously), but I also like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable, and I'm guessing that's what most Slackware users prefer too. I don't spend all day rebooting my machine, and having looked at systemd config files it seems to me a very foreign way of controlling a system to me, and attempting to control services, sockets, devices, mounts, etc., all within one daemon flies in the face of the UNIX concept of doing one thing and doing it well. To the typical end user, if this results in a faster boot then mission accomplished. With udev being phased out in favor of systemd performing those tasks we'll have to make the decision at some point between whether we want to try to maintain udev ourselves, have systemd replace just udev's functions, or if we want the whole kit and caboodle. Wayland, by comparison, seems fairly innocuous, assuming that they'll be able to implement network transparency either directly or through some kind of add-on compatibility layer. Again, another thing that most desktop users don't have a lot of use for but many users can't do without. I like X11, and would probably stick with it if moving to Wayland meant losing that feature, even if Wayland's rendering method carried with it some benefits like reduced rendering artifacts or increased video performance. I guess we'll just have to see what the overall benefit is when it's far enough along to make such comparisons.

I can't find anything exact, but these seem to be useful:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/the-mass-exodus-if-slackware-uses-systemd-4175523380/
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/systemd-for-better-or-worse