Hey, so maybe it's not (yet) suitable for entire roadways? Who cares? Maybe the tech will evolve, maybe the economics will keep it feasible for smaller-scale projects - who knows? I'm still glad to see people thinking about the future.

I've spent most of the last 20 years living and working in developing countries. Life in most of these places consists of:

• poor power reliability, usually generated by burning diesel - the single most expensive and ecologically unfriendly solution out there
• concrete buildings (houses, offices) with zero insulation, with window A/C units to keep the temperature down: huge energy consumption, and concrete has no natural insulation properties; it's ridiculous
• water pollution, total unreliability of the water quality and frequent water shortages
• ecological catastrophes in the making, especially decimation of fisheries or deforestation
• douchebag politicians insisting this is the fault of (a) colonial powers or (b) regional superpowers
• same douchebag politicians putting their full effort into getting internationally funded 'donated' projects to cure their ills.

Get smart, people! There are technological solutions to these problems! This is the kind of thinking that gets us places.

Wondering what happened? Offhand, I'm imagining:

1. guy forgot to renew his domain name
2. Doteasy stopped it, canceled it, whatever
3. Guy tries to get the name back
4. Doteasy requires some ridiculous, expensive "reactivation" process
5. Guy decides, fuck it, I'll just buy the DotOrg and be done with it.

I used Doteasy back in the day. Free Hosting (OK, but you pay like $25/yr for the domain name, so that's where they're making their money). It was no hassles. Pleasantly surprised to see a site i read fairly regularly was also housed at the same provider. Granted, I never used whois/dig to check it out.

It's true I've got a NYT membership, for which I pay. That is something I hadn't considered. But I'm also living in Senegal (see http://www.therandymon.com) so I've got an African IP address. You wouldn't believe what kind of trouble that gets me. A lot of sites - American consumer sites, mostly - are totally off-limits to me. Netflix, for example: I can't even get past the front page. A lot of Youtube/Vimeo stuff too: "This video is not available to your region." What the fuck? This isn't what the Internet was supposed to be all about.

I'll take your comment as a compliment then - I think editorial focus and the like tend to be the effect of the editors' work and the quality of the submissions. The selection of articles you see is basically the result of me putzing around on the web and choosing stuff that interests me that I think would be interesting to discuss. If you wish we were discussing other things, I'll do my part if everyone else submits quality articles.

This is also, I think, the result of being able to build up a user/reader base from the ground up instead of inheriting a bunch of Slashdot refugees and trying to make everyone happy. I don't envy NCommander and all they've had to do over there to keep everyone satisfied without the ship's crew mutineeing. In fact, they're doing great work given the circumstances.

0-5 articles per day about tech stuff isn't hard to do. Let's pitch in!

Glad to see all the people chiming in with support for Pipedot - as Bryan says, this isn't the end of Pipedot, but he's apparently going to put his time and energy into the coding, and that leaves it up to us to make it a good place.

Good time to ask again what kind of articles we should be posting here. There are so many forums out there, and it's annoying to see the Pipe so frequently empty.

Or, if it's a matter of additional site functionality, what would it be?

I dig Pipedot because the software makes the site hugely readable and useable on my smartphone and tablet, and great on the desktop, too. I like the comment flow, the fact you can stay anonymous at will and on any given post, and that users can have a feed. Some of the social networky stuff isn't my cup of tea, but it certainly appeals to others.

In sum, no reason we can't keep this site going. But let's keep a steady stream of interesting articles flowing through this site. We've got a great interface but a small community. SN has a great community but an interface I don't like. Help get the word out, invite your friends, link to your blog posts, whatever. Get people coming here and the place will build.

Yeah - conspiracy theorists would probably go nuts with theories that Mozilla signed some secret agreement with Google in which they let their browser languish in exchange for millions of marketing dollars from making Google the default search engine. That's certainly a more palatable and intriguing theory to cling to, because it's more fun than the more probable and obvious one: they just suck.

Innovate, you lazy bastards! And learn how to code! And stop F-ing with the interface! I'm tired of UX/UI changes being touted as progress. It's just shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic!

Very cool. My money is on water and energy research - two things we're going to run desperately short of sooner rather than later. Land, too - there's enough of it but this planet is increasingly an ecological catastrophe.

FYI, I will continue to post articles here. But the submit button is at the top right, and I'll make an effort to ensure anything submitted makes it to the front page for discussion. I'm not giving it up. Keep Pipedot on your RSS readers and keep reading!

Very impressed to see such gentlemanly cooperation between sites. I think it's natural and awesome that two spin-off sites will each head in different directions and will essentially complement each other. When it's simply nerds interested in good communication and information sharing, it doesn't have to be a winner-takes-all battle to the finish, and when it's not a commercial entity desperate for ad-clicks in order to justify its existence suddenly all the pressure is off.

I will continue to contribute to both sites in hopes that both thrive, each on the basis of their own merits. No reason these two parallel experiments can't continue to advance, being inspired by and challenged by the other. Long life to Pipedot, long life to Soylent! Long life to Usenet! Rest in Peace, Technocrat!

The "Submit" button is at the top-right, pal. Go to it.

I barely have enough time to post and edit stuff for this site, much less worrying about who's likely to have or lack cookies, and at the risk of freetards insulting my intelligence. Pipedotters may or not have surpassed the IQ of Slashdotters, but the troll factor seems to be about the same ...

You've got a good point, sort of. You mean they didn't put all this hardware and software on line for my benefit only, so I could share pictures of my kid vomiting with friends and family?

There's a good XKCD about it: http://xkcd.org/1390/ "Research Ethics"

Good point. Also, the Israeli coffee. I think they are a culture that goes for those little black coffees that are so strong they actually rot out the bottom of your cup/stomach. This news site reads vaguely like a press release. Hoping this is really news and not just creative publicity, but I wouldlike a ride on that MagLev.

For me, it was some pretty great footage. I can see why not everyone would like it, though. Didn't realize there was any music to it - I usually have my laptop's speakers muted. I spent the whole video waiting to see if one of the final blasts would actually nuke the copter out of the sky. Realized afterwards I was kind of disappointed it didn't happen. Stay tuned for drone's eye video of the American military blasting a picnic of Taliban generals wedding party into the hereafter!

Actually, that footage probably exists somewhere, but getting it can land you in Guantanamo.

You are absolutely right. I've fixed both of them. Thanks.

I don't pay much attention to TV, but as a casual observer, I can say they definitely didn't do a good enough job of explaining to a guy like me just what the advantage in plasma was, or why a cheapo LCD would be an inferior option. They seemed like damned expensive devices. BTW, I've heard a lot of people complain - like you did - about the loss of colors and quality of an LCD relative to a CRT. Again, I'm an unsophisticated observer, but I don't really see a difference. Maybe I should do a side-by-side comparison to really take notice of the difference.

Ha ha, I'm trying to get people to COME to this site, not go away! :) But all I know is, if someone says the link doesn't work, and I try it and it works, my job is done. Although it's funny watching someone desperately fail to figure out how to get to the linked article - Christ, you can even read it in the printed URL!

Here's his comment post: "I can call Google legal and ask them to give me some free, biased legal advice on what's okay and not, but I suspect I'm just going to get someone whose job it is to further intimidate me into self censorship the same way China intimidates all its locals."Looks like Google lawyers told him to take it down. Remember kids, the best censorship is self censorship! http://dictatorshandbook.net/book/node105.html

The link to the NYT is good - just checked it myself from another computer.

Ah, of course, I'm being stupid. Actually, what threw me off was the image associated with this article - looks like a pretty thick component relative to the thickness of your average "ultra-book" these days.

(bring back netbooks, goddammit!)

Interesting article but I realized I don't know much about the subject. I had to look up NAND:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_gate talks about the digital logic circuit, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory shows how it's used in solid state storage. OK, now I get it.

Looks like this would make devices thicker, no?

If this NSA shit keeps up, I'd bet money that something like FIDONet is the future! I still visit the Electronic Chicken BBS once in a while, usually by Telnet, just for fun. Still a great place. Found it via Synchronet's list of BBSes.

By the way, one fun thing I did was to visit it on my Psion 5MX (http://therandymon.com/index.php?/171-The-Psion-5-For-Writers-on-the-Move.html - my page about the Psion, not the Chicken session). The Psion had a decent serial terminal app and it was a pretty easy thing to dial up using the modem and access the site via that terminal. Cool nerd self gratification, if nothing else!

Long-term Economic Grand All-region Locomotion? (LEGAL). A stretch, I know. I suck at this.

Interesting how the leaders in the field suck at this. Washington DC has pretty crappy public transport - a limited underground metro system that purposely avoids the Georgetown University area (that was a bone thrown to the Cab lobby, who makes great money in that neighborhood), and a hub-and-spoke network that makes it pretty hard to move around the spoke without first going into the city. New York tried banning cars and Bloomberg took a beating because of it.

Frikking Denver? How the hell they come out front in an intellectual issue like this. Not that Denver doesn't have smart people, it's just not the kind of place you expect to see this kind of innovation.

I'm pretty judicious about what I keep, but I've still got stuff i'd hate to lose: scanned versions of all important documents in case of fire (birth certificate, marriage license, passports, etc.), the full manuscripts to seven editions of three books I've written, offsite backups of my websites and their databases (in case of disaster on those servers), and some correspondence, plus every resume I've ever produced. But the biggest treasure is my photo collection - I went full digital in about 2005 and scanned all my old physical photos and then destroyed the originals. On the same list goes old genealogical pics I've scanned and incorporated into a family tree book, and some other basically priceless stuff. I'm at about 200G of data, I think.

I do monthly CD or DVD burns, each starting with the present and going back as far as the medium will reach, so each disk overlaps the previous by a stretch, allowing for multiple copies of that stuff in the middle. Once a year I take the disks to my folks' place for offsite storage. I know CDs and DVDs have a shelf life too, but it's better than nothing. I also religiously backup my machines to external hard drives - the Mac is the "official storage place" for all important data, so it's the device I'd grab if I had to quickly abandon the house, or something. I back up twice to two separate external USB drives, and store the two drives in different locations.

But I just got a NAS, and that's forcing me to change everything. First of all I've added a lot of ISOs and MKV video and so on - I've decided not to back any of it up. If I lose my movie collection, who cares? But now the NAS is the central, official repository for everything I have in digital form. It's FreeNAS with 4, 1TB WesternDigital Red drives in a RAID-Z formation. And I'm experimenting now with how to back up what's on the NAS. Pulling data off the NAS over my network to, say, the Mac, where I replicate it to an external USB drive is turning out to be slow given my crappy router and wireless network. I'm experimenting with mounting the external drives to the NAS itself and running a cron script that mounts the drive, rsyncs the data, and then unmounts. Then I just have to remember to attach a drive every Sunday evening at 5PM or something like that.

I'm lastly tempted to get an account with something like rsync.net or something to automatically rsync to an offsite server. But I'm feeling too cheap to pay a monthly fee for the service and kind of reticent to put stuff like my passport scans on someone else's server. And the price per gig for offsite storage of my photos, for example, is a bit much.

Still experimenting here, but in the mean time I still plan on burning monthly disks. They've saved my bacon on many, many occasions!

That's awesome if it's true (I hope it is!). But i'd heard it was the name of the Google developer who created it.

You wind up using it a bit in the early stages of setting up a new server, and it's pretty unpleasant on the eyes - jaggy, blocky fonts and all that. It also somewhat affects your visual impression of the boot-up process if you're sitting in front of a workstation. PC-BSD for example - this will allow them to have a slightly more impressive graphical boot up (graphical still meaning console interface, but perhaps something equivalent to the penguin at the top of a Linux console running a framebuffer, for example.

Glad to see Lady Fortune is getting some attention! Somehow it seems like she should be part of any back up solution. Archiving too.

I don't ask much from a console, but my Linux virtual consoles generally look pretty good including - up until recent kernel changes I think - some faint bitmapped graphics in the back. The font is usually chosen to render cleanly at whatever resolution my monitor is running at. On FreeBSD my 1440x900 screen console usually renders as though the terminal were expecting 800x600 and vidcontrol provides some but not enough control over that to make it pleasing to the eye. Sounds like this is an improvement. To me, at least.

There seems to be more to it that that - notice there is some incident also involving posting of information relating to her boyfriend or something. This is probably a case of poorly-educated individuals doing menial-labor clerk jobs at a hospital, who are given more access than they deserve, and abusing that privilege to engage in cheap retribution and personal attacks. I say fire the lot of them, hire and train more responsible staff, and move on before the scandal ruins the reputation of your hospital. As for syphlilis, she must have gotten it from someone, so she's not guilty alone, at any rate.

Awesome read, and I love the ending:

B.D.: Nice chatting with you. Oh, and one more thing?
AE: What's that?
B.D.:There's one thing Big Data can'tdo.
AE: Really? What's that?
B.D.: Big Data can't compensate for a shitty, ill-conceived product or a really dumb idea.

Hope those youngsters over at Hacker News are listening - they seem to think data and algorithms are all it takes.

I suppose it's fair to say there are different types of nostalgia: there's a variant where you yearn for old days you truly believe were better somehow, and another where you simply have fond memories of a period that's now past.

I have a strange fascination with dial-up, but if you offered to take away my broadband and hook me up with a modem, I'd refuse. But I do have fond memories of that dial-up sound, and the amazement of being on line from a personal computer. Was just thinking of buying this poster, actually: http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html

Wow, great comment. Yeah, I remember drooling over the catalogs of those companies that produced component audio systems. You'd spend $400 just for a turntable alone, then listen to it with over-the-ear headphones with an emphasis on high quality audio reproduction, not the number of MP3s you can fit on the device. I don't undervalue portability and love my ipod, but yeah, those were fun times.

Thumbs up for Gopher, too, and Usenet. No flash ads, etc. Try taking an article from huffingtonpost.com and extracting just the article text (ie, removing all the scripts, ads, etc.). The ratio is like 8% information.

He's definitely right that the interface isn't as clear or user friendly as it could be, but I'm also new to ZFS, RAIDZ, and the like, so I'm learning too. I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending this to a non-tech person. But I'd rather have a not-fully-baked GUI on top of a powerful BSD system with ZFS, snapshots, rsync backups, and the like, over a great GUI for a NAS that doesn't have as much functionality. The FreeNAS plug-in architecture (it's run by ixsystems, the guys who do PC-BSD, which has the same architecture) is really pretty awesome. In two or three clicks you can install a jail and a sickbeard, plex, or bittorrent plug in and have it up and running. I've also got volumes exported under NFS and Appleshare and more. You get FTP access, full Root access, and more. I think it's the way to go. Just for now, you've got to do some reading and learning - the interface is definitely headed in the right direction but not quite there yet.

This is a great article on RAIDZ, maybe one of the best I've seen. I'm still trying to get my arms around ZFS and figure out all its advantages. What a clever file system. Still puzzling my way through this article.

Interesting (and I wish I'd seen this earlier). I'm absolutely, definitely running FreeBSD on RockVPS, but I just checked their page and it indeed seems they're not advertising it (it used to be right up front). Wonder if it has to do with some recent change of theirs that required me to change IP address and move my image to some new hardware? I'll have to look into alternatives.

Thanks for linking to that Ars article comparing the two NAS systems. I hadn't seen it and it's a good article. I just bought and set up a FreeNAS on ixSystems hardware. It was expensive but I don't regret it - the machine has tons of RAM and high bandwidth network cards and it runs at less than 35W, which is good enough for me. I'm still figuring out all the goodness of ZFS and the different plugins but despite my learning curve, it's at its heart a solid FreeBSD system I have full, root access to, and no worries that some crazy script is mining bitcoin on my hardware.

No, it's happening to me too, and the blocking/overlay advert at the bottom of the page is frankly unforgivable, in my opinion. I really detest it.

The joke is that CBS took two serious things, made a ridiculous connection between them, added a terminator graphic, and made an ignorant, alarmist topic out of it. The second joke is that this qualifies as news in American mainstream media.

Wow - disappointing and totally inadvertent. I wrote the Pipedot poll without being aware of the Slashdot poll, which I now see ran earlier. Wonder if I was remembering it subconsciously, or if it's just an obvious question with obvious answer-choices? Anyway, rest assured it's just an unfortunate coincidence, not plagiarism, and it's certainly not an effort to just siphon content from the green site to here.

If you have any poll ideas, join the pipedot mailing list and send them in, please. The more the merrier.

Given the quality of reporting at places like CBS and CNN these days, there is reason to believe AI already exists, and is intentionally dumbing us down by feeding us a steady diet of Kim Kardashian articles, weight loss tips, and vapid sit-com programming. We may not have yet created artificial intelligence, but as far as I can tell, real intelligence is quickly fading. At least in America.

You're right - fixed.

I haven't used it recently, because frankly I'd forgotten about it. But I used to regularly go there to discover software. Search for "project management," "spline editor," "graphing package," etc. always turned up software I'd never known about - that was fun. Google could do it, but it's nice having a dedicated resource and community committed to contributing to it. It doesn't all have to go to Google, the relentless, omnipresent monopolist. (exaggerating, a little, but you've got to admit Google is freaking EVERYWHERE).

I've never understood all the hatred around paying the NYT to read their articles. Journalists cost money - I have a couple of journalist friends, and their kids need shoes too. I pay the NYT for a subscription that lets me read it on the web - $8 a month or something, not much considering what I pay for coffee in a month, and the quality of the reporting is good. You want free? Go to CNN or Washington Post, but you get what you pay for.

There's a whole generation that insists on its right to reading news for free on the Internet, forgetting that it costs money to get the news, write it, edit it, and run the servers.

Good one - I still wish someone would screen scrape that site, fork it, and open it up as a community project. Remember Themes.org? Same thing - that place went through at least 3 iterations. Actually, criminy, I just tested that URL and it redirects to f*cking freecode.com! Dammit!

I was thinking the same thing. Slashdot isn't dead by any measure - their current poll about what time you get to the office has received 17,000 votes, for example while ours has received 16 :) But increasingly the articles aren't great and the comment quality is on decline. I was looking around for new things to read even before the Slashcott, and so are probably the better commenters. They might not be on the chopping block yet, but they're not far away, and it's clear Dice bought things expecting them to generate revenue, and will act if they don't. That's the way business works.

It's a reminder then that these kinds of sites are best run as community projects or by small, non-corporate entities and last longest if they resist the opportunity to sell out. Cycle is always the same - generate something cool, sell to corporation, corporation ruins it and then sells it off, and everyone loses. The Gracenote database is a spectacular example of this - a user-generated database of song titles and albums got sold to a corporation who immediately restricted access to the information. Screw you, consumer!

No regrets for jumping ship. Dice Media can go get **cked.

Interesting commentary here, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7912647

Google sells you a device so they can show you an ad encouraging you to buy a rake. In turn Google gets a sliver of the profits from selling a rake in the form of ad revenue. Amazon sells you a device so they can show you an ad encouraging you to buy a rake. Amazon sells you the rake, has it delivered in 2 days, and makes 100% of the profit. It's not that people will actively look for that integration, but that it exists gives Amazon a significant advantage imho.

Yeah, I'm skeptical too. They're either thinking "this can be a white box, generic phone sold by a company people like to buy from," or they're thinking "this will increase sales of Amazon products." If it's the latter, the obvious question is, "why not just an app anyone can run on their existing phone?" More likely, this is going to try to position itself as a media consuming pipeline between your pocket and Amazon's cloud services, providing easy access to movies and music, kind of like a "KindleFireTV for your pocket."

I'm not bullish on this one, though.

[sigh] I remember when the Internet was an open platform, level playing field. Now between Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, you scarcely have any reason to visit anywhere else on the web whatsoever. Oh yeah, Facebook [yawn].

I wasn't aware they were even doing any useability research. That's frightening, actually, to know they're making an effort and still not getting it right.

Ah yes, I see it - never used it before. Thanks. How useful!

Seconded. I just took their advice and created a bookmarklet. There are a few egregiously offesnive sites that specialize in these stupid slideshows, and finally I can read some of them again. I'd been avoiding them so they can't charge for 7 ad impressions for the price of one, greedy bastards.

Actually, you don't hear much about the chumminess anymore. I think it mostly went away when Novell sold SUSE to Attachmate, ("attach-meat" ha ha), who has done a great job of selling SUSE on its own merits. To listen to the recent press releases, I think their new "lover" is SAP. They're making a lot of noise about SUSE being the best platform to run SAP on. I don't know much about SAP but I get the impression it's not fun.