Wow - what a well-reasoned, measured, and carefully contemplated opinion! You'd make a lousy tech journalist! Take that as a compliment. I agree with you - it's fun to talk about a new age of gadgets, because we're bored using and writing about the old ones. But those old gadgets worked marvelously well for some tasks the new ones are perfectly unsuited. Welcome to the new world.

I wouldn't want to do any CAD or design on my ipad, that's for damn sure. But I'm happy to have one so I don't have to boot up "the beast" every time I want to see if there's a new Pipedot post.

Hey, all: the pipe is currently empty. If you have good ideas of what should go up on this tech news site, please post. Because it's a hell of a lot of work for just one person. This is an all volunteer site, so we don't exactly have paid journalists out walking the beat. When that pipe is choked with interesting articles, we'll be happy to cherry pick and make sure only the great ones make it to the front page. Right now the pipe is empty: do the math.

Should've perhaps added Hunger Games to the list as well.

Interesting and good point. First time I've even heard that acronym, but I'm not a crypto guy, either. Should be probably, the way things are going. Best I've got so far is Michael Lucas' GPG book (and it's not that good).

Let me see if I can work some magic. I really want to encourage people to post articles and anyone who takes the time to do so clearly feels it's a worthwhile thing to discuss. When editors start deleting articles, readers stop taking the time to contribute and the sense of cameraderie takes a hit.

Lavabit? Man, isn't that only one step removed from the NSA and Intel snoop chip stories? I'll post it a bit later tonight.

Editor here: your point is well taken. I paused, but thought it would be worse to not submit a link an author had taken the time to post to the pipeline. Hopefully, when we get more submissions coming in this will be less of an issue. I too would like this to not be a site that simply mirrors the infowars site (or any other site, for that matter). But today, that's what the pipeline mailman carried in.

Would love some of your article proposals, by the way - we're trying to publish just about everything that comes in that is serious.

I suppose we now beat on hipsters the way we used to beat on nerds? So, anyone caught with a mechanical typewriter in Starbucks, or riding an ancient big-wheeled bicycle? That sort of thing?

I get the impression everyone is loudly complaining that the "other guy" is doing the same thing the complainer is. Yeah, it's easy to point the finger at Huawei, but the US is apparently doing it too. There's only one guaranteed loser here: the consumer.

Pitchforks and torches, now!

Earthporn is a good idea. There's some great earth porn type stuff on Google Plus these days, but I'm getting nauseous over the new trend for highly/over-saturated colors, pink skies, etc. Real life is good enough for me; don't need my artwork to all look like the onset of an acid trip.

I've lived in malarial countries for well over a decade, so malaria is on my mind. I check the kids' room twice before going to bed to make sure no mosquitos are in there. But this thing isn't great. A bubbler that you have to put in each and every source of still water? Why not dump out the water? How many would you need? Maybe if you have a water fountain or something, but in most of the malarial south, this wouldn't quite do it.

Scientists posit malaria is the single strongest evolutionary force on the human genome at the moment. After nearly nine years in West Africa, I'm convinced it's true.

Is that your own photo? If so, it's brilliant. Slashdot in the background is the icing on the cake.

That's an interesting comment. I have a fondness for them too, sort of, but for no really well-justified reason. That was back when IOMEGA was a pretty darned good company, making good things. I've still got a CD burner from IOMEGA that is well made, solid, durable, and doing a great job burning CDs (quietly and reliably) and it's about 10 years old now! I later bought a DVD burner from another company and the thing is flimsy, loud, and cheap-feeling. I was kind of sad when IOMEGA pulled the plug. Or did they get bought out by somebody? I forget now.

Anyway, that's the thing about the zipdrives too. Those zip disks were much more solid-feeling than the 3.5" floppy disks that they helped retire. Solid little things. I was writing a book at the time and used a zip drive to do a daily backup of the manuscript. The whole thing fit perfectly on one zip, which I stored offsite.

I agree. It depersonalizes the costs of waging war - makes it into a video game, and a damned expensive one, at that. There was a good article making the rounds at Reddit not long ago where they are trying to personalize it by making a huge picture visible to a drone 'pilot' of some kid who got killed by another drone - make the pilot really think about it.

That said, since I've got kids, I'm glad the robots can go kill each other now. Leave my kids at home, thankyouverymuch.

I can't be sure, but I always thought this was a slam on Slashdot. When they first rolled out their mobile site, this is exactly what they did. I got asked "want to go to the mobile site?" on every goddamned link ... very annoying.

I'm hearing a lot of hatred over the new interface. My comments are:
1. if the only 'innovating' you are doing is aping someone else's UI, you are in a bad place. Nobody won by copying the other.
2. essentially the same comment, but: considering how many ways there are to improve browsers, is the widget set the only thing you could find to fix?

What keeps me off Chrome is all the skeevy Google tracking. What keeps me on Chrome is this new Chromebook :( It's also a decent browser. But Google is increasingly creeping me out. Firefox should be scooping up disaffected Chrome users. But they're not, because increasingly Mozilla Foundation's browser really sucks balls. And I am so fed up with the constant plug-in is out of date stuff, or checking plug-ins on boot time, etc. Find a better architecture! And fix those memory leaks! You are the Titanic, guys!

I'm definitely in the market for something like that, so I'm checking it out. Funny how cloud backup systems are set to be commoditized within another year or so - tough business to be in! Here's the URL for anyone else shopping: http://seafile.com/en/home/

Actually, the folks at Adobe seem to have had their own heads up their own asses for so long now it's amazing their eyesight hasn't atrophied, like blind cavefish. I mean seriously, I'm having trouble thinking of a software company whose software is more user-hostile. I really hate their new, "streamlined" version of Acrobat Pro. The previous version had so much powerful functionality available via the menus. Now in the latest version that functionality has either been stripped out or buried so users can't find it. Either way, Adobe sucks.

I've been mixing it up, but I'm still not happy with my backup system. On my Mac I've got a combination of TImeMachine doing basically daily backups, and Chronsync which does backups of the whole machine to a separate disk that I keep on the other side of the house. That second USB disk is basically my "go disk" if Al Qaeda busts in with a nuclear warhead and I need to skedaddle with whatever I can in a rucksack. Videos of the kids and so forth though now takes up too much space for a simple USB disk, and I'm a bit tired of having drawers full of external drives that all require managing and that can - any of them - crash hard and die at any given moment, taking their contents with them. So I've got that stuff on a NAS.

I played with SpiderOak a bit because I dig their philosophy and they offered a native client for openSUSE Linux, which is a big sell for me. I've heard people say its UI is awful but I never thought so - works perfectly well for me, and it's perfectly intuitive. Tarsnap looks damned interesting though, and their pricing is great. I was looking at other rsync providers to back up my NAS and it gets expensive super fast!

Finally, for music not only is all my stuff uploaded to Google Music (which I'm not sure is considered a backup, and I'm not sure I can get it back out, either). And I actually do burn the monthly disk of family photos, manuscripts to my books, and a few other things that are truly irreplaceable. Got to plan for an EMP too, right?

Well, anyboy who's looking for breaking news on Pipedot is barking up the wrong tree. These kind of sites - from Pipe to Soy to Slashdot and beyond - simply don't fill that role. Think back to how many times we bitched about old news on Slashdot. I mean, do the math: everything posted here includes a link <i>to some other site where it appeared first</i>. You want breaking scoops, go to a site that pays for a fleet of reporters who are actually out there gathering the scoops and breaking the news. And yes, those guys are paid. This place on the other hand, is a place where people of similar interests can gather to discuss those things, hopefully sharing their collected wisdom and their own links to things of interest.

This thing might not be breaking news, but I don't give a flying you-know-what. It was interesting to me and I thought it would be interesting to others as well. And it was! I am actually thinking of doing one article per week about some interesting project on github or elsewhere, kind of "hey, check out this interesting project!" kind of thing. I've been exposed to all sorts of interesting software by reading Slashdot/equivalent and following the links when someone posts, "oh that's cool but it reminds me of this other thing." That's interesting to me, and if there are things that interest you, well, the Submit button is at the upper right. Use it.

I have been keeping articles on the site because I like this place and has potential. It takes me a bit of time, but I'm happy to do that on the grounds that a tight group of smart, technically minded people who appreciate the site and its interface/credo and are willing to get together to discuss things that interest them - that benefits me too. Any one of these sites can be replaced by an RSS feeder with a healthy number of feeds. What makes it interesting is the people who gather there to discuss the news.

Good comments. Yes, I'm noticing 100+ comments on some articles - an order of magnitude better than Soy and two orders of magnitude better than Pipe. But a heck of a lot of those comments are garbage, almost at the Reddit level of tomfoolery. Long gone are the days when it was a bastion of tough, knowledgeable nerds. They're still in there, but the signal to noise ratio has dropped.

Also, the new banner ads, like the one at the bottom that actually obscures the text, are unforgiveable and truly obnoxious. They're going to look like LinuxToday before too long, and LT is currently, totally unuseable it's been so stuffed with horsecrap on the front page. The content is like an afterthought, a little texty buffer zone that keeps the ad-choked sidebars from collapsing into each other under their own weight.

Seriously, didn't Huawei get blacklisted from purchases by the American government, largely for doing that exact same thing? Kim Jong Un is about to offer a cellphone to the N. Korean people (running Android, naturally). Anybody want to bet whether or not there's eavesdropping, tracking, and Darth Vader choke-hold technology built into it at the factory?

Meanwhile, Linux users are dealing with "secureboot"crap that - wait for it - keeps a windows install from suffering the dangerous implications of untrusted software. Is this whole world just a big f*cking joke or something?

Ha ha - just tried the Firefox Replace add-on, which is even better. You can replace all mentions of anything with anything else. My websurfing experience just got better.

I downloaded the Firefox extension and it's pretty funny. I notice it only converts that very phrase: "the cloud" with "my butt". So visiting 'talkingcloud.com" delivered only imperfect results. Any mention of "cloud" or "cloud platform" etc. remains unaltered. Still, Google results were hilarious:

"how to incorporate wifi services in my butt"
"click here to download our white paper from my butt"

etc. This plug in has tons of add-on potential.

I hereby vote for the <BarryWhite> tag to become a formal part of an upcoming HTML spec. Too awesome.

Yes, for me Paypal and Ebay are almost conjoined twins, although I have used Paypal to make some end-of-year contributions to foundations and software projects.

Yes, you've phrased it very well. Too bad RIAA executives and their cronies can't see this as clearly. Blinded by the money, perhaps (and the whores and cocaine, I'm sure).

Awesome quote at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/15/game_of_thrones_written_on_brutal_medieval_word_processor_and_os/

Martin the says he uses WordStar 4.0 as his word processor, which elicits laughs from the studio audience, but justifies his choice by saying "I actually like it.""It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital. If I'd wanted a capital I would have typed a capital!"Martin says he also hates spell check, because the made-up words he uses in his work is often corrected for him.There's a certain symmetry to the choice of WordStar and DOS. Martin's work depicts a brutal time in which the available technology is clunky and unreliable and magic is still in limited use. WordStar and DOS come from a time in which PCs were brutal and digital technology was clunky and unreliable, but Macintoshes were in limited use. ®

The question of DRM or no DRM is often a false dichotomy. I published the Dictator's Handbook (www.dictatorshandbook.net) in a no-DRM EPUB format and no-DRM MOBI format. Anyone who wanted to could buy a single copy and spaff it all over the internet for pirating and sharing. That's not really happened, and I've sold plenty of books. I think a lot of musicians are finding the same. Not sure about movie publishers.

OK, so they are against it, but feel obliged to keep up with the times and to prevent people from having to reach for an alternative web browser they're going to implement DRM too. Lovely. How about, we just don't visit those DRMed sites? What the F has happened to the Internet we know and love? Is FIDOnet still around? At least we owned that one. This new, corporate-run, DRMed, spy-platform Internet sucks dogballs. Guess it's time to switch to Chrome! Nope. Opera? Hmm. Lynx/w3m/elinks?

Yes, you're right - VPS. Thanks for the correction! I've heard about lowendbox.com and the price is great. I pay a bit more than that - $12/month - but I'm happy with the hardware, the software, and the service, so no complaints. The one thing I've found VPSes aren't good for is offsite replication/storage. I've got many gigs of photos I'd like to backup with an rsync script, and while a Linux or BSD VPS would make that easy, most packages don't provide nearly enough space, thinking what you are probably going to build is a webserver or something.

Mine also runs a Usenet node (www.dictatorshandbook.net for the dictator.* newsgroups), but I don't use it for much else than that. It's just so cool how much you can do with a good OS on a dedicated box (OK, virtual, but from my point of view you'd never know it), and a fixed IP address.

All of my sites are run from my FreeBSD VPN, so I have no idea. I used to run a site or two off of siteground. I'm not surprised they're not on the list: they are smaller, specializing in PHP template sites you could use to get a Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress site up and running in minimal time. But I get the idea they were over-subscribed, because I started having all sorts of trouble getting even simple pages to load. Finally dumped them for my VPN, so I've saved a lot of money annually and also have my own dedicated bandwidth. On the other hand, I get to administer my own Apache server, which is not easy and is slightly scary.

wow, the site made a mishmash of that URL. Check out which part of it actually got translated into the URL! Funny. Anyway, if the video you linked to is a fleet of flying evil helicopter-cats, I'm glad I didn't click it. Would probably scare the shit out of me. "Evil has a new name." Might make a good movie, though.

Soylent just linked to an interesting article published at Slate: the emacs vs vim flamewar, 40 years on. Interesting to think how old both pieces of software are, at this point!

Ha ha - I use that one too. I only wish it didn't default to hardwrap. You can get to it fastest by running it as jstar (jstar, jmacs, and joe all run the same binary but with different menu and keystroke configurations - a very cool idea).

BTW, maybe you'd have been better off with a Raspberry Pi running openELEC and XBMC? That's what I did as an alternative to Plex. Total price less than $100 including cables etc and if you are a bit more clever than me you can bring the price down even further. Boots in < 20 seconds, connects to your NFS NAS or equivalent (AFS, Samba also supported out of the box), and pumps video goodness over an HDMI cable. Cheap and easily replaced. Plus you've got a Raspberry Pi to play with, which means like me you'll start disconnecting it from your TV and playing with it, changing, reconfiguring, trying different distros, etc. - all until your wife tells you to knock it off and hook the damn thing back up so she can watch her show. Good times.

Plex transcodes - it's kind of its claim to fame. You mean you accessed your Plex media server over the HTTP connection and weren't happy with it? I did the same and thought that was good enough for me. I was planning on nuking ChromeOS and installing Linux but I'm going to keep Chrome around just a bit longer while I play with it. I'm already kind of frustrated with its limitations as an OS, but I concede this is probably what the future looks like, and it's better than I thought it would be. The HP14 is nice hardware, actually, with a very useable keyboard (once you accept it's almost impossible to get a machine that doesn't have that blasted chiclet keyboard these days).

Yes, I also need to get to an NFS share though, and it's probably the straw that will drive me to nuke Chrome and go ahead with the full Linux install.

Just tested and as suspected, the colors follow you as you access from computer to computer. That tops Usenet, and is highly useful. Wowzer.

For a president focused on green energy and the like, taking this long to get a system in place is pathetic, to say the least. Obviously the White House had security issues to deal with - imagine some rogue state putting listening equipment in the panels and having access to a great listening opportunity - but still, those problems have solutions and this is ridiculously late in Obama's presidency. It comes across as an afterthought.

Anyway, better than nothing. I'll be putting solar panels on my place next year too, hopefully. I'd like to do it while there are still fancy tax credits on the offer.

Pipedot now has more features than soylentnews despite having a fifth of the developers

Also, in < two months, Pipedot now has an interface that a recent scientific study concluded is 500,000% better and more useable than Slashdot Beta (F it! Buck Feta!)

Which reminds me - I look forward to the NNTP interface ;-)

Oh man, that would be like tech nirvana for me. Id probably never turn off the computer again if that happened, and slowly lose all contact with the outside world ... I spend a lot of time on comp.misc and really love Usenet in ways the WWW has never really re-implemented (for better or for worse).

Ha ha, your post reminds of this article at the Register from this morning: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/13/supposedly_secure_dogecoin_service_dogevault_goes_offline/ "Supposedly secure Dogecoin service Dogevault goes offline: Much worry. So familiar. Such losses"

Lets face it: this post was just a cheap pretext to try out the nifty new WYSIWYG editor.

I guess the editor is cached, because it took a second to load the first time, but appeared instantly afterwards on other posts. You know, ten years ago Id have said this is bloat, but increasingly I can no longer be bothered to do it the hard way. This is nice.

Nifty! This plus the limited Unicode support are a big deal and a killer combination. Thanks!

Agreed - this is very useful and is a huge improvement in useability. Im not aware of any other site on earth that does this. Does anyone know of another site offering this functionality? Has it ever been seen in the wild?

Funny, I just received my new Chromebook yesterday - an HP 14. Ive only played with it a few hours but am pretty darned impressed. That said, Ill probably wind up wiping it and installing Linux. Im a Usenet fan and there are no workable Usenet Chrome apps, I do a ton of work at the console and it doesnt have a great terminal app that I can see, and it doesnt seem to have a good text editor. But I admit Im not exactly the target user group for a Chromebook. Other than that, if you are willing to stay within Chromes use cases, its pretty nice, and the HP machine is surprisingly good hardware for $200. Keyboard is decent (better than my HP laptop at work, actually), fast on and off, quick wireless, etc. Im more impressed than I thought Id be.
If I wipe it, Im installing BodhiLinux, which is a Ubuntu core with E17 (Enlightenment) on the desktop. Its a lovely distro, and E17 is way more usable and configurable/tweakable than either Gnome3 or Unity.

Yeah, editor fail. Sorry about that. I balked at first, thinking, "is this subject matter really germane to pipedot?" Then it got a couple of upvotes and I figured, "hell with it - let's publish and see what happens." In a better world, we'd have a bigger community upvoting and downvoting new article submissions. In the real world, I try to get stuff published as soon as possible, figuring anyone who took the trouble to post an article deserves to see it in print.

I'm within days of receiving a new HP Chromebook I ordered. But it's only going to run ChromeOS for about 1 millisecond before I wipe it and install a real Linux distro. No hard feelings to Chrome - I'm just not its target audience. I made a list of things I do on a computer and Chrome doesn't do any of them. My folks, on the other hand ... they've got an aging Mac and I'm thinking it's high time I start thinking about its replacement. Chrome is an option, potentially.

Logically, wealth is an expression of your current belongings. Materialism is a philosophy or at least an approach, and it's based on wanting more things. By wanting you are implicitly starting from a point of dissatisfaction, and if that's how you spend every day, you are living a dissatisfied life.

Does anyone here use something like puppet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_%28software%29) to manage bulk configurations? Sounds like a similar idea but much more built out for use in an administrator's toolbox.

Ha ha - I just reviewed and published this article, and if I'm reading the logs correctly, I hit "go" less than 60 seconds after Rocks submitted it. Instantaneous gratification! (No charge) ;)

Interesting article - thanks for posting it. I'm not much of a gamer but agree the world has changed and Nintendo has some catching up to do. Nintendo "was" gaming for a whole generation of kids. But they risk becoming the Blackberry of consoles if they don't shake it a bit.