There IS an RSS feed, and this isn't the first time someone has complained it's hard to find. Look for the word Feed at the bottom of the page, or click here: http://pipedot.org/atom But maybe it's time to use a header so the magic orange icon shows up in the URL bar.

Looks nice! I agree with the suggestion to darken up the reply button, but overall the site is clean and fresh - nice work. Hey, maybe we can keep everybody happy by doing an MTV and having hundred of logos, that change every time the page refreshes ... ideally they would each be animated GIFs :)

Probably, a fleet of lawyers circling over the carcass, beating their wings in slow flaps. These guys are conflicted - it's in their interest to get as many "affected parties" as possible to strengthen the lawsuit. They sort out the details later, and after all in suits like this the poor, suffering bloke who was overcharged for DRAM might come home with a check for $3.65 while the lawyer fees will reach millions.

Revolution now!

Finally I understand that XKCD! Never got the joke until now. Live and learn. Yay Pipedot!

"Fantastic" was supplied by me as editor. So, it's neither hype nor permanent beta, just a non-gamer editor who had a look at the Kerbal website and thought it looked pretty damned fun. Basically, sloppy editing. Sorry about that - I'll accept a reduction in *cough* salary (joke: I'm a volunteer).

Editor here: apologies for that. I had trouble figuring it out from what was supplied. Let me re-edit the text.

I for one am pleased to be in the company of Pipeheads that know their firearms :)

Ultimately, a CEO - any leader, in fact, sets the moral and ethical tone for a company. If your CEO is a blatant racist, not only does your company get associated with racism, but it affects employee relations. If your CEO kicks puppies, then your company kicks puppies and it's OK for aspiring leaders to also kick puppies, because "that guy does it." How's you like to be a gay Mozilla employee? You're not going to feel as secure and comfortable in that work environment knowing that your CEO is against you. Maybe you'll look for work elsewhere, and take your talent with you. Inclusive work environments are more productive, because people feel safe to be who they are and focus on their work instead.

I have no problem with this guy being forced to defend his stance. He seems to be taking a relatively conservative stance at a moment when the world is shifting in a different direction.

You don't have to agree with all of your CEO's views. But you do have to understand that his views not only impact your company's reputation but also affect employee relations and more.

Holy crap, some of those proposed logos are damned good looking! I didn't take the time to try to figure out if some guidelines were proposed, but they seem to all fall into a certain color scheme, and they are mostly variations of a certain play on the shape of the letters P and D. I thought there would be some entries using the pipe and dot characters; maybe before the end there will be.

Meanwhile, I'm impressed!

I doubt these are created by |. lurkers though. There's probably a community of hungry graphic designers hanging around that site waiting for contests. They don't have a connection to the site, they just know how to do art and when somebody needs something, they jump in to compete.

This is all brute supposition, of course.

I should add: had you used Comic Sans in the body text I'd probably have had to dig out my own eyeballs with a spoon. Catastrophe averted!

Glad to have a laugh. My favorite part was squeezing in the word "Suckage." Not sure it's in the dictionary.

Hey, Happy April 1st. The site looks great! But knowing what I know now I think I'd like to back and vote again. Is it too late to recheck the box 'garish colors?'

This is the only site carrying on the noble tradition of trashing itself visually on the 1st of the month. Probably because it's the only site with a decent CSS scheme that permits doing so with little effort! MUST HAVE MORE PONIES ...

For me it's clear.
Unless devs want user backlash, they need to listen.
Commonly they choose business motivation over engagement of their core users. It
Kills the site, every time.

Sloppy coding habits, excess reliance on javascript and other
Lame technologies like Flash, not to mention ugly banner
Advertisements can lead to total
Suckage if they're abused. LinuxToday was another great site before some
Ham-fisted attempts to bring in more revenue led to more ads than articles and the
Death of the community that so
Often had interesting conversations on
That site.

Before you start making a site flashy you've got to get the basics right.
Even relatively complex things can be done simply, and if you choose flash over substance
The readers that have an
Alternative will flee your sucky site like rats abandoning a sinking ship.

Good point about how the Target article fails to describe how many misses there are. I always get a good laugh out of the ads Google's fancy algorithms think I should see. I am regularly bombarded with ads for things I've already bought, for example.

There's an old quote by Pico Ayer (I can't find it at the moment but probably discovered it through that old website from the late 90s, the Utne Cafe), in which he worries that people are confusing information for knowledge, and knowledge for wisdom, and that although the modern technologies provide us tons of information they don't provide much knowledge, and far less wisdom. I'd kick that one level further to say that before even information, they drown us in data, which is totally worthless unless you know what you're looking for, or are trained in noticing things you were not suspecting.

Frankly, there's enough pr0n elsewhere it's not an issue, but you were probably joking. I could use an improvement on Reddit for technology and computer stuff, though. The Reddit system seems to favor shitty word play and pun fights, and the comments quickly degenerate into banal, four-word one liners based on a shared lexicon ("you gorgeous bastard," etc.). I'm done with Slash, and the drama at Soy has cheapened the site, for the moment.

The site's 'flavor' will probably evolve as a function of what kind of articles people enjoy posting and others enjoy commenting on. Post stuff, and let's see what happens. What if suddenly a team of astrophysicists decides to camp out here and suddenly all the articles are about astrophysics? Pipedot becomes the world's best tech site for discussion of astrophysics. Just sayin'.

This is a great article - well written, informative. But I was blown away by the link at the end (History of Computer Communications). What a wealth of material, and the way he's organized the book makes it so easy to understand.

But why for the love of all that is holy did he decide to leave it as a bunch of HTML pages instead of offering an EPUB or a PDF? I'd love to read this but definitely won't/can't sit in front of the computer to read it on line. This is annoying.

I might have to see if I can create one or something. This would be a huge hit on my ereader, but less so if I need to be connected to the website to read it.

I was the editor for this article, and I asked Bryan the same question: is it cool to post articles already posted elsewhere? His response was that the poster has done so before, and it was fine with Bryan (so it's okay with me).

I personally don't want much overlap between the sites, for two reasons:
1) I don't want anyone to think the two sites are poaching each other's articles, and
2) Different articles at each site means a reader gets more choice and more interesting things to read, which is good.

That said, I think I agree with Bryan here: the submitter posted at both sites deliberately, and I thought it would be rude not to post an interesting article someone had taken the time and energy to submit.

This question might become more academic at some point, as different communities evolve around both sites. I'm active on Usenet's comp.misc too, which frankly grapples with the same issue. There is bound to be a bit of overlap and cross-fertilization, but provided we make an effort, it won't necessarily become a problem.

Interesting article, by the way. I know a teacher of autistic kids, and it's clear we're just scratching the surface here with regard to our understanding of autism.

I agree the whole thing is pretty astonishing - both Mats' performance and the robot's. Even the agility necessary to do that kind of trick is impressive, not to mention the mental processes behind the hands. Most of the people I work with can't even tie their shoes (or type!) that fast.

I signed up as soon as possible for both sites, but heard about - and started visiting - Soylent first. I really got disgusted with all the drama, airing of dirty laundry in the name of transparency, and general, juvenile ass-hattery. I find this site better run. I think the mob-rule mentality over at Soy will be hard to manage. I hope they overcome the challenge, but I don't see how - sooner or later someone is going to either suggest members pay in, or post ads, or something else, and it's going to be a sh*tstorm.

Full disclosure - I volunteered to help Bryan and am now one of the volunteer editors. If you're worried about what to submit or how to format it, my response would be "do your best" and let the editors bang it into shape, if necessary.

I worry when the pipe is dry. I'd like this to be a place where people can discuss what they find interesting. Let's post a bunch of stuff and see what sticks, and the site will eventually evolve. The nice voting mechanism on the pipe allows every user to have a say in things they'd like to see hit the front page for discussion. Jump in!

I'm tempted to agree with you, but then I look down at my phone, which is laboring over its crappy 3G connection to bring in a webpage, and I think, there might be use for this thing yet?

In a way, internet-over-smartphone rivals the days of dialup in terms of frustration. There are some heavy, graphic laden sites I simply don't visit on my smart phone - not worth the bother; I know it will never work. (I know, let's create a parallel mobile site with some javascript to determine if we have to send you to that one! - No, fix your f*cking site).

Why not just line up the soundtrack so the climax falls where you want it, and then work backwards the length of time you require and add a fade in? Place climax, include 3 seconds earlier plus 0.5 second fade in. Badda boom, badda bing.

I'm skeptical about algorithms being able to do something as subtly complex as this. As for Hollywood movies, aren't they already being written and acted by computers and robots anyway? (Keanu Reeves, whoever wrote the Diehard series: I'm looking at you). I mean, same crap, over and over and over. I think the entire romantic comedy genre has been coopted by a bit of software only marginally more complex than emacs' psychiatrist.

There's the famous muscle memory as well, not exactly an issue of intelligence, but habitual movement of certain muscle groups when certain neurons fire. 250 beats per second is pretty impressive, and being able to correct in 3 beats is also impressive. But somehow it's not surprising - if you're a fruitfly, remaining airborne seems like it should be what you focus most of your mental energy on.

Ha ha. Let's go ask Mr. Fuck Beta what his opinion is. Hey Mr. Fuck Beta, can I offer you a nice glass of scotch on the rocks?

While we dallied, this got posted on Soylent. Not sure we want a dupe?

I think for me the concern is rather, "sector creep." That is, the airlines prove it's effective and useful technology that allow them to greet me with "Good afternoon, Mr. Zafiro17," and a glass of scotch on the rocks, as I'd like.

So now that we know it's effective, the cops want in on the action too, so they can scan me as I ride my bike home from work. Then the guy in the corner newspaper kiosk wants a pair so he can subscribe to some new service that matches my face against people who like to buy crack cocaine, and so on. Maybe I don't want to be part of your frikkin database, y'know?

Thanks for that - much appreciated. I just ran it and due to various typos copying that line, had a nice ride on the emotional roller coaster before confirming my system is clean.

I'll be happy when we have the legislation in place that allows us to feed these scumbags into wood chippers when convicted.

Hey, I'm glad to know that! Thanks. (Still want me a real keyboard though - I wish those early Androids with physical keyboards were still around but alas, the market has spoken).

The article references, towards the end, one of the proponents of a competing theory, who is gracious and congratulatory, but somewhat skeptical, as you'd expect from a scientist. He's looking forward to more data that confirms the theory. I found myself thinking about this all night: what an amazing discovery, if it holds. What's the name of that theory where the universe is going to expand out to some point, then collapse, then reemerge like a bubble that inverts itself, constantly rebirthing the universe? I like that theory, because I love the idea of a periodic crash-and-burn.

I don't care what Windows did to OS/2. (Well, yes I do). But here and now, there's potentially hope for app compatibility. I've got a few Samsung Android phones, including the Note 3, which is their flagship (and it's a pretty great phone). But I'm looking seriously at the new Blackberry Q10 with keyboard. Why? I like the hardware, and Blackberry does things that no Samsung Android does today. I can assign shortcuts/hotkeys to the physical keyboard, and launch a call to my wife in a single keypress. On my phablet I've got to unlock the screen, navigate over to the phone icon, hit favorites, and select her from the list (voice control works when I have a wifi connection, but I don't always have one).

Point is just: I wouldn't be considering BB alone because their software ecosystem isn't as good. But getting a Q10 Blackberry hardware with Android app compatability is potentially a sweet spot for a consumer like me! (ironic, since most tech analysts look at Blackberry and tell them to stop making handsets, as their value is increasingly only in their patent portfolio - how stupid).

I agree with that. But perhaps we'd see a split - due to community demand - for some distros that handle the games and some that remain free/unDRMed? So RedHat would decide they want in on the action and you'd get a RedHat distro knowing what you're getting into. Ubuntu would follow suit. But you'd also have niche distros that specialize in DRM-free kernels and so on, for those that prefer to give up the games than to give up freedom.

I'm hopeful anyway.

Those are some really phenomenal images. I'm just diving into the stereographic images and I'm blown away. Many thanks for the tip.

As usual, Google is your (carefully tracking and note-taking) friend:

There's this but it doesn't give a sense of scale. This NASA video doesn't quite give you the "live from the planet's surface" sense. This one on Uyirvani is the best one I could find (is that Russian?)

Interesting, I didn't know any of this stuff. Relevant clip:

"Mercury, on the other hand, has only one solid shell for a crust, rather than Earth's many plates that shift about. As Mercury's molten iron core has cooled over the billions of years since the planet formed, it has contracted and the shell of rock surrounding it has cracked and shifted to accommodate the smaller size. Today, the signs of those changes are written all over the face of Mercury. "Some of these things are really, really big," said Paul Byrne of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the Lunar and Planetary Institute. "There are some truly gargantuan cliffs on Mercury." Bryne is the lead author of a paper presenting the results in the March 16 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. The greater shrinkage corresponds to a model of the planet with a much larger iron core, said McKinnon."

I'd love to see an artist's rendering of what those gargantuan cliffs must look like, says the guy who's afraid of heights.

Poor things. I'll ask the obvious - why operate? Since it's almost impossible either will survive, or you'd have to choose one head and lop off the other, why not just leave well enough alone? Life is full of mysteries and miracles.

RSS Feed already exists! It's at the bottom of the page, or http://pipedot.org/atom .

I'll add my voice to the chorus saying this site is headed in the right direction, and it remains really gorgeous to look at. I have no need for a journal/blog, a daily newsletter, or other. I'd appreciate it if the site is responsive (that is, on a small screen, if the CSS design allows the stuff at the right hand side to reposition itself at the bottom). I visit |. regularly on a mix of desktops, smartphones, and tablets. Slashdot was almost unusable on a small screen, and their improvements miraculously made it worse. Soylent is no better. This site does pretty well but there's room for improvement.

In the meantime, how about an offer to help, in a non-coding way? It seems you could use a fleet of editors, each overseeing a topic, to make sure you have a steady stream of content. There are probably a lot of folks eager to help make this site succeed.

Here's another thumbs up for the Kinesis. I bought one and consider it one of the best computing purchases I ever made. I wrote about it here and wrote another bit here about how to get a Kinesis to be useful with emacs. That, with a trackball, feels great.

I've had a hell of a lot less luck with desks and chairs. I've tried raising my desk to no avail, have tried using a yoga ball as a desk chair, have tried raising my monitor, etc. Nothing feels comfortable. No idea what I'm looking for, but I notice my neck getting stiff at the end of the day, so a change in posture would be appreciated. Meanwhile, I set a timer for 30 minute intervals and get the hell out of my chair and do some stretches. Better than nothing.

To all the Soybeans who looked at this site yesterday and cried "waaa, no anonymous posting," that little bit of functionality seems to have been fixed.

Everyone likes to throw around the word community. But to many, it means "I get what I want." We've seen some pretty appalling behavior on Soylent the past couple of days, and the drama has been unbearably painful to watch - embarrassing, really.

This DDoS is childish behaviour who has probably decided he is going to "punish" someone for the transfer of power.

The big take-away is that it is hard for a "community" to organize itself fast enough to do just about anything interesting at all. It takes leadership and dictatorial spirit to force people into organized behavior. Read the Dictator's Handbook if you don't believe it.

These things work better when some budding entrepreneur with a vision quietly builds his/her own thing, and then a community forms around it because they like and see value in it. Like this place, for example. I haven't heard any masturbatory "we're a community, goddammit" blather around here. Face it: A rowdy crowd of violent, pitchfork-wielding nerds is no way to start a business.

Final lesson: this stuff is, after all, a business. In the world of the WWW, someone has to host and manage the code, pay the server costs and the costs of the people who manage software and hardware, and pay bandwidth fees as well. If you want free, then chug down a reality pill and recognize that with the exception of a few vanity sites, the WWW needs to make money to pay for itself. Free means going back to the federated, ownerless model of Usenet, which remains an awesome place to meet and discuss tech with other nerds. And you can't DDoS Usenet, you can't whine about the new interface. You can only choose a Usenet client that suits you and suck up the plain-text goodness. No ads, no Flash, no bling, no images, even. It's Usenet: the worst you can do if you want to behave badly is crapflood, spam, and bitch about other people's posts.

Go get yourself an account on Solani.org Usenet provider and hook your newsreader up to start participating on comp.misc if you don't believe me.

Meanwhile, Pipedot seems to be relatively drama-free. How refreshing.

I like these polls, but would humbly suggest we find something other than the "insensitive clod" phrase, which is too tightly linked with another site that probably has more lawyers than we do, and which is getting tired, anyway. Suggestions, anybody? Here are some of my (lame) ideas.

X ... so pipe down, already
X ... and that's the way we like it!
X ... so get offa my lawn!
X ... and that's the facts
X ... YAWN
X ... ya hipster douchebag
X ... take your poll and shove it
X ... OMG, so bored
X ... because Wikileaks predicted it
X ... because the NSA is watching me.

I like the pipe joke, because it fits the site, but my heart is really set on the hipster douchebag joke, because everything is funnier if you add "ya hipster douchebag" at the end of it. And actually it's about time to start making fun of the NSA, just because it makes the current state of affairs easier to bear.

My humble suggestions.

I'm being a little facetious, but my point is, I don't see any obvious way these thingies are going to have any better longevity than your standard old CD, which seem to self-destruct if you pick them up and ever handle them. Moisture peels away the reflective layer, they scratch, heat warps them, etc. The press release says "better quality" or whatever but doesn't specify.

Given the current shift away from discs and all the moving, breakable parts their readers require, I'm wondering if Sony hasn't missed the boat. Discs aren't cool anymore in the same way 3.5" floppies stopped being cool the moment disc technology arrived, or the way the 3.5" guys used to sneer at the old fashioned, 5 1/4" floppy guys. "Hey, go get yourself some real hardware, eh?"

Ironically, tape seems to be making a comeback, possibly because it has proven itself in a way this new tech hasn't.

Dude - that is absolutely fucking Jesus TittyFucker Christ awesome!

Now that we know profanity works, we can have some meaningful discussion about Oracle's open source efforts! Hot damn.

It's like kicking a cripple. Sure, you can do it, but it's so easy. I usually have lots of unpleasant things to say about Windows, and I run OSX, Linux, and FreeBSD at home.

But I no longer have to badmouth Windows because Windows users are busy enough doing it themselves. Seriously, the amount of hate I'm hearing from people who'd otherwise never even think about installing another OS is incredible. A friend saved for a long time to buy his first laptop, and when he finally bought it and he realized he was forced to buy Win8, not Win7, he was seriously disappointed. To listen to him, you'd think he got sold defective goods.

In a way, he did. I use Win7 at work and it's surprisingly good, though it takes way too much space on a hard drive. But Win8 is awful, absolutely atrocious. Take that you f*cking cripple.

[hey, does this site have a profanity filter?]

My first reaction when I saw this blurb was, 'awesome - this will help.' But on further reflection, it's more of an interesting conversation piece than a technological improvement that is going to make any difference.

I happen to know something about life with malaria. I've lived in Senegal for nearly 4 years and lived in Benin for another 4 before that, and I've also spent 5 in Nicaragua and 1 in Indonesia. So that's fourteen years in malarial countries, and in the case of Benin, extremely malarial. But lack of microscopes isn't really the issue. Even in poor countries like Benin there are medical clinics with doctors, and state hospitals that even the very poor go to. And those clinics have microscopes and labs. Lousy ones, but they're there. Let's say this technology adds another 100 microscopes per country - that's useful, but not huge.

Because equally in short supply are doctors who know how to diagnose and treat malaria, lab technicians who know how to identify and categorize it under the microscope (there are several different strains, and you treat them differently), and of course you need the medicine as well.

So this is cool, and it would be fun to whip up an origami microscope at a cocktail party full of nerds. It might help you catch the eye of a potential love interest. But I suspect its impact will be that this level of creativity and technological advance will lead to *other* advances, with higher impact than this.

Or maybe I'm just jealous because I've never invented anything that cool.

I agree - I attended a university where Sagan had taught, or taught occasionally, and the aura around the guy was supernatural. In fact, he was rarely around and seldomly seen. Good scientist maybe, but his reputation outpaced his abilities, I think.

Just discovered this an hour ago while posting on the Kepler article. Works well! But *thanks* for offering a script-free alternative too. I frequently browse from low-spec browsers and sites that don't work without Javascript usually don't capture me as a user.

The BadAstronomer is a great site - I love almost everything they post. Way to go, kepler: find us some inhabitable worlds quickly, because we're trashing this one as fast as we can! While you're looking, I'll be standardizing my petroleum-rich lifestyle by consuming only pre-packaged things wrapped in non-biodegradable packaging, because science will save my ass!

By the way, each time I log onto this site, there's new functionality. Not sure how this new posting thing works, but it sure looks interesting!

It's not impossible, though it's not ideal: even Exchange allows IMAP functionality, I'm told, though you have to manually make it available. Let's say you have existing Microsoft software ecosystem and want to make a switch. Me, I'd start by changing out Exchange first and let everyone continue to use Outlook as an IMAP client to whatever Linux solution I had on the back end.

But if for some reason they started with the desktops, then they could have conceivably just let Exchange continue as an IMAP server in the gap. Obviously, we could probably learn something by reading the article before speculating, but what fun is that?

I've followed Kolab on and off since at least 2001, when the Kompany was still around (rememeber them? Produced Rekall, the first good GUI MySQL database software for Linux?). Kolab was just getting started and everyone was hot to produce a decent Exchange replacement. Looks like they made huge strides since then - congrats to them.

Sounds interesting to me - I'll be happy for anything other than the Hershey Bar form factor, and if modularity gets us more options, that's good. Sometimes I'm happy with my touch keyboard and sometimes I like the physical keyboard. Perhaps this approach would allow me both. Likewise, I'd be happy to go without a camera.

In fact, if I'm looking for a phone for my daughter, I'd be willing to pay extra for a phone without a camera. Let some other guy's daughter sext herself all over Web 2.0. Those things are a menace.

I've got FreeNAS with the Plex Media Server plug in blasting out my media. The family can watch on their ipads, Nexus tablets, and via a Roku/Plex connected to the TV, different movies all at once. I'm actually stunned at how well it works. Cable TV can now officially kiss my gringo butt.

The Plex app is like XBMC but a bit newer/better. The new Roku runs it. Roku wants me to subscribe to a bunch of channels, which I don't do and don't need to do. The fact it runs Plex and picks up my FreeNAS over wireless is the only trick it needs to do.

I could have saved a few bucks by installing a Chromecast which now also runs Plex, but I was reticent to do so and Plex makes you buy something called PlexPass which sounds suspiciously like an attempt to work me into a subscription model, which I don't want.

That article from 1968 was spectacular! As I wrote on comp.misc, I'm a fan "in theory" of the centralized computing model. Certainly it makes maintenance and admin easier, reduces the chances that some employee will leave your customer database in a strip club/bar, etc. But I have worked for most of the last 10 years in Africa on some really awful bandwidth connections, and here it would be a non-starter.

It's a reminder to me you need resiliency and backup and all this cloud horsesh*t doesn't provide either. If your desktops are in the cloud, one busted telephone line that takes down your ADSL connection buys you a snow day. It just doesn't work.

Personally, I'm still on the "keep the servers in house" bandwagon, because at work they migrated us all to Office365 cloud solution by Microsoft, and it's been pretty imperfect. We've even had some trouble with things like wrong certs blocking access, etc., it's been a hassle and I'm not happy with it.