You're right, not far off. I'd like a "Web server and IRC server" cartridge. Click, turn on, you're online.

I'm most nostalgic for my old C64, and that thing had you at the READY prompt in about a second, I think. Obviously, "LOAD game ,8,1" would take up to 20 minutes if you were unlucky, but man, back in 1985 those were 20 delicious minutes of anticipation. Good times. My greatest hit was a BASIC program that would help you create a dungeons and dragons character, a choice of project that probably solidified my soul into nerddom forever.

Not sarcasm - just, the only pic available as a choice by the little routine that selects some pictures and lets you choose :(

Because someone took the time to submit it to the pipe, and I found it interesting. If you'd like to see other types of articles, you know where the submit button is. Meanwhile, if you don't like the project, feel free not to fund it.

Yeah, me too. I bought a Nexus 7 as an experiment/trial and wound up liking it more than I'd expected. Add a bluetooth keyboard and it does a lot of what I need to do. For serious console work though I go back to my desktop, with a real keyboard, trackball, better apps, etc. For $199 in 2012 it was basically a no brainer.

Y'know, i just went back and had another look at the site and was again impressed by the quality of the articles. I went through the whole NAS section and was stunned by how useful and informative it was. (The comments, on the other hand, were ridiculous. I'd assumed better quality article would lead to more technical and thoughtful discussion. Instead it was pretty lame).

Specifically, many EV owners in the western region (upwards of 60%, according to one California study) - and all the EV owners considered in our analysis - have signed up with their utility to get highly discounted electricity between midnight and 7am, in exchange for a daytime price hike. The sudden surge on the right side of the graph above suggests the behavioral effectiveness of this framework: when EV owners enroll in a time-of-use rate plan, they operate in alignment with it.

Also:

2) EV owners are much more likely than their peers to own solar panels.

Also:

EV rate plan subscribers - with their huge night-time charging spike, bigger and fancier homes, and elevated grid electric consumption in the morning and evening - are a distinctive sort of energy user.
And it appears that there are many more of them on the way.

Agreed - the guy has the right touch of managerial, customer-oriented, trends-spotting, and so on. He has a tech degree and I wonder if he won't be going into some sort of visionary/guidance type post where he helps management prioritize and refine. Sounds like fun, anyway.

Meanwhile, though I wish Anandtech the best, i can't imagine they'll be able to keep it up.

All very good points. There's also the repairability factor: the company I work for regularly services its PCs (boring old Dell and HP boxes), replaces burned network cards and so on. If your ipad goes, you buy a new ipad. There's value in both approaches, but it's not mix-and-match. I think this guy wrote an article he hopes will get the market to respond with some new product that doesn't exist so he can go out and pat himself on the back for being a visionary. I don't see those super-tablets arriving any time soon now, and I'm not convinced this guy even understands the market at the moment.

Glad for the feedback. Maybe someone will post those political articles but I actually disliked that stuff on Slashdot and avoided those articles. When Slashdot got a "politics" tag I actually felt disappointed.

That said, the Submit button is at the top right. Let's see what the Pipe says, as every article has buttons to vote up and down. It may happen anyway!

If it wasn't clear, I didn't add computer sciences, cryptography, coding, and the like because we are already publishing those kind of articles and there's little doubt they're popular. Looking for other disciplines to add to the mix here.

Wow, it sure is. It cuts both ways though: on one hand, you may conclude "people have been bitching about this forever." On the other hand you can conclude, "it's true and a trend that has been continuing for as long as the industrial revolution. What would that guy from 1871 think if he saw modern teens texting each other with two fingers?" Unless it's a sext: he might like that.

I hope you're right, but I'm skeptical. Check out the average post on Reddit, for example, or Youtube. Maybe those are outliers, but holy crapamoly...

It would be nice to have an image format that resizes, but it would also be nice to have the server do the resizing, not the browser. Of course that would be an easy line of attack for DDOS and breaches to the system, so here we go again ...

I think increasingly there's some pride in design and this thing isn't really meant to be hidden under a desk/table. You're right about the wires though: thought the same thing about Apple's new "trashcan Mac."

Wow. Much obliged, then! If I have made one A/C happy, then perhaps it was worth it. :)

I still find myself going back to WindowMaker. Not sure why, but it has everything I need, stays the hell out of my way, and doesn't try to be fancy.

Somebody over at Soylent called the Internet's news reporting a huge echo chamber. "What news sites do you visit?" someone asked, to which the reply was, "Doesn't matter; they're all reporting the same stuff anyway and hardly anyone is producing original content."

I think Slashdot and the Register are both already reporting this, and now I see Soylent has published it as well. Holy crap, what a lot of work for nothing.

The alternative is of course to follow and scour endless, personal blogs. Who's got the time and energy for that?

Hey, be nice! If you remove Windows, who will Linux devs have to copy from? I'm being snarky, but it's more than half true on the interface/GUI front, at least. Although there's a fair bit of aping of Apple these days too. I find the new KDE5 interface to be full of low contrast pastels and thin, sans serif fonts. Looks like iOS. Come on guys, be original!

I for one will be glad when the "Buttons confuse users" craze comes to an end. It's led to a regression in usefulness in so many tools. Why should we be pandering to the mouth breathers? Power users need tools too, ya know. Remember when you actually had to read the manual because the new toy/tool was capable of so much? It's like that's anathema these days. Isn't the current joke that the Gnome3 interface is slowly being reduced to a blank screen with one big button, and the button is deactivated by default, or something like that?

Who's to say - with the right leadership and a bright idea they may even come back. Their Razr phone was the must-have flipphone before iphones changed the market. They're still kind of a nice phone, actually. It's getting tougher to bounce back, but it's not impossible.

I find it hard to believe the huge candybar formfactor smartphones and the sheet of icons you flip and slide are going to be here for ever. There's got to be something better out there, and someone is going to have to discover/invent/impose it. I'd be happy if it were someone other than Apple just because I'm bored with the status quo. Blackberry seems to be out of ju-ju. So, who's going to be the next nuclear bomb in the market place?

Here are a couple of starting points. I'm not a zealot: I use both Linux and FreeBSD and like them for different reasons. The BSDs tend to be more conservative, so instead of systemd you've still got init scripts; it boots more slowly, has less hardware support, so on. The Linux distros evolve more rapidly, but they also sometimes stray into territory (HAL, Udev) that turn out to be a mistake.The absolute classic resource on the question is here, though it's a couple years out of date now.: https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html

BSD projects maintain the entire "Operating System", not only the kernel. This distinction is only marginally useful: neither BSD nor Linux is useful without applications. The applications used under BSD are frequently the same as the applications used under Linux.As a result of the formalized maintenance of a single CVS source tree, BSD development is clear, and it is possible to access any version of the system by release number or by date. CVS also allows incremental updates to the system: for example, the FreeBSD repository is updated about 100 times a day. Most of these changes are small.

This one seems pretty good: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-differences-between-linux-and-bsd/

There is an old saying about BSD vs. Linux: "BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.

Finally, this quote from Nesbitt http://www.nesbitt.ca/freebsd.html agrees with me:

The FreeBSD documentation is available as a constantly updated, well written web handbook (and on paper as well). The handbook covers each and every aspect of the FreeBSD system in a concise, yet thorough, style. The documentation manages the delicate balance of being both a definitive resource for an experienced administrator, and a valuable learning guide for a Unix neophyte. It is written in a style that does not presuppose much familiarity with Unix systems, and covers such basic Unix topics as permissions, but also covers advanced topics such as kernel configuration and tuning, security and encrypted disk partitions.

I find Linux distros have wildly varying approaches to documentation, and I frequently turn first to Google searches. The FreeBSD is far more authoritative, and because the ports packages and kernel/base system are all maintained together as one integral source tree, everything fits together and seems to me to be more professionally managed. Somehow, and it's hard to describe exactly, everything seems more cohesive. But the documentation is a big deal. It's very easy to get instructions from the source on how to do exotic things like set up a PPP server or a SLIP connection, and beyond. That's useful on some systems, but on others you want Linux for hardware compatibility and faster boot times.

Fair enough - but you don't usually go to all the work to add code, just to not eventually release it. Plus, it seems they believe they are solving a real problem in a way that (cough, cough) just happens to earn them some money. On a fresh install, a newly opened tab will have 8 links on the page, but no browser history available in order to present you recent, frequently visited sites. What to do? Oh yeah, sell real estate.

I think Opera does this too, by the way. That allows me to ding Firefox twice: once for this bad idea, and a second time for copying Opera. :)

Maybe that's not so bad. Opera's preset "speed dial" choices are what helped me discover Reddit, which, believe it or not, i'd never heard of.

Took me a minute to figure out "do what I mean." I was thinking, "Deal with it, motherfu ..." Although they're not far apart.

Me too. I've got an aging Bold 9900 and it's some of the best hardware I've ever used. Still love the keyboard, and they've thought out lots of things in the interface and the hardware that even the best Androids haven't even touched.

You can charge it just by sitting it in a dock, for example, whereas my Samsung Note III dock is just a plastic thing with a micro-USB plug sticking up. The blackberry design is so better thought out.

Give me the 9900 with a taller screen, better browser, Android app store, and then take my money!

I'm not sure there's going to be much to watch while you munch on your popcorn. Firfox users are getting sick of all the bullshit and will start deserting the platform. Then they'll limp along a bit until Google decides to stop paying them the few million a year they pay to make Google the default browser.

Then Firefox will use DuckDuckGo as the default browser and try to make that choice into some sort of "power to the people' decision when the reality is that they got screwed.

Then when they can't hire developers, the platform will stagnate, fall behind on security features, and rot away.

Nice work, Mozilla, you bunch of asshats.

It always is!

Off-hand, I'm not sure you'd have to make any compromises at all, other than learning where BSDs put things. On BSD, /bin is for system stuff, and everything you install after initial OS installation goes into /usr/local. So if you build an Apache server, it's in /usr/local/bin and the configs are in /usr/local/etc/apache/ . Meanwhile, sendmail, being part of the initial system, winds up in /bin and /etc/mail/.One interesting question is using cmake and gcc now that FreeBSD has moved to Clang/LLVM. But I'd think those packages are in the ports, so you install them and then work away. According to https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?&t=10076 Matlab is available in the ports collection too. Doesn't look like you'd be affected at all, and there are dozens of WMs to choose from, from Ratpoison all the way up.

I think I'll also ask Bryan - HEY, I just did! - for some kind of dashboard where editors, or maybe everyone, can see how many articles were clicked on or something like that. Most CMSes provide some kind of similar functionality already.

That's kind of what is happening now. Have a look at the history of the feed and note that 80-90% of the articles were submitted and then posted by me. The site currently represents - for better or worse - my interests.

That's a problem, actually. It would be great to have people posting other stuff. In the meantime, hope you guys like astronomy, security, BSD, Bodhilinux, and openSUSE, because that's what you're going to get: ;)

Probably better than it did a year ago. I've just updated a FreeBSD server from 9.0 to 10.0 and one of the major changes is the new package management system: pkgng or something ("next generation"). I'm still finding my way around it, but initial impressions are favorable. I very infrequently have to compile packages these days, so the pkg system is almost indistinguishable from apt-get. I have yet to find a busted port, but give me time, if I try ...

There's a somewhat good discussion of it here: https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?t=45658 and here: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-May/100411.html

There's also the fact that the BSDs are traditionally server, not desktop OSes, and Gnome3 is a very unfriendly, heavyweight desktop with lots of packages and dependencies and high resource demands from the hardware. That makes it unsuitable for servers.

That said, it's apparently running on OpenBSD, which is somewhat of a minor miracle.

Kind of cool that even though he is was a high-up manager, he was also somehow involved in the XWindow system! That's kind of amazing.

Our second dupe? Sweet - when I get to five dupes, Bryan gives me a free cup of coffee. Only 3 to go, c'mon!

Yeah, I think that article was standing to close to all the stuff that came in from Soylent and got washed out to sea in the purge.

OK, glad to hear it! The last few ones had few if any comments and I was thinking no one is reading this stuff. Seems like some way of people indicating if they liked or did not like a story is useful as it shows interest in a subject even if no one comments.

That said, the value of this site over an RSS reader of your choosing is the commentary. If you like the articles about distros, you could just as easily subscribe to Distrowatch's RSS feed and be done with it. The idea of posting it here is to elicit commentary and opinion from our readers. If no one bothers to comment, what's the point? You could simply replace this site with a few RSS feeds and save everyone else the trouble.

This place only works if the articles lead to interesting and informative discussion, and beyond that every reader should make an effort to get the word out to friends and colleagues so the place grows. Link to articles at other places where possible - readers aren't going to find us just by luck. I'm in the habit of linking recently posted articles to Google+ because I don't/won't use Facebook (I'm https://plus.google.com/100052614455936939751/posts at G+ if you're interested), and hope others can do the same on places like Reddit and 4chan and techdirt and so on.

Yeah, thanks for all the stuff you've already submitted to the pipe. I unfortunately don't have the time to go visit Soylent and hand scrape your articles to this site. I barely have time to submit what I already have put into the queue.

I was thinking the same. I actually quite like Win7 and would prefer it over WinXP if I'm installing on a machine with enough space. I'm amazed at how many more gigs on the harddrive Win7 requires. For virtual machines and such I still prefer XP and for some stuff I even try to install Win2000, which is pretty light in comparison.

Makes for easier distribution, too. That said, I live in a place with crappy bandwidth and kind of miss DVD installs. I frequently go buy the disks from a place like osdisks.com or whatever they're advertising on distrowatch, just because it's hard to get an uncorrupted ISO downloaded. It's cool to buy for example the Debian repository and have the equivalent of that whole ports tree on 27 DVDs or something, I forget how big it is. Useful if you live in a place with net that approximates dial-up.

Awright then, now that I know, look for some more astro stuff. I like those subjects too.

Smart point. As volunteer editor, I can guarantee you when an article goes up and doesn't generate any discussion, I think, "hmm, shouldn't post more articles like this." If you haven't seen any astronomy articles here recently, that's why: none of the previous astronomy articles generated any talk. And what's the point of posting articles if they don't generate some feedback?

Perhaps articles can have a thumbs up/down button when posted so people can send feedback to submitters even if they don't care to comment on them? Not posting for our health here: probably all of us also has a day job.

Furthermore, congrats to the Soylent team - the site is looking and getting better every day. You have had some good articles and some good conversations going on there recently.

I also have seen Soylent is struggling with the "not enough articles being submitted and too many of them are off topic or not good" problem too. That's the problem with community-run sites: you need a community and you need them to participate. If Pipedot - or Soylent, for that matter - consists of a bunch of news junkies who come to read but not write, your site is dead in the water.

I think we need to focus on how to get get content on Pipedot. Maybe feedstreams like the Soyfeed (I love that word!) are one approach, but there may be others? This isn't my site and I'm not doing the coding, but just to get the party started, what about things like:

• submit articles by email, using some kind of protocol (first paragraph is the title, second is the intro, third is the link or something). Spam wouldn't be too much of a problem because all articles have to go through an editor anyway
• what about some easy way to go from an RSS reader to a submittal form, like Android's awesome "share via" system that allows you to build various bridges. Or does this mean getting someone to develop an app or equivalent, which would be a totally different and maybe cumbersome coding effort? (but cool/awesome nonetheless)?

A couple of thoughts from one of your volunteer editors:

1. Our current poll shows most of us also read Soylentnews. That's good news - we should be sister sites, not competition, and it's my preference to avoid duplicate content. That's sometimes impossible but I have noticed any article that has also been submitted to Soyent gets no comments, so maybe we should avoid multiple submissions.
2. Pipedot flipped the switch on the Soy feed after (A) the pipe had been dry for a whole week, and (B) I was too busy with my day job and a database project to be able to provide content. If no one submits articles here there aren't going to be any to read. Thanks to the handful of you who do provide content.
3. I noticed the soy feed instantly killed discussion at Pipedot. Because you could comment on the article over at Soylent and have them replicate here, that's what everyone - including yours truly - did. It seems with the Soy feed turned on, Pipedot became nothing more than an alternative GUI to Soylent (like a reader). That makes Pipedot not very useful, particularly because you could read but not comment on articles, or if you did comment, they wouldn't be replicated back.

In general, I like having both Soy and Pipe, and i like it that they're separate. That allows both groups to develop their own personalities and focus, and it allows everyone to see how the differences in moderation etc. lead to different characters of site. I don't see these two sites as competition, as I contribute to both. But I would like to see them diverge a bit, and that will probably happen over time.

Other unintended effects: everyone stopped commenting on Pipedot because if you commented on Soylent they'd replicate to Pipedot, but not the reverse. Also the flood of articles/comments kind of drowned out the Pipedot faithful. This was an interesting technical feat but I'm not sure it benefited the site.

You are absolutely right, and quite insightful. Hoping the comments section will lead to discovery of some of those interesting blogs and less-known sites. The world doesn't need another site that simply aggregates content from the biggies - if you want to know what ArsTechnica is doing, you can go there yourself, methinks.

You're right. But try it - it works! It resolves to .org. But face it, that place hasn't been a dot-org for at least ten years now. If the rapaciouscorporation TLD ever becomes available, I'd be tempted to register it and then assign links to a couple of companies I know. How funny would it be to own exxon.rapaciouscorporation and have it autoresolve; repeat for other companies that seem more interested in making money than in offering decent, customer-based service?

No wonder you posted anonymously. I'd want anonymity too if I'd posted such a weak attempt at trolling. I'm no fan of Windows but I'm also not blinded by fanboyism, thinking by using a niche OS I'm safe. You might be *safer* on another OS, but you're not *safe.* Security takes a lot of effort, no faint amount of smarts, and a bit of annoyance to the user. Windows has problems, but there isn't an OS out there that doesn't have vulnerabilities or can be/has been cracked.

There are a hell of a lot of busted Linux installs out there, and that's just the start of it. This DoxBox sounds pretty neat.

There's some excellent commentary over at HackerNews. Looks like the UI is universally hated (I didn't think it's so bad).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8212885

Within that thread is a link to a LWN article worth reading, about some security flaws and the project owner's somewhat arrogant refusal to fix them. Looks like calibre may be open source in that you can see the source code. But the project owner isn't overly open to taking bug reports, it seems. Oh well, a one-man project! He's not the only one!

Somebody - maybe you? - mentioned this on an earlier post. I'm surprised! I don't have a great machine - Intel Core Duo, I think, with 2G of RAM. It runs just fine. I wouldn't want to run it on a Pentium 4 I'm sure. I'm not disputing your experience, just surprised. I think it runs a huge number of complicated Python scripts behind the scenes.