It's like xkcd knew to put this out a few days ago. So that we could all repost it today!

I find it amazing watching a 1-2 year old child successfully use a tablet or other gadget then try the same pitch to zoom on a dead tree magazine.

When I was in college, the school would kick you out of the program if your GPA dropped below a certain threshold in the core classes (science, math, etc) and higher threshold for classes in your field (computer science for me.) Furthermore, the thresholds where quite high, 3.0 and 3.5, I believe.

The school allowed anyone to "drop" a class without any GPA penalty if done by a certain date. This led to the mass-abandonment of the harder classes midway through the semester. After this date, a lecture hall of 300 calculus (or whatever) students instantly became less than a hundred.

Not formated in story form. Sorry ^^

Matt Angels' post seems to have answered most of the dangling questions.

Yes. Goto your account settings page and uncheck the "Enable JavaScript" option. At the moment, the server-side rendering defaults to "expand everything" but the collapse logic will soon be available as a threshold setting there as well.

Done. The "Enable JavaScript" checkbox in your settings page is now honored across the board. The site won't use (or even download) a single line of JavaScript with the option turned off.

Interesting, I always associated it with Calvin and Hobbes.

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/02/14

Those changes are set to be pushed either later tonight or early tomorrow.

Ya, that s'qute site is pretty slick. I'd suggest everyone checking it out, if you haven't yet.

Ya, I'd say wait until the SN staff post a formal response to the whole thing.

A long time ago, Before Compact disks, I shall call this period "BC", people made due with analog recording devices. Then came the enlightenment of the optical disk. And there was much rejoicing. Much storage was available for pr0n and pictures of cute animals playing the piano. But the users soon fell unwell, for the disk formats of old could not support the massive needs of dvd::rip and MakeMKV. Now cometh the Archival Disk, I shall call this period "AD", and again there was much rejoicing.

I think, thus far, the trig CAPTCHA on the sign-up form may have averted the first round. Now, if I could only find some wood to knock on...

And don't forget to salt them too! Lots of people always seem to forget the salt.

Let's hold off on this for a bit. I'm not sure adding to the drama pool is the best approach atm.

I played the recent Sim City reboot (despite the whole controversy around the always-online requirement.) At least for that game, once the popularity decreased enough, they eventually allowed to an "offline" play mode. Here's hoping they continue along that path and remove all the required-online-bits before they give up all support for it (so that it won't be worthless in a few years.)

At Soylent's staff meeting last week they agreed to forbid editors (just editors, not members) from cross-posting stories to the different news-for-nerds sites. This had the obvious effect of reducing new story submissions on Pipedot. Of course, some stories are just too popular to not get reported everywhere, and I have no problems with dupes slipping through.

I have to admit, though, it's a little annoying to find a worthy news item, write up a story about it, submit it, then notice that the green/red sites already have a similar story posted.

If an atrocity like this persists, then what next? Allowing "X Windows" to pass?

Depends on the dock. Some of my older USB2 docks have a 2 TB limit, while by nearly-brand-new USB3 dock complains at anything over 3 TB.

Because most onboard SATA ports allow hot swap, you can get a passive internal dock like this that will just pass the electrical signal through without messing with it.

"ings" - http://www.itworld.com/open-source/407290/wind-river-outfits-vxworks-internet-things

I think the link is missing a few characters at the end.

I think the link is missing a few characters at the end.

Code will be on pipecode.org when it's ready.

Yes, the dropdowns do allow you to moderate a comment. However, they do not "disappear" afterwards like on the green site. You can freely change your vote (until the story archives.)

I was under the impression that slashdot started at zero as well. If you have good karma, however, you get a karma bonus of +1 added to your comment. The karma system here isn't finished yet.

Kolab?

My ASUS transformer tablet has an HDMI out that I've connected to a TV to watch a movie or two on. The best I could manage was 720p though. Plus, the hardware acceleration can't always keep up with the high-end encoding settings and it skips. I've tried Atoms (45nm) and AMD Brazos (40nm) with mixed results as well.

Since a real desktop-grade processor can decode full HD in software without breaking a sweat and still only use 10-15 watts at the wall, I've kinda given up on the whole "low end" / "low power" HTPC setup.

Here is a cool article (from 1968!) describing this what-is-old-is-new-again phenomenon and how it relates to display processors.

It's more relevant for the current X Window / Wayland efforts than full desktop virtualization, but it always gives me a chuckle how such things never seem to change.

Oh nice, 22nm bay trail atom with 2.5" drive spot, 4 watts at idle.

IRC

Will be XMMP

wiki

Built into the site (instead of the old term "journals")

Bug Tracker

Now up at: http://bugs.pipedot.org/

See comment #104. More characters will be added when it's ready.

Nope, same blue (#506890) that I've been using for over 15 years.

Not quite there yet.

I'd prefer not just a single "winner" but several choices that are keeping competing with each other and keeping the other side in check.

-Sent from my iPhone while reading websites on my Android tablet

and changed the way NASA handles shuttle missions to this day

It looks like they "handled" shuttle missions by retiring them :)

blockquote added added to the list of allowed html tags

I just added the first set of "editor" functions for publishing/closing submissions. I hadn't done a "Call-for-editors" yet because of the lack of such tools.

Scott has already volunteered to help with some content/submissions, and I'd gladly welcome others that have some time to contribute.

preview for submissions added

My current HTTPS certificate is valid for pipedot.org (and www.pipedot.org) only. I'm in the process of getting a wildcard cert (*.pipedot.org) so that the subdomains (yourusername.pipedot.org) will work over HTTPS, but the validation process will take another few days.

Yes. Editors get to fix typos, check links, and correct grammar before hitting the publish button.

For long stories, such as book reviews (and probably this one), Slashdot would use a short synopsis of the story (they call it the "titletext") to display on the front page feed. This way, the front page entry isn't overly long, but it still gives you an option to click the story for the full review.

I had been debating adding such a feature but now it's looking like it really is the right thing to do.

Mainly because there have been no story submissions. A site relying on user-submitted stories kinda needs users to submit them :P

Submit a story

See the list of submitted stories waiting to be published

Chips and Dip

Hot grits and Natalie Portman

1. what syntax to use to format the submission?

Simple HTML. See #103

2. where to report bugs?

feedback@pipedot.org

The "Content-Type" header has been: "text/html; charset=utf-8" (as well as the equivalent meta tag) since the first day.

As for posting comments, I'm currently being "overly safe" and only allowing keys that can be typed on a US keyboard (minus the ampersand). The idea is that I eventually loosen the rules a bit for most western languages and useful symbols (like euro, pound, and yen.)

The full set is just a huge potential source of abuse with non-printing characters, right-to-left switching, and CJK characters. Within minutes of Soylent News adding it, for example, people where posting pages of braille and other crap.

Tags: a b i strong em ul ol li pre

Attributes are also cleaned, so, for example, the "a" tag only allows "href"

I have a WYSIWYG editor too, just waiting to get the user settings pages finished so I can make it optional and not scare off the no-script people.

Done.

My Dwolla email is bryan@pipedot.org

Also added a section to the FAQ for it.

If anyone wants to rewrite this, please go for it. I expanded his other submission quite a bit before posting it, but I'd prefer to code the website than do some major editing ATM.

Preview added.