You forgot Dice buying Slashdot, SourceForge, and FreeCode/FreshMeat for only $20M.

Seems almost insignificant with all the recent acquisitions being in the Billions.

The Internet is full of one-off examples of silly over priced auctions and purchaces. This doesn't nessesarily mean that such an item could command that price again, but more like some fool with too much money decided to blow some of it on something they thought would be funny, or would give them the impression of novelty.

• Potato Salad Kickstarter ($55,492)
• Pretty much any posting on Rich Kids of Instagram ($168k bar tab?)
• Marilyn Monroe's "Happy Birthday Mr. President" Dress ($1,267,500)
• Lock of Elvis Presly's Hair ($115,000)
• Any painting by Jackson Pollock (or any number of other "artists")

And so on...

Announced at the same time as Cisco BGP routers overflowing and causing problems on the Internet...

I was on the ropes about blowing away my ChromeBox drive too. I even bought a second M.2 SSD so I wouldn't mess up the original drive. But, Google offers a really simple backup and restore from USB thumb drive directly from their UEFI.

Lol, I never knew he actually named his daughter after Princess Zelda. Still making us laugh posthumously...

They need to release the Pixel 2.

The original was great, but Sandy Bridge is now 3 generations behind.

And this, and this, and this, and this.

In other words. :)

Example of previous generation USB connector brain-damage.

• A single USB-A connector couldn't draw enough power, so they added a second USB-A on a Y cable to get extra power.
• The Micro-B connector didn't have enough space for the extra pins for USB 3.0 speeds, so they added a kludge to the side of the Micro-B making this "micro" connector freaking huge.

Sign in. I don't know how to reliably count votes of ACs.

Thank you for reporting the error; you found a bug! (now fixed)

Your vote was indeed being correctly counted (which is why the number of votes changed) but the redirect back to the comments page was using your local time of your user account instead of UTC time. Thus it was trying to navigate to a date that was off by one (2014-08-12 vs 2014-08-11)

Interesting that they are using the grsecurity LSM.

Sorry... As a 33 year old addicted to a few computer-based video games myself (Starcraft, Warcraft, SimCity, etc), I did not realize that those "older-age-gamer" stats extended to some console systems as well.

I personally have never owned an Xbox, or know anyone that has, so my only impression of them come from some of the TV advertisements that I have seen such as this one that depicts a number of families playing the games. In these official ads by Microsoft, aside from a few parents, the average age appears to be somewhere in the 10-12 range. Perhaps these family friendly ads full of youngsters where mainly a stab at Nintendo's Wii successes and not at the general population of actual users of the console. Forgive my unfair generalizations.

It looks like something targeted to little kids.

And "Xbox" isn't targeted towards little kids?

Indeed. Biometric login supporters always get this wrong and is one of my personal pet peeves. Fingerprints and retina scans are not passwords! In terms of login, you can narrow information sources into two simple categories.

Things you have

• Name (or username)
• Email address
• Fingerprint
• Retina Scan
• Simple ID Card

This first list is mainly public information that nearly anyone can obtain (or guess) to use as a unique identifier. Nothing on this list should ever be used as a "password substitute."

Things you know

• Password (or PIN)
• Shared secret

This second list is secret information that is not public or easily obtainable. These are the things that could be used as a password.

To improve security, simply include an element from each list. A common example is: withdrawing cash from an ATM requires both a card and a PIN.

I'm looking forward to getting a 4k computer monitor. My phone and tablet both have sexy screens, why does my monitor have fewerpixels than it did 10 years ago? (was 1920x1200 now 1920x1080)

Both ASUS and Samsung now have reasonably priced models (under $600), but they are still TN and 27". The nice IPS 30" models are still in the thousands, so I'm eagerly waiting for their prices to drop a bit more.

The battery life seems to be comparable to that of other contenders, too. Asus claims run times up to nine hours on a single charge, which matches my subjective impressions based on casual use.

iPad mini Retina: 9.8 hours, 23.8 Wh battery
Memo Pad ME176C: ~9 hours, 15 Wh battery

Mainly due to Intel's lithography advantage. Bay trail at 22 nm vs Apple A5 at 32 nm

Also interesting blog on upcoming wayland support in KDE.

So is KDE5 available in the default package sources of Ubuntu based distros? Or do you have to wait until October? Or go through some exotic manual installation? Or maybe a PPA?

MicroXwin is a non-free kernel module. Here is the LICENSE file:

Following files :
libX11.so.6.3.0
libXcursor.so.1.0.2
libXext.so.6.4.0
libXrender.so.1.3.0
x11.ko
are the intellectual property of VolksPC LLC, CA, USA (http://www.volkspc.org).
These are made available for evaluation purpose or non-commercial use.
For commercial use please contact info@volkspc.org.

With all the emphasis they get in sci-fi movies and tv shows, I really thought we'd have more robots by now. But as a marketable product, there just aren't that many things that they can actually do today.

Robotic maid? Not quite there yet - unless you count Roomba. Unfortunately, the Roomba products haven't progressed at all. They are the same designs from 15 years ago with hardly any computational or mechanical advances. If they followed the same Moore's Law curve as the rest of the computer industry, they should have been bipedal androids that can walk and talk by now. Instead, they are the same dumb "Drive forward until you hit something, then backup, take a slight turn, and try again" that they have always been. Although the company claims to have sold over 10 million of the devices, they have almost nothing to show for it.

Maybe Intel can shake things up a little with their Jimmy robot.

When a coworker that works in the same room as you comes in reeking of smoke, you suffer because of their habit.

Unfortunately, speaking from experience.

Seems like both Objective C and Swift are missing from the poll.

Batteries last longer if they are charged slowly. I used to be a fan of radio controlled cars (the enthusiast kind, not the ones you find at Toys'r'Us.) You realize, quite early, that battery packs that you charge with the "quick 15 minute" charger loose potency much faster than the packs that you charge with the "slow overnight" charger. The same applies to the full scale electric vehicle batteries. In fact, the manual even warns that frequently using the extra quick charge ports that you find at 3^rd party charging stations will degrade your battery.

Lithium Ion batteries also last longer if you do not constantly bring them to 100% and 0%. Ideally, just like in your cellphone or your laptop, you keep the charge in the nice middle area. The Leaf has a convenient "80%" button that stops the charge before the battery gets too full. The first low range warning beeps occur at around 16 miles remaining mark. Keeping the battery within the 20-70 mile zone limits the range a bit, but increases the life expectancy of the battery.

That would be the <pre> tag that ACs on slashdot abuse a lot too. Although it does tend to make the post stand out, it is not the ideal use of the tag. I kept it as an allowed tag mainly from tradition with slashcode and possibly for formatting short blocks of source code inside a comment.

Looks like I might need to break with tradition.

system that could be booted from a floppy disk and run from memory

Not long from now, in fact it may have happened already, a substantial portion of the population will have never used or even seen a floppy disk.

On the next *ubntu release (14.10), I'll have to retry KDE again. I'll admit that it's been many years since I last played with it.

I fondly remember the math department at my university running KDE version 1 off a dual core 400Mhz Hershey Bar Pentium connected to several hundred X thin clients. I probably spent more time tinkering with the KDE desktop than learning whatever math program they where trying to make us use in that lab.

So they are cutting 18,000 jobs, mostly from Nokia divisions not working on Microsoft compatible products.

Errr... seems the Developers! chant was from another video clip. Monkey dance still a monkey dance though.

Ballmer's nickname arose from his infamous monkey dance video where he screams Developers! Developers! Developers! while dancing like a (rather chubby) monkey on stage at a Microsoft event.

Sorry, didn't have time to write up a proper article.

I've always struggled with the subtle differences between the slash-style moderation ratings. I mean, how much difference is there between "Insightful" and "Interesting" anyway - and, since it's the integer score that determines the comments visibility, does it really matter?

TL;DR; Use "Underrated" and "Overrated" - These are the generic "+" and "-" options. Articles will never be tagged with either of these two strings but will increase/decrease its score by one point.

It's only a matter of time before needing to go in the 3rd dimension like they've already started doing with NAND flash. In fact, during the last few years, semiconductor companies have tested out new process nodes with NAND flash before atempting them with complex structures like CPU cores. With rows and rows of identical gates lined up in a perfect grid, this makes sense as it's probably a lot easier to spot defects and implement improvements.

So, if you want a preview of what CPU process nodes will be like in a few years, simply look at what NAND flash is doing today.

Being able to root your tablet or smart watch is often a good thing. You gain more control over the device that the manufacturer greedily stole from you whilst trying to cage you in their walled garden. Of course, these devices almost always act as clients and do not have server-like services "listening" on a network port.

A router or light bulb, however, do listen to a port on the network. Being able to remotely root these types of devices are definitively a bad thing and an obvious security vulnerability that needs to be patched.

I agree with the GNOME sentiment, but one of the strengths of the GTK+ toolkit was that it wasn't limited to just GNOME - it was a standalone library that an alternative DE could easily use. XFCE and LXDE are example desktops, while a rather large majority of GTK+ applications didn't touch the GNOME libraries at all.

Scientific progress on producing energy is already a relatively solved problem. Our major hurdle now, is storing energy.

If every building covered their roofs with solar panels, we'd have plenty of free renewable energy. At least until the sun went down or a cloud comes out. We desperately need a reliable and cost effective way of storing surplus electricity to cover these coverage gaps.

The code is easy enough to fork, but the trick is to have an active developer team that can then continue its development. GTK has traditionally been developed by paid Redhat employees who also work on Gnome.

Mate is a project to maintain and continue development of Gnome 2 (including GTK2) and seems like the most likely place for such a task.

There is a stupidly long video on youtube about the infeasibility of solar roadways. Although there are a few good points, I'm not really sure why the video goes on to poo-poo the idea for 30 minutes. Or why the dissenters insist that it's a project to convert every inch of asphalt in the world to solar instead of just a few private parking lots. Or why they don't give constructive criticism instead of essentially calling the creators idiots.

Regardless, I can see why people have such a negative view on the solar roadway fund-raiser after sitting through that video.

32 layers at 40 nanometers per layer is still very thin. :)

• Mukii Zipo Hard Drive Sleeve - Not really required, but protects the bare drive a bit.
• INEO USB3 Hard Drive Dock - Pretty Aluminum base, 100MB+ transfer speed, unfortunately only works up to 3TB (my 4TB WD Red drives do not work!)

The most common model of this type of hard drive dock is the Thermaltake BlacX line. The original models all have over 600 reviews at newegg. The updated USB3 version has fewer favorable reviews, but many other manufacturers have now come out with similar products.

Twenty years ago, I began saving videos and clips that I downloaded from the Internet. Back then, dial-up modems and crappy video codecs meant that anything you downloaded took days and was a great accomplishment once successfully transferred. Obviously, I wanted to save the downloads, so I started looking for archiving options.

Hard drives back then where far too small, so I started to burn the videos off to CD media. The blank CDRs where cheap and could be bought by the spindle. A few years later, DVD burners became available and were a welcome upgrade (1 DVD could hold about 7 CDs worth of data) All in all, I burned approximately 600 CDs and 400 DVDs. Many of the CDs have started to deteriorate - the thin foil on the top of the disk just flakes off. The DVD media has protective plastic layers on both sides and have endured a little better, but read errors still occur on all of these 10+ year old optical disks.

Spinning 3.5" hard drives are the new best bet for large archives. I could store an entire spindle-worth of CDR disks on a single large capacity hard drive. Of course, loosing one of these hard drives to a failure made relying on a single copy a significant risk. Nearly 100% of all hard drives (around 20 drives) that I purchased with capacities between 80GB and 1TB failed within 5 years. I recovered from nearly all failures by simply storing 2 copies of all the data. Each drive was purchased in pairs - one drive as the master while the other was an offline full copy backup.

I tried creating large arrays of hard drives, but there are significant limitations and costs to doing this in a single system. After experimenting with a number of different setups with large 3ware raid cards as well smaller consumer raid cards, I've come to the conclusion that an ideal system should not include more than about 8 hard drives per computer. Trying to find which "bad disk" is spewing SATA errors to the console in a 16 drive array is just not fun. Scaling storage beyond 8 drives should involve a second computer and a network filesystem over Ethernet.

But what if you don't need all of the data online all the time? Instead of keeping all the disks spinning all the time, why not place the drives into external USB enclosures and only turn them on when needed? This system worked great for me - up to about 20 drives. You see, USB doesn't have enough power to run a 3.5" hard drive. So 20 external USB enclosures + 20 wall wart power adapters + 20 power cables + 20 USB cables + daisy chaining multiple USB hubs and their associated power adapters = one giant rats nest of wires. I tried to salvage this system with a custom made wooden cabinet with 18 front mounted switches, an series of internal USB hubs, and individual cubby-holes for each drive. It worked, but the low speed of USB2 (less than 20MB/s) as well as incompatibility of the external USB enclosures on drives larger than 2TB has caused me to abandon this system.

My latest attempt at archival is simply storing caddy-less hard drives on the shelf. It's so simple, I have to wonder why I bothered with any of the other approaches. Now that hard drives have ditched the IDE ribbon cable for SATA connectors, a new breed of USB enclosures have sprung up. These devices are USB3 (nearly as fast as the drive itself), can easily be upgraded (to support multi-terabyte drives), and simply accept a bare drive into its slot at the top of the unit. Increasing storage capacity is simply a matter of buying another drive or two. I did, however, end up purchasing several dozen hard drive sleeves (just a few dollars each) to protect the drives from dust and minor vibrations while on the shelf.

Hmm, I had never even heard of Orkut. The webpage, of course, is now just a redirect to a support.google.com page about the shutdown notice. A quick trip to the wayback machine shows a standard looking google login dialog and not much else.

For desktop:

1. C
2. C++

For web:

1. Javascript
2. PHP or Python

For mobile:

1. Java (Android)
2. Swift (iOS)

There is a similar site called Ohloh that has been active for a few years now: https://www.ohloh.net/

Ohloh is a free, public directory of Free and Open Source Software and the contributors who create and maintain it. Ohloh Code is a publicly available, free code search site that indexes most of the projects in Ohloh.

Ohloh is editable by everyone, like a wiki. All are welcome to join and add new projects, and to make corrections to existing project pages. This public review helps to make Ohloh one of the largest, most accurate, and up-to-date FOSS software directories available. We encourage contributors to join Ohloh and claim their commits on existing projects and add projects not yet on Ohloh, to assemble a complete profile of all their FOSS code contributions.

Ohloh is not a forge - it does not host projects and code. Ohloh is a directory, a community, and analytics and search services. By connecting to project source code repositories, analyzing both the code's history and ongoing updates, and attributing those updates to specific contributors, Ohloh can provide reports about the composition and activity of project code bases, and aggregate this data to track the changing demographics of the FOSS world.

So, if you "borow" other people's computers for cryptocoin mining, make sure to set the processes to run at a lower priority as to not affect the system's legitimate users.

Now if you could only hide their electric bill and somehow silence the squealing little fans that come on most of those little NAS boxes...

From: http://www.benzinga.com/news/14/06/4647356/underlying-tech-and-pricing-concerns-scorch-amazons-fire-phone

Assuming the purchase of the recommended 1GB Plan for the 32GB Fire phone, and not including taxes and additional fees, the cost for the phone equals $199.00 + ($65.00 x 24 months) + $99.00 for 1 year of prime membership (using the current promotion of one year free) = $1858.00.

LWN being Linux Weekly News.

I like the approach taken by LWN. Offer a subscription (starting at $3.50 per month) for full access to all articles. Once an article is over 2 weeks old, allow access to everyone.

I guess this also means that Dice will trim off Slashdot when the page views get too low. The comment counts of Slashdot stories have been steadily dropping for the past few years, even before the beta and alt-slashdot thing from earlier this year. One could probably plot a graph and get a pretty good end time estimation.

SourceForge will pass the mark first, though. Ever since they've allowed obnoxious ads that look like download buttons on their download pages and malware to their hosted packages, that site seems to be universally hated. Most sane projects have moved to GitHub and I expect that transfer to continue.

The new Firefox OS is actually pretty neat, development wise. Instead of having to learn custom languages and tool kits, they use standards-based web technologies. Anyone familiar with current web development will immediately go: "Hey, I know this!" when looking at how to make an app for their new phone. Or, at least that's how I felt when I thumbed through it.