I love it.

Your developers should be mindful of the target systems. If they're not, they're doing it wrong. Your testers should have systems with the target specs. If they don't, they're doing it wrong.

Even if you have all those programs running, most of 'em should be [mostly] swapped out while not being actively used. If they're not, you're running the wrong OS.

Computers are so powerful that I do all my development work on a laptop - and it runs like a dream. Even if I had 100 windows open and they all took 50MB of memory and were all fully active all the time, I'd still have several GIGABYTES to do real work in. I mean - just typing that shit blows my mind, because a decade ago that was hard to imagine, and two decades ago it was unfathomable.

When I started in college, emacs was still jokingly said to stand for Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. Because 8 meg could easily cause you to swap - and because emacs was so HUGE!

Those days are gone.

I figure that almost all of that is the chromium base. nodejs is in there, too - but it can't be all that big.

So I guess I'd chalk it up to "lazy" - but I figure that once you cover the stuff you want to show, you probably don't want to go trying to tear out all the stuff you don't need.

As always, if you're worried about memory on your development machine, you're doing something wrong - gigs are practically free. I don't think I'd try to deploy Atom to an embedded system :-)

It takes a bit of editorial control from the get-go to ensure your site looks good.

And that's where I disagree. I think it takes a LOT of editorial control - rejecting a LOT of articles.

While I respect your opinion, I believe the same sentiment was shared by some members of society about computers back in the day. If we had stopped using them or trying to innovate when computers still relied on vacuum tubes, where would we be today?

I guess I don't think there are any real parallels in that analogy. There were very very few naysayers about computers. It was clear to just about everyone that they would serve a purpose. There was a lot of doubt and terrible guesses about how much they would do or what they would be used for.

SolarRoadways solves exactly 2 problems:
* something to drive on
* power
It's hard for me to imagine them solving any more [real] problems. Like -- really hard. I mean, those are the goals, right? Those are the end goals.

There exists N solutions for those 2 problems, for example:
* asphalt
* solar panels (on roofs, over parking lots, etc)

There is no way, at all, that SolarRoadways will ever be price or performance equivalent to either of those. Ever*. By orders of magnitude.

We should invest time and money into existing solutions rather than this non-solution.

* nano-tech will change everything in unpredictable ways. We would do better to invest in that research, for example.

And that's a fine idea, but I don't think it serves the general purpose of giving a site a reason to exist. I don't think "post whatever you want" and let users filter out the crap is a good plan. I think a site needs a focus to be useful to anyone.

And sure, there will be topics around that focus that people will want to filter - but I'm pretty sure that there already exist plenty of sites that cover everything and make users do the filtering.

just in case any new pipers haven't seen it, or maybe you just live under a rock or in your parent's basement:

Or marybe you can do math.

Look, you want solar power? (and you should) Put panels on your roof.

Want solar parking lots? Put panels OVER the parking lot.

Both of these are easy, cost effective, and not experimental.

Solar roadways is an expensive pipedream distraction, not a solution.

As I mention in another post: real geek articles, and not too many. Not the crap that spouts on /. or SN.

I like pipedot because it seems to be tech focused and real.

I dislike soylent because it seems to be random. Seriously, TSA articles and (from today): "Why Does Everyone Look Hotter in Sunglasses?"

I don't want 20 stories/day about crap. If I wanted that, I'd read . I want 0-5 stories a day about real geek stuff.

To be fair to your father, I think that ADA has improved in the past couple of decades (to toss out a wild guess). Certainly it improved a lot in the 90's. I had kind of a crappy time with it in the late 80's. Beta compiler with bugs. Very frustrating.

I don't care for the language because it doesn't subclass the way that I like.

Still, it has a bunch of really cool features, and as a learning tool it has a lot to offer.

The only time I would recommend starting with JavaScript is if that's all you ever want to do - write (crappy) JS code for web pages.

If you want to learn to program, then I'd recommend starting with something simple and then adding to it. I started my college education with Pascal, and I can't think of a reason that was a bad choice then, or would be now. But very soon thereafter I did some of:
* C
* ADA
* Prolog
* lisp
* Assembly (68000)

These days I would probably recommend starting with something like pascal - simple, no (c style) pointers, no OO. And then
* C (understand the machine)
* Maybe some assembly - but maybe not
* Something OO (Java, python, ruby)
* Something crazy (Prolog)
* Something DI (maybe javascript)

You could do a lot worse than http://pragprog.com/book/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks once you have the fundamentals.

I use OSX's Time Machine to a local network drive, and I love it.

But I also want to do something offsite, and I haven't figured that part out, yet.

Huh. Yeah, I guess I never came across that - but I can see where that'd be an issue.

Well, good on 'em, then!

Maybe I'm old.

I don't get it. VT100 support. Check. Good to go, right? What else do you want from your console?

Not good enough? Fire up emacs and console from there.

What more is there?

NeXTSTEP

I used to use freshmeat a bit. I guess back in the .. 90's? But searching improvements (google, etc) and distribution packaging improved immensly in the past 15-20 years.

Sad to see it go - but just for nostalgia reasons.

Is there anyone around here that'll actually miss it, functionally?

Yeah, doesn't seem like an iPhone killer. And if it can't kill and iPhone, it certainly can't kill other Androids.

Seems like it's pretty obvious, but it's been a long time coming. Nice.

I should say, re: link to the poll. I arrive at this site from the RSS feed, and land directly in the article. So I don't see the poll on the front page.

Maybe polls should be added to the RSS feed. But certainly a link to the poll from the article wouldn't hurt.

If you talk about a poll, link to the poll.

Ugh. I can't vote - not because it doesn't work, but because they are not boolean answers.

I want to see all the things listed on the poll. But by "politics", I mean a really really small subset and I mean only quality articles. For example, I don't want to see who is suing who - it takes nothing to bring suit. I want to know when there are meaningful decisions, or meaningful decisions are about to be made.

The same is true on all the subjects.

Firefox does not load this module directly. Instead, we wrap it into an open-source sandbox . In our implementation, the CDM will have no access to the user's hard drive or the network. Instead, the sandbox will provide the CDM only with communication mechanism with Firefox for receiving encrypted data and for displaying the results

So they are adding a way to load a module that supports DRM playback. They are not adding DRM to Firefox. They are adding DRM capabilities to Firefox. I think that's an important distinction.

Rockin. Good on ya for adding this.

I do HTML every day[ish]. Doesnt mean I want to manually add tags in a comment.