Il y a une logique derrii¨re ce "Je ne sais pas"?

Google already has everything else. If I give them this, they'll probably have enough to make a robot to replace me in my family!

I am not sure that image has a whole lot to do with the story. :p

No doubt you will also be screaming for kids to get off of said lawn. :)

I don't think there's any argument for the ridiculousness of e-sports that can't be applied to real sports, to be honest. In both cases you are passively watching people much, much better than you compete together in some activity you like to engage in. People like to watch because they are able to marvel at the skill on display, discuss tactics and events with their friends, cheer for their favourites, and generally feel like some part of a community.

It's also crossing into the real world. There are many pubs around the world which will display e-sport events on their screens, and friends will gather to watch the games the same way they'd watch soccer or hockey

As far as the economics go, this is interesting. Valve's The International 4 event for DOTA 2, which was last week, had a prize pool of 10 million $ for the top 8 teams, but that was entirely founded through in-game purchases by the players. I think e-sports still have work to do to attract sponsors. Typically, computer hardware companies have been happy to contribute some money, but ideally you want events to be sponsored by the big ones: Coke, McDonalds, cable companies, etc. I think that with young people who have grown up on these games aging, this will soon be a reality.

However, that's just big events. Twitch is a whole lot more than that. There are many people who just watch players stream their gaming sessions because they want to improve their own play, learn about new games or generally just hang out with friends and chat, with the game being like a show running on a TV in the background. All these smaller streams taken together add up to a whole lot of advertising money. At any time there are hundreds of thousands of people watching stuff on Twitch. I think this is a great move by Google because they now essentially have a monopoly on this market. However, I fear their overzealous practices when it comes to copyright will ruin Twitch. I'm hoping someone else will start a service to compete, but given the dominance of youtube, a service that has been the source of many complaints recently, I'm not holding my breath.

I don't really think it's about not wanting to think, it's mostly about wanting to be able to find what you want as fast as possible. A program that includes everything will naturally add a lot of noise which will make it harder to find the option you need. Obviously you also need a basic set of features if you're gonna do any work, in that sense I perfectly understand the frustration with designers who make things "clean" at the cost of functionality.

The average user does want to think: he wants to think about the task at hand. I'd rather spend my brain's processing power dealing with whatever I wanted to do than to use it trying to figure out my tools. Yes, you can discover things you might not have expected when you are given complex tools, but an enterprising spirit would have sought out those advanced techniques anyway.

This is why I prefer to deal with those things using extensions, or simply choosing to install more advanced software if needed. To me a program like thunar is really striking the perfect balance: it does all that an average user might want, provides more niche functions in an unobtrusive fashion and is extensible as well

Isn't the unix philosophy to do one thing, and to do it well? I like that way of thinking. :)

I guess you can tell I'm a vim user, not an emacs one. :)

I'll have you know, I was born without a nose and find this deeply offensive!

Fo' real though, I actually kind of dislike how cluttered most KDE apps are. I don't consider it a good thing to include everything and the kitchen sink into a program. I'd rather be given options for realistic use cases. So that's why I tend to prefer the Gnome stuff (that and the fact that they pull less libraries; have they fixed that?). If a piece of software doesn't do enough for me, I'll look XFCE's way or try to find a GTK non-gnome app that has what I need. So for example, they made nautilius pretty useless, so I'm running thunar. But when it comes to music players, I really just want a play button and a slider.... So the gnome player is fine by me.

I'd prefer if KDE programes were more extendable, rather than being cluttered by default.

There are already companies like Stardock capitalizing on this by offering paid software to change the look and behaviour of your desktop. There's clearly demand.

Betteridge's law makes life so simple.

In this case, I'm not sure why anyone should be excited about an update that makes it easier to ignore new features. They still have a very schizophrenic interface. And that start menu is a mess.

I'll stick to linux where I can decide what window manager or desktop environment I'll use.

If you'll remember, their initial announcement didn't quite hit the mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbWgUO-Rqcw People were disappointed that games were almost a footnote, and such focus was put on the Xbox's TV-related functions. Since then, Microsoft has turned around on a bunch of issues. I see this sutdio closing as their final admission of defeat when it came to their pre-launch strategy. Given that the last E3 was 100% games for Microsoft, with no bullshit, I'd say this is just a sign that they are focusing on games. Mind you, this is a failure for Microsoft, since they did not enter the games market to make games: the Xbox was always a trojan horse through which Microsoft would enter (and take control of) your living room. Bringing the Xbox back to being merely about games might allow them to break even, but it does not fit with their long term strategic goals.

I'd still say this console generation is underwhelming, but I expect Microsoft to last through it. I'm not sure we'll see an Xbox Two however (or whatever they decide to call it...).

Ah, I was wondering why the author's note had nothing to do with the article.

Yep, the studio they closed is the one that was working on their TV content. This will not affect the games.

I'll still comment on it anyway. This is one of the only generations, from memory, where one can build an affordable computer that is stronger than the consoles. That has always been true before, but only a while after the consoles came out. But it was true the day they came out, this time. The IGN team made a 600$ computer, not long ago, that can outperform an Xbox One... If you bought the kinect model and pay for xbox live, you're looking at pretty much the same price for the inferior console experience...

Those consoles are seriously underpowered.

I have nothing more to say about what you typed, other than to say that BillG is an awesome nickname and I will now always refer to him as such.

I can't say I know all that much about graphical toolkits, but could we just fork GTK, using GTK2 as the base? Most of my applications use GTK2 and I'm pretty happy with this state of affair. The GTK3 ones tend to break things. But I really prefer the modular nature of GTK. When I need to use other toolkits, it tends to pull 50 libraries...

Never heard of it. Thanks, I'll check it out.

Ever since the update which added the menu button at the right, I've been meaning to make the switch to another browser. The seamonkey project looked interesting, but they're integrating browsing with email, and I'd rather keep things seperate. Anyone had luck finding a good replacement? I only care about speed, compatibility with web standards and ad-blocking. And an interface that doesn't suck, I guess, but that's pretty much the easiest thing to get right.

That sunglass article is just shameful. This is the kind of thing that I expect on my facebook feed. I don't read my facebook feed.

The day I quit soylent for slashdot (yes, we can say it, it's not Voldemort) is when I went back on slashdot, just to check, and saw a really insightful story about apple becoming one of the world's leading producers of saphire. I compared it to the content of the SN frontpage. Right click > delete bookmark.

Are you in favour of articles about personal rights/privacy issues? These make a lot of waves on slashdot, but the discussions there predictably devolve into people shouting at each other since the audience is so big. Or are we keeping this purely tech related? I was hesitating to post articles earlier since I haven't really seen that kind of subject end up on pipedot.

Are there still drama posts every day? That's when I quit.

Happily went back to slashdot, and I'm reading pipedot on the side.

We have plenty of laws in place to protect people from their own idiocy. It's not always such a bad thing because while you may not feel empathy for them, it's probably best not to reward companies for exploiting others. Because you might end up being their next target.

Also I would add that since buzzfeed and such sites frequently take content from others without proper attribution, they may not always be around...

I don't think we're in any kind of danger of being irrelevant. These kinds of websites regroup a technical audience that cares deeply about a particular subject, so that they can have (hopefully) enlightening conversations and learn about the latest discoveries in their field. That is a completely different mission objective than a website which, the summary admits, is basically all over the place with extremely shallow content. http://buzzfeedminusgifs.tumblr.com This website does a good job of showing just what we're dealing with here...

Just look at pipedot. It doesn't have a huge community, but it doesn't have to. There's still quality content in here. This site is "threatened" by buzzfeed the same way indie games are "threatened" by AAA games: not at all since they address different audiences.

That is, until site owners decide they want to chase the big crowd. But that's not because the site doesn't work, it's because the owner has dollar signs in his eyes.

Is it really? Using Terminator as a source when talking about AI?

We haven't even come close to making truly intelligent machines yet. That's like some skinny dude saying he wants to work out but "doesn't want to be ripped". We don't have anywhere near the skill or knowledge required to make machine that could even begin to be a threat to us. Hell, we don't even really know what we're looking for; there is no consensus on what makes our brains so special that we are "intelligent" while our machines just follow instructions. They're basically all brute forcing the problems that are presented to them, with clever tricks being programmed in by humans to reduce the parameter space on hard problems. Ugh...

Is it me or is Hawking getting increasingly more alarmist as time goes on? In the past few years, he's warned us about nuclear war, aliens, machines... What's next? Bees? Should we be afraid of bees? Are they plotting to overthrow us? What time is it on the "Bee overthrow doomsday clock"? I must know!

An emergency stop button is something, but one would think there'd be some steering in case the thing's about to drive you into incoming traffic or some other dangerous situation. I'd rather take public transport than risk my life in this, to be honest.

Given the way the auto industry has been trying to use the law to slow down Tesla and spreading a whole lot of FUD about it, at this point I'd say "it's a conspiracy!" is actually a very reasonable reaction when stuff goes wrong for them.

What if I think watches are pretty. :(

My wriswratch has been broken for months. I haven't sent it for repair. I just like the look of it.

Most of us have only a simple, easy to pick door lock standing between any would-be thief and our stuff. The real use of these things is merely to act as a deterrent, so people have to be serious if they want to get your stuff. But if they are serious, no amount of security will keep you completely safe. We generally seem to be ok with that situation.

I think the situation is relatively the same for computers. If someone really wants your digital stuff, they'll get it. You can't really prevent that. But you can control what information you allow to be digitally stored.

I wonder what the people higher up on the ladder think of him "being Google".

People's claims that desktops would die seems to me to be more of an attempt to click-bait than anything. I understand that people like new things, and new is mobile right now, but as long as the desktop can accomplish things that laptops and mobile devices can't, of course it will stay alive.

Gamers, artists, programmers and other professionals still need desktops, so people will keep fabricating them.

I don't know, that new interface is kind of breaking it for me. There's no firefox anymore: there's chrome and a chrome knockoff. I'm probably going to switch to something else.

I should add that when people think of Fortran, they think of Fortran 77, which is truly a primitive language (one I unfortunately had to deal with...). The recent Fortran standards are a lot more sane and bring it a lot closer to something like python.

I did my undergraduate work entirely in Fortran. Just for reference, I am in my mid-twenties... My supervisor told me that's the language I should use. There are certain fields where a lot of really useful code is in Fortran, so it's at the very least important to be able to read it (although that's clearly not very hard to do). Some people had some convincing numbers to show Fortran programs were more efficient than C programs for number crunching. Given that a lot of our code is just running a set of very simple operations a huge amout of times, Fortran does a great job. The only issue I had with it is the lack of widely available libraries compared to more modern languages. You've got Numerical recipes and a few other non-free libraries, and then the rest are homemade solutions stored somewhere on your supervisor's hard drive...

I switched to C for my graduate work and I was pretty happy with it. I'll gladly save myself some coding time, even if it means my programs might run a little slower. They can run 24/7, I can't program in these conditions. :p

That's true, alhtough I have had some difficulties in the past getting this to work properly. Sometimes some configuration files can conflict, and of course when you pull the DE or WM from upstream, it might not look as good or be as functional out of the game as one that comes packaged with the distribution.

I did get Awesome WM to work on XFCE the other day and it was lovely.

After all this time, my WRT54G is still going strong. Guess I'm lucky!

One really has to wonder why they have decided to make its successor so expensive. You'd think that something that cost you around 80$ back then could be made even cheaper now.

Same here. Diablo 2 was my favourite game.

Torchlight 2 is a better casual ARGP, and Path of Exile is a better hardcore one. No room for Diablo 3.

You are greatly oversimplifying the situation.

NCommander's extremely petty and vindictive blog post where he attacked the previous owner was drama no one needed. He started the post by saying this was an "amicable" change of ownership, but as I read on, it was clear that if it was amicable before, then it would no longer be the case afterwards. Honestly, you should probably wait until you have full ownership of a site before you start trash-talking the previous owner. I'd say John's behaviour is very understandable. I'd be angry too if I had decided to take risks to start a site like that, and then everyone was turning on me. This wasn't part of a "transparent process". It was just mudslinging. There was no purpose to this other than to make John look bad.

I don't understand why the volunteers complained. John made if very clear from the start that this was a business for him. It was *his* business. If you still volunteer after that, then you have to accept the terms.

He also spent more than 1000$. Some of the stuff he spent money on ended up not being used, but that's completely irrelevant. He's selling his business, he's entitled to ask to be completely refunded for all expenses.

All I can say is that, from a user's point of view, the site was better under John. There was no drama that we could see, and there were frequent posts asking the community for input. I think if people had let the site just run for a while, as John wanted, it'd probably be better off.

Ever since the change in ownership, there's been tons of drama. It's unfortunate. This site was better with the previous owner.

The linode site is down as well.

Let's get some popcorn...

You have to admit, this situation is thorougly entertaining. They are absolutely recreating the scenario of animal farm. You can match up each animal to a staff member or a group of users.

In this consumerist society, is there anything better than savings? I propose we rename it to Daylight 30% off Time!

I think it's fair to say that 90% of the time people inject a french word in an english sentence, it's horribly mangled. It used to tick me off but now I'm used to it. It certainly detracts from the person's intentions of sounding fancy, however...

XFCE is still fine. Cinnamon and MATE are also great. It's not THAT bad.

A lot of people are experimenting because of the rise of mobile devices. The situation will stabilize eventually when people are more experienced with making desktop interfaces that are adapted to the desktop, but familiar to mobile users.