Does anyone else see anything odd about the search results for this story?

I Googled "heartbleed" around 15 minutes ago and looked through 13 pages of results. I was looking for some info a little on the hardcore side, and the Google results were kind of surprising. There were tons of big well-known sites at the very top of the list - Fox, CNN, BBC News, Reuters and Forbes, etc; then a whole lot of mainstream "tech news" sites (PC World, ZDNet and so on) and blogs (HuffPo for example), then finally some more tech oriented or actual tech ones (YCombinator, Netcraft, StackOverflow) with a tiny sprinkling of blogs and relevant support forums (Cisco). US-CERT's listing was down on page 3 or so and honestly there just were not that many "hardcore" sites to be seen.

Running the search again after clearing cookies, the layout has changed a lot. The big news sites hits have slid way down (Fox News is on p. 3 now, for instance) with tech news and blogs moving up. All in all, the harder tech sites are floating upward and the less so are moving down. It's like the lava lamp version of a security scare.

Wondered what other Slashdotters think, it just seems a bit... strange, somehow. Don't these things usually bubble around in the tech community for a bit before surfacing in the mainstream world? It's like every big news site on the planet picked it up simultaneously, followed by the mainstream tech news site, and finally it began to filter down into the tech world. Could just be an artifact of Google's update cycle, but it definitely piqued my curiosity.

Agreed 100%. Ron and his fellow volunteers have worked on this for several years, not only transcribing the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module flight software from paper listings, but also writing the toolchains and simulators with which to build and run it. And not only for Apollo, but also for the Saturn IB and V rockets, the Gemini spacecraft, and probably other things I haven't found yet. There are lucid explanations of everything, and original project documentation as well. The site is a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in the software aspect of these great historical space missions.
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/...

The new Slashdot design is based on Windows 8. That fact alone, even aside from the numerous usability issues, indicates that the new owners have no fucking idea in the world what they've acquired.

Slashdot is a technology site, a geek site, an open source site, a programming site, an Internet / Web advocacy site. But more than that, it is a Linux community site. It lives and dies by its community. That community, by and large, is made up of passionate Linux advocates who can be whipped into a frenzy at the mention of Microsoft, who think Bill Gates is the Great Satan, who sincerely believe in free and open source software, and who implement that passion in their lives, hobbies, and jobs. Sure, not everyone here fits the mold. But that's the core of the community.

As one single data point, I work on simulators in the aerospace segment. We develop and integrate specialized, whole-system, software-only simulators, supporting software development when the hardware has limited availability or hasn't been built yet. Our user community is not large, but includes key technical people at well known organizations. Like others we interface with, our work has gone from Windows and Linux in the beginning, to mostly Linux, plus Windows if we have to. That's how we like it. Linux works for us - it's developer friendly, it's rock solid, it's quite deployable, and it lets us do what we need to do. And a bunch of us come to Slashdot to catch the news on Linux and other geek-worthy subjects, and discuss it with others.

And now the owners, having acquired this rather unique and valuable site, want to make it into Windows fucking 8 - the friendly, cuddly, but unusable Fisher-Price operating system that represents everything we despise? The mind reels. You might as well just make it a SEO parking page for Microsoft.

Seriously, DICE, do not do this thing. I know you don't care about the history, community, or shared values of this site, but this move will destroy them, and take the site with it. It will become a ghost town, abandoned by its residents, only visited by tourists and people that got lost on their way somewhere else.

I used to be a huge Subversion cheerleader, but switched to Git everything I could some time ago. Our work repo is Subversion, but using Git day-to-day is well worth the hassle of converting files in and out of another tool to do so.

I was actually considering going back to Subversion full time at work a couple weeks ago, but merging a long-running development branch to trunk was enough to kill that idea. Subversion's merge pretty much shit itself at the get-go. The CM lead insisted on saving the development history on the branch - not worth the effort, but his call. I managed to save history for pre-existing files that were modified. After wasting hours of my (and Google's) time and trying everything short of standing on my head, I finally brute-forced the added and deleted files so I could move on with my life. Lesson learned but day wasted.

Merge is fundamental, and it's completely solid on Git. I'll let someone else sort out whether it works now in Subversion.

It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that the same CEO that canned the Sun-Times photo staff did the same thing at Newsday in 2008. See for instance, Vincent Laforet's blog on the layoffs. But these aren't isolated instances.

The new millenium has not been kind to newspapers. Certainly the newspapers are under great pressure from blogs, social media, and other Internet sources. There may also be an element of union busting in these actions. But from what I've seen over the years, there is a much larger element of simple greed following the familiar script of buy out the companies, dump half the staff, make the survivors do the jobs of the laid off as well as their own, count the dough. The continued existence of quality newspaper journalism in this country is quite remarkable considering the owners' continued efforts to get rid of the people who produce it.

Can we get along without traditional newspapers? Absolutely. Are we still losing something of tremendous value? Without a doubt. Will blogs pick up the slack? I hope so, but I just don't see it. There are a lot of truly great blogs out there. I follow a number of them. But to think they will make up for the depth and breadth of professional journalism that's disappearing before our eyes is naively optimistic.

I prefer the metric assload, because it's a bit bigger than a "regular" assload.

You mean, if Open Source isn't magic, it's bullshit? Way to straw man.