A year or two ago everybody was happy with Gnome. Just Gnome, we didn't have to call it Gnome 2.x. Now we have Gnome 2.x, plain Gnome 3.x, Unity, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions, MATE and now another kid on the block... what the hell went wrong?

I'm still happily using Gnome 2.x (on LMDE), but it won't last forever :/

For the record: I really thought that champagne cooler was empty.

In 1997, right after Chips n' Dips had faded away, to be replaced by the enigmatically named http:///..org, all of us free software nerds hung on its every story, comment and poll like it was carved on tablet and flung from a burning bush. A year later I had started at hardware maker VA Research and /. was falling down for lack of machinery, so we rummaged through our returns piles and sent Rob and Jeff some 2u servers to help out. That was for me the beginning of some of the most important friendships in my adult life.

Its hard to explain how important Slashdot was to all of us 10 years ago. Indeed, without it it would be hard to imagine HN, Reddit, Digg, Fark or any of a thousand lesser sites. The editorial perspective of Rob and the other editors of /. is what kept people coming back and for a long time that perspective was Rob's, then Rob and Jeff and a bunch of us (some, like Timothy and samzenpus, still around!), but then Jeff left, now Rob. In some way I see this as a passing of an era in free software.

Throughout, while some have left for those greener shores, slashdot abided even while buffeted by the markets and the de/evolving internet news world, and it has remained a default tab in my and many others' browsers.

I didn't mean this post to be about Slashdot though, but about my friend Rob. I'll only say that while the site will be the lessor for you leaving, I firmly believe that computer science will gain my. While this note reads like an epitaph or the last pages of a book, it is really no more than a thank you note from me and many I know to your for your decade+ of work on the site. So...

Thanks.

I've read about it being done in a few cities in Poland. It's more of an art happening then a practical thing. The "exposition" is made of members of different kind of minorities (one Jew, one atheist, one gay person, etc.) who you can "borrow" and talk to. Neat idea and of course it's been protested by homophobic morons.

The project is called ywa Biblioteka (alive library) - http://www.zywabiblioteka.pl/ .

Ukraine ( http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-PL-monthly-200910-201010 ) and Ukraine ( http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-PL-monthly-200910-201010 ) seem to have the weakest IE market share. 19% and 20%. Still, there are some sites that require IE (I know of 2 banks).

Luckily browser makers don't have to worry about catering to idiots. Who needs 90% of the market?

My hard drive should be able to talk to your hairdresser.

Sorry, but Theora is still not as high quality as later codecs. That hasn't changed. But I was very happy to fund this work out of my group.

The one does not exclude the other. There's nothing stopping you from doing what Google did - funding development a CUDA accellerated Theora codec if you feel so inclined (and if you have the money). :-)

I guess Google thought Theora on the desktop was "good enough" and wanted to focus on ubiquity rather than perfection - for now.

Non-technical problems, such as H.264 requiring licensing patents.

Patents are specifically intended to restrict usage of technology (to those who are inclined to pay for it).

So - a royalty-free product which produces comparable (if slightly inferior) results *should* become the ubiquitously available option. It is as it should be. :-)

I very much doubt, however, that Apple and Microsoft will include Theora in their web browsers or in the iPhone. I think it is much more likely that the patent-encumbered option is set to become more ubiquitous than the free option, due to corporate politics. (After all, neither Apple's or Microsoft's products support Theora or Vorbis out of the box now.)

Baidu's real spiders obey robots.txt. However there are plenty of malicious spiders out there who pretend to be Baidu in their User-agent string - giving Baidu a bad name in this area.

IPv6 does nothing to protect you against malicious routing updates, as far as I'm aware.

IPsec is a mandatory feature of an IPv6 stack, but nobody's forcing anyone to use it.

This hijack was on the routing level, not the DNS level.

Blacklisting China's IP ranges would do nothing to protect you against bad routing - something you as an end user don't have any control over.