An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack has been bullish on the idea of "the metaverse" for a long time, as he'll be among the first to point out. But the id Software co-founder spent a good chunk of his wide-ranging Connect keynote Thursday sounding pretty skeptical of plans by the newly rebranded Meta (formerly Facebook) to actually build that metaverse. "I really do care about [the metaverse], and I buy into the vision," Carmack said, before quickly adding, "I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times." The reason for that seeming contradiction is a somewhat ironic one, as Carmack puts it: "I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse."

Today, Carmack said, "The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox." That said, Carmack added, "I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything." That's because a single bad decision by the creators of that walled-garden metaverse can cut off too many possibilities for users and makers. "I just don't believe that one player -- one company -- winds up making all the right decisions for this," he said. The idea of the metaverse, Carmack says, can be "a honeypot trap for 'architecture astronauts.'" Those are the programmers and designers who "want to only look at things from the very highest levels," he said, while skipping the "nuts and bolts details" of how these things actually work.

These so-called architecture astronauts, Carmack said, "want to talk in high abstract terms about how we'll have generic objects that can contain other objects that can have references to these and entitlements to that, and we can pass control from one to the other." That kind of high-level hand-waving makes Carmack "just want to tear [his] hair out... because that's just so not the things that are actually important when you're building something." "But here we are," Carmack continued. "Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is developing a smartwatch with a front-facing camera and rounded screen, according to an image of the device found inside one of the tech giant's iPhone apps. The photo shows a watch with a screen and casing that's slightly curved at the edges. The front-facing camera -- similar to what you'd see on a smartphone -- appears at the bottom of the display, and there's a control button for the watch on the right side. The image was found inside of the company's app for controlling its new smart glasses launched in partnership with Ray-Ban. The picture was located by app developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News.

The watch has a detachable wrist strap and what appears to be a button at the top of the watch case. Its large display mimics the style of Apple's watch -- rather than the more basic fitness trackers sold by Google's Fitbit and Garmin. The camera suggests the product will likely be used for videoconferencing, a feature that would make Meta's device stand out. Apple's smartwatch doesn't have a camera, nor do rival products from companies such as Samsung. Facebook has been planning to launch its first watch as early as 2022, but a final decision on timing hasn't been made yet and the debut could be later, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company is working on three generations of the product aimed at different release time frames, the person said. The device in the image could ultimately represent a version that is never released, but it's the first evidence of the company's work on the project. Not only does the code inside the software of the watch indicate it'll work with iOS and Android devices, but it may also be used as an input device or accessory for the company's VR and AR headsets.

Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg announced it's changing Facebook's name to Meta. While he said Facebook's existing brands wouldn't be changing, we have learned that's not entirely true. "In a lengthy Facebook post, CTO-in-waiting Andrew Bosworth detailed about 15 minutes later following the completion of the keynote that as part of the new rebrand, they will be killing off the Oculus brand," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Oculus phrasing was conspicuously absent from the presentations today and features like the Oculus Store were consistently referred to as the Quest Store. In his post, Bosworth details that starting early next year the process to rename the Oculus app to the Meta app and the Oculus Quest to the Meta Quest will begin. "We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make. While we're retiring the name, I can assure you that the original Oculus vision remains deeply embedded in how Meta will continue to drive mass adoption for VR today," Bosworth wrote. Facebook bought Oculus VR back in 2014 for $2 billion.

At the time, Zuckerberg said the Oculus Rift VR headset was the beginning of something big: "This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures."

Facebook said Thursday it's changing its name to Meta. "From now on, we''ll be metaverse first, not Facebook first," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's Oculus Connect event. "Over time you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services."

71-year-old Hugh Pickens (Slashdot reader #49,171) is a physicist who explored for oil in the Amazon jungle, commissioned microwave communications systems in Saudi Arabia, and built satellite control stations for Goddard Space Flight Center around the world including Australia, Antarctica, and Guam.

After retiring in 1999, he wrote over 1,400 Slashdot posts, and in the site's 23-year history still remains one of its two all-time most active submitters (behind only long-time Slashdot reader theodp). Today theodp shares an article by Hugh Pickens: I am a Covid Survivor," writes former Slashdot contributor extraordinaire Hugh Pickens (aka pickens, aka Hugh Pickens writes, aka Hugh Pickens DOT Com, aka HughPickens.com, aka pcol, aka ...). "I got the Covid six weeks ago and yesterday I was declared virus free. I had what was called a moderate case of Covid. I was never hospitalized. I was never in any real danger of death. But I was in bed for three weeks.

"It knocked me on my ass. I have been talking about my Covid when I go out and a lot of people are interested in what it really means to have a moderate case of Covid. I don't claim to speak for every Covid patient. I certainly can't speak for the ones who went into the hospital and are on ventilators. But I think the majority of people have a moderate case of Covid so I thought I would write this up for people that were interested."
During those three consecutive weeks in bed, "I guess I ate Jell-O for about two weeks..." Pickens writes. "I was laying in bed all day long. I was sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day..." He lost 25 pounds — and vividly describes having nightmares "every night like clockwork." But the essay ends with him committed to making the most of his second chance. "I'm only going to do what's important from now on...

"I'm 71 years old and I may have five more years or ten but I am going to live every day like it's my last."

Obviously Slashdot has had some issues the past couple days. For those wondering, we inherited an aging hardware setup in the acquisition that was located physically far away from us. We made a big investment in a new hardware set up, and ran into sizable issues including a massive DDOS during the migration process. Going forward we expect much better uptime. If we inconvenienced anyone, we're sorry. If it's any consolation, it wasn't fun for us either, and our team worked non-stop for days to get Slashdot back online. With our new infrastructure in place, we will be dedicating a lot of time and resources this year to improving Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Happy New Year, Slashdot! To say goodbye to 2017, I've created a web page that displays random Slashdot stories from the year gone by.

It chooses a page from over 6,600 different URLs -- every story that Slashdot ran in 2017. And every time you reload this page, it pulls up a different story from 2017.

Slashdot's most-visited story of 2017 was Google Has Demonstrated a Successful Practical Attack Against SHA-1, which was visited more than 212,000 times since it was published in Feburary.

And our second- and third-most popular stories also came in February -- both just one week before.

FCC Chairman Wants It To Be Easier To Listen To Free FM Radio On Your Smartphone and IT Decisions Makers and Executives Don't Agree On Cyber Security Responsibility.

Keep reading for a complete list of Slashdot's 10 most-visited stories of 2017.

An anonymous reader writes: Happy aniversary, Slashdot! To commemorate your 20th year, here's a special web project I created. Every time you reload the page, it pulls up another one of the 162,000 stories Slashdot has posted over the last 20 years -- each time choosing a different story at random.
The original submission has one caveat. If you keep reloading the page long enough, you'll eventually get a story by Jon Katz.

For Slashdot's 20th anniversary, "What could be geekier than celebrating with the help of an open-source neural network?" Neural network hobbyist Janelle Shane has already used machine learning to generate names for paint colors, guinea pigs, heavy metal bands, and even craft beers, she explains on her blog. "Slashdot sent me a list of all the headlines they've ever run, over 162,000 in all, and asked me to train a neural network to try to generate more." Could she distill 20 years of news -- all of humanity's greatest technological advancements -- down to a few quintessential words?

She trained it separately on the first decade of Slashdot headlines -- 1997 through 2007 -- as well as the second decade from 2008 to the present, and then re-ran the entire experiment using the whole collection of every headline from the last 20 years. Among the remarkable machine-generated headlines?

• Microsoft To Develop Programming Law
• More Pong Users for Kernel Project
• New Company Revises Super-Things For Problems
• Steve Jobs To Be Good

But that was just the beginning...

Slashdot turned 20 this month, which is ancient in internet years. How far have we come?

Also, we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups around the world to celebrate. Read on for the full 20-year history of Slashdot.

Today we're marking Slashdot's 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven't had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we've managed to keep track of almost all our old postings - all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we've held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward. As we celebrate Slashdot's 20th anniversary this month, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight a few of the notable or interesting stories and discussions that have happened here in the past decade and a half. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.

Read on for a trip down memory lane.

Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.

tomhath quotes a report from TechCrunch: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's $45 billion philanthropy organization is making its first acquisition in order to make it easier for scientists to search, read and tie together more than 26 million science research papers. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta, an AI-powered research search engine startup, and will make its tool free to all in a few months after enhancing the product. Meta's AI recognizes authors and citations between papers so it can surface the most important research instead of just what has the best SEO. It also provides free full-text access to 18,000 journals and literature sources. Meta co-founder and CEO Sam Molyneux writes that "Going forward, our intent is not to profit from Meta's data and capabilities; instead we aim to ensure they get to those who need them most, across sectors and as quickly as possible, for the benefit of the world."

As of yesterday, Slashdot now serves over https. In addition, the polls have been moved exclusively to the right rail, and will not show up with the other stories any longer. We've also disabled auto-refresh, and fixed various issues with search and other features. In the last few weeks, we've also discontinued videos, and removed the "Jobs" section of the site. You can follow all of the changes on the Slashdot blog.

kodiaktau writes with a link to today's announcement that DHI Group, Inc. (which you might know better as Dice, the company that bought Slashdot and sister site SourceForge in 2012) today announced that it completed the sale of its Slashdot and SourceForge businesses (together referred to as 'Slashdot Media') to BIZX, LLC in a transaction that closed on January 27, 2016. Financial terms were not disclosed. DHI first announced its plan to sell Slashdot Media in July 2015 as part of its strategy to focus on its core brands, as Slashdot Media no longer fits within the Company's core strategic initiatives. KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. served as the Company's exclusive financial advisor for the transaction. (FOSS Force has a short article with some more info BIZX and the sale.)

An anonymous reader writes: DHI Group Inc. (formerly known as Dice Holdings Inc.) announced plans to sell Slashdot Media (slashdot.org & sourceforge.net) in their Q2 financial report. This is being reported by multiple sources. Editor's note: Yep, looks like we're being sold again. We'll keep you folks updated, but for now I don't have any more information than is contained in the press release. Business as usual until we find a buyer (and hopefully after). The company prepared a statement for our blog as well — feel free to discuss the news here, there, or in both places.

If you were browsing the site on Thursday, you may have noticed that we went static for a big chunk of the day. A few of you asked what the deal was, so here's quick follow-up. The short version is that a storage fault led to significant filesystem corruption, and we had to restore a massive amount of data from backups. There's a post at the SourceForge blog going into a bit more detail, and describing the steps our Siteops team took (and is still taking) to restore service. (Slashdot and SourceForge share a corporate overlord, as well as a fair bit of infrastructure.)

It's been a long time since Slashdot has awarded the Beanies -- nearly 15 years, in fact. But there's no time like the present, especially since tomorrow edges on the new year, and in early 2015 we'd like to offer a Beanie once again, to recognize and honor your favorite person, people (or project; keep reading) of the past year. Rather than a fine-grained list of categories like in 2000, though, this time around we're keeping it simple: we can always complicate things later, if warranted. So, please nominate below whoever you think most deserves kudos for the last twelve months. Is it ...

• Edward Snowden, for the impact his leaks (though they began in 2013) have continued to make? (Or William Binney, for similar reasons?)
• Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzay, who fought a difficult battle for children's right to an education?
• Telescope popularizer John Dobson, who died earlier this year at the age of 98, after bringing space a little more down to earth for many thousands of people?
• May-Britt Moser, her husband Edvard Moser, and John O'Keefe for their discoveries about how the brain navigates through the world?
• Eben Upton, whose little educational hardware project has bloomed into millions and millions of cheap, hackable Linux computers?
• How about Maryam Mirazkhani, the first woman to become a Fields medalist?
• Theo de Raadt, who stepped in with replacement project LibreSSL soon after cracks appeared in OpenSSL, and who's been helming the OpenBSD project since 1995?
• The ESA team that landed a probe on a comet, or the ISRO engineers who managed to send a probe to Mars on a shoestring budget?
• Anita Sarkeesian, for helping draw attention to undue harassment faced by women in the video game world?
• Someone relatively quiet or obscure who's nonetheless made the world better through some kind of interesting innovation or contribution?

Read on below to see how you can take part, and then nominate your favorite in the comments below.

Along with the rest of the mix that makes this site work, Slashdot has nearly two decades now of spotting and showing off interesting projects, inventions, technologies, and hobbies. Some of them are strictly personal, some are frankly commercial, and some are the fruits of ambitious organizations (or tiny teams) motivated by curiosity and passion (or even politics, or just plain fun). As outlined earlier, we've been gathering a lot of these into our new Build section; read on to learn a bit more about what that includes. (And watch out later today for the first part of our conversation with technology-inspiring Rennaisance Man Tim O'Reilly, and later in the week for answers to the questions you asked Bunnie Huang.)

We've had only a few major redesigns since 1997; we think it's time for another. But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta site that houses Slashdot's future look. So let's all slow down. Right now, we're directing 25 percent of non-logged-in users to the beta; it's a significant number, but it's the best way for us to test drive this new design, to have you show us what pieces need to be fixed, and how. If you want to move back to Classic Slashdot, that path is available: from the Slashdot Beta page, you just need to select the "Slashdot Classic" link from the footer (or this link). We're committed to keep you informed of the plans as changes are implemented; we can't promise that every user will like every change, but we don't want anything to come as a surprise. Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready. And — okay, we've got it — it's not ready. We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process. Some of you have suggested we're not listening; on the contrary, some of us are 'listening' pretty much full-time. We're keeping you informed of this process, because we're a community and we want to take everyone with us. But, yes, we're trying something new. Why? We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories. It's not an either/or. It's going to be both. If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that. And in the meantime, we're not sorry to have received a flood of feedback, most of it specific, constructive and substantive. Please keep it coming. We will be adding more specific info here in the days to come.