If you're never used Trello before, I'd highly encourage you to do so. It's the equivalent of a digital whiteboard that allows teams to organize, collaborate, and collectively manage tasks. I discovered it in about 2011, set up a free Trello board for the team and project I manage, and have had no regrets at all: people love it, it's easy to use, and makes it easy to stay organized via tablet, phone, or desktop.

And now, it's an independent company. The Wall Street Journal reports:

For the second time, Fog Creek Software Inc. has spun out a company-Trello Inc., an internal project management tool that became so popular, according to the founders, it needed to exist on its own. ... Trello takes with it $10.3 million in funding and follows a familiar path of companies that grew up around tools created somewhere else. Twitter Inc. started out as twttr, a short message service used internally by the podcasting company Odeo, while Yammer, acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2012 for $1.2 billion, was an internal communications tool for the geneology website Geni.com. ...

"It reminds us of the early traction that Dropbox"and other apps up there had that have grabbed individuals and caused them to start using it and bring it to work and convince teams and colleagues to use it and it's gradually taken over organizations," said Index Partner Neil Rimer, whose brother Danny, also an Index partner, invested in Dropbox for that firm. "It turns out to be a better solution than the stuff at the top that's driven into the organization by policy."

That last comment is a not-very-veiled swipe at SharePoint, and it fits my experience perfectly: management requires it, even though it's almost totally useless for our purposes.

Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, tells the story beautifully over at the company blog. Clearly, there's still tons of money to be made simply by creating things that help people accomplish things more efficiently. As an avid Trello advocate, I'm raising a glass to these guys [and hoping under the new arrangement corporate ownership doesn't screw the pooch or raise prices, etc.]

Someone over at the US House of Representatives - or maybe a group of someones - has made such a nuisance editing Wikipedia that Wikipedia's administration has applied a ten day ban on all anonymous edits at the site.

What precipitated the ban was not edits to articles about jam bands and their fans' favorite foods, but rather a series of more creative edits that suggested that, among other things, Cuban spies orchestrated the assassination of JFK and a race of hyper-intelligent extra-terrestrial lizardmen has infiltrated the U.S. government, Mediaite said. ... ome staffers are upset about the ban and took to Wikipedia to complain. "Out of over 9000 staffers in the House, should we really be banning this whole IP range based on the actions of two or three? Some of use here are just making grammatical edits, adding information about birds in Omsk, or showing how one can patch KDE2 under FreeBSD," said one staffer from the House's IP address.

Important take-away conclusions from this article:
1. House Representatives or their staffers are spending way too much time on Wikipedia.
2. The Twitterbot and Wikipedia oversight have been useful and shed light on what's going on.

But most importantly:

3. Holy crap: the House of Reps is running KDE2 on FreeBSD!

After all the rumours and speculation, back-and-forth, and legal wrangling, it is complete: Google has completed its purchase of Twitch.

We had heard rumours about it, but it's now official. The exact price of purchase and official announcement are yet to come, but investors are reportedly happy about the deal. Considering Google's ownership of Youtube, this will give them firm control over online game session streaming. Venturebeat states:

The deal underscores the value of live Internet streaming and the rise of competitive gaming as a spectator sport - something that draws millions of viewers, can offer prize pools that surpass pro golf's marquee events, and provides a multibillion dollar opportunity for advertisers.

Author note: What do you think of this, pipers? (That's how we're calling ourselves, right?) Considering Google's often clumsy attempts to control copyrighted material on Youtube, does this spell doom for many Twitch channels? As Twitch users would say, is it time for us to declare: "Rip in peace, Twitch."?

Everyone knows opinions are like noses: everyone has one. But Bruce Byfield has been at it longer than most, and his opinion often reflects the industry. And he loves KDE5.

At a time when the Linux desktop offers six main alternatives (Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, Mate, Unity and Xfce), KDE Plasma consistently tops reader polls with an average of 35-40 percent. In such a diverse market, these figures indicate a broad appeal that other Linux desktop alternatives can't match.

I believe that one of the main reasons for this appeal is the KDE design philosophy. GNOME and Unity may offer a more aesthetic-looking default, but only at the cost of simplifying both the desktop and the utilities in the name of reducing clutter.

By contrast, KDE goes to the opposite extreme. KDE applications typically include every function you can imagine. Sometimes, they can take a version or two to organize the menus in a meaningful way, but applications like Amarok, K3B, or digiKam go far beyond the most common use cases. When you run into problems with them, they usually offer solutions.

Read the rest of his thoughtful and insightful review here.

[Ed. note: Actually, opinions are like something else. But Pipedot is a family-friendly site.]

Recent scientific inquiry shows that the mighty Tyrannosaurus may have been inclined to hunt in packs, rather than going it alone. Adjacent track ways of tyrannosaurus footprints have been discovered (full text) that suggest that tyrannosaurids hunted in packs. The fossilised footprints show clear evidence that the animals travelled together, with all three tracks going in the same direction around the same time, suggesting that these dinosaurs may have been social, and not solitary, animals.

The skeletal record of tyrannosaurids is well-documented, whereas their footprint record is surprisingly sparse. There are only a few isolated footprints attributed to tyrannosaurids and, hitherto, no reported trackways. We report the world's first trackways attributable to tyrannosaurids, and describe a new ichnotaxon attributable to tyrannosaurids. These trackways are from the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian - Maastrichtian) of northeastern British Columbia, Canada. One trackway consists of three tridactyl footprints, and two adjacent trackways consist of two footprints each. All three trackways show animals bearing southeast within an 8.5 meter-wide corridor. Similarities in depth and preservation of the tyrannosaurid tracks indicate that these three trackways were made by track-makers walking concurrently in the same direction. These trackways add significantly to previous osteology-based hypotheses of locomotion and behavior in Tyrannosauridae by providing ichnologic support for gregariousness in tyrannosaurids, and the first record of the walking gait of tyrannosaurids.