Recent Comments

"it's" should be "its".That's all.

Although I would not consider myself to be conservative. I don't think MikeeeUSA's behavior would be tolerated by any mainstream political movement. He's not being targeted for his political beliefs, but for his trolling behavior. Plus, that was like one guy suggesting that it not be packaged, not a Debian wide decision or policy.

Erm... I must lie to say that this didn't cross my mind. But only for a second. ;-)

Can't really tell. As I said, I knew nothing about the FF games and checked some Youtube gameplays after your post. I really like anime, but for some reasons playing one has absolutely no appeal to me. I like a dense RPG story, which is worth good fantasy book. FF surely has a dense background story, I once saw a FF film in a cinema, but as Game? I just rechecked FFX... Not my thing.

My mind immediately wondered what they would taste like...

Go for it! And when I'm a rockstar, I'll buy one--it would be very metal. Unfortunately for the time being, cloned mammoths and my rockstar dreams are equally unlikely.

Wait, what? Are you just talking about FFXIII?

I'm talking about the old-school games basically up to FFX

It's a very long running series, FFVII being one of my favorites.

I was addicted for a while until I killed a tablet playing Swordigo. BloonsTD5 would have taken out another had I not deleted it. Fieldrunners was tough, Fieldrunners 2 was a worthy successsor. Why, yes, I am a fan of Humble Bundle. How could you tell?

Super Mario World was excellent, Secret of Mana was better. :-)

Considering the posturing with warships during the G20 it may very well be an unconcealed threat. Related: http://mobile.news.com.au/national/third-australian-warship-sent-to-halt-russian-flotilla-bound-for-g20-in-brisbane/story-fncynjr2-1227122396768

That's true of Consumer Reports, techdirt, Newsweek, VOA, National Academies, Huffington Post, Breitbart, and a decent number of others. They're a minority, but there's plenty of them. If you wanted to get all your news from sites that offer full text RSS feeds, you could do so without too much of a trade-off.

UPDATE: Had PopSci in there, but looks like they JUST NOW (in the past week) changed their full-text RSS feed to summaries only.

Yes, of course. But does it matter? You will never have huge mammoth herds. At best a few zoos get one. If the offspring shows defects, it just isn't used for breeding.

Population bottlenecks happen and happened naturally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
Species still survived. Some without human intervention.

As a threat/deterrent? Not saying that is a good idea.

If they clone one, and then clone another bunch from that one, and so on, would that lead to the same kind of ill effects as inbreeding?

Or maybe it's not a weapon. Speculation is kind of silly. The US X-37B spaceplane we know is Air Force.

The BeagleBone was not "over $100". It was $89. And not gigabit. Fast (100) only. At least that's the case for the BeagleBone Black, and I'm sure for the earlier boards too.

But your point is taken. Competition is good. When the BeagleBone Black came out after the Raspberry Pi, it was priced at either $40 or $45. But it seems that was too ambitious. The Rev C BeagleBone Black was raised back up to $55 in return for no meaningful improved features. It has some more memory and more eMMC. Snort. So what.

Will it glow in the dark?

... to have a weapon in space monitored by all and sundry when the owner is known..

I've tried cheap kid's toy night vision, with an LCD screen connected to a camera without IR filter... It's HORRIBLE. Distance perception is way off, it really needs those IR LEDs, and the range is just a few feet. Nothing like real night-vision, and certainly not something you'd be using to drive. But even more on point, if it can be done at a reasonable price, why stick it in a pair of glasses, instead of building it into the car, where you'll need it the most?

Also, it only requires a $15 Infrared thermometer to find poorly insulated spots in your house, if taking a little bit more time than a thermal camera... So I wouldn't call that a killer app.

Any of those genres, but must have been made at least 10-12 years ago. FF 6 / Madden 95/ Super Mario World was enough for me. Nothing has gotten any better, only more complex.

/curmudgeon rant off

Confluence for wiki, intranet and collaboration
JIRA for task tracking and workflows.
Trim for final document management.
Sharepoint for shared document editing, personal workspace, NOT for wiki pages
Lync for IM
ServiceDesk for CRM, customer tickets, customer interaction.

Pity Jira isn't up to the same level of CRM Servicedesk can do. RT3 was previously used to good effect.

Internal IM must support file transfer. Plenty of options out there.

Interesting. I would Final Fantasy not even count as RPG. I just looked at a few Youtube gameplays. For me it is a primitive combat game with excessively long cut scenes and admittedly great graphics. Would not touch it with a ten foot pole. Buuuuut..... there is no accounting for taste. :-D

I went to play.google.com and searched under apps for "RSS Reader" and it turned up at least 160 apps. Guesstimate that about half are either specialized ("News feed for the Syrian Revolution") or bad quality and you've still got 80 apps, all of whom seem pretty darned indistinguishable.

Ideally, get one that offers OPML import/export to make your life easier. Typing all those feeds into a new reader would be a major unpleasant activity.

Not a fan of FPS, but I love me a good RPG. Final Fantasy is my favorite series.

Binge leveling is the reason I quit WoW -_-

I use to play TOO much in university and had trouble keeping up with assignments and sleep. I swore I'd never go back... I'm pretty sure if I did my wife would leave me and I probably wouldn't even notice until I died of starvation. I get way too involved.

Yeah, I think google wave would have also been a good solution ( aside from the lack of portability and propritaryness) . But I never had the opportunity to use it to its potential. So maybe not.

But a mailing list would serve the same purpose, right? You'd just need to configure their clients to filter the messages off into the right categories. So maybe usnet would be better because it would do some of that automatically, but with lists people could use whatever client.

It's not strange we use the same app. Back when I went looking for an RSS reader, there was only a handful in the Market (now Play Store), and I used the by-far most popular and highest rated one. Just by virtue of being among the first, and still being around many years later (even if it has been a dead project for 2+ years now) they've got a lot of users to show for it. Being old and getting no updates has the secondary advantage of it still running on older phones, where newer apps often do not.

I'm not too happy with them, as I purchased a license for v1 right at the end of its life cycle, and they offered no upgrade path to v2. No idea about v2 to v3. But with no signs of life, the current release of v3 is probably the end of the line, even with the bugs with some feeds and podcast handling. It's just a question of how long until newer versions of Android break backwards compatibilty and put and end to it.

Looking through the store I don't see any other RSS readers that look obviously good. That's likely a byproduct of my now-aged phone, hiding newer and incompatible apps, as is frequently the case.

RSS is essentially my killer app for the internet, and definitely for my smartphone, and it's driving me crazy that the trend is away from RSS and towards making everyone download individual apps. The New York Times and the Economist are guilty of making their RSS feeds hard to find.

There are dozens and dozens of Android RSS readers out there, but by coincidence I settled on the same one as you and mostly like it. I hoped for a reader with cloud sync so that from one Android device to the next the app would remember which articles I'd marked as 'read' but no love. The closest I got was running an instance of ttrss on my own server and using not the official Android app but a 3rd party one. That was a lot of work and I didn't much like the interface, so I dropped it and am back to RssDemon again.

On the desktop side, huge thumbs up for the console based reader 'newsbeuter' and either rawdog or CURN. They're all somewhat obscure, but you can run newsbeuter on a shell account and then access it from work over SSH or something, and it's a lean, mean feed reader. Rawdog creates an HTML page you can use on your own site (I put one up for my own use here: http://therandymon.com/rawdogger.html via a cron script that runs every morning). CURN is a java app, which turns people off, but it's highly configurable and you can use it to create and mail to yourself an HTML email of your feeds, and do other things as well. All these solutions are better, in my opinion, than just being forced to download an app for every news source.

Then, you're only inches away from podcast technology too - highly recommend doggcatcher on Android for managing podcasts.

Was thinking that actually, Usenet technology is good for team collaboration on a project. With email, you only have access to the messages sent to you since you've arrived on the team, and you miss out on all the history. With an internal NTTP spool, all project conversation winds up in a single location, everyone has access to every message ever sent, and any new employee simply has to take the time to read through the history to see "how we got here." It also eliminates huge problems of attachments (impossible: post them to the doc repository and send a link), storage/replication of multiple mailboxes, and more. On the downside: 80 char hard wrapped, fewer and fewer useful clients, and it's different for a lot of workers who are used to Outlook + Reply All.

"Slack" is supposed to operate the same way, but doesn't thread its replies, which is inexplicable to me. I've found no other good substitutes other than perhaps a good mailing list with archive. Any suggestions for mail archive?

Dishonored for the win. :-)

I have always enjoyed the combination of FPS and RPG.

As I'm recovering from binge leveling two characters to 100 this last weekend...

Not every vehicle has such a display. Different vehicles might have different displays, which might distract from the traffic until one is used to the new layout. Harder to upgrade when integrated in a vehicle.

So what is the advantage over a HUD/windshield integrated display then? That seems to me like it would be easier/cheaper to implement(no need to be tiny, wired directly into vehicle and accessories).

Nope - you're totally right about google drive. On the plus side it's totally cross platform (if you include web access).

On the downside, managing it means someone has to manage it. If you have small teams and everyone picks up after themselves, it can work well. Otherwise (for those of us in the real world), it tends to get real messy real fast.

I don't know of any good solution to the problem.

1,3,4,5 are decent satire.

2 & 6 I think crimes against children should result in a permanent loss in certain freedoms. Think of the children, isn't always hyperbole.

I don't really care when on /. the members troll. It is troll articles where I draw the line. And /. has far too many of those for quite some time. I lost every bit of respect I once had for /. as platform itself.

Anandtech awesomely includes the entire article in their RSS feed.

Maybe a devil's advocate is like a troll who is too daft to post anonymously :) I think you're right. The really sad thing about Slashdot these days is that the trolling is really amateur. A good troll has to be very carefully crafted and quite subtle. These days the level of dialogue is so banal the trolls all look like wankers. Where's the sport in that?

I'm going to keep playing the devil's advocate here, not because I disagree but simply because it leads to more discovery.

Offtopic response. But this coincides with my sayings that every forum needs a certain amount of trolls. I have seen more forums die because of a lack of trolls than because of too many trolls. Trolls might individually be disgusting, but can keep threads and discussions alive. And often this leads to new discoveries. We'll see if a devil's advocate is a sufficient troll replacement. :-D

I'm going to keep playing the devil's advocate here, not because I disagree but simply because it leads to more discovery. My current company standardized on a bog-standard Microsoft shared drive, which for lack of curation/management turned into a corporate document landfill. I find Google Drive to be the cloud version of the same. Yes you can store a load of documents in sub-folders and such there, but it doesn't offer more sophisticated features like check-in, check-out, versioning, and so on (as far as I know).

I was going to say the same. I'd been working for a company that was on google for a couple of years until we got bought. Now it's Microsoft whatever.

As a remote user on a Mac, Microsoft blows.

Downsides of google:
No Gantt/project planning software.
Google drive is flexible and unstructured. Sometimes it'd be nice to have a more rigid document layout and enforcement.

Really stellar upsides:
Email
Calendar
Google Hangouts (super useful for remote users)
Drive has been very useful

Good advice, but your own response seems to me a reminder that there are no integrated systems that completely fit the situation (no surprise there) and it takes serious professional help to identify and install relevant systems.

Just discovered http://openkm.org, which is a doc repository that allows for check-in/out, team editing, and such. There used to be a similar system called o3spaces (Dutch), but they turned their attention to some kind of new Android/iOS app that does team writing, and they've let the collaboration system lapse, which is too bad - it was based on Tomcat and ran well. There are probably a few others out there. O3spaces had neat plugins for OpenOffice and MS Word so you could check out, edit, and then check back in your docs. That was awesome, but since the OO.o-LibreOffice split I haven't seen anyone updating their plugins and this model seems to be falling out of favor in lieu of constant-connection online editing, which is good if you're all plugged into fat connections but bad news otherwise.

On the messaging side, the ycombinator folks are crazy about something called http://www.slack.com which seems like running your business on twitter (internal communications) with links to Trello, Github, others. Seems pretty neat, but the messages don't get organized in a tree, so you've kind of got a running feed, which annoys me. I'd almost prefer an internal NTTP site (no peering, sharing) instead of corporate email, which sucks.

Excellent email, Google Drive does all the document collaboration you could ask for including offline access and multiple platform support, great calendaring, chat, etc. It's $50/user/year. You can't even buy a server for that.Google sites will take care of the intranet needs. What am I missing here?

Maybe you could even market a "professional" version at a higher price point for truck drivers that includes additional features that would be useful for that application (not sure what those are, but I'm sure there are some -- connection to the CB radio or dispatch office, maybe).

Visual warnings for too low bridges.

maybe software-assisted highlighting of lane markers and roadsigns.

This would make much more sense then:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/glow-in-the-dark-road-lights-the-way-to-energy-savings-in-the-netherlands/

Would be nice, but most likely regulated immediately: #pervertswithinfraredeyes. Not being able to see heat silhouette would be by far more important than preventing accidents.

Google Glass for Driving would be a great idea. Too bad Google wants to get rid of driving with their autonomous vehicles, so they probably aren't interested.

But I can see a market for dedicated driving glasses that incorporate infrared sensors (to see pedestrians and wild animals at night), anti-glare magic (for oncoming headlights), maybe software-assisted highlighting of lane markers and roadsigns. Probably lots of other cool stuff. This would be great for people who are scared of driving at night because of night blindness or extra glare from cataract surgery. Maybe use the GG software platform but tailor them to driving and hit a $299 price point. Then you just keep a pair in your car for much safer night driving and don't have to worry about looking like a fool for wearing them while walking around the street/school/office.

Maybe you could even market a "professional" version at a higher price point for truck drivers that includes additional features that would be useful for that application (not sure what those are, but I'm sure there are some -- connection to the CB radio or dispatch office, maybe).

These days, there's been a ton of innovation in these areas, and there's consensus that collaboration-by-email is not fun. And there are lots of new approaches to these age-old problems.

So, how would you do it?

I'd hire a consultant.

OK, seriously, what you are describing is nowadays referred to as a CMS - which can variously refer to call, contact, customer, configuration or content management system.

Some of the Wikipedia articles I'm about to cite identify some of the attributes that people care about, such as the ability to interact with the system via an electronic mail interface, or a web interface, or support for a specific operating system, or adherence to a specific license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_management_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_configuration_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRM_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_configuration_management_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

Each of those attributes translates into a choice of different software packages, which it is worth your while to negotiate if only to keep the results manageable, so that, after the dust settles down, you don't have three or four different, contending open source RDBMS installed.

And so we return to the original advice: engage a consultant.

My personal favorite is RedMine, but the last time I chedked they didn't support FreeBSD too well, and there was that horrible dependency upon Ruby.

Many people like Trac, but the last time I looked, it didn't have security.

I recently realized what my killer app would be for a screen that is always visible: an infrared camera. Being able to see into the infrared spectrum would give you "superhuman" powers, like never accidentally touching a hot surface, easily finding and insulating the spots where your house is losing heat during the winter, and being able to see pedestrians while driving at night. I think it will take that kind of incredible practicality to amaze people so much that they can't justify opposing Google Glass.