OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: There are many fantastic open-source tools out there for everything from scanning documents to making interactive music to creating 3D assets for games. Many of these tools have an Achilles heel though -- while the code quality is great and the tool is fully functional, the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are typically significantly inferior to what you get in competing commercial tools. In an nutshell, with open source, the code is great, the tool is free, there is no DRM/activation/telemetry bullshit involved in using the tool, but you very often get a weak UI/UX with the tool that -- unfortunately -- ultimately makes the tool far less of a joy to use daily than should be the case. A prime example would be the FOSS 3D tool Blender, which is great technically, but ultimately flops on its face because of a poorly designed UI that is a decade behind commercial 3D software. So here is the question: should open-source developer teams for larger FOSS projects include a professional UI/UX designer who does the UI for the project? There are many FOSS tools that would greatly benefit from a UI re-designed by a professional UI/UX designer.

New submitter Hrrrg writes: A number of years ago, I built a computer with an Asus LGA 1150 Z87-Pro motherboard. Since the discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws, I was hoping for a BIOS update to address them. However, it seems that there will be no BIOS update forthcoming for this 5 year old motherboard. I would prefer not to repeat my mistake with future builds. Can you recommend another manufacturer that is doing better?

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: As someone who grew up with 1980s and 1990s computers and electronics and still has whole boxes of lovingly prepared printed computer, peripheral, game and software manuals from that era, I am continually surprised by how just many products ship without a proper printed manual these days. Case in point would be things like Android phones. Android has quite a few not-entirely-obvious functions built into it. And a lot of people aren't even aware they exist. No Android phone I've bought has ever had a printed manual included in its little product box. Not even a small one. Even expensive laptops ranging in price from 2,000 to 5,000 Dollars often come only with a few sheets of printed paper in the box -- warranty card, where to register the device, URL for downloading drivers and so on. Why is this? It can't be environmental concern -- the electronics devices themselves, when thrown away, are a hundred times (if not worse) more harmful to the environment than a little 50 to 100 page recycled paper booklet would be. So where are the manuals? Is it the cost of preparing the manuals? The cost of printing them? Is it a few grams of extra weight added to the product box? Is everyone supposed to look up everything online now, even in places where there is no internet connection? And why can't there be a print manual option -- e.g. pay 3 to 5 Dollars extra, and get a full, printed manual you can study on a couch?

Long-time reader theodp writes: Some education watchers have adopted a wait-and-see response to Jeff Bezos' two-pronged $2B pledge to aid the homeless and to establish preschools for low-income children (Mark Zuckerberg's The Primary School interestingly prefers 'em even younger, noting "we admit students at or before birth"). Not so Audrey Watters, who presents her misgivings in a blog post, titled, "It's Like Amazon, But for Preschool" (tl;dr: read her URL), wondering what a chain of preschools that "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon" might look like, considering Amazon's own labor practices. She asks, "Are private preschool chains really the path we want to pursue, particularly if we believe that access to excellent early childhood education is so incredibly crucial? Can the gig economy and the algorithm ever provide high quality preschool? For all the flaws in the public school system, it's important to remember: there is no accountability in billionaires' educational philanthropy." Sharing Watters' concerns is author Anand Giridharadas, who argues in his new book Winners Take All that the wealthy pursue social change without uprooting the systems that produce inequality. Bezos has a "a stark opportunity to be a traitor to his class, to actually think about giving in ways that transform the system atop which he stands," Giridharadas said. "It is great to be a winner who gives back. It is even better to be a winner who thinks about how winners can take less."

We have not run book recommendations and book discussion posts for some time. So here it goes: What's a book -- or books -- are you reading this month? Additionally, what's a book you finished recently that you found insightful, or funny, or both. (The latter request comes from a reader.) Leave your recommendation and any additional notes in the comments section below.

Make everyone stand. Work to an agenda. Don't let people go on endlessly. There are plenty of suggestions on how to run meetings so they are not a waste of time. People pay less attention to a bigger waste of time: the multi-participant conference call, argues a story on Financial Times. The story -- shared by an anonymous reader and which may be paywalled -- makes a case against the need for conference calls: You know the drill. An invitation arrives in your inbox with a date and time, a list of participants, numbers for dialling in from different countries and a sign-in code (followed by the pound or hash sign). I have had dozens of these invitations to conference calls, particularly those to discuss forthcoming panels and events. None of the calls has contributed much to the eventual event. I know this because my role is often to chair the eventual event. This is the first difference between a conference call and a face-to-face meeting: it is clear who is chairing the meeting, whereas it is seldom clear who is chairing the call. On conference calls, there is usually someone listed as the organiser, with their own sign-in code (followed by the pound or hash sign), but they are often not the most senior person on the call. The organiser, I can say from experience, is seldom the person who is going to be chairing the planned event. Usually, they are the person who organised the call. That may be a senior person; it may be their personal assistant.

The call organiser may take the leading role in the call. It is hard to tell because -- unless you have met several times before -- it is difficult to know who is speaking at any time. Unlike in a face-to-face meeting, you cannot see people's faces. As participants "arrive" in the conference call, they usually say, "Hi, this is Diane", or are announced by a recorded voice like entrants to a 19th-century ball -- "Simon Oates has joined the call" -- but after that you have to listen keenly for any voice marker (an accent, a shouty tone) that will help you identify who is talking. That is if you can remember who is on the call in the first place. What do you think?

Last month, Gmail's big redesign became default for everyone, changing up the aesthetic appearance of the email service and introducing several new features. One of the key features, Confidential Mode, lets you add an "expiration date" and passcode to emails either in the web interface or via SMS, but not everyone is so trusting of its ability to keep your private data secure. "Recipients of these confidential emails won't be able to copy, paste, download, print or forward the message, and attachments will be disabled," notes Engadget.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) doesn't think this new mode is secure at all. It's not encrypted end-to-end, so Google could read your messages in transit, and the expiring messages do not disappear from your Sent mail, which means they are retrievable. What's more is that if you use an SMS passcode, you might need to give Google your recipient's phone number. Because of these reasons, Slashdot reader shanen doesn't believe the new feature goes far enough to secure your data. They write: [M]y initial reaction is that I now need a new feature for Gmail. I want an option to reject incoming email from any person who wants to use confidential mode to communicate with me. Whatever conspiracy you are trying to hide, I'm not interested. So can anyone convince me you have a legitimate need for confidential mode? The main features I still want are completely different. Easiest one to describe would be future delivery of email, preferably combined with a tickler system.

theodp writes: "Long before phone addiction panic gripped the masses and before screen time became a facet of our wellness and digital detoxes," begins Katie Reid's article, How the Shared Family Computer Protected Us from Our Worst Selves, "there was one good and wise piece of technology that served our families. Maybe it was in the family room or in the kitchen. It could have been a Mac or PC. Chances are it had a totally mesmerizing screensaver. It was the shared family desktop." She continues: "I can still see the Dell I grew up using as clear as day, like I just connected to NetZero yesterday. It sat in my eldest sister's room, which was just off the kitchen. Depending on when you peeked into the room, you might have found my dad playing Solitaire, my sister downloading songs from Napster, or me playing Wheel of Fortune or writing my name in Microsoft Paint. The rules for using the family desktop were pretty simple: homework trumped games; Dad trumped all. Like the other shared equipment in our house, its usefulness was focused and direct: it was a tool that the whole family used, and it was our portal to the wild, weird, wonderful internet. As such, we adored it." Did you have a shared family computer growing up? Can you relate to any of the experiences Katie mentioned in her article? Please share your thoughts in a comment below.

A Slashdot reader writes: I've tried a lot of phones for extended periods of time. Some of these have included the Samsung S4, S5, S8+, Note 4, S7, iPhone 5, and Huawei Honor 8. I have stayed away from Apple... My favorite phone was the Nokia 920 Windows phone for its fluid performance and simplicity and hardware camera button, but that phone is long gone.

When searching for an unlocked phone after leaving my current job I ordered a Huawei Honor 8 which refused to join a network, and a iPhone 7 which was DOA. This led to my reluctant purchase of a Sony Xperia XA2 Ultra when the Microcenter sales team couldn't find the last Google Pixel they had in stock. Had no idea I was in for such a treat. The Sony Xperia phone experience is well refined and a joy to use.

Are there any other unlocked phones that you know of under $500 that run this good?
Share your own opinions and experiences in the comments. What's the best unlocked smartphone?

An anonymous reader shares a report: Not quite, but it's certainly more than a blip in the cultural history of communication: in 2017, for the first time, the number of voice calls -- remember, those things you did with your actual voice on your actual phone -- fell in the UK. Meanwhile, internet addiction keeps growing, presumably because we haven't quite worked out what to do with all those hours we're saving on talking.

More than three-quarters (78%) of British adults own a smartphone, and we check them on average every 12 minutes. That adds up to 24 hours a week online via our phones -- much of that time swallowed up by modern-style chat on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, with some left over for texting. It has taken a toll on talking, sure, but few smartphone users might claim to feel less connected as a result.

Now, the idea of ringing someone for "a chat" has a quaint, retro quality. I can, and will, talk you under the table, but phone calls are a luxury usually reserved for about five people: my mum, my sister, two best friends and my editor, obviously. Even then, I'm rubbish at picking up. Much is made about smartphones leading to dumber conversation -- amid claims that the art of chatter has been lost. Arguably, however, conversation has simply been rebooted and reconfigured. Take the myriad ways in which we can and do communicate now. It's a given that I will spend an embarrassing portion of my day glued to a screen (It's work!) and much of that will be chatting (again, it's work!).

An anonymous reader writes: Plain and simple: What motivated or pushed you to leave your last job? Did you have any colleague or friend or family who had left their job for a similar reason?

New submitter pgralla writes from a report via HPE: Many devices, designed for both long-term and short-term use, were shortsighted when it came to flexibility. How do you handle the hardware that never gets software updates, such as embedded systems and task-dedicated equipment? The article that pgralla shared provides the example of medical devices running Windows 7. "Many of the current generation, when they were first released, used Windows 7, and the devices still work well enough that they remain in service today," reports HPE. "But Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 7 back in January 2015, so the operating system gets updated only with an occasional security patch as part of Microsoft's extended support. In January 2020, that extended support will end as well." Many IoT devices are in a similar boat as they're powered by embedded Linux and are not designed to be updated after they enter service."

Of course, these outdated devices create all sorts of security concerns. "Hackers and their access to knowledge and computing power only go up as the years pass, which means that long-lived, fixed-firmware devices become ever more insecure over time," says Michael Barr, founder of the Barr Group, which provides engineering and consulting services for the embedded systems industry. The WannaCry ransomware hack in 2017 affected not just PCs but also medical devices, and ended up costing businesses $4 billion.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It is almost a decade since Rick Rashid, then head of research at Microsoft, posed that question and ventured his own answer: no more than a few, at least to handle the vast majority of the planet's digital workload. Back then, he thought, it was possible to discern the emergence of a small group of companies that would run those computers. The give-away was that a fifth of all the servers sold in the world were already being purchased by a clutch of US tech groups that included Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

[...] Of course, "how many" is a trick question when it comes to the distributed computing systems being built by today's tech giants. There are many nodes to these octopus-like systems, each with its own silicon brain and information-processing capabilities. But they are connected to a greater whole. One sign of just how far their tentacles are starting to reach came this week with Google's announcement that it has designed an AI chip to run in smartphones and other devices. Google's TPUs -- processors that are optimised to both train deep-learning algorithms and then apply them to make inferences from new data -- are already a key part of its data centre infrastructure. The new low-power version of the TPU can make inferences in "edge" devices, far from the computing core, and will be an important element in making sense of the world's data.

[...] The rise of the global computers raises many questions, but two stand out: will they comprise a truly competitive market, or come to look like the more Balkanised "platform" markets in the consumer world? And what will it mean for so much computing power to be concentrated in a handful of private companies? The good news is that the cloud landscape is shaping up to be a competitive one, at least if competition can be said to truly exist between oligarchs.

In a story earlier this week, Popular Science magazine explored an age-old topic: Do people need to safely eject a USB stick before they pull it from their computer? The magazine's take on it -- which is, as soon any ongoing transfer of files is complete, it is safe to yank out the flash drive -- has unsurprisingly stirred a debate. Here's what the magazine wrote: But do you really need to eject a thumb drive the right way? Probably not. Just wait for it to finish copying your data, give it a few seconds, then yank. To be on the cautious side, be more conservative with external hard drives, especially the old ones that actually spin. That's not the official procedure, nor the most conservative approach. And in a worst-case scenario, you risk corrupting a file or -- even more unlikely -- the entire storage device. To justify its rationale, the magazine has cited a number of computer science professors. In the same story, however, a director of product marketing at SanDisk made a case for why people should probably safely eject the device. He said, "Failure to safely eject the drive may potentially damage the data due to processes happening in the system background that are unseen to the user."

John Gruber of DaringFireball (where we originally spotted the story), makes a case for why users should safely eject the device before pulling it out: This is terrible advice. It's akin to saying you probably don't need to wear a seat belt because it's unlikely anything bad will happen. Imagine a few dozen people saying they drive without a seat belt every day and nothing's ever gone wrong, so it must be OK. (The breakdown in this analogy is that with seat belts, you know instantly when you need to be wearing one. With USB drives, you might not discover for months or years that you've got a corrupt file that was only partially written to disk when you yanked the drive.)

I see a bunch of "just pull out the drive and not worry about it" Mac users on Twitter celebrating this article, and I don't get it. On the Mac you have to do something on screen when you eject a drive. Either you properly eject it before unplugging the drive -- one click in the Finder sidebar -- or you need to dismiss the alert you'll get about having removed a drive that wasn't properly ejected. Why not take the course of action that guarantees data integrity? What are your thoughts on this? Do you think the answer varies across different file systems and operating systems?

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino does PHP for a living, but says he's growing "increasingly frustrated with the ignorant and clueless in the vincinity of PHP." Crappy code and baaaaad application setups is one thing, but people refusing to fix them or simply not even understanding the broader implications of bad applications or attempting SEO with gadgets while refusing to fix 3.5 MB-per-pagecall are just minor tidbits in a history of increasingly unnerving run-ins with knuckledragers in the "web agency" camp...

Will I leave the larger part of this backwards stuff behind if I move to another server-side programming language such as Java or Kotlin for professional work in the broader web area? Do I have a chance to do quality work on quality projects using PHP, or are those slim compare to other programming languages? In short, should I ditch PHP?
"I think .NET is a much cleaner language to work in with Microsoft's excellent Visual Studio IDE and debugger," argues Slashdot reader Agret , adding "there are many large projects in my city hiring .NET developers and being a strongly typed language the code quality is generally better than PHP."

But what's been your experience? And would a frustrated developer find more quality projects by ditching PHP?

An anonymous reader shares a report: This is the first time FIFA, soccer's governing body, has allowed video replay to be used to make penalty calls in a World Cup. And while fans of basketball and American football are used to the referees stopping the game to consult video footage, soccer purists say it's ruining everything. The major complaint is that it's making the matches much longer than the typical 90-minute games. Martin Rogers, a sports columnist for USA Today, says Video Assistant Referee (or VAR) is "slow, clunky and unpredictable." Over the phone from Russia, where he's reporting on the World Cup, he jokes, "I remember back in the day, when if a game kicked off at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you'd be all wrapped up by 4:45."

Rogers says this type of technology works well for American football and basketball. "When you look at the calls that are used for replay, in basketball for example, it's normally factual. It's based on, 'Did a player get a shot off before the clock expired?' It's easy. You know. It's black and white." But soccer, Rogers says, is different. He's referring to one of the most hated and beloved qualities of the game: the endless drama. It's a thespian sport.

dryriver writes: If you are a user of a popular professional desktop software program, it is not uncommon for that program to get anywhere from 5 to 20 major or minor new features and functions about once a year to stay desirable and competitive. But it seems that hugely popular internet-based sites and services like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Google Search, Gmail, Outlook, WhatsApp, Telegram and others get major new features/changes much, much slower than desktop software. Quite often you'll come across a barrage of breathless news articles that say "Popular Internet Service X will add Y feature starting from April 1st." It is often one single and very obvious feature or functionality being added that people have wanted for years, not a cluster of 5 or 10 funky new functions at the same time.

Why is this the case? How is it that desktop software with just a few hundred thousand users and no more than a few dozen coders working can add 5 to 20 major new functions in just one year, and do this year after year, but a major internet-based service with tens or hundreds of millions of users and presumably hundreds or thousands of techies working behind the curtain keeps everyone waiting three years or longer to build a much requested feature into the system, and then only rolls out that one desired feature to great fanfare as if it is a huge achievement? Is it really that much harder to code major new features into an internet/cloud service, versus coding major new features into desktop software; or is this a deliberate business model that has become popular?

"Suddenly, calls and texts went unreturned," writes LinkedIn's editor at large, describing a recruiter who suddenly discovered the candidate she'd wanted to hire failed to respond to 12 messages, including emails like "Please let me know that you have not been kidnapped by aliens. I'm worried about you," and even a snail-mailed greeting card. Recruiters complain that prospective employees are now borrowing a practice from dating -- and "ghosting" recruiters and employers to let them know that they're not interested.

"Candidates agree to job interviews and fail to show up, never saying more. Some accept jobs, only to not appear for the first day of work, no reason given, of course. Instead of formally quitting, enduring a potentially awkward conversation with a manager, some employees leave and never return. Bosses realize they've quit only after a series of unsuccessful attempts to reach them.... Meredith Jones, an Indianapolis-based director of human resources for a national restaurant operator, now overbooks interviews, knowing up to 50 percent of candidates for entry-level roles likely won't show up."

A long-time Slashdot reader writes, "It'd be interesting to hear Slashdotters' experience with this." Have you ever ghosted a potential employer, or perhaps more relevant, have you ever been ghosted by a potential employer during the hiring process? Do you feel it's unprofessional, or simple justice for the behavior of some companies when the balance of power was more on their side?
Inc. magazine blames the low unemployment rate and "the effects technology have had on the communication style of younger generations." But leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Does ghosting show a lack of professionalism, or is it simple payback for the way corporations treated job-seekers in the past? And have you ever "ghosted" an employer?

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: In the world of 2D and 3D Visual Content Creation, new tricks that ship with commercial 2D or 3D software are almost always advertised as "fantastically innovative". But when you do some digging as to who precisely invented the new "trick" or "method" and when, you often find that it was first pioneered many many years ago by some little known computer graphics researcher(s) at a university somewhere. Case in point, a flashy new 3D VR software that was released in 2018 was actually based around a 3D calculation method first patented almost 10 years ago. Sometimes you even find that the latest computer graphics software tricks go back to little-known computer graphics research papers published anywhere from 15 to 25 years ago. So the question: What, in mid-2018, is the latest and greatest in 2D or 3D computer graphics research? And which academic/scientific publications or journals should one follow to keep abreast of the latest in computer graphics research?