Slick_Snake - Slashdot User

Submission + - How would you solve the IM problem?

Submitted by Artem Tashkinov on Monday March 13, 2017 @12:24PM

Artem Tashkinov writes: The XKCD comics has posted a wonderful and exceptionally relevant post in regard to the today's situation with various instant messaging solutions. E-mail has served us well in the past however it's not suitable for any real time communications involving video and audio. XMPP was a nice idea however it has largely failed except for a low number of geeks who stick to it. Nowadays some people install up to seven IMs to be able to keep up with various circles of people. How do you see this situation being resolved?

People desperately need a universal solution which is secure, decentralized, fault tolerant, not attached to your phone number, protects your privacy, supports video and audio chats and sending of files, works behind NATs and other firewalls and has the ability to send offline messages. I believe we need a modern version of SMTP.

Comment Godspeed (Score 1) 1521

by rune.w on Thursday August 25, 2011 @02:37PM (#37210092) Attached to: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

You are lucky that you leave with the satisfaction that arises from a job well done. Congratulations on your achievement and best of luck in your future life. You'll be missed.

Time to move on.

Comment Re:Someone help me out. (Score 1) 54

by rune.w on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @06:26PM (#36816984) Attached to: Dawn Takes First Pictures of Vesta From Orbit

I'm a complete idiot with this sort of thing, but why did they orbit so far away (9k miles)? It surely can't have that great of a gravitational pull, can it? Why not get as close as is prudent (or is 9k miles the prudence limit)? It seems like the closer the better for studying the thing.

As someone far more knowledgeable than me has pointed out elsewhere, they did this because astronomers are not sure about the exact mass of the asteroid and therefore want to play it safe until they have more data, at which point they plan to lower the orbit.

Link

Zynga Seeks $1 Billion In IPO 93

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 01, 2011 @03:42PM from the that's-a-lot-of-farmville dept.

bizwriter writes "Zynga finally filed its IPO paperwork today, as it wants to raise $1 billion. And while the reports of how well it did were significantly overstated, this is a company that still makes significant revenue and profit. If you thought that LinkedIn's IPO was hyped and hyper, Zynga's going to put that all to shame."

Portal 2 Bringing Steam To the PS3, Possible Early Release 156

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 15, 2011 @04:04PM from the i'm-making-a-note-here dept.

itwbennett writes "Portal 2 is breaking some new ground – at least the PlayStation 3 version is. 'Portal 2 marks the first time that Valve's social gaming network (and digital distribution system), Steam, will appear on consoles,' writes blogger Peter Smith. What this means is that once you link your Playstation Network [PSN] and Steam accounts 'you'll be able to keep tabs on what your Steam friends are up to from within a game of Portal 2 on the PS3,' says Smith. And, you'll be able to play Portal 2 with friends playing on PC or Mac. 'I can think of at least one other example of cross-platform gaming (Shadowrun supported both PC and Xbox players in the same game servers),' says Smith, 'but it's still very rare.'" This afternoon Valve launched a countdown to Portal 2 which can be accelerated by playing any of a group of indie games.

Comment Adverse drug events and duplicity (Score 1) 60

by rune.w on Monday April 11, 2011 @07:48PM (#35787442) Attached to: Bringing Open Source To Biomedicine

Drugmakers are already required to keep track of adverse drug events that arise during clinical testing. Much of this information is reported to regulatory agencies on almost a daily basis and there's a lot of work going behind the scenes to make sure the information is reliable, consistent and keeps patient privacy.

I can understand to some extent why drugmakers aren't too keen to jump into this. There is little use in adding yet another database into an already busy workflow. This new database is guaranteed to be different from many in-house solutions currently in use, so you will need to train people, get them used to the new process, etc. just to input the same data the regulator already receives. IMO this won't be worth the effort in the eyes of many drugmakers unless you get regulatory agencies involved.

I am not saying in general this is not a worthy cause. We currently have more data derived from genomics (and all the other -omics) than we can analyze. However to be successful this guys need to make sure they aren't duplicating the functionality of the myriad of public databases already out there.

Ski Lifts Can Could Help Get Cargo Traffic Off the Road 225

Posted by timothy on Monday January 31, 2011 @03:11AM from the you-either-like-this-or-have-no-soul dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this except from a beautifully illustrated, thought-provoking article: "These days, we use them almost exclusively to transport skiers and snowboarders up snow slopes, but before the 1940s, aerial ropeways were a common means of cargo transport, not only in mountainous regions but also on flat terrain. An electrically powered aerial ropeway is one of the cheapest and most efficient means of transportation available. Some generate excess energy that can be used to power nearby factories or data centers. An innovative system called RopeCon (not to be confused with a role-playing convention held annually in Finland) can move up to 10,000 tonnes of freight per hour."

Comment More to this discussion... (Score 1) 152

by rune.w on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @12:02PM (#34487832) Attached to: NASA's 'Arsenic Microbe' Science Under Fire

...in this great blog. Also check out the rest of the posts, if you're a chemist you'll definitely will enjoy the "stuff I won't work with" series.

Comment Re:Enhancements (Score 1) 67

by rune.w on Monday April 26, 2010 @03:29PM (#31987984) Attached to: 20 Years of Hubble

What's your point? If we didn't have equipment, we couldn't see the rings around Saturn. We couldn't see Uranus let alone Neptune.

You probably mean we couldn't see the rings around Jupiter instead of Saturn. Saturn's rings are quite visible from any decent backyard telescope.

Technical Objections To the Ogg Container Format 370

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @03:25PM from the do-these-objections-matter-on-modern-hardware? dept.

A user writes "The Ogg container format is being promoted by the Xiph Foundation for use with its Vorbis and Theora codecs. Unfortunately, a number of technical shortcomings in the format render it ill-suited to most, if not all, use cases. This article examines the most severe of these flaws."

Living In Tokyo's Capsule Hotels 269

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @05:34PM from the living-in-the-hive dept.

afabbro writes "Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 once offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home. Now with Japan enduring its worst recession since World War II, it is becoming an affordable option for people with nowhere else to go. The Hotel 510’s capsules are only 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide. Guests must keep possessions, like shirts and shaving cream, in lockers outside of the capsules. Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas says, 'It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep. You get used to it.'”

Comment Re:infinite? (Score 1) 241

by rune.w on Friday December 11, 2009 @12:41AM (#30398422) Attached to: "Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores In Japan

You could probably get more than that if you rotate 90 degrees on the same spot those pixels that have a color gradient.

Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC 115

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 20, 2009 @05:40PM from the going-in-circles dept.

feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."

SCO Terminates Darl McBride 458

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 19, 2009 @12:05PM from the end-of-an-era dept.

bpechter writes "Linux Today reports SCO has terminated Darl McBride and linked to the SCO 8K SEC report. The report found also at the SCO site and states: 'the Company has eliminated the Chief Executive Officer and President positions and consequently terminated Darl McBride.'"

Interview With an Adware Author 453

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @05:26PM from the warming-up-for-the-botnet-era dept.

rye writes in to recommend a Sherri Davidoff interview with Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, who talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) "So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that's encrypted — really more just obfuscated — to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. ... There was one further step that we were going to take but didn't end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. ... It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network."

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