A collection of stories tagged 'collaborative' from Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/ Copyright 2006 RoomforMilk.com. RoomforMilk is not affiliated with Slashdot.org. Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:31:57 EST adamengst writes in with good news for anyone who needs to collaborate remotely on a writing or editing project — coding too. It's especially good news for those using Windows and Linux. Mac users have had SubEthaEdit for a few years now. With EtherPad, two or more people can edit a document and see all the edits simultaneously. EtherPad's main differences from SubEthaEdit: it's a Web application that de facto supports many platforms without the need for a central Mac OS X host; and it's free. Here is a comparison of EtherPad and SubEthaEdit.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26309 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/1abCqA1YBxs/article.pl Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:05:17 EST The Dutch Ministry of Finance organized an architecture competition to design not a building, but rather the new 5-Euro commemorative coin. The theme was 'Netherlands and Architecture'. The winning design was made 100% with free software, mainly Python, but also including The Gimp, Inkscape, Phatch, and Ubuntu. The design is amazing — the head of Queen Beatrix is made up of the names of architects based on their popularity in Yahoo searches (rendered in a font of the artist's own devising). In the end the artist, Stani Michiels, had to collaborate closely on location with technicians of the Royal Dutch Mint, so all the last bits were done on his Asus Eee PC. Soon, 350,000 Dutch people will use and enjoy the fruits of free software."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25943 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/XNbB592wQ44/article.pl Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:05:08 EST There's an interesting new community by ASUS and Intel called WePC. It enables anyone to post their dream PC including not only function, but form as well. You can draw up your dream and describe it in words, and also fiddle with some predetermined properties. No doubt the two companies are looking for common configurations so they can implement them in future products, but according to the press release, even individual designs may get the two companies' backing."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25904 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/suS9mJBYV2U/article.pl Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:05:03 EDT After attending DEFCON in August and seeing the overwhelming interest in this book, I was eager to dive into The IDA Pro Book by Chris Eagle. Chris Eagle's team, School of Root, won the 'Capture the Flag' event at DEFCON this year and Chris gave a presentation on CollabREate, a tool that integrates with IDA Pro to allow collaboration in reverse engineering (RE). All of that — together with the fact that the book sold out — screamed that this book should quickly make it to the top of my list." Read below for the rest of Ryan's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25856 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/u6NT5tkRVHk/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:06:14 EDT After attending DEFCON in August and seeing the overwhelming interest in this book, I was eager to dive into The IDA Pro Book by Chris Eagle. Chris Eagle's team, School of Root, won the 'Capture the Flag' event at DEFCON this year and Chris gave a presentation on CollabREate, a tool that integrates with IDA Pro to allow collaboration in reverse engineering (RE). All of that — together with the fact that the book sold out — screamed that this book should quickly make it to the top of my list." Read below for the rest of Ryan's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25841 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/u6NT5tkRVHk/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:05:09 EDT Andrew Bartlett of Samba fame has written a document describing their recent collaboration with Microsoft's Active Directory team. In brief, it would seem that the sky is falling, as Microsoft's engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully interoperable with AD. They have organized interoperability fests and have knowledgeable engineers answering technical questions without legal or marketing drones getting in the way. However according to Andrew the Samba AD team is currently very short on manpower, so if you have network experience, now is the time to get coding."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25724 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/KoT85-_IZes/article.pl Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:05:04 EDT An anonymous reader recommends a speculative blog entry by Chris Soghoian up on CNet. Soghoian makes a convincing case that the NSA could be using loopholes in the law to gather real-time location information on the mobile phones of millions of people. There is no hard evidence that this is happening, but the blog post sheds light on the dense undergrowth of companies populating the wireless space that could be easy pickings for a National Security Letter with a gag order attached. "While these household names of the telecom industry [AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint] almost certainly helped the government to illegally snoop on their customers, statements by a number of legal experts suggest that collaboration with the NSA may run far deeper into the wireless phone industry. With over 3,000 wireless companies operating in the United States, the majority of industry-aided snooping likely occurs under the radar, with the dirty work being handled by companies that most consumers have never heard of."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24649 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ZFuK2O2kcKo/article.pl Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:05:03 EDT The FBI, NSA, and CIA are jointly supporting a newly created 'MySpace' for the intelligence community. Named 'A-Space,' the site will contain highly classified material, so naturally, it won't be available to the public. From CNN: '[Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis] demonstrated the program to CNN to show how analysts will use it to collaborate. "One perfect example is if Osama bin Laden comes out with a new video. How is that video obtained? Where are the very sensitive secret sources we may have to put into a context that's not apparent to the rest of the world?" Wertheimer said. "In the past, whoever captured that video or captured information about the video kept it in-house. It's highly classified because it has so very short a shelf life. That information is considered critical to our understanding."'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24582 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/A6OHz9rhjLE/article.pl Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:05:05 EDT This week's Google outages left several Google Apps admins in the lurch — and many of them are second-guessing their advocacy for making the switch to hosted apps, InfoWorld reports. The outages, which affected both Gmail and Apps, 'could serve as a deterrent to some IT and business managers who might not be ready to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their servers,' according to the article. 'If we began to experience a similar outage more than about two or three business hours per quarter, we'd probably make Google Apps and Gmail a backup solution to a locally hosted mail system, if we used it at all,' said one Apps admin. 'And it would likely be years before we'd try a cloud-based collaborative system again from any vendor.' Coupled with recent Apple and Amazon cloud issues, these Google outages are being viewed by some as big wins for Microsoft."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24201 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/367241023/article.pl Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:05:01 EDT Mozilla has unveiled a spectacular new concept browser, dubbed Aurora. The bleeding-edge browser is part of a new Mozilla Labs initiative, in which the open-source foundation is encouraging people to contribute ideas and designs for the browser of the future. The Aurora browser demonstration shows a highly advanced way of collaborating data gathered on the web, and represents a spectacular introduction to the new Mozilla Labs, which much like Google Labs looks to become a home for offbeat projects which would otherwise probably never see the light of day. More details, and a video demonstration, are on the Mozilla Labs site."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23992 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/357384080/article.pl Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:05:00 EDT Austrian newspaper Der Standard continues its recent series of in-depth interviews with free software developers. This time they sat down with Novell's Vice President of Developer Platform, Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame. The interview was conducted at GUADEC (GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference). Miguel talks mainly about Mono 2.0 and .Net 3.5 compatibility, enhancing the collaboration with Microsoft over Silverlight ("Moonlight" in Mono), and the larger political situation of Mono and Moonlight. When the interviewer asks whether Moonlight is only validating Silverlight on the web, Miguel gives a quite detailed answer that includes a possibly well-deserved swipe at Mozilla..."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23952 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/355363529/article.pl Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:05:02 EDT The recently concluded 2008 Mozilla Summit, held in Whistler, Canada, was impacted by a rock slide that cut off the main highway between Whistler and Vancouver, where most attendees planned to depart via airplane. In true open-source fashion, summit attendees collaborated on a solution, opening a Bugzilla bug (severity: "blocker"), posting crash dumps, and proposing solutions, including chartering a flight (which would land first in TRUNK, then BRANCH). Eventually, attendees settled on a workaround which seems to have been successful. For next year's summit, organizers might want to consider a location with more redundancy."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23921 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/353669862/article.pl Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:05:00 EDT The automobile industry may be hurting, but Microsoft is doubling down and making a massive new investment in its automotive business unit. Microsoft already works closely with a number of car companies and will enhance that effort with more people and more resources. Sync developed as a collaboration with Ford Motor Co. allows motorists to control their cell phones, music players and navigation systems with voice commands while they drive. Microsoft is also making 'Live Search' technology available to automakers to develop in-car search and navigation. Detroit native Tom Philips, the new unit leader said 'There are a lot of technologies that are two to three years out that are going to provide even more connectivity and innovation. There's such a disconnect between what people experience in their cars and what they experience in the rest of their lives.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23837 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/349515109/article.pl Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:05:23 EDT Many Web developers wish to create e-commerce sites that also support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other features that can increase traffic to the sites. But most shopping cart products do not include those capabilities, or, if such third-party add-ons exist, they may be quite limited in functionality. Similarly, most if not all content management systems (CMSs) lack native e-commerce capabilities. Yet that barrier is being overcome, because a handful of e-commerce modules have been created for the most popular CMSs. Perhaps the most promising pairing, at this time, is Drupal and the e-Commerce module — a combination covered in the book Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce by Michael Peacock." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23687 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/341775874/article.pl Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:05:00 EDT IBM's Nathan Harrington has an interesting essay on using open-source tools to ensure privacy on Google Calendar: 'Today's Web applications provide many benefits for online storage, access, and collaboration. Although some applications offer encryption of user data, most do not. This article provides tools and code needed to add basic encryption support for user data in one of the most popular online calendar applications. Building on the incredible flexibility of Firefox extensions and the Gnu Privacy Guard, this article shows you how to store only encrypted event descriptions in Google's Calendar application, while displaying a plain text version to anyone with the appropriate decryption keys.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23670 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/340921602/article.pl Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:05:01 EDT Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. The tour was given by Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems. Some of the key aspects of this dynamic virtual world are voice communication with distance attenuation, the ability to join a Wonderland meeting through a regular phone if a computer is not handy, and the sharing of applications such as Open Office. Wonderland is currently being used by educational facilities and can be used by other organizations for virtual collaboration. Since the project is an Open Source project, users can tweak the tools available to suit their particular purpose."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23415 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/329052852/article.pl Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:05:01 EDT UK astronomers, as a part of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration, have reached a milestone in the construction of one of the largest ever cameras to detect dark energy by completing the shipment of the glass required for the five special lenses. Each step in the process of completing this sophisticated camera brings scientists closer to detecting the invisible matter that cosmologists estimate makes up around 75% of our universe."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23357 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/326372784/article.pl Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:05:01 EDT Finally, a Forrester analyst who understands the attitudes of software developers. Mike Gualtieri identifies nine behaviors managers need to steer clear of or risk being labeled "clueless" — from control freak tendencies to being a vendor puppet. My favorite, however, is point #8: "the CIO collaborates to death," in which Gualtieri opines, "And, if you never watched Star Trek then you shouldn't even be a CIO.""Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23313 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/324416479/article.pl Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:05:02 EDT An international collaboration of astronomers is taking a unique approach to funding their research, through an 'adopt-a-star' program. Preparing for the launch of NASA's Kepler satellite next February, the group will help characterize thousands of stars that the mission will be searching for evidence of Earth-like planets. For a small donation, early adopters get a certificate by email and updates when any planets are found around their adopted star."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23309 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/324320794/article.pl Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:05:01 EDT An industry wishlist for future browsers has been collected and developed by OpenAjax Alliance. Using wiki as an open collaboration tool, the feature list now lists 37 separate feature requests, covering a wide range of technology areas, such as security, Comet, multimedia, CSS, interactivity, and performance. The goal is to inform the browser vendors about what the Ajax developer community feels are most important for the next round of browsers (i.e., FF4, IE9, Safari4, and Opera10) and to provide supplemental details relative to the feature requests. Currently, the top three voted features are: 2D Drawing/Vector Graphics, The Two HTTP Connection Limit Issue, and HTML DOM Operation Performance In General . OpenAjax Alliance is calling for everyone to vote for his/her favorite features. The alliance also strongly encourages people to comment on the wiki pages for each of the existing features and to add any important new features that are not yet on the list."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23287 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/323484487/article.pl Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:05:01 EDT CNET is reporting that on Monday Orbitz will announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite, both 'part of a Complex Event Processing system designed to monitor large distributed applications, analyze the data that is gathered and display that data in real-time graphs.' Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday's announcement adds significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry. In particular, it highlights Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's vision that enterprise IT needs to open up and collaborate. However, as Orbitz's development team notes, it's easier said than done to participate in open source, especially when creating projects rather than simply contributing to existing projects."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/23237 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/321614007/article.pl Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:05:02 EDT Fantastic Lad, among many others, points out another in a long series of claimed "powered by water" sources of automotive power, this one by a Japanese company called "Genepax," which interestingly enough does not have so much as a Wikipedia entry. What's scary is the uncritical, even serious-sounding, presentation by Reuters of such extraordinary claims quite unbacked by extraordinary evidence. "Almost sounds too good to be true" isn't the half of it; if cars could be made which would run as "long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report), you'd know not only about the car, but you'd notice the long lines of people buying generators, laptops, and power tools that run on the same technology. The snippet Reuters is carrying says "Jun. 13 — Japanese company Genepax presents its eco-friendly car that runs on nothing but water. The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car. Genepax, the company that invented the technology, aims to collaborate with Japanese manufacturers to mass produce it." Fantastic Lad, deadpan, goes on: "Check out the Reuter's story and accompanying video. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there some sort of conservation of energy thing happening in the whole 'separating hydrogen from water' game? I wonder what the real story is on this. Investment fraud? Magic?" Show your work; bonus points if you use Haiku.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/22982 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/311926644/article.pl Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:05:01 EDT TaeKwonDood writes to tell us that another step towards Star Trek's Holodeck technology has been taken with the advent of HoloVizio 3D. Allowing users to see and manipulate objects in 3D without the assistance of goggles, this distributed system shows a lot of promise. "The HoloVizio is a 3-D screen that will allow designers to visualize true 3-D models of cars, engines or components. Better yet, gesture recognition means that observers can manipulate the models by waving their hands in front of the screen. The function offers enormous scope for collaboration across the globe."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/22886 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/308274603/article.pl Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:05:06 EDT Britannica has long been a vocal critic of Wikipedia's user-generated content, and has repeatedly attacked the accuracy of its articles. Surprisingly, then, it is rolling out a new system allowing readers to potentially contribute to articles, Wiki-style. But Britannica is keen to stress that its new website will not be following the Wiki-model, describing it "as a collaborative process but not a democratic one." You can try out the new Britannica beta site."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/22874 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/308037505/article.pl Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:05:01 EDT Preston Gralla has a decent idea that could move the office needle: If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs, and sell support for the combined suite to small businesses, medium-sized business, and large corporations. Given the reach of Google, the quality of OpenOffice, and the lure of free, it's a sure winner. Imagine if a version of it were available as a Web service from Google, combined with massive amounts of Google storage. Integrated with Google Docs, it would also allow online collaboration. For those who wanted more features, the full OpenOffice suite would be available as a client — supported by Google. wouldn't be at all surprised to see this happen. Just yesterday, IBM announced that it was selling support for its free Symphony office suite. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine Google doing the same for OpenOffice, after it integrates it with Google Docs."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/22792 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/304849522/article.pl Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:05:01 EDT