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17 votes
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Why email is the best discussion platform
10 votes -
When phones were fun: Samsung's "Matrix Phone" (2003)
8 votes -
What if the internet never existed?
5 votes -
Incognito mode detection still works in Chrome despite promise to fix
11 votes -
Alexis Ohanian (site co-founder) resigns from Reddit's board, urging them to fill his seat with a black candidate and pledging future gains on his stock to serve the black community
63 votes -
The great race to surrender our privacy (2019)
5 votes -
Signal app downloads spike as US protesters seek message encryption
16 votes -
Schools turn to surveillance tech to prevent Covid-19 spread: "We are very much interested in the automated tracking of students"
6 votes -
Critics warn of multimedia 'hell' (1995)
9 votes -
One Twitter account is reposting everything Trump tweets. It was suspended within three days
34 votes -
Retrotech: The Novell NetWare Experience
4 votes -
Internet service provider Optus has been ordered to hand over the details of a customer accused of defaming a Melbourne dentist through a Google review
7 votes -
AWS and Slack join forces
6 votes -
Seven years later, I bought a new Macbook. For the first time, I don't love it
26 votes -
What are secure alternatives to slack, and what are your experiences with them?
First, some context. The latest from the US justice department saying that they will be focusing on finding "ANTIFA leaders" is incredibly troubling for anyone involved in leftist groups. I...
First, some context. The latest from the US justice department saying that they will be focusing on finding "ANTIFA leaders" is incredibly troubling for anyone involved in leftist groups. I foresee a lot of good activists, regardless of how far left they actually are, arrested on trumped up charges in order to squash opposition.
Organizing is essential to resist fascism. This is made more difficult by the pandemic, as in person meetings bring a huge, almost unacceptable risk. As such, many orgs have been turning to platforms like Slack instead. Trouble is, Slack logs are not encrypted and I am certain that as a business based in the US Slack will not put up a fight to keep user data safe if the feds come calling.
I'd like to collect a decent list of alternatives. Important factors include encryption, ownership, open source status, ease of use, federation, scalability, hosting, cross platform, and anything else you can think of.
23 votes -
How a raccoon became an aardvark
7 votes -
Reddit's /r/history closed down for 24 hours in protest against Reddit's lack of anti-racist policies
25 votes -
Hands-on review: Why Apple’s newest iPad Pro packs a powerful punch
8 votes -
Even if you're trying to avoid Grubhub by calling restaurants directly, Grubhub could still be charging it a fee
8 votes -
DuckDuckGo now crawls the web regularly to create a free list of trackers to block
21 votes -
Black Lives Matter protesters aren’t being tracked with Covid-19 surveillance tech. Not yet
6 votes -
Retiring old service versions
3 votes -
An AMA with the developers of Lemmy, a federated open-source alternative to reddit
23 votes -
Introducing peer-to-peer Matrix
18 votes -
Sexism in technology
11 votes -
A good egg: Robot chef trained to make omelettes
3 votes -
Facebook employees stage virtual walkout to protest US President Donald Trump posts
16 votes -
Microsoft lays off journalists to replace them with AI
15 votes -
Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for 'glorifying violence'
20 votes -
Galaxy Z Flip comes with an unexpectedly low-tech vibe
6 votes -
Here are the Minneapolis police's tools to identify protesters
14 votes -
US President Donald Trump signs executive order designed to limit the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content users post on their platforms
31 votes -
US President Donald Trump's executive order isn't only about Twitter; it's also attempting to ensure that Facebook won't change their own approach in the lead-up to the election
10 votes -
How does the Gmail unsubscribe button work?
10 votes -
On WD Red NAS Drives: disclosure of Western Digital products that make use of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR)
15 votes -
US President Donald Trump has accused Twitter of "completely stifling free speech" after the social media company flagged some of his tweets with a fact-check warning
42 votes -
“Core Web Vitals” replaces AMP as requirement for Top Stories module
16 votes -
Obsidian is now in public beta - A knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files
20 votes -
Overclocking and water cooling a TI-84 graphing calculator (to play DOOM on it)
23 votes -
macOS 10.15.5 has a trivial bug or a ‘reprehensible’ security decision
7 votes -
If Trump kicks out Twitter, there's always Germany
7 votes -
Zuckerberg dismisses fact-checking after bragging about fact-checking
6 votes -
How do you design a Proof of Concept project for a new dev/test tool?
Input wanted for an article. Let's say that your company is considering the purchase of an expensive new application to help in the company's software development. The demo looks great, and the...
Input wanted for an article.
Let's say that your company is considering the purchase of an expensive new application to help in the company's software development. The demo looks great, and the feature list makes it sound perfect for your needs. So your Management arranges for a proof of concept license to find out if the software is worth the hefty investment. The boss comes to you to ask you to be in charge of the PoC project.
I'm aiming to write an article to help developers, devops, and testers determine if a given vendor's application meets the company's needs. The only assumption I'm making is that the software is expensive; if it's cheap, the easy answer is, "Buy a copy for a small team and see what they think." And I'm thinking in terms of development software rather than enterprise tools (e.g. cloud-based backup) though I suspect many of the practices are similar.
Aside: Note that this project is beyond "Decide if we need such a thing." In this scenario, everyone agrees that purchasing a tool is a good idea, and they agree on the baseline requirements. The issue is whether this is the right software for the job.
So, how do you go about it? I'm sure that it's more than "Get a copy and poke at it randomly." How did (or would) you go about designing a PoC project? If you've been involved in such a project in the past (particularly if the purchase wasn't ideal), what advice could someone have given you to help you make a better choice? I want to create a useful guide that applies to any "enterprise-class" purchase.
For example: Do you recommend that the PoC period be based on time (N months) or workload (N transactions)? How do you decide who should be on the PoC team? What's involved in putting together a comprehensive list of requirements (e.g. integrates with OurFavoredDatabase, meets performance goals of X), creating a test suite that exercises what the software dev product does, and evaluating the results? ...and what am I not thinking of, that I should?
7 votes -
Twitter allows new tweets to restrict replies to "everyone, people you follow, or only people you mention"
14 votes -
Reverse engineering a £339 5G bioshield
7 votes -
Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou loses key court battle as British Columbia judge rules extradition bid should proceed
7 votes -
GE switches off light bulb business after almost 130 years
7 votes -
WeCo - Cooperatively owned, democratically governed, open source social news
19 votes -
Celebrating ten years of WebM and WebRTC
6 votes