Lucas.ces

Daniel_Stuckey writes "Shakira F. Suglia and co-authors surveyed 2,929 mothers of five-year-olds (PDF) and found that 43 percent of the kids consumed at least one serving of soft drinks per day. About four percent of those children (or 110 of them), drank more than four soft drinks per day, and became 'more than twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people.' In the past, soda and its various strains have been related to depression, irritability, aggression, suicidal thoughts, and delusions of sweepstake-winning grandeur. Of course, this study didn't find out what types of soda the children had consumed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The internet is all about the free flow of ideas, right? Collaboration! Discourse! Sharing! The day to day reality of what we do online may not always be quite so idealistic and ideologically motivated, but the open underpinnings are there. Except, of course, when they're not at all. This visualization, published by Sebastian Sadowski, uses Google's transparency data to visualize all the things the company has been asked to censor.

Read more...

Cloud-based inventory and sales management developer TradeGecko has announced that it is now integrated with online accounting system Xero. The Singapore-based company says that the partnership will allow its clientele of small- and medium-sized businesses to monitor financial transactions in real time.

The integration links invoice, stock and customer data automatically, and allows businesses to save time by eliminating manual data entry and reducing the risk for errors between separate IT systems.

“Xero inventory management has been one of our most requested features, and anyone whose run a growing business will understand why,” said TradeGecko CEO Cameron Priest. “Linking TradeGecko and Xero makes staying in control effortless and means our customers can grow without needing to increase headcount in the back office.”

Based in Singapore, TradeGecko launched in September and was founded by former clothing designer Carl Thompson. Its cloud-based inventory and sales management system was developed to emphasize user experience with intuitive data displays. The company’s investors include WaveMaker Labs, Golden Gate Ventures, and the Singapore National Research Foundation.

Xero’s partner program gives developers access to its API and connects them to Xero’s 150,000 customers, as well as the company’s network of accounting and bookkeeping partners.

“Any small business can run their accounts on Xero, but to get real value, we want to allow our customers to connect all their other applications: CRM, e-commerce, stock, job management etc. If it touches finances or your customer and supplier data, then we want to help developers integrate it,” said Xero Developer Partner Program manager Ronan Quirke.

TradeGecko will continue to integrate with other cloud services this year to allow businesses to connect their back-end systems and automate their administration process.

C++14 is the next update to the C++ programming language. While only considered a minor update over C++11, it will bring with it several new features...

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: always more room , half full , wine , half empty , after 12 , g rated Share on Facebook

The complexity of connecting tools in this new API economy is getting compounded by the inability to link this new breed of services so people can talk in context about the code. Application development cycles are shorter and developers are picking tools that make them more productive.

To counter the increasing complexity, Tasktop Technologies, an application lifecycle management (ALM) integrator, is today launching an open-source effort called Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) that would link the disparate tools in the software lifecycle management process. The new initiative is called M4, and if approved at EclipseCon, it will become part of an open-source project under Eclipse-Mylyn.

SLI is what Tasktop CEO and co-founder Mik Kersten calls an underlying service that acts as a universal linked data message bus that allows for real-time synchronization between different tools so people can immediately discuss problems with the code as they surface.

Tasktop links data from different ALM tools that a company uses. Often, companies may use software from IBM, HP or Atlassian. But the tools are often disconnected. Tasktop has developed a way for these tools to connect to each other through a linked data infrastructure that allows for developers to see real-time updates to the projects they are developing in collaboration with each other.

Tasktop hopes to provide a similar linked data underpinning so developers can get to the data in these ALM suites to help fix integration problems that are increasingly common as more companies use APIs to connect different software and online applications.

Agile tools like GitHub have become indispensable for developers. They have broken down the barriers, bringing conversation to application development. That same level of conversation needs to extend through to the chain of tools that make up the software development cycle.

APIs are great connectors, but there has to be a better way to see the development behind the tools that developers use to make this next generation of software and services. We’ll see if the various vendors in the software world recognize the issue and recognize the need for a way to sync data across the app ecosystem.