firehose

A customer-service platform company, Zendesk is moving one step closer to launching an initial public offering.

The seven-year-old start-up has added three new members to its board with credentials at publicly-traded tech companies. They include Caryn Marooney, vice president of technology communications at Facebook, and Michelle Wilson, a former general counsel for Amazon. With the addition of these people, the company now has seven directors.

A formal announcement of the appointments is expected to sometime today (Feb. 4).

Zendesk is slated to go public sometime this year and has hired lead underwriters Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to handle an initial public offering, according to a recent report (paywall) by the Wall Street Journal. Bringing on board members with credentials from public companies usually signifies a firm’s intent to prepare for life under the public microscope. Zendesk has not commented on its plans for an IPO so far, and a spokesman declined to comment.

Launched in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007, Zendesk represents a number of companies like Box Inc. and Dropbox, who have sought to offer retail and business consumers software products remotely. Zendesk provides online customer service through email, Twitter, phone calls and chat conversations.

Zendesk already has raised about $85 million and boasts roughly 400 employees housed in an office not far from Twitter’s headquarters. According to sources, the company now has 40,000 customers using software that serve more than 300 million people worldwide.

tomewing:

ancientpeoples:

Stone Dice

Greek

1st Century AD

20 sided dice made of stone, inscribed with letters of the Greek alphabet (from alpha to upsilon)

(Source: The British Museum)

Cannot believe my parents took me endlessly to the British Museum as a kid to look at stolen carvings, mummies etc and never tried to sell me on it with a 2000 YEAR OLD D20.

Asus' new Chromebox is a nice step up from Samsung's model.

Asus

Google's Chrome OS continues to show up on more and more devices, and while the majority of them are laptops, it looks like desktop users are going to have quite a few options as well. Joining LG's upcoming Chromebase all-in-one is the Asus Chromebox, a headless mini-PC that goes on sale in March for $179. At 4.88" by 4.88" by 1.65", it's similar to but slightly larger than Intel's more versatile NUC desktop in every dimension.

Despite its desktop-shaped package, the Chromebox is the same on the inside as many recent Intel Chromebooks, including the Acer C720. The base model includes a 1.4GHz dual-core Celeron 2955U based on Intel's Haswell architecture, integrated Intel graphics, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of solid-state storage, dual-band 802.11n with Bluetooth 4.0, and an SD card reader and Kensington lock slot. AnandTech reports that the Chromebox will also be available in higher-end variants with a 1.7GHz Core i3-4010U and a 2.1GHz (3.3GHz Turbo) Core i7-4600U and up to 4GB of RAM across its two DIMM slots. The Core i7 version apparently won't be available on American shores, though.

In addition to the USB ports on the front, the box includes two more USB 3.0 ports on the back, one gigabit Ethernet jack, one full-size HDMI port, and one full-size DisplayPort.

Asus

The Asus Chromebox includes many of the features of Samsung's $329 Chromebox originally introduced in 2012 but at a substantially lower price. Samsung's model had more display outputs but lacked HDMI, and its Sandy Bridge Celeron CPU also needed a cooling fan that the Asus version doesn't need.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

In an interesting bit of geotagging, the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit has placed its global temperature data on Google Maps. The data set, called CRUTEM4, tracks how the temperatures at the Earth's surface have changed over the last century or so (ocean data is handled by a different project and is not included here). By adding geographic data, it's possible to get a sense of how different regions are responding to our changing climate and where we still lack solid data.

CRUTEM4 calculates what's called a global mean land surface temperature. To do so, it divides the Earth's land areas into equally sized grid squares. Using temperature data from monitoring equipment in each grid cell, an average temperature for the cell is calculated; these temperatures are then averaged across the globe to give a global mean temperature.

These grid cells are displayed in red and green on Google Earth (the color has nothing to do with the temperature trend in the cell). By clicking any one of them, you can bring up a history of the temperatures within that cell. The map also makes it clear that there are lots of areas in the globe with sparse coverage. Antarctica and Greenland only have some scattered readings along its coast; Siberia, the Amazon, and Sahara all lack readings from some spots in their interiors.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Microsoft

This morning, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella, until now Microsoft’s vice president in charge of the company’s enterprise and cloud products, has been named the company’s new chief executive officer. The company also named a new chairman of the board, as Bill Gates will return to help Nadella plot the course for the company and take a greater role in the company’s operations.

The announcement ends months of speculation about who would replace outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer. But it also signals a less radical shift at the software giant, as Gates will return to provide a great deal more guidance over the company’s technology development.

In an e-mail to employees this morning, Nadella wrote:

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

In response to the absurd music video “The Fox” by Ylvis, SciShow takes a look at what sounds foxes really make.

Thanks to a couple of Norwegian musicians, a lot of people have become obsessed with one question: What does the fox say? It turns out that foxes “say” lots of different things depending on the situation, and if you think the song is weird, just wait ’til you hear the real thing.

More often than not the most wonderful cats are regular okay cats doing regular okay cat things, as explained in this “Cat Song” written by Heather Anne Campbell and performed by Liz Beebe for Animation Domination High-Def (ADHD).

You’re my cat, my regular okay cat, turns out you’re pretty good at that. No special purr, no fancy mew, but I’m glad the cat I got is you. And I hope you’re glad you got me too…I put you in a sweater and you didn’t move.

hodad

Here’s Jeff’s piece, just in time for the winter sports/

Original Source

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hi, all: Here's a link for my IndieGoGo Medusa's Guide for Gamer Girls.

I am VERY passionate about getting more women interested our tabletop RPG hobby. I'm just as passionate about wanting to advise women on how break into the gaming industry as writers or editors, as women are often more fearful of putting themselves out there--whether it be the fear of rejection or failure. But the hobby just flat-out needs more female representation!

Now, even though I've been nicknamed THE Feminist Conspiracy, I really enjoy my male gaming friends! So note that this is not a book I will write to exclude them or degrade them; in fact, I'll seek some male perspectives on the issues brought up within the book. But I do want to discuss the problems we face as women gamers and how to overcome them, and some of those problems involve dealing with guys who are not very open minded or who simply see women as objects. I also want to introduce readers to some positive women role models who are industry professionals, and I want to talk about how women can break into this industry--if that is their goal.

This book has been inspired by the many panels I've done on the topic of women and gaming, especially by the Gamer Girls Unite & Write panel I did with Amanda Hamon and Amber Scott at PaizoCon 2013. Those have all been well-attended--by both men and women--panels.

So, I guess you might want to know who the heck I am before supporting this project. I've been a gamer since the early 1980s, having started with D&D. I play Pathfinder (including PFS), Savage Worlds, and RIFTS, mostly--but I will try most any RPG. I had my first publication in Dungeon #61, which I co-authored with a friend. Nowadays, I write, edit, develop, and publish gaming material. I'm a developer with Rogue Genius Games and Misfit Studios; and I publish my own line at Christina Stiles Presents. I've done freelance work for Paizo Publishing, Kobold Press, Green Ronin Publishing, White Wolf Studios, Troll Lord Games, and many others. In 2012, I was a GenCon Industry Insider Guest of Honor. You can find my website (which needs updating to add more book releases) at www.christinastiles.com. One of my upcoming projects is Strange Brew: The Ultimate Witch & Warlock for Pathfinder, which is kickstarting now through February.

In short, I love RPGs! I love them so much, in fact, that I want to write, edit, develop, and publish them on a full-time basis. So backing this electronic book (pdf, mobi, epub) helps me leave the day job behind and be able to support my family. My husband and I have had a very hard time of things over the last few years (he's been unable to work for 3 years, and has been trying that long to receive disability; because of this, I had to file Chapter 13 bankruptcy), but I believe we are headed for better times; and my working on the things I love and being at home help me and the husband enjoy a closer relationship.

So, support a book about women and gaming to help a woman gamer and game designer make a full-time go of her dream.

The Sasquatch! Festival is taking place over two weekends this year, Memorial Day weekend and the Fourth of July weekend at the Gorge Amphitheater in central Washington. Your traditional American holiday festivities are just gonna have to take a back seat to music-festing this year, because the (entirely different) lineups for both weekends—announced last night—are among the strongest Sasquatch has had in years.

Highlights of the May 23-25 weekend include: Outkast, the National, Haim, Die Antwoord, Chance the Rapper, Phantogram, Yelle, Panda Bear, Phosphorescent, Parquet Courts, Damien Jurado, Deafheaven, Black Joe Lewis, Liars, Lucius, the Stepkids, Little Green Cars, Cloud Control, Jonathan Wilson, Waxahatchee, Pink Mountaintops, Radiation City, La Luz, Modern Kin, Tacocat, and more,

Highlights of the July 4-6 weekend include: Kraftwerk, New Order, Frank Ocean, Royksopp & Robyn, Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, Broken Bells, Tegan and Sara, Rhye, the Black Angels, the Horrors, the Notwist, Dr. Dog, Kurt Vile, Talib Kweli, Action Bronson, Lee Fields, Sharon Van Etten, Courtney Barnett, Fuck Buttons, Cloud Nothings, Palma Violets, Mikal Cronin, Majical Cloudz, Death, Black Prairie, Reigning Sound, Typhoon, Phox, Ages and Ages, Chad VanGaalen, Chastity Belt, Iska Dhaaf, and more.

Click the jump for the full lineup in copy-and-pasteable text. Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10 am and can be purchased through the Sasquatch site. Last year, they sold out in 90 minutes, although with two separate weekends this year, I don't expect they'll go quite so fast.

Memorial Day Lineup (May 23-25, 2014)

Outkast, The National, Queens of the Stone Age, M.I.A., Foster the People, Kid Cudi, Haim, Neko Case, Foals, Major Lazer, Cut Copy, Die Antwoord, Elbow, Violent Femmes, The Naked And Famous, Cage The Elephant, Mogwai, Tyler, the Creator, Chance The Rapper, Portugal. The Man, Rudimental, Boys Noize, Gesaffelstein, Cold War Kids, City and Colour, Phantogram, First Aid Kit, Tune-Yards, Yelle, AlunaGeorge, Panda Bear, Phosphorescent, Bob Mould, Washed Out, Band of Skulls, Austra, Parquet Courts, Damien Jurado, Deafheaven, Big Freedia, Classixx, Black Joe Lewis, Liars, Tourist, Ryan Hemsworth, Tokimonsta, Chet Faker, Banks, The Dodos, The Lonely Forest, Lucius, Hozier, The Stepkids, Half Moon Run, Little Green Cars, Crystal Fighters, Houndmouth, Cloud Control, Jonathan Wilson, Waxahatchee, Foy Vance, Mary Lambert, Willy Mason, Papa, Shakey Graves, The Growlers, Syd Arthur, Cowboy and Indian, White Sea, Rathborne, Pink Mountaintops, The Physics, Radiation City, La Luz, The Bright Light Social Hour, Big Scary, Modern Kin, Tacocat, Raz Simone, Sam Lachow, Gifted Gab, Hobosexual, The Grizzled Mighty, Fly Moon Royalty, The Flavr Blue, Deap Vally & more.

Comedy: Princess Feat. Maya Rudolph, Nick Swardson, Bridget Everett, Eric André, Charlyne Yi

Fourth of July lineup (July 4-6, 2014)

Soundgarden, Kraftwerk (3D), New Order, Frank Ocean, Röyksopp + Robyn, Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, Broken Bells, Tegan and Sara, Local Natives, La Roux, Gogol Bordello, Jake Bugg, Atmosphere, Rhye, The Bloody Beetroots, Dillon Francis, Big Gigantic, The Black Angels, Deltron 3030, The Horrors, Junip, The Notwist, St. Lucia, Kurt Vile & the Violators, Dr. Dog, Talib Kweli, Of Montreal, The Cave Singers, Punch Brothers, Action Bronson, Lee Fields & The Expressions, Sharon Van Etten, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Sol, Casey Veggies, RL Grime, Tchami, Audion, Fuck Buttons, Courtney Barnett, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, Cloud Nothings, Foxygen, Palma Violets, Mikal Cronin, Mac DeMarco, Jon Hopkins, Gold Panda, Majical Cloudz, Duke Dumont, Oneohtrix Point Never, Death, Black Prairie, Latyrx, Metz, John Grant, Reigning Sound, Black Milk, Typhoon, Cass McCombs, Young & Sick, No, Boy & Bear, Ásgeir, Wild Cub, Gangstagrass, Phox, Ages and Ages, The Districts, Mimicking Birds, Chad VanGaalen, Shelby Earl, Hunter Hunted, Fly Golden Eagle, Sandrider, Helms Alee, Night Beats, Chastity Belt, Dude York, Iska Dhaaf, Kithkin, Pollens & more, plus 4th of July Fireworks.

Comedy: Demetri Martin, Eugene Mirman, Kurt Braunohler, W. Kamau Bell, Kyle Dunnigan, John Hodgman.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

There are best-shape-of-his-life anecdotes, and then there are best-shape-of-his-life pictures. This is one of the latter.

Finishing my workout to have another monster season for all those media hater that still doubting!!! pic.twitter.com/Aoorrc1egG

— David Ortiz (@davidortiz) February 3, 2014

Going to guess that everyone has the Medium Papi joke at the ready. So we can also go with:

Moderate Papi
Median Papi
Sparse Papi
Appropriately Portioned Papi
Still Quite Big, But Not As In Your Face About It Papi
Papi

Jokes aside, he looks terrifying. And that's probably a good thing for the Red Sox.

At the time I decided to make Unread, I wasn’t using RSS anymore. Months earlier, even before Google Reader announced it was shutting down, I was so busy with my day job and side projects that I couldn’t keep up with all my subscriptions. So I stopped trying. I felt relieved not to have the burden of another inbox to clear, but I missed reading my favorite writers — those who post less frequently but write with care.

Unread was more than just my first project as an indie developer. It was a chance for me to change my reading habits. Despite having a new baby boy around the same time — who has since reached six months old and change — I found some downtime left over each day to start reading again. I needed an RSS app that could help me slow down and read peacefully.

One of Riposte’s users once wrote a very flattering post about our app:

I loved @riposte almost immediately. Well designed and self-assured, the UI felt, when compared to others, both somewhat foreign and surprisingly comfortable.

The words that struck me most were “foreign and suprisingly comfortable.” While that wasn’t a deliberate goal when we made Riposte, I have consciously strived to make Unread feel unexpected yet instantly familiar, like what I look for in new music.¹ I hope that’s what you’ll feel if you try Unread.

I really like the idea of an app being comfortable. Comfortable means always knowing where you are. It means not worrying about making a mistake. It means information has an obvious visual hierarchy: bold titles, tidy paragraphs, and spacious margins. Comfortable means there’s not visual clutter to distract you, except for those items that are supposed to stand out, like buttons or the damn status bar.

Comfortable also means physical comfort, which is an aspect of mobile app design that designers often forget. Anyone with a new baby knows how convenient it is to be able to use an app with one hand. Some areas of the screen are hard to reach, especially on an iPhone 5 or later. Grip your phone in one hand observe the sweep of your thumb. It’s easy to reach objects in the center, but the navigation bar is too far away to reach without adjusting your grip. Although it’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that closer is always better, positioning an item too close to your hand can cause discomfort because of the way your thumb has to flex to reach it.

I decided that best way to make Unread a comfortable app was to let the reader directly manipulate each screen anywhere her thumb might land. This freed me to remove interface chrome and focus on the text. It’s now a trite idea for design to focus on “content,” but in Unread’s case it really was an essential goal. I wanted readers to get their minds out of the email rut that has trapped their expectations of what RSS can be.

Unread doesn’t use navigation bars², tab bars, or tool bars. It has a full-screen interface, interrupted only by the status bar at the top and a “footer bar”, paired to match the status bar, at the bottom. The footer bar shows the title of the current screen. I experimented with having no footer bar, but since the same article can appear in many different lists, I often felt lost without it.

Click to see full resolution.

Because there’s no navigation bar, there’s also no back button. To go back, you pan to dismiss the current screen, dragging from left to right. Unlike other apps, you don’t have to start dragging from the edge of the screen. You can start wherever your thumb happens to be. Swiping back through several screens feels a bit like dealing cards in a poker game. I think this interaction is really great, but don’t take my word for it. Mikhail Madnani of Beautiful Pixels had this to say:

@unread I want iOS 7 navigation to be like you. Please make them Sherlock the app and everything.

Or as he put it more emphatically on another occasion:

It gives me a boner.

Unread’s article view is just text. There are no buttons. The status and footer bars stay hidden the entire time.³ There are two themes, one for day and one for night.⁴ Both themes are set in Whitney and Whitney Condensed from HOEFLER & CO. These fonts make my eyes feel relaxed. They’re warm and slightly playful in bold title weights, and subdued and crisp in body text weights.

Examples: Day, Night, and Campfire (a hidden theme).

The hardest design for me to solve was the article list screen. In a typical RSS app, this screen is the one that most resembles an email inbox. I knew I wanted to avoid email design cues, but it was really hard to find another way. All those conventions were developed for good reasons. Here’s a link to a sampling of outtakes. I’m a slow learner. It was months before I finally found the current design.

Here are links to the screenshots I am using for the App Store:

• Screenshot One
• Screenshot Two
• Screenshot Three
• Screenshot Four
• Screenshot Five

Unread’s article list screens are unlike those found in other RSS apps you may have used. There are no toolbars, no unread indicators (dots), and no buttons. Each article summary is neatly laid out with obvious consistency. The titles are set in a condensed bold font, bucking the iOS 7 trend towards unreadable thin fonts. There’s an ample amount of padding above each article title and below each article summary, which makes it easy to see where one article ends and the next one begins. You’ll notice that there are no favicons. Most websites have crappy, non-retina favicons, even sites that otherwise have an attention for detail. I think real-world favicons distract more than illustrate, so I chose not to include them.

The last word of a sentence is the most _______. That’s why Unread’s article summaries aren’t truncated at an arbitrary number of lines using elipses. Summaries are composed of whole sentences. Each summary is about the length of an App.net post, give or take a few sentences. If you subscribe to good writers who don’t bury their ledes too deeply, you’ll find that the summaries give you a good idea of what each article is like.

If an article is determined to be a Linked-List style article — i.e. the article’s URL is a link to another site and not the permalink — then the domain of the linked item’s URL is displayed at the bottom of the summary. This is a feature I’ve always wanted in an RSS reader.

Every screen in Unread has its own set of options.⁵ Rather then put them in a toolbar, which would add clutter and feel too familiar, the options are tucked away offscreen in an options menu. This menu is invoked by dragging the screen from right to left — just like pull-to-refresh, but sideways. Just drag your thumb wherever it may be. This helps make Unread comfortable to use with one hand, no matter what size iPhone you have or how big your hands are:

Pull sideways to trigger options menus.

There’s comfort in consistency. One of the things I learned from people’s positive feelings about Riposte was the importance of using gestures solely for navigation and not mixing navigation gestures with action gestures. The options menu doesn’t strictly adhere to that idea, but it follows the spirit of the law. The entire screen moves with your thumb. There are no competing swipe gestures on article cells that will confuse you. Gestures are the same on every screen in the app. Learn them once. Use them everywhere.

The options menus keep your screen free of invasive toolbars, but they don’t sacrifice features. Unread has lots of sharing options, with more yet to come. All the sharing features were built using OvershareKit, an open-source library made by me and Justin Williams. Try it out in your next project.

I think it’s important to reiterate what I wanted Unread to be. I didn’t make it to be a feature-for-feature replacement for an app you may already be using. That would make Unread merely a thin coat of paint on old ideas. The point of Unread is to give you an opportunity to change the way you read. Its design can only take you halfway there. I urge you to prune your subscriptions down to the writers you care about most. Look for new writers you haven’t read before. If you’re a writer, I hope it inspires you to write more thoughtfully, too.

Our users' trust is something we never take for granted here at GitHub. In order to earn and keep that trust we are always working to improve the security of our services. Some vulnerabilities, however, can be very hard to track down and it never hurts to have more eyes.

We are excited to launch the GitHub Bug Bounty to better engage with security researchers. The idea is simple: hackers and security researchers (like you) find and report vulnerabilities through our responsible disclosure process. Then, to recognize the significant effort that these researchers often put forth when hunting down bugs, we reward them with some cold hard cash.

Bounties typically range from $100 up to $5000 and are determined at our discretion based on actual risk and potential impact to our users. For example, if you find a reflected XSS that is only possible in Opera, which is < 2% of our traffic, then the severity and reward will be lower. But a persistent XSS that works in Chrome, which accounts for > 60% of our traffic, will earn a much larger reward.

Right now our bug bounty program is open for a subset of our products and services (full list is on the site), but we are already planning on expanding the scope as the things warm up.

Check out the GitHub Bug Bounty site for full details, and happy hunting!

Researchers find a way to give Android users prominent warnings when apps are tracking their location.

By David Talbot at the MIT Technology Review.

slackeremeritus:

floranna2:

errors-dot-albi:

thegoddamazon:

fipindustries:

incognitomoustache:

catbountry:

nerdgerhl:

wondygirl:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

mcstack:

kumeko:

Oh Billy, you look so small right there…

Superman’s sheer anger over Billy Batson’s situation is a sight to behold. Batman and Robin get away with it because he knows it’s the world’s best internship and that Bruce is willing to put out all the stops to protect him. But Billy? He doesn’t have anyone looking out for him. And that pisses off Superman more than anything.

Seriously, Clark’s face here

He is ready to kick the ass of whoever put this boy in this situation SO HARD

Next page he really lets the Wizard Shazam have it.

Shit, son. I might have to buy this book for those last two panels alone.

When Superman is written well he is an amazing goddamned character.

these few pages are some of my favourite in comic book history. So good. For anyone wondering what the next few pages look like, here you go:

This is a bigger deal than some of you might think, because Superman is one of the heroes in the DC Universe who keeps his secret identity pretty damn secret, because as probably the most powerful and influential person on earth, a lot of people do not wish him well - and would jump at the chance to hold people dear to him as leverage.

Yet, he trusts this poor, scared little kid. To comfort him, and entrust him with his biggest secret - just as Billy did for him.

Superman is just really important, ok?

this for people to truly understand superman

This is why I love Supes.

scenes like this make me wonder why the hell I’m not into comics more

What comicbook is this? I WANT IT!!!!

This storyline takes place in the Superman/Shazam: First Thunder miniseries, published in 2006.

Such a favorite.

geektoriassecret:

me leaving your party

Quinns: Ooh, it's nice to have dramatic news to lead off with. Fantasy Flight has done a grand reveal of the first "Huge Ship Expansion" for their excellent X-Wing Miniatures Game, the GR-75 Rebel transport. Just look at it! Imagine how many new players it's going to bring to the game when they double-take at it in their local game shop.

We all knew that these huge ship packs would be an investment (the Rebel transport will cost $60), so it's nice to see that they'll be a mini-expansion in and of themselves, with new rules for damage, movement and energy, an x-tra X-wing, and a deluge of tokens and cards. And this is just the first of the two huge ships revealed at Gen Con last year, with the other being approx. 20% huger (and $90).

But wait, because I've got some expansion news that's even more exciting!

Read More