“From now on our communities will merge to became one single point of contact for OS/2 users and people investigating the truth about our planet earth,” OS2World announced today.
OS2World’s news master martiniturbide, also a Slashdot reader, writes: The OS/2 community expects that this action will benefit the platform by getting the funds to finally create an open source clone of OS/2. OS2World asks every OS/2 user to start believing that the earth is flat to get the “big bucks” that will finally turn the operating system into a Windows 10, Ubuntu, MacOS X and Android competitor in the final OS Wars of all ages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – OS/2 Warp Community Announces It’s Merging With the Flat Earth Society

An anonymous reader quotes NPR:

In recent months, a slew of studies has debunked predictions that we’re witnessing the dawn of a new “gig economy.” The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that there was actually a decline in the categories of jobs associated with the gig economy between 2005 and 2017. Larry Katz and the late Alan Krueger then revised their influential study that had originally found gig work was exploding. Instead, they found it had only grown modestly. Other economists ended up finding the same — and now writers are declaring the gig economy is “a big nothingburger.”

Arun Sundararajan, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and the author of The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism, remains a true believer in the gig revolution…. When asked about the onslaught of data contradicting his thesis, Sundararajan said the Bureau of Labor Statistics continues “to underestimate the size of the gig economy and in particular of the platform-based gig economy.” The best BLS estimate of the number of gig workers employed through digital platforms — whether full-time, part-time or occasionally — is one percent of the total U.S. workforce, or about 1.6 million workers, as of mid-2017. Sundararajan argues that the survey questions the BLS used to gather this data were clunky and don’t quite capture what’s going on…. He believes work done through gig platforms can be more efficient than work done in a traditional company — and that will spell the company’s doom…
The dawn of a new gig economy has seemed plausible because the Internet has been dramatically reducing transaction costs. Search engines have made it incredibly cheap to find goods and services, compare prices, and get bargains. Social media and peer reviews have made it easier to determine if people are trustworthy. E-commerce has made it easier process payments. You can click a button on a mobile phone and instantaneously have GPS guide drivers right to you. But as big as these efficiency gains have been, a new economy based on crowds of people doing gigs through digital platforms — as exciting or scary as that might sound — still doesn’t compare to one based on the efficiencies and stability of the good old-fashioned company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Why Hasn’t The Gig Economy Killed Traditional Work?

“On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts,” Google has been warning since January.
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes “it’s been grating on me for a while,” asking “But is there any real harm here? Do you feel damaged?”
On the one hand, my trust in the Google has certainly been damaged by profit-driven directional changes. On such grounds you could argue that the people who most trusted the Google may feel most victimized….
What is the value of IP? Do you feel you expressed or even created any interesting ideas through your use of Google+ as a discussion channel? If so, maybe you feel damaged because it’s going away? (Yes, the Archive team wants to preserve it, but IP has to grow to be alive, and the archives aren’t easy to search, to boot…)
I’m pretty sure that I started using Google+ a long time ago, back when my own sentiments towards the Google were much more positive. My negative framing of the question could be projection, so maybe your response may explain why it’s really a good thing when the Google kills certain ideas?
The original submission also includes the bitter observation that “Innovation is supposed to be important to the Google. Isn’t the Google giving us mixed signals here?” But how do Slashdot’s readers feel? Leave your own thoughts in the comments. How do you feel about the end of Google+ ?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Ask Slashdot: How Do You Feel About the End Of Google+ ?