Social network is just beginning to affect the way the governed relate to The Government. Let's not close the door on congressional access to tools like Twitter, Qik, and Identi.ca. The Sunlight Foundation urges the Congress to clarify rules and remove restrictions on member web use. If you want congress to let member tweet, sign the petition by tweeting.
RailsConf Europe 2008, happening 2-4 September 2008 in Berlin, will feature presentations, keynotes, and tutorials by experts from the full spectrum of Rails techniques and practices. Seasoned Rails practitioners and newcomers alike will find a program honed to their particular interests and needs. Register by 15 July and save up to €150!
Anyone who develops software for a living needs a proven way to produce it better, faster, and cheaper. The Productive Programmer offers critical timesaving and productivity tools that you can adopt right away, no matter what platform you use. Master developer Neal Ford details ten valuable practices that will help you elude common traps, improve your code, and become more valuable to your team. Learn more.
"I truly enjoy my work more now that I have a better understanding and grasp of programming. I also get much more interesting work assignments and get more out of my work. [OST] courses are a challenge and so much fun to do!" —Ingrid Mifflin, Systems Librarian
What kind of software does it take to send a 700+ pound device millions of miles away to land safely on another planet? Peter Gluck is the project software engineer for the Mars Phoenix lander mission. In this interview with O'Reilly News, he describes how rocket scientists write and manage code, and why you're not likely to see NASA's source code any time soon.
We all know digital photos can be modified. So much so that, at least in the popular lexicon, Photoshop is synonymous with turning fact into fiction. But at least one facet of a digital photo, a variety of metadata called EXIF, is supposed to be secure. EXIF records when and how an image was captured, and if credible, might actually be judged admissible in a court of law. But not if Deke has anything to say about it. To hear Deke tell the story, metadata forensics is pure baloney. Learn how to cook your own EXIF in this episode of dekePod.
Learning Perl, popularly known as "the Llama," is the book most programmers rely on to get started with Perl. The bestselling Perl tutorial since it was first published in 1993, this new fifth edition covers recent changes to the language up to Perl 5.10. Reflecting years of classroom testing and experience, this edition is packed with exercises that let you practice the concepts while you follow the text. Learn more.
I suggest..an ISO standard giving definitions for different kinds of openness. Openness is a motherhood term now, so of course there will be surprises and debate about what kind of motherhood we actually mean. My opinion, for what it is worth, is that RAND-z and RF is necessary but not sufficient for openness, and that governments embarking on an open standard policy need to put in place some patent-limitation plan which would bring existing, market dominating, royalty-bearing standards into the RAND-z fold by, say, 2010. This necessarily will mean that some successful consortia and even some SCs within ISO will have the ground cut out from under them
The idea has gone from statistical curiosity to a deeply entrenched belief - especially in Silicon Valley: We are moving toward an economic state where it no longer becomes necessary to invest just in the top 1% of all ideas, but that instead an investor could create strategies using the web to take advantage of the statistical long tail - small niche markets (perhaps only one consumer deep) that in the aggregate can prove more lucrative than the blockbuster.
Velocity: Transforming Web Operations from Cost Center to Competitive Advantage — In the Web 2.0 world, web operations has moved from IT support function to mission-critical competency. In an online business, the web site is inextricably bound to the product. This report lays out the three crucial high-level principles for succeeding with web operations and performance, identifies the eight business principles that should drive web operations strategy, and describes best practices for implementing that strategy. Learn more.
IT workers are in general perhaps better prepared for the upheavals in that emerging world than most - a world where knowledge, flexibility, indepence of action and thought, and an ability to network will prove to be the most desirable characteristics, but that nimbleness comes at the cost of not tying yourself down to the older society's expectations. Even if the economy does manage to avoid the worst of the doldrums, these are traits to encourage in the days ahead.
Brian Cox talks about the scientific and technical challenges as well as some of the LHC-related computing efforts. Cox makes the case for the importance of continued commitment to pure scientific research calling the LHC the Earth's "first Apollo Mission of the 21st Century". He compares life as a rock star to life as a high-energy physicist, and debunks some of the FUD surrounding the possible creation of black holes. The Large Hadron Collider will collide up to 600 million protons every second, and it will produce 2 GB of data every 10 seconds requiring a globally distributed network of petabyte-scale storage and thousands of CPUs.
By Deke McClelland
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