OSCON 2008 -- O'Reilly's annual open source conference -- is going on now. O'Reilly News interviews Allison Randal, co-chair of OSCON, for a quick survey of what's new and interesting in the world of open source. Here's what to see and do and what to watch for in the world of free software for the next year.
The base64 module contains functions for translating binary data into a subset of ASCII suitable for transmission using plaintext protocols.Module: base64Purpose: Encode binary data into ASCII characters.Python Version: 1.4 and laterDescription:The base64, base32, and base16 encodings convert 8 bit bytes...
Is Terry Childs a Maniacal Hacker-Terrorist or a Capable and Dedicated System Administrator. While the mainstream media paints a colorful picture of villain and vice, Paul Venezia of infoworld uncovers a different story. What if this is just the case of job termination gone wrong.
Data messaging formats represent the life-blood of any distributed application. The ability to pass information back and forth between disparate systems becomes crucial for any organization, but for companies such as Google, the challenge of setting up communications between the thousands of different servers that host the various Google services forced the need for a specialized format that met their needs in particular.<
Social Networks have been around since the inception of bulleting board systems in the mid 1980s, and each one of them seems, for a time at least, to be the radical new paradigm that establishes how people will interact with one another over the web. Certainly, this seems to be the case to those investors (whether individual or corporate) who pay surprisingly stiff premiums in order to be a part of the next big wave, yet in truth social networking sites have a surprisingly consistent "life-cycle" that seems to play out regardless of the "angle" that the sites have.
Why are these people so scared of openness? This may seem a strange and provocative thing to say. Surely ODF is the open technology and OOXML is the proprietary technology? Surely we know this because "ISO" is the organization which is just the puppet of MicroSoft while OASIS is a bastion of community openness!
Simon Delivers, the first online grocery store in Minnesota, is shutting down.
Behind the competing technologies for Internet application development--which impinge directly on the plans of Internet providers and dot-com businesses--lie some basic problems with Internet standards and protocols. Each technical problem is also a metaphor for difficulties in the way people interact, both online and off-line: we don't know how to handle many-to-many connections, we don't know what will happen next in time, and it's hard to split tasks between systems.
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