Archive for April, 2008

Why Life On Mars May Foretell Our Doom

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Hugh Pickens writes "Nick Bostrom has an interesting interpretation on why the failure of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for the past half-century is good news and why the discovery of life on Mars could foretell our doom. Bostrom postulates a 'Great Filter,' which can be thought of as ...

Google Sets Sights On 3D Map of the Oceans

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Several readers wrote to tell us about one of the next major projects to enter the Google-verse. We already have pretty views of the Earth and the Sky, the next target is apparently a 3D map of the oceans. "The tool — for now called Google Ocean, the sources say, ...

Is Ubuntu Selling Out or Growing Up?

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

AlexGr notes an article by Jeff Gould where he says " Sometimes I wonder whether Ubuntu is really an open source software company any more. Yes, yes, I realize Ubuntu is not a company at all but a free Linux distribution, GPL'd and open source by definition. But still, the ...

Is Help Desk a Launchpad or a Dead End?

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Tracy Mayor writes "Is a gig on an IT help desk really the career death it's always assumed to be? Not always, this Computerworld writer found out, just don't get comfy and stay too long. "

Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

paleshadows writes "Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending ...

Building Powerful and Robust Websites With Drupal 6

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Michael J. Ross writes "For creating Web sites, developers are increasingly making use of content management systems (CMSs), any of which can provide the framework for a new site. But just as there are many similarities among all the leading CMSs, there are some significant differences, such as how easy ...

Nvidia’s Chief Scientist on the Future of the GPU

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

teh bigz writes "There's been a lot of talk about integrating the GPU into the CPU, but David Kirk believes that the two will continue to co-exist. Bit-tech got to sit down with Nvidia's Chief Scientist for an interview that discusses the changing roles of CPUs and GPUs, GPU computing ...

Is Ubuntu Selling Out or Growing Up?

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

AlexGr notes an article by Jeff Gould where he says " Sometimes I wonder whether Ubuntu is really an open source software company any more. Yes, yes, I realize Ubuntu is not a company at all but a free Linux distribution, GPL'd and open source by definition. But still, the ...

OpenPipeline seeks to ease document prep for search

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Enterprise search vendor Dieselpoint is behind a new open-source project centering on a document "pipeline" -- or as the Chicago company's CEO, Chris Cleveland, puts it, "all the boring stuff you need to make enterprise search work."

Berners-Lee Claims Web ‘Still in Infancy’

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

eldavojohn writes "The man credited with inventing the internet at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, has made a statement on the 15th anniversary of the internet that the web is still 'in its infancy'. He also made a pretty insightful comment about CERN's releasing of the code for the internet into public ...