Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

Grids in business -- Comment()
Grid software gets business connection: "Developers of the Globus Toolkit program--open-source software used to link groups of servers and storage systems into a single pool of computing power--have released an alpha version of their software that incorporates Web services technology, the group said Monday. Web services are a host of technologies sweeping the computing industry, standardizing next-generation Internet processes such as advertising what capabilities a computer has or governing who has permission to use a certain computers on the network." [Loosely Coupled news aggregator]

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Esoteric computer languages: "This site is sort of a clearing house for bizarre programming languages, designed either to annoy the user or to explore odd programming paradigms (often both). My personal favorites are Unlambda (functional programming in hell) and Befunge (two-dimensional control constructs, anyone?). Another highly amusing language is called hq9+, which is, oddly, not linked from the above site. If you like this sort of thing you should also check out this site." [Lambda the Ultimate] [Sam Gentile's Weblog]

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Where We'll Go in 2003: "Almost everyone likes to make predictions. After looking into my crystal ball, this is what I see happening in 2003 -- or at least what I'd like to see happen. As the Chinese curse says, I expect that we'll find 2003 "interesting" regardless of the final outcome. For starters, this will be the year that we see Microsoft go into decline." [osOpinion]

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SVG 1.1, Mobile Profiles reach Recommendation status: "The W3C has released the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 Specification and Mobile SVG Profiles: SVG Tiny and SVG Basic as Recommendations, along with some much more exciting demos than is typical for the XML world." [xmlhack]

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More on scientific openness: 'In the January 13 issue of The Scientist, Willie Schatz offers his summary of the swirling currents at the recent NAS conference on national security and research in the life sciences. Pressure to classify more research is increasing and resistance to this pressure is also increasing. Quoting John Hamre, president of CSIS: "The security community looks at the scientific community as at best disobedient and at worst traitorous. The scientific community looks at the security guys as a bunch of dopes. Both views are terribly wrong, of course."' [FOS News]

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Is Microsoft Losing Control?: "A few well-aimed chinks in the armor that may, over time, begin to spread big time." (Mac Night Olw via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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c|net: Safari highlights Mozilla questions: "Mozilla project is facing new questions about quality after Apple's release of Safari browser based on rival open-source code--the KHTML rendering engine that is the core of Konqueror, an open-source file manager and Web browser for the KDE. The article notes a recent email from Safari's engineering manager touts the KHTML engine choice over Mozilla's Gecko engine and notes the release of WebCore and JavaScriptCore (also used in Sherlock) to the open-source community." [The Macintosh News Network]

X11 for Mac OS X Frequently Asked Questions -- Comment()
If you are using the X11 package recently provided by Apple, you should check the document X11 for Mac OS X Frequently Asked Questions. This contains a lot of useful tips and tricks.