Friday, July 11, 2003

OSCON: Open source in the enterprise. Stormy Peters' keynote speech at OSCON 2003 covered some interesting points about how HP works to maintain a sane open source policy and works with the open source community. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] Interesting to see HP's guidelines for employees contributing to OSS and using OSS. 4:45:28 PM    comment []

OpenGroupware.org is developing an OSS groupware server. Their mission? To create, as a community, the leading open source groupware server to integrate with the leading open source office suite products and all the leading groupware clients running across all major platforms, and to provide access to all functionality and data through open XML-based interfaces and APIs. VERY cool! They have integration for MS Outlook, Ximian Evolution, Apple iCal and Mail, KDE, and a web interface. Exchange? Why bother. 4:28:30 PM    comment []

Ruby, the gem of OSCON 2003. Put Ruby on your radars, folks. It's on the minds of the developers here at OSCON. While OSCON is normally dominated by PERL & Python Hackers this has been like an unofficial Ruby conference. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] Jon this one's for you... 4:05:02 PM    comment []

Can Machines Reproduce?. You can find the answer to this question, and to another one even more important, "should they be allowed to?" in this article published by NewsFactor Network. In a recent issue of the journal Artificial Life, a group of Canadian researchers says yes despite warnings to the contrary -- most notably from author Michael Crichton in his new book "Prey," about self-replicating nanobots run amok. To prove their point, the researchers have created a primordial soup that works like a digital DNA factory, where T-shaped "codons" swim in a computer-generated virtual liquid forming single, double, and even triple strands. These researchers think that such self-replicating nanometer-scale robots might be "the key to low-cost manufacturing." You'll find more details and references in this summary, including the JohnnyVon project, where you can run demos. [Smart Mobs] 12:56:08 PM    comment []

The University of Texas has released many of Edsger Dijkstra's writings and made them available for download. You can check out the collection here. 7:36:59 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Tom Pierce.