Cody Taylor

Your local cable company might like to talk about looming internet brownouts in order to convince you to pay for all those internet videos endangering its television revenues, but research shows again that the tubes just keep getting wider and wider.

Both Firefox and Facebook are probably working very hard to figure out new models of generating advertising revenues – something both are dependent on but neither can take for granted.

From content management systems to web portal creation tools, Linux has just about everything you need. Among those thousands of tools, a select few stand out as the best of the best. Listed below you will find my top 10 must-haves for Linux server/web/cloud-based tools.

Singularity Hub writes “Robots can climb stairs, and they are doing it everywhere you look. “No big deal” you say, but it really is a big deal. Five to ten years ago almost nobody was doing it. Now grad students are doing it all by themselves for thesis projects. Check out our review of robots navigating stairs, which includes some awesome videos.”

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destinyland writes “AI researcher Ben Goertzel peeks at the new Ray Kurzweil movie (Transcendent Man), and gives it ‘two nano-enhanced cyberthumbs way, way up!’ But in an exchange with Kurzweil after the screening, Goertzel debates the post-human future, asking whether individuality can survive in a machine-augmented brain. The documentary covers radical futurism, but also includes alternate viewpoints. ‘Would I build these machines, if I knew there was a strong chance they would destroy humanity?’ asks evolvable hardware researcher Hugo de Garis. His answer? ‘Yeah.'” Note, the movie is about Kurzweil and futurism, not by Kurzweil.

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eldavojohn writes “The Best American Comics of 2008 was a book I purchased on impulse. Not being a graphic novel or even political cartoon fan, I read the introduction at a bookstore (which was, itself, a comic strip) and decided to give it a try. I expected to find humor. What I found was not only humor but sadness, anxiety, insight, happiness, remorse and a gamut of human emotions. I expected black ink on white paper. What I found was water color, wood cuts, cubism and even a comic about the start of cubism. In short, I was pleasantly surprised to find the Americana here that I had previously relegated only to historical novels.” Read on for the rest of eldavojohn’s review.

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IndioMan writes “In this article, learn about the new PHP V6 features in detail. Learn how it is easier to use, more secure, and more suitable for internationalization. New PHP V6 features include improved support for Unicode, clean-up of several functions, improved extensions, engine additions, changes to OO functions, and PHP additions.”

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MJackson writes “UK cable operator Virgin Media has announced the first real-world customer pilots of up to 200Mbps broadband services using DOCSIS3 technology from Cisco, which could make it one of the fastest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the world. Following successful lab trials, the 6 month long pilot started last week in Ashford, Kent (England), and will ultimately employ 100 customers in the testing process. The pilot will, among other things, test future online consumer applications, including High Definition Internet TV (HD IPTV) and the ability to deliver applications and support for home IT needs through its network. By comparison J:Com in Japan supplies broadband at up to 160Mbps and Cablevision in the US supplies broadband at up to 101Mbps. Like Virgin Media, both companies use DOCSIS3 technology for broadband over cable networks.”

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An anonymous reader tips news that Micro Focus is in the process of buying Borland Software for million. They also picked up Compuware’s application testing and automated software quality business. Quoting ZDNet: “The boards of both companies agreed to the deal, which is expected to complete around mid-2009. … In 2008, Texas-based Borland made a pre-tax loss of 4m, almost four times the size of the previous year’s loss. It had revenues of 2m, part of a consistent downward trend since at least 2004. … Borland was one of the oldest software companies in the PC software business, having been founded in 1981. Its most successful era was in the late 1980s via massive sales of Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application, and development tool Turbo Pascal, which challenged Microsoft’s dominance in the application-development market.”

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