Cody Taylor

The act of Googling oneself has become the digital age’s premiere guilty pleasure — an activity enjoyed by all and admitted by few. The phenomenon has even been the subject of scholarly research. Last year, a team of Swiss and Australian social scientists published a study concluding that the practice of self-Googling (or “Egosurfing” as it’s somet

tobiasly writes “I administer several Ubuntu desktops and numerous CentOS servers. One of the biggest headaches is keeping them up-to-date with each distro’s latest bugfix and security patches. I currently have to log in to each system, run the appropriate apt-get or yum command to list available updates, determine which ones I need, then run the appropriate install commands. I’d love to have a distro-independent equivalent of the Red Hat Network where I could do all of this remotely using a web-based interface. PackageKit seems to have solved some of the issues regarding cross-distro package maintenance, but their FAQ explicitly states that remote administration is not a goal of their project. Has anyone put together such a system?”

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An anonymous reader points out a ReadWriteWeb piece on an hour-long demo of Wolfram Alpha (which we discussed at its announcement). Stephen Wolfram does not like to call it a “search engine,” preferring instead the term “computational knowledge engine.” It will open to the public in May. “The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next ‘Google killer’ from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we’ve seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype — though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a ‘Google killer.’ According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information.”

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