Linux News: Collaboration

Larousse: A Wikipedia Where Everyone Knows Your Name

Wednesday - May 14, 2008

France has long battled against the Anglophone cultural invasion, and now it has thrown down a virtual gauntlet. Larousse, the French encyclopedia created more than 150 years ago, is launching its own -- it would say improved -- version of Wikipedia. Its first, free-access, online encyclopedia will have the same contributor function, but to try to surmount the inherent problem of unreliability of articles that can be modified by anyone at any time, Larousse has introduced some constraints. [More...]

Wikis: The Crown Jewels of Collaboration

Wednesday - May 14, 2008

Increasingly, managers find themselves leading teams that are scattered in different cities or even continents, working on projects which have to be flexible enough to rapidly evolve to meet changing business needs. In this environment, business managers are starting to learn what software developers have known for years: Wikis provide a simple but powerful boost to collaboration. [More...]

New Powerset Search Tech Gets Your Drift

Monday - May 12, 2008

Powerset, a new Internet search engine company, has launched a proof-of-concept salvo in the search engine war -- a natural language processing engine that attempts to understand the meaning behind a search phrase and the text it's searching against. Instead of returning a long list of results that simply contain the key words a user enters, Powerset attempts to unlock the meaning encoded in ordinary human language. [More...]

Google Speaks in Tongues

Sunday - May 11, 2008

Teaching a computer to understand languages isn't rocket science -- it's not nearly that easy, said Peter Norvig, director of research at Google. It takes a limited number of calculations to send a spacecraft to the moon, Mars or other planets. And while the calculations aren't so simple, they are fairly easily managed by a computer, he said. [More...]

Not Much Life in China's Virtual Worlds

Saturday - May 10, 2008

Last November, Procter & Gamble's Vidal Sassoon launched with much fanfare its first hair salon in China's virtual world. There was even a virtual ribbon-cutting ceremony. However, today the VS salon in HiPiHi, China's oldest and largest virtual world, sits mostly empty save for the occasional visitor. [More...]

Collaboration to Drive Innovation at HP Labs

Friday - May 9, 2008

HP has unveiled an initiative allowing academic institutions to collaborate with HP Labs in joint research through an open and competitive process. The HP Labs Innovation Research Program invites colleges, universities and research institutions around the world to submit proposals related to current research. [More...]

Kids in Second Life: Does Danger Lurk?

Thursday - May 8, 2008

Second Life is no place for kids, a Republican congressman declared Monday. U.S. Representative Mark Kirk has sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting a consumer alert warning about the dangers of Second Life, which he charges could expose kids to child predators and registered sex offenders. [More...]

Sun's OpenSolaris to Shine Through Amazon's Cloud

Monday - May 5, 2008

Sun Microsystems and the OpenSolaris community it created a few years ago have officially released the Unix-based OpenSolaris operating system into the wild. The two organizations shared the news at the CommunityOne Developer Conference Monday in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is based on Sun's Solaris kernel, but it has since been transformed into a more open and developer-friendly OS. [More...]

Pondering the Reiser Fallout

Monday - May 5, 2008

After the exuberance that followed Hardy Heron's landing not long ago, the mood on the Linux blogs shifted considerably last week in the wake of the conviction of ReiserFS file-system designer Hans Reiser of first-degree murder. Before the highly publicized trial, Reiser and his team were working on Reiser4. [More...]

The Social Side of Fund-Raising Online

Sunday - May 4, 2008

Online social networks used to be just gathering places for friends and long-lost acquaintances. Then the marketers arrived, followed by politicians and job recruiters -- all looking to tap into a growing mass of young people who are spending much of their time on the Web. [More...]

Helping Addicts Cope Through Virtual Immersion

Friday - May 2, 2008

Scientists believe that virtual worlds can help patients in therapy to overcome addictions. A new study by University of Houston associate professor Patrick Bordnick reveals that a virtual reality environment can provide a safe haven in which patients can practice how to say "no" when offered drugs or alcohol. [More...]

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