Archive

For those of us old enough to remember life before the Internet, the term "virtual space travel" probably conjures memories of childhood visits to the local planetarium. Fast forward to today, and things are just a little different. In today's Internet-enabled world, ordinary citizens can explore th...

Disney World and Google are teaming up to take tourism to a new dimension. Walt Disney Parks and Resorts worked with programmers at Google Earth to create a fully three-dimensional virtual viewing experience -- said to be the most advanced rendering Google has ever created. Walt Disney World Resort ...

Computers have become more complex in recent years as demands on systems have continued to increase in size due to the amount of external devices, software, hardware and communication components. Technical professionals are depending more and more on the Internet, a blog or a peer whenever they need...

The recent Facebook rumors have come true -- the social networking company is making much of its third-party application development platform open source. The company announced the change one year after it launched Facebook Platform. "On the anniversary of our platform launch, we want to give back t...

Wikia Search -- the open source search engine Wikia initially launched in January -- got a fresh start Tuesday. The refurbished version lets users edit, comment on and influence search results. After performing a search query on any major search engine, a user typically gets a static results page --...

The daily need to tap into knowledge relevant to their field is driving tech workers in all types of organizations to scour the Web for timely, up-to-date information, but making sure it's accurate can prove a challenge. A recent survey asked tech workers how they search for information, to what deg...

Venezuela is now the latest country to appeal the adoption of an international standard based on Microsoft's Office Open XML file format. Following news last week that the South African Bureau of Standards had sent a letter protesting the decision late last month, Brazil and India joined with their ...

Even as the presidential elections draw ever nearer, debate rages about the technologies used to enable the voting process. It's too late for any large systematic changes to be implemented for this year, said Matthew Zimmerman, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. However, ...

Google reportedly took a moment to show off a prototype mobile phone based on its Android operating system at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco Wednesday. Android is Google's open source, Linux-based mobile phone OS, middleware stack and software development platform. Android has the backin...

The power of community is grossly underestimated in this country. Current collaborative trends on the Internet, from Web 2.0 to Wikipedia models, are seen as merely social or arguably informative in nature. That's a bit like saying the U.S. Constitution, another collaborative work, is a fetching fli...

Chipmaker Via Technologies took the wrapper of its OpenBook Mini-Note reference design Tuesday, making the blueprint for its latest ultra mobile PC available to anyone who wants to manufacture low-cost computers based on Via's line of low-power processors. The open source, computer-assisted design f...

Technology moves at a lightning-fast pace. A brand new desktop computer has an average lifespan of two to five years, after which both its hardware and its software have become obsolete. For businesses and other organizations, this poses a significant challenge as they attempt to keep their IT purch...

Facebook has come up with a new plan to fight off its competitors: open sourcing its application platform. Citing multiple sources, TechCrunch reports that Facebook is planning to form an open source community around its API, which it launched just a year ago. We can expect that the four pillars of ...

As the 2008 elections approach, political mudslinging on the campaign trail has become an all-too-familiar sight. No less muddy, however -- and no less central to the democratic process -- is the battle that's currently being waged over the ballot box. How Americans cast their votes has become a sub...

It didn't take long for the European Union to react to Microsoft's Wednesday announcement that it would provide support for additional document formats in its market-dominating Microsoft Office productivity suite. Shortly after Microsoft announced that it would support the Open Document Format v1.1 ...