Topic: Open Source
"Store em if you got em!" That's the way Lindsey Simon of Google describes the crowd sourced Browserscope project for profiling web browsers. Take thousands of browser tests, store them in the cloud, and share them through various visualizations. Browserscope aims to track the performance of browsers as they become faster, safer, and more consistent for both users and developers. This talk explains and demonstrates how.
From rebuilding communities in Detroit around technological and artistic innovation to improving legal services, each of these speakers share their experiences and insights as to why groups succeed - and sometimes fail - in their attempts to adopt the latest information technology developments and apply them to the greater public good.
In these two Gov 2.0 presentations, Jeffrey A. Sorenson and Clay Johnson, respectively, showcase the inventive winning entries and motivations behind "Apps for the Army" and The Sunlight Foundation's "Design for America" competitions. Through utilizing the potential and input of the wider community, both initiatives aim to encourage new ideas, and ultimately better practices, for government.
Google has crawled over 3 billion lines of computer code, revealing some surprising trends. "The way people code is very interesting," says Chris DiBona, Google's open source programs manager. He shares insights from the "Google Code" project, and closes by identifying "the most important coder in the world, who will be shaping computer science for decades to come."
If you remember programming in C, you'll remember that it felt like music, or wine, or philosophy. Programming languages back then were laconic; they said all in just a few words. Today's mainstream programming languages, in contrast, are heavy, intricate and verbose. How did we get here and what comes next? Rob Pike, the co-creator of the Go programming language and a Distinguished Engineer at Google, thinks the solution is a language that gives us the best from both worlds.
Facebook's David Recordon discusses the history and evolution of the LAMP stack, and how this simple idea is central to the way that open source-backed web sites are built today. By now, the open source community offers a huge number of software choices for solving a wide variety of scaling challenges; David covers just a few of the ways that Facebook chooses the right tool for the right challenge.
Incident responders can use social media as they rush to put aid in place after disasters. Jeannie Stamberger, of the Disaster Management Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, shares her studies of crowd-sourcing. When disasters impact populated areas, social media helps agencies quickly identify the extent of the damage. This audio interview covers utilization of social media for disaster response, planning and risk analysis.
Announcing the creation of setiQuest, Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute makes an appeal for aid from the open source developer community. Tarter invites the open source community to check out the SETICloud stack, and highlights advances in fifty years of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. "We all have a common origin in stardust," Tarter says. Intelligent life leaves its imprint in this dust, as well. The key to finding it, Tarter says, is "sticking around long enough."
"Tap and pay" enabling cell phones to replace credit cards -- just one of the innovations Eric Schmidt sees coming soon. As mobile and internet markets grow at exponential rates, Google is building applications that will re-shape how we use that technology. Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits down with web pioneers Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010 to discuss Google's new Chrome OS, Google TV, mobile technology, talent acquisition, privacy, security and net neutrality. Whew!
How do enterprise-level MySQL installations avoid spikes, pile-ups, and freeze-ups during peak operations? Crash-proof solutions are not beyond the capabilities of open-source database software, Baron Schwartz explains. He outlines Percona's enhancements to MySQL and InnoDB. They include XtraDB, a high-performance storage engine based on InnoDB, and Xtrabackup, a hot backup solution. Schwartz explains why each feature is needed to keep a scalable high-performance site up and running at peak loads.
