Spotlight Features

The free and open source software community is known for many things, but perhaps none more than its propensity for passionate debate. No topic is too small for the community's spirited analysis, so it should come as no surprise that the Linux kernel -- one of the most central elements of the FOSS w...

Most segments of the technology market are hurting due to the recession, but one -- open source systems -- appears to be thriving despite the economic turmoil. Open source vendors such as Red Hat, SugarCRM and Vyatta say the recession has compelled organizations and corporations large and small to t...

The Web 2.0 revolution has spawned hundreds of cover stories, thousands of companies, and millions of words of hype. But there's one thing it hasn't brought: Profits. With the coming of the credit crunch and the global recession, hype won't pay the bills. That's why the next wave of Web 2.0 will be ...

Every industry has a hero who paves the way with innovation. Cisco is looking for developer heroes for the open source software industry and hopes to find three as winners of its Think Inside the Box Developer Contest. The contest, which started in October, encourages developers to produce applicati...

Some 20 years after the Exxon Valdez went ashore on Prince William sound, oil still remains at the bottom of the arctic waters -- but not because those responsible for cleanup have ignored it. Rather, multiple attempts to remove the oil from the sea floor have failed. Cold temperatures have rendered...

About eight months ago, the owners of a sporting goods company contacted their attorney, Doug Wolf, a partner at Wolf Greenfield. It seemed a company was using the firm's logo and trademark without proper authorization. Setting the matter right should have been a straightforward task for Wolf -- exc...

Simplify. That, at its heart, is the purpose of XBRL -- extensible business reporting language. XBRL employs a common set of tags for financial terms, making reports more searchable and transparent to everyone who uses them. Designed to provide information to investors and anyone else researching fi...

When Jeffrey Spencer prepared for his college exams, he would tape his notes to the handlebars of his bike and ride to school, studying all the while. To him, it made perfect sense. "I am a kinetic learner, which means I learn and mentally perform best when I am moving," he says. To visual or audito...

New adopters often see virtualization as the Holy Grail of enterprise computing. It enables consolidation of separate servers and databases to provide more economic operations. Running consolidated computers from one virtualized machine also eliminates the electrical waste spent to keep idling serve...

The choice of particular audio-video compression technology is of vital interest to commercial and not-for-profit organizations involved in producing and delivering digital multimedia products and services. New York-based Paltalk's choice to go with industry-standard H.264/Mpeg-4 AV for video and a ...

The explosion in Web-delivered music and video we're seeing today just wouldn't be possible without the use of sophisticated encoded compression algorithms, or codecs, and the file storage formats in which compressed audio, images and data are saved. As Internet bandwidth and broadband access has ex...

Now that NASA has entered the virtual world with its two islands in Second Life, public outreach, collaboration and space exploration may never be the same again. On its CoLab Island, outreach and collaboration are the focus, as Part One of this two-part feature explains. Its other island, called "E...

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, ...

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...

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...