Today’s News Stories
Business Week: A Better Web through Higher Math.
“So before you dismiss a paper with a title such as A Phase Transition in the Optimum Partitioning Problem as irrelevant gobbledygook, consider that the work was done at Microsoft Research — and could lead to the software revolutions of tomorrow.”
O’Reilly Network: How the Wayback Machine Works.
“The Internet Archive made headlines back in November with the release of the Wayback Machine, a Web interface to the Archive’s five-year, 100-terabyte collection of Web pages. The archive is the result of the efforts of its director, Brewster Kahle, to capture the ephemeral pages of the Web and store them in a publicly accessible library. In addition to the other millions of web pages you can find in the Wayback Machine, it has direct pointers to some of the pioneer sites from the early days of the Web, including the NCSA What’s New page, The Trojan Room Coffee Pot, and Feed magazine.”
John Markoff: How Lonely is the Life that is Lived Online? [NY Times]
The study concludes that Internet use at home has a strong negative impact on time spent with friends and family, while Internet use at work decreases the time spent with colleagues.
GovNet: What is it good for? [Wired News]
Federal security experts will be reviewing proposals for the GovNet this week, but insiders report there is little excitement among the federal intelligence community for the project.
The Web Services Ecosystem and Vitiris. John Aloysius Ogilvie of Killdara sketches his views of the current Web Services ecosystem and describes the different ways to build a Web Services provider, including using Killdara’s Vitiris product.