Web and Technology

Rackspace Hosting announced the launch of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. Rackspace, the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform.

There are many social networking sites around which you can join. But if you want to start one on your own for a select group of individuals, you can make one yourself and the only thing you will need is open source software.

Open source software for social networking is free. It can be downloaded into your computer and then set up in a matter of days or weeks. To helр you get started, here are some of examples which you can try out.

(CC-BY 10ch)

(CC-BY Yutaka Tsutano)

Interest in iPad app development is waning, and the device just got here. Maybe that means it's time to explore more open options. Here are five.

Twitter, the world's most famous Microblogging service picked Cassandra as alternative to its MySql database system.

Cassandra is a no-sql open source distributed database management system. One of the top-level Apache Software Foundation projects, written in Java and first developed by Facebook to develop their Inbox Search features.

Living Stories, the innovative experimental news format provided by Google is now Open Source.

(CC-BY Carlos Luna)

Nokia and Intel announced they merged their Linux platforms into Meego, a Linux platform which targets everything from netbooks to TVs and media phones.
The new merged system is a an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia.
According to the Meego website, the project includes:

Linux infrastructure was heavily used in Avatar's graphics rendering done by Weta Digital.

Google has announced it will stop support to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.

"Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We're also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites," Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, wrote in a blog post Friday.

After revelations that the large-scale cyber-attack on Google's infrastructure originating from China was caused by the weakness of the Internet Explorer (IE) web browser, Internet users have been asked to leave previous versions of the software.

(CC-BY-SA William Hook)

United States Air Force will buy new 2200 Sony PlayStation3 to be used in its supercomputing cluster.

Last year, the Air Force purchased more than 300 PS3s for testing purposes of the Cell Broadband Engine. The systems are now located at Air Force Research Laboratory's information directorate in Rome, N.Y. and they work with an in-house developed Linux-based OS.