AWS News Blog

Margo Seltzer is CTO of SleepyCat Sleepycat is a successful model of how to take OSS and make it available for both commercial and non-commercial use. Survey, who uses BDB, who knows about it, who has used it (hands all around). First half of talk is intro to BDB, is new goodies and product direction. […]

I came into Gregor Kiczales talk a bit late to find that the room was standing room only. I was was standing towards the back, with barely enough room to cradle my laptop on one arm. Gregor’s a professor at the Software Practices Lab at the University of British Columbia, working on research “directed at […]

Michael Tiemann Wrote the first native code C++ compiler, founded Cynus Solutions, now part of Red Hat. Talking to clients about the state and strategy of open source. At an IT technology forum last year, CEO speaker of $1B company said they would rearchitect the company around open source. IT cost and head count as […]

Introduced by Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO. Rael is a serious blogger, he wrote Bloxsom, his own blogging software. Subject is remix: beyond rip, mix, burn. Idea is to look at a trend, see what citizen engineers are doing with their stuff — taking apart boxes, throwing out warranties, etc. Hacking cars — hope it is […]

Halo 2 is the next step in Bill Gate’s goal to put Microsoft software in your living room. So far, so good. http://news.com.com/Gates+taking+a+seat+in+your+den/2008-1041_3-5514121.html Eric Neustadter is here at Amazon to talk about the success of Halo 2 and how Halo 2 was made. By the way, Microsoft and Bungie racked up $125 million in sales […]

The title of this session’s description is, “Gosling, the Father of Java.” What a title! Imagine going to a party and introducing yourself like this: “Hi, I’m James Gosling, the father of Java.” I suppose that would work better as some parties than others, like maybe a LAN party, but I digress. (I should point […]

George opened up his speech with this statement: “I’m interested in how thing begin…what was the first computer?” Anyone? It was at the University of Princeton, per Dyson. You got to love the cathode-ray tube era of computer technology. John Von Neumann wrote the “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata”. Even before that, Thomas Hobbes wrote about […]

Introduced by Larry Tesler. Interested in beginnings of things, computing has a very clear beginning. Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, John von Neumann. Deserves a lot, but not all, of the credit. Picture, canisters, memory tubes. 32×32 matrix, 1024 bits, actually pixels. Dots on a CRT screen. von Neumann, theory of self-reproducing Automata. Thomas […]