- Microsoft Research works on query language for both SQL and NoSQL
As Slashdot notes, the investigators into the question of a standardized language for both classes of databases concede that their natures are dual, non-overlapping. Even though this comes from Microsoft, their research group often produces some thought provoking work and it happens to mesh with my long held opinion that NoSQL could stand a bit more coherence around interfaces. - What if we lose data.gov?
Harlan Yu at Freedom to Tinker considers a timely question considering the likely federal government shutdown, a question whose answer is surprisingly deep. As he explains, it isn’t just the public facing sites and services that have been enabled by open data but the standards and processes that have been developed from which all agencies have benefited. De-funding could set all open government efforts back to square one or worse. - The greatest engineers from comic books
I love this MAKE list, it resonates with some of my own essays that I found to be the most fun to write, the ones intersecting fiction and hackerdom. In this instance they’ve assembled a great list with some fun reasoning. Phillip Torrone, the post’s author, wins extra points in my book for his top choice, a character I’ve also suggested has a strong hackish streak. - Facebook opens the specifications for their data center infrastructure, Slashdot
- World’s first computer more complicated than originally thought, ReadWriteWeb
- Professor gets tenure with the help of his Wikipedia contributions, Techdirt
- More to consider on Android chief’s response to critics, Ars Technica