The feature allows Web developers to specify that a single body of text should flow through certain regions of the page. For example, you could create several div elements in a specific arrangement and have the overflow text fill those consecutively. Another feature proposed by Adobe, called CSS Exclusions, makes it possible to have inline text automatically wrap and flow to conform with a specific shape.
via HTML5 roundup: magazine-style Web layouts with CSS regions.
The <span> tag is used to group inline-elements in a document.
The <span> tag provides no visual change by itself.
The <span> tag provides a way to add a hook to a part of a text or a part of a document.
When the text is hooked in a <span> element you can add styles to the content, or manipulate the content with for example JavaScript.
via HTML span tag.
From The SPAN Tag
Use span tags when you don’t want any changes to the layout other than exactly what you specify in the styles of the span. For example, if you use a <div> or <p> most browsers will add space around the element, because they are block elements.
Why search yourself, though? perldoc’s -f switch searches perlfunc for you, presenting only the documentation for the named operator. Type instead:
$ perldoc -f substr
GOING UNDERGROUND ON CAMPUS
Tapping the Earth for Clean, Efficient Heating and Cooling
The name ‘Outercurve Foundation’ speaks to our ambition to be a foundation on the leading edge of the open source world, representing the interests of the growing audience of developers and corporations engaging with the traditional FOSS community.
via Outercurve Foundation Overview.
Microsoft is involved in this organization.
ScaleXtreme is a powerful product that allows you to build, deploy, and manage servers across a variety of different public and private cloud providers.
via Overview | ScaleXtreme: Cloud-Based Server Automation.
From: Accel-Backed ScaleXtreme Takes Data Center Management To The Cloud
ScaleXtreme wants to do the same thing to data automation that Salesforce did to CRM. Replace million-dollar deployments that take months with a five minute download that can have a machine being managed from the cloud in five minutes. And instead of an upfront $1,500 licensing fee per machine, plus maintenance and upgrade fees, ScaleXtreme is shooting for something closer to $150 a year per machine. “This is a radically different model,” says Mulchandani, who started out as an enterprise IT sales guy. “You download the agent and you are done—no sales people, no Italian suits flying across the country.”
The Mitel Networks suit, filed on March 16, 2012, in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, alleges infringement of two different patents, one for an “automatic web page generator” and another for “pro-active features for telephony.” They date from 1999 and 2007.
And two patent applications filed last week come from Compass Labs and AOL and respectively cover “user interest analysis and systems” and “content publication activity by a user.”
Most every site on the Internet, including this WordPress site, has its web pages generated automatically using a backend database.
The prospect of allowing patents on what amounts to human thought prompted a broad range of interest groups, including the ACLU, the Cato Institute (disclosure: I contributed to Cato’s brief in the case), and the American Medical Association, to file briefs urging the Supreme Court to invalidate the patent. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court did so in a unanimous vote.
via Supreme Court saves medical profession from diagnostic patents.
There are well known problems of course. The most obvious relates to guaranteeing the security of data when it is stored on computers that that a user does not own and that many others can also access. But various solutions have emerged such as encrypting data before it is sent to the cloud. For that reason, the migration to the cloud is proceeding at full speed in many places.
That may be folly. Today, Bryan Ford at Yale University in New Haven says that the full risks of this migration have yet to be properly explored. He points out that complex systems can fail in many unexpected ways and outlines various simple scenarios in which a cloud could come unstuck.
via The Hidden Risk of a Meltdown in the Cloud – Technology Review.
Now Ford imagines the scenario in which both load balancing programs operate with the same refresh period, say once a minute. When these periods coincide, the control loops start sending the load back and forth between the virtual servers in a positive feedback loop.