nick kolakowski

Nick Kolakowski is a senior editor at Slashdot. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, Playboy, WebMD, Trader Monthly, Carrier Pigeon, and other venues. He is the author of "How to Become an Intellectual" (Adams Media, 2012), a work of comedic nonfiction.

Windows 8 Won’t Become Business Standard: Forrester

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May 17, 2013
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Posted In Windows Desktop, Working in Tech
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Windows 8 Won’t Become Business Standard: Forrester (via slashdot) Windows 8 won’t become the enterprise standard, according to a new report from research firm Forrester. “Most IT shops are still too focused on migrating to Windows 7 to bother with Windows 8 anytime soon, if at all,” read the summary of Forrester’s report, which could have several Microsoft… continue…

European Startups Battle Labor Laws for Best Talent

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May 16, 2013
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Posted In Looking in Tech
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European Startups Battle Labor Laws for Best Talent (via slashdot) As the cult of entrepreneurship spirals upward in Europe, the intricate vagaries of immigration policy on the continent are being newly scrutinized by our company-building classes. Freshly venture-backed European Internet companies want your talent, and they are going to remarkable lengths to get it… continue…

JavaScript Is Eating the World

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May 16, 2013
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Posted In Mobile Development, Web Development, Working in Tech
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JavaScript Is Eating the World (via slashdot) With due apologies to Marc Andreessen, I believe that a very specific type of software is eating the world, namely, JavaScript. There are several trends and technologies that are coalescing at the same time to make Jeff Atwood’s famous “law”—any application that can be written in JavaScript… continue…

Google I/O Will Double as Big Data Experiment

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May 15, 2013
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Posted In Big Data, Cloud Computing, Working in Tech
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Google I/O Will Double as Big Data Experiment (via slashdot) When the Google I/O 2013 conference kicks off May 15, the crowds of developers and Google-philes swarming San Francisco’s Moscone Center will find themselves involved in a massive Big Data experiment, courtesy of the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team. “Since we love open source hardware… continue…

Adobe’s Creative Cloud Illustrates How the Cloud Costs You

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May 8, 2013
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Posted In Cloud Computing, Web Development, Working in Tech
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Adobe’s Creative Cloud Illustrates How the Cloud Costs You (via slashdot) Adobe plans on focusing the bulk of its software-development efforts on its Creative Cloud offering, with no plans to further update its “boxed” Creative Suite products. The move isn’t surprising, considering the tech industry’s general movement toward the cloud over the past few years; nonetheless… continue…

Finding Your Next Superstar Programmer

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May 7, 2013
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Posted In Looking in Tech
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Finding Your Next Superstar Programmer (via slashdot) Last month, a story in The New York Times described the peculiar way in which a software company hired a programmer. The firm searched GitHub and other public code repositories in order to recruit (and eventually hire) this employee, who is still working there today; it was someone who had no idea… continue…

Widenius: Oracle’s Suffocating MySQL

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May 6, 2013
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Posted In Living in Tech
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Widenius on MySQL: Oracle’s Suffocating It (via slashdot) Michael Widenius, co-founder of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), has something of a bone to pick with Oracle, which owns the platform’s copyright and trademark. Speaking to Muktware, Widenius—who founded another open-source database called MariaDB—suggested that Oracle… continue…

Google Continues to Show Kansas That Google Fiber Love

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May 3, 2013
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Posted In Living in Tech, Silicon Valley
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Google Continues to Show Kansas That Google Fiber Love (via slashdot) Google hearts Kansas. The search-engine giant announced May 2 that Shawnee, Kansas will become the next city to receive Google Fiber. Google already has plans to install the high-speed broadband network in nearby Kansas City and Olathe, Kansas. “We’ve also been impressed by Shawnee’s vision to…

Gartner: SSDs Simply Can’t Replace Hard Drives

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May 3, 2013
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Posted In Big Data, IT Architecture, Working in Tech
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Gartner: SSDs Simply Can’t Replace Hard Drives (via slashdot) Hard-drive manufacturers can breathe a sigh of relief—solid-state disks (SSDs) won’t replace their “traditional” product lines anytime soon, according to a new Gartner report. Given the enormity of future capacity needs, it will be impossible for CIOs and IT managers to completely replace hard…

Oracle Invests in Ingestible Sensors

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May 3, 2013
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Posted In Big Data, Working in Tech
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Oracle Invests in Ingestible Sensors (via slashdot) Oracle has made a “strategic minority investment” in digital-health firm Proteus, which builds ingestible sensors. In theory, ingestible sensors could play a key role in the expanding field of medical-data analytics, in which researchers and other healthcare experts use information gathered from… continue…