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The Internet changes the power relations between companies and customers. Social technologies like blogs, social networks, ratings and reviews etc. allow customers to share experiences; good and bad to the 1.4 billion people on the Internet. Zappos exemplifies the positive benefits of extraordinary customer service while Comcast shines a light on the perils of getting it wrong. Lane (co-founder of...

Two tips in Dear Author's recent post "10 Things Epublishers Should Do for Readers" caught my attention: 1. Eternal Bookshelf. An eternal bookshelf means that every purchase you have bought...

Dr. Gary Rost Bradski and Adrian Kaehler, the creators of OpenCV, have put their knowledge into a new book for O'Reilly. With Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library developers and hobbyists can learn how to build simple or sophisticated vision applications. Over the next few days Gary--a consulting professor at Stanford, senior scientist at Willow Garage, a robotics institute research institute/incubator, and vision team leader for Stanley, the Stanford robot that won the DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous race across the desert--shares his Top Tips and Tricks for getting the most out of OpenCV. Read on for Tip #9: Google's Vision for OpenCV .

Apple has dropped the NDA covering the iPhone SDK. Developers will now be able to discuss how they develop for the iPhone. This was one of the biggest complaints developers (and technical publishers) had about developing for the platform. Apple posted the following message. We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. We put...

The official word is out, OSCON 2009 will be moving from Portland, Oregon to San Jose, California. We've received significant positive feedback on the move, and messages of welcome from Bay Area open source contacts, but also some messages of disappointment from the local Portland open source community, and from non-local attendees who enjoyed visiting Portland every year. We're also...

In my keynote last week at Web 2.0 Expo New York, I made the comment that, cool as Dell Ideastorm is, the fundamental supply-chain approach behind dell.com is actually a better example of how Web 2.0 applies to the enterprise. I also made the provocative assertion that WalMart is a Web 2.0 company (or at least a model of how...

We hear a lot of talk about Web 2.0, but has the financial sector even got to Web 1.0, really? Lets take two key things: first, that data interchange should be rich, and second that everything important should be identified. But unless there is an accounting standards emphasis towards objective valuation, we can have all the good standards for financial data interchange we like, and it we won't have reduced society's risk nor improved evidence-based management.

At one point, the stock market fall was so rapid that several financial sites web service update servers were overwhelmed and crashed as people refreshed their browsers second by second to watch the carnage. At the end of the day, the damage was significant - the Dow down 672 points (6.2%), the S&P; down 94 points (7.8%) and the NASDAQ down a staggering 200 points (more than 9.1%). In Canada, the TSX closed down 750 points, and it's likely that the selloff in Asia and Europe will be just as brutal.

John Lam, who heads the Iron Ruby effort at Microsoft, stopped by to tell O'Reilly News all the exciting work going on with dynamic languages at Redmond. John spent some time discussing what makes a language dynamic, what the benefits of dynamic languages are, and how Microsoft is trying to leverage the power of lanaguages such as Ruby inside their CLR framework.

Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what...

Are you or your offspring struggling to pass the AP Physics B exam? Is your college physics class giving you a headache? Or do you wish you understood how the world around you really works? Frankly it's been a while since I've taken a physics course. That's why I gave our newest release, Head First Physics, to our high school intern, Dylan Field, to check out. Read on to find out what Dylan had to say about our new guide to algebra-based mechanics and practical physics.

As I understand it, the proposed bail-out is shooting seven hundred billion dollar-sized bullets into the dark. But banks know where their money is. We could figure out exactly how risky each asset is, exactly how much exposure each institution has to bad loans or collapsing stocks and bonds, and what the overall health of each institution is.

A. Garrett Lisi gives a tour of the Wiki he uses to record his own research into Theoretical Physics. Lisi uses TiddlyWiki and jsMath to create a open, self-contained platform for scientific collaboration.

Programming Flex 3 — If you want to try your hand at developing rich Internet applications with Adobe's Flex 3, and already have experience with frameworks such as .NET or Java, this is the ideal book to get you started. Programming Flex 3 gives you a solid understanding of Flex 3's core concepts, and valuable insight into how, why, and when to use specific Flex features. Learn to get the most from this amazing and sophisticated technology. Learn more.

Arjan van de Ven is a Linux kernel hacker and the author of PowerTOP and LatencyTOP. His goal is to fix problems in the Linux desktop to save power, respond more smoothly, and to run faster. This interview explains how.