Before Facebook, which is now just days away from a record-busting IPO, there was America Online or AOL. Before Social Media, there was Community. It’s quite possible that without the bulletin boards and chat rooms of the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s, there were would be no Facebook or Twitter. No Instagram or Viddy. Services like AOL were the proving grounds for the digital interaction revolution of the new millennium. Ask AOL founder and former CEO Steve Case. He always believed community was the “killer app.” Today, AOL is primarily a content and online advertising company with fewer paid subscribers than ever and scarcely remembered as the platform that, as Case puts it, “put America online.” Case moved on from the then merged AOL Time Warner almost a decade ago to launch an investment company, Revolution LLC, back some memorable startups like ZipCar and work with the Obama administration to help drive entrepreneurship.

Being the language nerd that I am, I actually find it fun to learn new programming languages. Now typically this is nothing more than me reading all of the official documentation and writing some toy examples that give me a very shallow, quick-and-dirty feel for a language. Since I have been involved in language design for nearly a decade (started participating on python-dev in June 2002) and have done toy examples now in 18 languages (17 actually still run; I have never bothered to get Forth to work again after a gforth change broke my code), this is actually usually enough for me to grasp the inspirations for a language and thus understand its essence.

As everyone knows, time in the world of software passes very quickly when compared to other aspects of business.  So, in the last ten years, the way many companies handle their software needs has seen drastic change.  In particular, many companies and organizations that would have, in the last century, employed their own software engineers, now outsource the creation of software to external sources.  I'm not talking about India or Russia, though that could very well be the case -- I'm just talking about having someone else do the work because the costs of doing it in-house are too high

As slick, smooth and functional as webOS is on the HP TouchPad, and wherever the future of the platform may lie, there remains a problem – the shortage of apps. While things may have improved in recent months – the addition of homebrew apps in Preware has been a particular boost – the fact remains that there are a whole host of application types and games that could run on the HP TouchPad, if only the developers had a mind to do so.

A lieutenant colonel reservist in the Israeli Air Force brought his car to a halt and rolled down the window, the morning after Shaul Mofaz deserted the opposition and joined the government. "Why do they lie to us like this?" he asked. "These are our commanders, people who demand complete accountability, and who send us out to battle." Then he drove on to his job in a security factory, where he produced another war weapon.

The latest Manchester United news including match reports, player ratings, match previews, Man United transfer news and discussions.

Monterrey, Mexico (CNN) -- Mexican authorities found at least 49 decapitated and dismembered bodies along a highway in a northern border state Sunday morning, officials said. The remains were left along the road in Nuevo Leon state, between the cities of Monterrey and Reynosa. A message written on a wall nearby appeared to refer to the Zetas drug cartel. "This continues to be violence between criminal groups. This is not an attack against the civilian population," said Jorge Domene, Nuevo Leon's state security spokesman.