Mike Loukides

Mike Loukides is Vice President of Content Strategy for O'Reilly Media, Inc. He's edited many highly regarded books on technical subjects that don't involve Windows programming. He''s particularly interested in programming languages, Unix and what passes for Unix these days, and system and network administration. Mike is the author of "System Performance Tuning", and a coauthor of "Unix Power Tools." Most recently, he's been fooling around with data and data analysis, languages like R, Mathematica, and Octave, and thinking about how to make books social.

The NoSQL movement

The NoSQL movement

How to think about choosing a database.

by  | @mikeloukides  | +Mike Loukides |  8 February 2012

A relational database is no longer the default choice. Mike Loukides charts the rise of the NoSQL movement and explains how to choose the right database for your application.

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On pirates and piracy

On pirates and piracy

The media industry's wholesale takeover of creativity is the real piracy.

by  | @mikeloukides  | +Mike Loukides | 23 January 2012

Mike Loukides: "I'm not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven't paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity."

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Don't expect the end of electronics obsolescence anytime soon

Don't expect the end of electronics obsolescence anytime soon

Software updates can't rejuvenate old hardware.

by  | @mikeloukides  | +Mike Loukides | 20 January 2012

Software updates for consumer electronics sound great in theory. But over time, the discrepancy between what the software is supposed to do and what your devices are capable of will rub obsolescence in your face.

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From SOPA to speech: Seven tech trends to monitor

Data, voice recognition, and the "social backbone" will shape the months ahead.

by  | @mikeloukides  | +Mike Loukides | 19 January 2012

Mike Loukides weighs in on the tech trends — good and bad — that will exert considerable influence in 2012.

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Putting money where our mouths are

The business that can't deliver the goods doesn't deserve to survive.

by  | @mikeloukides  | +Mike Loukides | 17 January 2012

SOPA and PIPA are attempts by established companies to preserve an industry that has been fundamentally unchanged since the 1950s, if not the 40s.

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Understanding randomness is a double-edged sword

Understanding randomness is a double-edged sword

A review of "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives."

by  | @mikeloukides  | +Mike Loukides |  5 January 2012

While Leonard Mlodinow's book offers a good introduction to probabilistic thinking, it carries two problems: First, it doesn't uniformly account for skill. Second, when we're talking probability and statistics, we're talking about interchangeable events.

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