Texture caching systems are designed to overcome the texture budget limitations of 3D games. Only the textures required to display the current scene are held in RAM. When new textures need to appear in the scene, they are loaded from a larger and slower repository, or they are dynamically generated.
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Google recently launched a service that allows webmasters to feed Google pages they would like to have indexed. Up till now, webmasters had no control over what pages Google crawled. Webmasters could only submit their homepage to Google and hope that Google would crawl through links to find the rest of their web site. Google’s new service, Google Sitemaps, provides webmasters with a method to inform Google exactly which pages they want crawled, how often these pages change, and the order that these pages should be crawled.
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A number of new geospatial viewing tools from major players in the Internet industry have recently appeared on the scene and are taking the geospatial world by storm. Google,Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all released web-based mapping tools in the recent past, and collectively these new players to the industry have raised the bar for Internet mapping. Although their functional capabilities don’t provide anything we haven’t seen in web offerings from traditional GIS vendors, their emergence has been significant in that they have managed to capture a wider audience. Google, in particular, has emerged as the leader of this pack with it’s recently released Google Maps product which provides a slick, highly responsive visual interface built using AJAX technologies along with detailed street and aerial imagery data, and an open API allowing customization of the map output including the ability to add application specific data to the map.
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The rise of the software-as-a-service paradigm has led to the development of a new breed of sophisticated, interactive applications often called Web 2.0. While web applications have become larger and more complex, web application developers today have little visibility into the end-to-end behavior of their systems.
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Everybody is now talking about Web 2.0, a Web that is more dynamic, richer, more interactive, and, ultimately – much more exciting than anything we know now. It’s just human nature to look for unusual and new stuff. But, what does that mean for business applications?

Let’s look at Google Maps. Yes, we are all excited by Google Maps. It looks great. It is very interactive. And, most importantly, it behaves completely differently from what we expect to see in a “normal” browser. But, compared to any realistic business application – say something like trivial Internet banking – Google Maps is nothing. It supports just a few use cases compared to the hundreds or thousands of use cases for a typical business application.
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Websites have changed significantly in the Web 2.0 world. The youtube generation has quite different expectations about websites in general. For starters, websites with plain HTML forms and smartly laid text are passé, and are being replaced by websites full of dynamic content: Google Maps, Gap’s highly interactive website and Nike’s all new Flash website are all examples of the new generation of websites. Not only are the sites getting richer – more rich media, video etc. – they enable users to do a lot more. Companies like Timberland, Ikea, Home Depot, Sherwin Williams, have created websites that offer sophisticated applications that allow users to create-a-custom-product or try-before-you-buy.
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Many IT organizations view the phrase Web 2.0 as either just marketing hype that is devoid of any meaning or they associate it exclusively with social networking sites such as MySpace. That’s understandable as Web 2.0 is not the same as a new protocol that has an associated RFC that spells out definitively what is and what is not included as part of the protocol. As a result, many concepts get lumped under the banner of Web 2.0. In one of the most insightful analyses of Web 2.0, Tim Reilly points out that Web 2.0 involves fundamentally new design patterns and business models and he compares companies that were successful with Web 1.0 with those companies that are leading the movement to Web 2.0.
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What on earth is Web 2.0? Web 2.0 carries a high profile and surrounding hype. Developers must surely be feeling the heat to quickly adopt the new second generation of dynamic, interactive and simple by design technologies.

Web 2.0 is the term pioneered by O’Reilly for new generation Web applications.Live.com, start.com, Google maps, Google Docs, YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace are few examples. Adaptation of this technology vector has changed the web application development approach and methodology significantly.AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript), RIA(Rich Internet Applications) and Web Services form the core components of Web 2.0applications.
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