Search results for ""Author Rob Brooks""

ColdFusion has enjoyed widespread use among developers as a powerful, easy-to-learn platform for creating and deploying dynamic Web applications. ColdFusion's simple, tag-based language makes it easy to handle basic tasks, like processing form data and querying databases, but the language is also powerful enough to deliver highly scalable, robust applications. And now that Macromedia has integrated ColdFusion into its MX family of technologies, ColdFusion is capable of interacting with Flash MX applications, which opens up even more possibilities. This new edition documents new techniques for using ColdFusion MX to develop and serve dynamic web page content. This exhaustive guide covers everything from the basics to advanced topics, with numerous examples that you can use for your own applications. Contents include: Sharing application data using the Web application framework and shared scope variables; accessing databases, maintaining database records, and advanced database techniques such as drill-down queries, query caching, and query of queries; integrating applications with ColdFusion MX's new security framework; interacting with other data sources, including LDAP directories, email servers, and other web servers; extending ColdFusion with user-defined functions (UDFs), custom tags, and ColdFusion Components (CFCs); advanced topics such as working with XML, consuming and producing Web services, and integrating ColdFusion with Flash via Flash Remoting; and reference material for all the tags and functions that comprise CFML, the ColdFusion Markup Language. The book covers ColdFusion MX, the latest release of ColdFusion, and is packed with advanced strategies, insider hints, tips, and tricks for creating effective web applications. If you are a ColdFusion developer, you need this book to help you make the most out of ColdFusion MX.

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What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons, stimulating and sometimes exploiting the ways people make friends, gossip with neighbors, and grow intimate with lovers. Sex robots present the humanoid face of this technological revolution—yet although it is easy to gawk at their uncanniness, more familiar technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are insinuating themselves into human interactions. Digital lovers, virtual friends, and algorithmic matchmakers help us manage our feelings in a world of cognitive overload. Will these machines, fueled by masses of user data and powered by algorithms that learn all the time, transform the quality of human life?Artificial Intimacy offers an innovative perspective on the possibilities of the present and near future. The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider the interaction of new technologies and fundamental human behaviors. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs—and are getting better at what they do. Brooks combines an understanding of core human traits from evolutionary biology with analysis of how cultural, economic, and technological contexts shape the ways people express them. Beyond the technology, he asks what the implications of artificial intimacy will be for how we understand ourselves.

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