Practical Technology

Based on Microsoft’s latest earnings report, its Surface RT is a flop. This, in turn, means that Windows RT has failed. But, there are many other would-be tablet operating system challengers to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Seriously, though, do any of them have a real shot? Can any tablet OS challenge Android and iOS? [...]

Almost two-weeks after Bluebox Security announced a vulnerability in Android’s security model that could enable attackers to convert most Android applications into Trojans, and more than a week after Google released the fix for it, the vast majority of Android OEMs has yet to patch the hole. So, Duo Security and Northeastern University’s System Security Lab [...]

Almost twenty-years ago in August 1993, Microsoft released its second networked version of Windows: Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It wasn’t a success. Success for Microsoft in a network-enabled operating system would come in the same year with Windows NT. On Sunday, July 14 2013, with a wink, Linus Torvalds released the first version of the [...]

When it comes to security, Android 2013 is a lot like Windows in the 1990s and much of the 2000s: A mess. Still, Microsoft got one thing right with security early on. Starting with Windows 98, Microsoft released regular direct-to-user security updates with Patch Tuesday. It’s high time Google followed Microsoft’s lead and start implementing [...]

The scary news was that Bluebox Security had worked out a way to break Android’s security model. In theory, this could be exploited with almost any Androids apps. The hopeful news was that Google quickly released a patch for the security hole to phone original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s . The annoying news is that almost [...]

It’s no secret that the PC market is awful. With tablets on one side and Windows 8′s failure to gain market success on the other, worldwide PC sales have dropped more than 10-percent in the last quarter alone. According to retail sales analysis firm NPD there is one bright spot though: low-priced notebooks with Linux-based, [...]

Without virtualization, we wouldn’t have cloud computing. It’s that simple. Virtualization, however, isn’t the same thing as cloud computing. For starters, virtualization came long before cloud computing appeared. Virtualization: Cloud Computing’s Foundation. More >

In the beginning of supercomputer performance measurement there was Linpack. This benchmark, the gold standard for measuring high-performance computing, has been the basis for the TOP500 supercomputer ranking list  since 1993. Now, Jack Dongarra, distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, creator of the TOP500, and Linpack’s inventor thinks the benchmark [...]

When NGINX zoomed up to take second place from Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) in the Web server derby, it looked like NGINX, a fast open-source Web server, would leave IIS in the dust and challenge long time Web leader Apache. It hasn’t worked out that way. Web servers Microsoft IIS and NGINX battle for [...]

After Citrix bought Xen in 2007, the core of this popular open-source hypervisor remained open source, but some of the rest became proprietary software. Now Citrix has decided to take all of its virtual machine manager and cloud XenServer software back to its open-source roots. Citrix goes all in for open-source XenServer cloud. More >

The famous quantum reality thought experiment Schrödinger’s Cat, may or may not exist, but the latest version of Red Hat’s community Linux Fedora 19 nick-named Schrödinger’s Cat is alive, well, and ready to be downloaded. Fedora 19, Schrödinger’s Cat, lives. More >