Practical Technology

Serious businesses use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its near-twin brother CentOS for their servers. The question today for CIOs using or RHEL and CentOS is: When should they upgrade to RHEL 7.1 and/or CentOS 7.1?

Red Hat 7.1 is here, CentOS 7.1 coming soon. More>

BOSTON – At the Linux Foundation‘s new Vault show, it’s all about file systems and storage. You might think that there’s nothing new to say about either topic, but you’d be wrong.

Storage technology has come a long way from the days of, as Linus Torvalds put it, “nasty platters of spinning rust” and Linux [...]

Do you want a job in IT that you can count on in years to come? Then start polishing up your Linux skills.

According to the Linux Foundation and tech job company Dice, in the 2015 Linux Jobs Report, “Nearly all hiring managers are looking to recruit Linux professionals.” While programmers and Linux system administrators [...]

There are endless ways to share files between devices. Some of them are complex, ftp and Network File System (NFS). Some, such as Apple Bonjour and Windows Homegroup, work with only a few operating systems. Still others, like Dropbox and Google Drive, require you to use a cloud. Then, there’s BitTorrent Sync 2.0, which is [...]

The newly minted Cloud Foundry Foundation would like you to believe that the open-source war for the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has been won and that it’s the winner. Red Hat with its OpenShift PaaS begs to differ.

Red Hat invites all to work on its OpenShift PaaS cloud. More>

This has not been Lenovo’s finest hour. First, security experts found that Lenovo was shipping Superfish adware, which turned out to have malware potential. Then, the company completely mishandled the news about it, simultaneously declaring it to be both a security concern and not one. Spoiler alert: Superfish was a major security foul-up. Now, the [...]

Most people are happy with inexpensive Chromebooks. Some people, and I’m one of them, want top-of-the-line hardware and were willing to pay $1,449 for the Chromebook Pixel back in 2013. Now, Google will soon be releasing a Chromebook Pixel 2.

Chromebook Pixel, the Rolls-Royce of Chromebooks, is getting a refresh. More>

When the last version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol 1.1 (HTTP/1.1) was approved in 1999, fast computers were running 500MHz Pentium III chips, Bill Clinton was president of the United States, and software engineers were working hard at fixing the Y2K bug. As for the internet, the US Federal Communications Commission defined broadband as 200 [...]

No one likes crapware–the adware and trial software that PC and smartphone vendors put on their devices. Until recently, though we rarely got actual malware installed on new computers. Now, thanks to Lenovo and Superfish Visual Discovery adware, we didn’t merely get injected ads in our search engine results, we also had our computer doors [...]

Last year, Red Hat decided that the 64-bit ARM architecture was ready for the data center and cloud. This year, Red Hat announced that its Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program has expanded to include more than 35 companies. It also expects them to contribute open-source system-specific software and drivers to the upstream Linux [...]

Cord-cutting continues to leap forward in 2015 with Dish Network‘s Sling TV partnering with premium movie channel EPIX to bring all the EPIX movie channels and video-on-demand (VOD) to Sling TV Internet customers.

Sling TV expands offerings with EPIX movies and VOD. More>

In 2015, many Linux and open-source vets still distrust Microsoft’s conversion to open-source. In 2006, no one believed that when Sam Ramji, who oversaw BEA Systems move to open-source software, became Director of Platform Technology Strategy for Microsoft’s Open Source Software Labs, that Microsoft was doing more than paying lip-service to open source. They were [...]