Practical Technology

While digging into the last OpenStack User Survey, I found that Ubuntu Linux was the most popular OpenStack operating system. No matter if users had dozens, or thousands, of CPU cores in their cloud, most preferrred Ubuntu. It was followed by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone CentOS, which is now part of the […]

If there was ever any doubt that security is a process and not a product, the results of HP Zero Day Initiative’s (ZDI) annual Pwn2Own hacking contest will lay those doubts to rest. All the major Web browsers—Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE), and Safari—were cracked by the end of the two day competition. Crash, bang, […]

Red Hat has announced a new application certification program: LXC containerized applications. This Red Hat Container Certification (RHCC) program ensures that application containers built using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will operate seamlessly across certified software hosts. Red Hat gets serious about supporting container-style virtualization. More>

Well, that was annoying. Twitter, the popular short conversation social network site, went down at approximately 2 pm EDT on Tuesday. By 3 pm, the service seemed, for the most part, to be back up. Twitter goes down, and then rebounds More>

The Xen Project, once a Citrix project, and now a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, announced on March 10th the release of the Xen Project Hypervisor version 4.4 with enhanced ARM support. For both datacenter and cloud production managers this is big news. Xen is a very popular server-level virtualization program.  Xen brings its virtualization goodness […]

As usual, NetMarketShare has Internet Explorer (IE) as the most popular Web browser with a global marketshare of 58.19 percent in February 2014. That represents a minute decrease from January’s 58.21 percent. Its rival Web browser measurement company, StatCounter, on the other hand, has Chrome as king of the world on the browser mountain with […]

According to some reports you’d think the security sky was falling. Yes, GnuTLS, an open-source “secure” communications library that implements \Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), has serious flaws. The good news? Almost no one uses it. OpenSSL has long been everyone’s favorite open-source security library of choice. Red Hat discovered the latest […]

Back in 2011, the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution made a major and controversial user-interface (UI) change. It moved from GNOME 3.x to its own GNOME-based UI design: Unity. One of its bigger design changes was to force all in-focus applications to use a single global menu. Things are different now. Marco Trevisan, one of Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent […]

One Operating System to rule them all;One Operating System to find them;One Operating System to bring them all and in Android bind them.* Or, some people would add, “in Google bind them.” But that’s not true: Android is much too open for Google to lock vendors in. Amazon proved that with its Kindle line, and […]

Computerworld - Having seen Windows 8.1, I have a question I’d like to ask Microsoft: “Is that the best you could do?” My assessment: Windows 8.1 doesn’t suck as much as Windows 8. If you felt, when using Windows 8, as if you were banging your head against a brick wall, Windows 8.1 might feel […]

How bad are Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks getting on the Internet? Arbor Networks, which specializes in DDoS defense and mitigation, has found that so far in 2013 the average DDoS attack now stands at 2.64Gbps, up 78 percent from 2012. Now, in concert with Google Ideas, a Google think tank, the two have […]