Practical Technology

In late 2011, Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload file-sharing site was one of the top 100 Websites in the world. Then, the FBI, working in concert with New Zealand police, seized the site and all the user files within its servers.

Dotcom’s legal battles continues, but he now claims that Netherlands-based Web-hosting company LeaseWeb has deleted millions of users’ files, “petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property.”

Kim Dotcom: Petabytes of MegaUpload users’ data has been destroyed. More >

The June 2013 TOP500 supercomputer list is in and 476 of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux.

Linux continues to rule supercomputers. More >

Benchmarks can reveal the truth – well, some of the truth – about technologies. A well-constructed benchmark can provide a way to compare performance, reliability and other metrics that can make a difference in comparing product quality and effectiveness. But you have to look closely at what a benchmark is measuring and how it was run – and, even then, take its results with a large grain of salt. Here’s how to approach benchmarks and their touted results.

Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks. More >

Thomas Penfield Jackson has died. The former U.S. District court judge ruled in 2000 that Microsoft was a monopoly that should be broken up into two companies. This part of his decision was over-turned, but what might have happened had the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld his decision to break up Microsoft?

Two Microsofts: Mulling an alternate reality. More >

The story sounded plausible. Red Hat was said to have announced that the next version of its flagship operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 would ship with the MariaDB database management system (DBMS) installed by default, instead of Oracle’s MySQL. Too bad the story was wrong.

Mark Coggin, senior director of product marketing for RHEL, told me that “RHEL provides customers choice by shipping with several databases supported on a 10-year life-cycle. We plan to do the same with RHEL 7 when it ships; however we are not confirming specific features such as the databases, at this time.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 software stack still under wraps. More >