Practical Technology

If you ever watched the later seasons of 24, you’ll recall that Jack and his buddies at the Counter Terrorist Unit were always using Cisco Telepresence for video-conferencing. That was no surprise. John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, has long thought that Cisco should be thought of as not just the big dog of networking, but of [...]

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If you spend much time in a CIO or CTO’s office, you’ll have heard the phrase “software stack” a million times. It usually means a suite of operating system, utilities, and applications designed to deliver various services. For example, the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack is what lies behind many Web sites, and the [...]

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I was one of those lucky people given early admission to Google Wave. There was only one problem. Once we had Google Wave, we couldn’t figure out what to do with it. And if we, a bunch of techno-geeks and technology journalists, couldn’t come up with a good use for Wave, what chance did anyone [...]

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Some people hate the idea of adding proprietary software to their desktop Linux. For these people, there are Linux distributions such as gNewSense that use only free software. For the rest of us, who use distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu, there are times we either want to, or feel forced to, add proprietary [...]

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Code for America has a rather novel notion. It is that the U.S. would be a far, far better place if we stopped complaining about local government and started hacking it No, no, they don’t mean hacking it open. Well, actually, they do in a way. What Code for America would like to do is [...]

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