Practical Technology

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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Portland, OR- Canonical., the company behind Ubuntu, has always had many user and developer fans. Enterprise business fans though? Not so much. Canonical hopes to change that with today’s, July 21st, launch of a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform in private and public cloud configurations. The [...]

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Since I run my own small business, I’m very interested in health care reform. You see, my tiny — two-person — company pays more than four figures a month for health insurance. Ow! That and taxes are the two biggest expenses on my ledger. Unfortunately, I don’t see much reason for hope in the crippled [...]

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On this past Christmas Day, a holiday nightmare was averted when a passenger and good luck kept a terrorist from blowing apart Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it prepared to land in Detroit. While this story has a happy ending, we’re left to wonder why the automated systems designed to catch such people in the [...]

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The EC (European Commission), the European Union’s top competition authority, isn’t crazy about Oracle buying Sun. You might have thought it was just open-source advocates objecting to the deal out of the fear that Oracle, the world’s biggest proprietary DBMS (database management systems) company would close down the most popular open-source DBMS. You’d be wrong. [...]

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