Practical Technology

If you were to list all the reasons why Obama beat Romney in the 2012 presidential race, chances are DevOps, the cloud, and open-source software (OSS) wouldn’t be on your list. They should be. As Harper Reed, the CTO of Obama for America explained in his recent Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) speech, all these technologies played a major role [...]

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Tragically, Aaron Swartz, hounded by an apparently over-zealous prosecutor, committed suicide in early 2013. His just-unveiled major open-source privacy project, DeadDrop, lives on in a citizen and press protection program, The New Yorker’s Strongbox. Strongbox is the first use of DeadDrop technology. The New Yorker magazine will use it so that its readers can “communicate [...]

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Linux is far faster than Windows. That’s old news. It’s why Linux runs 90 percent of the world’s top 500 fastest supercomputers, while Windows runs 1 percent of them. What’s new “news” is that an alleged Microsoft operating system developer recently admitted that Linux is indeed much faster, and explained why that’s the case. Anonymous [...]

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Do you want to know how to tell real Linux geeks from people who just use it? Ask them what their favorite application packaging system is. Hardcore old-school Linux users will soon be telling you all all about RPM vs. DEB and before it’s over someone is sure to chime in about going straight to [...]

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Since Facebook started open-sourcing the data center in 2011 in the Open Compute Project (OCP), Facebook and its OCP partners have had some successes in making data-center computing more open and affordable. Now, the OCP takes on what may be its biggest challenge to date: Creating open-source, high-end network switches. Open Compute to open-source high-end [...]

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