Practical Technology

Get over it people. Red Hat is not getting acquired anytime soon. I know, I know, you’d heard all the rumors. Here’s the truth as I see it: If Red Hat gets acquired anytime soon, I’ll eat my fedora. It’s not happening. What is happening, as Paul Cormier, EVP of Red Hat, announced this morning [...]

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Jeff Dean, a Google Fellow who has been with the company since 1999, gave a speech at the Web Search and Data Mining meeting in 2009 where he unveiled how Google puts together its data centers (PDF). Because the meeting was in Barcelona, Spain, his speech didn’t receive the attention it deserved in the United [...]

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I’m cheap. Given a choice between buying an elaborate, full-featured server requiring expensive technicians and administrators, versus turning an out-of-date PC into a single-purpose Linux server, I’m going to go with the Linux server every time. It’s not that Linux isn’t expensive. It sometimes is. But if a department or a branch office just needs [...]

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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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Google Android was always going to be the heart of many Linux-based iPad like devices. That’s no news. But, what is new and news is that Google and Verizon appear to be working together to create a Chrome operating system based tablet. According to the first report, from The Download Squad, HTC is building the [...]

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