Practical Technology

For years, decades, the big companies didn’t tend to wage patent wars on each other. The reason is simple. Major patent holders don’t tend to target other major patent holders because of MAD (mutually assured destruction). Or, in other words, if you sue me, I sue you, and we can both burn potentially hundreds of [...]

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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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ecently, I’ve been writing a lot about IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol that makes the Internet and most home and business networks go. Now, like it or lump it, we, starting with our businesses and mobile devices and eventually our home networks, are all going to have to move to IPv6. That [...]

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Every few years there’s another panic about everyone running out of IP addresses. The terror that the Internet would simply run out of room is finally coming true. It’s not so much that computers are consuming the IP addresses; it’s all those smartphones, iPads, and other devices that require Internet access. The Number Resource Organization [...]

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One important piece of a multilevel security defense for companies of almost any size is network access control (NAC), which lets you enforce policies for end-user machines. The basic idea behind NAC — which can include hardware, software or a combination — is deceptively simple. Before any end user’s computer — an endpoint — is [...]

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