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between buying an elaborate, full-featured server requiring expensive technicians and administrators, versus turning an out-of-date PC into a single-purpose Linux server, I’m going to go with the Linux server every time.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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Microsoft claiming that it loves open source?! What next? Cats and dogs living together?! Seriously, in a recent Network World interview, Microsoft’s General Manager of Interoperability and XML Architecture Jean Paoli said, “We [Microsoft] love open source” and that “We have worked with open source for a long time now.” Really? But what about Microsoft [...]

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As everyone who ever tried it knows, trying to count how many people use a particular Linux distribution is almost impossible. Now, Rick Lehrbaum, founder of LinuxDevices, a friend and former editor of mine, has tried a new and interesting way to count Linux users on his new site LinuxTrends: look at Google search results [...]

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