Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 9, 2015
by sjvn01
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Where DevOps is today

OK, so you get that DevOps is important. Yay you! But how broadly has DevOps been accepted? That’s a darn good question, and IDC and AppDynamics have some answers in their recent report, DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified.

First, let’s put into perspective the problem DevOps is meant to tackle, getting development and operations into sync on the cloud. If you’re serious about the cloud, you’ve moving your business IT to it. And that’s a job that comes with a heavy price-tag for failure. How heavy? The average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour. And, worse still, the average cost of a critical application failure per hour is $500,000 to $1 million.

So you better get DevOps right, or you may soon be looking for another CIO position… a lower-paying CIO position.

Where DevOps is today. More>

February 9, 2015
by sjvn01
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Mission: Funding all those small but important open-source projects

In 2014, OpenSSL had a gigantic security problem: Heartbleed. Its root cause? A combination of blind trust in the open-source programming method and a shoe-string budget. Less than a year later Werner Koch, author and sole maintainer of the popular Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) email encryption program, revealed he was going broke supporting GnuPG.

Koch’s story had a happy ending. First, The Linux Foundation, via its Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), donated $60,000 to GnuPG. Then, e-payments vendor Stripe and Facebook agreed to sponsor the program’s development to the tune of $50,000 a year.

That’s great, but something’s seriously wrong when small, but vital open-source programs can be ignored until either the code breaks from neglect or its programmers abandon it to make a living from more lucrative projects.

Mission: Funding all those small but important open-source projects. More>

February 6, 2015
by sjvn01
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Fed up with Adobe Flash? Make it safer

We’re addicted to Adobe Flash, and it’s time to break the habit. In the last three months, multiple Flash security holes have been found and exploited. In the last two weeks alone, security expert Brian Krebs has reported that Adobe has released three emergency Flash security patches. Enough already.

Fed up with Adobe Flash? Make it safer. More>

February 5, 2015
by sjvn01
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Some patents become less troll friendly

In one small step for patent law interpretation, one giant leap forward for patent sanity, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has agreed to let the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE) new Standard Association (SA) patent policy stand. This new policy, in turn, will reduce the cost of fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) patents and make it far harder for patent holders to sue others using these patents.

Some patents become less troll friendly. More>

February 4, 2015
by sjvn01
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The best open-source software for serious Linux users

Everyone has their personal favorite programs, but some users are more serious about their software than others. One such group includes the people at LinuxQuestions. These are Linux experts who are kind enough to answer newbies’ endless questions. So when they pick out their favorite Linux distributions and open-source programs, I take their opinions seriously.

The best open-source software for serious Linux users. More>