Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 11, 2015
by sjvn01
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Sam Ramji takes lead at the open-source Cloud Foundry Foundation

In 2015, many Linux and open-source vets still distrust Microsoft’s conversion to open-source. In 2006, no one believed that when Sam Ramji, who oversaw BEA Systems move to open-source software, became Director of Platform Technology Strategy for Microsoft’s Open Source Software Labs, that Microsoft was doing more than paying lip-service to open source. They were wrong. Now, years after leaving Microsoft, Ramji is returning to play a major open-source leadership role as the new CEO for the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Sam Ramji takes lead at the open-source Cloud Foundry Foundation. More>

February 11, 2015
by sjvn01
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Can CyanogenMod phones challenge iPhones and Android smartphones?

Cyanogen, the company behind CyanogenMod, started small. It began as a group of developers that wanted to produce a high-quality alternative Android firmware. Today, it still stands behind a great Android alternative, but its ambitions now go so high as to consider taking on Apple and Google.

Can CyanogenMod phones challenge iPhones and Android smartphones? More>

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>