Category Archive

You’ve probably heard the claim that coding, or computer programming, is as crucial a skill in the 21st century as reading and math were in the previous century. I’ll go one step further: Teaching a young person to code could be the single most life-changing skill you can give them. And it’s not just a career-enhancer. Coding is about problem-solving, … Read More

Open source has entered the limelight at work. Not only is it frequently being used in businesses – but it’s helping people build their professional reputations, according to the recently released 2017 GitHub Open Source Survey. Notably, half of the 5,500 survey GitHub contributors say that their open source work was somewhat or very important in getting their current role. The … Read More

Red Hat may be planning on being the leading private cloud company, but that doesn’t mean it’s giving up its Linux leadership. On Aug. 1, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.4, the latest version of its flagship enterprise Linux distribution. Here are its latest features: Security Updated audit capabilities to help simplify how administrators … Read More

The debate about whether vendors can thrive and scale if their primary outputs are freely licensed continues to brew nearly two years since I wrote about the topic. Basing a business on an open source strategy is undoubtedly challenging, because no matter how many times you quote Richard Stallman that software freedom means “free speech,” not “free beer,” there is a persistent expectation that … Read More

Tech titans ranging from Google to Facebook have been steadily open sourcing powerful artificial intelligence and deep learning tools, and now Microsoft is out with version 2.0 of theMicrosoft Cognitive Toolkit. It’s an open source software framework previously dubbed CNTK, and it competes with tools such as TensorFlow (created by Google) and Caffe (created by Yahoo!). Cognitive Toolkit works with … Read More

Back in the mid-2000s, AMD and IBM collaborated on a supercomputer project for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which featured over 64,000 dual-core Opteron processors and numerous custom accelerators to achieve 1 PetaFLOP of computing performance. For a time, the massive system – dubbed Roadrunner — was the fastest supercomputer on the planet. It required 696 racks and covered approximately 6,000 … Read More

Brief: Ring, Open Source alternative to Skype, has reached its first stable release. Have a look at how to install and use Ring. Ring is a free and open source cross platform software featuring instant messaging, free unlimited calling with call recording, media sharing with multiple audio codecs support and audio and video conferencing. Ring 1.0 has been released officially after … Read More

Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux will be a fully supported feature in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, but it won’t support end-user scenarios. After over a year in beta, Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) will move to a fully supported feature in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, which is due for release around September. There are a few minor bug fixes in … Read More

It’s happened again. Microsoft has joined yet another open source group. Whatever happened to Redmond’s long held belief that open source is a cancer? Times change, and evidently Microsoft has learned to change with them. On Wednesday the company announced it’s joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a top tier platinum member. The foundation is a project of the … Read More

We’ve been trundling along nicely in IPv6, and now it is time to keep my promise to teach some iptables rules for IPv6. In this two-part series, we’ll start by examining some common IPv6 security myths. Every time I teach firewalls I have to start with debunking myths because there are a lot of persistent weird ideas about the so-called built-in IPv6 … Read More

They promised, and they will deliver! Canonical recently announced that they started working on rebasing the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system on the Linux 4.13 kernel. One of the highlights of Ubuntu Kernel Team’s latest newsletter is the fact that work started on the building and testing Linux kernel 4.13 for Ubuntu 17.10, and it looks like users … Read More

One of the key features of the OpenStack platform is the ability to run applications, and quickly scale them, using containers. Containers are ready-to-run applications because they come packed with the entire stack of services required to run them. OpenStack is an ideal platform for containers because it provides all of the resources and services for containers to run in … Read More

The point of a network monitoring solution is, of course, to tell you when something malfunctions on your network, but the effectiveness of a solution is directly related to how noticeable and timely its alerts are. For my work, system-malfunction emails can be overwhelming, so I thought a chatbot service would be more useful. After doing some research, it seemed like I … Read More

What if a critical portion of your business strategy were based on a mistaken notion? Of course you’d want to know, right? If you’ve made the assumption that proprietary enterprise software is superior to open source enterprise software, you’re not alone. And you’re not alone in being mistaken. The conceptual divide today between open source software and enterprise users can … Read More

openSUSE today announced the official and immediate availability for download of the latest and greatest update to the openSUSE Leap operating system series, version 42.3. Based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack (SP) 3 enterprise-ready operating system, openSUSE Leap 42.3 is at best a hardware enablement release that includes hundreds of updated packages compared to the previous update, in … Read More