Archive

Harvesting, querying, delivering, enriching and analyzing data is at the heart of every business. However, most organizations are saddled with high-priced commercial databases as a result of continual departmental investments in new database projects, business intelligence projects, and the addition...

The Web 2.0 revolution has spawned hundreds of cover stories, thousands of companies, and millions of words of hype. But there's one thing it hasn't brought: Profits. With the coming of the credit crunch and the global recession, hype won't pay the bills. That's why the next wave of Web 2.0 will be ...

The traditional process for sourcing creative work contains significant risk for the buyer along with the potential for wonderful reward in the form of great design. The typical risks are threefold: first, finding and working with the right designer for your project; second, the inherent limitations...

Linux has proven that the open source model works -- it addresses two of the biggest challenges for IT professionals: the high cost of infrastructure software and the limitations a closed stack imposes on the enterprise. Open source is particularly appealing for cost savings, vendor neutrality, acce...

In the past five years, the mettle of mobile Linux has been tested -- and it has deservedly earned a shining new reputation as a real technology of choice -- an embedded operating system and a flexible platform for truly open innovation. Linux has even gained the status of the de facto operating sys...

Regardless of all its hype, security in cloud computing is not a revolution; rather it's an evolution of the age-old business model of outsourcing. The concept of cloud computing has evolved from the concepts of grid, utility, and SaaS, and these models evolved from the application service provider ...

It's an interesting question: Why would large, established companies like Adobe and others embrace open source strategies? In some ways, it seems counterproductive. After all, releasing a software application's source code to the community could be viewed as letting an organization's competitive adv...

Computers have become more complex in recent years as demands on systems have continued to increase in size due to the amount of external devices, software, hardware and communication components. Technical professionals are depending more and more on the Internet, a blog or a peer whenever they need...

Memory bugs, essentially a mistake in the management of heap memory, are caused by a number of factors and can occur in any program that is being written, enhanced or maintained. The fact that memory bugs can be introduced at any time is part of what makes memory debugging a challenging task. This i...

PayPal transacts more than $1,500 every second of every day, with millions of people around the world relying on the robustness of its system. It comes as a surprise to many people that PayPal runs such a large financial services company on an open source platform, but that's precisely how we're abl...

While Linux has come a long way in the past 10 years, I think it's safe to say that it hasn't yet taken over the world -- nor has Linux reached its full potential. Linux continues to become more mainstream every day -- we now see Linux hosting mission-critical servers in the enterprise, large financ...

The IT industry appears to be in the thick of a number of interesting trends happening not only in technology, but in society at large. Cultural assumptions are changing about the nature of media and production, and consumers are being empowered as producers. The Web at large has embraced this shift...

It's often said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Nothing could be more applicable to IT management. IT managers are in a constant fire drill, responding to some "unbeatable fire" when they are desperate to correct an ensuing dis...

One of the most common security challenges Linux and Unix IT administrators face is how to effectively manage the root or super-user account. In an age of regulatory compliance and data privacy laws -- and as more and more organizations elect to run mission-critical financial, customer relationship ...