Issue #144 / Nov 2012

Patent law is a very imperfect tool for establishing moral culpability. Whether you favor patents or not, it is important to face the fact that patent law is a construct of the business world. Patents protect opportunities for patent holders and restrict opportunities for others – all for some supposedly greater purpose, we are told, but in any case, none of this ever has the clarity that will allow you to point your finger at a violator as you would at someone who stole your car. So I don’t have a lot of faith in patents, but I still have a feeling you’ll do better in life if you come up with your own solutions.

Getting into high-performance computing has never been easier. We investigate HPC cloud computing and a popular Big Data platform.

The double-sided DVD attached to this issue comes with 32- and 64-bit versions of the latest release from the openSUSE project. openSUSE 12.2 continues in the long tradition of SUSE Linux, offering a full-featured system that is ready for the server room yet friendly enough for the desktop.

• Android gains market share
• VMware Workstation
• Perforce on Demand
• openSUSE 12.2 released
• CUDA 5 rc
• Web Foundation index measures world
• New Z shell release first since 2004

SpringSource Releases New Tool Suites

Codethink Releases Baserock 1.1

PostgreSQL 9.2 Released

ROSA Announces Enterprise Distribution

Cloud computing has become a viable option for highperformance computing. In this article, we discuss the use case for cloud-based HPC, introduce the StarCluster toolkit, and show how to build a custom machine image for compute nodes.

Experience the power of supercomputing and the big data revolution with Apache Hadoop.

Red Hat peps up performance of multimedia applications on remote desktops with SPICE (Simple Protocol For Independent Computing Environments).

SSH can make you crazy if the WLAN connection keeps breaking down, the IP address changes, or the data packets trickle over a slow mobile connection. AutoSSH and Mosh offer some features you won’t find in ordinary SSH.