The commoditization of tech reached new heights this month with the announcement of the Pepsi smartphone, which appears to be a standard Android model. The new phone will only be sold in China. Whether the trend continues and spreads to the West will depend on many factors that would discourage my speculation in a one-page Welcome column.

Sabayon 15.09 and Mageia 5 KDE4

Updates on technologies, trends, and tools.

Find out how your web server performs under fire with Apache's JMeter testing tool.

HTTP/1.1 was advanced for its time, but it wasn't designed for today's complex websites. We'll show you why the new HTTP/2 specification provides a solution.

People wanting to encrypt the network traffic sent over public lines usually use either IPsec, SSL via port 443, or OpenVPN. We look at four alternative tunnel builders that promise VPN using the peer-to-peer method.

The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 5.0.0 at the beginning of August, and the first update 5.0.1 appeared just three weeks later. In addition to several fixes and new features under the hood, Version 5 provides some very visible improvements.

We look at a number of new features in VirtualBox 5.0, a popular desktop virtualization solution.

Is the current package for your favorite Ubuntu program woefully behind the times? No problem: Just a few steps creates an updated Debian package that you can then share with others in a PPA.

The unassuming ss utility is easy to understand and easy to type, but it adds some powerful options to your admin toolkit.