News

Off the Beat * Bruce Byfield

Gnome and KDE: Financials and Culture Large free software projects now resemble other non-profit organizations, with governing boards and obligations to release regular reports. Their financial statements are worth a close look, because they suggest the priorities and directions of the project.

Is Cloud Storage Innately Insecure? Whenever a major security leak breaks, I hope some serious discussion will happen, but I am always disappointed. No one, apparently, wants to explore the idea that, just maybe, buying cloud storage is a flawed business and security model.

Productivity Sauce * Dmitri Popov

Email Articles with Fetch Services like Pocket and Framabag offer a convenient way to save articles, but Fetch provides a different way of saving stories for later perusal: Send a link to a special email address, and the application duly sends you a distilled text from the provided page. Theoretically you can host Fetch on your server, but the meager documentation doesn't offer any clues on how to install Fetch.

Block Ads on Unrooted Android Devices Until recently, if you wanted to enjoy an ad-free browsing experience on Android, you basically had two choices: 1) root your device and install the AdAway app, or 2) use alternative browsers like Firefox or Tint equipped with appropriate ad blocking add-ons. Now, the makers of the AdBlock Plus extension have released an Android app.

ADMIN HPC

http://hpc.admin-magazine.com/

ioprof, blktrace, and blkparse * Jeff Layton

Understanding how applications perform I/O is important because of the volume of data being written and read, and because the performance of some applications depends on how I/O is conducted.

Watson Takes on Science * Joe Casad

IBM's supersystem gives the research scientist encyclopedic knowledge of all papers written on a specific topic.

ADMIN Online

http://www.admin-magazine.com/

Hybrid Drives * Jens-Christoph Brendel

Hybrid drives promise to be as fast as SSDs while offering as much capacity as hard drives.

Redo Backup * Thomas Zeller

Redo Backup backs up complete hard drives locally or over a network. The focus is on simple operation and high reliability in a variety of deployment scenarios.

Landscape * Carsten Schnober

Manually maintaining large IT infrastructures inevitably leads to errors. Enter Canonical's Landscape, a commercial tool that uses a web interface and an API to gather information, render it graphically, and complete maintenance work.