Stories by: Paul Venezia

In the real estate world, the mantra is location, location, location. In the network and server administration world, the mantra is visibility, visibility, visibility. If you don't know what your network and servers are doing at every second of the day, you're flying blind. Sooner or later, you're going to meet with disaster.

"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." -- Joseph Stalin

As the window to the Internet, the Web browser is arguably the most important application ever developed, and it will only become more important in the coming years, as applications continue their retreat from the local system and into Web frameworks built on Apache, IIS, Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, and countless other languages and tools. Against this backdrop, today's official introduction of Firefox 3 may in fact be a watershed event in the history of computing.

Once upon a time, using open-source servers and applications for business was frowned upon in many circles. Today, you'd be hard pressed to find any sizeable infrastructure that doesn't leverage open-source code in some form or another, be it a few MySQL databases, Apache on the Web servers, or a pile of Perl, PHP, Ruby, or Python applications holding things together.

The last time I had a Stratus server in the lab, it was the ftServer W Series 4300, back in January 2006. That was a Windows-based system, and discussions with Stratus about Linux distributions showed that although it had a Linux version, it was the company's own distribution, and not standard. For some Linux shops, this wasn't a problem, but for those looking to run specific applications and services -- such as Oracle Database -- that require a certified distribution, it was an obstacle.

Parallels for Desktop 3.0 improves on a good thing with 3D graphics acceleration, snapshots, and usability tweaks.

Nearly three years since Jon "maddog" Hall predicted that "VOIP using an open source solution, such as Asterisk, will generate more business than the entire Linux marketplace today," open source VOIP for the enterprise remains a wild frontier. SMB uptake has been considerable, as open source VOIP's promise of control and cost savings make it a natural fit. But when it comes to large-scale implementations, open source voice has yet to get most enterprises to listen.

There's a reason nearly every security appliance vendor uses open source tools, and it has little to do with licensing. The vast majority of these devices -- ranging from spam and spyware filters to network scanners to intrusion detection and prevention systems -- are not only built on an open source platform such as Linux or FreeBSD, but they also actively use other open source products to accomplish their given tasks.