Category Archive

Closely following the developing news of the worldwide Coronavirus pandemic over the preceding months, DcData took early and extreme steps to not only reduce infection risk but also applied additional focus on ensuring continuity of our vital technical expertise and business services. Our “work from home” policy was successfully implemented and mandated early on the 18th of March – the use of DcData’s … Read More

After several years of building and testing previews, Microsoft on Monday announced the general availability of its Azure Sphere secure IoT service. Microsoft first introduced Azure Sphere in 2018, opting to use its own version of a Linux operating system instead of Windows 10 to drive its new Azure Sphere OS to securely connect Internet of Things devices. Azure Sphere … Read More

Phoronix’s Michael Larabel is doing some performance testing on Walmart’s $199 Motile-branded M141 laptop (which has an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, Vega 3 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 14-inch 1080p display). But first, he compared the performance of its pre-installed Windows 10 OS against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution. Some highlights: Java text rendering performance did … Read More

Hailed as the last good version of Windows by many, Windows 7 is now officially retired. Zorin OS’s creators know this leaves a massive chunk of users with a choice between two equally uncomfortable solutions: upgrade to Windows 10 or jump ship to Linux. This is primarily the user group Zorin OS targets and, to Microsoft’s chagrin and as we’ll … Read More

This week a former engineer for the Microsoft Windows Core OS Division shared an insightful (and very entertaining) list with “some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years” in the computer programming world. Some excerpts: Some programming concepts that were mostly theoretical 20 years ago have since made it to mainstream including many functional programming paradigms like immutability, … Read More

With the article about the NUMA improvements to FreeBSD’s network stack made by Netflix in their quest to serve 200Gb/s encrypted video content per server, in no time the forum comments were quick to theorize whether those changes would work their way back upstream to all FreeBSD users or due to the BSD license would be held as a guarded … Read More

As of this morning in the Linux kernel Git source tree, the kernel weighs in at 27.8 million lines! The stats as we start 2020 put the Linux kernel source tree at 27,852,148 lines (including docs, Kconfig files, user-space utilities in-tree, etc), 887,925 commits, and around 21,074 different authors. The 27.8 million lines are divided among 66,492 files. During 2019, … Read More

“That belongs in a museum!” The Computer Museum of America is home to an impressive collection of consumer technology from the past century, as well as more than 70 supercomputers. The collection has actually been growing for years, but only now has the museum been able to secure a permanent location Being able to see so many retro computers was … Read More

Linux darling faces the lawyers over Shotwell shenanigans The GNOME Foundation, maker of the eponymous Linux desktop, has been hit with a sueball over how its Shotwell photo manager, er, manages photos. The plaintiff, Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, has alleged in a complaint filed at the United States District Court Northern California that defendant, GNOME Foundation, has infringed its patent … Read More

The openSUSE Project announced today the release and general availability of the openSUSE Leap 15.1 operating system, the first minor point release to the openSUSE Leap 15 series. Based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1 (Service Pack 1) operating system, the OpenSuSE Leap 15.1 release features an improved installer, updated kernel and graphics stacks with improved support for AMD … Read More

More and more people are trying Linux-based operating systems these days, and with Windows 10 being so hated, that should not be a surprise. Sadly, while the Linux community should be thriving from Microsoft’s missteps with Windows, it feels like the opposite is happening. The Linux Mint development team is experiencing turmoil, for instance, while Scientific Linux has shut down … Read More

Windows 7 End of Life prompted the switch to Linux In an effort to prepare for Windows 7’s End of Life early next year, South Korea has revealed that all of its government computers will soon make the switch from Windows to Linux. The official Windows 7 End of Life is set for January 14 2020 and Microsoft has said … Read More

Windows 10 is getting a new terminal for command-line users, Microsoft announced at its Build developer conference today. The new so-called “Windows Terminal” will launch in mid-June and promises to be a major update of the existing Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell experience. Indeed, it seems like the Terminal will essentially become the default environment for PowerShell, Command Prompt and … Read More

Users are urged to update their installations immediately An important kernel security update has been released for the CentOS 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system series to address a recently discovered vulnerability and other bugs. Marked by the Red Hat Product Security team as having an “Important” security impact, the new kernel security update contains a fix … Read More

LibreOffice Writer can be used to create fillable PDF forms, being a great free, open source alternative to Adobe’s Acrobat for this use case. LibreOffice is cross-platform too, so you can use it not only on Windows and macOS, but also on Linux. PDF files may contain editable form fields that can be filled / edited and saved by the … Read More