Several years back, Songbird was going to be the newest, coolest,
most-awesome music player ever to grace the Linux desktop. Then
things happened, as they often do, and Linux support for Songbird was
discontinued.
Ever since the announcement of the Raspberry Pi, sites all across the
Internet have offered lots of interesting and challenging uses for this
exciting device. Although all of those ideas are great, the most obvious
and perhaps least glamorous use for the Raspberry Pi (RPi) is creating
your perfect home server.
Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most
cases
runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU
cores. In such highly concurrent environments, lock contention sometimes hurts
overall system performance more than data copying, context switches and so
on.
When it comes to public key cryptography, most systems today are still stuck in
the 1970s. On December 14, 1977, two events occurred that would change the
world: Paramount Pictures released Saturday Night
Fever, and MIT filed the
patent for RSA.
For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire
experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command
line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced veterans, in
the Linux community, command-line use is encouraged.
One amazing thing about Linux is that the same code base is used for
a different range of computing systems, from supercomputers to very
tiny embedded devices. If you stop for a second and think about it,
Linux is probably the only OS that has a unified code base.
I have a huge collection of NASA photos taken from the Astronomy Pic of
the Day Web site (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html) stored in a
folder in my Dropbox. No matter what computer system I'm using, I rotate
those images on my background, getting a virtual tour of the universe
on every screen.
System administrators at the USENIX LISA 2011
conference (LISA is a great system administration conference, by the way)
in Boston in December got to hear Michael Perrone's
presentation "What Is Watson?"
For those of you playing along at home, you'll recall that our intrepid
hero is working on a shell script that can tell you the most recent year
that a specific date occurred on a specified day of the week—for example,
the most recent year when Christmas occurred on a Thursday.