Sean Michael Kerner

Mozilla’s open source Firefox web browser has expanded its feature set significantly over the last several years. One byproduct of that feature set growth has been an expansion of the system memory that Firefox uses. With Firefox 7, which is being officially released today, Mozilla is taking specific aim at reducing the amount of memory […]

From the ‘Time Flies’ files: Has it been a year already? Time sure does fly. This week the The Document Foundation celebrated its’ 1-year anniversary. That’s 1 year since they forked OpenOffice to go a new route with LibreOffice. A year ago, I was skeptical that OpenOffice would survive the split. As it turns out, […]

Oracle is advancing the Sun SPARC server architecture with a new chip and new engineered systems.The SPARC T4 is the latest generation chip architecture from Oracle’s SUN hardware division. “The T4 microprocessor is up to five times faster, depending on what you’re testing, than the T3 chip it replaces,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said during […]

The OpenStack open source cloud platform came out with its Diablo release last week. Among the items included in Diablo is a tech preview of Project Quantum, the new networking project within OpenStack. Quantum offers the promise of expanded networking capabilities within an OpenStack cloud. “Service providers want to enable their customers to do more […]

From the ‘Just Release 6.1 Already’ files: The CentOS Linux distribution has a problem. They were months late in getting CentOS 6 released and as a result CentOS 6 users were not getting the most up-to-date security patches. CentOS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RHEL 6.1 was released in May, providing […]

Networking vendor NETGEAR is expanding its UTM appliance product line today with a new UTM9S appliance that provides VDSL broadband capabilities. VDSL is the next generation of DSL broadband access and currently can deliver as much as 50 Megabits per second of access speed. The UTM9S is a modular hardware appliance that allows small business […]

SSL is a critically important part of Internet security and it has come under increasing scrutiny in recent months. Last Friday, a pair of security researchers demonstrated a new attack called SSL BEAST at a conference in Brazil. Researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo leveraged weaknesses in cypher block chaining (CBC) in order to exploit […]

The open source Puppet configuration management system has become a defacto required skill for many systems administrators in recent years. With the new Puppet 2.0 Enterprise Release, Puppet Labs, the lead commercial sponsor of Puppet, is aiming to further accelerate Puppet adoption with improved usability and provisioning capabilities. “Puppet is becoming in some ways, a […]

As security threats in the modern world continue to grow, so too does the need for security professionals. One of the ways to meet need is by way of training and certification. The International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (ISC)2 is one such security education and certification body, with some 80,000 certified members. (ISC)2 is […]

The global networking market is in a period of transition, with vendors big and small being impacted. Infonetics Research this week released its second quarter 2011 Ethernet Switches and Enterprise Routers market share reports, painting a mixed picture of both market growth and decline. On a quarterly basis, Infonetics reported that Ethernet switch sales hit […]

Copper connectivity predates the Internet as a means by which telecom operators connected their customers’ phone lines. In the Internet era, demand for higher speed has often led to a conversation about fiber optics as a better, faster medium for connectivity. While Fiber Optics technology does provide the potential for greater bandwidth speeds, the reality […]

Cisco released new findings from its latest Connected World study this week. The study surveyed the attitudes of 2,800 professionals and college students, 30 years old and younger in 14 countries. A key finding was that 55 percent of college students and 62 percent of young employees said that they could not live without the […]