Attila-Mihaly Balazs

We, the authors, have over a decade’s experience in running GNU/Linux in a corporate setting and we would like to share that with you, to make your journey easier. However, first, why would you want to run GNU/Linux at work rather than the operating system supplied by your employer? We don’t know, but here are some of our reasons for running it:
- It is faster – Generally, GNU/Linux is faster on the same hardware than other operating systems. Moreover, there is a quirk in corporate settings which makes this even more true: security software. You can probably get away with not installing any under GNU/Linux (because it’s not available and GNU/Linux is less susceptible to security issues), your machine will be 2x as fast.

Using free/libre software confers many advantages to the persons/organizations doing so, especially if these users are technical (like software companies for example). This article will discuss these advantages and dispel some of the myths floating around free/libre software. Free software is software which respects your (the users’) freedoms . It is commonly written as free/libre (or colloquially “free as in freedom not as in beer”) to emphasize the fact that we’re not talking about price. Indeed, free software can be sold commercially - more about this shortly.

Latency is defined as the time interval between the stimulation and response and it is a value which is of importance in many computer systems (financial systems, games, websites, etc). Hence we - as computer engineers - want to specify some upper bounds / worst case scenarios for the systems we build. How can we do this?

Attila: Do you think that a generalist approach is something that can be sustained? For how long can it be sustained? Do we need to specialize in different subdomains?
Richard: I think the body of work has been large enough that we always needed specialists. There are too many skills to know, but each one has its role.

Richard Campbell has more than 30 years of high-tech experience and is both a Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP). He has consulted with a number of leading North American organizations. In addition to speaking at conferences around the world, Richard is co-host of „.NET Rocks!, the Internet Audio Talk Show for .NET Developers” and the host of „RunAs Radio, the Internet Audio Talk Show for IT Professionals.”

This article aims to give a high-level plan for automating a large part of the software lifecycle. It will also show, based on a concrete example, how such a plan can be implemented.

Hello, everybody! This is Attila for Today Soft Mag and today I have with me Peter Lawrey. Peter thank you for agreeing to this interview and we will talk about Java performance. Could you please introduce yourself? [Peter] Yes, my name is Peter Lawrey, I am a Java consultant in the low latency space. I have a popular blog called “Vanilla Java” which gets about 120 000 hits / month; I also have a library called Chronicle which is for low latency persistence IPC and data store and also I’m third on StackOverflow for Java.

These days the challenge of building a successful product includes ensuring that the product uses the available hardware resources in an efficient manner. This usually means clustering for all but the most trivial problems since our datasets have outgrown our individual computers considerably. However clustering brings a set of new problems: splitting up the processing between nodes, orchestrating the process and very importantly - ensuring that we don’t lose any data / progress if a subset of nodes goes offline - a possibility which increases dramatically as we add more and more nodes to our cluster.

Launching a website cannot be simpler in theory: write ten lines of HTML , save it in a file named index.html and poof, you have a website. For the site to be able to fulfill the purpose for which it was built, it must have two qualities:
- to be usable by the users who need to access it
- potential users need to be able to learn about its existence

This article it will show the basic steps required to achieve these qualities.

PHP is a very popular dynamically typed scripting language available on a variety of operating systems. There are however alternatives to the standard interpreter which provide various features that may be advantageous in certain circumstances. This article aims to provide a theoretical and practical overview of the existing options. The practical part consists of running the synthetic performance test from the PHP source tree against each runtime and testing a WordPress site with Apache Bench .

Most mainstream programming languages contain a large set of features and diverse standard libraries. Because of this it becomes important to know not only “how” you can achieve something (to which there are usually several answers) but also “what is the recommended way”. In this article I will argue that knowing and following the recommended ways of coding doesn’t only yield shorter (easier to write), easier to read, understand and maintain code but also prevents programmers from introducing a lot of bugs.