Practical Technology

The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC’s killer app, and the world would never be the same.

On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3′s day is done.

Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3. More >

If you were to list all the reasons why Obama beat Romney in the 2012 presidential race, chances are DevOps, the cloud, and open-source software (OSS) wouldn’t be on your list. They should be. As Harper Reed, the CTO of Obama for America explained in his recent Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) speech, all these technologies played a major role in the campaign. Or, as the New York Times explained after the election: “Technology doesn’t win political campaigns, but it certainly is a weapon — a force multiplier, in military terms.”

Whatever your own politics, and regardless of who you think ought to have won the 2012 presidential election, there’s no question that technology played a huge part in Obama’s success. Reed explained that the campaign, which amounting to “creating a billion-dollar enterprise from zero in 18 months,” couldn’t have happened without these open-source, Internet-centric technologie

Open Source Software Helped Obama Win the 2012 Election Campaign. More >

Mea culpa. When the news first broke that Adobe was no longer going to be selling its Adobe Creative software line– Photoshop, InDesign, DreamWeaver, etc., etc. — as Adobe Creative CloudI thought Adobe had moved their creative professional product line to the cloud. I was wrong.

My only consolation is that everyone else also seems fooled by Adobe’s improper use of the word “cloud.” The cloud is indeed “real,”but, there’s almost nothing of true cloud technologyin what Adobe is doing.

There’s next to no cloud in the Adobe Creative Cloud. More >

Earlier in May, Jimmy Kaplowitz, Google Site Reliability Engineer and Debian developer, announced that Google would not just be adding Debian 6 and 7 images to the Google’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Google Compute Engine  (GCE) it was making Debian Linux it’s default server image.

Debian Linux now Google Compute Engine’s default OS. More >

Linux is far faster than Windows. That’s old news. It’s why Linux runs 90 percent of the world’s top 500 fastest supercomputers, while Windows runs 1 percent of them. What’s new “news” is that an alleged Microsoft operating system developer recently admitted that Linux is indeed much faster, and explained why that’s the case.

Anonymous MSFT developer admits Linux is faster than Windows. More >