Cameron Laird

Rob Toxen's new book, Real World Linux Security: Intrusion Prevention, Detection, and Recovery, appeared on store shelves late last year. Toxen, now the president and CTO of Fly-By-Day Consulting, sports a colorful professional résumé with an abundance of highlights: he's the creator of the Sunset Computer, one of the 162 recognized developers of Berkeley Unix, one of the four developers who did the initial port of Unix to the Silicon Graphics hardware, and the software architect of the Netgear ND508 and ND520, as well as of the Kennedy Space Center PC space shuttle payload document network. We held a discussion with Toxen in ITworld.com's Interviews forum. You can read the complete conversation there; what follows is an abridged version. Who needs it? LinuxWorld.com: Bob, you're proud of your book -- I know that already from our conversations. Who should be reading ... (more)

Ian Murdock: From Debian to clustering

The ian in Debian Linux stands for Ian Murdock, a former research staff member at the University of Arizona and coauthor of the Swarm storage system. He's now president and CEO of Progeny Linux Systems, headquartered in Indianapolis. Progeny is commercializing Progeny Debian and the Linux NOW clustering system, which emphasizes manageability at least as much as performance, the traditional selling feature of Linux clusters. Last month we held an online discussion with Murdock in ITworld.com's Interviews forum. This is a partial transcript of that interview. To read the full inter... (more)

Who cares about Silicon Valley?

In last month's installment of Future Computing, Larry Smith explained the benefits of working from home. Telecommuting is only a tiny fraction of the upheaval we should expect in employment conditions, though. (See Resources for a link to Smith's column.) The most obvious change coming is "the end of geography," in analogy with Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" (see Resources for a link). For more than half a century, US residents have expected superior pay just because they live in the United States. The computing industry is well into its second generation of careers premise... (more)

Interview with Bruce Perens

Bruce Perens is ubiquitous. At least, it's sometimes seemed that way; he's known to computing specialists as the primary author of the open source definition, the former project leader for Debian, a senior programmer with Pixar, the creator of Electric Fence, and a prolific advocate of GNU/Linux and related open source matters. At the end of 2000, Hewlett-Packard hired him as a "strategic advisor." Last month, we interviewed him in ITworld.com's Interviews forum. This is a transcript of that interview. See the Resources section for a link to the full interview, which includes ans... (more)

The warp and woof of data storage

e all know the future of computing storage. Well before Amazon common stock pays a dividend, there'll be essentially three kinds of computer storage. First, tiny holographic biogelled libraries the size of a dime will be able to hold your entire digitized life history under your skin, or the dashboard of your personal mover, if not your toaster. Really large projects will offload to storage-over-next-next-generation-Internet-Protocol. Backup will be as much of a utility as potable water, with pro-quality encryption and super-high availability assumed. Finally, there'll be a few m... (more)