Stories about: ADVENT

A concise history of silly Internet traditions

Andrew Morton is well-known in the kernel community for doing a wide variety of different tasks: maintaining the -mm tree for patches that may be on their way to the mainline, reviewing lots of patches, giving presentations about working with the community, and, in general, handling lots of important and visible kernel development chores. Things are changing in the way he does things, though, so we asked him a few questions by email. He responded at length about the -mm tree and how that is changing with the advent of linux-next, kernel quality, and what folks can do to help make the kernel better.

For those of us who make our living behind a keyboard in IT, it's hard to imagine a more time-tested vulnerability than the end-user. Armed with network access, these IT viruses wreak havoc nearly everywhere you look -- havoc borne of tech idiocy.

Thirty years ago, on June 8, 1978, Intel introduced its first 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086, with a splashy ad heralding "the dawn of a new era." Overblown? Sure, but also prophetic. While the 8086 was slow to take off, its underlying architecture -- later referred to as x86 -- would become one of technology's most impressive success stories.

In a new study that has potentially Orwellian implications, ABI Research projects that revenue for video surveillance software will quadruple over the next five years.

EMC executives predict flash storage technology will be nearly as inexpensive as high-end disk drives within two years. Most disk drives will continue to offer lower prices than flash, though, ensuring a long life for disk technology, it said.

The same question people used to ask about PCs can be asked of social networks: Were our lives easier or harder, better or worse, simpler or more complex, before they came around? The answer is yes. For some folks, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace seem nearly as indispensable as e-mail, but creating and maintaining these virtual circles of friends turns out to be quite a bit of work, often necessarily so. Here are the ten things that bug me most about today's social networking services.

A major transformation in the way that large data centers are built is under way, and the expected changes may have as much impact on IT productivity as the adoption of shipping containers did on operations in the freight industry starting in the late 1950s.

Though the purchasing power of many young Sierra Leoneans is still a limiting factor, the advent of wireless services in Sierra Leone has enabled more people to embrace the use of the Internet.

Long gone are the days when politicians only had to bring their "A" games to stump speeches and meet-and-greets. Now with the ubiquity of 24-hour cable news, online political coverage and even private citizens with digital cameras, politicians have to be more alert and focused in public than ever before. As former senator and presidential candidate Fred Thompson tells it, this constant scrutiny carries a definite price for people running for office.

Asia is leading the way in new media and interactive marketing, according to Ian Rowden, chairman and CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Asia/Pacific. "Internet users have topped 160 million in China and 50 million in India.