The highly-competitive financial industry has a history of adopting IT trends ahead of the curve. The Street's forecast for Linux? A strong buy.

Web Services have unleashed a raft of technologies, but are any effective? A number of developers say no and suggest that the Web already offers everything you need to build a great Web Service. And more.

The ultimate in high-density computing, blade servers have revolutionized data centers and server farms. While some optimize for size, and some for sheer processing power, blades are sure to cut through your workload.

One of the many amazing and marvelous facets of the Open Source movement is its volunteer spirit. All across the Internet -- on the Web, and in newsgroups, blogs, and CVS trees -- people from all walks of life, spanning all parts of the globe, contribute their time, energy, and expertise to the cause. It's quite remarkable, and even though I'm exposed to Linux projects every day, I still find the whole Open Source process fascinating.

In 2001, revenue from the sales of video games exceeded $9 billion, a new record. By the end of October 2002, sales of video games had already surpassed $6 billion, and was expected to eclipse $10 billion by year-end, setting yet another record (a final revenue tally for 2002 was not available as we went to press).

As Web applications grow more complex, they also become more and more vulnerable. As with other areas of network security, it's best to have multiple levels of protection in place. Ideally, you'd have security controls in place on your router and firewall, as well as in your application and database servers.

Linux systems have several ways to run jobs unattended at some later time -- either once or many times. Scheduling jobs in the future is handy for system maintenance, for sending yourself reminders, and for making more practical and efficient use of your CPU by running jobs when users are away.

Installing Linux on more than a few nodes in a cluster is time consuming, boring, and potentially fraught with error. Since it's typically desirable to have a nearly identical operating system on each node, selfsame, full installs and configurations must be performed repeatedly. While disk cloning is a good solution for clusters with the exact same hardware, cloning hard drives can be problematic on nodes with a variety of different disks, network interfaces, and processors.

Popularity often comes at a high price, especially on-line where news, fads, links, and word-of-mouth literally spread at the speed of light. The creators of the popular "Hot or Not" site (http://www.hotornot.com) learned this lesson the hard way. Overnight, their traffic went through the roof. In response, they had to spend a fair amount of time and effort figuring out how to manage (and pay for) the traffic their site generated.

Many C and C++ applications use a plug-in or modular architecture to add features dynamically. Unlike monolithic applications, where all features are compiled into a single executable, modular applications typically have a central engine and a set of complementary feature libraries. Each library -- usually called a plug-in or a module -- implements a unique feature. When that specific feature is needed, the engine simply loads the module on demand, and calls the module to do the work.

Deploying an application across a number of servers poses some of the most daunting programming problems you're ever likely to face. In addition to implementing accurate business logic, reliable database transactions, trustworthy security, and efficient load balancing, your server-side software must remain robust and responsive even when servers and network connections fail unexpectedly.

1. How can I set up a printer under lpd?

Celestix FV930: Awesome Appliance

SuSE's Openexchange Server