There's nothing like a popularity contest to elicit a wide array of opinions, but recently an example appeared in the Linux blogosphere that seems to be something of an exception."Debian is now the most popular Linux distribution on web servers,"proclaimed W3Techs in a blog post. For the most part, Linux geeks appeared to be largely in agreement. Could this be a historic first?

Thin is all the rage in electronics these days, and nowhere is that more evident than in the notebook computer realm, where Intel has created a deafening buzz with its Ultrabook platform. However, Intel's archrival, AMD, isn't sitting on its silicon when it comes to thin computers.

Thin is all the rage in electronics these days, and nowhere is that more evident than in the notebook computer realm, where Intel has created a deafening buzz with its Ultrabook platform. However, Intel's arch rival, AMD, isn't sitting on its silicon when it comes to thin computers.

Facebook eradicated the Koobface virus from its site about nine months ago. However, the social network says it is on a mission to vanquish it completely. It intends to share what it has learned in three years of battling the malware with law enforcement and the larger security community.

Measuring Web scalability is a critical component of website scaling. The way you do this in a testing environment is, of course, called"load testing."In this second series installment, I'll go over what Little's Law is and how it can be related to load testing, determining how to scale the Web and data layers. Finally, I'll share my tips for troubleshooting common scaling bottlenecks.

LiVES is an advanced video editor that can double as a video jockey tool. It is surprisingly powerful. But its interface makes it rather simple to learn. In fact, it has so many feature levels that this app would be right at home as the video editor of choice in any professional film editing studio.

Move over, NTFS -- Microsoft has announced a newly engineered file system, ReFS, for Windows Server 8. ReFS, or Resilient File System, builds on NTFS, including many of its features but leaving out others. It will be introduced only as part of Windows Server 8, in line with Microsoft's standard approach for putting out new file systems.

The stories of websites that fell over and died when they got unexpected traffic are legion. A recent example of what not to do would be Target's introduction of a low-priced Missoni collection. The site attracted so much traffic that Target.com was swamped for several hours on Sept. 13, 2011, leading would-be shoppers to face a cute but frustrating site-down page.

OK, Greenpeace, arrest me now as an eco-criminal. I must have single-handedly deforested a good tract of the Amazon rain forest over the last few days. In mitigation, I plead that this was because of the requirements of my job. I was testing the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The device is sleek and sexy, has a great UI and nice features, but its appetite for power is incredible.

The routine is almost universal. Every day, millions of workers turn on their computers, take a second or two for a sip of coffee as their desktop or laptop"boots up,"and then get to work. In those few seconds, the basic input-output system, or BIOS, of the computer loads the protocols that actually run the PC -- in effect, acting the same as the worker's shot of coffee.