Econometrics is the application of statistical or quantitative methods to understand economic issues and test theories, and models. It is the study of economic models, mathematical statistics, and economic data. It is also a set of tools which can verify or disprove economic theory using real-world data.

Is Canonical taking on Red Hat with its new commercial support service? Canonical's move "is not as much a competition as an expansion into a growing market," Pogson opined. "GNU/Linux has taken about all it can from Unix operating systems; now it is time to kick M$ out of servers."

At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth is bullish on PCs exposing millions of consumers to Linux – despite the industry succumbing to Jobsian tablet fever. Shuttleworth reckons that Ubuntu is approaching a tipping point among the ordinary PC-buying public, with the distro shipping on a record (for Ubuntu) five million machines this year.

Red Hat General Manager Max McLaren has told IT Brief that the company has the fastest growing operating system in the world.

The only conclusion I can draw is that the audience that Ubuntu attracts are not your usual "computer-savvy" user who has no problem reinstalling something, switching distros or even forking a distribution. They obviously seem to want something that just works, which is not the product Mark Shuttleworth supplies.

Some netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs are shipped with compact operating systems designed to boot particularly quickly. Among those offering such systems are BIOS and firmware specialist Phoenix Technologies.