I've watched many things drop from sight during my lifetime. Some are simply reminders of days past, such as mailboxes on the street, pay telephones, and vinyl record albums. Some of the innovations that have disappeared, however, have had a more profound effect on me, such as rotary dial phones that gave way to push-button phones, compact discs that gave way to downloadable music, and camera film that gave way to digital blips on a computer screen. The point is that all of the innovations I've seen during the past couple of decades have been made to make my life easier or richer in some obscure way. But the next generation of inventors isn't just thinking about the external environment: They have turned their sights toward you and me – in the years ahead, the consumers won't just use the product, they will become part of the product.

The Fedora Project is a free software community sponsored by Red Hat. With Fedora's rapid release schedule, you get the latest in virtualization, networking, and other technologies. The 64-bit Server version on this DVD is aimed at system administrators and is not a Live distro.

Email has the reputation of being insecure, unreliable, and easily readable for any user – just like a postcard. An initiative led by the founders of Lavabit and PGP hopes to replace email with a new medium.

Those who think that enabling STARTTLS in the mail client will make their mail traffic more secure are wrong. Only those who bank on DANE can be sure that a mail server or a firewall will not switch off encryption in transit.

Microsoft's WIMBoot lets you run Windows 8.1 from a compressed file on solid state drives.

Windows provides a simple dialog box for configuring IPv6, but the available settings only scratch the surface. IPv6 comes with many features that are primarily managed using the command-line tool NetShell.

DMARC retrofits email with sender verification and thus provides a useful tool for fighting spam.

Some users may struggle when setting up various services, such as web servers, email servers, firewalls, and the like. Zentyal simplifies configuration of all those things, thanks to its intuitive user interface.

The statistical programming language R dissects its database in a masterful way, and you can embed your R in Python using the Rpy2 interface.

Automating your system builds can save a lot of time. We describe the steps of a minimal installation using CentOS and Kickstart.