Practical Technology

Apple’s iBooks2’s reinvented textbooks really are something. They’re gorgeous, they’re fast, they’re real-time interactive with up to date information and they’ll only cost $14.99 or less. But, to use them, you’ll need an iPad–minimum list price: $499. Can you afford that for your kids? Can your school board? I could, but I’ve been lucky enough [...]

[Read more →]

Picking a Web server used to be easy. If you ran a Windows shop, you used Internet Information Server (IIS); if you didn’t, you used Apache. No fuss. No muss. Now, though, you have more Web server choices, and far more decisions to make. One of the leading alternatives, the open-source NGINX, is now the [...]

[Read more →]

When the U.S. Department of Justice working in conjunction with New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies took down the popular file-storage and sharing site Megaupload and arrested its executives, they never counted on the Internet-based hacker and protest group, Anonymous, attacking the Department of Justice (DoJ), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of [...]

[Read more →]

Network administrators have long known that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses. But, IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, adoption has remained slow. Until now, now many of the major ISPs, network vendors, and Web sites have publicly committed to supporting IPv6 later this year. In a promising sign of things getting better for IPv6, [...]

[Read more →]

There is nothing wrong with your Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. The reason you won’t be able to use Wikipedia, Reddit, or numerous other Web sites on January 18th is that these Web sites have decided to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). Here’s my [...]

[Read more →]