Practical Technology

When Cisco CEO John Chambers said that the company had lost its way and that he was going to re-target the company, he wasn’t kidding. Today, April 12th, Cisco has shut down its popular Flip video camera business and is integrating its umi consumer videoconferencing and Eos media solutions into its business video offerings. While [...]

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I’ve been a baseball fan since 1969 when the “Miracle” Mets bounced my Chicago Cubs from the National League championship. Living in the backwoods of West Virginia, I never saw my Cubs play in person or on TV. Instead, I listened to my beloved Cubs at night on my radio, which was tuned in to [...]

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Hi, there Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols your host today. I’ve been using and writing about Linux and open source for entirely too long. Suffice it to say that while I didn’t use Linux 0.01, I was running Linux not long after that. So, with introductions out of the way, let’s move on to the quiz shall [...]

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When Banshee, the popular Mono-based open-source media player was first included by default in the next version of Ubuntu Linux , Banshee’s developers thought this was great news. But, then Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company decided that they wanted 75% of any revenue from Banshee’s built-in connection to the Amazon music store-revenue that Banshee was already [...]

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First, Google opened up its VP8 video codec. Then, Google removed built-in support for the MPEG-LA patent encumbered H.264 video codec from its Chrome Web-browser in favor of VP8. After that it was only a matter of time before the MPEG-LA patent consortium came gunning for Google VP8. As a MPEG-LA representative told ZDNet’s Ed [...]

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