Practical Technology

With the advent of standardized 802.11n Wi-Fi, it’s easier than ever to expand your business network wirelessly, but that may not always be a smart idea. I’m sitting outside an office building in Portland, Oregon. The building has at least half a dozen businesses with about 40 Wi-Fi access points (AP). In the hour I’ve [...]

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I was one of those lucky people given early admission to Google Wave. There was only one problem. Once we had Google Wave, we couldn’t figure out what to do with it. And if we, a bunch of techno-geeks and technology journalists, couldn’t come up with a good use for Wave, what chance did anyone [...]

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“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” is a line from Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West. It could also apply to Windows and Linux. If you don’t know what you’re doing, getting the two to meet on the network can seem like it’s almost impossible. Fortunately, [...]

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ecently, I’ve been writing a lot about IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol that makes the Internet and most home and business networks go. Now, like it or lump it, we, starting with our businesses and mobile devices and eventually our home networks, are all going to have to move to IPv6. That [...]

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Every few years there’s another panic about everyone running out of IP addresses. The terror that the Internet would simply run out of room is finally coming true. It’s not so much that computers are consuming the IP addresses; it’s all those smartphones, iPads, and other devices that require Internet access. The Number Resource Organization [...]

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