Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 12, 2012
by sjvn01
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Linus Torvalds interviewed by Slashdot readers

Slashdot, the 15-year old popular technology discussion site, recently had their readers come up with a list of their top questions to ask Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator. The results were interesting.

For example, the first question presumed that Torvalds was anti-patent and copyright. Eh… no, he’s never really been either. As Torvalds explained, “I like copyrights, and even on patents I’m not necessarily in the ‘Patents are completely evil. camp. When I rant about patents or copyrights, I rant against the *excesses* and the bad policies, not about them existing in the first place.”

And, as for copyright, “I don’t understand why people were that surprised, but I understand even *less* why people then thought that ‘copyrights have problems’ would imply ‘copyright protection should be abolished.’ The second doesn’t follow at all.”

What Torvalds does have problems with are, “I was talking about things like ‘life of author+70 years’ and the corporate 95-year version. That’s *ridiculous*. Couple that with the difficulty of judging fair use etc, and it really hinders things like archival of material, making of documentaries, yadda yadda…”

Linus Torvalds interviewed by Slashdot readers. More >

October 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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OwnCloud: Build your own or manage your public cloud storage services

Want a do-it-youself private, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud? Want a way to unify all your corporate cloud storage services? Then ownCloud has new open-source software for both your business and personal use.

In the newly released version, ownCloud 4.50, the company claims that this release comes with “significantly faster upload, download and sync of files – even very large files — a re-factored sharing engine, greater and more granular administrative control, and greater integration with popular business tools, ownCloud 2012 Business and ownCloud 2012 Enterprise give companies the security and control they need while providing end users the flexibility and ease of use they demand.”

The key difference between ownCloud and such popular cloud storage serves as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box, which store your data at remote third-party data centers is that you get to pick where ownCloud stores your data. You can deploy it by itself on your own servers or you can seamlessly integrate it with other cloud-storage services such as the aforementioned services or others such as Amazon. S3 Thus, you can use ownCloud with its security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools to manage not only your own private cloud storage, but those from multiple other cloud storage services as well.

OwnCloud: Build your own or manage your public cloud storage services. More >

October 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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Alcatel-Lucent opens the doors for 4G LTE programmers

Joe Phone-User will never see it, but underneath his bright, shiny iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S3’s blazing fast 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) data speed there’s a whole infrastructure world for developers to create new applications. The number two company in providing the LTE foundation is Alcatel-Lucent and they’re opening the doors to low-level developers by introducing a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs).

These nine Nine ‘New Conversation APIs’ are designed to give developers easy access to communication capabilities in service providers’ IP Multimedia Subsystem, the infrastructure that sits at the heart of 4G LTE and IP networks.

Specifically, Alcatel-Lucent claims that, “These capabilities include high definition voice and video, audio/video conferencing, interactive voice, messaging and call control, which can be used to build services for both consumers and businesses. … To jump-start the developer ecosystem Alcatel-Lucent is leveraging its ngConnect program, which brings together service providers and apps developers as well as offering easy access to the APIs, along with a fast prototyping environment provided by the New Conversation API developer portal. These APIs are based on REpresentational State Transfer (REST), a popular, easy-to-use software architecture used to create applications for the Web.”

Alcatel-Lucent opens the doors for 4G LTE programmers. More >

October 10, 2012
by sjvn01
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Microsoft Office coming to Android and Apple devices in early 2013

We’ve known for months that Microsoft was bringing a version of Microsoft Office 2013 to Android tablets and Apple’s iPad family. Now, according to the Czech tech news site, IHNED, Microsoft product manager Petr Bobek has said that Microsoft is planning to release native iOS and Android versions of Office 2013 in the first quarter of 2013

Bobek, a Microsoft Office portfolio manager in the Czech Republic, said that these new versions of Office will be available to larger companies and Microsoft partners In December 2012. small-office/home-office (SOHO) and household users will have to wait until at least February. The online version of Office 365 edition for mobile devices and tablets will appear in early 2013.

In an e-mail, the author of the INHED story clarified that the release would be after March 2013. “We had a slight miscommunication with the MS guys and the timeline for Office for iOS and Android is not a March release, but release sometime after March.”

Officially, the only thing Microsoft had to say at first was that “As we shared previously, Office Mobile will work across Windows Phones, Android phones and iOS, and we have nothing additional to announce today about retail availability of the new Office.”

Microsoft Office coming to Android and Apple devices in early 2013. More >

October 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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The Highlander and the Cloud’s Future

Highlander is a great movie. But when it comes to the cloud, it’s not a case of “There can be only one.” At LinuxCon in San Diego this summer, that point was made over and over again.

“Great movie, bad representation of the cloud market,” said Peder Ulander, VP of product marketing for the Cloud Platforms group at Citrix, said in his keynote address. “One thing we’ve learned from Linux vendors: There’s plenty of room in the market for open solutions. From community distributions like Debian and Fedora to Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu, to PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Apache HTTPD and Nginx. Multiple solutions can and do co-exist, and [they] even cooperate and compete simultaneously. There’s no reason that the cloud need be any different.”

Looking at the cloud and its future, Ulander sees “lots of players at lots of layers in the cloud moving forward and it’s through these communities that the cloud will evolve.”
He’s not the only to see this vision in his crystal ball.

The Highlander and the Cloud’s Future. More >

October 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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The shocker that wasn’t: Intel CEO disses Windows 8

It’s been reported — and Intel isn’t denying it — that Intel CEO Paul Otellini told his Taiwanese staff that Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system is being released before it’s fully ready. This is shocking only in that it suggests that there were people who thought otherwise.

Yes, it is somewhat shocking that Intel is talking smack about its biggest partner, though Otellini softened the blow by adding that he was sure Microsoft would patch Windows 8 up to acceptable levels after its release. But then you consider how Microsoft has been treating all its hardware partners lately.

Surface, the tablet that Microsoft is manufacturing and selling itself, is a slap in the face to all of its Windows 8 and RT tablet partners. Phone makers were thrown under the bus when Microsoft announced that no current phone hardware would support Windows Phone 8. As for Intel, it’s got to be annoyed that Microsoft is now supporting Windows on ARM processors.

But Otellini’s assessment itself isn’t shocking. Even if every bit and byte in Windows 8 were rock solid, who outside of Windows fanatics — the ones who probably have Microsoft stock in their 401(k) plans — really wants Windows 8 in his office?

The shocker that wasn’t: Intel CEO disses Windows 8, More >