Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 17, 2012
by sjvn01
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Good-bye old Internet: Europe is down to its last IPv4 addresses

If you’re Joe User, you don’t have to worry about IPv6 yet. But, if you own a business in Europe, the Middle East or some of Central Asia, start worrying. RIPE NCC, the RIR (Regional Internet Registry) for this part of the world, is down to its last IPv4 block. And, when those old-style Internet addresses are gone, the IPv4 cupboard will be bare.

RIPE has announced that “The RIPE NCC is now allocating IPv4 address space from the last /8 [address block].” A single IPv4/8 address block consists of almost 17-million addresses. That may sound like a lot. It’s not. RIPE is allocating 350-thousand addresses a day. At this rate, Europe will completely run out of addresses on about November 5th.

Good-bye old Internet: Europe is down to its last IPv4 addresses. More >

September 16, 2012
by sjvn01
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Is Aliyun OS really Linux? Android? A rip-off of both?

Acer was ready to announce a new smartphone running Alibaba’s Aliyun OS when Google told them that if they released it, they’d end their partnership. Acer, which uses Android for 90% of its smartphones and no fool, canceled the release.

Acer, a Taiwanese computer and smartphone vendor, wasn’t happy. Alibaba, which is China’s largest e-commerce company, was even less happy. The company claims it wants Aliyun OS to be the “Android of China” and that they’ve spent years working on their Linux-based mobile operating system.

Google didn’t see it that way. Google thinks Alibaba is an Android rip-off. 

Is Aliyun OS really Linux? Android? A rip-off of both? >

September 14, 2012
by sjvn01
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Murder, YouTube, and Censorship

nnocence of Muslims is a crude and trashy video that portrays the Prophet Mohammad as a hate-mongering bum who approves of violence and sexual child abuse. Considered by Western audiences that adores the popular cartoon South Park, which mocks many religions on a regular basis, Innocence of Muslims is clearly insulting, but it’s too boring to be worth a second thought. By conservative Islamic standards it’s blasphemy. And, it’s sparked the murder of four American diplomats in Libya.

Largely ignored at first, for the simple reason that’s it’s really not very good by any standard, this YouTube video has now been seized as an excuse for protests and attacks on American embassies in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen.

Google, YouTube’s owner, but in no way, shape, or form the video’s creator, is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, as part of the Western culture, they’re invested in freedom of speech. On the other, this shabby video has been used as an excuse for murderous attacks.

Murder, YouTube, and Censorship. More >

September 13, 2012
by sjvn01
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How Twitter Uses Open Source

The sheer scale of Twitter is amazing: 2.8-billion tweets a day works out to about 5,000 tweets a second. Each tweet of 140 characters (or about 200 bytes) has to be sent, recorded, and retransmitted to up to 20 million followers in less time than it took you to read this paragraph.

So, how does Twitter do it? With Linux and open-source software.

Chris Aniszczyk, Twitter’s open-source manager and a leading Eclipse developer, offered a detailed explanation of how Twitter tweets at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technology conference, and the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference.

“On the surface, Twitter is a simple real time service where the unit currency is 140 character messages called Tweets. However, if you look underneath the surface, there are over 2.8 billion tweets being sent out a day at an average steady state of 5,000 Tweets a second,” Aniszczyk says. “At this scale, you have to deal with some interesting real time engineering problems.”

You think!?

How Twitter Uses Open Source. More >

September 12, 2012
by sjvn01
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IPhone fantasies, Android phones realities

I hate to break it to you, but the new iPhone 5 is not going to be the second coming of Steve Jobs; it’s not going to give the economy a big push upward; nor will it be the best phone ever. It’s just going to be a new smartphone.

The real news, which has been written on analyst walls around the world for months, is that Android phones continue to out-sell iPhones by a wide margin. For all the hype, for all the hysteria, iPhones come in second to Android.

How far behind? According to IHS, cumulative shipments of Android smartphone by the end of 2013 will crack the 1.1 billion mark. Apple? IPhone shipments will only reach 527 million in 2013 and it won’t hit the 1 billion mark until 2015.

I hate to break it to you, but the new iPhone 5 is not going to be the second coming of Steve Jobs; it’s not going to give the economy a big push upward; nor will it be the best phone ever. It’s just going to be a new smartphone.

The real news, which has been written on analyst walls around the world for months, is that Android phones continue to out-sell iPhones by a wide margin. For all the hype, for all the hysteria, iPhones come in second to Android.

How far behind? According to IHS, cumulative shipments of Android smartphone by the end of 2013 will crack the 1.1 billion mark. Apple? IPhone shipments will only reach 527 million in 2013 and it won’t hit the 1 billion mark until 2015.

IPhone fantasies, Android phones realities. More >

September 11, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down

Go Daddy, the popular and controversial Web domain and service company, which crashed and burned, along with millions of it customers on September 10th, is now claiming that it wasn’t taken down by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, but by “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.”

Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down. More >