Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 7, 2012
by sjvn01
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The Birth and Rise of Ethernet: A History

Nowadays, we take Ethernet for granted. We plug a cable jack in the wall or into a switch and we get the network. What’s to think about?

But it didn’t start that way. In the 60s and 70s, networks were ad hoc hodgepodges of technologies with little rhyme and less reason. But, then Robert “Bob” Metcalfe was asked to create a local area network (LAN) for Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His creation, Ethernet, changed everything.

Back in 1972, Metcalfe, David Boggs, and other members of the PARC team assigned to the networking problem weren’t thinking of changing the world. They only wanted to enable PARC’s Xerox Altos (the first personal workstations with a graphical user interface and the Mac’s spiritual ancestor), to connect and use the world’s first laser printer, the Scanned Laser Output Terminal.

It wasn’t an easy problem. The network had to connect hundreds of computers simultaneously and be fast enough to drive a very fast (for the time) laser printer.

Metcalfe didn’t try to create his network from whole cloth. He used previous work for his inspiration.

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August 7, 2012
by sjvn01
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Microsoft is pushing users and vendors to Macs and Linux

What is Microsoft thinking? First, the company decided that it was going to compete with its own partners of decades in the growing tablet market with its Surface tablet. Then, it decided that it’s going to force feed Windows 8 users its “Metro” interface. Can they really be surprised when their partners and customers start to turn their back on them?

Microsoft has always been a “my way or the highway” kind of company and it worked… when they have a lock on the desktop. That was in the 90s and 00s, it’s the twenty-teens now and the desktop is no longer the center of the computing universe. Now, we use tablets and smartphones as well and we do much, sometimes most, of our “desktop” work on Web sites and with cloud-based applications.

I know it, you know it, and now Acer is reminding Microsoft that they know it as well. Acer CEO JT Wang said that Microsoft competing with its partners  “will create a huge negative impact for the [computer hardware] ecosystem  and other brands may take a negative reaction. It is not something you are good at so please think twice.” Acer’s global PC operation chief Campbell Kan added Acer was debating whether to “find other alternatives” to Windows.

Microsoft is pushing users and vendors to Macs and Linux. More >

August 6, 2012
by sjvn01
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SPDY: Speeding Up the Web

Portland, OR: Chris Storm, owner of EEE Computes, a Web consulting business, and author of The SPDY Book, had a message for all Web developers and designers at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON): “HTTP is antiquated and obsolete.”

HTTP, the Web’s fundamental protocol that’s used by all Web browsers and sites, “hasn’t been updated in twelve years,” says Storm. “The last time HTTP was updated, Bill Clinton was president and there was no Ubuntu Linux,” he points out.

That might be fine, if HTTP was fast enough for today’s Web, he asserts; but it’s not. Strom says we need a new protocol that can deliver Web pages and sophisticated Web apps faster and more reliably. That protocol is Google’s SPDY.

SPDY: Speeding Up the Web. More >

August 6, 2012
by sjvn01
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4G isn’t fast enough for tablet and smartphone users

In theory, a 4G connection will give you up to 100Mbps (Megabits per second) speeds. Right. The reality is, on a good day at exactly the right spot, you may see 30Mbps 4G download speeds. Usually, though, you’ll do well to see speeds above 10Mbps and,  according to an end-user survey by Keynote Competitive Research that’s not fast enough.

In a survey of 5,000 U.S. smartphone and tablet users, Keynote found that “while expectations vary somewhat depending on the platform – desktop, smartphone or tablet – they are definitely increasing (PDF Link). In short, user expectations no matter the device are for very fast performance. Many sites, especially on smartphones and tablets, continue to be slow and disappoint consumers on a regular basis. Bottom line: Keynote’s research shows that the ‘expectation gap’ for performance has tightened considerably across platforms, and vendors ignore these increased expectations for blazing fast performance at their own peril.”

When it comes to “frustrating mobile Web experiences over the past two months, two-thirds of smartphone users cited ”Web pages slow to load.’


4G isn’t fast enough for tablet and smartphone users. More >

August 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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IPv6 growth explodes

or years, decades, no one wanted to switch their Internet connection from good old IPv4 to IPv6. Oh, we knew we’d have to  move to IPv6 eventually, but we really didn’t want to. Now, though, according to Akamai, a Web high-performance company, on the last World IPv6 Day, June 6 2012, IPv6 traffic exploded by 460 times since 2011’s World IPv6 Day.

What’s more significant though, since every Internet network administrator was tinkering with IPv6 on that day, is that in the year since the 2011 IPv6 Day, Akamai saw a nine-fold increase in IPv6 traffic. And, this growth rate is only increasing. Erik Nygren is Chief Architect at Akamai, wrote, “The IPv6 preference rate for many dual-stacked sites has been steadily rising by a few percent week-over-week since World IPv6 Launch.”

IPv6 growth explodes. More >

August 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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Desktop Android? Multi-user Android support is on its way

Your smartphone is your smartphone, your tablet is usually your tablet, but your desktop, well you probably share it sometimes with friends, family, and co-workers. That’s one of the reasons why Android, the popular Linux-based device operating system has never been seriously considered for the desktop. Without multi-user support, it’s not great for a shared computer. That may be changing. We now know that Google has been slowly introducing multi-user support into Android.

There’s never been any question that Android users want multi-user support. A quick look through the Android bug tracker shows that users have been demanding multi-user support since 2011. Ron Amadeo, a writer for Android Police, an online publication dedicated to Android, has dug into the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for code for Android 4.0 and 4.1, which was publicly released in early July,, and he’s found clues that Android multi-user support is being built into Jelly Bean, Android 4.1. Indeed, some of it is already working today.

Officially, Google tells me that they “don’t have anything to announce at this time!” But, while they may not have any announcement, the code speaks for itself.

Desktop Android? Multi-user Android support is on its way. More >