Practical Technology

for practical people.

April 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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What Microsoft’s AOL/Netscape patent purchases means

We now know a little more about the Netscape patents that Microsoft bought from AOL. It’s believed that the patents that Microsoft either bought outright or acquired a license for over a billion bucks include:

Patent No. 5657390, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which has since been transformed into Transport Layer Security (TLS). SSL/TLS sets up an encrypted communication channel between Web browsers and servers. It’s used in practically every Internet financial transaction

Patent No. 7478142. Packing Web-browser based applications This describes how to package applications that are delivered over the Internet and then runs inside a Web browser. You could argue that this covers all Web 2.0 technologies.

Patent No 5774670 and Patent No. 5826242, Cookies. These patents cover cookies and their use. Web servers and browsers use cookies for advertising, e-commerce shopping carts, persistent Web site logons and on and on and on.

You get the idea. These are all essential Web technologies.

What Microsoft’s AOL/Netscape patent purchases mean. More >

April 10, 2012
by sjvn01
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Google’s new Chrome OS: Back to the future

I have little love for the new generation of desktop interfaces, such as Windows 8 Metro. They use a smartphone/tablet like metaphor in which each application takes up the entire screen. So, why did I buy all these 20-inch and larger displays? Google, in the latest developer release of its Linux and cloud-based Chrome OS, has reversed this trend. This developer Chrome OS update adds a taskbar and support for multiple windows to its light-weight, desktop operating system.

Say hello to Google’s new, old Chrome OS (gallery)

This new interface, Aura, is both a new desktop window manager and shell environment. Aura is an optional replacement for last year’s Chrome OS single Web browser interface. With it you can have multiple, small browser windows, each with its own set of tabs, against a desktop screen background. These windows can be overlapped like the Windows on older desktops such as GNOME 2.x, Windows 7 or Mac OS X.

You also get, like OS X’s dock, a status bar on the bottom of the screen with icons for each of the open windows and system status displays for as the clock and battery. When you maximize a window to full screen, the task bar vanishes. You can always bring it back though by moving your pointer down to the screen’s bottom.

Google’s new Chrome OS: Back to the future. More >

April 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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Microsoft buys Netscape Web patents from AOL to attack Google

When AOL agreed to sell more than 800 patents to Microsoft for a cool 1.1-billion in cold cash, it didn’t just buy patents. Microsoft seems to have bought, according to AllThingsD, the “underlying patents for the old [Netscape] browser.” However, AllThingsD may not have realized just how incredibly vital those Netscape patents are to all Web services and browsers.

There was a time when this deal would have been enormous news. Netscape was once a fierce rival to Microsoft. Indeed, it was Microsoft’s illegal attacks on the Netscape browser that led both to Netscape’s eventual decline and death and the Department of Justice’s taking Microsoft down a peg.

Netscape, today, though is more than an obscure brand name, a URL and an ISP, which AOL will keep, and little else. Indeed, in AOL’s Security & Exchange Commission 8-K describing the deal, AOL merely states that, in addition to selling Microsoft patents and granting them the right to use all of AOL’s other patents, “The transaction is structured as a purchase of all of the outstanding shares of a wholly-owned non-operating subsidiary of the Company and the direct acquisition of those patents in the portfolio not held by the subsidiary.” What is “that non-operating subsidiary? That would be Netscape.

Guess what? This is still gigantic news.

Microsoft buys Netscape Web patents from AOL to attack Google. More >

April 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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The six best personal cloud storage choices for your stuff

Recently, Dropbox the popular cloud-storage company doubled the amount of free space you got for inviting friends to Dropbox. How much is that? For every friend you’d invite who installed Dropbox, you’d both get 500 more MBs of free space. With a free account, you can invite up to 32 people for a grand total of 16 GB of extra space. Pro, read paid, accounts now earn 1 GB per referral, for a total of 32 GB of extra space. Better still, you get this space retroactively if you’d already gotten people to give Dropbox a try.

That’s great, but does it make Dropbox the best of the personal cloud storage services? Maybe. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is offering some kind of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud services lately. In IaaS that you find file storage, ala Dropbox, but other companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft are also offering storage, media serving, and other IaaS ad hoc services for either free or minimal prices.

The six best personal cloud storage options (gallery)

These services are transforming rapidly. Prices, amounts of free storage, and additional services beyond pure storage are constantly being changed. Here’s what’s what with them though in the spring of 2012.

The six best personal cloud storage choices for your stuff. More >

April 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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Before the Internet: The golden age of online services

Many of you, perhaps even most of you, think of the Internet as a birthright. You’ve always had it, you can no more imagine life without it than you can imagine life without electricity. Believe it or not, though, the Internet you know and love only dates back to 1991 and the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX). Before that if you were just an ordinary Jane or Joe and wanted to be online you needed not an ISP connection — they didn’t exist yet — but an account on one of the online services such as America Online (AOL), BIX, CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, or a local bulletin board system (BBS).

Oh sure, the Internet had been already around for decades by the early ’90s. But, unless you were at a university, government agency, or a research institution you had precious little chance of getting an Internet connection. Besides, the pre-Web Internet was about as user friendly as a bad-tempered Doberman.

Before the Internet: The golden age of online services. More >

April 4, 2012
by sjvn01
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Shuttleworth defends Ubuntu’s Linux contributions

Lots of companies, even Microsoft, contribute to the Linux kernel. When you look at the top 20 list of who’s been contributing to Linux’s heart, you’ll find many familiar Linux names such as Novell (now SUSE), Red Hat, and The Linux Foundation. Who you won’t find is Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company. Some people wonder how Microsoft could do more for Linux than Canonical does. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, has a response to such claims: “Our focus is on the user experience, making things ‘Just Work.’”

In an e-mail, Shuttleworth explained to me that, “Stabilizing and maintaining the kernel is very important to Ubuntu. We have 25 or more kernel engineers at Canonical, focused on device enablement from ARM through to Xeon, and QA [Quality Assurance]. Our focus is on the user experience, making things ‘Just Work,’ and quality. The kernel team plays an important role in making Ubuntu so easy to use on everybody’s laptops, servers and clouds, and they maintain arguably the most widely used kernels in Ubuntu releases.”

Specifically, “Our teams have lead the ARM tree unification effort in Linaro, and we lead Linux kernel efforts among the vendors that ship devices with Ubuntu. We also maintain AppArmor, which is a security framework that takes the rigor of SELinux [Security Enhanced Linux] and makes it easy to use.”

Shuttleworth defends Ubuntu’s Linux contributions. More >