Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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Microsoft is finally making good products — but it’s too late

you’ve read many of my articles over the past 20 years, you may have noticed that I don’t care for Microsoft or its products. That isn’t because I think open-source software or Apple products are unbeatably great. It’s because Microsoft’s products are usually awful.

A lot of you are thinking I can’t possibly be right about that. After all, you work and play with Windows, Office and other Microsoft offerings every day. You’re hardly in the minority. But has Microsoft enjoyed its enviable market position because it produced the best products? Nah.

Microsoft became No. 1 because, in business, Bill Gates had the morals of a great white shark in a feeding frenzy. By the time the courts finally slapped Microsoft down in the Netscape case, it was too late. The great monopolist had either killed off or bought out its competition.

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January 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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TV for Human Beings: Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu Linux fans will recognize this story’s title as a play on the operating system’s slogan: Ubuntu: Linux for human beings. Now, Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is taking on Apple and Google by trying to make Ubuntu the operating system of choice for all-in-one Internet, cable, and satellite TV: Ubuntu TV.

According to Jane Silber, Canonical’s CEO Ubuntu TV is not an attempt to bring a Linux desktop to your TV or just put a browser on your TV. Instead, the idea is to use Ubuntu GNOME-based Unity interface as the universal interface.

I can see this. I’ve long thought that Unity, while an OK desktop for non-power desktop users had great potential for tablets, smartphones, and, yes, now TVs.

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January 6, 2012
by sjvn01
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NGINX takes 2nd place in Web Servers from Microsoft IIS

If you know anything about Web servers, you know that open-source Apache is the number one Web server in the world by a wide margin. You also know that Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) is the number two Web server. As of the end of 2011, though, you’d also be wrong about second place. The number two active Web server, according to Netcraft, the leading Web server analytics company, is now NGINX.

NGINX, pronounced Engine-X, if you don’t know it, is an open-source Web and reverse proxy server and e-mail proxy server to boot. It’s has been used for years on many popular Russian Web sites such as Yandex, Vkontakte, and Rambler. In recent years, it’s been picked up by major Western sites including Facebook and WordPress.com.

These Web sites, and millions of others, have moved to NGINX because it’s very fast and uses few system resources. The company has claimed that NGINX can deliver 10 times the performance of the leading Web server on the same hardware. I’m not sure about that but I do know it’s faster than Apache or IIS. NGINX manages this by being event-based. So, it doesn’t spawn new processes or threads for each Web page request. That means that even as the Web server load increases, memory use remains low and predictable.

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January 6, 2012
by sjvn01
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Fedora, Mint, openSUSE, Ubuntu: Which Linux desktop is for you?

There are more interesting Linux desktop distributions to choose from than ever before. However, if you’re looking for major distros with a great deal of support, you’ll want to look at the big four: Fedora, Mint, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.

Each has its own outlook and methods. Thanks to Linux’s customizability, you could take any of them and completely revamp it, if you wish. But unless your idea of a good time is operating system hacking, chances are you’ll want a distribution that already meets your needs.

Three of the four — Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu — use GNOME as their default desktop interface, although they use it in very different ways. OpenSUSE, on the other hand, uses KDE for its default interface.

Both GNOME and KDE have moved away from their early days when their interfaces resembled that of Windows XP. Each now tries to integrate all available resources and programs, bot

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January 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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Firefox wants to be your business buddy Web browser again

Mozilla, the group behind the Firefox Web browser, has finally gotten a clue that business users don’t like constant updates. On the Mozilla wiki page, Mozilla admits to what many of us have known for a long time: Firefox’s recent rapid-fire release schedule was way too fast for corporate and institutional users. On the page, Mozilla states:

The shift to a new release process has been difficult for organizations that deploy Firefox to their users in a managed environment. We’ve heard 2 primary concerns:

1. The release schedule doesn’t allow sufficient time for the organizations and their vendors to certify new releases of the products.

2. The associated end-of-life policy exposes them to considerable security risk if they remain on a non-current version past Firefox 3.6.

These groups-which include small & medium business, enterprise, academic, and government-want to continue to offer Mozilla products to their users, but they need a version of Firefox that gives them a longer support tail than what we currently offer.

You think!?

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January 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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NASA opens it Open-Source Code Doors

Back in the 1980s, I was writing open-source programs for NASA. Oh, we didn’t call it open source then. Open source as a term wouldn’t exist until 1998. All the code we produced was “free software,” but we didn’t call it that either. We just made the best code we could and shared it with people. It was a different time. Many of these programs were made available under the COSMIC software project. Today, NASA is centralizing its open-source offerings at the Code NASA Web-site.

The idea of this new Web-site is to “continue, unify, and expand NASA’s open source activities. The site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution.” That’s all for the best since, while NASA started formally supporting open-source software in 2003, those efforts have usually not been very co-ordinated.

As William Eshagh, who is spearheading the project wrote on the NASA open-source blog, NASA is first “focusing on providing a home for the current state of open source at the Agency. This includes guidance on how to engage the open source process, points of contact, and a directory of existing projects.”

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