Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 9, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments

The Tech Press: We’re not all Arrington Scum

Michael Arrington continues to try to con everyone, including possibly himself, into thinking he does technology journalism. Normally, I ignore the scum of the technology press. Life is too short. Every field has its fakes, its liars and its prostitutes, but every now and again someone, such as Arrington, falls to the bottom and makes such a splash along the way, that I can’t ignore him.

Arrington, for those of who don’t know him, is the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a tech “news” site now owned by AOL. TechCrunch and Arrington are famous gossip-mongers—the National Enquirer if you would—of technology journalism. That’s fine by me. I’m not interested in covering MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe supposed romance with Paris Hilton. More power to you if that’s what floats your boat. After all, there are more readers for that than the kind of things, such as Linux and networking, that I cover.

But, here’s the difference between yours truly, and everyone I know and respect in technology journalism and a Michael Arrington: I don’t own a share of stock in any company that I cover. I don’t get one thin-dime if Red Hat makes a billion dollars. I also don’t make a penny if Microsoft crashes and burns.

Continue Reading →

May 4, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments

Is Mono dead? Is Novell dying?

Well, that didn’t take long. I had thought that after Attachmate bought Novell it would be keeping its open-source teams working. Indeed, Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn had told me that, “Business will operate as usual.” While Attachmate will be keeping SUSE Linux as a spin-off company, Mono, the open-source implementation of Windows’ .NET, is being shut down and there have been hundreds of additional Novell layoffs. So much for business as usual.

In a statement, Hawn told me, “We have re-established Nuremburg [Germany] as the headquarters of our SUSE business unit and the prioritization and resourcing of certain development efforts–including Mono–will now be determined by the business unit leaders there. This change led to the release of some US based employees today. As previously stated, all technology road-maps remain intact with resources being added to those in a manner commensurate with customer demand.”

At this time, I do not know what other development efforts are being put on the back-burner. Nor, do I know if Miguel de Icaza, the founder and driving engine of Mono, has been let go. I’ve send several requests for comments to him, but I haven’t received a reply. De Icaza, who is usually very outspoken, has also not tweeted nor written on his blogs about the fate of Mono and his own future with Novell. My understanding is that all of the Mono team, approximately 30-individuals, have been let go.

The Salt Lake City KSL television station reports that, “Novell Inc. laid off hundreds of employees Monday from its Provo office, just days after the company was sold, according to employees.” Under Attachmate’s rule, Provo was to be Novell’s headquarters.

More >

May 4, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments

Court rules Internet IP addresses are not people

“I am not an IP number, I am a free man!” OK, so that’s not exactly what actor Patrick McGoohan said in the classic TV show, The Prisoner, but Number 6 would have agreed that people aren’t numbers, and they certainly aren’t their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. And, now a U.S. District Court has ruled that an IP address is not the same thing as a person’s identification.

This current decision came about because of a recent wave of copyright owners filing approximately 100,000 lawsuits against file sharers based on their IP addresses. Mind you, the organizations, such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) know that lawsuits don’t actually stop file piracy. In a recent statement to the Commerce Department these groups and their allies wrote, “The role of lawsuits in solving the online theft problem is clearly limited “For instance, bringing clear-cut claims against major commercial infringers is not by itself a solution in the long run. These cases take years to litigate and are an enormous resource drain.”

That hasn’t stopped them though from suing file-sharing services, such as Lime Wire for, I kid you not, $75 trillion in damages. This recent wave of lawsuits isn’t about taking a leading file-sharing service out behind the barn for a whipping. No, this recent lawsuit flood was designed to scare individual file sharers using services such as BitTorrent from sharing files.

More >

May 3, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments

OpenDNS offers IPv6 Internet DNS services

OpenDNS, a popular third-party Domain Name System (DNS) provider, is now offering IPv6 DNS support. The company claims that “OpenDNS is the first major recursive DNS service in the world to offer the service.”

I’m not sure that they’re the first, but I do know this is a big step forward for network administrators. I use OpenDNS myself for DNS look-ups. It provides faster DNS look-ups than ISP’s DNS I’ve tried and it’s proven to be more reliable than many ISP’s DNS servers.

We need to start working with IPv6 for our Internet connections because we’re down to the last dregs of our IPv4 Internet addresses. Asia’s out of IPv4 addresses now and it won’t be long now until the last IPv4 addresses are assigned. With IPv6 and its 128-bit addresses, we’ll have enough Internet addresses until the day we need to start worrying about interstellar Internet addresses. But, of course, to use them, we need to switch over to IPv6.

More >

May 2, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments

Chrome 11: The Best Browser?

Was it only a few weeks ago, that we were looking at the latest crop of Web browsers? Why, yes, yes it was, but now Google has released yet another newer, faster, better, and more feature-full version of its Chrome Web browser: Chrome 11.

Voice to Data

Besides the usual improvements in security and speed, which I’ll get to in a moment, Chrome 11 comes with a new, interesting feature: voice-to-text, or more properly, voice-to-data. So, with a Web site set up to handle it, such as Google Translate, you can “talk” to the Web.

Currently, Google Translate is the big application that uses it, but Google promises there will be more. It’s clear, for example, that a voice to text feature, once it’s perfected, for Google Docs would find fans.

This voice-to-data feature uses HTML 5’s Speech Input application programming interface (API). This proposed API was developed and proposed by, guess who, Google.

I found it to work “amusingly” well. It made far too many mistakes for me to consider using it, but when you consider that it’s a first try at a mass-market cloud-based real time translation tool, it is impressive–just not very useful yet.

More >