Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 15, 2011
by sjvn01
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I want my iPad at work!

Does it seem to you that everyone and his brother wants to bring his own gear into the office now? You’ve got people wanting to bring their Apple iPads to work, users who want to use their iPhones or Android Droid 2s instead of their company-supplied Blackberries as their smartphone, and someone out there has surely tried to bring an Xbox 360 and Kinect to work for … uh … three-dimensional motion analysis? Yeah! That’s the ticket!

OK, so maybe no one has tried, successfully, to get an Xbox and Kinect into the office, but people are always trying to bring their tech toys to work. As Patrick Thibodeau tweeted from this year’s Computerworld Premier 100 conference, “CIOs who don’t support employee-owned devices, smartphones, iPads, etc., may be a minority: i.e. dinosaurs.”

This isn’t just talk. According to Nielsen’s latest smartphone market research, RIM is currently in a marketing-share dead heat with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, but it’s losing ground. Forty-three percent of recent smartphone buyers purchased an Android device, compared to 26% for Apple iOS and 20% for RIM’s Blackberry.

Of course, some companies, such as Wells Fargo, just say no to all personal phones and tablets. They seem to be in the minority, though.

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March 14, 2011
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu Linux and GNOME: The Disputes continue

Linux is the supercomputer operating system of choice; thanks to Android, Linux is becoming the most popular smartphone operating system of them all;and Linux continues to make gains in the server market. But, when it comes to the desktop, no matter how you measure it, Linux has never how more than a tiny share of the desktop market. Why? Well, I can give you lots of reasons, but one that Mark Shuttleworth founder of Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has pointed out that there’s a lot of disorganization and disorder in Linux desktop developer circles.

The specific problem that started the current discussions roiling the Linux desktop waters was explored by Dave Neary, a member and former director of the GNOME, in a commentary on how Canonical and Ubuntu people claimed that “We offered our help to GNOME, and they didn’t want it.”

The technical problem behind the dispute is that GNOME rejected the Ubuntu Ayatana system status indicators. These indicators, and their messaging application programming interfaces (APIs) would be used on the Linux desktop to convey such information as “Whether you are connected, what the time is, whether you are online, whether your battery will last long enough for you to finish your work, whether you have messages,” etc. etc.

I think we can all agree that this is useful information for desktop users. The devil, as usual, was in the hard work details of getting it to work.
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March 12, 2011
by sjvn01
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Surviving Disaster: Japan’s Internet

In the grand scheme of things, the fact that the Internet has, by and large, kept working in Japan despite earthquakes, tsunami, and potential nuclear reactor meltdowns, is very small. But perhaps it isn’t really that minor when you consider that for hundreds of millions of people wanting to know if friends and family are well, a simple e-mail, instant-message, or even a Facebook update can spell the difference between hours or days of worry and the relief of at least knowing their loved ones’ fate.

Unlike Egypt or Libya, where dictatorships found it all too easy to turn off the Internet, Japan’s Internet has largely stayed up in the face of disaster.

This is a credit to Japan’s robust Internet that has managed to keep running despite a 8.9 Richter scale earthquake and numerous powerful aftershocks, tidal waves, and all the havoc that such natural disaster play on a modern society’s infrastructure.

As Jim Cowie, Chief Technology Officer of Renesys, an Internet business analysis company wrote in his blog, “It’s clear that Internet connectivity has survived this event better than anyone would have expected. The engineers who built Japan’s Internet created a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth, as befits a critical gateway for global connectivity in and out of East Asia. At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.”

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March 11, 2011
by sjvn01
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Installing 32-bit IE 9 on 64-bit Windows

Since I’ve written about how much faster 32-bit Internet Explorer (IE) 9 is than 64-bit IE 9, and all other browsers, on Windows 7, I’ve been buried by people running 64-bit Windows, and one poor soul who was still running 64-bit Vista, wanting to know how to install 32-bit IE 9 on their 64-bit Windows 7 systems. It’s actually both quite easy and a bit confusing, so here’s how to do it and a little of the back story.

First, as many of you have discovered, if you try to download and install 32-bit IE 9 on a 64-bit Windows PC, you’ll get the error message: “This version of setup doesn’t support your Windows system type (32-bit/64-bit).” It’s right. You can’t.

Instead what you need to do is to download the 64-bit version of IE 9. Yes, I know, it’s the version you don’t want if you want great Web browser performance, just stick with me. After you’ve done this, if you look at your All Programs menu, you’ll see, right under Internet Explorer (64-bit), “Internet Explorer,” that’s the 32-bit version.

That’s right, when you install the 64-bit version, just like a Cracker-Jack prize, you get the real prize–32-bit IE 9–at the bottom of the box.

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March 10, 2011
by sjvn01
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OpenSUSE 11.4: SUSE Linux Revitalized

It may not be as cool as Ubuntu or as cutting-edge as Fedora, but I’ve always had a soft spot for openSUSE Linux. Like MEPIS, another old favorite of mine, openSUSE just works and works well. The last couple of versions didn’t really get me excited though. They seemed more incremental than real advances. Now, though, now, I’m excited by the brand new openSUSE 11.4 release.

Why? Well, a bunch of things really. First, 11.4 uses the 2.6.37 Linux kernel. This kernel does a much better job of scaling virtual memory. That doesn’t matter much to me on my desktop, but it has mattered a lot from time to time over the years on my servers.

On the desktop side, I like that this kernel includes the open-source Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers. It also includes the latest X.org and Mesa graphic driver for noticeably better 2D and 3D acceleration.

On top of this, openSUSE uses the KDE Plasma Desktop 4.6 desktop by default, Over the years, I’ve had my ups and down with the KDE 4.x desktop, but I’ve gotten to like KDE 4.6 If you prefer the GNOME desktop, you can also opt to use the GNOME 2.32 interface. This distro also includes the GNOME Shell, which is part of the forthcoming GNOME3 desktop, available for testing.

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