Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 13, 2012
by sjvn01
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How Twitter Uses Open Source

The sheer scale of Twitter is amazing: 2.8-billion tweets a day works out to about 5,000 tweets a second. Each tweet of 140 characters (or about 200 bytes) has to be sent, recorded, and retransmitted to up to 20 million followers in less time than it took you to read this paragraph.

So, how does Twitter do it? With Linux and open-source software.

Chris Aniszczyk, Twitter’s open-source manager and a leading Eclipse developer, offered a detailed explanation of how Twitter tweets at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technology conference, and the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference.

“On the surface, Twitter is a simple real time service where the unit currency is 140 character messages called Tweets. However, if you look underneath the surface, there are over 2.8 billion tweets being sent out a day at an average steady state of 5,000 Tweets a second,” Aniszczyk says. “At this scale, you have to deal with some interesting real time engineering problems.”

You think!?

How Twitter Uses Open Source. More >

September 12, 2012
by sjvn01
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IPhone fantasies, Android phones realities

I hate to break it to you, but the new iPhone 5 is not going to be the second coming of Steve Jobs; it’s not going to give the economy a big push upward; nor will it be the best phone ever. It’s just going to be a new smartphone.

The real news, which has been written on analyst walls around the world for months, is that Android phones continue to out-sell iPhones by a wide margin. For all the hype, for all the hysteria, iPhones come in second to Android.

How far behind? According to IHS, cumulative shipments of Android smartphone by the end of 2013 will crack the 1.1 billion mark. Apple? IPhone shipments will only reach 527 million in 2013 and it won’t hit the 1 billion mark until 2015.

I hate to break it to you, but the new iPhone 5 is not going to be the second coming of Steve Jobs; it’s not going to give the economy a big push upward; nor will it be the best phone ever. It’s just going to be a new smartphone.

The real news, which has been written on analyst walls around the world for months, is that Android phones continue to out-sell iPhones by a wide margin. For all the hype, for all the hysteria, iPhones come in second to Android.

How far behind? According to IHS, cumulative shipments of Android smartphone by the end of 2013 will crack the 1.1 billion mark. Apple? IPhone shipments will only reach 527 million in 2013 and it won’t hit the 1 billion mark until 2015.

IPhone fantasies, Android phones realities. More >

September 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down

Go Daddy, the popular and controversial Web domain and service company, which crashed and burned, along with millions of it customers on September 10th, is now claiming that it wasn’t taken down by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, but by “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.”

Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down. More >

September 10, 2012
by sjvn01
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Open source the vote

Want to do your part in the upcoming U.S. presidential elections? There’s an open-source app. For that.

The Democratic party has released a Ruby on Rails open-source program, Voter Registration that enables you to deploy a Web application that enables U.S. citizens to register to vote. There is also a version that you can simply embed on your site, which is branded for the Obama/Biden campaign. The open-source version is unbranded so there’s nothing on it that even a Tea Party member could object to.

To deploy the open-source version, your Web site will need to have Ruby 1.9.3 installed and the the RubyGem “bundler” installed. RubyGem is the Ruby package manager.

Open source the vote. More >

September 10, 2012
by sjvn01
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Losing the ‘Personal’ in ‘Personal Computing’

I got involved in computers just in time for the revolution. It was the 1970s, and we were moving from centrally managed computers to PCs. For the next 40 years, users had an unprecedented level of choice, which put the “personal” in “personal computing.” Today, that revolution is being pushed back.

I don’t want to overstate the case. In some organizations, users never moved from the terminal/server model, and even if you had a PC, there was always some vendor lock-in. If you bought a Mac, you used Apple’s operating system. You had more options with a Windows PC, but they were limited.

Through all those years, though, no matter what sort of PC you bought, you could always modify it to meet your changing needs. All you needed were expansion slots and a bit of know-how. It was easy to upgrade to a more powerful graphics card, add more memory or switch out to a bigger hard drive.

The first sign that things were changing came with the arrival of sealed-unit smartphones and, a bit later, tablets. Upgradability just doesn’t exist in the tablet world. With a tablet, what you see is what you get, and there’s no way to give yourself more down the road.

Losing the ‘Personal’ in ‘Personal Computing.’ More >

September 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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The Five best things coming in Ubuntu 12.10 Linux

Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions around and the next version, 12.10 aka Quantal Quetzal, has just gone beta. Here’s what looking to to be the new Ubuntu‘s best features so far.

5) Unity Previews

In the Ubuntu Unity desktop, when you get a file, you get a lens that automatically open the file in the appropriate application. So, for instance, if you click on a document file, LibreOffice will open it, if you click on an image, Shotwell, will pop it open for you and so on.

What’s new and improved in Ubuntu 12.10 is that you can now right click on files. Besides the usual more detailed information for the file from doing this that you get from most operating systems, you get a ”Preview Pane” for its content type. For instance if you right click a song in Unity’s Dash display, you the album artwork and music player controls. This is a handy little feature.

The Five best things coming in Ubuntu 12.10 Linux. More >