Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 30, 2012
by sjvn01
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How Twitter tweets your tweets with open source

San Diego, CA: Some people may have been surprised when Twitter recently joined The Linux Foundation. You couldn’t tweet about your dinner, your latest game, or the newest political rumor without open-source software.

Chris Aniszczyk, open-source manager at Twitter, explained just how much Twitter relied on open source and Linux at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technology conference. “Twitter’s philosophy is to open-source almost all things. We take our software inspiration from Red Hat’s development philosophy: ‘default to open.””

Specifically, according to the company, “The majority of open-source software exclusively developed by Twitter is licensed under the liberal terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. The documentation is generally available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. In the end, you are free to use, modify and distribute any documentation, source code or examples within our open source projects as long as you adhere to the licensing conditions present within the projects.” Twitter’s open-source software ware is kept on GitHub.

You’re welcome to use this code. Indeed, Aniszczyk strongly encourages others to use and build on it. 

How Twitter tweets your tweets with open source. More >

August 29, 2012
by sjvn01
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The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux

San Diego, CA: Most Linux people know that Google uses Linux on its desktops as well as its servers. Some know that Ubuntu Linux is Google’s desktop of choice and that it’s called Goobuntu. But almost no one outside of Google knew exactly what was in it or what roles Ubuntu Linux plays on Google’s campus, until now.

Today, August 29th , Thomas Bushnell, the tech lead of the group that manages and distributes Linux to Google’s corporate desktops unveiled Goobuntu from behind Google’s curtain at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, First things first, can you download Goobuntu to run it yourself? Well yes and no.

Bushnell explained that “Goobuntu is simply a light skin over standard Ubuntu.” In particular, Google uses the latest long term support (LTS) of Ubuntu. That means that if you download a copy of the latest version of Ubuntu, 12.04.1, you will, for most practical purposes, be running Goobuntu.

The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux. More >

August 29, 2012
by sjvn01
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How to put your movies on your media server

I have a huge movie collection. It used to all be on VHS tapes, then I moved to DVDs, and now I’m slowly moving to Blu-Ray. That’s all well and good, but along the way I decided I liked the convenience of making my hundreds of movies accessible from a single hard drive instead. Does this sound good to you? Here’s how you, too, can put twenty boxes of DVDs into a single 2TB hard drive.

Note: Before you go any farther, you should know that most movies comes with some kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption. I feel that since I bought these videos I should have the right to do with them what I want — so long as I don’t try to sell or distribute their contents to others. I am not a lawyer though and this is a legal gray area. If you decide to follow a similar course, you should be fine, but neither I nor ITworld can be responsible for any legal damages that may result from this how-to article. Got that? OK then.

[Here’s what buying movies and TV shows online looks like, drawn in marker ]

The media server and extender

Before you start any of this you need a media server and a media extender. A media server is a program, such as iTunes, MythTV, or Windows Media Center, that enables you to “broadcast” your videos to other computers and media extenders. A media extender, in turn, is just a device, like an Apple TV, the Xbox 360 and most 2011 and newer Blu-Ray DVD players, such as a Sony BDP-S580, that lets you view video from your media server on your TV.

How to put your movies on your media server. More >

August 29, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux

San Diego, CA: Most Linux people know that Google uses Linux on its desktops as well as its servers. Some know that Ubuntu Linux is Google’s desktop of choice and that it’s called Goobuntu. But almost no one outside of Google knew exactly what was in it or what roles Ubuntu Linux plays on Google’s campus, until now.

Today, August 29th , Thomas Bushnell, the tech lead of the group that manages and distributes Linux to Google’s corporate desktops unveiled Goobuntu from behind Google’s curtain at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, First things first, can you download Goobuntu to run it yourself? Well yes and no.

The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux. More >

August 29, 2012
by sjvn01
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Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone’s building open-source software

San Diego, CA: At LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation‘s annual North American technical conference, Jim Zemlin’s, the Foundation’s executive director said, “If you are going to master software development, you must master open source.”

Why is it important for businesses to master open source? Zemlin said it’s because “Software is the future of IT. Hardware is important to enable software, but what I mean that the value that end-users sees from technology increasingly comes from the software.”

He then showed a slide of half-a-dozen smartphones that were turned off and pointed out that even with a very technical crowd, “If you just look at the hardware of smartphones, you can’t tell them apart, it’s only when you turn them on that you can tell the differences.”

Zemlin said that all successful tech companies are now using and contributing to open source communities. “Besides the usual suspects–Amazon, Google, IBM– there are companies that you may not think of as being big open-source companies, even competitors, now admit that they must participate in open source.”

Like who? Zemlin pointed out that “Microsoft is now supporting Linux in their cloud. Not because they want to, but because their customers demand it.”

Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone’s building open-source software. More >

August 28, 2012
by sjvn01
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Apple v. Samsung: The legal aftershocks

At first glance, it looks like Apple cracked Samsung like an egg in their US patent court victory. Lawyers don’t see it as being that clear-cut.

Besides, questions about the jury’s rush to judgment –they didn’t even bother to read their court instructions–and the simple fact that the case will be appealed for years to come, there are concerns that the jury was in over its head from the start.

In an AP story, Robin Feldman, an intellectual property professor at the University of California Hastings Law School said “This case is unmanageable for a jury. There are more than 100 pages of jury instructions. I don’t give that much reading to my law students. They can’t possible digest it.”

Daniel Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) thinks that “Apple tried the ‘kitchen sink” strategy and throwing everything at Samsung they could, hoping something would stick. They only got 1B of the 2.5B they were asking for. It’s a win in one sense, but not a blow out as some have said, especially since Apple had home court advantage. I actually thought they’d get a stronger win.”

Apple v. Samsung: The legal aftershocks. More >