Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 16, 2012
by sjvn01
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Businesses can’t use Office on Windows RT tablets!?

One of the attractions of Windows RT tablets to business was to have been that it was coming with a baked-in version of Office 2013. And, so it will, it’s just that you may, or may not, be able to use that edition for “commercial, nonprofit, or revenue-generating activities.” Say what?

If sounded odd to me too, but Windows RT tablets will come with Office Home & Student 2013 RT and Microsoft expressly states that it is “not for use in commercial, nonprofit, or revenue-generating activities.”

Microsoft has long formally held that its Home and Student versions were not licensed for business use. For example, Office Home and Student 2010 is licensed only for “non-commercial use for members of your household.” 

The Windows 8 Pro tablets and Surface devices, with x86 processors, are meant for the mainstream IT market and will support a business version of Office 2013.. Still, Windows RT and Microsoft’s ARM-powered Surface tablets, are meant to take on Android tables and iPads in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) market. There has been no news of a “full” extra-cost Office suite for RT.

Businesses can’t use Office on Windows RT tablets!? More >

October 16, 2012
by sjvn01
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Android malware, FUD, and the FBI

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a U.S. government task force made up of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, recently issued an Android malware warning. This has been taken by some to be yet more proof of how insecure Android is compared to Apple’s iOS. Please. Give me a break.

All the IC3’s badly written, vague release really said was that: “The IC3 has been made aware of various malware attacking Android operating systems for mobile devices. Some of the latest known versions of this type of malware are Loozfon and FinFisher.” And, what are these?

Loozlon is a Trojan horse that Symantec reports as having less than 50 reported instances. FinFisher is a much more serious spyware program.

FinFisher has been around for years on Macs and Windows PCs as “legal” spyware from Gamma International, a UK security company. Recently it’s been ported to all the major mobile devices, including Android, Blackberry, and, yes, the iPhone. It is in no way, shape, or form purely an Android problem.

In any case, both programs aren’t classic computer viruses. They require users to go above and beyond the call of stupidity to catch them.

Android malware, FUD, and the FBI. More >

October 15, 2012
by sjvn01
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Don’t kill my Windows XP!

October 25th is the official release date for Windows 8, but I, for one, have no intention of “upgrading” to Windows 8 from Windows 7 or XP. Indeed, I still think XP SP3 is one of the best versions of Windows ever, so why exactly should I switch?

Yeah, so XP SP3 is five years old. So what? Does it still work? Yes. Does it still run all my Windows applications? Yes. So, tell me again, exactly why I should upgrade?

Oh sure, Windows 7 SP1 has some good points. It’s a bit faster, it’s a bit more secure, it has some nice network features such as Libraries and DirectAccess,  and it has Internet Explorer (IE) 9, which is better than IE 8. Of course, Chrome 21 is better than any version of IE and it runs just fine on Windows 7 and XP.

The bottom line is that while I prefer desktop Linux, especially Mint, on my Windows PCs I’m still using XP on many of them. Why? Because it just works.

Don’t kill my Windows XP! More >

October 12, 2012
by sjvn01
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Linus Torvalds interviewed by Slashdot readers

Slashdot, the 15-year old popular technology discussion site, recently had their readers come up with a list of their top questions to ask Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator. The results were interesting.

For example, the first question presumed that Torvalds was anti-patent and copyright. Eh… no, he’s never really been either. As Torvalds explained, “I like copyrights, and even on patents I’m not necessarily in the ‘Patents are completely evil. camp. When I rant about patents or copyrights, I rant against the *excesses* and the bad policies, not about them existing in the first place.”

And, as for copyright, “I don’t understand why people were that surprised, but I understand even *less* why people then thought that ‘copyrights have problems’ would imply ‘copyright protection should be abolished.’ The second doesn’t follow at all.”

What Torvalds does have problems with are, “I was talking about things like ‘life of author+70 years’ and the corporate 95-year version. That’s *ridiculous*. Couple that with the difficulty of judging fair use etc, and it really hinders things like archival of material, making of documentaries, yadda yadda…”

Linus Torvalds interviewed by Slashdot readers. More >

October 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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OwnCloud: Build your own or manage your public cloud storage services

Want a do-it-youself private, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud? Want a way to unify all your corporate cloud storage services? Then ownCloud has new open-source software for both your business and personal use.

In the newly released version, ownCloud 4.50, the company claims that this release comes with “significantly faster upload, download and sync of files – even very large files — a re-factored sharing engine, greater and more granular administrative control, and greater integration with popular business tools, ownCloud 2012 Business and ownCloud 2012 Enterprise give companies the security and control they need while providing end users the flexibility and ease of use they demand.”

The key difference between ownCloud and such popular cloud storage serves as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box, which store your data at remote third-party data centers is that you get to pick where ownCloud stores your data. You can deploy it by itself on your own servers or you can seamlessly integrate it with other cloud-storage services such as the aforementioned services or others such as Amazon. S3 Thus, you can use ownCloud with its security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools to manage not only your own private cloud storage, but those from multiple other cloud storage services as well.

OwnCloud: Build your own or manage your public cloud storage services. More >

October 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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Alcatel-Lucent opens the doors for 4G LTE programmers

Joe Phone-User will never see it, but underneath his bright, shiny iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S3’s blazing fast 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) data speed there’s a whole infrastructure world for developers to create new applications. The number two company in providing the LTE foundation is Alcatel-Lucent and they’re opening the doors to low-level developers by introducing a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs).

These nine Nine ‘New Conversation APIs’ are designed to give developers easy access to communication capabilities in service providers’ IP Multimedia Subsystem, the infrastructure that sits at the heart of 4G LTE and IP networks.

Specifically, Alcatel-Lucent claims that, “These capabilities include high definition voice and video, audio/video conferencing, interactive voice, messaging and call control, which can be used to build services for both consumers and businesses. … To jump-start the developer ecosystem Alcatel-Lucent is leveraging its ngConnect program, which brings together service providers and apps developers as well as offering easy access to the APIs, along with a fast prototyping environment provided by the New Conversation API developer portal. These APIs are based on REpresentational State Transfer (REST), a popular, easy-to-use software architecture used to create applications for the Web.”

Alcatel-Lucent opens the doors for 4G LTE programmers. More >