Practical Technology

for practical people.

June 27, 2012
by sjvn01
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Red Hat acquires FuseSource

FuseSource is one of those companies that makes software frameworks that big businesses use every day, but chances are you’ve never heard of them. Linux giant Red Hat however, did know about them and brought them from parent company Progress Software.

FuseSource is a provider of open-source application integration and messaging frameworks and services. FuseSource’s products are based on Apache ServiceMix, Apache ActiveMQ, Apache CXF and Apache Camel. The name of the game with all these programs is to provide a  enterprise service bus (ESB). This is part of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) model. An SOA, in turn, is a way to get programs to work with each other without being tightly coupled together. So, for example, you could use FuseSource programs and its services to get a Windows .NET Web-based application to work with a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python (LAMP) program.


Red Hat acquires FuseSource. More >

June 27, 2012
by sjvn01
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Android quietly partners up with Chrome

t took them look enough, but with the next release of Android, Jelly Bean, Google has finally brought its Chrome Web browser to Android.

Google brought its popular Chrome Web browser to Android Ice Cream Sandwich as a beta feature earlier this year. Today, at Google Input/Output, Google quietly showed that Chrome will now be built into Jelly Bean.

Of course, getting your hands on Jelly Bean, like any new version of Android, depends on your vendor. Jelly Bean itself won’t arrive on anyone’s phone—except for developers—until mid July. The first device to include Chrome is the brand new Asus Google Nexus 7.

Android quietly partners up with Chrome. More >

June 26, 2012
by sjvn01
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Vortex wireless: Terabytes of Wi-Fi is on its way

Wi-Fi networking has gotten to be remarkably fast. But even as 802.11n, with up to 600 Megabits per second (Mbps) speeds has become commonplace, and 802-11ac, with its gigabit speeds is finally showing up, we’ve seen nothing like the speeds that the still experimental twisted, vortex beams using orbital angular momentum (OAM) is going to deliver. In the lab, OAM technologies is already delivering a mind-bending 2.5 Terabits per second (Tbps).

Alan Willner and fellow researchers from the University of Southern California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, have just announced in a Nature article, Terabit free-space data transmission employing orbital angular momentum multiplexing that they can deliver 2.56Tbps speeds with by twisting beams of light together, multiplexing them, and then encoding data using OAM and current Wi-Fi technologies, such as spin angular momentum (SAM), which we’re already using in Wi-Fi and 4G.

How fast is that? 2.56Tbps is about the same as 320 Gigabytes (not bits, bytes) of data a second. Or, to put in more homey terms, as 25GBs for a typical single layer Blu-Ray HDTV movie, an OAM wireless connection could send almost 13 HDTV movies a second to your television.

Vortex wireless: Terabytes of Wi-Fi is on its way, More >

June 26, 2012
by sjvn01
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Antennas: The Old School TV Networks

40-years ago I was on a tower in the middle of the West Virgina hills putting up an antenna for state of the art TV reception. That is, I was installing a TV antenna. In WV, with few TV stations and lots of low mountains the only way you got TV was by having someone like my dad and his assistant—aka me—install up to 100-foot tall towers and antennas on top of them. That was then. This is now.

Today, most people get their TV from cable or satellite. But, as their costs have sky-rocketed, a lot of people have been turning to the Internet for televisiom. That’s great, but over-the-air (OTA) TV never went away. In fact, since OTA TV shifted over to digital from analog in 2009, it’s gotten better than ever.

In 2012, instead of offering a single channel, most OTA TV stations actually offer two or three different “channels.” In addition, most stations broadcast their network programs in HDTV. And, unlike, your local cable or satellite company, they don’t charge you a thing for the extra “service.”  Best of all OTA is still free.

Antennas: The Old School TV Networks. More >

June 25, 2012
by sjvn01
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Fixing the Facebook e-mail foul-up

Come on Facebook! Isn’t it enough that you make securing my Facebook account a game that’s even more annoying than the social games you’re constantly pushing on me? Did you really have to silently change my default e-mail address—along with your other 900-million plus members—to my never, ever used facebook.com address without any warning over the weekend?

I’m willing to bet that most of Facebook’s 900+ million members didn’t even know they had a Facebook.com e-mail address. Today, I suspect most of them still don’t know that, but over the weekend Facebook changed each and everyone’s default e-mail address on their Facebook profiles to their almost certainly never-ever used Facebook address.


Fixing the Facebook e-mail foul-up. More >