Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 14, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Google starts changing Google+ naming system

Google+ is the best social network for grown-ups, but Google still doesn’t get it when it comes to letting people go by the names they want.

The good news is that Google will soon let you use human readable names for your Google+ account. In the next few weeks you can follow me at http://google.com/sjvn01 instead of https://google.com/113169713749496726739/posts. The bad news is that Google is limiting who can use such names.

Saurabh Sharma, a Google project manager, wrote, “We’re introducing custom URLs to make it even easier for people to find your profile on Google+. A custom URL is a short, easy to remember web address that links directly to your profile or page on Google+.”

Google starts changing Google+ naming system. More >

August 13, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Are Android tablets ready to take on the iPad?

Do you remember April 2010? That was when the tablet market sprang to life.

Tablets had been around for more than a decade, but hardly anyone outside of certain vertical industries (utilities, for example) had noticed them. When Apple released the iPad in April 2010, everything changed.

The iPad wasn’t destined for some niche market; it was an object of desire. Apple claimed that it sold 300,000 iPads on the first day that it was available. No other vendor had technology that could come close to competing with iOS on the iPad.

Many tried. There was the now largely forgotten Moblin operating system, RIM’s PlayBook OS, Intel and Nokia’s short-lived Meego, Chrome OS and, of course, Android, most promisingly realized in the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. None of them was good enough to seriously compete with Apple, in either 2010 or 2011.

But now it’s 2012, and at long last, we have a contender: Google’s Nexus 7, running Android 4.1.

Are Android tablets ready to take on the iPad? More >

August 13, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Red Hat finally commits to OpenStack for the cloud

Red Hat has long supported OpenStack cloud software… in theory. In practice though the Linux giant wouldn’t commit to OpenStack until now.

On August 13, Red Hat, announced the immediate availability of the preview release of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution.  This test release is based on the Essex version of popular open source OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud framework.

Red Hat claims that “With this, Red Hat delivers the next step in its plans for the industry’s only enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution with Red Hat’s award-winning commercial support, certified ecosystem of hardware and application vendors and leadership in delivering trusted open source clouds for organizations worldwide requiring enterprise-grade solutions and support.” This would come as a surprise both to Canonical and Hewlett-Packard, which had long committed to OpenStack for their cloud offerings.

Red Hat finally commits to OpenStack for the cloud. More >

August 10, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

The Internet IPv4 address business

We all know we’re running out of IPv4, the old-style Internet Protocol (IP), addresses). If you’re in the network business, you know you need to start switching over to IPv6 soon. What you may not know though is that you can still buy IPv4 address blocks even if your region is officially out of them.

Recently, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) the Regional Internet Registry (RIR)  for the US, Canada, and the Caribbean “implemented Policy ARIN-2011-1: ARIN inter-RIR Transfers. This policy creates the opportunity for organizations to move address space between regions and removes boundaries from the growing IPv4 Transfer market.”

The Internet IPv4 address business. More >

August 9, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

The Internet is getting faster

The good news, according to Akamai, a high-performance Web and analytics company, is that “the global average connection speed experienced a 14% quarter-over-quarter increase in the first three months of 2012, returning to 2.6 Mbps (Megabits per second.”  The bad news is we want much faster connections than we’re getting.

Akamai, in its The State of the Internet, 1st Quarter 2012 report (PDF link, registration required.), now defines “high broadband” as connections to Akamai at speeds of 10 Mbps or greater.  In the past, the company defined “narrowband” as connections to Akamai at speeds of 256 Kbps (Kilobits per second) or below, but as connection speeds continue to increase globally, especially in countries with developing infrastructure,  the number of connections that Akamai sees at these levels continues to decline so Akamai will no longer be reporting on narrowband adoption.

With those specifications, Akamai found that with a few exceptions, South Korea, the last mile of Internet was getting faster throughout the world.

The Internet is getting faster. More >

August 8, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

SCO is finally “Dead Parrot” dead

SCO has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to its meet its maker. It’s joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-company. With apologies to Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch, SCO, the company behind a series of foolish anti-Linux lawsuits, is finally really and truly dead.

SCO, which has been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy since the fall of 2007, has now gone into Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The difference is that in chapter 11 there is some plan, albeit not very rational in SCO’s case, that the company can eventually return to normal business. In Chapter 7, all that’s left is to close and padlock the doors and then sell the furniture.

As Pamela “PJ” Jones, founding editor of Groklaw, a leading intectuall property legal news site, said, “Did you ever think you’d see this day? I confess I did not. I thought SCO, now calling itself TSG, or so they told the world, would never let a outsider trustee come into the picture, which they will have to in Chapter 7.”

In SCO’s case, with 3.7-million in debt and not quite $150-thousand left in cash, there’s really is much left for a trustee to do except to switch out the locks and put up the closed sign

SCO is finally “Dead Parrot” dead. More >