Practical Technology

for practical people.

April 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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Google Plus gets a new look and feel (Review)

I’ve been a happy user of Google Plus since its early days.. Now, with its recently revised interface and functionality, Google+ is indeed a bit simpler and more beautiful, but… it still have some blemishes. Such as, what the heck is that large swatch of white space anyway? Bur more about that later. First, the good stuff.

Google Plus, which now has 170-million users according to Vic Gundotra, a Google senior vice president, has been redesigned to make it easier to use and more attractive. The first feature you’ll notice is the left-hand Google Plus menu-bar, the “ribbon.” From it you can quickly go to your favorite Google Plus service.

And, I do mean your favorite service. Google makes it possible for you to edit the ribbon, So, for example, you can place your favorite service on the top. Or, if you don’t care for one—I have no real use for social network games—drop them in the bottom-right “More” box. If you hover hover over some applications you’ll also be presented with a set of quick actions for them. For example, if you hover over the photos app, you’ll get options to add images from your phone or an online album.

Say hello to the new look of Google Plus (screenshots)

It’s also a lot easier to start video hangouts. These are free video-conferences. You can have up to ten people in a hangout. It’s always been a nice feature, but a trifle hidden. Now, it’s right on the ribbon. Once in it, it’s also easy to pick and choose who you want to join you in your impromptu video-conference.

Google Plus gets a new look and feel (Review). More >

April 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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What Microsoft’s AOL/Netscape patent purchases means

We now know a little more about the Netscape patents that Microsoft bought from AOL. It’s believed that the patents that Microsoft either bought outright or acquired a license for over a billion bucks include:

Patent No. 5657390, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which has since been transformed into Transport Layer Security (TLS). SSL/TLS sets up an encrypted communication channel between Web browsers and servers. It’s used in practically every Internet financial transaction

Patent No. 7478142. Packing Web-browser based applications This describes how to package applications that are delivered over the Internet and then runs inside a Web browser. You could argue that this covers all Web 2.0 technologies.

Patent No 5774670 and Patent No. 5826242, Cookies. These patents cover cookies and their use. Web servers and browsers use cookies for advertising, e-commerce shopping carts, persistent Web site logons and on and on and on.

You get the idea. These are all essential Web technologies.

What Microsoft’s AOL/Netscape patent purchases mean. More >

April 10, 2012
by sjvn01
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Google’s new Chrome OS: Back to the future

I have little love for the new generation of desktop interfaces, such as Windows 8 Metro. They use a smartphone/tablet like metaphor in which each application takes up the entire screen. So, why did I buy all these 20-inch and larger displays? Google, in the latest developer release of its Linux and cloud-based Chrome OS, has reversed this trend. This developer Chrome OS update adds a taskbar and support for multiple windows to its light-weight, desktop operating system.

Say hello to Google’s new, old Chrome OS (gallery)

This new interface, Aura, is both a new desktop window manager and shell environment. Aura is an optional replacement for last year’s Chrome OS single Web browser interface. With it you can have multiple, small browser windows, each with its own set of tabs, against a desktop screen background. These windows can be overlapped like the Windows on older desktops such as GNOME 2.x, Windows 7 or Mac OS X.

You also get, like OS X’s dock, a status bar on the bottom of the screen with icons for each of the open windows and system status displays for as the clock and battery. When you maximize a window to full screen, the task bar vanishes. You can always bring it back though by moving your pointer down to the screen’s bottom.

Google’s new Chrome OS: Back to the future. More >

April 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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Microsoft buys Netscape Web patents from AOL to attack Google

When AOL agreed to sell more than 800 patents to Microsoft for a cool 1.1-billion in cold cash, it didn’t just buy patents. Microsoft seems to have bought, according to AllThingsD, the “underlying patents for the old [Netscape] browser.” However, AllThingsD may not have realized just how incredibly vital those Netscape patents are to all Web services and browsers.

There was a time when this deal would have been enormous news. Netscape was once a fierce rival to Microsoft. Indeed, it was Microsoft’s illegal attacks on the Netscape browser that led both to Netscape’s eventual decline and death and the Department of Justice’s taking Microsoft down a peg.

Netscape, today, though is more than an obscure brand name, a URL and an ISP, which AOL will keep, and little else. Indeed, in AOL’s Security & Exchange Commission 8-K describing the deal, AOL merely states that, in addition to selling Microsoft patents and granting them the right to use all of AOL’s other patents, “The transaction is structured as a purchase of all of the outstanding shares of a wholly-owned non-operating subsidiary of the Company and the direct acquisition of those patents in the portfolio not held by the subsidiary.” What is “that non-operating subsidiary? That would be Netscape.

Guess what? This is still gigantic news.

Microsoft buys Netscape Web patents from AOL to attack Google. More >

April 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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The six best personal cloud storage choices for your stuff

Recently, Dropbox the popular cloud-storage company doubled the amount of free space you got for inviting friends to Dropbox. How much is that? For every friend you’d invite who installed Dropbox, you’d both get 500 more MBs of free space. With a free account, you can invite up to 32 people for a grand total of 16 GB of extra space. Pro, read paid, accounts now earn 1 GB per referral, for a total of 32 GB of extra space. Better still, you get this space retroactively if you’d already gotten people to give Dropbox a try.

That’s great, but does it make Dropbox the best of the personal cloud storage services? Maybe. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is offering some kind of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud services lately. In IaaS that you find file storage, ala Dropbox, but other companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft are also offering storage, media serving, and other IaaS ad hoc services for either free or minimal prices.

The six best personal cloud storage options (gallery)

These services are transforming rapidly. Prices, amounts of free storage, and additional services beyond pure storage are constantly being changed. Here’s what’s what with them though in the spring of 2012.

The six best personal cloud storage choices for your stuff. More >

April 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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Before the Internet: The golden age of online services

Many of you, perhaps even most of you, think of the Internet as a birthright. You’ve always had it, you can no more imagine life without it than you can imagine life without electricity. Believe it or not, though, the Internet you know and love only dates back to 1991 and the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX). Before that if you were just an ordinary Jane or Joe and wanted to be online you needed not an ISP connection — they didn’t exist yet — but an account on one of the online services such as America Online (AOL), BIX, CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, or a local bulletin board system (BBS).

Oh sure, the Internet had been already around for decades by the early ’90s. But, unless you were at a university, government agency, or a research institution you had precious little chance of getting an Internet connection. Besides, the pre-Web Internet was about as user friendly as a bad-tempered Doberman.

Before the Internet: The golden age of online services. More >