Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 28, 2012
by sjvn01
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Red Hat: The first billion dollar Linux company has arrived

Depending on how you look at these things, Red Hat has long been a billion dollar company. With a market cap of almost $10-billion dollars, Red Hat, the biggest of Linux companies, has long been open-source’s shiniest success story. The gold standard of business success, though, is making a billion dollars in revenue in a single fiscal year and Red Hat has just pulled this feat off.

Red Hat didn’t just creak the billion dollar mark though. It smashed its way through it. For the full fiscal year 2012, total revenue was $1.13 billion, an increase of 25% over the prior year. Subscription revenue from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was $965.6 million, up 25% year-over-year.

In the earnings call, Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s President and CEO said. “Red Hat is the first pure-play, open source company, and one of only a select few software companies, to have achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone. The open-source technologies which we provide are being selected by more customers every day as they re-architect the infrastructure of their data centers for greater efficiency, agility and cloud enablement.”

Red Hat: The first billion dollar Linux company has arrived. More >

March 28, 2012
by sjvn01
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What Ubuntu users think about Ubuntu 2012

Once upon a time Ubuntu was the popular Debian-based desktop Linux distribution that everyone-well not Debian’s hardcore fans-loved. That was then. This is now. Today, Ubuntu has gotten into servers, the cloud and Canonical the company behind it, wants it to play in TVs, tablets, and smartphones. That’s all well and good, but what does Ubuntu’s faithful think of all this? Well Canonical asked them and this is what they had to say.

Over 17,000 Ubuntu users responded to Canonical’s survey. According to Gerry Carr, Canonical’s director of communications, the average Ubuntu user’s age is between 25-35. Carr also found the Ubuntu’s users “Overwhelmingly male. The average number of women responding is <4%. Here I do wonder how much the bias of the sampling methodology has affected the response rate – i.e. is that for whatever reason the way we reached resulted in fewer women responding than is actually reflective of the user base. We can’t extrapolate from this data, but certainly such a hugely weighted response means we have to look at how we make the product, the community and probably both, more appealing to both genders.”

What Ubuntu users think about Ubuntu 2012. More >

March 28, 2012
by sjvn01
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Apple says 100% iPad recharge “problem” is by design

o believe Apple about its iPad 3 battery problem or not to believe Apple is the question. In a story by Ina Fried at AllThingsD, Apple VP Michael Tchao explained that while the iPad–and iPhone and iPod Touch—display as 100% charged before the device is actually 100% charged, it’s because they’re constantly charging to 100 percent, and then discharging and recharging back up to 100 percent. The point, according to Apple, is to maintain the best possible charge. Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate, the world’s leading display and display tuning company, who found the battery problem in the first place disagrees.

While Tchao calls this “a great feature that’s always been in iOS,” Soneira doesn’t see it that way. He sees it as the Apple VP acknowledging “my point that the iPad is not 100% charged when it says so. It’s not the full admission that I would have liked, but it is actually more than I expected Apple would admit to.” In short, he sees Apple spinning how iOS mishandles its battery-powered device reporting.

Apple says 100% iPad recharge “problem” is by design. More >

March 26, 2012
by sjvn01
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Does VMware have a real future?

We all know that technologies come and go. Sometimes, technology companies do the same thing. I’ve long thought that VMware’s days were numbered, and not because there’s anything wrong with its technology.

VMware has dominated the virtualization market ever since that market came into being. It has done so the old-fashioned way: by offering good software and support. What could go wrong? Well, price is a big weakness when every player in the market, VMware included, is either offering a free virtualization program or baking one into their operating systems. It’s hard to compete with free.

Though VMware provides its low-end offerings for free, it can’t stay in the game by relying on those alone; it makes its money exclusively from selling high-end virtualization and virtualization management software. Unlike its competitors, VMware doesn’t have much of a revenue stream from operating systems and other products. And when it attempted to overcome that weakness, it was blindsided.


Does VMware have a real future? More >

March 26, 2012
by sjvn01
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Batterygate: Apple’s dysfunctional iPad 3 battery charger

Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate, the world’s leading display and display tuning company, found while testing the iPad 3’s display, “that the batteries do not actually reach full charge when 100% is shown and need up to an extra hour before the charging is done. After further investigation, Soneira has discovered, “when the battery indicator first says 100% the battery is actually only 90% charged and you get 1.2 hours less running time.”

Apple, however, claimed to CNBC’s Jon Fortt, that “If you charge it more than [when the battery indicator reads 100%], you could actually harm the longevity of the battery.” Nonsense, replied Soneira.

Indeed, Soneira said, “Damaging the longevity of the battery is then exactly what the new iPad’s internal battery charging hardware and software are doing since it is their responsibility to properly control and manage the battery recharging process. It’s pretty obvious that if the new iPad knows that it is fully charged then it should automatically stop the charging! So according to Apple the new iPad is configured to damage the longevity of its own battery if it isn’t manually disconnected from the AC charger when the 100% indicator appears. Anyone that recharges their iPad unattended, especially overnight, will be doing this.”

Batterygate: Apple’s dysfunctional iPad 3 battery charger. More >

March 23, 2012
by sjvn01
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Batterygate? Apple’s iPad “Fibbing” battery charger

Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate, the world’s leading display and display tuning company, is best known for his graphics expertise, but he also knows his way around electrical engineering and physics. During his extensive testing of the iPad 3’s display Soneira also found “that the batteries do not actually reach full charge when 100% is shown and need up to an extra hour before the charging actually stops. So what’s up with that?

Soneira found the problem during his iPad 3 benchmarking. He measured “the power actually drawn by the AC Adapter and first found that the new iPad continues to charge for up to 1 hour after it claims to reach 100%. This affects the battery run time if you stop charging when it says 100%.” This isn’t just an iPad 3 problem. Soneira notes that “Other tablets and smartphones also lie about their charging status.”

Further testing by Soneira has shown that “At 2:00 hours after reporting 100% charge the new iPad hardware started to reduce the charging power. At 2:10 the recharging cycle fully terminated with a sharp decrease in power.” Thus, “The new iPad battery is truly fully recharged 2 hours and 10 minutes after prematurely reporting on screen that it was fully charged.”

Batterygate? Apple’s iPad “Fibbing” battery charger. More >