Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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Firefox wants to be your business buddy Web browser again

Mozilla, the group behind the Firefox Web browser, has finally gotten a clue that business users don’t like constant updates. On the Mozilla wiki page, Mozilla admits to what many of us have known for a long time: Firefox’s recent rapid-fire release schedule was way too fast for corporate and institutional users. On the page, Mozilla states:

The shift to a new release process has been difficult for organizations that deploy Firefox to their users in a managed environment. We’ve heard 2 primary concerns:

1. The release schedule doesn’t allow sufficient time for the organizations and their vendors to certify new releases of the products.

2. The associated end-of-life policy exposes them to considerable security risk if they remain on a non-current version past Firefox 3.6.

These groups-which include small & medium business, enterprise, academic, and government-want to continue to offer Mozilla products to their users, but they need a version of Firefox that gives them a longer support tail than what we currently offer.

You think!?

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January 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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NASA opens it Open-Source Code Doors

Back in the 1980s, I was writing open-source programs for NASA. Oh, we didn’t call it open source then. Open source as a term wouldn’t exist until 1998. All the code we produced was “free software,” but we didn’t call it that either. We just made the best code we could and shared it with people. It was a different time. Many of these programs were made available under the COSMIC software project. Today, NASA is centralizing its open-source offerings at the Code NASA Web-site.

The idea of this new Web-site is to “continue, unify, and expand NASA’s open source activities. The site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution.” That’s all for the best since, while NASA started formally supporting open-source software in 2003, those efforts have usually not been very co-ordinated.

As William Eshagh, who is spearheading the project wrote on the NASA open-source blog, NASA is first “focusing on providing a home for the current state of open source at the Agency. This includes guidance on how to engage the open source process, points of contact, and a directory of existing projects.”

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January 4, 2012
by sjvn01
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Should Amazon, Google & Wikipedia “nuke” the Web to stop SOPA?

With the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Congress, at the request of big media, is still considering trying to censor the global Internet in the name of preventing media piracy The major Internet companies, who don’t like the idea of being forced to monitor customers’ traffic and block Web sites suspected or accused of copyright infringement. They don’t want any part of being in the Big Brother business. So it is that Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia appear to all be considering the ‘nuclear’ option.

According to multiple sources, the nuclear option would mean many major sites would simply and simultaneously go dark. Were you to go to any of them, you’d either find a 404 error page not available message or a page explaining why the site’s currently unavailable. The most popular Internet sites would simply go dark.

This is pretty drastic, but then so is SOPA. SOPA, while a proposed American law, attempts to censor sites throughout the world. In effect, as it’s currently written, SOPA would try to impose global censorship almost as bad as the Chinese firewall.

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January 4, 2012
by sjvn01
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Can Firefox be a Web browser contender again? Firefox 9.01 Review

December 20th, 2011 wasn’t Mozilla’s best day. No sooner had they released the latest version of Firefox than reports started coming in of a killer bug. By the next day, Mozilla had to release a bug-fix version of Firefox, 9.01, just to getting the popular Web browser working for users. Clearly, Mozilla’s accelerated release schedule has real problems. Still, once the launch problem was cleaned up the new Firefox looks pretty darn good.

Let’s start with its performance numbers. The last few versions of Firefox haven’t been very fast. While generally speaking Firefox still isn’t as fast as the current speed-demon Web browser, Chrome 16, it’s better than it has been and faster than the rest.

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January 2, 2012
by sjvn01
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Chrome keeps winning; Internet Explorer keeps falling

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), according to both Web browser surveying companies, Net Applications and StatCounter, is continuing its fall like a stone, while Chrome keeps flying upward Indeed, StatCounter has Chrome 15, now Chrome 16, thanks to Chrome’s automatic update feature, being the world’s most popular single browser version.

Even by Net Applications’s account though, IE has dropped to a new all-time, modern low of 51.9%, By their numbers IE dropped over seven points last year. If its decline keeps up at this rate, IE will fall below 50% by March. By StatCounter’s statistics , which look at the global Web browser market, IE went under 40% for the first time. StatCounter has IE’s share down to 38.65%.

Roger Capriotti, Microsoft’s IE marketing head, chose to put the most positive spin on the results. Capriotti wrote in advance of Net Applications’ final numbers for the year, We’re pleased to say IE9 … will soon take the top spot from IE8 on Windows 7.” Capriotti didn’t comment on IE’s far more dismal StatCounter’s performance numbers.

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January 2, 2012
by sjvn01
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Microsoft reluctantly bows to Linux users

Ace Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley swears she’s not drinking. Microsoft really is getting ready to enable customers to make Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) persistent on Windows Azure, its public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud service.

That Microsoft was going to enable users to set up persistent VMs on Azure came as no surprise. While Azure has persistent storage, its inability to keep a VM persistent has annoyed many people, and not just Linux server managers. I know several SharePoint and SQL Server administrators who’ve avoided Azure because of this lack. There are ways to hack your way around the lack of a persistent Azure VM, but they’re not easy.

According to Foley’s sources, Microsoft will launch a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test-build of the persistent VM capability in the spring of 2012. Microsoft itself has been close-mouthed about support for persistent VMs and supporting Linux on it in particular.

So why is Microsoft, ever so quietly and reluctantly doing this? Because its customers are demanding Linux support. Oh the irony!

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