Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 28, 2011
by sjvn01
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2011’s Five Most Important Networking Stories

At first I thought I’d write a little nothing of a story about the five most popular networking stories of 2011. Then, I looked at the list:

Five Reasons not to “Upgrade” to Windows’ Internet Explorer 9

Chrome 10: Close to a perfect Web Browser 10

Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Reconsidered

Internet BitTorrent Spies

Installing 32-bit IE 9 on 64-bit Windows

Eh, they’re all decent stories, but they’re also already dated. I mean, we’re already up to Chrome 16! While people are always interested in what’s the best browser-Chrome right now–let’s face it: that changes every few months. So, I asked myself: “What are the most significant networking stories of 2011,” and this, from least to most important, is what I came up with.

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December 26, 2011
by sjvn01
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Linux Mint’s Cinnamon: A GNOME 3.x shell fork

GNOME is continuing to lose users and supporters. Its developers can say what they will about this Linux desktop’s advantages, most people, including Linus Torvalds himself, dislike the new GNOME 3.x interface. Many Linux users, like myself, simply find GNOME 3.x to be far more trouble than it’s worth. Now, Clement “Clem” Lefebvre, leader of the popular Linux Mint distribution has also had enough of GNOME 3.x and is creating a more user friendly GNOME shell: Cinnamon.

As Lefebvre explained, “I’m not going to argue whether Gnome Shell is a good or a bad desktop. It’s just not what we’re looking for. The user experience the Gnome team is trying to create isn’t the one we’re interested in providing to our users. There are core features and components we absolutely need, and because they’re not there in Gnome Shell, we had to add them using extensions with MGSE [Linux Mint Shell Extensions for Gnome 3].”

MGSE is not enough though. Lefebvre continued, “The extension system in Gnome Shell is handy but core parts of a desktop need to be able to communicate with each others and be integrated properly. The Gnome development team is not interested in the features we implemented, it’s opposed to adding them to Gnome Shell, and it doesn’t share our vision of a desktop. In other words, our work on Gnome 3 does not influence the development of Gnome Shell, Gnome Shell isn’t going in a direction that is suitable for us, and we’re not interested in shipping Gnome Shell ‘as is,’ or in continuing with multiple hacks and extensions.”

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December 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Go Daddy’s SOPA Entanglement

It’s one thing for congresscritters who wouldn’t known an Internet Protocol (IP) address from a domain name to support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), it’s another thing entirely for a top Internet domain registry company like Go Daddy to support SOPA. I mean Internet companies may not know anything about the First Amendment—something like far too many Congressmen come to think of it–but Go Daddy should certainly know their Internet technologies and what their customers would think of Go Daddy fouling up their Internet.

What’s that? Newly appointed Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman has yanked his company’s support for SOPA. Really? Look at what he said again. He started fine, “Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ currently working its way through U.S. Congress.”

But, then Adelman started to waffle.

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December 22, 2011
by sjvn01
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Apple loses one in its iPad tablet war with Samsung

Take a long look at the two versions of Samung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 on the right. One, says a German court, violated Apple’s iPad intellectual property (IP) design and thus couldn’t be sold in the European Union (EU). The other one is fine and dandy and can be sold. Can you tell the critical IP differences? Try to work it out before this story’s end.

As you may recall, Apple managed this summer to get the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 banned from being sold in the EU (European Union) because its design looked too much like an iPad. That was a dumb decision. Any tablet has to look pretty much like any other tablet. Now, though, it appears that the tide has turned against Apple. The German court has preliminarily decided that Samsung’s revised design no longer violates Apple’s iPad design.

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December 21, 2011
by sjvn01
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Which Tablet has the Best Display?

We all have our own ideas on what looks good on a tablet display and what doesn’t. Unlike most of us though Dr, Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate, the world’s leading display and display tuning company, has more than just an opinion. He has a long, well-respected history of scientifically analyzing what separates great displays from good ones. When Soneira talks, I listen.

So when Soneira turned his attention to the latest generation of popular tablets–the Amazon Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, and the Apple iPad 2–I paid attention.

After all, as Soneira writes, “A key element in the success of all Smartphones and Tablets is the quality and performance of their display. There have been lots of articles comparing various smartphone LCD and OLED displays and technologies, but almost all simply deliver imprecise off-the-cuff remarks like “the display is gorgeous” with very little in the way of serious attempts at objective or accurate display performance evaluations and comparisons – and many just restate manufacturer claims and provide inaccurate information, performance evaluations and conclusions.” Soneira objectively evaluates the display performance of the tablet display based on extensive scientific lab measurements together with extensive side-by-side visual tests using DisplayMate Multimedia Edition for Mobile Displays and other tools.

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December 19, 2011
by sjvn01
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Review: Chrome, the Sweet 16 Web Browser?

Mozilla, bless its heart, keeps trying to make Firefox relevant again with its speedy update schedule, but it just hasn’t been working out. Google, on the other hand, with its new Chrome sweet 16 release keeps getting better than ever.

No, there’s nothing new in capital letters in this release. It’s just faster than ever, and includes a couple of nice, useful improvements. Under the hood, as always, there are several important security improvements.

If you haven’t tried Chrome yet, here are the basics. The Chrome Web browser has a minimalist interface. Instead of a tool-bar, the basic interface has a combination address and search bar, the Omnibox, at the top with tabs above that. The handful of visible control buttons consist of Back, Forward, a combined Stop/Reload button, and a preferences wrench icon. That’s it.

If you add extensions, they’ll appear as icons on the right of the Omnibox. If you like having lots of tool-bars and endless interface tweaking power, Chrome is not for you. If you want a clean, fast Web browser Chrome is for you.

That’s not to say you can’t add a lot of extra stuff to Chrome. The whole point of a Chromebook, for example, is that you can do pretty much anything you need to do on a computer with just a Web browser and a bunch of cloud-based applications and extensions. To find these with Chrome, head over to the Chrome Web Store.

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