Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 29, 2012
by sjvn01
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Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone’s building open-source software

San Diego, CA: At LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation‘s annual North American technical conference, Jim Zemlin’s, the Foundation’s executive director said, “If you are going to master software development, you must master open source.”

Why is it important for businesses to master open source? Zemlin said it’s because “Software is the future of IT. Hardware is important to enable software, but what I mean that the value that end-users sees from technology increasingly comes from the software.”

He then showed a slide of half-a-dozen smartphones that were turned off and pointed out that even with a very technical crowd, “If you just look at the hardware of smartphones, you can’t tell them apart, it’s only when you turn them on that you can tell the differences.”

Zemlin said that all successful tech companies are now using and contributing to open source communities. “Besides the usual suspects–Amazon, Google, IBM– there are companies that you may not think of as being big open-source companies, even competitors, now admit that they must participate in open source.”

Like who? Zemlin pointed out that “Microsoft is now supporting Linux in their cloud. Not because they want to, but because their customers demand it.”

Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone’s building open-source software. More >

August 28, 2012
by sjvn01
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Apple v. Samsung: The legal aftershocks

At first glance, it looks like Apple cracked Samsung like an egg in their US patent court victory. Lawyers don’t see it as being that clear-cut.

Besides, questions about the jury’s rush to judgment –they didn’t even bother to read their court instructions–and the simple fact that the case will be appealed for years to come, there are concerns that the jury was in over its head from the start.

In an AP story, Robin Feldman, an intellectual property professor at the University of California Hastings Law School said “This case is unmanageable for a jury. There are more than 100 pages of jury instructions. I don’t give that much reading to my law students. They can’t possible digest it.”

Daniel Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) thinks that “Apple tried the ‘kitchen sink” strategy and throwing everything at Samsung they could, hoping something would stick. They only got 1B of the 2.5B they were asking for. It’s a win in one sense, but not a blow out as some have said, especially since Apple had home court advantage. I actually thought they’d get a stronger win.”

Apple v. Samsung: The legal aftershocks. More >

August 27, 2012
by sjvn01
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How to watch DVDs on your Windows 8 PC: VideoLAN’s VLC

No, I’m not making this up. Come the day you buy a Windows 8 PC, or if you’re brave enough to install it yourself on an older PC, you’ll find that Windows 8 can’t play DVDs. You can also forget about TV tuner support and DVD Video Object (VOB) file playback. They’re gone too.

Microsoft did this because it didn’t want to pay for the video codecs you need to watch DVDs. For a time, Microsoft will let you “upgrade” to what was once a standard feature for free, but as you know Microsoft is still being coy about Windows’ final pricing and it doesn’t appear that it will be bundled by default into new Windows 8 PC.

So, what do you do?

How to watch DVDs on your Windows 8 PC: VideoLAN’s VLC. More >

August 27, 2012
by sjvn01
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Even Windows 8 early adopters prefer Windows 7 by two to one

Forumswindows8.com, the self-proclaimed largest Windows 8 help and support forum on the Internet, is filled with posts on such subjects as how to try to terminate a process in the Windows 8 task manager when access is denied and the state of Winodws 8 HP printer drivers. These hard-core Windows 8 early adopters group recently polled their users. And, 50,000 votes later, they found that their memberships’ favorite Windows operating system was overwhemling Windows 7.

The breakdown for favorite version of Windows, from top to bottom, was Windows 7: 53%; Windows 8: 25%, XP: 20% and Other: 2%. Research house Gartner wouldn’t argue. In a Webinar, Gartner analysts Steve Kleynhans and Michael Silver argue that if your company is still using XP you want to upgrade to Windows 7 and not be distracted by Windows 8.

Kleynhans said, “Get Windows 7 done, and then you can start to experiment and dabble with Windows 8, but don’t let Windows 8 derail your Windows 7 upgrade project.” He continued, “”We really don’t think Windows 8 will get significant traction as a PC OS in a corporate environment.” Gartner’s clients are certainly following that course. Those who plan on upgrading are are moving to Windows 7 and plan to skip Windows 8 for PCs entirely.

Even Windows 8 early adopters prefer Windows 7 by two to one. More >

August 27, 2012
by sjvn01
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The History of the Floppy Disk

In the fall of 1977, I experimented with a newfangled PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80. For data storage it used—I kid you not—a cassette tape player. Tape had a long history with computing; I had used the IBM 2420 9-track tape system on IBM 360/370 mainframes to load software and to back-up data. Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: it held tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning. There had to be something better, for those of us excited about technology. And there was: the floppy disk.

In the mid-70s I had heard about floppy drives, but they were expensive, exotic equipment. I didn’t know that IBM had decided as early as 1967 that tape-drives, while fine for back-ups, simply weren’t good enough to load software on mainframes. So it was that Alan Shugart assigned David L. Noble to lead the development of “a reliable and inexpensive system for loading microcode into the IBM System/370 mainframes using a process called Initial Control Program Load (ICPL).” From this project came the first 8-inch floppy disk.

The History of the Floppy Disk. More >

August 26, 2012
by sjvn01
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The 5 most popular Linux distributions

These conclusiosn aren’t from a formal survey. IDG and Gartner only look at pre-installed server operating systems and Web browser surveys, such as StatCounter and NetMarketShare, don’t drill down far enough to say which Linux desktop distributions are the most popular. So it is that I have to turn to DistroWatch, the master Linux desktop tracking site for useful desktop Linux use data.

Before launching into this though, I should point out that the most popular end-user Linux of all is probably in your pocket and not on your desktop. That is Android of course. With just over half of the U.S. smartphone market, and hundreds of millions of smartphones around the world, Android is the most popular Linux distribution ever… even if 99% of its users don’t realize that their Linux users.

Moving on, DistroWatch comes right on and states that “The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.”

All true, but for better or worse, it’s also the best data we have.

The 5 most popular Linux distributions. More >