Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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Reddit’s anti-SOPA “Nuclear” protest is a good start

Reddit, the popular link-sharing and social networking site with over 2 billion page-views and 35 million active users a month, is taking the nuclear option in protest about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP draft laws by shutting down on January 18th for 12 hours. During that time, Reddit will suspend its normal operations

“Instead,” the Reddit administrators state, “of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action. We will showcase the live video stream of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts (including reddit co-founder Alexis ‘kn0thing’ Ohanian) will be testifying. We will also spotlight community initiatives like meet-ups to visit Congressional offices, campaigns to contact companies supporting PIPA/SOPA, and other tactics.”

The social network isn’t, according to Reddit, doing this lightly. “We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it. Blacking out reddit is a hard choice, but we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community.”

Good for Reddit!

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January 10, 2012
by sjvn01
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Winners and Losers in Business Open-Source Software

We all know that Linux, Apache and Samba are vital for business data center servers, Web servers and file and print servers respectively in businesses both large and small. What you may not know though what’s trending below the top-tier of open-source software. That’s where OpenLogic, an enterprise open-source software provider and consultants comes in. In their recent study 2011 Open Source Adoption Trending Report, OpenLogic looks at the winners and losers in open-source software adoption.

According to the company’s analysis, the fastest growing open-source projects from 2010 to 2011 in terms of business adoption were:

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January 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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802.11ac: Gigabit Wi-Fi Devices will be shipping in 2012

To network equipment we used to drag yellow cable about the size and flexibility of garden hose through buildings’ plenum spaces. It was an ugly job. It got better. Then, we got wireless networking and setting up networks got much easier. Still, physical networking usually delivered faster speeds than Wi-Fi networking. Now, things are changing. Broadcom is promising us that the first 801.11ac chipsets will bring us Gigabit wireless speeds without any cables at all.

Mind you, 802.11ac is still a standard in the making. Still, that hasn’t stopped Broadcom from announcing that it’s building 802.11ac chipsets, under the trademark name 5G WiFi, that will be “three times faster and up to six times more power efficient than equivalent 802.11n solutions.” How fast is that? Rahul Patel, Broadcom’s VP of mobile and wireless, promises that their implementation of 802.11ac will be able to deliver speeds of up to 1.3 Gigabits per second (Gbps). Now, that’s fast!


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January 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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Microsoft is finally making good products — but it’s too late

you’ve read many of my articles over the past 20 years, you may have noticed that I don’t care for Microsoft or its products. That isn’t because I think open-source software or Apple products are unbeatably great. It’s because Microsoft’s products are usually awful.

A lot of you are thinking I can’t possibly be right about that. After all, you work and play with Windows, Office and other Microsoft offerings every day. You’re hardly in the minority. But has Microsoft enjoyed its enviable market position because it produced the best products? Nah.

Microsoft became No. 1 because, in business, Bill Gates had the morals of a great white shark in a feeding frenzy. By the time the courts finally slapped Microsoft down in the Netscape case, it was too late. The great monopolist had either killed off or bought out its competition.

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January 9, 2012
by sjvn01
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TV for Human Beings: Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu Linux fans will recognize this story’s title as a play on the operating system’s slogan: Ubuntu: Linux for human beings. Now, Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is taking on Apple and Google by trying to make Ubuntu the operating system of choice for all-in-one Internet, cable, and satellite TV: Ubuntu TV.

According to Jane Silber, Canonical’s CEO Ubuntu TV is not an attempt to bring a Linux desktop to your TV or just put a browser on your TV. Instead, the idea is to use Ubuntu GNOME-based Unity interface as the universal interface.

I can see this. I’ve long thought that Unity, while an OK desktop for non-power desktop users had great potential for tablets, smartphones, and, yes, now TVs.

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January 6, 2012
by sjvn01
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NGINX takes 2nd place in Web Servers from Microsoft IIS

If you know anything about Web servers, you know that open-source Apache is the number one Web server in the world by a wide margin. You also know that Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) is the number two Web server. As of the end of 2011, though, you’d also be wrong about second place. The number two active Web server, according to Netcraft, the leading Web server analytics company, is now NGINX.

NGINX, pronounced Engine-X, if you don’t know it, is an open-source Web and reverse proxy server and e-mail proxy server to boot. It’s has been used for years on many popular Russian Web sites such as Yandex, Vkontakte, and Rambler. In recent years, it’s been picked up by major Western sites including Facebook and WordPress.com.

These Web sites, and millions of others, have moved to NGINX because it’s very fast and uses few system resources. The company has claimed that NGINX can deliver 10 times the performance of the leading Web server on the same hardware. I’m not sure about that but I do know it’s faster than Apache or IIS. NGINX manages this by being event-based. So, it doesn’t spawn new processes or threads for each Web page request. That means that even as the Web server load increases, memory use remains low and predictable.

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