October 13, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments
October 13 is a big day for Ubuntu fans. It’s the day that the next version of Ubuntu arrives. If you want to give it a try, download a copy of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, burn an ISO copy to a CD or USB stick, pop that into your PC, and follow along.
Before doing anything drastic, like actually installing Ubuntu on your PC, make sure it works first. Only after testing it out for a while, should you reboot your computer and chose the Install Ubuntu option.
October 12, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments
Every organization has one: Someone who may be brilliant in some ways, but can really stick his foot in his mouth. Sometimes, as with Richard M. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, it can be the head of the organization. With Google, the latest case of foot in mouth disease goes to Steve Yegge, a Google engineer who declared that “Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership.”
Yegge published his rant on Google+ for all to see. Later, Yegge claimed that he was so new to Google+ that he didn’t realize he had sent it to the world. Right there, is a red flag. He’s declaring Google+ to be a complete failure but he doesn’t even know how to use a Google+ circle? Clearly, he hasn’t a clue about the very system he’s declaring to be a failure.
That didn’t stop him from declaring that “The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought” and that “Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product.” He goes on and on like that for quite a while.
October 12, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments
Microsoft has always been fond of paying analysts to say that its products are best, or having partners release reports showing how their rivals’ products are second-rate, and, now, Web sites that “show” how Internet Explorer (IE) is better than Chrome and Firefox when it comes to security. Really? Didn’t Microsoft just release yet another major Internet Explorer patch?
I quote from the IE patch update (MS11-081), which apples to all currently supported versions of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer and IE 6 as well: “The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.”
Yes, that includes IE 9, the best and most up-to-date IE which is only available on Windows 7. Isn’t it funny how Microsoft claims that IE 9 is the most secure of its browser family, but somehow it has to have the same problems fixed that exist in IE 6, 7, and 8? Could it be that it’s really not that different after all from the rest of its historically insecure family?
October 11, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments
You know me. I’m a Linux guy. Still, I think Windows has gone from being a bad joke of a desktop operating system (Windows ME) to being a reasonable choice (Windows 7). Its course hasn’t been steady, though: After the still popular XP SP3, we got Vista. And now we have Windows 8. What the heck is Steve Ballmer thinking?
Microsoft has made it clear that it considers Windows 8’s Metro interface and applications to be the future. When I look at Metro, however, I see gaudy colors, boxy designs, applications that can either run as a small tile or as full screen with no way to resize or move windows. Where have I seen this before? Wait, I know! Windows 1.0.
Twenty-five years of user-interface development and this is what we get? Scary.
More >
October 11, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments
It used to be easy for Web server administrators. If you ran a Windows shop, you used Internet Information Server (IIS), if you didn’t, you used Apache. Now, though, you have more Web server choices and one of the leading alternatives, the open-source NGINX Web server, is gaining fast.
According to Netcraft, the leading Web server analytics company, NGINX, with its over 40-million Web domains and 8.5% of all Web domains, is catching up with the big two. Indeed Netcraft analysts believe that “If current trends continue NGINX will soon overtake Microsoft to have the second largest number of active sites.”
NGINX has moved into this position because it’s very, very fast. The company claims that NGINX can deliver 10 times the performance on the same hardware. I don’t know about that, but I do know on my own servers that NGINX is very fast and uses far less resources than Apache or IIS. It does this by being event-based. That means it doesn’t spawn new processes or threads for each Web page request. The end result is that even as the load increases, memory use remains predictable.
October 10, 2011
by sjvn01
0 comments
Last week, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company Canonical CEO Jane Silber announced at the OpenStack cloud software conference that HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system for its Public Cloud. That’s impressive. It’s Canonical’s biggest enterprise win to date, but that’s only a hint of what Canonical is up to with the cloud.
Canonical started its move to OpenStack from Eucalyptus in February. While Canonical has promised its not going to leave its Eucalyptus users without support, the company is clearly pinning all its cloud plans going forward around OpenStack.