Practical Technology

for practical people.

June 21, 2012
by sjvn01
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Microsoft poisons its partners

With friends like Microsoft, who needs enemies?

First, Microsoft announces a vaporware tablet, Surface. On paper Surface is much better than anything its partners were building. Now, Microsoft has announced Windows Phone 8, a smartphone operating system that instantly makes every existing Windows Phone obsolete. On behalf of ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Nokia, thanks for nothing Microsoft!

In the days since Microsoft announced its hybrid tablet/laptop I’ve talked to most of the major PC original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). None of them would go on the record with me on their reaction to the Surface. What I can tell you though is that every last one of them is as angry at Microsoft as a Boston Red Sox fan is at the New York Yankees after being swept at home.

Microsoft poisons its partners. More >

June 21, 2012
by sjvn01
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Tweetless in Seattle, also New York, San Francisco, etc., etc.

Twitter, the popular social network went down with a bang sometime around noon Eastern time. According to the Down For Everyone Not Me site, Twitter was down for everyone. After coming up briefly at about 1:15 Eastern, the site is down again.

Usually, when Twitter fails, which doesn’t happen nearly as often as it used to, the site comes up with its famous, or infamous, fail whale. Not this time. Indeed, many attempts to reach the site aren’t resolving at all.

Tweetless in Seattle, also New York, San Francisco, etc., etc. More >

June 20, 2012
by sjvn01
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3 Ways to Print Over the Internet

It’s easy to print from the office. But, if you’re in Timbuktu and you need to print to the printer in your office in Milwaukee… well, that’s not so easy. Unless you set up an office printer to accept print requests over the Internet. Then it’s a snap.

There are many ways to implement an office Internet printing solution. Not all printers, however, can handle network printing. In particular, low-end Graphics Design Interface (GDI) printers, which depend on the computer’s processor to rasterize the print job, are unlikely to work with any network printing technique. These printers, also known as host-based printers, are designed specifically to work with Windows PCs. You shouldn’t even bother to try to use them as Internet printers even if your clients are all running Windows.

However, beyond GDI printers you have three good choices: Internet Printing Protocol, Jetdirect, and e-mail-based printers.

3 Ways to Print Over the Internet. More >

June 20, 2012
by sjvn01
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Shuttleworth on Ubuntu Linux, Fedora, and the UEFI problem

If you buy a Windows 8 or Windows RT computer or tablet, yes even Surface, it will come with secure boot enabled by default in their replacement for the BIOS, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). I doubt that will actually make them more secure, but it’s always crystal clear that it will make it much harder to boot Linux or any other operating system, such as Windows XP or 7, on them. Fedora came up with a way to get around this problem and Ubuntu Linux has come up with its own solution to the Windows 8 lock box as well (PDF Link). Fedora’s developers, however, don’t like Ubuntu’s answer.

In a blog posting Matthew Garrett, a developer for Red Hat, Fedora’s parent company, wrote Ubuntu’s UEFI requirements are “basically the same set of requirements as Microsoft have, except with an Ubuntu key instead of a Microsoft one.”

Shuttleworth on Ubuntu Linux, Fedora, and the UEFI problem. More >

June 19, 2012
by sjvn01
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Fast, Faster, Fastest: Linux rules supercomputing

A few decades back I was working at Goddard Space Flight Center. I’m sorry to say that I left just before some people I’d met, Don Becker and Thomas Sterling, built the first Linux cluster, Beowulf. They didn’t know it, but by making a cheap cluster from 16 486DXs processors and 10Mbps Ethernet, they were creating the ancestor to today’s Linux supercomputers. Now, not 20 years later, well over 90% of the world top 500 supercomputers are running Linux.

The new supercomputer champion of champions, according to the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers is Sequoia. This IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved an impressive 16.32 petaflop per second (Pflop/s) on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores.” That’s 16.32 quadrillion floating-point operations per second). The operating system? Linux of course.

Fast, Faster, Fastest: Linux rules supercomputing. More >

June 19, 2012
by sjvn01
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It’s 2016, and Chrome OS is ascendant

The very first PCs were just appearing when I started using computers. We had already seen the advent of microcomputers and minicomputers. Those machines were designed for people who loved technology, not people who loved getting work done with technology. For work, you used mainframes and midrange Unix and VMS computers with a terminal on the client end. The CP/M-80, Apple II and IBM PC changed all that. Fat client computers took over the world, and they’re still reigning, in the form of Windows PCs and Macs.

But the PC is no Queen Elizabeth II. Its reign, half the length of hers, may be coming to an end.

Google thinks we’re ready to say goodbye to fat client systems and move to cloud-based operating systems, such as its own Chrome OS. Instead of PCs, it wants us to use Chromeboxes and Chromebooks. We’re resisting, but I think we’ll come around to Google‘s point of view in a few short years.


It’s 2016, and Chrome OS is ascendant. More >