Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 28, 2011
by sjvn01
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The Amazon Kindle Fire is no iPad Killer

This? This is what all the excitement about? Don’t get me wrong. The just unveiled Amazon Kindle Fire is a fine low-end Android Linux-based e-reader/tablet, but it’s not a major Android tablet and it’s certainly no iPad killer.

While waiting to get my hands on one-come on Amazon, you’ve shipped enough books to my place to know my address by heart-I already know enough to know what the Kindle Fire is and isn’t. First, it’s not a full-powered tablet. If you want a full-sized tablet with Android under the hood I recommend you give the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 a try.

It is, however a nice media consumer device. When I look at the Kindle Fire, I don’t see so much a tablet as the next generation of the e-reader. Instead of just e-books, the Kindle Fire will let you watch movies, off Amazon Prime’s newly enlarged video library, listen to music, and get just enough of the Web, with its new Silk Web browser, that you can use it for some basic Web browsing.

Put it all together, and I see Amazon’s next generation competitor for Barnes & Nobles Nook Color much more so than I do a full-powered tablet. Of course, with a price-tag of $199, it could be very popular.

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September 28, 2011
by sjvn01
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Microsoft’s Samsung Android Patent Troll Win

Microsoft has just announced its biggest ever Android-related patent deal with Samsung. In this contract, Microsoft will get a royalty payment on every Android smartphone and tablet that Samsung sells. And, what exactly is Samsung paying for and how much are they actually paying? We don’t know.

Horacio Gutierrez, vice president of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft, smiling all the way to the bank, said in a statement that “We are always looking for new opportunities to work collaboratively within the industry, and Samsung was a natural fit, particularly because of its leadership in the rapidly changing world of digital media technologies. That’s another way of saying that Microsoft has managed to scare yet another company into paying them off for some unknown and untested patents.

On Twitter, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, triumphantly tweeted, “Today’s agreement demonstrates we now have a clear path forward for resolving the industry’s mobile patent issues” and “While we haven’t yet reached the beginning of the end of mobile patent issues, perhaps we have now reached the end of the beginning.” So, yeah, if you’re idea of a clear path ahead is to pay off Microsoft, and other major companies like Apple, than we indeed have a way forward.

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September 27, 2011
by sjvn01
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Google+ shows explosive growth

Ever notice how some people are a little, ah, delusional? For example, some folks were telling me recently how Google’s social network Google+ usage was going down and the site really wasn’t that popular. Seriously. Clearly these people have been under a rock, or perhaps too besotted with Facebook, to notice that since Google+ opened its doors to everyone, its growth has been nothing short of explosive. Indeed, Google+ made it to 50-million users faster than any other social network.

According to Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, a leading genealogy site and Google+ unofficial statistician, “Google+ likely crossed the 50 million user mark. And since being opened to the general public (over age 18) last week, Google+ has been growing by at least 4% per day, meaning that around 2 million new users have been signing up each day.”

To be exact, it took Google+ 88 days to hit 50-million users. MySpace—remember them?–took 1,046 days. Facebook, with 1,096 days, took even longer.

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September 26, 2011
by sjvn01
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Linus Torvalds’s Lessons on Software Development Management

If anyone knows the joys and sorrows of managing software development projects, it would be Linus Torvalds, creator of the world’s most popular open-source software program: the Linux operating system. For more than 20 years, Torvalds has been directing thousands of developers to improve the open source OS. He and I sat down to talk about effective techniques in running large-scale distributed programming teams – and the things that don’t work, too.

Torvalds says there are two things that people very commonly get completely wrong, both at an individual developer level and at companies.

“The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help,” when it comes to open-source software development, he says. “That’s not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you’ll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they’ll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you’re going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.”

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September 26, 2011
by sjvn01
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Facebook: The Spy in Your Network

I used to like Facebook. Oh, its security and constantly changing privacy protection was a bad joke, but it was still the best way to find and keep in touch with old friends from high school (Hi Cathy!) and the like. That was then. This is now.

It was bad enough that Facebook tries to harvest your phone number, in the new Facebook Open Graph platform you can share all kinds of usage data with your advertisers… uh friends. With the new Facebook, you can automatically share what movies you’re watching on Netflix, what music you’re listening to on Spotify, and what’s you’re reading on Flipboard.

Privacy aside, I don’t care for Facebook’s new non-stop news-streaming ticker, either. Does anyone really want to know everything I watch, listen to, and read? Neither my wife nor daughter do. I can think of two groups, though, that would find all my information endlessly interesting: Advertisers and competitors. You may want AT&T, Exxon, and Microsoft to keep tabs on your every move; I don’t.

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September 26, 2011
by sjvn01
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The Air Force’s secure Linux distribution

Outside of the U.S., there are several “national” Linux distributions. These include China’s Red Flag Linux; Turkey’s Pardus, and the Philippines’ Bayahnian. Other countries, like Russia, are on their way to moving their entire IT infrastructure to Linux and open-source software. In the U.S., the government, especially the military, makes use of Linux all the time. Indeed, Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), the most popular software set for hardening Linux against Linux is sponsored by the National Security Agency. But, there hasn’t been a national American Linux desktop distribution… until now.

The Software Protection Initiative (SPI) under the direction of the Air Force Research Laboratory and the US Department Of Defense recently created Lightweight Portable Security (LPS). Like the name indicates, this is a small Linux desktop distribution that’s designed for secure use.

LPS is designed to boot from a CD or USB pen-drive on any Intel-based computer. It doesn’t install anything. It’s designed solely to run solely in memory and to leave no traces behind when you’re doing running it.

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