Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 29, 2011
by sjvn01
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Red Hat’s biggest enemy? VMware

Let’s play a game. Who do you think Red Hat’s biggest enemy will be in a few years? Will it be Microsoft, Linux’s traditional enemy? Could SUSE, the number two business Linux distributor, make a try for the top? Might Ubuntu’s Canonical make its big break into corporate Linux? All good guesses, but Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, is pretty sure that Red Hat’s biggest competitor in 2016 will be VMware.

I know, I know, you’re thinking, “VMware? VMware!? The king of virtualization? A company that doesn’t even have an operating system or a middleware stack?” Why not Oracle? I mean Oracle makes no bones about wanting to take Red Hat on… and bury then.

Whitehurst, knows all that and has good reason for seeing VMware as Red Hat’s real rival in the decade to come. At LinuxCon in Vancouver, British Columbia explained his reasoning to me.

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August 28, 2011
by sjvn01
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Defending Against the Apache Killer

Apache, the open-source Web server, is the most popular Web server on the planet. It’s also as safe as safe can be. Well, usually it is. An old, unfixed security hole has come back to haunt the Apache webmasters in the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack tool: Apache Killer.

You may have already heard about this, and ignored it. I mean, in a world where every day brings a new security hole announcement but the Web keeps working anyway, many people have taken to a “Who cares” attitude. That’s usually a mistake. And, when it comes to Apache Killer, it could be a business-killing mistake.

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August 26, 2011
by sjvn01
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Apple iPad design – it’s been done before (images)

In Germany, Apple currently looks like it may win a legal battle to keep Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 from being sold in the European Union. Their reasoning? The Galaxy Tab looks too much like the iPad.

Excuse me? The iPad just looks like a freaking tablet to me. It also appears that Apple doctored the Samsung’s image to make it look even more like an iPad.

Come on Apple, aren’t you a little big to be throwing fits like this? Just because, Android now has 20% of the market, do you really have to try to keep potential competitors out of the marketplace by suing them? I think not.

Besides, let’s get real, a tablet is a tablet, and I’ll now show, there’s nothing new about your tablet format—especially if you consider how often the idea’s been kicked around in toys and fiction,

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August 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Apple without Jobs: Winners and losers

Some people are still in denial. They think that Steve Jobs retiring as Apple’s CEO won’t change Apple much. I beg to differ. I think it changes everything. Further, I think it changes far, far more than just Apple’s role in the world.

You don’t replace a Steve Jobs easily. Actually, you can’t replace him at all. Love him or hate him, he’s a genius and you can’t just go out on the street and hire genius. So, in the short run, Apple will be fine. They’ll still dominate smartphones and tablets. Two, three years down the road, it will be a different story.

As I said, though, Jobs moving out of the spotlight will affect far more than Apple. Here are my quick thoughts on what his departure will mean for the other technology players.

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August 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Steve Jobs: The NeXT Years

As an East-coast based technologist I barely knew the Steve Jobs of Apple’s early years. As a journalist covering Unix though I did get to know Steve Jobs when he founded NeXT and directed the creation of NeXTStep, the first Unix desktop meant for a mass market. Today, you know its direct descendant as Mac OS X.

For the last decade, you’ve known Steve Jobs as the wizard-king of Apple. From his throne room at Macworld or Apple’s developers conference, he would strive forth in his robes of office–a black turtleneck and jeans-announce “One more thing” and determine the shape of computing for the next year. Hate him or love him, he was the trend-setter not just for Apple, but for all computing. And, just like the Wizard of Oz, outside his throne room, he would have nothing to do with you. That wasn’t the Jobs I met in 1989.

The Jobs I knew, still chastened by his forced departure from Apple in 1985, was happy to talk to the press. I think he rather liked me since I was one of the few people who took his new company, NeXT; his new PCs, the NeXT Cube and the NeXTStation, and his new operating system, NeXTStep seriously.

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August 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Twitter adds SSL security

I was sitting in a local coffee shop recently and, since I was bored, I kicked on a Windows instance in VirtualBox on my Mint Linux-powered laptop so I could run Firesheep. Firesheep was, and is, a hacking program meant to frighten people into being serious about their Wi-Fi security. It didn’t work. Most people, and Web sites, still don’t secure even their logins. So, sure enough, out of twenty-one active Wi-Fi connections, I could look over the shoulder of twenty of them. This is just sad.

Still, some interactive Web sites are finally adding basic security. The Google sites support Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its ancestor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for protection, Facebook added encypted security early this year, and now Twitter is joining the list of sites that use SSL to secure its users’ connections.

It’s about time!

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