Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 23, 2011
by sjvn01
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Three simple steps to setting Google+ straight

When I read Violet Blue’s account of her struggles to maintain her Google+ account, it occurred to me that Google isn’t just making life hard on some of its most dedicated users, it’s also making life hard on itself. More than ever I was reminded that Google is an engineering company, not a people company. So, here’s my short list of some very basic, very human, things Google could do to make life better both for its users and for its own staffers.

First, Google doesn’t really have a policy on Google+ names yet. Oh, they came up with something–everyone will need to use their real names!–but clearly they never really thought that out. After all, some of their own top people don’t use their “real” names!

So, until Google has really thought out and laid out what the heck their naming policy is going to be, may I suggest that Google cut everyone some slack with their names? Sure get rid of “Darth Vader” or “Iluv youlongtime,” but let’s use some common sense with most people shall we?

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August 23, 2011
by sjvn01
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Hurricane Electric takes its IPv6 expertise to the datacenter

Hurricane Electric, arguably the world’s largest IPv6-native Internet backbone and co-location provider, has expanded its IPv6 Professional Services offerings so that they can now help you with IPv6 datacenter deployments.

If you’re a home user or just have a small office/home office (SOHO), you don’t need to worry about the fact that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses anytime soon. It’s a different story though if you’re managing a datacenter. In a datacenter, you can need hundreds or thousands of new Internet addresses on any given day. Since the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) expects to allocate its last IPv4 addresses before year’s end, datacenter managers must start converting over to IPv6.

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August 22, 2011
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu Linux bets on the ARM server

In today’s data center, millions of instructions per second (MIPS) and gigabyte per second (GBPS) throughput are well and good, but being green (having a low power consumption) is becoming just as important. That’s why Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is betting that in the long run, ARM processors will play an important role in tomorrow’s servers and datacenters.

Ubuntu Linux doesn’t play a big role in the x86 business server space. For Linux, Red Hat takes those honors. So, after four years of working with ARM, Canonical is trying to win a new server market for itself by helping create the ARM business server space.

Here’s how Canonical plans on making this work. In October 2011, the Ubuntu Server 11.10 release will be released simultaneously for x86, x86-64 and ARM-based architectures. The base image of the releases will be the same across architectures with a common kernel baseline. The ARM architecture will also be part of the long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu Server in 12.04 and other future releases.

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August 19, 2011
by sjvn01
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Leo Apotheker’s HP never wanted webOS to succeed

liked webOS, HP’s Linux-based take on a tablet operating system. I thought it had a shot to be a tablet player. But, then, Leo Apotheker, HP’s new CEO, along with spinning off HP’s PC business, killed webOS. Was it because, as Apotheker said, the tablet effect is real and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations,” and that the TouchPad was quickly becoming a money pit? No, no it wasn’t.

Yes, webOS and the TouchPad were doing badly on the market. But, so what? A company the size of HP doesn’t get out of the consumer PC market and new tablets and spin around on a dime because it can’t be as “as cool as Apple.” No, it does so because Apotheker and his cronies had planned for months to try to transform HP into their old company, SAP, and go head to head not so much with IBM, but his old sparring partner, Oracle.

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August 18, 2011
by sjvn01
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Red Hat CEO thinks the desktop is becoming a legacy application

Vancouver, British Columbia—A running joke at this years LinuxCon is that “X is the year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Zemlin, head of the conference’s sponsoring organization, The Linux Foundation, started it with his keynote in noting how often he’d made that prediction and how often he’s been wrong. The current prediction, which I believe Linus Torvalds made last night was : “2031! The year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, has another year in mind for the Linux desktop though: Never. Oh, and the Windows and Mac desktops? Get ready to say good-bye to them soon.

In an interview with me, Whitehurst told me that he believes that the “Fat client operating system [the traditional desktop] is becoming a legacy application.” What he meant by that isn’t that your desktops are suddenly going to vaporize into puffs of smoke in 2016 like from some really lame disaster movie. No, his point is that the cost of maintaining and securing a desktop operating system is growing increasingly higher.

So, what he sees happening is that everyone, and it’s not just Linux, “writing their functionality for the back engine. Why would anyone with all the different platforms—smartphones, tablets, etc.—and the costs of securing all of them want to spend money on that? The cost to manage and secure a fat client is ridiculous.”
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August 18, 2011
by sjvn01
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Linus Torvalds on Android, the Linux fork

Vancouver, British Columbia—During his question and answer session at the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds, founder of Linux, revealed that while mainstream Linux and its popular smartphone and tablet son Google’s Android still aren’t as close as they should be, they’re slowly—ever so slowly—coming back together.

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