Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 15, 2011
by sjvn01
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Google and Motorola Mobility: It’s all about the patents

I can’t prove it, because I didn’t write about it, but I’ve thought for a long time now that Google buying Motorola Mobility made a lot of sense. It wasn’t my idea though. I give full credit to billionaire investor Carl Icahn. In July, Icahn said that Motorola should shop around its patent portfolio, in particular Motorola Mobility, to wireless technology companies such as Google. His proposal made sense to me, and, what’s important, it made sense to Google as well.

As Icahn said at the time, with 17,000 approved patents and another 7,500 in the pipeline, Motorola Mobility “has one of the strongest and most respected patent portfolios in the industry.” Sure, Google can build its own Android phones now, but so what? The real value here for Google is in those patents.

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August 14, 2011
by sjvn01
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What’s really up with Facebook’s phone number flap

The rumors began in the midd le of last week: Facebook was snatching your phone numbers from your mobile phone address book and were publishing them for everyone to see. You may have seen a message like this yourself:

Friends! “ALL THE PHONE NUMBERS IN YOUR PHONE are now PUBLISHED on Facebook! Go to the top right of the screen, click on Account, then click on Edit Friends, go left on the screen and click on Contacts. Then go to the right hand side and click on “visit page” to remove this display option. Please repost this on your Status, so your friends can remove their numbers and thus prevent abuse if they do not want them published.”

It wasn’t true and it wasn’t really new, but there’s enough truth in it that even without the sensationalism I, for one, am concerned.

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August 12, 2011
by sjvn01
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Cartoon makes better password security point than many security experts

I’ve been using cryptic passwords since I cut my computing teeth on an IBM 370. I never liked using passwords like xkcd1234EMC2. They may have been more “secure,” but they were hellish to remember. I still use them today, but the brilliant Internet cartoon xkcd by Randall Munroe has just shown me that I, and many security experts, have been idiots for years. Read the cartoon below and you’ll see what I mean.

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August 12, 2011
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu Linux makes musical friends with the Apple iPhone

Linux and Apple’s iPhones, iPods, and iPads usually get along about as well as cats and dogs. Oh sure, you can root a jailbroken iPhone to boot Linux, but that’s just a stunt. And, if you don’t mind living dangerously, you can use the popular Linux music application Banshee to manage your music collection on iPhones or iPods. Generally speaking, though, when you try to bring Linux and Apple devices together, the fur flies. Until now. Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux introduced an iPhone streaming music app that lets you stream music from the Ubuntu One cloud to iPhones and iPod.

According to Canonical, “The new Ubuntu One Music Streaming app for iPhone comes packed full of great functionality and an elegant new UI, so you can wirelessly sync your entire music collection saved to your Ubuntu One personal cloud. Along with supporting MP3?s and non-DRM iTunes song formats we’ve made managing your music on the fly easy, so you can browse and search by artist, album, or song title. You can also build and listen to playlists and control your listening with skip, shuffle and repeat functions.”

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August 11, 2011
by sjvn01
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Google’s Chrome operating system gets a much needed update

I quite like Google’s Chrome operating system (OS)–a Linux variant that use the Chrome Web browser as its interface–but as it’s being shipping today, Chrome OS has problems. Fortunately, in the latest Chrome OS stable channel release, Google is finally addressing some of these rough spots.

To put it to the test, I installed the new Chrome OS, Chrome version 13.0.782.108, to my Samsung Chromebook. It took a while to install-not the installation itself, that took about a minute-but to get it going. I had to click the update button several times to get things going. I’m not the only one who found that to be the case.

Once installed, everything ran smoothly. While I was making sure nothing had been broken in the update, it occurred to me that one neat thing about Chromebooks is that, more so than with conventional PCs, you don’t need to update your hardware to get major new functionality. With Chrome OS, or any cloud-based operating system, the goodness is baked into the operating system and the Web. Ah, if only that promise had been better kept in this release of Chrome OS.

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August 10, 2011
by sjvn01
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Cisco and Twitter join Linux patent protection pool

In case you’ve been under a rock for the last decade, you might not know that today’s technology wars aren’t over who has the best prices, the most features, or the greatest quality. No, in 2011, instead of working on innovating, tech. giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle, are now wasting their resources on intellectual property (IP) lawsuits. So, perhaps it should come as no surprise that networking powerhouse Cisco and social networking force Twitter, is joining the Linux patent protection group, the Open Invention Network (OIN).

The OIN was formed in 2005 by IBM, Sony, Philips N.V. and Linux distributors Red Hat Inc. and Novell. Then, as now, the group was created to defend Linux from patent trolls and other attacks from patent holders. It tries to do this with its own patents which are then available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux. While it hasn’t been done, these patents could also, in theory, be used by the OIN, or an OIN member, against a hostile company in a patent war.

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