Practical Technology

for practical people.

June 6, 2011
by sjvn01
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Syria’s Internet is back up… for now

On June 3, 2011, Syria turned off its people’s Internet connectivity. Syria’s dictatorship had had enough of its citizens’ self-reporting on the government’s attacks on them. But, then Syria turned the Internet back on. What happened?

As Renesys, an Internet analytics firm, reported, only those sites that belonged to the Syrian government, and not all of them, were still on the net after the shutdown hit on Friday. In particular, “The networks that are not reachable include, substantially, all of the prefixes reserved for SyriaTel’s 3G mobile data networks, and smaller downstream ISPs including Sawa, INET, and Runnet.” In short, the people’s Internet was blocked.

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June 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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Syria shuts down the Internet

What is with Arab dictatorships and their thinking that cutting their people off from the Internet is a good idea? First, it was Egypt. Then, it was Bahrain, and finally Libya gave it a try How’s that working out for you guys? Egypt’s government was overthrown; Bahrain’s ruling family is hanging on thanks to outside support and mercenaries; and Libya’s in the middle of a bloody civil war. All-in-all, trying to cut the people’s communications’ life lines just angers the protesters even more and draws the world’s disapproving attention.

The state-run Syria News site reported earlier today, June 3, 2011, that “The Syrian government has cut off Internet service (3G, DSL, Dial-up) all across the country (Arabic link), including government institutions.” Later the same site reported that the Internet is available across parts of Syria [but that the] “Internet was ‘broken’ in Damascus, Syria’s capital, and Aleppo, and the provinces.”

This sounds to me like the officials are making up their story on the fly. This, in turn, suggests that Syria’s dictatorship hadn’t really thought out the ramifications of turning off the Internet.

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June 2, 2011
by sjvn01
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Browser Wars: Chrome winning, IE losing

The latest NetMarketShare Web browser numbers are out for May 2011, and they show Chrome growing faster than any of the other browsers with Internet Explorer (IE) continuing its slow decline.

I’ve always thought that Microsoft restricting Internet Explorer (IE) 9 to Vista and Windows 7 was a mistake. What I hadn’t realized that even on Windows 7, IE 9 was going to face such an uphill battle for mind share. On Windows 7, where Microsoft unexpectedly started pushing IE9 to users via Windows Update in April instead of June, IE 9 still has only 12.04% of the market.

Indeed, while IE 8 is Windows 7’s number one Web browser with a healthy, but declining 42.51%, Chrome 11, with 14.82%, and Firefox 4 with 14.05% are both ahead of IE 9. If you lump in Firefox 3.6’s numbers, 8.52%, with Firefox 4’s share, Firefox has almost twice as much market share on Windows 7 as does IE 9.

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June 1, 2011
by sjvn01
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Oracle gives OpenOffice to Apache

As I reported on May 31st, 2011, Oracle has, with IBM’s encouragement, given the open-source OpenOffice office suite to The Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

In a statement issued this morning, June 1st, Oracle’s Luke Kowalski, VP of Oracle Corporate Architecture Group, stated that the company was going to “contribute the OpenOffice.org code to The Apache Software Foundation’s Incubator. The company then claims that Oracle is doing this to “demonstrate its commitment to the developer and open source communities. [By] Donating OpenOffice.org to Apache gives this popular consumer software a mature, open, and well established infrastructure to continue well into the future. The Apache Software Foundation’s model makes it possible for commercial and individual volunteer contributors to collaborate on open source product development.”

IBM’s Kevin Cavanaugh, VP of Collaboration Solutions., which lobbied for Oracle to spin OpenOffice off after it became clear that Oracle wasn’t going to put much, if any, resources into OpenOffice, said in a statement, “IBM welcomes Oracle’s contribution of OpenOffice software to the Apache Software Foundation. We look forward to engaging with other community members to advance the technology beginning with our strong support of the incubation process for OpenOffice at Apache.”

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May 31, 2011
by sjvn01
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What the heck is happening with OpenOffice?

This weekend was filled with rumors about the fate of OpenOffice. Oracle essentially abandoned OpenOffice, after The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice fork but rumor has it that IBM wants the project to continue. The big question, which is still unresolved as I write this, is, “How?”

At the moment, almost all of what I have are comments from people close to the matter who are unable to go on the record. That said, here’s my current understanding of what’s going on with OpenOffice.

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May 30, 2011
by sjvn01
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New Linux Kernel, Same as the old Linux Kernel

In 1996, Linus Torvalds released Linux 2.0, and we got symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and we were on our way to Linux supercomputers. In 1999, Linux 2.2 appeared, and Linux made a major move off Intel chip architectures. In 2001, after some delays, Linux 2.4 turned up with great server improvements. And, in 2003, Linux 2.6 showed up, the prototype for modern Linux. So why haven’t we seen a Linux 2.8 or 3.0 in the last few years? I’ll let Torvalds explain:

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