Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 11, 2011
by sjvn01
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Canonical switches to OpenStack for Ubuntu Linux cloud

OK, it’s not too surprising that Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has switched to OpenStack for its Ubuntu cloud foundation technology. After all, Canonical started flirting with OpenStack back in February. What is surprising is that Neil Levine, who as Canonical’s VP of corporate services, which included the cloud, has jumped ship to start a new company, Soba Labs.

First, for Ubuntu, OpenStack, and not Eucalyptus will make up the core of the Ubuntu Cloud. The company claims that the current releases of the Eucalyptus-based Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), will not be impacted. Specifically, “Eucalyptus will continue to be a available for download and will be supported by Canonical. This means that customers who have deployed private clouds based on existing Ubuntu releases will continue to receive maintenance, and in the case of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long Term Support) this will continue through to April 2015. Eucalyptus will remain within Ubuntu and will be available for users who prefer this technology. For customers with existing private cloud deployments, Ubuntu will provide tools to automate the migration process to the Ubuntu Server 11.10 release when it is released in October 2011.”

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May 10, 2011
by sjvn01
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Microsoft’s Ballmer $7.7-Billion Skype Blunder

I’m bemused to see that Microsoft’s Grand Poobah Steve Ballmer has blundered yet again. This time, instead of Vista, the operating system that never should have seem the light of day, or Windows Phone 7, the far too little, too late, attempt to play in mobile devices, he’s wasted a cool $8.5-billion (Billion!) on Skype.

Seriously? Ballmer just burned more money than Oracle did on buying Sun for a video-conferencing and Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) company? Come on! The only thing that Skype has over any of the dozens of other video-conferencing and VoIP companies out there is brand recognition and Skype’s brand is not worth $850-million much less $8.5-billion.

I mean, come on, Microsoft already has this technology. They’ve been selling these services in products like Live Meeting and Microsoft Lync, formerly Office Communications Server, for over a decade now. Sure, hundreds of millions of people already know and use Skype, but how long will they now that Microsoft owns it? I think Harry McCracken, well-known writer and editor, hit the nail on the head when he remarked, “Skype to be rebranded as Microsoft Internet Phone Professional Premium 2012 (KIDDING!)” on Twitter. Boy, I wish I had come up with that line. That’s exactly how people will see this deal.

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May 10, 2011
by sjvn01
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Novell will continue to support LibreOffice

While Attachmate has talked a lot about its plans for Novell after it bought Novell, no one saw Attachmate closing down Novell’s Mono programming effort. Indeed, other than cutting Novell’s work-force by 25%, Attachmate has said little concrete about the company’s open-source plans. I have learned from sources though that LibreOffice, the open-source office suite, will continue to receive Novell’s support.

Novell developers were leaders in founding the LibreOffice’s parent organization, The Document Foundation and splitting LibreOffice away from the Oracle sponsored OpenOffice project. Their feeling was that Oracle, as Sun had before it, had been neglecting OpenOffice and letting bugs go unfixed and new features go un-added for far too long.

The LibreOffice project quickly picked up many supporters, but much of the “goodness” in LibreOffice came from work that Novell had already done on its own spin on OpenOffice. This included better support for Microsoft Office’s Open XML formats.

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May 9, 2011
by sjvn01
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World of Warcraft to go IPv6

As June 8, 2011, World IPv6 Day approaches, I’m not surprised to see major ISP and networking vendors getting ready to test out their IPv6 Internet connections. What I didn’t expect was to see Blizzard Entertainment, the publishers of the wildly popular Massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft (WoW), is now supporting IPv6.

With the 4.1 patch to WoW, IPv6 is now an option for WoW players. Of course, to use it, you must first have an IPv6 connection. If you don’t have an IPv6 Internet hook-up, according to a Blizzard employee, the IPv6 connection option will be grayed out.

To play WoW over an IPv6 network, you must use native IPv6. 6To4, a dynamic tunneling method that uses IPv4 unicast over the IPv4 Internet or Teredo, another tunneling technique that in which IPv6 packets are sent as IPv4-based User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets.

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May 9, 2011
by sjvn01
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The Tech Press: We’re not all Arrington Scum

Michael Arrington continues to try to con everyone, including possibly himself, into thinking he does technology journalism. Normally, I ignore the scum of the technology press. Life is too short. Every field has its fakes, its liars and its prostitutes, but every now and again someone, such as Arrington, falls to the bottom and makes such a splash along the way, that I can’t ignore him.

Arrington, for those of who don’t know him, is the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a tech “news” site now owned by AOL. TechCrunch and Arrington are famous gossip-mongers—the National Enquirer if you would—of technology journalism. That’s fine by me. I’m not interested in covering MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe supposed romance with Paris Hilton. More power to you if that’s what floats your boat. After all, there are more readers for that than the kind of things, such as Linux and networking, that I cover.

But, here’s the difference between yours truly, and everyone I know and respect in technology journalism and a Michael Arrington: I don’t own a share of stock in any company that I cover. I don’t get one thin-dime if Red Hat makes a billion dollars. I also don’t make a penny if Microsoft crashes and burns.

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