Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 21, 2011
by sjvn01
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OpenSUSE 11.4: A blast from Linux past

I’ve liked openSUSE since before it was named openSUSE and went by the unlikely name S.u.S.E Linux 4.2 back in 1996. It’s come a long, long way since then. Today, this Novell-supported community Linux distribution makes both a strong, server and desktop. For all that, though I’ve found in this go-around some fit and polish issues.

To test it out, I put openSUSE 11.4, on two computers. The first was a Gateway SX2802-07 desktop. This PC uses a 2.6GHZ Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300 processor and has 6GBs of RAM and a 640GB hard-drive and was being wasted doing nothing but serving as a full-time Windows PC. The other was VirtualBox 4.04 VM (virtual machine) running on my Mint 10 desktop. Behind the VM was a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

Neither of these are exactly screamingly fast PCs. I’d characterize them as inexpensive, older PCs. You’d almost have to try hard to get slower PCs in today’s market. That said, openSUSE 11.4 ran like a top on both of them. I especially noticed on the Gateway PC, which I’d been using for Web browser benchmarking on Windows 7, just how much faster openSUSE is than Windows 7. It was like moving from a family sedan to a sports car.

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March 21, 2011
by sjvn01
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Microsoft vs. Android

It’s pretty clear that Microsoft, a many-time failure at mass-market tablets has decided that if they can’t beat Apple and Android at popular tablets, they’ll sue them instead. That’s my only explanation for Microsoft suing Barnes & Noble, Foxconn, and Inventec over their Android e-readers.

Microsoft, we now know, from Microsoft’s Horacio Gutierrez, Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property & Licensing, that Microsoft was trying to win by litigation even before Microsoft commercially released Windows 7 tablets. Gutierrez wrote, “We have tried for over a year to reach licensing agreements with Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec. Their refusals to take licenses leave us no choice but to bring legal action.”

Now, I’m no lawyer nor am I a patent expert, but Microsoft’s patents strike me as the kind of bogus software patents that are a perfect example of why software patents are a horrible idea. The patents cover such “patentable” ideas as “Loading Status in a Hypermedia Browser Having a Limited Available Display Area” and “Selection Handles in Editing Electronic Documents.”

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March 21, 2011
by sjvn01
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Four Reasons Firefox 4 can make a go of it–And one reason why it can’t.

In 2004, Internet Explorer (IE) 6 was already a security nightmare but since Microsoft has stomped all over Netscape and alternative browsers like Mozilla, now SeaMonkey, and Opera had little traction, Windows users pretty much stayed with IE… until Firefox appeared. It was a breath of fresh air. IE users concerned with security and open-source fans quickly flocked to the new Web browser, and over time others followed. But, in the last few years, Firefox lost some of its luster. Can Firefox 4 restore it?

Now that Firefox 4 has been released a day early, albeit after months of delays, I asked myself if Firefox 4 really was, not just better than the Firefox 3.6.x series, but it’s more serious competitors: IE9 and Chrome 10.

To see how it would do I’ve been running the Firefox 4 betas, release candidates, and just now the final, on Windows 7 SP1, Windows XP SP3, and the Mint 10 Linux distribution. For XP and Windows 7, I used a Gateway SX2802-07 desktop. This PC uses a 2.6GHZ Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300 processor and has 6GBs of RAM and a 640GB hard-drive. For my Linux Firefox box, I used a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB drive. This is what I found.

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March 21, 2011
by sjvn01
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AT&T & T-Mobile: Already Married in Technology

The news that AT&T was going to buy T-Mobile for a cool $39 billion surprised, and even shocked, a lot of people. I don’t know why. AT&T and T-Mobile have been working together technically and operationally for years.

As Glenn Fleishman, wireless networking expert, points out in his latest blog, “One of the dirtiest barely secrets of the modern mobile cell world is that AT&T doesn’t really have national 2G coverage, much less 3G. AT&T leans on T-Mobile for a large number of areas it never spent to cover. This stems from an agreement years ago when AT&T Wireless consolidated on GSM service, and T-Mobile was building out its initial GSM service. In 2004, the companies dissolved a cooperative agreement (when Cingular bought what was then AT&T Wireless), but roaming never disappeared.”

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March 18, 2011
by sjvn01
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Oh my God! Porn is officially on the Internet!

Can you believe it! There’s porn on the Internet!

Cue Avenue Q’s The Internet is for Porn.

What really happened was that after a decade-long fight, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), at the close of its 40th public meeting in San Francisco finally approved the .XXX top-level domain (TLD http://www.icmregistry.com/news/welcomeapproval.php). According to a PC Magazine report, Peter Dengate Thrush, a New Zealand lawyer and chairman of ICANN, announced today, March 18th, that ICANN had finally approved this red-light district TLD.

If you think this was done with the approval of the adult entertainment industry, you’d think wrong. They hate it. According to a press release by the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade association, FSC Executive Director Diane Duke said, “”Over the past seven years, we have tried to communicate the adult industry’s opposition to .XXX at every opportunity, using every means and forum available. We have participated in public comment periods, letter writing, conversations with stakeholders, and testimony at ICANN’s public meetings. All three of the world’s only existing adult-trade-associations have issued statements in opposition to .XXX.”

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March 17, 2011
by sjvn01
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Does Google’s Android violate Linux’s Copyright?

Does Google’s Android smartphone and tablet operating system violate Oracle’s patents? Who knows. I’m no software patent lawyer, but I cover intellectual property (IP) lawsuits far too often and I expect it will be years before the courts decide, or, as is more likely Google and Oracle will come to a licensing agreement. But, now one attorney is claiming a much more clear-cut IP law violation: Android violates Linux’s copyrights.

Edward J. Naughton, an IP attorney and partner at the international law firm Brown Rudnick, building on the work of Ray Nimmer, a copyright law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, claimed that when Google built Android around Linux and its GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), that “a key component of Android–the Bionic Library [which] is used by all application developers who need to access the core functions of the Linux operating system. Google essentially copied hundreds of files of Linux code that were never meant to be used as is by application developers, ‘cleaned’ those files using a non-standard and questionable technical process, and then declared that the code was no longer subject to the GPLv2, so that developers could use it without becoming subject to copyleft effect that would normally apply to GPLv2-licensed code taken from the Linux kernel.”

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