August 5, 2011
by sjvn01
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I think Google+ may just turn out to be the best social network of them all. I also think though that Google+ has a lot of headaches currently and unless you’re ready to deal with them you should stay off Google+ for now.
Here’s my short list of Google+ problems. If you can’t live with any of these: Don’t try to get on Google+ yet. Most of these will be fixed. Keep in mind that some of the potential policy problems may not be changing anytime soon… if ever.
August 4, 2011
by sjvn01
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People debate how “open” various open-source projects all the time. In fact, the very way I made that statement is charged because I didn’t include the phrase “free software.” Sometimes these arguments get more serious though. For example, in VisionMobile, a market research firm, A new way of measuring Openness, from Android to WebKit: The Open Governance Index report the company declared that Android was the least open project they examined. Chris DiBona, Google’s open-source manager, vehemently disagrees.
August 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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Those of us, who’ve known Linus Torvalds over the years, like yours truly, know that Linux’s inventor, Mr. Penguin if you will, is a quiet gentle soul who never raises his voice when something distributes him. Ahem. I lie like a rug. While I have known Torvalds for decades, he’s anything but shy and he never suffers fools gladly. So, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that when Torvalds decided he didn’t like the new version of the GNOME desktop, he didn’t mince any words about it.
It all started in a public Google+ posting by Dave Jones, a Red Hat engineer and one of the maintainers of Fedora Linux, where Jones announced some minor Linux kernel news for a Fedora update. As the discussion continued, Torvalds joined in and remarked, “Could you also fork gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment? I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3.”
He’s not the only one. I also don’t like GNOME 3 either. I much prefer the last version of GNOME 2.x: GNOME 2.32. It may be “out of date,” but it’s the default desktop for my current favorite desktop Linux: Mint 11.
Why? Well, I’ll let Mr. Torvalds tell you:
August 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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Besides search and social networking, Google keeps getting deeper and deeper into the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market. While Google hasn’t opened the doors for anyone in the world to use Google Voice yet, Google has just made it possible for Google Talk users to call land-line and mobile phones around the world.
In a Google blog, Pierre Lebeau, Product Manager, announced, after making “it possible for those of you in the U.S. to call any mobile phone or landline directly from Gmail [last year] and starting today, we are making this [service] available to many more of you who use Gmail outside the U.S. by offering calling in 38 new languages.”
This will enable international users to make phone calls from Gmail, or other Google services such as Google+ that support Google Talk. While you can still call or video-conference with people for free over the Google Talk Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) network, you’ll need to pay if you want to use Google Talk to chat with people on their conventional phones in other countries.
August 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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Cyber-warfare sounds like something from a science fiction novel. It’s not. It’s reality. Cyber-security firm McAfee claims to have uncovered a cyber-espionage campaign that’s been going on for five years against more than 70 public and private organizations in 14 countries.
The campaign, called “Operation Shady RAT” (remote access tool), was described by Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s VP of threat research in a recent blog post: Revealed: Operation Shady RAT. According to Alperovitch, these attacks are major assaults against both countries and corporations.
He writes, “Having investigated intrusions such as Operation Aurora [China’s attack on Google) and Night Dragon (systemic long-term compromise of Western oil and gas industry), as well as numerous others that have not been disclosed publicly, I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact. In fact, I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know. ”
August 2, 2011
by sjvn01
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At long, long last, Windows XP is no longer the number one, end-user operating system. It only took, Microsoft, what? Not quite two years to get desktop users off XP to Windows 7? Well, you could look at it that way, but you’d be wrong.
The truth is that users haven’t been moving from XP to 7 of their own free will. They’ve been moving only because their old XP PCs are finally giving up the ghost. Then, and only then, are they getting Windows 7. Or, are they? If you look closer at Net Applications’ latest end-user Web statistics you’ll see that desktop users are Not moving to Windows 7 in droves.