Practical Technology

for practical people.

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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May 4, 2011
by sjvn01
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Is Mono dead? Is Novell dying?

Well, that didn’t take long. I had thought that after Attachmate bought Novell it would be keeping its open-source teams working. Indeed, Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn had told me that, “Business will operate as usual.” While Attachmate will be keeping SUSE Linux as a spin-off company, Mono, the open-source implementation of Windows’ .NET, is being shut down and there have been hundreds of additional Novell layoffs. So much for business as usual.

In a statement, Hawn told me, “We have re-established Nuremburg [Germany] as the headquarters of our SUSE business unit and the prioritization and resourcing of certain development efforts–including Mono–will now be determined by the business unit leaders there. This change led to the release of some US based employees today. As previously stated, all technology road-maps remain intact with resources being added to those in a manner commensurate with customer demand.”

At this time, I do not know what other development efforts are being put on the back-burner. Nor, do I know if Miguel de Icaza, the founder and driving engine of Mono, has been let go. I’ve send several requests for comments to him, but I haven’t received a reply. De Icaza, who is usually very outspoken, has also not tweeted nor written on his blogs about the fate of Mono and his own future with Novell. My understanding is that all of the Mono team, approximately 30-individuals, have been let go.

The Salt Lake City KSL television station reports that, “Novell Inc. laid off hundreds of employees Monday from its Provo office, just days after the company was sold, according to employees.” Under Attachmate’s rule, Provo was to be Novell’s headquarters.

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