Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 23, 2011
by sjvn01
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Openflow: Internet 3.0?

If it’s not broke, then don’t fix it. I may make a living on the cutting edge of technology, but I like that advice. Now, just as we’re finally switching from IPv4 to IPv6 for the Internet’s master protocol, the newly formed Open Network Foundation (ONF) is proposing that we use the OpenFlow as a new standard on how packets are forwarded through network switches and how we’ll manage them.

Was packet switching really broke? Did we need yet another network switch standard? Well, actually, according to the researchers who came up with OpenFlow, we don’t. Instead, according to their 2008 white paper, OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus Networks (PDF Link): “The basic idea is simple: we exploit the fact that most modern Ethernet switches and routers contain flow-tables (typically built from TCAMs [Ternary Content Addressable Memory) that run at line-rate to implement firewalls, NAT [Network Address Translation], QoS [Quality of Service], and to collect statistics. While each vendor’s flow-table is different, we’ve identified an interesting common set of functions that run in many switches and routers. OpenFlow exploits this common set of functions.”

In other words, the OpenFlow researchers wanted to standardize what a lot of network vendors were already doing.

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March 22, 2011
by sjvn01
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Android Linux FUD Debunked

The claims that Android has intellectual property worries from Linux and its Gnu General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2) are rather absurd. After all, Android is a smartphone/tablet optimized Linux. Android may have real legal worries from Microsoft and Oracle, but from Linux? I think not. And, now Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has declared that these claims are so much junk.

In an e-mail to my friend Brian Proffitt, Torvalds declared that the claims that the Android violated the GPL “It seems totally bogus. We’ve always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too.”

Sean Hogle, a technology attorney, agrees. Hogle wrote, “The most objectionable aspect to the Mueller and Naughton blog entries are the wildly exaggerated claims that Android applications will be forced to be licensed under the terms of the GPL in open source code form.”

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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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