Practical Technology

for practical people.

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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March 16, 2011
by sjvn01
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Red Hat turns on Oracle and other Red Hat Linux clone-makers

Red Hat has decided it’s no going to be Mr. Nice Linux anymore for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone makers such as Oracle and CentOS . Sure, in open-source, you share the code. That’s rule one. But, that doesn’t mean you need to make it easy for your rivals.

What Red Hat has done, for the last several months, is release its version of the Linux kernel with all its own patches incorporated into the RHEL code. Before that, pre-RHEL6, which was released in November 2010, Red Hat released the vanilla Linux code with its improvements and fixes in separate patches. This method made it very easy for an Oracle or another Linux distributor to see exactly what Red Had had done and thus made it easy for them to pick and choose which patches they’d adopt. Now, it’s much harder both to do this and to copycat RHEL.

As Joe Brockmeier aptly put it, “It’s sort of like asking someone for a recipe for the family’s chocolate chip cookies, and getting cookie batter instead.” Sure you can tease out what the ingredients are, but it’s not easy.

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March 15, 2011
by sjvn01
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I want my iPad at work!

Does it seem to you that everyone and his brother wants to bring his own gear into the office now? You’ve got people wanting to bring their Apple iPads to work, users who want to use their iPhones or Android Droid 2s instead of their company-supplied Blackberries as their smartphone, and someone out there has surely tried to bring an Xbox 360 and Kinect to work for … uh … three-dimensional motion analysis? Yeah! That’s the ticket!

OK, so maybe no one has tried, successfully, to get an Xbox and Kinect into the office, but people are always trying to bring their tech toys to work. As Patrick Thibodeau tweeted from this year’s Computerworld Premier 100 conference, “CIOs who don’t support employee-owned devices, smartphones, iPads, etc., may be a minority: i.e. dinosaurs.”

This isn’t just talk. According to Nielsen’s latest smartphone market research, RIM is currently in a marketing-share dead heat with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, but it’s losing ground. Forty-three percent of recent smartphone buyers purchased an Android device, compared to 26% for Apple iOS and 20% for RIM’s Blackberry.

Of course, some companies, such as Wells Fargo, just say no to all personal phones and tablets. They seem to be in the minority, though.

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March 14, 2011
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu Linux and GNOME: The Disputes continue

Linux is the supercomputer operating system of choice; thanks to Android, Linux is becoming the most popular smartphone operating system of them all;and Linux continues to make gains in the server market. But, when it comes to the desktop, no matter how you measure it, Linux has never how more than a tiny share of the desktop market. Why? Well, I can give you lots of reasons, but one that Mark Shuttleworth founder of Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has pointed out that there’s a lot of disorganization and disorder in Linux desktop developer circles.

The specific problem that started the current discussions roiling the Linux desktop waters was explored by Dave Neary, a member and former director of the GNOME, in a commentary on how Canonical and Ubuntu people claimed that “We offered our help to GNOME, and they didn’t want it.”

The technical problem behind the dispute is that GNOME rejected the Ubuntu Ayatana system status indicators. These indicators, and their messaging application programming interfaces (APIs) would be used on the Linux desktop to convey such information as “Whether you are connected, what the time is, whether you are online, whether your battery will last long enough for you to finish your work, whether you have messages,” etc. etc.

I think we can all agree that this is useful information for desktop users. The devil, as usual, was in the hard work details of getting it to work.
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