Practical Technology

for practical people.

April 11, 2011
by sjvn01
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Red Hat’s Future Linux Desktop

San Francisco–Red Hat is the strongest Linux company in the world when it comes to servers, but it has almost no presence on the desktop. That will be changing in 2012 with the reintroduction of a Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE)-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

It’s not that Red Hat has ever completely done away with the Linux desktop. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop is still available, but in the big scheme of Red Hat’s business, the desktop counts for little. That may be changing though as Red Hat gets ready to explore a server-based VDI thin-client desktop.

This revised desktop will use SPICE, which like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Citrix’s Independent Computing Architecture (ICA), is a desktop presentation services protocol. The point of these programs is to let the servers do the heavy lifting while a thin-client gives the user the illusion of a full fat-client desktop.

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April 10, 2011
by sjvn01
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Mission Accomplished: SCO Loses, Groklaw Closes

Eight years ago, SCO, a long-time x86 Unix company, which had recently been bought out by Caldera, a leading Linux business of the day, shocked the IT world by suing IBM for stealing Unix code placing it in Linux. A Linux company suing Linux’s leading enterprise partner!? While SCO/Caldera did have reason to be annoyed at IBM for how they had handled Project Monterrey, an effort to bring IBM’s AIX Unix to the x86 processor, SCO’s Linux lawsuit made no sense–except as an attack by anti-Linux enemies using SCO as a puppet. I, and others, said the lawsuit was nonsense, but at the time .many people still assumed that where there was smoke, there must be fire. Enter Pamela Jones, a Linux-loving paralegal who hated what SCO was trying to do, and so she started to methodically poke holes in SCO’s claims in a legal analysis blog she called Groklaw.

For the next eight long years, Pamela “PJ” Jones used her legal research skills, and the help of numerous others, day by day and claim by claim, to show just how baseless SCO’s claims against IBM, and later Novel, were. She also helped show how Microsoft financed SCO’s seemingly endless lawsuits.

During those years, she was frequently attacked by people who claimed she was an agent for IBM. Her privacy was attacked by so-called journalists. Others claimed, and still claim to this day, that there is no PJ. That’s utter nonsense.

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April 7, 2011
by sjvn01
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How to cut off the Internet the easy way? A Shovel

According to the Guardian, one little old lady in Georgia managed to cut off an entire country, Armenia, from the Internet for five hours Her weapon? A shovel.

No, I’m not kidding.

The story goes that the woman was hunting for copper, which is worth real money these days everywhere, when in mid-dig, her shovel cut the fibre-logic cable which carried 90% of Armenia’s Internet.

Whoops.

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April 7, 2011
by sjvn01
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Why is Microsoft pushing IE 9 out now? Firefox.

Some people may have been surprised when Microsoft started to push Internet Explorer (IE) 9 out early. I wasn’t. Why not? Because Firefox 4 has been kicking the stuffings out of IE 9 in adoption rates.

According to both StatCounter and Net Applications, Firefox 4 is being picked up by users far, far faster than IE 9.

As Asa Dotzler, Mozilla Director of Community Development, recently wrote, “So what explains this disparity? It’s you all. It’s every one of you that downloaded Firefox 4, found it to be awesome, and told all of your friends and family about it. No ad campaign from Microsoft can top that. Keep spreading the word. Firefox answers to no one but you!”

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April 7, 2011
by sjvn01
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Yahoo: The Linux Company

San Francisco–If you know anything about big companies that run Linux, you know Google runs on Linux. Yes, every time you do a Google search you are, in one sense, a Linux user. What far fewer people know is that Yahoo is also a Linux company. Today, at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Sven Dummer, Director of Linux engineering at Yahoo!, explained that 75% of Yahoo’s Web sites and services run on Linux. The rest? It runs on FreeBSD.

While Yahoo isn’t as big as it used to be, it still, according to Dummer, has 100,000s of servers, 640-million users, and over a 1 billion visits a months. According to Netcraft’s list of the most popular Web sites in the world, that’s still good enough to put Yahoo in as the 13th most popular Web site on the globe, or the fourth if you count all the international Google sites as one. In other words, Yahoo is still a player.

So what does Yahoo use? Well, Dummer explained, “Yahoo has its own Linux distribution, YLinux, targeted for out specific needs. It’s based on Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Yes, that’s right Yahoo is another Red Hat customer helping Red Hat become a billion dollar company.

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April 6, 2011
by sjvn01
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20 Years of Linux down, and the best is yet to come

San Francisco–Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, speaking from a wheelchair, opened the 2011 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. This meeting Zemlin said, was for the “leaders of Linux.”

The leaders of Linux aren’t ready to declare victory over Microsoft, Zemlin told me before the presentation, but “We’re beyond the obsession with Microsoft.”

In his presentation, Zemlin amply demonstrated why Linux vendors, developers and users are looking far beyond Microsoft. Zemlin who had had a nasty ski accident, opened his presentation with a clever video celebrating 20-years of Linux history.

From there, Zemlin pointed out that Linux runs everything from air traffic control systems to infotainment systems to nuclear submarines. Linux also powers the $10-billion CERN super collider, the special effects in Avatar. Zemlin also pointed out that Linux-powered stock markets now trade “72% of the world’s equity trades in 2010.” This, I might add, was before the London Stock Exchange went to Linux earlier this year. And of course, there’s been a “complete inversion” in supercomputing. In ten years, the top 500 supercomputers have switched from 96% Unix to 96% Linux.

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