Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 22, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Windows 7? On ARM Tablets? I don’t think so!

You’ve got to be kidding me. First, Bloomberg and then the Wall Street Journal reported that at CES next month, Microsoft will unveil a full-featured version of Windows that runs on ARM processors. The expectation is that it will be used in tablets… in 2013.

2013!? Come on, would someone please fire Ballmer already. I have no love for Microsoft, but if this is true, this has got to be the dumbest plan I’ve heard from Microsoft since 1995’s Microsoft Bob.

As Eric Lai explains, there are several ways that Windows on ARM could play out. I don’t think any of them can work though.

The only reason for Microsoft to bring Windows 7, Windows 8, or whatever to ARM is to put it on a tablet. The best existing fit would be Windows Phone 7, but the story being spun by Microsoft rumor spiders seems to be that this will be bigger and better than Windows Phone 7.

Excuse me as I roll my eyes. Microsoft has always promised that their next big operating system will be the greatest thing ever. The business reason for this is to try to freeze the market. Ideally, a customer goes: “Oh, I can’t buy WordPerfect today; Word 6.0 next year will be sooo much better.” This tactic worked for decades, which is why the younger among you will never have even heard of WordPerfect, much less used it.

That was then. This is now.

More >

December 22, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Changing DNS probably won’t help your Video Streaming

When I first read that some Apple TV users were seeing significant speed-ups when they start using a local ISP Domain Name System (DNS) server instead of continuing to use one of the universal DNS services, such as OpenDNS, DNS Advantage,or Google Public DNS, my first thought was, “That’s wrong.”

I understand their logic that “When millions of users all tap into the same DNS server addresses to resolve domain names, as Google DNS does by design, Akamai and other CDNs [Content Delivery Networks] route content to those users along the same path, preventing the network from working optimally.” The problem is that this isn’t really how the big DNS networks and CDNs work these days.

For starters, this proposed fix starts with the notion that your ISP has a local DNS, hence you’ll get a better, less-crowded route for your video. You probably don’t have a truly local DNS though. The national ISPs like Comcast. Verizon, or ATT, just like the universal DNS services, spread their DNS servers around. In this case, their DNS server isn’t going to be much ‘closer,’ in terms of network distance than Google’s.

More >

December 21, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Free Fonts Forever

When you think open source, chances are you think software. You may not know that there are open-source fonts as well. Today, Google and Ubuntu have released a new free, open font to the Web: the Ubuntu Font Family.

Web developers will be able to use Google Font API to select the Ubuntu fonts from the Google Font Directory. With these fonts embedded on the page, Web visitors will always see the text and fonts as intended. It doesn’t matter what Web browser or operating system visitors are using, or even if the font is not installed on their PC, smartphone, or tablet, they’ll see the fonts you’ve selected for them. The new Ubuntu Font Family debuted in Ubuntu 10.10 release and is also available for download from the Ubuntu Font Family site.

These fonts really are open. They were developed by Dalton Maag font foundry and are free to be shared, sold, bundled and built upon. This release includes Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek support, and future versions will include support for Hebrew and Arabic.

More >

December 20, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Linux rules the Clouds

Color me surprised. I knew that Linux, while still only a niche player on the desktop, was continuing to do well on the server and was doing even better than ever on the cloud. What I hadn’t realized was just how much better Linux, and in particular, Canonical’s Ubuntu, was doing on in the market place.

Before I’d seen The Cloud Market’s analysis of operating systems on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), off the cuff I would have guessed the leading operating system on the top cloud platform would have been Red Hat and its close relatives, CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and Fedora. Boy was I wrong.

Today, December 20th, Ubuntu is running 4,840 instances on EC2, followed by CentOS, with 1,250, Fedora with 313; Oracle with 80; and Red Hat with a mere 73 instances. That’s a grand total of 1,716 for the Red Hat family, which means that Ubuntu is doing more than twice as well as all the Red Hat variants put together.

Windows and Azure? They’re back in the back with a mere 1,120 instances.

More >

December 20, 2010
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Linux on the Cloud: The Ubuntu Way

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has always had many enthusiastic user and developer fans. It’s a different story within the enterprise. Canonical has been trying to improve its business reputation though in both the server and cloud spaces. In particular, according to Neil Levine, Canonical’s VP of Commercial Services, Canonical has been working hard to bring Ubuntu’s well-known ease of use on the desktop to cloud deployments.

A recent xample of this was Canonical and IBM’s launch of a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C database management system. This virtual application can run on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform, in private and public cloud configurations.

DB2 Express-C is IBM’s free community edition of DB2 software. Small businesses and multi-branch companies, as well as developers, can use it as their DBMS platform. DB2 Express-C has all of DB2’s core features and can be used to power in-house DBMS applications, Web 2.0, and SOA-based solutions.

How this can work for an enterprise, said Levine, is “to give large companies a way to get a taste of our low-cost way to try Ubuntu and DB2 on public cloud. If you want to try it, you can.” Then, if you like the experience, you can use a more powerful DB2/Ubuntu stack on either a public or private crowd, “using the same tools and architecture that you’re already using. There’s no need to re-architect it.”

Continue Reading →

December 20, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect Email as much as You might think

If you’re concerned with email privacy, at first glance, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Constitution forbids the U.S. Federal Government from grabbing stored email without a warrant (PDF Link) sounds like great news. And, it is. It’s just not as great as you might think.

What happened in the case was that the government forced an ISP to reveal 27,000 emails without securing a warrant or giving notice to the customer, Steven Warshak. The Sixth Circuit Court held that the seizure violated Warshak’s Fourth Amendment rights because they were allowed to so because of the Stored Communications Act. Ironically, that act was meant to prohibit ISPs and other electronic communication providers from sharing mail or messages without their senders or receivers’ permission.

More >