Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 6, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Microsoft’s coming heart-attack moment

I’ve been saying for a while now, ever since it became clear just how dreadful Vista was going to be, that Microsoft was starting its long, slow decline. Now, others are jumping on the dump-on-Microsoft bandwagon.

Most damning of all, Goldman Sachs has downgraded Microsoft from “buy” to “neutral,” spit on the company’s feeble mobile computing efforts and suggested that Microsoft divide itself into consumer and enterprise divisions .

It couldn’t happen to a nicer company — well except for Oracle. Microsoft got to the top not by delivering great products — ever — but by Bill Gates’ white-shark approach to business competition. Even after the Department of Justice slammed it with an antitrust suit, weak enforcement left Microsoft to continue on its way. It was only after Gates left on July 1, 2008, that the company started to lose its mojo.

The first mistake was picking Steve Ballmer as CEO. Ballmer was then, is now and always will be a fine business-to-business salesman. That’s it. As I write this story, in early October, Microsoft has a market cap of $206.91 billion. That’s well behind Apple’s $ 254.56 billion. If you had asked anyone in the summer of 2008 whether Apple would be worth almost $50 billion more than Microsoft, they would have laughed themselves silly. No one, least of all in Redmond, is laughing now.

More >

October 6, 2010
by sjvn01
4 Comments

ITworld Review: Dropbox on Linux

Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud services that lets you store, sync, and share files over the Internet. And, with some work, you can use it on your favorite Linux desktop as well.

iles on your desktop PC, your laptop, your iPhone, your … you get the idea. That’s where programs such as Dropbox come in. With these programs, you can back up your files, share them with friends, and keep all your devices in sync. Of this software class, Dropbox is especially popular.

It’s easy to understand why. Dropbox may be simple, but even your aunt Agatha who has trouble understanding the difference between what’s on her PC and what’s on the Internet can use it. Indeed, that’s part of Dropbox’s charm. From a user’s viewpoint, it just looks like another folder. It just happens to be a folder that almost any computer or device you use can access.

Unlike many such programs, Dropbox can be used with Windows, Macs, iPhones, Android-based devices, and, oh yes, Linux.

Since I use all those platforms, but mostly Linux, I really liked this idea. I’m always needing access to one file or another. Google Docs is fine for sharing the gist of word processor files and the like, but if I want to reference a PDF, I’m out of luck. Enter Dropbox.

More >

October 6, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Take that Microsoft: IE drops below 50%

For everyone who ever thought that once Microsoft had a market by the throat that it would never lose significant market-share, I present the news that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s share of the world Web browser market has dropped to 49.8%. Finally!

While the Department of Justice couldn’t bust Microsoft’s Web browser monopoly even though it had won its anti-trust suit against Microsoft, open-source software is finally cracking Microsoft’s once iron-grip on Web browsers. First, Firefox, and more recently Google with its Chrome Web browser have managed to pry Microsoft’s fingers from around the users’ throat.

They did it the old-fashioned way. They delivered better products.

More >

October 5, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

The Upside of Moving to IPv6

OK, you know your business will need to move to IPv6 for its Internet connection real soon now, but are there any reasons other than sheer necessity to make the move? As it happens there are.

First, let’s get the basics out of the way. What are the differences between IPv6 and IPv4? IPv4, with its 32-bit addressing, has all of the 4.3 billion unique addresses. That sounds like a lot until you start considering that you might have an iPad in your brief-case, a computer in front of you, and a PC in front of you, all of which may have a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. With IPv6’s 128 bits worth of possible addresses, that’s 2 to the 128th power, until our dogs and cats are also carrying around a baker’s dozen of Internet connected devices, we should be safe from running out of IPv6 addresses.

More >

October 4, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

The OpenOffice fork is officially here

It’s not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn’t going to be having anything to do with it.

When The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, the group wanted to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project and make significant improvements to OpenOffice, such as adding Microsoft OpenXML format compatibility to the program. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they’d place LibreOffice in next spring’s update of Ubuntu.

There were only two major companies that didn’t jump to support LibreOffice: IBM and Oracle. IBM’s Robert Sutor, VP of Open Systems and Linux, told me that IBM was taking a wait-and-see approach to LibreOffice. Oracle told me nothing. Until now.

In an e-mail note, Oracle public relations stated: "With more than 100 million users, we believe OpenOffice.org is the most advanced, most feature-rich open-source implementation and will strongly encourage the OpenOffice community to continue to contribute through www.openoffice.org,"

As for The Document Foundation’s offer for Oracle to work with them on streamlining and improving the OpenOffice development process: "The beauty of open source is that it can be forked by anyone who chooses, as was done [by The Document Foundation]. Our sincerest goal for OpenOffice is that it becomes more widely used so, if this new foundation will help advance OpenOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF), we wish them the best."

In other words, the fork is official now. Oracle won’t work directly with The Document Foundation, so LibreOffice is now a de facto OpenOffice fork. Let the coding begin and the best program win.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

October 4, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

NAT won’t save you from the need to switch to IPv6

Once upon a time, anyone could get a static Internet Protocol (IP) Class C /24 address. That meant you got 256 addresses, well actually since .0 and .255 are set aside, and one address was assigned to your gateway you actually had 253 addresses. But that was more than enough for most small businesses. That was then. This is now.

Today, ISPs don’t hand out Class C /24 addresses to just anyone. Instead, you’ll need to ask for one, and you’ll probably pay extra for it. Today’s SOHO default seems to be a Class C /30. That will give you 8 addresses, with again only five of them actually being usable. Yes, all your devices on that network can get to the Internet via NAT (Network Address Translation), but NAT is no more a permanent fix than using duct tape to seal a gas tank leak.

Sure, it will work fine for you for today, but what about tomorrow when you need more addresses? In the long run, as John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) explained, “Although NAT works fine for a single enterprise, ISPs know that NAT can’t be scaled indefinitely on the scale that they would require to continue to connect customers just via IPv4. This is why they’re looking to IPv6 to connect new customers. And while some carrier-scale NAT (between IPv6 and IPv4) will be used during transition to IPv6, we need to focus on making public web sites IPv6 reachable in order to keep the Internet running over the long-term.”

More >