Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 21, 2010
by sjvn01
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It’s official: Carrier Pigeons are faster than rural Internet

Take 10 carrier pigeons, strap each one with a 30GB USB keys and then race them against a typical rural Internet connection starting from a Yorkshire farm in the United Kingdom. Who do you think will win? Well, I’ll tell you. The pigeons reached their destination, 120 miles away, in an hour and fifteen minutes. The Internet? It hadn’t even delivered a quarter of the 300GB video file.

This was done for fun, but it was also to make a serious point. Outside of major cities, Internet connectivity is still awful. I should know. When I first moved to the Blue Ridge mountains outside of Asheville, NC, I had to go back to a dial-up connection. Yes, there are still places where dial-up is all you can do. Let me tell you right now, 56Kbps sucks dead gophers through rusty tail-pipes.

I then tried satellite Internet. The download speed was much better… when they’d let me get it. My maximum download at “High-Speed 3Mbps” each month was for 10-hours. I went through that in a day. After that my satellite network connection gave me 100-200Kbps. On top of that, the latency was dreadful. When your Internet has to go 22,300 miles, at best, straight up for its first hop even the speed of light begins to feel slow.

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September 21, 2010
by sjvn01
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How to avoid falling into the Twitter security black hole

Twitter has a big problem. A new security design flaw is now being heavily exploited. Here’s what you need to know now.

First, don’t use Twitter. Third-party programs, such as TweetDeck, twhirl, and Twitterfall seem to be immune to the problem.

If you are using Twitter, the security hole will “appear” to be a block of black text. What it actually is though is a tiny JavaScript program. If you even just place your mouse over the text, no need to click, you’ll activate the program. This “mouseover bug” can then launch potentially malicious pop-ups, send you up to third-party sites, or even send out more tweets, thus spreading the problem.

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September 20, 2010
by sjvn01
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Oracle rips Red Hat and ‘sort of’ launches a new Linux

Oracle made a weird announcement at its Oracle OpenWorld love-fest and trade-show. The company announced that it was releasing its own Linux: the Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux.

Funny, and I thought Larry Ellison already had his own Linux, Unbreakable Linux, which Oracle introduced not quite four-years ago. Of course, Oracle Unbreakable Linux wasn’t really Oracle’s Linux. It was Red Hat‘s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with an Oracle Linux logo pasted on the front.

But, this time, Oracle swears its new Oracle Linux is different. The company claims that it’s been optimised for Oracle software and hardware and that Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is faster than RHEL To be precise, Oracle claims its more than 75 percent faster, as shown by Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) performance tests; 200 percent faster at InfiniBand messaging; and is 137 percent faster at solid state disk access than a "Red Hat Compatible Kernel."

Speaking as the guy who designed and ran the very first Linux server benchmarks back in 1999, I’m not impressed by Oracle’s claims. An expert can make any operating system look like the greatest thing since sliced bread and its rival look like a two-day old dead dog.

I’m sure on Sun/Oracle hardware, tuned Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel can beat un-tuned RHEL. So what? It will take more than Oracle’s employees claiming Oracle’s new Linux is great before I buy it.

Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux–what a name!–is based on the stable 2.6.32 mainline Linux kernel. For some reason, a few idiots seem to think this represents a Linux fork. Nope. It doesn’t. When you get past all the hype, Oracle’s new Linux just a Linux distribution that’s been optimized for Sun/Oracle hardware. Specifically, Oracle sees this as their Linux for the company’s Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and high-end, Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) servers.

At the time though, according to Edward Scriven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle will continue to sell its RHEL-compatible Linux under the name Oracle Linux. Still, Oracle insists in its press release that "Existing Oracle Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 customers can easily upgrade to the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. No reinstall of the operating system is required."

What’s more surprising is that Oracle also asserts that "Third-party applications that run on RHEL 5 should run unchanged on Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, while delivering significant performance and reliability improvements for end users."

So what the heck is Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Linux? It sounds to me like it’s just Oracle-branded RHEL that been tuned up for Oracle’s hardware. Color me totally unimpressed.

Oh, according to reports, Ellison claims that Oracle’s new Linux "will be more modern, it won’t be four years behind the mainline, there’ll be lots of timely enhancements from Oracle and the Linux community, and it will deliver much better performance."

OK, riddle me this. How can you be bleeding edge, offer stability for high-end applications, and stay compatible with a Linux that you claim is four-years behind the time? The answer to this conundrum? You can’t.

Ellison also said, "We [Oracle] spend a lot of time finding and fixing bugs in Red Hat Linux, and we have no problem with that–we do that with lots of operating systems."But sometimes when we fix a Red Hat Linux bug, Red Hat can take a very long time before making the fix. We’d fix the bug for our customers, and we’d send the bug off to Red Hat for them to fix, and sometimes the fix would be made very quickly but sometimes not."

Really? You could have fooled me. Both Red Hat and Oracle are leading Linux development companies, and I’ve not noticed Oracle cleaning up Red Hat’s messes. Red Hat does just fine at cleaning up its own code thank you very much.

My take away from Oracle’s announcement is that Ellison hasn’t been able to damage Red Hat nearly as much as he wanted to. So, now he’s resorting to an announcement that’s more noise than news. Sorry Oracle, RHEL’s that been tuned for your hardware and software is interesting, but it’s not much of a new distribution and the way you’re presenting it will only confuse your customers.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

September 17, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Canonical partners with AMI, Dell & Intel

Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company is meeting with engineers and product managers from many top device and computer manufacturers in Taipei, Taiwan on September 24, 2010.

The commercial sponsor of Ubuntu will be hosting its second annual Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) at the Ubuntu Hardware Summit. Companies confirmed as attending include: American Megatrends Inc. (AMI), Phoenix, Compal, Dell, Foxconn, Intel, MSI, Marvell, and Quanta. In other words many of the leading PC, laptop, and tablet players will be there to learn about how to work with Ubuntu on boot time optimizations, hardware enablement, debugging, multi-touch, networking and more.

Why are they coming? I think it’s safe to say these companies wouldn’t be showing up if they weren’t interested in learning how to pre-install and deploy Ubuntu Linux on their devices.

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September 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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VMware is buying Novell

I’m not the least bit surprised that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that VMware will be buying Novell’s Linux business. After all, I suggested that VMware could really use Novell’s SUSE Linux for its future, and I also knew that Novell was in hot and heavy merger and acquisition talks earlier this week. My own sources have also now confirmed that VMware is Novell’s suitor.

I still don’t know those critical questions of how much, when, or any of the rest. According to the WSJ, and this I have been unable to confirm, Novell’s remaining assets, including NetWare, Novell’s old network operating system may end up in the hands of “Attachmate, which is owned by private equity buyout firms, which include Golden Gate Capital and Francisco Partners. Attachmate is a 30-plus year terminal emulation and networking company that could probably do a good job of supporting the last of Novell’s die-hard NetWare customers. In short, this part of the reported deal also makes sense.

Whether VMware will do a good job of taking care of SUSE Linux is another question. VMware CEO Paul Maritz is a former Microsoft powerhouse. Don’t think though that just because at one time he might have been in line for Microsoft’s CEO chair that he’s a good friend of Microsoft these days. When Microsoft rently took out an ad in USA Today urging businesses not to buy long-term VMware licenses, whatever love was left was lost.

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September 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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There will never be an IE 9 for XP

When it comes to Web browsers, I’m a Google Chrome fan. Before that I was a Firefox aficionado. I also thought though that Internet Explorer 8 was a real step forward. I’m also willing to believe that IE 9 will turn out pretty darn good too.

Based on my early play with it, I won’t go as far as Ed Bott does with his praise for IE 9, but I do think Windows 7 users will get a lot out of it. Mind you, I think they should also look at Chrome as well, and Firefox 4 as well. And, if you’re not running Windows 7–say you’re running XP, Vista 64-bit, Mac OS X, or any Linux–you’re not going to have any choice in the matter. IE 9 isn’t available on any of them. No, there won’t even be an IE 9 for Android.

In particular, it’s not now, never has been, and never will be available on XP. For some reason though I keep hearing from XP fans who are up in arms that Microsoft isn’t going to give them IE 9. Get over it already. Or, as Adrian Kingsley-Hughes put it so succinctly, “XP is dead people, time to get used to that.”

Yes, yes, we all know that most people are still running XP. Microsoft knows that too. Why do you think they’re using the IE 9 carrot to try to get people to upgrade to Windows 7?

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