Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 18, 2010
by sjvn01
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Real Life ‘Pre-Crime’ Technology

We live in an age of wonders. We can talk and see our friends in the world over the Internet. We live in an age of horrors. Third-world dictatorships are working on atomic bombs. And, we live in age where new miracles and terrors are only a research project away.

Take, for example, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the government agency that brought us the Internet. Now, besides working on bullets that will home in on their targets, EXtreme ACcuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO), DARPA is working on algorithms that can be used to predict when someone is getting ready to commit a crime.

Who needs three mutant pre-cogs ala the movie Minority Report and Philip K. Dick’s short story The Minority Report it was based on, when you have computers? The theory is, given the right algorithms and computers, the government should be able to figure out when “a soldier in good mental health” may become an “insider threat.”

Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales (ADAMS) is still in its Request for Proposal (RFP) days may sound like science fiction, but really, is there anything that’s fictional about it?

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October 14, 2010
by sjvn01
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Five problems Linux still needs to overcome

Big business loves Linux for servers and they seem to like it more than you might expect for the desktop. That said, enterprises still have some concerns about Linux. Here’s the top five as picked by people who responded to The Linux Foundation’s recent corporate and government end-user survey: “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users.”

Before diving into these problems, I’d like to point out something. These are the opinions of business people who, for the most part, are already Linux users. Questions like, whether KDE or GNOME is the better desktop interface or just how cool Ubuntu 10.10 is, matter a whole lot less to them then do to Linux fans or programmers. Instead, they care about how they can use Linux to advance their work. They don’t love Linux for its own sake. They love it because of what it can do for them. That said, let’s get on with their list of concerns in the order they gave them in importance.

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October 14, 2010
by sjvn01
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Five ways for IPv6 and IPv4 to peacefully co-exist

It would have been so easy if the early Internet and TCP/IP network designers had made IPv6 backward compatible with IPv4. They didn’t. In 1981, IPv4’s 32-bit 4.3 billion addresses look more than enough addresses for the ARPANet/Internet. That was the Internet then, this is the Internet now.

Oh, network professionals saw the Internet address shortage coming and knew it would be a problem. I can’t do better than to quote, Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society, who admitted at a June 2009 meeting that “IPv6’s lack of real backwards compatibility for IPv4 was [its] single critical failure.” It’s too late now to cry over spilled standards. We need to work on getting the two fundamental network standards to peacefully co-operate today.

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October 12, 2010
by sjvn01
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Big business go big on Linux

I know Linux is continuing to play a larger and larger role in big business, but it’s always nice to see hard, cold proof that this is true. The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating Linux’s growth, published “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users.” This report shows that Linux is continuing to grab market share from Unix and Windows and it’s doing it more mission critical applications.

Admittedly, the 1,900 people surveyed were both from The Linux Foundation’s Enterprise End User Council as well as other companies and government organizations, but I feel the results still were valid. And, unlike similar surveys, sponsored by proprietary software companies where you have to dig to find out who paid for the research and who’s actually being surveyed, the Linux Foundation comes right out and tells you ”

In particular, the Foundation, and its partner in the survey, Yeoman Technology Group, an engineering and management firm, focused on larger enterprise companies and government organizations–those with $500 million or more a year in revenues or greater than 500 employees.

These businesses are moving to Linux far faster than they are to Windows or Unix. Given that we already know that they’re interested in Linux that’s not too surprising. What was interesting was that conventional wisdom is that Unix users are the most likely to switch to Linux. While it’s true that Unix users are migrating to Linux, it turns out that, by a few percentage points, Windows users at 36.6% are more likely to be heading to Linux than Unix, 31.4%.

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October 12, 2010
by sjvn01
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Netgear gets back into Internet video with Roku

Everyone knows Netgear as, along with D-Link and Cisco’s Linksys, as one of the leading SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) and home networking companies. What’s less well known is that, like D-Link with its Boxee Box, Netgear would like to compete with Apple’s Apple TV and Google’s upcoming flood of Google TV-enabled devices.

The reason why you don’t know about this is that Netgear has, well, flopped at this business with such non-starters as the NTV550 and NeoTV 550. That may change now. Netgear has quietly started selling a Roku XD under its own name at Fry’s.

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October 11, 2010
by sjvn01
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Is Windows Phone 7 really a threat to Android or the iPhone?

Maybe it’s a slow news day. Maybe people want to find nice things to say about Microsoft’s rather dismal recent history. But, for some reason or the other, people actually seem to be excited about Microsoft’s launch of Windows Phone 7. Yawn.

How many times do we have to go through this? Whether Microsoft calls it Windows CE, Pocket PC, or Windows Mobile, Microsoft has never done that well in the mobile device or smartphone space. The company’s market-share has been declining for years. Specifically, Windows Phone’s slice of the market pie has been shrinking fast even before Android started grabbing so much of the smartphone business.

In a way, it’s a shame. From what I can see of Windows Phone 7 in action, it doesn’t look bad. But, it’s too little, too late.

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