Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 19, 2010
by sjvn01
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Five Important Video Formats You Must Know

There are hundreds of Internet video formats, but fortunately for you, you can ignore most of them.

It’s all too easy to get tangled up in the seemingly endless number of video formats on the Web. Fortunately for all of us, there are only a handful that you’re likely to need to view or use.

There are several reasons why there are so darn many of them. Number one on my list is the sheer number of possible displays and the standards that come with them. To take just one example you might think that all standard definition TVs are the same. You’d be wrong.

Even something as simple as frame rate, the number of images per second, comes with four different standards. These are PAL (Phase Alternate Line), which is used in the UK and most of Europe, Asia, and Australia and SECAM (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire) is used in France and Francophone Africa ) both of which require 25 frames per second. Then, there is NTSC (National Television System Committee, which is used in most of the Americas and Japan), which demands 29.97 frames. But at the same time, film is shot at the slower still frame rate of 24 images per second.

On top of that, video displays can also be interlaced or progressive. With interlacing, which is used in ordinary OTA (over the air) U.S. television, the horizontal scan lines of every frame are split into a pair of fields and a broadcast alternative refreshes one set of lines after another. With progressive, all the scan lines are updated every time. The advantage of interlaced is that you can squeeze video into a narrow frequency while with progressive you get a sharper picture with fewer artifacts.

Oh, and did I mention that the number of those horizontal scan lines varies from standard. Your old analog TV in the U.S. displays 480 lines of interfaced video, or 480i. A television of the same vintage in the UK would show the same episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle in 576i.

But enough of that. I’m not even going to touch on resolution, data compression, and all the other things that makes working with video across platforms and devices such a complicated mess. For practical purposes, if you want to do more with them, look to FFmpeg for those of you who are technically minded. If all you want to do though is to translate one common video format to another then what you want is HandBrake.

That said, let’s say you want to view videos, what are the formats you’re going to need to deal with?

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July 19, 2010
by sjvn01
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Can Windows kill the Internet?

I’ve long thought that someday Windows security problems could end up fouling up the Internet for everyone. That day may be arriving.

That’s not just me being paranoid about Windows. That’s the ISC (Internet Storm Center), the group that tracks the overall health of the Internet, wondering whether the newly discovered ‘LNK” exploit might be used to slam the brakes on the Internet’s high-speed traffic.

According to Lenny Zeltser, an ISC security consultant, the ISC has “decided to raise the Infocon level to Yellow to increase awareness of the recent LNK vulnerabilityand to help preempt a major issue resulting from its exploitation. Although we have not observed the vulnerability exploited beyond the original targeted attacks, we believe wide-scale exploitation is only a matter of time. The proof-of-concept exploit is publicly available, and the issue is not easy to fix until Microsoft issues a patch. Furthermore, anti-virus tools’ ability to detect generic versions of the exploit have not been very effective so far.”

The LNK vulnerability is an obnoxious little security hole that’s present in all versions of Windows from Windows 2000 on up. There are now numerous attack programs that can use a malicious shortcut file, identified by the “.lnk” extension, to automatically run malware. All a user has to do is view the contents of a folder containing the infected shortcut, and, ta-da, the program is wreaking havoc.

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July 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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RIP OpenSolaris

Goodbye, OpenSolaris. It’s been fun knowing you. Unfortunately for you, it’s become all too clear that your new parent company, Oracle, doesn’t want a thing to do with you.

I predicted that Oracle, which is a Linux company, was going to let OpenSolaris die from neglect, but most people disagreed with me. Folks insisted that Solaris was better than Linux and that Oracle would never let OpenSolaris die.

Sorry, folks. I may not be right a lot of the time, but I was right on this one. By April of this year, the OpenSolaris Governing Board had seen the handwriting on the wall. Or, to be more exact, they saw that Oracle wasn’t even giving them the time of day.

Now, since Oracle has continued to ignore them, some members the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) are demanding that Oracle at least appoint a liaison to OpenSolaris’ leadership by Aug. 16, or they’ll disband the board.

I bet that “threat” has Oracle shaking in its boots. Oracle wants nothing more than OpenSolaris to vanish from the landscape. According to the OGB’s minutes, Jeb Dasteel, Oracle Senior VP and Chief Customer Officer, who never showed up for meeting, is reputed to have indicated that “The bottom line is that Oracle don’t have any information to pass on and that they’d like us to wait a couple of months before we make any moves to disband.”

I would have just killed the organization then and there myself — an option that was considered. Instead, the OGB has decided, rather forlornly, to give Oracle more time to ignore them before pulling the plug. As Simon Phipps, formerly Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer and member of the OGB, points out: “It became obvious to the OGB quite some time ago that Oracle is not interested in the sort of OpenSolaris open source community that the [OpenSolaris] Charter envisages.”

Exactly. It’s over. OpenSolaris’ only real future is as a fork, which would not be easy to pull off. Still, with enough interest from developers it could be done.

I’ve always had serious doubts about OpenSolaris’ future. By the time the “supported” version appeared in 2008, Linux wasn’t just established; it was already chasing Solaris, OpenSolaris’ commercial big brother, out of server rooms. And that was with Sun’s support.

Looking ahead, I doubt very much that OpenSolaris could be anything than it is already: a niche operating system. Yes, I know the arguments for why OpenSolaris is better than Linux. I also know the market hasn’t cared. In addition, for every OpenSolaris developer, they’re probably two dozen Linux developers. On the commercial front, Red Hat and IBM have just launched a new campaign to get people to move to Linux from OpenSolaris and Solaris entitled, “Where will you be when the Sun burns out?” Ouch!

OpenSolaris’ future was bleak even if Oracle had cared to support it. Without Oracle, the question for the OpenSolaris community now is where they will go next. I fear it will drop from being a niche operating system to first being an operating system just for hobbyists and then to the computer graveyard with the likes of OS/2. That’s a pity, since there really were great ideas in it and top-notch developers working on it. But, I see nothing else for it. Do you?

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

July 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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Ready or Not: Your Network is Moving to IPv6

You may have avoided moving your network to IPv6 for years, but you won’t be able to put it off much longer. Here’s why you need to plan for a transition.

Every few years there’s another panic about everyone running out of IP addresses. The terror that the Internet would simply run out of room is finally coming true. It’s not so much that computers are consuming the IP addresses; it’s all those smartphones, iPads, and other devices that require Internet access.

The Number Resource Organization (NRO), the organization that oversees the allocation of all Internet number resources, announced in January 2010 that less than 10% of available IPv4 addresses remain unallocated.

“It is vital that the Internet community take considered and determined action to ensure the global adoption of IPv6,” Axel Pawlik, chairman of the NRO, said in a statement. “The limited IPv4 addresses will not allow us enough resources to achieve the ambitions we all hold for global Internet access.”

IP addresses are allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which in turn is run by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). IANA distributes IP addresses to regional Internet registry (RIRs) who issue these addresses to ISPs and from the ISPs to you. “This is the time for the Internet community to act,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and CEO. “For the global Internet to grow and prosper without limitation, we need to encourage the rapid widespread adoption of the IPv6 protocol.”

When the Internet began (then called APRPANet), IPv4’s possible 32-bit 4.3 billion addresses looked like it would be more than enough. That was then. This is now.

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July 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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OpenSUSE 11.3: The Linux distribution for KDE lovers

I’ve been using SUSE Linux since its start in 1994 and then, as now, I like this strong desktop Linux distribution. Of course, openSUSE 11.3, the latest version, doesn’t look a lot like that vintage Slackware variant, but one thing has remained the same. Today’s OpenSUSE is a Linux for users, not developers or Linux technicians.

In particular, openSUSE 11.3 is the distribution for people who like the KDE 4.x desktop. While openSUSE offers baked-in support for more other desktop interfaces than most Linux distributions, such as GNOME 2.30.1 with a preview of GNOME 3.0 and the lightweight XFCE 4.6.2, it’s really the showcase for the latest in the KDE 4.4.4. While I’m still fond of the older KDE 3.5.x desktop interface, many users are fond of KDE 4.4 and, if you’re one of those people, openSUSE 11.3 is the Linux distribution for you.

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July 13, 2010
by sjvn01
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Windows 7 SP 1: You Don’t Need to Wait

If your business is like many, you’ve been waiting for Windows 7 SP1 before even thinking about moving from Windows XP to Windows 7. But with Windows 7, you haven’t really needed to do that. Out of the box, Windows 7 was ready to go.

Mind you, I say that as someone with little love for Windows. I think Linux makes a better desktop. That said, if you’re sticking with Windows and there was some reason to avoid moving to Windows 7, I’d be the first to say so. Instead, I find myself agreeing with Michael Silver, a research director in Gartner’s client computing group, who said, “The first Service Pack for Windows 7 is not necessary for the operating system’s stability and security readiness.”

Indeed, if you look closely at the Windows 7 SP1 beta, which I have (and you can download the Windows 7 SP1 beta here), you’ll see that – unlike, say, the jump from Windows XP SP 2 to Windows XP SP3 – this is not a significant upgrade. Indeed, Windows 7 SP1 is nothing more than a round-up of previous fixes already delivered through Windows Update.

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