Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 13, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

XP lives! Windows 7 dies?

OK, color me surprised. The last thing I expected from Microsoft was for the company to extend Windows XP’s life for an unbelievable ten-more years. I thought Microsoft might extend XP Home’s life for a while to try to keep Linux-powered netbooks at bay, especially those with Google’s forthcoming Chrome operating system under the hood, but the business XP line? Until 2020!? I never saw that coming.

You see I had though Microsoft was selling a lot of copies of Windows 7. Certainly, that’s what Microsoft has been saying. Last January, Microsoft CEO and chief cheerleader Steve Ballmer had claimed that, “U.S. retail data shows that Windows PC sales jumped almost 50% the week it launched.”On Black Friday, [NPD] reported that retailers sold 33% more Windows PCs than the year before. And for the 2009 holiday season a 50% increase in Windows PC sales from last year. Last year was a tough year, but these are still phenomenal numbers.”

I guess the word we should have been paying attention to in this speech was “tough.” A lot of other people have theories about why Microsoft is doing this. Of them all, I find Preston Gralla’s theory, that Microsoft did it to con… ah “get enterprises to buy Windows 7 now rather than later” to be the most persuasive. But, I don’t quite buy that one either.

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July 12, 2010
by sjvn01
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Will you be taking an e-reader or tablet to school this fall?

When I went to college, there were days I’d carry over 20-pounds of books to school in a backpack. Of course, we had it tough back then, “We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick the road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit’ bread knife.”

Seriously, though, textbooks were, and still is, a major pain to the back, not to mention hurting my wallet. That’s changing now. The rise of e-readers, like the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook and, what I see e-readers’ replacements, tablets like Apple’s iPad, the Cisco Cius and the upcoming wave of Android Linux powered tablets will replace textbooks.

You can already use tablets to highlight sections in your e-books and add notes to them. It’s a bit clumsy though now. Barnes & Noble wants to make it easier.
In its just announced NOOKstudy program study, this application will integrates instant eTextbooks downloads with support for searchable lecture notes, the class syllabus, color slides and images, and other course-related documents, and more. If all goes well with the closed beta testing, you’ll be able to download the free NOOKstudy this fall.

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July 12, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Even as SCO dies, the company lies

This would be funny if only there weren’t people out there who are fool enough to believe in any anti-Linus lie. I mean, how dead does SCO have to be before its anti-Linux FUD finally disappears into the history books? It’s not dead enough yet it seems.

In the latest revival of SCO’s long disproved claims that there’s Unix in Linux, Kevin McBride, brother to SCO’s ex-CEO’s Darl McBride, claims in the comments to a post on the Lanham Act on his law firm’s Website that, “after careful review of all these issues, … Linux DOES violate UNIX copyrights, particularly in ELF code and related tools (debugger code, etc.), header file code wherein implementation code (not just the header interface) have been copied verbatim; STREAMS code; etc. that the Linux community use without license. Then there is the entire question of the overall structure and sequence of Linux being almost an exact copy of UNIX.”

McBride goes on to write, “There was MUCH more submitted in the SCO v. IBM case that I cannot disclose publicly because it is comparison of code produced by IBM under court protective order that prohibits disclosure.” Oh no! Not the old SCO, “We do have evidence but we can’t show it to you!” line.

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July 12, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Have Online Communities become Havens for the Terminally Angry?

Blizzard Entertainment, makers of the wildly popular World of Warcraft online game recently started an online forum tempest when they decided to start showing users’ online account names when they posted messages to their game forums. Blizzard explained they were making this change to their online forums because their “forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild.”

No? Really?

It’s not just Blizzard’s forums though. Almost every forum I know that allows anonymous comments is filled to overflowing with abusive nonsense. Whether it’s GoComics (http://www.gocomics.com/); local newspaper online forums; social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit; developer mailing lists, or, alas, my own blogs and Web sites, all too often instead of intelligent conversation about the subject du jour I find non-stop ranting, sweating, and insults. Oh, and the occasional bit of spam.

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July 8, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Dumb and Dumber PC problems

So, there I was, trying to get an e-mail client, Evolution, set up on my faithful old ThinkPad R61 laptop and I was going nowhere fast. I’d decided to use Mint 9, the latest version of an Ubuntu Linux-based distribution and that had all gone perfectly well. So, why was a simple e-mail set up giving me fits? After hours of tinkering with it, and more swearing than I usually do in a month, I sat back, had a drink, and … remembered that I had reset that particular e-mail account’s password back in June.

I was such an idiot.

When it comes to computers we can all be dummies sometimes. I don’t mean the kind of basic computer stupidity such as a naïve Windows user who doesn’t install an anti-virus program on their PC. What I’m talking about is when people who really do know better make a dumb mistake.

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July 8, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Once around the Web with Firefox 4 Beta 1

I want, I really want Firefox to become a top-of-the-line Web browser again. It was Firefox, after all, that broke IE’s (Internet Explorer) strangle-hold on Web browsers. Even Microsoft owes Firefox some gratitude. If Firefox hadn’t pushed Microsoft into making IE into a decent Web browser, many of us might still be stuck with crapware like IE 6. Unfortunately, I’m not sure Firefox 4 is going to get Firefox back into competition with IE 8, much less, what I see as today’s leading Web browser, Google’s Chrome 5.

You see, Firefox has been getting a little long in the tooth. Like other software programs that haven’t aged well, Firefox has accumulated more features, which has led to bloated, slow performance. So the good Firefox developers at Mozilla have decided to give Firefox a facelift.

Firefox’s new interface, which is now only available on Windows 7 or Vista, consists of a single large orange button that gives you access to the rest of the browser’s controls. I’ve used it on one of my test Windows 7 boxes — a Dell Inspiron 530S, with a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor, an 800-MHz front-side bus, 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set. It ran quite well on this system. Its speed was comparable to the latest shipping version of Firefox 3.6, and that’s no small feat for beta software. Still, when all was said and done, the interface left me cold.

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