Practical Technology

for practical people.

November 17, 2010
by sjvn01
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Hulu Plus Arrives

I’m a fan of watching TV over the Internet, so I was pleased to see that Hulu Plus has finally opened its door to anyone. After using it for the last few weeks, as a beta tester though, I’m not as happy with it as I had hoped to be. Darn it.

Part of that is that even with a 20Mbps cable connection and an optimized 802.11n link between my router, a Linksys Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router WRT610N and my Sony BDP-S570 Blu-ray Disc Player I’m still seeing latency and lag at times during evening TV prime time. I’m not surprised. After all, I predicted that this would happen.

You see, Netflix was already gobbling up a lot of bandwidth during those same hours. In all seriousness, that wasn’t leaving a lot of bandwidth for other bandwidth hungry video applications like Hulu Plus. As I’ve said before, there’s not enough last mile bandwidth for Google TV, Apple TV, and Roku’s bandwidth demands.

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November 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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The Linux desktop may soon be a lot faster

Linux is fast. That’s why it’s 90%+ of the Top 500 fastest supercomputers run it. What some people don’t realize though is that Linux is much better at delivering speed for servers and supercomputers than it is on the desktop. That was by design. Over the last few years, though, there’s been more interest in delivering fast desktop performance. And, now, there’s a Linux kernel patch that may you a faster, much faster, desktop experience.

The patch by Linux kernel developer, Mike Galbraith, adds a mere 233 lines of code to the kernel’s scheduler, but it cuts desktop latency down by a factor of ten. Now, that, that’s impressive. It’s almost like getting a new computer.

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November 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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Facebook’s E-Mail Flop

As I watched Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yammer on and on yesterday about Facebook’s new messaging service, which he claimed really and truly wasn’t e-mail, I kept thinking: “Yawn. It’s e-mail, and it’s bad e-mail at that.”

Oh sure, it includes SMS and IM as well, but so what? Other Web-based e-mail systems, like my Gmail account sitting in another window as I write this, have been all-in-one communication centers for years. Heck, back when I was using Lotus Notes and Sametime on a regular basis years ago I could do this. Come on guys, unified e-mail is sooo 1995.

So what does Facebook Messages really bring to the table? I don’t see anything. To quote my wife Clara Boza, a legal marketing consultant, “Why would I want to use Facebook messaging?” Why, indeed. It’s just another damn e-mail account to check.

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November 15, 2010
by sjvn01
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IPv6 basics: Getting started with IPv6

Some people still think they don’t need to worry about the growing shortage of Internet IPv4 addresses and that they need to start thinking about how to migrate to IPv6. Oh boy are they ever wrong.

As I write this in late October 2010, the Internet is officially down to less than 5% of the possible IPv4 addresses. The bad news? It’s actually worse than that, according to the real-time IPv4 Address Report, we’re down to 4%. At this rate, local ISPs and businesses won’t be able to get new IP addresses after January 2012.

That doesn’t mean that Internet addresses won’t be available. They will be. But, as with good domain names, you can expect to start paying a pretty penny for your IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. This won’t matter so long as you or your business doesn’t expand or move, but when you do, as time goes on you can expect to pay progressively more for your new addresses.

When the Internet began, IPv4’s possible 32-bit 4.3 billion addresses looked like more than enough. We didn’t see mobile devices coming or predict that people would start carrying two or three IP devices — smartphone, laptop, tablet, MP3 player, etc. — at once. We could blame Vint Cerf for this vision failure, but it’s too late to play the blame game. It’s time to start working on the problem.

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November 14, 2010
by sjvn01
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Fedora, like Ubuntu, to dump X for Wayland

When I first saw that Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, was dumping the X Window System, which is the networking windowing system that’s the foundation of almost all Unix and Linux graphical desktop, for Wayland, an OpenGL-based display management system, I wondered if other Linux distributors would follow. After all, everyone in Linux graphics circles had one or more beefs with X-too complicated, too slow, too filled with archaic junk and so on. On the other hand, everyone in Unix circles had also been using X since the late 80s, long before Linus Torvalds started work on Linux. Could people really give up X that quickly? You betcha! Fedora, Red Hat’s community distribution, has also decided to start to move to Wayland too.

After the recent Linux Plumbers Conference, a gathering of core Linux developers, Fedora’s “graphics cabal,” Adam Jackson, Kevin Martin, and Dave Airlie decided that while Wayland wasn’t ready yet, with work, Fedora could, and should, use Wayland in place of X for its graphics stack.

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November 12, 2010
by sjvn01
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Here comes the 100GigE Internet

This summer, the IEEE ratified IEEE 802.3ba, which sets down the technical guidelines for 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 100GigE Ethernet. Now, companies and organizations are beginning to deploy these faster than fast optical Internet backbones.

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