Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 23, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Now what Novell?

There’s nothing like starting a technical conference, like Novell’s BrainShare, off with a bang. Or, in this case telling Elliot Associates’ unwelcome offer of not quite $2-billion for the company that Novell has no interest in selling out, not for that little anyway.

I think this was a smart move by Novell’s management. I think if Elliot Associates were to buy Novell it would end up killing the company and its Linux distributions: SUSE Linux and openSUSE.

Make no mistake about it. A cool $2-billion is a lot of money. But, to quote from the company’s rejection note: “$5.75 per share in cash is inadequate and that it undervalues the Company’s franchise and growth prospects.” I’d agree with that. After all, Novell has almost a billion in the bank.

The more important question is where does Novell, as a business, go from here?

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March 23, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Google takes on China

I know a lot of people thought that Google was just talking tough when it said it was considering getting out of the China market and that they’d never actually do it. Wrong. While Google’s words don’t say that they’re pulling out of China, for all intents and purposes they’ve made a move that squares them off against China’s government.

Sure, all Google is doing is switching its mainland China customers to use the uncensored servers in Hong Kong. Yeah, and what the U.S. has been doing in Afghanistan isn’t a war either; it’s just that there’s all this fighting going on there.

This is more than just Google ‘slapping China’s face. This is Google saying that it will not put up with China attacking it and more than twenty other U.S. companies. This is Google drawing a line in the sand, and saying that we will no longer obey your rules while you attack us and our customers.

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March 22, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

The Linux of Stock Markets

Today’s news that TSE (Tokyo Stock Exchange) has moved to Red Hat’s RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as the operating platform for its next-generation “Arrowhead” trading system shouldn’t come as any surprise. Linux has become the smart stock market’s operating system of choice.

Red Hat has been working with TSE and Fujitsu for some time on the Arrowhead platform. The name of the game, as always with stock markets is to accelerate TSE’s order response and information distribution speeds According to Red Hat, “Arrowhead is designed to combine low latency with high reliability to accommodate diverse products, trading rules and changes within a short time window.”

How short? Red Hat and the TSE claims that Arrowhead can accept ten times more orders per seconds than the previous system with an “order response time of two milliseconds and an information distribution time of three milliseconds. In addition, the solution offers the flexibility to accommodate new trading rules, the ability to be scaled with jumps in system demand and trading growth and expanded security and reliability.”

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March 22, 2010
by sjvn01
6 Comments

Windows 7, Security, and the Trusted Platform Module

Every Windows expert knows that the way to secure a hard drive in Windows 7 is to use BitLocker. To use that feature, though, you need either Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate. But, did you ever wonder how BitLocker manages to lock down data when so much of Windows is vulnerable to attacks? Here’s how Microsoft has managed to make BitLocker easily the most secure part of Windows.

Back in 2001, Microsoft began working on an encrypted security project called Palladium, which soon became known as Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB). While Microsoft has said hardly a word about NGSCB over the last few years, it’s clearly become the basis of Windows 7’s TPM (Trusted Platform Module). In turn, TPM is at the core of BitLocker.

In NGSCB everything on the computer, data and programs, can be encrypted. Only trusted processes can access disk storage, CPU memory space, and main memory. In practice, Microsoft has opted to only make NGSCB security available for BitLocker.

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March 19, 2010
by sjvn01
6 Comments

The New Ubuntu Linux’s five best features

The fothcoming version of Ubuntu Linux, Lucid Lynx, has just gone beta and it’s going to be the most important Ubuntu release in years. I say that not just because it brings numerous important changes to this most popular of Linux distributions but because Ubuntu 10.04 is the next LTS (Long Term Support) edition. As such, is going to be supported for paying desktop customers for the three years and for corporate server users for five years. In other words, this is the edition that’s going to make, or break, Ubuntu’s parent company Canonical’s business future.

And, what will this future look like? Based on my quick look at the beta, the main thrust of this re-design is to make it as friendly as possible to people who aren’t already Linux desktop users.

With that in mind, it should be no surprise that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, has been laying down the law on what going in Ubuntu 10.04. As Shuttleworth said in a discussion over some major changes in Ubuntu’s graphical design, “This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But, we are not voting on design decisions.” As my compadre Brian Proffitt pointed out in IT World, “Shuttleworth is in the right here. Ubuntu and a vast majority of free and open source software projects, including the Linux kernel, have never been democracies. They are meritocracies, and any member of a community that thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. ”

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March 19, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Don’t trust that Web Address!

It used to be e-mail spam, while annoying, wasn’t that harmful. Things have changed. During the last day I received e-mails promising that they contained news about March Madness; Sandra Bullock’s possibly misbehaving husband; and Michael Jackson’s estate making a deal for a mint of money. Every last one of them contained a link to Windows malware.

I know this because, running a Linux system, I could safely visit these bogus Websites and watch Windows malware smack on my PC like bugs on a windshield. Most users though, if they’d clicked on through these links, could have ended up with one or more of the latest and greatest of Windows viruses.

I find this more than a little disturbing. Yes, good anti-virus protection will stop most of the attackers. But, by the very nature of these ever-evolving threats, anti-virus software is always playing catch-up. Sooner or later, even if you’re religious about updating your anti-virus programs, something nasty is going to get through. If you’re lucky it will be something that’s easy to delete. If not, you may have to wipe your PC down to bare metal and reinstall everything.

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