Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 26, 2010
by sjvn01
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Chrome 4: King of the Web browser hill?

Firefox 3.6 has just come out and it’s great. There’s only one problem. Google has released the new version of Chrome, version 4, and it’s even better.

This new version retains its speed lead over other browsers. I tested it on one of my Dell 530S desktop PCs. This PC is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front-side bus. It has 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chipset and was running Windows XP SP3. On this machine, Chrome ripped by Firefox 3.6 on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test with a mark of 530.8 milliseconds compared to Firefox 3.6’s 1007.0 milliseconds.

While faster than Firefox, Chrome 4 isn’t a great deal faster than Chrome 3.x. On the same machine, my older copy of Chrome came in with a time of 553.0 milliseconds. I was unable to test this production version of Chrome on Linux or a Mac because those versions are still in beta.

Speed, though, isn’t the real news in this latest version of Chrome. This time around it’s the addition of features that demands your attention.

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January 25, 2010
by sjvn01
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Record-setting Linux

I know the value of Pi, the irrational number you get when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, as far as 3.14159 and after that I’m clueless. Recently, though, French software engineer, Fabrice Bellard, calculated the value of Pi out o 2.7 trillion numbers… with a souped-up but otherwise ordinary home PC running Red Hat’s Fedora Linux.

Bellard, best known for being the founding developer of FFMpeg, the highly respected audio/video program for converting music and movies from one format to another, took on Pi not because he was “especially interested in the digits of Pi, ” but because he was interested “in the various algorithms involved to do arbitrary-precision arithmetic. Optimizing these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge.” You can say that again.

To pull this off, Bellard used a PC running an 2.93 GHz 64-bit Intel Core i7 CPU with just over 6GBs of RAM. The only thing really extraordinary about his record-setting PC was that he used 7.5 TB (TeraBytes) of disk storage. This consisted of five Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB hard disks. These are high-performance drives with 3 Gbps (Gigabit per second) SATA (Serial ATA) interfaces.

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January 25, 2010
by sjvn01
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The IE Fix is in

I still think that the safest thing you can do about your Web browsing habits is to switch from IE (Internet Explorer) to Firefox or some other browser. But, if you’re wedded to IE 7 or 8 — please, please stop using IE 6–Microsoft has made a fix available for all versions of IE. If you’re reading this and you haven’t upgraded your copy of IE yet, do yourself a favor, do it now. I’ll wait for you.

OK, using updated IE or some other browser now? Good. Now, for the bad news, it turns out that Microsoft knew about this critical bug since last August!.

Some people are making excuses for Microsoft that five months isn’t too long for them to fix this, and seven other serious IE bugs. Please. Give me a break. Serious security bugs are found and fixed in open-source software in days or weeks. Why should Microsoft get a free pass?

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January 22, 2010
by sjvn01
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Google’s Chrome OS: Tomorrow’s Desktop Today?

Sometime in 2010, Google will release Chrome OS, its take on a netbook operating system. It will be far more than just that though. It’s an entirely new take on the desktop operating system. While a final version is still months away from release there’s already enough of Chrome available that we can begin to see what it’s going to look like.

or starters, Chrome OS is Linux. To be exact, it owes a lot of its genes to Ubuntu. But, that’s all under the surface. You won’t need to know a shell command from the GNOME desktop to use it. As a matter of fact, you won’t need to know anything about the traditional Linux desktops — KDE or GNOME — either. Chrome OS’s interface is Google’s Chrome browser. If you can use a Web browser, you’ll be able to use Chrome OS.

That’s not the case now. Today, you have two choices if you want to try Chrome OS. The first is to build it yourself using Google’s instructions. While this is trivial enough for an expert Linux user, it’s not for anyone else. The easier way to give it a try is to visit Chrome OS Blog, a fan site for Chrome OS that features frequent builds of Chrome OS that you can either run off a USB stick or as a virtual machine using Sun’s VirtualBox.

Either way, you should keep in mind that you’re working with a sketch of an operating system. This is no way, shape, or form an operating system that’s ready for prime-time yet. Between it, and recent public comments from Matthew Papakipos, Chrome OS’ engineering director, you can see where Google is heading with its netbook operating system.

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January 21, 2010
by sjvn01
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Make the right browser update: Firefox 3.6

Oh the irony! After one of the biggest IE (Internet Explorer) security fiascoes ever, Microsoft is finally releasing a patch for the IE problem… on the same day that the Mozilla Foundation is releasing the latest and greatest version of its Web browser, Firefox 3.6.

So, you have a choice today. You can either stick with the sickly IE family–6, 7, or 8, it doesn’t matter they all suffered from the same security hole–or you can move to what’s I’ve found to be the best version of Firefox in years. Boy, this is a tough decision isn’t it?

Seriously. How can you justify using IE these days? Just look at is track-record. Every few months a new critical, zero-day IE security bug pops up. Who needs this?

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January 20, 2010
by sjvn01
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Neolithic Windows security hole alive and well in Windows 7

One of the reasons I’ve never liked Windows is that it was never made to deal with the security problems of working in a networked, multi-user world. As a direct result, Windows has been fundamentally insecure for more than a decade. Even so, I was surprised to find that there’s a 17-year old security hole that’s been in Windows since NT and it’s still present today in Windows 7.

Wow. Even I’m shocked by this latest example of just how rotten Windows security is. It just reminds me again though that while Microsoft keeps adding features and attempting to patch its way out of security problems to Windows, Windows’ foundation is built on sand and not on the stone of good, solid design.

Tavis Ormandy, a Google security engineer, uncovered this new ‘old’ hole while digging around Windows. Ormandy found that way back in 1993 in Windows NT that Windows included a ‘feature’ to support BIOS service routines in legacy Windows 16bit applications.

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