Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 18, 2010
by sjvn01
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Should Ubuntu include proprietary software?

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, arguably the most popular of all Linux distributions, is asking its users what new, proprietary programs they’d like to see as optional software in Ubuntu.

Note, I said “new.” Ubuntu has actually included proprietary software in the form of hardware drivers since April 2007. Then, Ubuntu developers decided to place binary ATI and NVIDA graphic card drivers in the distribution because, “A large proportion of people using Ubuntu – including 70%-80% of people with new computers – need a non-Free driver for reasonable performance from their graphics card, wireless card, or modem, because there is no Free driver available, they had little choice in the matter.”

Never-the-less, when it came to end-user software, Ubuntu has, generally speaking, held the line against including proprietary software in their distribution. You won’t find, for example, Adobe Flash 10.x in Ubuntu, even though it’s commonly included in other popular Linux distributions such as openSUSE.

Indeed, there are several other distributions, such as Mint, which are perhaps best known for including proprietary programs that Ubuntu has refused to incorporate into the distribution. Until now.

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January 18, 2010
by sjvn01
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EHR is health care reform we call all agree on

Since I run my own small business, I’m very interested in health care reform. You see, my tiny — two-person — company pays more than four figures a month for health insurance. Ow!

That and taxes are the two biggest expenses on my ledger. Unfortunately, I don’t see much reason for hope in the crippled mess that has made it this far in Congress. Still, no matter what ends up passing into law, one common theme in all the reforms is support for electronic health records, and that’s good news.

EHR is just what it sounds like: maintaining medical records in an electronic format. Some of my records are on papers locked in cabinets. God help me if someone needs to know what my EKGs from a few years back looked like.

I’m not alone. According to an April 2009 survey in the New England Journal of Medicine, only 1.5% of U.S. hospitals have comprehensive electronic records systems, and only 8% have basic systems that cover at least one clinical unit. Think about that: Almost every important financial transaction you do is recorded online, but your medical records are stuck in the 19th century.

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January 18, 2010
by sjvn01
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Dump Internet Explorer Now

I’ve always known that Internet Explorer was an insecure mess, but this latest attacks on Google and dozens of other companies has really opened my eyes to just how bad it really is. The latest zero-day flaw exists not just in bad old IE 6, but in every modern version of IE.

To be exact, according to Microsoft, the same security hole is in IE6, IE7 and IE8 on Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 are vulnerable to attack. In other words, if you’re running any remotely current version of IE or Windows, you can be hacked. Great. Just great. How anyone on the planet can actually believe Microsoft when, with every new release of either their browser or operating system they claim that they’re more secure, is beyond me.

Windows has been, is now, and always will be insecure . It’s baked into its single-user, stand-alone computer design that was never designed to handle a networked universe with attackers always one network connection away.

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January 15, 2010
by sjvn01
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Update your Adobe software Now

Some things are the same no matter what operating system you run. Mac, Windows, or Linux user chances are you use Adobe Reader to read PDF (Portable Document Files) and Adobe Acrobat to create them. So it is that, no matter what you’re running on your PC, you need to update your copies of Reader and Acrobat.

After some delays, Adobe has finally updated these programs and to run safely you need to update as soon as possible. Windows, Mac and Linux users can all find the Reader updates at this site. Windows Acrobat users need to go to this page for their updates, while Mac users need to head to this site.

Why am I making such a fuss about this update? After all software gets patched every day. I’m raising a little Cain about it because major attacks on Google and Adobe are already happening because of these now fixed security holes.

These attacks aren’t coming from J. Random Hacker, they’re coming, according to Google, from the Chinese government.If you don’t want your computer to be part of state-sponsored espionage, you need to fix it now before you run across a malware-infected PDF.

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January 15, 2010
by sjvn01
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The best Linux file system of all?

Want to get Unix/Linux techies arguing? Besides such classic flame wars such as whether vi or EMACS is the bgetter editor, another sure fire way to start a fight is to talk about which file systems are the best. Now, Google, which knows a thing or two about fast systems has decided that, for their purposes anyway, Ext4 is the best and close to the fastest file system of all.

In a recent note to the Ext4 developer mailing list, Google’s Michael Rubin, a senior staff engineer, wrote, “Google is currently in the middle of upgrading from ext2 to a more up to date file system. We ended up choosing ext4.”

Rubin then explains, “The driving performance reason to upgrade is that while ext2 had been ‘good enough’ for a very long time the metadata arrangement on a stale file system was leading to what we call “read inflation”. This is where we end up doing many seeks to read one block of data. In general latency from poor block allocation was causing performance hiccups.”

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January 14, 2010
by sjvn01
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Linux Foundation helps Linux job hunters

These are rotten times for job hunters, but if you know Linux, you’ve got a better shot at getting a job. And, now the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization that backs Linux’s growth is doing its part to help by starting a new Web site: the Linux Jobs Board.

According to the Linux Foundation, “the new Linux.com Jobs Board will provide employers and job seekers with an important online forum in which anyone can find the best and brightest Linux talent or the ideal job opportunity.” Jim Zemlin, the Foundation’s director said in a statement, “Linux’s increasing use across industries is building high demand for Linux jobs despite national unemployment stats. Linux.com reaches millions of Linux professionals from all over the world. By providing a Jobs Board feature on the popular community site, we can bring together employers, recruiters and job seekers to lay the intellectual foundation for tomorrow’s IT industry.”

He’s right. Linux is still a hot area for would-be software developers, system and network administrators. The JobThread Network, an online jobs site, reports that the demand for Linux-related jobs has grown 80 percent since 2005. By the Linux Foundation’s count that makes Linux professionals the “fastest growing job category in the IT industry.”

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