Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 3, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Elliot Associates’ worrisome Novell plans

Elliot Associates L.P., a hedge fund, which claims to already own 8.5% of Novell’s stock made an unsolicited bid to buy the Linux company lock, stock, and code for $1.8 billion on March 2nd. This move may be good for Novell stock owners, but I fear it may be death for Novell’s commercial SUSE Linux and community openSUSE distributions.

Some people in the know, like Canonical’s COO Matt Asay think this deal could work for SUSE. In his view, Elliot would do well to sell off Novell’s Linux division.

I wish I could agree with him, but I looked at Elliot Associates’ past history of taking “an activist approach to investing, frequently amassing significant but minority stakes in distressed or under performing companies and attempting to foment change,” and I don’t like what I see.

Elliot Associates is best known as a ‘vulture fund.’ They don’t make investments to turn companies around. They make investments to crush the cash out of them and then leave the picked over bones for someone else to pick up.

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March 2, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Linux is doing just fine on servers

My good buddy Preston Gralla would have it that “Windows doesn’t just dominate the desktop, but the server market as well.” Eh… I don’t think so.

For proof, Gralla points to the latest IDC (International Data Corporation’) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. This report covers the worldwide server market’s factory revenue.

What Gralla and other people miss is that IDC is not measuring what server operating systems are being used. It’s measuring what server operating systems people are buying, which are bundled with their hardware purchases. To quote IDC, what the researchers are really measuring is “server revenue includes components that are typically sold today as a server bundle, including frame or cabinet and all cables, processors, memory, communication boards, and OS.”

So, it is time to start throwing a fit and start selling Red Hat stock for a dime on the dollar, and enroll in MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) night classes? No. I don’t think so.

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March 2, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Another day, another Internet Explorer security hole

Forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but yet another Internet Explorer security hole has been revealed. Is there no end to the ways that IE can be broken into? It doesn’t look like it!

In this latest flaw, there’s an unpatched bug in VBScript that hackers can use to drop malware on 32-bit Windows XP machines running IE 7 and 8.

According to Microsoft’s Senior Security Communications Manager Lead Jerry Bryant, an exploit “was posted publicly that could allow an attacker to host a maliciously crafted web page and run arbitrary code if they could convince a user to visit the web page and then get them to press the F1 key in response to a pop up dialog box.”

Microsoft says that, as far as they know, no one’s using this exploit yet. Yeah, and I don’t know that anyone is playing hockey in Canada today, but I’m willing to bet someone is.

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March 1, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

The Ultimate PC repair kit: SystemRescueCD 1.40

Like everyone who makes his living from computers, I’m always getting called on by friends and family to help them fix their PC problems. Thanks to the Gentoo Linux-based SystemRescueCD though, I’m usually able to fix most of their troubles without breaking a sweat.

SystemRescueCD, like the name suggests, is a system rescue disk. You can use it either as a bootable CD-ROM, USB stick, or even over a network connection. While you can use it as a desktop in own right, its real job is repairing crashed systems. In particular, with its disk and file system repair tools, it’s great for bring dead hard drives back to life.

With Linux disk and file tools like parted, partimage, fstools and many others and support for almost all Linux, Unix and Windows file systems, such as ext2/ext3/ext4, FAT, JFS, NTFS, ReiserFS, Reiser4, and XFS I have yet to find a hard drive that could still spin that I couldn’t at least pull data from with SystemRescueCD.

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February 23, 2010
by sjvn01
4 Comments

Chuck Norris is not a Linux virus

Get a grip people. A recent story about the so-called Chuck Norris botnet implies that it breaks Linux’s security. Wrong.

Windows malware, whether it comes in the form of a Trojan, virus, or worm, works by exploiting security holes in either the operating system itself or an application like Adobe Reader or Internet Explorer. Whatever the bug or the method it uses to arrive on a Windows PC, the fundamental way it uses to exploit the system is that Windows itself is inherently insecure.

While Chuck Norris runs on Linux-based DSL modems and routers, it doesn’t actually attack Linux at all. Instead, it runs as a normal Linux application. So how does it get there if it doesn’t try to crack Linux? It infects routers by trying common and default passwords. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

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February 23, 2010
by sjvn01
4 Comments

Amazon pays Microsoft for Linux

What was Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, thinking? Amazon just signed a patent cross-licensing deal that pays Microsoft intellectual property fees for, among other things, patents that cover Amazon’s Linux-based Kindle e-reader and its Linux servers. Too bad Microsoft has never, ever been able to show that its patents cover anything to do with Linux.

Mind you, Microsoft has been trying to make people believe that Linux violates its patents for years now. Only an idiot would believe them though since Microsoft has never even tried to demonstrate that any of its patents actually apply to Linux.

Yes, Microsoft claims that Linux and other open-source programs violate its patent rights. They’ve been making those claims for years. What’s always been missing is proof.

Microsoft’s biggest lie, first made by Steve Ballmer back in 2004, is that Linux violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents. There’s one little problem with this assertion which has underlaid every Microsoft attack on Linux’s intellectual property since then: it’s not true.

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