Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 14, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Snow Leopard hungers for your data

Usually, Microsoft makes the big security blunders, but with Snow Leopard Apple shows they can also compete with Microsoft when it comes to making really awful security mistakes. How awful? How about making it possible to easily lose all of your data? Is that bad enough for you?

And, here I was feeling sorry for the Sidekick users who lost all their so-called smartphone data )! It’s one thing to lose all your mobile phone files that should have been kept safely on the cloud, it’s a much bigger disaster when you lose all your PC’s data.

Apple has admitted that Snow Leopard can sometime lose everything a user has in his or her home folder. The company also promises a fix Real Soon Now. Don’t you just hate that?

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October 14, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Five ways the Linux desktop shoots itself in the foot

I don’t just write about the Linux desktop, I use it every day. At my desk, I tend to use MEPIS and Mint. On the road, it’s Ubuntu on my Dell netbook and openSUSE on my Lenovo ThinkPad. I do this because they work well and they’re as safe as a desktop operating system can get. So why aren’t more people using them?

The biggest reason is Microsoft. Microsoft is a jealous monopoly and doesn’t want to share the desktop with anyone. Desktop Linux is just another target in a long list that has included OS/2, DR-DOS, and, that eternal thorn in their side, the Mac. It’s no surprise then to see that in the history of the Linux desktop Microsoft has always tried to crush it.

For example, the very first attempt at a mass-market Linux desktop, 1999’s Corel Linux Desktop lasted less than a year. Why? Because, in 2000 Microsoft paid off debt-ridden Corel to kill it.

Much more recently, Microsoft, caught by surprise by the rise of Linux-powered netbooks, brought XP Home back from the dead and offered it to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) for next to nothing to stem Linux’s rise on low-end netbooks.

OK, it’s hard to beat a monopoly that will do whatever it takes to make sure people don’t see that there’s a better, cheaper alternative I get that. At the same time though Linux has shot itself in the foot quite often.

How? I’ll tell you how.

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October 14, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Financial Management for Hard Times

Businesses are at a critical point. Global financial markets are under stress; they are not following fundamental economic principles, and companies cannot get loans and financing easily, if at all. On top of that, demand for products and services is falling, and risk avoidance is paramount.

As a result, businesses are refocusing on short-term, financial imperatives — cost savings, cashflow preservation, meeting financial covenants, maintaining access to financing, and better risk and credit management.

All of that might make you feel like a mouse in a house full of traps and cats. But if you can identify the key issues — with the help of a good enterprise resource planning (ERP) or e-commerce system — you can still assemble a solid financial management solution for hard times.

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October 13, 2009
by sjvn01
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Sidekick: Microsoft’s biggest failure yet?

You can’t make stuff this bad up. Many T-Mobile Sidekick smartphone users lost all their contacts, calendar entries, photographs, you name it, when Sidekick’s back-end software provider Microsoft, Danger, went down.

Danger turned out to be an all too apt name. Sidekick users use the Danger servers to synchronize their smartphone’s content with a cloud-based storage service. When the servers went down, during it seems, an upgrade of Danger’s SAN (storage area network), all the online user information disappeared with it. You see, while neither Microsoft nor T-Mobile is saying exactly what happened, it appears that Danger didn’t back-up its servers before launching into a major, and failed, SAN upgrade.

I don’t know about you, but any where I’ve ever worked, not running a backup before any major upgrade is a firing offense. And, not just any firing, this is a “don’t let your feet touch the floor as the security cops run you out of the building” crime.

This isn’t just a tech problem though. This is an organizational problem. This is a case where firing them all, from the top down, and letting unemployment sort them out is appropriate. There is simply no way on Earth that Microsoft should have tried this ‘upgrade’ without knowing that a backup was set, checked, and ready-to-go.

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October 12, 2009
by sjvn01
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ARMing Linux

For a brief time in 2008, the Linux desktop actually owned a segment of the desktop industry: netbooks. When netbooks first showed up, they ran Linux and nothing but Linux. Microsoft panicked when they saw this and brought XP back from the dead and offered it for next to nothing to netbook vendors and so successfully fought off the Linux challenge.

That was then. This is now. Today, Linux netbooks are still popular, but not nearly as popular as they once were. ARM-based netbooks, however, are on their way and, since these systems can’t run Windows, Linux has the potential market all to itself. The real question is, “Will PC vendors choose to offer low-cost, less than $200 netbooks?”

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October 12, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Windows 7: Unimproved Security

I can give you lots of reasons to switch to Windows 7 from Vista. It’s much faster, more stable, and it’s a much smoother ride. That said, I can’t give you any real reasons to switch from XP to 7, but I can safely assure XP users that come the day you buy a new PC you won’t regret it the way so many people who ‘upgraded’ to Vista did. But, improving security isn’t a reason to move to Windows 7. When it comes to security and Windows 7, it’s just more of the same old, same old.

This point really came home to me when I was looking over all the patches that Microsoft will delivering tomorrow in what may be the largest Patch Tuesday ever. Microsoft “will ship a total of 13 updates next week, eight of them pegged “critical,” the highest threat ranking in its four-step scoring system, beating the previous record of 12 updates shipped in February 2007 and again in October 2008.”Of these 13, five are for Windows 7.

Pretty impressive don’t you think for an operating system that’s not even officially released yet?

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