Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 22, 2009
by sjvn01
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Linux or Windows: Most hardware support plans are worthless

Recently, a user who had replaced Windows on his netbook with Ubuntu Linux discovered that, as far as Best Buy was concerned, he had voided his warranty. For all practical purposes, he had.

In The Consumerist, the disgruntled netbook user reported, “My four month-old netbook’s touchpad and power adapter all stopped working. I took the machine into Best Buy for service under the Geek Squad’s Black Tie Protection Plan on Saturday, and demonstrated its problems. The manager of the Geek Squad informed me that installing Ubuntu Linux on my machine voided my warranty, and that I could only have it serviced if the original Windows installation was restored.”

In the end, he did restore Windows and that didn’t get him any service either. The manager said, “‘Look at the last page of the warranty. We can refuse service for any reason we want, and based on our conversation yesterday, I will not service your computer.’ He alerted security and ordered me to leave the store.”

The tech. support manager was clearly a jerk and deserves to be fired for the holidays. But, think about it, 99% of all vendor support don’t have a clue about what to do with a PC with Linux. Even if they wanted to help you, chances are they can’t do a thing for you.


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December 22, 2009
by sjvn01
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All Google, all the time, everywhere

We all use Google. Well, maybe not Bill Gates, but that’s about it. Now, Google is hoping to become an even bigger part of our everyday lives.

The key to this is Google’s three new search features: real-time search, location-based service and augmented reality.

Think about it: Google has primarily been about computer-based search. You sit at your PC and find what you want on the Web. But if you put those three new features together, where do they shine the best? On mobile devices. With Google’s Android powering phones and Chrome OS on netbooks, I see the company making a preemptive strike to take over mobile computing.

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December 22, 2009
by sjvn01
6 Comments

Windows 7 and IPv6: Useful at Last?

IPv6 has been “the next generation of TCP/IP protocols” for so long that you can be forgiven for thinking that it will never be useful. However, with Windows 7, Microsoft has finally given network administrators a reason to consider using IPv6.

First, some background. The reason why IPv6, a.k.a. RFC 2460, was created back in 1998 was to give network administrators more network addresses than they could possibly use. It was widely predicted that the Internet would soon run out of IPv4 32-bit addresses. IPv6, with its 128-bit addresses and the resulting astronautical address range seemed the perfect answer.

It wasn’t. Both the Internet and the vast majority of American and European business users elected to stay with the legacy IPv4 network. To get around the much-predicted Internet IPv4 address famine, people turned to network address translation (NAT) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). With this combination, thousands of corporate PCs can have their own internal IPv4 addresses while using up only a single IP address, as far as the Internet is concerned.

While Internet administrators were working out this (and other) ways to deal with the shortage of IPv4 addresses, Microsoft was tinkering with IPv6 in Windows. The protocol was available as a little-used test protocol in Windows 2000. By the time Windows XP and Windows 2003 rolled out, IPv6 was built into the operating systems.

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December 21, 2009
by sjvn01
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Dell introduces best Ubuntu netbook ever?

Dell has long been desktop Linux’s best friend in the big-time computer vendors, and it’s proving it again with the introduction of the latest version of its Mini 10 netbook with Ubuntu.

Yes, it’s true that the new Mini 10 will also come with XP Home and Windows 7 Starter Edition. But, XP Home is showing its age and while I actually like some of Windows 7’s features, I don’t know anyone who has a kind word to say for Windows 7 Starter.

Microsoft has restricted Windows 7 Starter to make sure it’s no competition for the more full-featured versions of Windows 7. For example, “It’s got to have a super-small screen, which means it probably has a super-small keyboard, and it has to have a certain processor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” That ringing endorsement for Windows 7 Starter Edition was made by some guy named Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

Ubuntu 9.10, however, is an excellent desktop Linux distribution. While I’ll be the first to admit that Ubuntu 9.10 has its rough-edges when you install it yourself on some systems, Dell has always done an excellent job of fitting Ubuntu on its systems.

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December 18, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Where does Ubuntu go from here?

Most people were caught by surprise yesterday when Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company that backs-up Ubuntu stepped down as the Linux company’s CEO. But after I thought about it for a bit, the move made perfect sense to me and for where I believe Shuttleworth wants to take Ubuntu.

First, as for his move, Shuttleworth is a really bright guy. He’s so bright, in fact, that he realizes his limitations. While Shuttleworth is a great start-up company guy–remember he made his fortune by starting and then selling Thawte, an Internet security company–and he knows technology well, he’s come to the conclusion that he’s not the right guy to be the CEO of a maturing company.

Do you know how rare it is to realize that just because you’re good at getting a company launched or you’re a technical wiz that doesn’t mean you’re going to be a great corporate manager? I can’t count how many potentially great companies I’ve seen crash and burn because their leaders didn’t realize that just because they were wonderful visionaries didn’t mean that they had what it takes to be a CEO.

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December 18, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Open Source doesn’t automatically mean safety

Yesterday, Mozilla fixed ten security bugs in Firefox. If you haven’t upgraded Firefox to 3.5.6 yet, you can do so now. I’ll wait for you. Done? Good. You’re better off than a friend of mine who, I discovered, was still running Firefox 3.0.0. His logic? It’s Firefox and open source therefore it’s still safer than, say, Internet Explorer 6. Oh dear.

Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. He was right that open-source programs tend to be safer than proprietary programs. And, yes, he was right in thinking that the ancient IE 6 isn’t safe at all. But, just because a program is open source doesn’t mean that it’s always safe, and an old program, no matter how it was made or who made it, is very unlikely to still be safe.

The simple truth is that all programs can be broken. Some, like operating systems, Web browsers, and commonly used office software are constantly being poked and prodded by crackers to find weaknesses. Therefore, when a vendor comes out with a security patch for whatever program it is that you’re using, your best move is to patch your copy of the software as soon as possible.

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