Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 9, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Who really has the most Linux users?

First, Red Hat’s claimed the lion’s share of the Linux market, then Novell said Red Hat’s not that much in the lead, so where does the truth lie? It’s a good question. At the recent Red Hat’s Analyst Day, Red Hat Executive VP Paul Cormier, said that Red Hat now represents 75 percent of the paid Linux market, easily beating out other the other Linux distributions such as Novell’s SUSE and Canonical’s Ubuntu.

Impressive, but, Novell’s PR manager Ian Bruce has a different take. In a Novell blog, Bruce wrote, “First, to borrow an analogy from the old car rental business, we should acknowledge that in the Linux market Novell is definitely ‘Avis’ to Red Hat’s ‘Hertz:’ we’re in second place and we try harder.”

Bruce went on to point out that in IDC’s latest report on the Linux market that SUSE Linux has about 28% compared to Red Hat’s 62% of the world’s business Linux market. He also added that while Red Hat’s mainframe Linux marketshare has indeed grown considerably, but that, according to Gartner, “Novell has by far the largest market share, which they estimate at 70 percent.” I’m inclined to agree to the numbers Novell cites. In any case, both agree that Red Hat is number one today. And, that’s quite true… as far it goes.

More >

October 8, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Eolas might sue every last, lousy company in creation

Do you want to know why I hate patent trolls? Let me tell you about Eolas Technologies. This company claims that it creates and markets technologies. It doesn’t.

Eolas, like other patent trolls, has taken an obvious idea, somehow managed to con the U.S. PTO (Patent and Trademark Office) into giving it a patent, and is now suing Adobe Systems, Google, Yahoo, Apple, eBay and Amazon.com. Oh, and it’s also suing Blockbuster, Frito-Lay, Office Depot, Sun, Playboy. (Playboy!?) and 10 other companies.

Eolas claims that these companies have all violated its U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906 (‘906 patent) and U.S. Patent No. 7,599,985 (‘985 patent). And, as these patents are written, they have all violated them.

It would be hard not to. You see, the ‘906 patent broadly covers any mechanism that can be used to embed an object within a Web document. And when Eolas says “object,” it means any applets or plug-ins. So, according to the company’s lawyers’ logic, Adobe’s Acrobat and Flash; Apple’s QuickTime; Microsoft’s ActiveX Controls and Windows Media Player; and Sun’s Java Virtual Machine, to name but a few, and any Web browser that automatically invokes such applets and plug-ins when you click on the appropriate link are in violation of Eolas’ patent. In other words, pay up or we’ll sue you. The ‘985 patent extends Eolas’ broad claim to anyone who tries to add applet-like functionality to Web pages with AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and similar Web development techniques.

More >

October 8, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The director of the FBI thinks Internet banking is unsafe

I’ve been banking online since I had to connect with my bank via a modem connection, so I really like it a lot. I’m not the only one. According to the Pew Internet and American Life September 2007 survey on online shopping, 53% of all online users use online banking, or 39% of all adult Americans. But, no less a person than the head of the FBI recently stopped because he was worried about his security.

Wow. FBI Director Robert Mueller said that he recently gave up on online banking when he recently came “just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet phishing scam” after receiving an e-mail that looked like it was from his bank. “It looked pretty legitimate,” Mueller said. “They had mimicked the e-mails that the bank would ordinarily send out to its customers; they’d mimicked them very well.”

This is scary stuff. Phishing e-mails are common, but most them aren’t that well done. The idea that one can come close enough to fooling the head of the FBI makes me really stop and think about this.

More >

October 7, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux

When it comes to business computer systems, nothing, but nothing, is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is going to go make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and it will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange software.

I saw this move coming. While the LSE never officially announced that its Windows and .NET stock trade software TradElect was the root of its September failure and its perpetually slow performance, it was an open secret in the City, London’s equivalent to America’s Wall Street, that that was the case. Indeed, it was this technology flop that lead to the LSE CEO Clara Furse leaving the Exchange in July. The new CEO, Xavier Rolet, immediately decided to get rid of TradElect and started shopping for other platforms.

Friends of mine in the City tell me that the LSE immediately started considering a Linux-based solution. It doesn’t take a genius to see why. The world’s fastest stock exchanges, like New York’s International Security Exchange, run on Linux. In a world with high-frequency trading where a millisecond really can mean the difference between profit and loss, stock exchanges can afford to be slow, never mind actually going off-line.

More >

October 6, 2009
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Karmic Koala: The best Ubuntu Linux ever?

I’ve looked at hundreds of Linux distributions over the years. Some of them have been awful. Many have been OK. And, a few have been great. Based on my early look at Karmic Koala, Ubuntu 9.10, I think we’ve got a very strong Linux desktop distribution coming down the way.

Before jumping into my early review, let me say that while I like Ubuntu, I’m not an Ubuntu fanboy. I also like Fedora, openSUSE, Mint, and MEPIS to name a few Linux distributions that I use on a regular basis.

What caught my eye with this version of Ubuntu is that, especially for a beta, it’s a remarkably attractive and smooth-running Linux distribution. I first installed it as a virtual machine with Sun’s VirtualBox on a Gateway DX4710-09. This computer uses an Intel Dual Core 2.5GHz E5200 processor. I have the 64-bit version of the new Ubuntu 2GBs of RAM and a 10GB virtual drive. In addition, I installed the Koala on a Dell Inspiron 530S. This low-end PC is powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. The test machine had 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

On both systems, I was very impressed by installation program. Not only did it look great, it automatically detected and set-up all the hardware. Linux distributions, in general, have gotten much better with this kind of thing, but Ubuntu 9.10 not only worked great at taking a PC from a lifeless pile of chips to a living and useful PC, it looked great doing so.

More >

October 5, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Mix and match Web browsers are a bad idea

We all know that Internet Explorer, especially the older versions like IE 6, is slow and insecure. You may also have heard that Google released a plug-in, Google Chrome Frame, that essentially lobotomizes IE and replaces its functionality with its much faster Chrome Web browser.

It’s a cute trick, and it really does show off just how much faster IE with Chrome Frame is than plain-Jane IE. I’ve done it myself on my Windows XP and 7 boxes and the results are stunning. I expect it to be faster, but what I got was ‘knock your socks off’ faster. I saw complicated pages that were fat with JavaScript and took up to 10-seconds to load with IE, explode onto the screen in less than a second.

Microsoft has thrown a fit about this. Amy Bazdukas, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, said, “It’s not necessarily that plug-ins aren’t or can’t be secure, but that running a browser within a browser doubles the potential attack surface in a way that we don’t see is particularly helpful.”

More >