Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 24, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Good-Bye IE 6

I hereby officially proclaim Internet Explorer 6 to be a dead browser walking. Even though IE6 still somehow manages to keep 19.8% of the Web browser market, IE6 is a late Web browser! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If Microsoft hadn’t nailed it to the operating system, it would be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are of interest only to historians! It’s shuffled off this mortal coil! It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This…. is an EX-Web browser!

Excuse me for the Monty Python moment there, but I was so pleased to learn that Amazon would no longer be supporting IE6 for its seller accounts at the end of March, I couldn’t help myself. I’m sure that this is only Amazon’s first move in dropping support for this hopelessly obsolete Web browser.

With this move, Amazon joins Google in stopping support for IE6. But don’t think that this is just a move by third parties. Microsoft itself wants you to stop using IE6. Heck, Microsoft even sent flowers to a recent mock IE6 funeral.

Of course, they’d rather have you move to IE8. Personally, I think you’d be better off with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

In any case, it’s clear that everyone with any sense is abandoning IE6 as fast as possible. I’m also sorry to report that some companies and government agencies aren’t helping matters by still running Web applications that won’t work correctly with anything except IE6.

Come on, people. It’s time. If you’re still running applications that are IE6-specific, you have to dump them. You’re doing your customers a disservice by requiring them to use a Web browser that’s infamous for its lack of security and is clearly on its way to the trash can. The sooner every company dumps support for IE6 and starts requiring that its Web applications can work with any generic HTML 4-compliant Web browser the better.


A version of Good-Bye IE 6 first appeared in ComputerWorld. >

March 24, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Windows’ Boll Weevil problem

You don’t have to be a security expert to know that Windows and its software have serious security problems. It seems that no sooner than Microsoft fixes some holes then more are revealed. Part of that is because Windows is insecure by design. But, another part of it is that Windows is much too popular for its own good.

Windows defenders like to claim that all other operating systems would have just as much trouble if they were as popular as desktop Windows is. They’re wrong of course. Windows was designed as a single user operating system and to make it easy for applications to share data. That single-user, no IPC (interprocess communication) DNA remains in Windows to this day. That said, they do have a point, which is why I like to say that Windows has a “Boll Weevil” problem.

Now, what the heck do I mean by that? Get ready for a little history lesson. After the Civil War, the U.S. South became more dependent on cotton production then ever. To make any money in the South in the late 19th century you probably did it by raising cotton.

Then, starting in the mid 1890s, “Mr. Boll Weevil” arrived and almost completely destroyed the cotton crop and the South’s economy along with it. With only one cash crop, this bug destroyed not only crops but hundreds of thousands of people’s livelihoods.

Windows is the 21st century money-making mono-crop.

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March 23, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Now what Novell?

There’s nothing like starting a technical conference, like Novell’s BrainShare, off with a bang. Or, in this case telling Elliot Associates’ unwelcome offer of not quite $2-billion for the company that Novell has no interest in selling out, not for that little anyway.

I think this was a smart move by Novell’s management. I think if Elliot Associates were to buy Novell it would end up killing the company and its Linux distributions: SUSE Linux and openSUSE.

Make no mistake about it. A cool $2-billion is a lot of money. But, to quote from the company’s rejection note: “$5.75 per share in cash is inadequate and that it undervalues the Company’s franchise and growth prospects.” I’d agree with that. After all, Novell has almost a billion in the bank.

The more important question is where does Novell, as a business, go from here?

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March 23, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Google takes on China

I know a lot of people thought that Google was just talking tough when it said it was considering getting out of the China market and that they’d never actually do it. Wrong. While Google’s words don’t say that they’re pulling out of China, for all intents and purposes they’ve made a move that squares them off against China’s government.

Sure, all Google is doing is switching its mainland China customers to use the uncensored servers in Hong Kong. Yeah, and what the U.S. has been doing in Afghanistan isn’t a war either; it’s just that there’s all this fighting going on there.

This is more than just Google ‘slapping China’s face. This is Google saying that it will not put up with China attacking it and more than twenty other U.S. companies. This is Google drawing a line in the sand, and saying that we will no longer obey your rules while you attack us and our customers.

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March 22, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

The Linux of Stock Markets

Today’s news that TSE (Tokyo Stock Exchange) has moved to Red Hat’s RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as the operating platform for its next-generation “Arrowhead” trading system shouldn’t come as any surprise. Linux has become the smart stock market’s operating system of choice.

Red Hat has been working with TSE and Fujitsu for some time on the Arrowhead platform. The name of the game, as always with stock markets is to accelerate TSE’s order response and information distribution speeds According to Red Hat, “Arrowhead is designed to combine low latency with high reliability to accommodate diverse products, trading rules and changes within a short time window.”

How short? Red Hat and the TSE claims that Arrowhead can accept ten times more orders per seconds than the previous system with an “order response time of two milliseconds and an information distribution time of three milliseconds. In addition, the solution offers the flexibility to accommodate new trading rules, the ability to be scaled with jumps in system demand and trading growth and expanded security and reliability.”

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March 22, 2010
by sjvn01
6 Comments

Windows 7, Security, and the Trusted Platform Module

Every Windows expert knows that the way to secure a hard drive in Windows 7 is to use BitLocker. To use that feature, though, you need either Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate. But, did you ever wonder how BitLocker manages to lock down data when so much of Windows is vulnerable to attacks? Here’s how Microsoft has managed to make BitLocker easily the most secure part of Windows.

Back in 2001, Microsoft began working on an encrypted security project called Palladium, which soon became known as Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB). While Microsoft has said hardly a word about NGSCB over the last few years, it’s clearly become the basis of Windows 7’s TPM (Trusted Platform Module). In turn, TPM is at the core of BitLocker.

In NGSCB everything on the computer, data and programs, can be encrypted. Only trusted processes can access disk storage, CPU memory space, and main memory. In practice, Microsoft has opted to only make NGSCB security available for BitLocker.

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