Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 17, 2009
by sjvn01
5 Comments

An open alternative for Palm Pre iTunes users

Apple will tell you that iTunes 8.2.1 fixes bugs and, in particular, improves interoperability with iPhones and iPod Touches running iPhone 3.0 Software. But, it really it only has one ‘feature:’ It blocks the Palm Pre’s iTunes compatibility. KDE thinks there’s another way.

But, just to get this out of the way, I’m now running iTunes 8.2.1 on my Windows PCs and Macs, including both a Tiger and a Leopard Mac OS X system. If there’s anything noteworthy about the new iTunes on any of these systems, I haven’t seen it yet. It certainly doesn’t seem to have mattered in the least to my 1st generation iPod Touches or my Apple TV.

As far as I can tell, the only thing it really does is prevent Palm Pre’s from talking to iTunes. I’m not a Pre fan, but if I were a Pre user I certainly would want iTunes compatibility. Or, at least, something that works like iTunes. Apple, however, isn’t going to let me have it.

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July 17, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

A Linux security story

There’s no such thing as perfect security. There are no programs that give you absolute software security. After all, security is a process, not a product. Linux’s security process, though, is outstanding, which is one reason why it has great security. Here’s an example.

On July 16th, a security programmer named Brad Spengler, who designs an open-source network and server security program called grsecurity revealed on the full disclosures security mailing list that there was a security hole in the 2.6.30 Linux kernel.

The short version of this vulnerability, according to the SANS Internet Storm Center goes like this: “The vulnerable code is located in the net/tun implementation. Basically, what happens here is that the developer initialized a variable to a certain value that can be NULL. The developer correctly checked the value of this new variable couple of lines later and, if it is 0 (NULL), he just returns back an error. ”

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July 16, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Dell looks to Moblin for Linux future

In a recent blog posting, Dell Technology Strategist, Doug Anson, said that Dell, as I wrote last week, was considering selling Google’s new Chrome OS in its netbooks. That’s interesting, but what I found far more interesting was that Anson seemed a lot more interest in Moblin, the new mobile Internet device, operating system for Dell.

Anson opened by talking about Google Chrome OS. He wrote, “Given that Google has made it clear that the Chrome OS will be available in the second half of 2010, there’s still a lot of time to see how this will develop. As with most new technology, Dell plans to evaluate the Chrome OS and other alternative operating environments, like we’ve done in the past. Luckily (for me!), Dell enjoys a great relationship with Google. As we have more details to share on the topic, we’ll do it here.”

Fine and dandy, but what caught my attention was that he went on to talk about how “Alternative operating systems, continue to evolve, flourish and prosper.” Specifically, what he finds interesting about them is that “These alternative operating environments are truly “different” from the traditional Windows platform – they don’t attempt to simply ‘mimic’ Windows.” Sure, Anson admits that that can be a problem, but “these alternative operating environments attempt to address this shortcoming by focusing their feature set with a self-directed experience: entice and direct the user to its strengths.”

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July 15, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Ballmer says Windows 7 is vaporware

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, shocked attendees at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner conference in New Orleans yesterday when he announced that while Windows 7 is certainly interesting since it won’t ship until late this year it’s little more than vaporware.

Ballmer continued, to the stunned audience of Microsoft programmers’ amazement, to say that “I don’t know if we can’t make up our mind or what our problem is over here, but the last time I checked, you don’t need two client operating systems. It’s good to have one.”

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July 14, 2009
by sjvn01
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Red-ink Sun Set

You can’t make up results as bad as this. Sun Microsystems, in its last days as an independent company has announced absolutely horrible preliminary numbers for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, which ended June 30, 2009.

According to the company, Sun expects revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 in the range of $2.580 to $2.680 billion, as compared with $3.780 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008. That’s a more than billion year-over-year dollar drop.

Sun went on to state that it anticipates a GAAP (General Accepted Accounting Principles) net loss per share for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 of from twenty-four to thirty-four cents per share. If you want to ignore GAAP, Sun says its net loss won’t be that bad: share holders will only lose six to sixteen cents per share.

Want to know more? Tough. “Sun will not host a conference call in conjunction with fourth quarter results. Results are expected to be posted on http://sun.com/investors upon the filing of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2009 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is due no later than August 31, 2009.”

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July 12, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris?

People outside of IT seldom think of Oracle as a Linux company, but it is. Not only does Oracle encourage its customers to use its own house-brand clone of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Oracle Unbreakable Linux, Oracle has long used Linux internally both on its servers and on some of its desktops. So, what does a Linux company like Oracle wants to do with its newly purchased Sun’s open-source operating system, OpenSolaris? The answer appears to be: “Nothing.”

Sun, Oracle and third-party sources are telling me that OpenSolaris developers are afraid that they’ll be either moved over to working on Linux or let go once the Sun/Oracle merger is completed. Other Sun open-source managers have expressed concern that their jobs may disappear once Oracle has acquired Sun.

This can’t come as much of a surprise. Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, said last year, “”Oracle definitely runs on Linux. We have very few servers in our infrastructure that are not Linux; that support, you know, internal IT systems, very few. And even the ones that continue to exist are on a plan to be phased out. So we definitely run our business on Linux. In fact, I mean, our entire IT infrastructure is Linux, our entire development infrastructure as well. So, you know, our development platform is Oracle Enterprise Linux. Our test platform is Oracle Enterprise Linux.”

He’s not just talking a good open-source game. Oracle has had thousands of Linux developers at work since the 1990s, and Wim Coekaerts, Oracle’s VP of Linux Engineering, is a major Linux developer. Indeed, Oracle is one of the top companies contributing to the Linux kernel.

The hand-writing is on the wall. OpenSolaris is on its way out.

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