Practical Technology

for practical people.

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
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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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October 9, 2009
by sjvn01
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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.

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October 8, 2009
by sjvn01
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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.

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October 8, 2009
by sjvn01
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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.

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