Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 8, 2010
by sjvn01
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Will tablet computers finally matter?

or all the hype about the rumored Apple Tablet, the ‘will they or won’t they’ about Microsoft’s Courier tablet, and a host of real tablet-announcements such as Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1 and the Dell’s still unnamed slate, everyone seems to have forgotten one tiny, little fact. Tablets have been around forever and they’ve never, ever lived up to their buzz.

For those of you with short-memories, Go Corp., back in 1987 was the first company to really try to get tablet-based computing off the ground. It quickly crashed. Then, in 1993, Apple tried to make a go of pen/tablet-based computing with the Newton. It flopped. In the meantime, Microsoft started toying with the idea of a dedicated tablet in 2000. Guess what happened to all its plans? Yeah, they all pretty much came to nothing too.

The first company to get anywhere with a tablet was Palm with its PDAs (personal digital assistances) in 1996. While they were wildly popular in their day–I still have my own Palm III hiding in my office somewhere–Palm wasn’t able to maintain its momentum and today Palm is just one of many smartphone vendors.

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January 7, 2010
by sjvn01
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How Social Networking Works

I’m on a social network; you’re on a social network, these days it seems we’re all on at least one social network–like Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc–if not two, three, or even more.

To be exact, the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey found that 35% of adult internet users now have a profile on an online social network site. If you’re a teenager, the numbers jump to 65%, but, it’s the young adults who really are behind the social networks. 75% of them belong to at least one social network. Since then, the social networks have only continued to grow at an explosive rate.

How do the social networks manage millions of users and hundreds of millions of updates? The answers lie in open-source software and thousands of servers. Let’s take a look behind the doors of a few top social networks — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace — and see exactly how they pull their tricks off.

The first thing that jumps out at you is that they’re almost all based on open-source software. For example, the operating systems behind Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace are all Linux. Facebook uses F5 Big-IP, which is a family of Linux-based appliances that also perform network management.

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January 7, 2010
by sjvn01
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New SUSE/Moblin Linux netbook from MSI arrives

What do you get when you mix Novell’s SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 11 with the Linux Foundation’s Moblin 2.1 netbook desktop? A lightweight Linux desktop that’s trying to snag the netbook desktop market before Google’s Chrome OS runs away with it later this year.

How well will Novell do at this? Well, after working with the Linux Foundation and Intel on combining the Moblin and SUSE Linux, we’re about to find out. Today, on January 7th, at the CES (Consumer Electronics Association), we’ll find out. MSI is releasing the first shipping of SUSE Moblin on its MSI U135 netbook.

According to Guy Lunardi, Novell’s director of client preloads, the mix and match of SUSE/Moblin’s core package is built on top of the Moblin 2.1’s 2.6.31 Linux kernel. Above that, most of the software is from SLED 11. Instead of KDE 4.3, though, for the interface, it uses the Moblin Web-oriented interface. So, for example, to use Firefox for your Web browser, you’ll get to it via the Moblin toolbar.

The U135 is powered by a second-generation 1.66GHz Intel Atom 450 Pineview processor. It comes with a 10-inch LED back-lit screen with a resolution of 1,024 x 600 pixels. The U135 also comes with a fully-supported 1.3-megapixel Webcam. Lunardi said that it’s good enough that he now uses the U135 for all his Skype video-calls.

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January 7, 2010
by sjvn01
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Flying the Frightened Skies

In the immediate aftermath of a would-be terrorist trying to blow a plane out of the sky over Detroit on Christmas Day, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) issued a vague set of new warnings that left passengers utterly confused as to what to expect. Now, days later, we know: For domestic air-flight, it’s pretty much business as usual.

At first, would-be passengers were expecting to be frisked as they prepared to board their planes; to have to sit during the first and last hour of their flight; to be unable to keep pillows and blankets on their laps; and you could forget about using any electronics on board. On some flights in late December, all these nuisances happened.

That was then. This is now.

I asked the hundreds of people I know who are now in Las Vegas for CES (Consumer Electronics Show) to let me know what changes, if any, as they made their way to Las Vegas’ McCarran airport. So, what they did see that was different? Nothing. Not one blessed thing.

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January 6, 2010
by sjvn01
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The next generation of Linux notebooks arrives at CES

After Dell broke the ice for pre-installing Linux on desktops and netbooks in 2007, the other major OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) reluctantly tried it out, and, in some cases, like Lenovo, backed right back out of the Linux desktop market again. As 2010 dawns though, Lenovo and HP are both back in the pre-installed desktop Linux game.

Lenovo gets the ‘credit’ for the oddest laptop, with or without Linux, that I’ve ever seen. The IdeaPad U1 is two computers in one. Or, as my fellow technology writer Mitch Wagner describes it, “It’s the mullet of notebook computers: Business in the front, party in the back.”

What you’ll get, when the IdeaPad U1 ships in June 2010, is a notebook that runs Windows 7 on an Intel Core 2 Duo CULV processor with a 128GB solid-state drive on one side. So where’s the Linux? I’m getting to that.

You see you can pull off the 11.6-inch multi-touch-enabled screen, and, ta-da, you have a full-sized tablet computer, running Lenovo’s Skylight touch-enabled version of Linux on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM chipset and 16GBs of flash memory.

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January 5, 2010
by sjvn01
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Can Imaging Technologies save us from Terrorists?

We already know that database passenger screening technologies won’t spot all prospective terrorists, but what about imaging technologies like millimeter wave and backscatter imaging? Will they do the trick?

While these two technologies are lumped together as full body scanning, or as EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) prefers to call it, “Digital Strip Search,” they’re not interchangeable.

Millimeter wave technology devices like L3 Communications’ ProVision Whole Body Imager scan you with millimeter wave radio frequency (RF) from two antennas simultaneously as they rotate around you. The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) claims that millimeter wave scanners use far less energy than a cell phone in their scans. The result is a 3-dimensional gray-scale body image. The images are revealing but they aren’t exactly titillating or likely to ever appear in a hypothetical whole body image Web site of the rich and famous.

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