Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 5, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Does VMware buying Zimbra from Yahoo make sense?

We don’t for certain that VMware, the giant proprietary virtualization company, is buying Zimbra, the open-source e-mail server company from Yahoo, but that’s the news from the rumor-mill. But, it’s not just any rumor, Kara Swisher, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and one of the most respected technology reporters around, started the story off when she wrote that Yahoo was close to selling Zimbra to VMware. Since then other sources, including some of my own, have confirmed that the deal is close to happening. The real question is: “Why VMware?”

The question isn’t, “Why is Yahoo trying to sell Zimbra?” If you follow Yahoo you know why that is. Yahoo needs cash for its disgruntled stockholders who still aren’t happy that Microsoft didn’t buy them out.

Besides, as Swisher reported earlier this year Zimbra isn’t a good fit with Yahoo’s attempt to refocus on the consumer market. Zimbra is an excellent business e-mail and groupware server. Zimbra isn’t meant to be an end-user program thoughl; it’s meant to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange.

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January 4, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Chrome: Linux’s best Web browser?

p>I’m a long-time Firefox fan, but I’ve also grown fond of Google’s Chrome browser. In fact, I’ve pretty much switched to Chrome as my browser of choice on my Windows PCs. I’ve stuck with Firefox on Linux, but now that Chrome is available as a beta on Linux, I’m being tempted to switch.

I’ve been using the Chrome developer builds on Linux for months. It was fast but also unstable, so I never seriously considered it as a Firefox replacement. But the Chrome beta is proving to be both faster than fast and stable to boot.

I’ve put this rapidly evolving Web browser to the test primarily on my Dell Inspiron 530s. This desktop PC is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front side bus, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 Graphics Media Accelerator. On it, I’m running MEPIS 8, one of my favorite desktop Linux distributions.

The first thing I noticed with the beta is that it’s faster than ever. Pages that drag to the screen on Firefox burst on to the screen with Chrome. This wasn’t just my perception. On the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test, Chrome 4.0.249.11 zipped in at 786.2 milliseconds. That’s more than three-times faster than Firefox 3.5.6 with its 2,969.4 milliseconds on the exact same machine. Wow.

Speed isn’t everything though. I’m also pleased that Chrome now supports extensions like Xmarks, my bookmark sync program of choice. While Chrome doesn’t have the wealth of extensions that Firefox has yet, there are already many good and useful Chrome extensions.

Chrome also looks good in Linux. The interface itself is written with the GTK+ toolkit, which is also the foundation for GNOME. While this means that Chrome works best with GNOME’s GTK themes, it also looked and worked great with my MEPIS’ default KDE 3.5.9 desktop. That’s because while KDE is built on top of the Qt framework, I always install GNOME’s fundamentals on my desktop even if I never intend to actually use GNOME on it. This way, when I use some of my favorite GNOME applications such as the Evolution e-mail client and now Chrome, I don’t have to worry with minor incompatibilities.

Speaking of incompatibilities, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Chrome on Linux passed the Acid3 Test with a near-perfect 99 score. This means that Chrome is compatible with Web 2.0 applications and should render correctly the vast majority of up-to-date Web standard-compliant sites and pages.

But there is one major problem with Chrome for some users. While Chrome is built atop the open-source Chromium, Google Chrome itself is a closed-source program. To be exact, in the Google Chrome Terms of Service for the Linux version, section 5.3 of the agreement reads: "Unless you have been specifically permitted to do so in a separate agreement with Google, you agree that you will not reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Services for any purpose." The ‘Services’ in this case includes the Chrome program.

It’s a rather odd terms of service since you can always build your own version of the Chrome browser from the Chromium code-base, which is licensed under the very liberal BSD license. The upshot of all this is that, unlike Firefox, you probably won’t see Chrome included in Linux distributions such as Fedora, which are pickier about program licenses. However, since Chrome is freely available in both the DEB and RPM formats almost any Linux users will be able to easily add it to their distribution.

At the end of the day, I’m still fonder for Firefox on Linux, but I think that has more to do with my years of experience with Firefox than it does with the comparative merits of Firefox vs. Chrome. If you can live with the oddities of Chrome’s license, I think you’ll find that Chrome is now Linux’s best Web browser.


A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

December 30, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Linux 2019

I don’t care how often I see it; I still can’t get used to people typing on tables. Bad enough that people are always mumbling to themselves-cut cells C3-C7, paste to D3-D7-but the constant drumming of fingers is just annoying. And, please, don’t get me started on people wearing iContact lens! At least when you saw someone with smart-glasses on you knew they might, or might, not be actually looking at you. With the new smart-lens you can’t tell if someone’s staring at you in a stoned haze, taking your photo, working on something entirely remote from the location, or-could it be!?–actually looking at you.

In 2019, we’ll be in the post-operating system world. Linux will still be around, and so will Windows and the Mac OS, but, just like today, most of them will be using Linux every day. Also, just like today, when people use Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc., they won’t realize that they’re using Linux. One key difference though is that while engineers and programmers will be aware of operating systems, users won’t have a clue.

That’s because, while Microsoft may be offering Windows 10, most people’s concept of computing will have left the desktop behind. Instead of thinking about whether Ubuntu 10.10 is better than WinTen, they’ll simply be using what Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable’s CEO, calls the world of the four “Anys” — any content, any device, anytime and anyplace.

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December 28, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

The technology and the terrorist

On this past Christmas Day, a holiday nightmare was averted when a passenger and good luck kept a terrorist from blowing apart Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it prepared to land in Detroit. While this story has a happy ending, we’re left to wonder why the automated systems designed to catch such people in the first place failed.

And, make no doubt about it, they did fail. After first pretending that some how the systems had worked, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano admitted on NBC’s “Today” show that “Our system did not work in this instance.” So, what are these systems anyway and why didn’t they stop Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, from ever getting on the plane with the powerful PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate) explosive.

The main failure was that Abdulmutallab was even allowed to get a ticket and boarding pass in the first place. His own father had reported that he was concerned over his son’s “radicalization” to the U.S. Embassy in November. What happened after that is where things began to fall apart.

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December 28, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

A decade of Linux

More than ten-years ago, I helped Linux’s adoption a little bit along by proving out that Linux and Samba actually worked faster than the then dominant Windows NT operating system. Today, as we bid the ‘noughts’ adieu, everyone uses Linux from devices, such as DVR (digital video recorders) and smartphones; to the Internet where everything from search engines such as Google to the social networks like Facebook and Twitter rely on Linux to vital business networks like the world’s stock markets, which run on Linux. Only the desktop remains unconquered and who knows? Between Linux-powered netbooks and Google’s Chrome OS, by 2019 perhaps even that will have changed. After all, who would have thought in 1999 that Linux would have quietly become so prevalent throughout computing?

Let’s take a look at this last decade and see how Linux made its journey from niche operating system to its current prominence.

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