Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 4, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

The other Ubuntu Linux distributions

I like the brand spanking new Ubuntu 10.04 a lot. But while I like its GNOME 2.30 interface, I also like other interfaces such as KDE. It would be nice if Ubuntu could also play MP3s, common video formats and Flash from the get-go. You could install all these and other extras from the Ubuntu repositories, but there’s also a wide-variety of Ubuntu spin-offs that come ready to give you the functionality you want right out of the box.

Here’s my list of the most important of the Ubuntu-based distributions.

Kubuntu 10.04. Like the name suggests, the big difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu is that the K-Ubuntu runs KDE 4.4.2 instead of GNOME 2.30 for its desktop. But Kubuntu isn’t just Ubuntu with KDE. Instead of KDE’s default Konqueror Web browser, Kubuntu defaults to using Firefox 3.6.3.

Kubuntu also does a nice job of integrating GNOME applications into the KDE 4.4 interface. That’s the good news; the bad news is, instead of using a KDE frontend to Ubuntu’s outstanding Ubuntu Software Center, you’re stuck with the far less attractive and more difficult to use KPackageKit to add new programs and update your software. KPackageKit is fine for experienced Linux users, but Linux newcomers, which is what Ubuntu wants, will find it less than appealing. For more on Kubuntu, check out this excellent review.

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May 3, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

First, we kill all the patent lawyers

Actually, I don’t think we should kill all the patent lawyers. Some of my best friends are patent attorneys — no, really. But I’d happily stick a knife into the American patent system.

In the beginning, the U.S. patent system was meant to encourage inventors and innovation. Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, “The Patent System added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” That was then. This is now.

Unless the Supreme Court does the right thing and tosses out business practice and, by implication, software patents with the proper decision in the Bilski case, we’re stuck with a system designed to wreck anyone who actually tries to implement his own ideas.

You see, with many software patents there is no specific language, no hard code, but only descriptions of general processes that can be implemented in multiple ways. Now, you might think you could avoid patent trouble by looking up the appropriate patents and not using them. Good luck with that.

As Bradley M. Kuhn, then executive director of the Free Software Foundation, told me a few years back, it’s “difficult today to write any software program — be it free software or proprietary — from scratch that does not exercise the teachings of some existing software patent in the U.S.A.”

Back when Steve Ballmer, Microsoft‘s CEO, first started talking about how Linux patents might be violating Microsoft’s patents in 2004, Dan Ravicher, an attorney and executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, said, “There is no reason to believe that GNU/Linux has any greater risk of infringing patents than Windows, Unix-based or any other functionally similar operating system. Why? Because patents are infringed by specific structures that accomplish specific functionality.”

But let’s say you do search for existing patents. You think you’re clear of any possible problems, but then you get hit by a patent lawsuit anyway. And guess what: You’re in more trouble than ever. Why? Because now you could end up paying up to three times more in penalties because you might have been aware that what you were doing was in violation of a patent. With patent lawsuit damages already commonly running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, this kind of legal reversal is enough to kill all but the largest companies.

Is this a great country or what?

This is why Microsoft, despite being the loser in some whopping patent lawsuits, such as the $200 million-plus it owes i4i for violating its patents and the $1.5 billion it once owed Alcatel-Lucent, is happy to threaten other companies, especially those that use Linux or open-source software, such as Amazon and TomTom into licensing agreements.

You see, it isn’t a question of whether Microsoft’s patent claims are valid or not; that’s not important. What’s important is that if a company settles any potential patent worries beforehand with a few million, it avoids spending millions in legal costs and the remote chance of having to pay out hundreds of millions in damages.

God help any small company targeted by an industry giant with a patent complaint. The legal costs alone would ruin most of them.

What we really need is a complete overhaul of the U.S. patent system. If the Supreme Court doesn’t strike down business process patents, the federal government should take up the problem. As it is now, any software program can be attacked either by patent trolls — companies that do nothing but collect patents and then look for companies that might be implementing the ideas within them — or by big companies wanting to stomp out competition.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

April 30, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Apple and Adobe’s war of words heats up

Steve Jobs anti-Adobe Flash rant is really quite a remarkable document both for what it says, and what it doesn’t say.

First, and foremost, there’s the fact that Jobs spends most of his time complaining about the Flash format and ignoring the real beef Adobe has with Apple. Sure Adobe doesn’t like that Apple won’t let Adobe Flash on its iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch platforms. But, that’s not what has Adobe executives ticked off to the point that they’re telling Apple to go screw themselves and that they’re quietly considering suing Apple.

No, what has Adobe ticked off is that Apple changed its iPhone SDK (software development kit) license so that developers couldn’t even submit programs to Apple that use cross-platform compilers. This blocks all Adobe developers from creating applications for the iDevice family. Worst still, Adobe had just finished building its latest master suite of graphic, document and Web development tools, Adobe Creative Suite 5, which included tools to port applications to the iPhone and all the rest. I don’t think you can blame Adobe for being a wee bit annoyed.

Officially, Adobe has thrown in the towel on iDevice development. Adobe isn’t taking this functionality out of CS 5, but Mike Chambers, the principal product manager for developer relations for Adobe’s Flash platform, has said that Adobe “is not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.”

You’d think that would be the end of it. It’s not.

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April 29, 2010
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Microsoft marches on Android and Linux

For years, Microsoft has made patent threats against Linux. Mind you, Microsoft has never proven, or even attempted to prove, any of these claims. That hasn’t, however, stopped Microsoft from using the threat of Linux patent lawsuit to force companies like Amazon into paying them off. Now, Microsoft has upped the ante. Microsoft has muscled mobile phone maker HTC into paying Microsoft off for patents that may apply to its Google Android-powered phones. In short, without actually proving that Linux is violating Microsoft’s patents, the Redmond giant is ‘taxing’ companies for using Linux.

We don’t know how much HTC is paying in royalties for these patents. In fact, we actually don’t even know what patents Microsoft is claiming that Linux-based Android may be violating. Both companies are hiding the specifics under a nondisclosure agreement.

Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel of intellectual property and licensing did say in a blog though, that “the radio stack–the functionality that allowed users to make and receive calls … still commands the highest patent royalties, on the order of 5% of the price the device manufacturer charges the mobile phone operator.” And, “the royalties for codecs (which encode and decode digital media) and other technology represent 1-2% of the price to operators. And now the industry is in the process of sorting out what royalties will be for the software stack, which now represents the principal value proposition for smartphones.”

So, if the software stack is where the “principal value for smartphones” lies, that means what? That the royalty payment should be, say, 4%? If that’s so, then $8 from every HTC Droid Incredible from Verizon Wireless, at its fully discounted price of $199.99 goes to Microsoft’s wallet. What a deal… for Microsoft.

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April 28, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Question: Why switch to Linux or a Mac?

Answer: Because, you can’t keep Windows secure even if you do the right things.

‘m no friend to Windows. I know the operating system too well to trust it. But, I did think that even though Windows is defective by design, you could keep it relatively safe by installing patches quickly and using anti-virus software religiously. I was wrong.

First, it turns out that one of Microsoft’s latest Windows patches just flat out didn’t work. Whoops!

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. But, what really caught my attention this go-around was that at just about the same time the news broke that a flawed McAfee Antivirus update knocked out millions of Windows XP computers. Talk about sloppy quality assurance! How the heck can a Windows anti-virus company release an update that locks XP computers into an endless reboot cycle?

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April 27, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Ubuntu 10.04: Where Ubuntu goes from here

The new Ubuntu release is almost here and I like the Ubuntu 10.04 desktop a lot. As a Linux expert, it’s a little too simple for my personal tastes, but it’s the best beginner Linux out of the box I’ve ever seen. That’s all well and good, but where Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company really hopes to make money is from this latest LTS (Long Term Support) Ubuntu Linux for the server and the cloud.

Canonical CEO Jane Silber and Founder and VP of Product Design Mark Shuttleworth were candid about this at a noon Eastern Time press conference announcing the arrival of the 10.04 Server and Desktop. That said, Silber was also pleased to report that other companies are now shipping Ubuntu desktop on laptops from Lenovo in China and Sharp in Japan.

Shuttleworth also noted that Ubuntu’s basic design philosophy is going to center on making it ‘light.’ By this he meant both light as a distribution and light and fast to deploy both on desktops and servers.

The real breakthroughs for Ubuntu though, according to Shuttleworth, is in cloud computing. He said that Ubuntu 10.04 has two major themes. The first is that it will be exceptional in its speed of deployment and configuration. The second is its ability to scale. As far as Shuttleworth is concerned, for enterprise customers, “Ubuntu is the right platform for speed and scalability on Amazon EC2 and Rackspace.”

Shuttleworth added that he is committed to “making Canonical profitable in the enterprise market.” He knows it won’t be easy but he’ll “see it through” and Ubuntu is already “showing good growth” in the business market.

Part of this will come from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server’s growing number of open-source and proprietary application providers certifying their applications on Ubuntu Server Edition. According to Canonical, “Almost 100 organizations have signaled their intent to certify applications on the platform, including Alfresco, Ingres, IBM, VMware, Zimbra, Yahoo! and many others with more expected to follow post-launch.”

“The range of industry, analyst and user support we are seeing for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on server has the makings of a breakout release for this technology,” said Silber in a statement. “We can consolidate the significant technical advances we’ve made since the last LTS release onto a stable, secure and long-term supported platform that the industry is gathering around. This is exciting for us, for our partners and most of all for our users and I expect to see Ubuntu adoption accelerate as a core infrastructure layer for volume services and cloud computing in the world’s data centers.”

Canonical also announced that it has advanced several new hardware and software partnerships. The biggest news on the hardware side is that Dell will support the Ubuntu server and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud as an option on its cloud-server PowerEdge-C line.

As for software, Adobe is also working with Canonical. Anup Murarka, director for Technology Strategy and Partner Development, Flash Platform, Adobe, explained in a statement that, “We are working with Ubuntu and other partners to enable certification of Flash Player 10.1 for Linux on the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release, an exciting release for Linux-based desktops and devices.” This Adobe and Canonical partnership could lead to much bigger things if Adobe and Apple continue to fight.

Likewise, which makes a CIFS (Common Internet File System) server and supports AD (Active Directory) integration on Linux is also working with Ubuntu. In a statement, Barry Crist, Likewise’s CEO said. “By enabling Ubuntu 10.04 LTS users to quickly and easily integrate with networks on both desktops and servers, we support Ubuntu adoption in the enterprise.”

Put it all together and you don’t have just a new Ubuntu release, but the announcement of a major effort by Canonical and its partners to make Ubuntu a worthy competitor to Red Hat and Novell in the enterprise space.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.