Practical Technology

for practical people.

June 26, 2009
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Amazon pulls plug on NC Amazon Associates over taxes

I was bemused to find out this morning, June 26, that Amazon had put an end to my, and all North Carolina residents, Amazon Associates accounts. This program, for those who don’t know it, is simply a way you can use to sell Amazon products through your Web site.

The reason that Amazon did this is that NC has slipped a new tax in its state budget: a ‘click-through’ tax. This will apply NC sales tax to purchases of digital media and physical items that are bought after clicking through a Web site.

So, for example, you may never actually ever have a Michael Jackson Thriller CD in hand, but by providing an Amazon Associates’ sales link to the CD on your Web site to the Amazon Web page where it can actually be bought, NC intends on levying a sales tax on your ‘sale.’
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June 25, 2009
by sjvn01
6 Comments

Cleaning the Spam Cesspool

Is there anyone left in the world unacquainted with the plight of the Abachas of Nigeria? The Abacha family fortune is not only down to a mere US $30 million, but it’s inaccessible, frozen in certain bank accounts that can be unlocked only with your Urgent Assistance, which usually consists of disclosing a bank account number, to your ultimate detriment.

The Abacha e-mails are just one of the many waves of Nigerian-based fraud schemes, which date back to faxes in the 1980s. And in turn, they’re just the tip of the spam sewage tsunami that, by some estimates, is much as 90%+ percent of all e-mails, and its volume is growing ever larger.

For years people have been trying, with only limited success, to sort the good mail wheat from the spam chaff in a variety of ways, such as creating lists of known spammers, or mail servers that harbor known spammers, blacklisting and lists of known spam messages, filtering. When done conservatively, such methods still let a lot of spam through. When done aggressively, they block legitimate messages as well as spam.

But these are hacksaws, when what’s needed are scalpels. And sure enough, a new technique has come along recently that promises to shunt almost all one’s unwanted messages to the virtual trash bin without also zapping any of the mail you want to read. It works by a sort of mathematical induction: you identify which messages are spam, and pattern-matching software, based on principles of probability theory first formulated by Thomas Bayes in the 18th century, finds commonalities among the bad messages, and among the remaining good ones as well. Rules are then formulated that generalize from those particulars.

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June 25, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Digg, Dug, Buried: How Linux news disappears

Like it or lump it, the major reason that determines whether any given online story will get read or not is how much play it gets on news link sharing sites and social networks like Digg, reddit, and StumbleUpon. Unlike earlier news sharing sites like Slashdot, these sites have no central editorial control. Instead, the stories that get prominent play on these sites is determined entirely by readers. That sounds like democracy in its most basic form, but in practice what it really means that stories can be buried from sight by abusive users with an ax to grind.

I became aware of this because in the last few weeks I’ve had several stories that were pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft-Linux, it doesn’t get any faster and Macs, Windows 7, and Linux–first became popular on Digg, and, an hour later they were buried.

On Digg, what this means is that, unless you already know the Digg link, or specifically search for a tale with the buried story option on, the story link disappears. In short, no matter how many people thought it was a good story, other people will no longer be able to see it.

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June 24, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Apple TV 2.4: Well worth the download

The latest version of the Apple TV firmware, Apple TV 2.4, doesn’t have any major improvements, but it does include a few nice, new features and, from what I can see, gives the Apple TV a real performance kick.

First, the features. The one that I like the most is that when you’re looking over your collection you can now view movies by genre, title, or by whether you’ve already viewed them or not. With your TV Shows or Podcasts in addition to seeing them grouped by show, you can also now view them by date or by whether you’ve watched them or not.

The Apple TV’s remote has also had a bit more functionality added to it. Now, when watching a video you can not only click right or left to fast forward or rewind, but if you click again you’ll increase the speed. In addition, although Apple doesn’t say so, it certainly seems to me that the Apple TV does a better job of displaying the video while either rewinding or fast-forwarding. If you click down, you’ll see chapter markets and can navigate through your video with these.

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June 24, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Red Hat rakes in big bucks

Some companies, OK most companies, are in trouble, but Red Hat, the world’s number one Linux company just keeps signing the customers and making the bucks.

In its first financial quarter for the 2010 fiscal year, which ended May 31st, 2009, Red Hat’s total revenue was $174.4 million, an 11% increase from the year ago quarter. The company also reports that “subscription revenue for the quarter was $148.8 million, up 14% year-over-year.”

GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) operating income for the quarter was $25.1 million with a 14.4% operating margin. After the usual adjustments for stock compensation and amortization non-GAAP operating income for the first quarter was $40.7 million, up 19% year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating margin was 23.4%, up 160 basis points from the year ago quarter. None too shabby eh?

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June 24, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The little Linux school house

As I pointed out recently, open-source software in schools isn’t just a good idea, it’s becoming a financial necessity if we’re to keep enough teachers for our kids in classrooms. So, it’s particular good timing that Sugar Labs and openSUSE have released free Linux distributions expressly designed for education.

Sugar Labs, for those of you who don’t know them, is a software non-profit spin off from the OLPC (One Laptop per Child). Sugar Labs provides the Sugar desktop interface, which runs in turn, on top of a version of Fedora 10.

On June 24th, at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany, Sugar Labs announced the immediate availability of Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry. As the name indicates, Sugar on a Stick is a live USB flash drive distribution. It requires at least a GB-sized drive. With it, you can boot Sugar on any PC. It was designed to work on older PCs, netbooks, and other low-end hardware. You can also run Sugar with the provided virtual machine software on both Intel-based Macs Windows PCs.

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