Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 15, 2009
by sjvn01
7 Comments

Microsoft to users: Don’t switch to Vista

It’s official. Bill Veghte, Microsoft’s senior VP for Windows business, told an audience of the Microsoft faithful at TechEd that Windows users should not switch to Vista. Veghte said, “If you’re just starting your testing of Vista, with the [Windows 7] Release Candidate and the quality of that offering, I would switch over and do your testing on the [Windows 7] Release Candidate, and use that going forward.”

In short, Microsoft is finally telling you what I’ve been telling you all along: Vista is junk.

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May 15, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Look out IE, Firefox, Chrome is getting much better

I love Google Chrome. It’s faster than fast and I really like the clean, but still helpful, interface. But, since it only runs on Windows and it didn’t support extensions, I usually recommend Firefox. Google is making big changes to Chrome though and by the end of summer I may need to rethink my position.

First, while Google has been slow to support Mac OS X and Linux, they are finally getting up to speed. In particular, while the Mac version of Chrome is in no way, shape, or form ready for prime time, hardily a day goes by that Google’s not releasing a new test build on the Chromium Mac site. Chrome for Mac isn’t there yet, but it you follow it closely you can see it getting better day by day.

Chrome on Linux is also moving forward at a good clip now. I’m running the latest builds on my Ubuntu 9.04 system. In my opinion, it’s getting close to beta status, which is to say it mostly works, but you can’t trust it for regular work. To my mind, this puts it ahead of the Mac port. Keep your eyes open. I won’t be surprised to see a real beta of Chrome on Linux out by the end of May.

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May 14, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

After Googlefail, will you trust online apps?

Well, that was different. It turns out that Google wasn’t the victim of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack by others; Google managed to knock-out its own network.

Wow.

With network engineers like this, who needs crackers?

Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior VP of operations explained, that Google had sent some of its traffic through Asia. Hoelzle wrote, “Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today.”

Besides search, all, and I mean all, of Google’s applications were knocked out. Which leads me to the question, “Do we really want to rely on Google or any of SaaS (Software as a Service) for our programs?”

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May 14, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Google down!

Starting on the morning of May 14, at about 10:45 AM Eastern Time, Google and its related services starting to move extremely slowly. In some cases, Google services are reported to have completely stopped working.

In the States, I’ve heard from users in NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco. They all report that Google searches were running at historically low speeds. I’ve heard similar reports from users Europe and Australia.

In addition, Google services like Google News and Gmail are completely failing. The Internet Storm Center is saying that it’s received multiple “reports of a total fail of Google Applications. Gmail, Reader, Docs, News, Apps. etc.”

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May 13, 2009
by sjvn01
4 Comments

MySQL Forks

Sun may have the MySQL name, but every one has its open-source code and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius is taking the popular open-source DBMS (database management system) and forking it in a new directions.

It came as no surprise to those who follow MySQL that Monty Program Ab, Widenius’ MySQL database engineering company, and Percona, a MySQL services and support firm, announced on May 13th that they were forming a vendor-neutral consortium, “The Open Database Alliance,” to become MySQL’s industry hub.

What they have in mind is to use Widenius’ own branch of MySQL, MariaDB, and its derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements as the new “MySQL industry hub.” According to Widenius, “MariaDB will work exactly as MySQL; all commands, interfaces, libraries and APIs [Application Programming Interface] that exist in MySQL also exist in MariaDB.”

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May 13, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Could Adobe be open-sourcing Flash?

Over the years, Adobe has become more Linux friendly. First, Adobe released an excellent version of its Flash Player for Linux, and, more recently, the company launched a version of AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) for Linux. Now, however, with Strobe, its just announced Flash framework, Adobe looks like it may be getting more open-source friendly as well.

Strobe, which will show up in the 3rd quarter of 2009, is an open framework for creating SWF (ShockWave Flash) server-side players. With Strobe, content creators and Web developers will be able to easily create sites that host their own video.

According to the Adobe, Strobe will be teamed up with the Open Screen Project to create easy-to-deploy Flash players via a consistent runtime that will run on not just Linux, Mac and Windows PCs, but on all other platforms such as phones and televisions.

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