Practical Technology

for practical people.

April 27, 2009
by sjvn01
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How many billions is open-source software worth?

Open-source software is big business. For example, most of what Oracle is getting for it $7.4-billion purchase of Sun is open-source software. Thanks to a Linux Foundation study, we know that creating the Fedora 9 Linux distribution would have cost $11.5-billionin conventional software costs. So, given all that, what do you think OSS (open-source software) as a whole is worth? How’s about $387-billion?

That’s the number that Black Duck Software came up with. Black Duck isn’t an open-source ISV (independent software vendor). The Boston area company started as an IP (intellectual property) risk management and mitigation company, but has since grown into an open-source legal management firm.

Since Black Duck was founded in 2002, the company has been tracking all known open source on the Internet According to their research, there are over 200,000 open-source projects representing over 4.9 billion lines of code. To create that code from scratch, Black Duck estimates that “reproducing this OSS would cost $387 billion and would take 2.1 million people-years of development.”

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April 27, 2009
by sjvn01
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Microsoft is doing something half right

Ever since Bill Gates stepped down and Steve Ballmer took over his role, Microsoft has been getting one thing after another wrong. Vista continues to be a disaster both for users and for the company’s bottom line. And Microsoft’s ad campaign last year, starring Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, is already a model of how not to do television advertising. Somehow, though, after years of stumbling around like a drunken college freshman after an NCAA basketball win, Microsoft is getting its act together.

First, Microsoft has reluctantly — oh how reluctantly — brought back Windows XP. Officially, Microsoft has cut XP support. Unofficially, hardware vendors such as Hewlett-Packard aren’t going to let XP die anytime soon. You’ll still be getting new PCs with XP on them well into 2010, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see fresh copies of XP appearing in 2011.

Microsoft finally got it. No one with two brain cells wants Vista.

What’s more amazing to me, though, is that Microsoft finally figured out that after Vista, no one wants a long, drawn-out rollout of a new Windows operating system. So, instead of orchestrating its traditional years-long series of pre-announcements and announcements, Microsoft is just focusing on getting Windows 7 — a.k.a. Vista Lite — out as fast as possible, with as little official fanfare as possible.

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April 25, 2009
by sjvn01
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Running Windows 7 RC on a netbook

Microsoft, in attempting to drum up excitement for Windows 7, has been leaking releases every few weeks. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Windows 7, Build 7100, which is said to be the release candidate, is now available. It can already be downloaded from most BitTorrent sites. Will you, however, want to download it if you have a netbook?

I recently spent a good deal of time looking at the earlier betas of Windows 7 on a Dell Mini 9 netbook. The Mini 9 is an excellent small computer, and I’ve been very pleased with it and its native Ubuntu 8.04 Linux desktop operating system.

With the Windows 7 betas it was a different story. I found, in short, that Windows 7 required too much RAM and other system resources to run well on typical 2008 netbooks.

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April 24, 2009
by sjvn01
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Get your software into Linux the easy way

It’s always been possible to port your application into any Linux distribution. All you had to do was know how to compile and link your program with each distribution’s libraries and then package it up in either DEB or RPM package. Easy! Right? Right??

OK, so actually it’s never been that easy to move applications from Unix to Linux or from one Linux family to another. The basics are simple. It’s all those nagging details of which library version is in one distribution and not in another and the like that makes porting programs a problem.

Now, thanks to the joint efforts of the Linux Foundation and openSUSE, any programmer has a straightforward way to get their program up and working in any Linux distribution without pulling out their hair. It’s called the openSUSE Build Service. Despite the name, the Build Service actually enables you to create packages not just for openSUSE, but for the Red Hat family-CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux-the Debian/Ubuntu group, and Mandriva.

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April 24, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Hands on: Running Windows 7 on a netbook

Microsoft made headlines recently when The Wall Street Journal reported that the company planned to equip netbooks with the Starter edition of Windows 7, a semi-crippled version that only lets users run up to three applications at a time.

This is puzzling, considering that Microsoft really needs Windows 7 to be on the netbook. Netbooks are the one segment of the PC market that’s actually growing, even in the current economy. For now, Microsoft is offering Windows XP on netbooks because Vista simply won’t run on a netbook’s limited hardware, but it’s going to need to move them to Windows 7 once that operating system hits the market.

(It’s worth noting that while Microsoft claims any version of Windows 7 will run on current netbooks, Intel is not making such claims. In fact, Anand Chandrasekher, Intel’s head of Ultra Mobility, recently said that Intel will be releasing new Atom processors in the second half of 2009 that will support Windows 7 Starter and Basic editions.)

Which brings up the question: Is there anything wrong with running a full version of Windows 7 on a netbook? To test this out, I decided to install the Windows 7 Ultimate beta (because of frequent updates, I worked with builds 7000 to 7077) on a Dell Mini 9 netbook. How well would it run?

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April 23, 2009
by sjvn01
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The fall of Microsoft

‘ve long thought it funny when Microsoft-fans would tell me how Linux, open-source, the Mac, whatever would never be important because Microsoft products were clearly better. Now, everyone can get on the joke as Microsoft’s earnings plummeted in the last quarter by 6%.

For the stockholders among you that means Microsoft’s diluted earnings per share were down 30% over last year and well below what the 39 the analysts were expecting. What carved into Microsoft’s piggy-bank? According to Microsoft it was “a poor showing in its Client, Microsoft Business Division and Server & Tools groups.” In other words, pretty much everything.

What’s caused this?

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