Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 19, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Think you own your Kindle books?

During the night of July 16th, while Amazon Kindle owners slept, Amazon was quietly deleting their copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Most people who are upset about this were upset and surprised that Amazon would unilaterally delete their books. They’re missing the real points.

Whether Amazon had the right to do this is an argument for another day. There is no question that they badly mishandled it. At the very least, Amazon should have told their buyers that it had turned out they hadn’t the rights to sell e-copies of those books and that they were going to need to remove them. That appears to be what Amazon will do in the future, or that Amazon will let people who bought copies in good faith keep them while not selling any more copies in the future.

Fine, but none of that touches on the real problems. Amazon is telling you that you will never own any book you buy for your Kindle. This is the old DRM (digital rights management) trap that won’t let you make back-ups of your DVDs snaring yet another media’s users.

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July 17, 2009
by sjvn01
5 Comments

An open alternative for Palm Pre iTunes users

Apple will tell you that iTunes 8.2.1 fixes bugs and, in particular, improves interoperability with iPhones and iPod Touches running iPhone 3.0 Software. But, it really it only has one ‘feature:’ It blocks the Palm Pre’s iTunes compatibility. KDE thinks there’s another way.

But, just to get this out of the way, I’m now running iTunes 8.2.1 on my Windows PCs and Macs, including both a Tiger and a Leopard Mac OS X system. If there’s anything noteworthy about the new iTunes on any of these systems, I haven’t seen it yet. It certainly doesn’t seem to have mattered in the least to my 1st generation iPod Touches or my Apple TV.

As far as I can tell, the only thing it really does is prevent Palm Pre’s from talking to iTunes. I’m not a Pre fan, but if I were a Pre user I certainly would want iTunes compatibility. Or, at least, something that works like iTunes. Apple, however, isn’t going to let me have it.

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July 17, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

A Linux security story

There’s no such thing as perfect security. There are no programs that give you absolute software security. After all, security is a process, not a product. Linux’s security process, though, is outstanding, which is one reason why it has great security. Here’s an example.

On July 16th, a security programmer named Brad Spengler, who designs an open-source network and server security program called grsecurity revealed on the full disclosures security mailing list that there was a security hole in the 2.6.30 Linux kernel.

The short version of this vulnerability, according to the SANS Internet Storm Center goes like this: “The vulnerable code is located in the net/tun implementation. Basically, what happens here is that the developer initialized a variable to a certain value that can be NULL. The developer correctly checked the value of this new variable couple of lines later and, if it is 0 (NULL), he just returns back an error. ”

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July 16, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Dell looks to Moblin for Linux future

In a recent blog posting, Dell Technology Strategist, Doug Anson, said that Dell, as I wrote last week, was considering selling Google’s new Chrome OS in its netbooks. That’s interesting, but what I found far more interesting was that Anson seemed a lot more interest in Moblin, the new mobile Internet device, operating system for Dell.

Anson opened by talking about Google Chrome OS. He wrote, “Given that Google has made it clear that the Chrome OS will be available in the second half of 2010, there’s still a lot of time to see how this will develop. As with most new technology, Dell plans to evaluate the Chrome OS and other alternative operating environments, like we’ve done in the past. Luckily (for me!), Dell enjoys a great relationship with Google. As we have more details to share on the topic, we’ll do it here.”

Fine and dandy, but what caught my attention was that he went on to talk about how “Alternative operating systems, continue to evolve, flourish and prosper.” Specifically, what he finds interesting about them is that “These alternative operating environments are truly “different” from the traditional Windows platform – they don’t attempt to simply ‘mimic’ Windows.” Sure, Anson admits that that can be a problem, but “these alternative operating environments attempt to address this shortcoming by focusing their feature set with a self-directed experience: entice and direct the user to its strengths.”

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July 15, 2009
by sjvn01
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Ballmer says Windows 7 is vaporware

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, shocked attendees at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner conference in New Orleans yesterday when he announced that while Windows 7 is certainly interesting since it won’t ship until late this year it’s little more than vaporware.

Ballmer continued, to the stunned audience of Microsoft programmers’ amazement, to say that “I don’t know if we can’t make up our mind or what our problem is over here, but the last time I checked, you don’t need two client operating systems. It’s good to have one.”

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July 14, 2009
by sjvn01
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Red-ink Sun Set

You can’t make up results as bad as this. Sun Microsystems, in its last days as an independent company has announced absolutely horrible preliminary numbers for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, which ended June 30, 2009.

According to the company, Sun expects revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 in the range of $2.580 to $2.680 billion, as compared with $3.780 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008. That’s a more than billion year-over-year dollar drop.

Sun went on to state that it anticipates a GAAP (General Accepted Accounting Principles) net loss per share for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 of from twenty-four to thirty-four cents per share. If you want to ignore GAAP, Sun says its net loss won’t be that bad: share holders will only lose six to sixteen cents per share.

Want to know more? Tough. “Sun will not host a conference call in conjunction with fourth quarter results. Results are expected to be posted on http://sun.com/investors upon the filing of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2009 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is due no later than August 31, 2009.”

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