Practical Technology

for practical people.

November 16, 2008
by sjvn01
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Sun: Dead company walking?

Over the years I’ve had mixed feelings about Sun. I like SPARC systems, much of the software, and several of their senior staffers are great, bright people. On the other hand, for ages the company kept going back and forth on such fundamental questions as: “Are we a hardware or software company?” And, “Are we a proprietary or open-source software company?”

That used to really tick me off about Sun, and, far more importantly, I think it also confused Sun’s customers, which made it easier for Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft, and IBM to grab Sun’s business. Today, Sun has finally become a true open-source company. Unfortunately, I think it may be too late.

Sun is laying off 15% to 18% of its employees, that’s between 5,000 and 6,000 employees, after a quarter which saw a $1.68 billion quarterly loss. Even before the economy started its nose-dive, Sun had been bleeding red-ink for several quarters.

I don’t see how Sun can recover. The bulk of Sun’s business came from high-end financial companies. You don’t have to know a thing about the stock market to know that the financial sector is a burnt-out husk.

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November 13, 2008
by sjvn01
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Novell vs. Red Hat: Linux vs. Linux

If you think about where Linux is fighting for market and mind-share, chances are you’re thinking about Linux slugging it out with Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris on the server, or trying to tear desktop customers away from Windows, and to a far lesser extent, from Mac OS X. That’s all true, but there’s also fierce competition between Linux distributions.

Some of that conflict is inside baseball stuff. Some Debian developers, for example, are jealous of Ubuntu’s popularity and some developers feel that Ubuntu hasn’t done enough for Linux. Unless you’re a Linux insider this kind of stuff isn’t going to matter to you.

What is going to matter to everyone who buys and deploys operating systems is that Novell is heating up its competition with the number one Linux distributor: Red Hat. On November 11th, Novell announced a new subscription and support program “designed to aid customers making the transition from their existing third-party Linux distribution to SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server).” What makes this interesting is that the three-year SLES subscription under this plan also includes two years of technical support for a customer’s existing Linux deployments while they make the SLES transition.

That’s new. I can’t recall ever seeing a vendor offering to support the competition’s offering while helping you to transition to their product. It does make sense. This is Linux after all. There are a lot of differences between how Novell handles management with its ZENworks and Red Hat does the same jobs with its Red Hat Network, but underneath the top-level management tools a good Linux administrator won’t have any trouble running either SLES or RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

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November 12, 2008
by sjvn01
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World without Linux

DATELINE: WindowsWorld 2008: Microsoft CEO and President, Steve Ballmer was happy as a clam today at his WindowsWorld keynote in San Francisco’s Gates Center. “Nothing can make me happier to tell you that, Larry Page CEO of Google,” a niche AOL search engine, “has agreed to run their search engine on Windows Server 2004.”

Ballmer continued, “It can only be good that even Google’s customers finally have access to a real server. Unix had its place, but, come on, that old command-line driven thing? Unix hasn’t been businesses’ operating system of choice since NT was introduced.”

Ballmer also announced that Windows Longhorn for Personal Computers would be released, after nine years of development, “sometime in 2011 for a list price of $799.” This made the fourth time in the 21st century that Ballmer had announced that Longhorn would be release soon. In the meantime, users will have to make the best of Windows 98 XP.

At this point in his keynote speech, there was a disturbance in the front as a group of demonstrators started shouting “GNU-HURD! GNU-HURD! GNU-HURD!” The police quickly hustled them away.

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November 11, 2008
by sjvn01
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The big Windows 7 lie

You’ve read the early reviews with comments like Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista and Windows 7 is wicked fast. Sounds great doesn’t it? On closer inspection though Windows 7 M3 (Milestone 3) is being revealed as being just a “slightly tweaked version of Vista.”

When I said recently that early Windows 7 reviews based on handpicked bribes, ah high-end laptops, to reviewers and bloggers could only give results that were not a lot different from those of a rigged demo I was more right than I knew. Randall Kennedy put the Windows 7 engine on a real test-bench and discovered that, at the kernel level, “When viewed side by side in Performance Monitor, Vista and Windows 7 were virtually indistinguishable.”

In case you haven’t used Vista, that means you can expect Windows 7 performance to be lousy. Kennedy ran the same application performance tests comparing XP and Vista and found that Vista ran 40% slower than XP. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, if you must run Windows, run XP SP3.

Application tests underlined Windows 7’s more than skin-deep resemblance to Vista. Kennedy found, “In a nutshell, Windows 7 M3 is a virtual twin of Vista when it comes to performance.” There are also peas in a pod when it comes to being resource hogs. Microsoft can talk about how Windows 7 will work great on netbooks and some people can claim that Windows 7 will run desktop Linux off netbooks, but Windows 7 is no more suitable than Vista is for a netbook.

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November 10, 2008
by sjvn01
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Linux software installation myths

In a recent story about Microsoft running scared of Linux, I got a lot of mail saying things like, “when installing programs becomes as easy as Windows then Microsoft will be in trouble….most people couldn’t be bothered stuffing around trying to find programs that will work and then figuring out how to install [them].” Ah, hello, it’s actually easier to install software in Linux than it is in Windows.

There is, however, a key difference that it appears many Windows users don’t get. In Windows, every program has its own installation routine. Usually, but not always, it requires you to click on some variety or the other of individualized setup program. In mainstream Linux distributions you use one program, often called a package manager, to install all your programs.

Personally, I find the Linux method easier because not only do package managers install the programs, they also enable you to search for a program. Say you want a program to display Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) files. In Windows, you need to find out what program you’ll need-Adobe Acrobat Reader, then download it, and then install it. Easy enough, but it could be easier.

With openSUSE, for example, I select Install Software from my main KDE menu. Install Software is part of openSUSE’s YaST administration program. I’m then presented with a menu where one of my options is to search for software. I put in ‘PDF,’ you see I don’t even need to know the name of the program that can handle PDF, and it shows me a listing of programs and their descriptions. At the top of the list is AcroRead from Adobe. I click on it and YaST takes care of downloading and installing it.

So, in short, with Linux I don’t need to even know the name of a program, I just search for what I need with the package manager and once I find something I like I just give it one click and that’s it. With Windows, searching, downloading and installing software is three separate operations. Advantage: Linux.

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November 10, 2008
by sjvn01
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The next Windows: 7Up (the Un-Vista) or New Vista?

Running away as fast as it can from Vista, Microsoft rolled out an alpha version of Windows 7 at its recent Professional Developers Conference. But is Windows 7 going to be 7Up, the Un-Vista, or is it going to be (gag) New Vista?

Microsoft would like you to believe that Windows 7 is going to be the next great desktop operating system. It’s not. The company would also like you to please forget that it said the same things about Vista. Remember how Windows 98 was followed by Windows 98 Second Edition? That’s what we have here: Windows 7 is Vista SE.

That’s not an altogether bad thing. Windows 98 SE was a big improvement on Windows 98, and at this very early stage, it looks like Windows 7 will also be a major step up from Vista Service Pack 1. Of course, that’s not saying much. Frankly, I think Windows XP Pro SP3 is a step up for Vista users.

Under the hood, Windows 7 uses the Vista engine. However, at the PDC, Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s senior vice president of Windows and Windows Live, promised that Microsoft would be tuning up this notoriously slow and cranky motor. It’s too early to tell how successful that effort will be, but at least Sinofsky’s team is tossing out Windows Mail and Windows Photo Gallery, which have no business being in an operating system.

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