Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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The 21st century mobile application

A few years ago, we knew exactly what the future of mobile computing software development would be like. It would be powered by WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), a set of specifications designed to provide low-speed wireless devices with limited screen space, with a means to access information and to communicate and interact with Web services via WAP gateways that bridged the gap between telephony networks and the Internet.

We were so naïve.

Today, with 3G, 802.11g/n and Mobile WiMax (IEEE 802.16e) wireless networks, mobile devices have access to TCP/IP network speeds above 100Mb/sec. The devices of 2008 are as powerful as the PCs of only a few years ago.

Apple’s iPhone, for example, has a 620MHz ARM processor with 128MB RAM and up to 16GB of flash memory running Apple Mac OS X. As John Sullivan, manager of operations for the Free Software Foundation, said of Apple’s closed development system, “The iPhone is not a ‘phone’ any more than my laptop computer is a phone. The iPhone can make phone calls, but so can my laptop. I could call your phone using my voice-over-IP system, and you wouldn’t know the difference. I can even put a card in my laptop that enables communication over a cellular network.”

The same is true of other mobile devices. While they’re not quite the same things as PCs, many of them have all the power of a computer from a few years ago. Other devices—such as Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet and Intel Atom-powered netbooks like the Asus EEE 901, MSI Wind NB U100 and Acer Aspire One—completely blur the difference between PCs and mobile devices.

This is not a small matter. According to Juniper Research, “The global market for Mobile Web 2.0 will be worth US$22.4 billion in 2013, up from $5.5 billion currently.”

What’s a developer to do?
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September 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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Is Microsoft buying Citrix? Novell!?

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the stories of Microsoft mergers. Once more, rumors are swirling that Microsoft might buy Citrix. By my count, this is the fifth time this particular rumor has emerged. In addition, though, this time around I’m hearing that some people think Microsoft might buy Novell.

Oh please.

Microsoft, in case you’ve forgotten, just flopped in its attempt to buy Yahoo. Steve Ballmer may be a great salesman, and he does a mean monkey dance, but he’s no businessman. Would someone fire Ballmer already and put Microsoft out of its misery?

Even with my low opinion, I can’t believe that Ballmer would be dumb enough to waste money buying Citrix. Citrix, since WinFrame back in the mid-90s and then MetaFrame in the 2000s, has acted as a de facto branch of Microsoft. To really use MetaFrame, you not only had to have a license for each MetaFrame remote Windows client, you also had to have Windows Terminal Server license and/or a Windows desktop license for each remote session. Thus, every Citrix customer became a Microsoft customer. What’s not to like?

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September 15, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Does cloud computing have a silver lining?

Depending on who you ask, cloud computing is either the most wonderful thing to hit IT since sliced bread or an utter waste of time. Indeed, in his latest book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, technology pundit Nicholas Carr wrote, “IT departments will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud.” Really? So, which is it? As is so often the case, the answer appears to be somewhere in-between.

To start with there’s still the problem of defining what the heck cloud-computing is in the first place. The answer varies, needless to say, varies from company to company. We can look to a neutral party for a better answer, but even then things can get a little puzzling.

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September 15, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Why Google Chrome won’t rule the world — yet

I like Google’s new Chrome Web browser a lot — as in, I think it’s going to change the desktop world in a way we haven’t seen since Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released the first modern Web browser, Mosaic, back in 1993.

What Chrome brings to the table are behind-the-scenes features like V8, a killer multithreaded JavaScript virtual machine. V8 compiles JavaScript code directly into machine code instead of interpreting it as most JVMs do. The result is that Web-based applications written in JavaScript — like, say, Google Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps — run much, much faster than they do on other browsers.

How much faster? I put Chrome, Firefox 3, Safari3.1.2 and Internet Explorer 7 on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark racetrack, and this is what I found: Chrome won, running away with a mark of 1,975.0 milliseconds. Firefox 3.0 came in second, with 3,125.2msec. Safari, which uses WebKit, the same open-source browser engine as Chrome, took third, with 4,006.8 msec. And IE — oh, the shame! It came in dead last, with a mark of 32,221.4 msec.

Fast enough for you?

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September 14, 2008
by sjvn01
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OpenOffice 3 Release Candidate Arrives

OpenOffice 3’s release candidate is here and ready for download for Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows.

This is more than a little cool. Those of us who don’t like paying the Microsoft Office suite tax have been waiting for the next version of OpenOffice for some time now and it’s almost ready to go. The OpenOffice developers are still saying it’s not ready for production use, but it is more than ready now for some serious testing by regular users.

This new version brings users a lot of features that they’ve been waiting for since 2007. One prime example is that you’ll be able to import Office 2007’s Open XML documents into OpenOffice. You may hate Open XML. I know I do. I mean what kind of standard can it be if Microsoft itself can’t support it? Still, being able to trade files back and forth between Office 2007 and OpenOffice is another step in making OpenOffice acceptable to offices that are still stuck on Microsoft’s proprietary formats.

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September 12, 2008
by sjvn01
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Three blue screens of death and an iTunes mess

“Read my lips; no new taxes,” President George H. W. Bush; “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” President Bill Clinton;” and “Windows Vista has turned into a phenomenal product, better than any other OS we’ve ever built and far, far better than any other software available today, Co-president of Microsoft’s Platforms & Services Division Jim Allchin. Three great recent lies, but there’s only one of them that’s still being maintained as the truth: That Vista is a great operating system. Please, it’s not even stable.

Vista SP1 was supposed to make Vista all better. It’s actually more of a band-aid on a severed hand. If you must use Windows, you’re much better off with Windows XP SP3 than Vista SP1.

Take, for example, Vista, and indeed Windows’ biggest BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) of all time at the Beijing Olympics. Over a billion TV viewers got to see Vista on Lenovo hardware go boom. Listen, Lenovo? Are you really sure you want to drop desktop Linux?

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