Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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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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September 11, 2008
by sjvn01
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Experts Agree (On Nothing) About Intersection of Cloud And Virtualization

Do two technology trends, the rise of server virtualization and the advance of cloud computing, go together like peanut-butter and jelly, or more like tunafish and pistachio nuts?

It depends on who you ask, but in general, virtualization is seen as complementary to cloud computing but not a necessity.

“Virtualization is one of a number of useful technologies for cloud computing. Not all applications of cloud computing require the use of the use of virtual machine technology,” according to Dan Kusnetzky, lead analyst of the Kusnetzky Group. “They may, however, use virtual access, application virtualization and/or storage virtualization.”

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September 11, 2008
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu to work more with larger Linux community

Some people hate Ubuntu. I know, I know, far, far more people love Ubuntu, but that doesn’t change the fact that others really dislike it. Hate is not too strong a word.

Those who hate Ubuntu tend to fall into two groups. There are those who dislike Ubuntu because it makes Linux too easy. To these people, I say: "Get over it. Linux isn’t just for people with EMACS macros hard-wired into their fingers anymore." The other group are those, usually Debian Linux users, who think Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, has ‘stolen’ their work and that its developers haven’t contributed enough back to Debian or the other open-source communities that create Linux-related software.

That’s about to change. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced in his blog that Canonical will be "hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality." "Those desktop experiences ideas" are Ubuntu’s design ideas. Shuttleworth recently said he wanted the Linux desktop to be better than the Mac’s interface. He’s now putting his money behind this idea.

Shuttleworth knows that achieving such a goal won’t be easy. "When I laid out the goal of ‘delivering a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years’ at OSCON, I had many questions afterwards about how on earth we could achieve that.’Everyone scratches their own itch, how can you possibly make the UI consistent?’ was a common theme. And it’s true – the free software desktop is often patchy and inconsistent. But I see the lack of consistency as both a weakness (GNOME, OpenOffice and Firefox all have different UI toolkits, and it’s very difficult to make them seamless) and as a strength — people are free to innovate, and the results are world-leading. Our challenge is to get the best of both of those worlds."

Mark Shuttleworth is well aware that some people see Ubuntu as not being a contributor. "In Ubuntu we have in general considered upstream to be "our ROCK", by which we mean that we want upstream to be happy with the way we express their ideas and their work." The upstream is Debian, the Linux kernel developers, and Linux-related software programmers." Shuttleworth continued, "More than happy – we want upstream to be delighted! We focus most of our effort on integration. Our competitors turn that into "Canonical doesn’t contribute" but it’s more accurate to say we measure our contribution in the effectiveness with which we get the latest stable work of upstream, with security maintenance, to the widest possible audience for testing and love. To my mind, that’s a huge contribution."

But, that’s no longer enough. Shuttleworth opened his comments by writing, "When you present yourself on the web, you have 15 seconds to make an impression, so aspiring champions of the web 2.0 industry have converged on a good recipe for success:

1. Make your site visually appealing,
2. Do something different and do it very, very well,
3. Call users to action and give them an immediate, rewarding experience.

We need the same urgency, immediacy and elegance as part of the free software desktop experience, and that’s an area where Canonical will, I hope, make a significant contribution. We are hiring designers, user experience champions and interaction design visionaries and challenging them to lead not only Canonical’s distinctive projects but also to participate in GNOME, KDE and other upstream efforts to improve FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) usability."

So, starting now, Ubuntu is going to contribute in a big way to desktop Linux. Shuttleworth wrote, "Canonical is in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can’t imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality. Those teams will publish their Bazaar branches in Launchpad and of course submit their work upstream, and participate in upstream sprints and events. Some of the folks we have hired into those positions are familiar contributors in the FLOSS world; others will be developers with relevant technical expertise from other industries."

I was one of those that doubted that desktop Linux could ever equal the smooth, graceful integration of the Mac OS. Now, between the driving pace of open-source development, and Shuttleworth’s millions, I can see it happening. Why not? After all, Mac OS itself is based on FreeBSD. Desktop Linux’s future, despite Lenovo’s recent retirement from retail desktop Linux sales, is starting to look brighter.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

September 10, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Lenovo blows the Linux desktop off

I’m ticked off. Lenovo, after years of dancing around the question of would they or wouldn’t they, offer a ThinkPad with pre-installed Linux finally offered one, and, less than a year later, Lenovo has decided to take its Linux-powered ThinkPads off the retail market.

What the heck is this?

I like ThinkPads. I like them a lot. They are other good laptops, and I wouldn’t turn down a MacBook Air, but when it comes right down to it, I’ll pay the extra money to get a ThinkPad. They’re little tanks in laptop-form.

There was only one thing they lacked from where I sat: pre-installed Linux. Then, finally, in January of this year, Lenovo finally made good their promises of desktop Linux support and shipped the ThinkPad T61 and R61 notebooks with Novell SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop).

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