Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 9, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Deep, down and dirty PC repair

Sometimes, no matter how much you try to protect your computer, you need to get down and dirty with the hardware. Sometimes it’s the obvious. I never cease to be amazed at how many PC problems turn out to be loose cables or-the shame of it all!-an unplugged electrical cord. But, others times, it will be you vs. your PC’s internal workings in a battle for system superiority.

It’s for times like those that you need the kind of repair tools that Lincoln Spector talks about in his article 6 downloadable boot discs that could save your PC. My one concern with his tale is that he doesn’t mention what I consider to be the best of all the system repair boot disks: SystemRescueCd 1.02.

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May 7, 2008
by sjvn01
4 Comments

Millionaires, Billionaires, and Open Source

Thanks to a recent column by my friend Andy Patrizio, I found out that there’s “been an ongoing debate among bloggers and industry observers over one simple question: Where are the open source billionaires?” OK, I’ll buy that some people think that’s a real question, but I think it says more about they don’t understand the connection between software development genius and what it takes to become a billionaire.

My short answer is that the open-source billionaires are the same place where Tim Paterson (Quick & Dirty DOS) and Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina (Mosaic) are today: Doing well, to the best of my knowledge but they’re not in the Fortune 500. In case you don’t recognize those names, QDOS became MS-DOS and Mosaic became Spyglass Mosaic, which in turn, became Internet Explorer 1.0. We don’t ask though why they and their companies faded into relative obscurity and Microsoft and Bill Gates are worth more than most medium-sized countries.

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May 7, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

WiMax finally gets real

I am, shall we say, more than a little cynical, even by my standards, when it comes to wireless networking. For example, I really, really have doubts about the wisdom of moving up to 802.11n. That said, I think the monster Mobile WiMax deal, which was announced today, may actually go places.

Why? Well Mobile WiMax (worldwide interoperability for microwave access), aka IEEE standard 802.16e, is a real standard-unlike the never quite approved 802.11n-and the WiMax Forum actually tests and certifies equipment for interoperability.

In other words, if you buy a WiMax device from any vendor say a laptop with the next generation of Intel’s Wi-Fi chips, the Montevina/Centrino 2, which will start shipping in June, it will work with any WiMax ground-station. In other words, you won’t have to sweat matching vendors for your WiMax connectivity to work.

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May 6, 2008
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Apple TV keeps getting better

With a tweak here and a bit of tuning there, the Apple TV is going from the best available media extender to becoming to movie watching what the iPod is to music: the device that defines a category.

First, you can now rent and buy movies for Apple TV on the same day that they’re released on DVD. Numerous studios including 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney , Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, Sony, and Lionsgate among others have finally free Apple from the silly restriction that Apple couldn’t sell or rent movies until they had sat in movie rental stores for 30-days.

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May 6, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Pondering when your next break-in will happen

As my friend Ryan Naraine, soon to be security evangelist for anti-malware company Kaspersky Labs, recently observed, “This list of 0days is always a source of content for me.” The list in question is the Zero Day Initiative’s list of vulnerabilities.

This list is perfect for any cyber cynic. It shows for the whole world to see who’s been good and who’s been naughty about working on zero-day vulnerabilities. These aren’t, we hope, publicly known security holes. They’re the ones that have been discovered by researchers, who then turned over their results to Tipping Point. No one, we hope, know about them except their discoverers, Tipping Point’s engineers and the vulnerable software’s programmers.

The list serves two purposes. One is, of course, to get you to buy Tipping Point’s IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) device. The other, and the one I also rather enjoy, is that it’s an attempt to shame the big software vendors into cleaning up their programs, if not their acts.

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