Apocalypse Not: So just Suck it up People

This month's Wired magazine has a wonderful article on the coming Apocalypse or lack of one. The story debunks many of the Apocalypse myths and memes of the last 50 years. From oil shortages and running out of energy to the horrors of overpopulation. There must be a dozen examples of "experts" who's prediction of our demise has already come and gone.



Of course the author does miss the most likely end of the world... the Zombie Apocalypse. Which we all know from video games and TV shows, is inevitable. But I guess I will cut him slack on that one. :)



So I guess we will be around for a while, better suck it up and soldier on.

Sea Change for Big Networks?

VMWare's $1B purchase of Nicira Networks was big news. Why? That was my question. Remember that new OpenFlow technology for managing large networks? Well Nicira is one of the first companies to build a product based on OpenFlow. This technology is aimed directly at Cisco and Juniper networks. One of the original investors explains.



Now if the big guys are smart, they will quickly embrace this technology and come out with their own products and thusly crush their smaller competitors. It will be interesting to see if that happens.

Internet Usage by Operating System

I found this interesting so I thought I would share:

Usage share of Operating Systems



For my next project at work, I was wondering what operating system to use for any activities. The original course, which this content is based off of, was written for Solaris. But I can't imagine most potential students would have that. So one way of determining operating system usage is to look at statistics gathered by browsers. So the link shows that data for Wikipedia and some other sites that gather these sort of statistics.



Some observations:

• Windows usage is still around around 70% with most users on Windows 7 and XP.


• iPhone plus iPad plus Android share is already over 10%. Smaller than I thought it would be, but if you think world wide usage it makes a lot of sense. Smart phones and tablets are just beginning to penetrate everywhere. And tablets are really gonna take off with 7" form factors and $200 list prices like the Google Nexus 7.


• Mac OS X combined with Linux is only around 10%.

As another data point, I looked at the stats from one of my web sites (abbeyworkshop.com) to see what the geeks are using during the last year. Windows is still strong at 62%, but Mac OS X plus Linux jumps up to 36%. Way to go geeks!



Anyway, it looks like Windows 7 and XP are still my primary targets. But maybe I should think about Linux in the future.

Dropbox Doubles Plan Sizes

Got this story from CNET. Dropbox has doubled the size of their plans. Thus the starter plan goes from 50Meg to 100Meg for $100 a year.



As I suggested in an earlier post, Dropbox would have to eventually answer Google and Microsoft on size or price. Smartly, they have started with size. As a Google Drive user, its a good product, but the feature parity with Dropbox is still not there yet.



I would suggest to Dropbox that they offer an inexpensive smaller option under their two competitors. Once customers try their Dropbox, I think it is unlikely they will switch to something else.

A place to report Phishing Scams

Phishing scams seem to be an epidemic these days. Text messages seem to be just the latest way for crooks to SPAM us. But take heart, CERT has setup an e-mail address for reporting phishing URLs. Send an e-mail to phishing-report@us-cert.gov with the URL in the message. In my case, I seem to have repeatedly won Target.com gift cards!!! Woo hoo!

Your entry in our drawing WON you a FREE $1000 Target Giftcard enter XXX at www.target.com.ppdf.biz/ to claim it and we can ship it to you immediately

For the non-tech savy readers, if you look at the domain name, you will notice instead of it ending in target.com the URL actually ends in target.com.ppdf.biz. This, of course, is not a Target website and is most likely a crook trying to steal your credit card number and/or other information.



It would seem to me that given someone has to actually pay for the domain that law enforcement could follow the money and shutdown these sites quickly. But when I looked at the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the FCC website for reporting similar information, filling out the forms was way too difficult. In addition, they wanted way too much information. My guess is these sites are for folks who have already been scammed. But its seems like in this case it would be better to focus on preventing crimes rather than on reporting on crimes that already happened.



For more information, see http://www.us-cert.gov/nav/report_phishing.html

Microsoft includes Ads in Skype! Woo hoo!

Ars Technica has this story on the wonderful new feature in Skype:

Ars Technica: Skype calls to feature ads big enough to interrupt any conversation



So here is the long and short of it, on any Windows Skype to Skype audio calls (Windows client), an image ad will appear along with your picture. To quote the Skype blog, "think of Conversation Ads as a way for Skype to generate fun interactivity". That is how I think of all ads in my private calls, fun interactivity. lol. They also stated that the ads will have no affect on call quality. We will have to see if this claim remains true.



Did any of these geniuses ever use Skype? After I start an audio call, I never look at the interface. In fact, Skype is usually running in the background. I could see them sticking ads into the video chats, but audio calls? Seems pretty silly. Heck ads in a phone calls seems like a really bad idea.



Maybe Microsoft can make Skype Windows only! That would be really awesome! lol. Expect a lot of competing Skype like startups very soon. And, if Microsoft keeps adding "fun interactivity" to Skype, expect it to be replaced by something better in a year or two. It amazing how badly large companies can mismanage great products.

The TV Business is about to Collapse

I found this post from Henry Blodget at Business Insider earlier this week. I just didn't have time to post until today.



The story is a really interesting read. It points out some key issues with the TV industry today including:

• No one watches TV live any more.


• No one watches ads any more.


• We can watch movies on our laptops and tablets.


• The majority of money we spend on cable is wasted.

That last point is a really important one. Right now you can't buy your content ala carte. In my case, the only reason I keep cable is to watch English soccer, the NBA, and some other sports. If I could get this content in another way, I would drop my cable tomorrow. I know a lot of people that have already cut the cord or feel the same way.



Another point, TV as an experience is just getting worse. There are sooooo many commercials now it is hard to enjoy anything. You know how you used to be able to flip between to channels? When a commercial was running on one, you could watch the other? Now it seems like all the networks are synced up! When you do that, everyone is running a commercial at the same time. So surfing your TV for new content becomes less and less useful. Because of this, I would much rather look for new content on Netflix where I can just search for it and play it.



Also have you noticed how bad most ads have become? We have gone from "I wish I was an Oscar Mayer weiner" to erectile dysfunction and a myriad of other ailments. Only the ads created for the Superbowl are any good. Most of the year, we end up looking at 95% total crap when it comes to ads.



So at this point, I have to agree with Mr Blodget. Things don't look good for the TV biz.

Who has the fastest wireless network?

There is a lot of talk about which wireless network is the best. Most opinions are based on anecdotal evidence. For example, the assumption that the AT&T network sucks everywhere because it sucks in San Francisco.



Well PC Magazine went out and did some real testing and here are the results.

• T-Mobile has the fastest 3G


• AT&T and Verizon have the fastest 4G

The article has lots of graphs, pictures and city by city data. Well worth a look.

Google News worth Another Look

Have you looked at Google News recently? I had not in a while and was surprised by the improvements after using the system for a while.



Customize

The main thing that is different is you can customize a lot of stuff. You can choose which news sources you prefer so those are favored over others. You can also add new categories to the list of topics on the left. This is a bit hit and miss. For example, I added a category for Java which seems to work pretty good. However, when I added JavaScript, I received a number of stories that had a JavaScript error message in them. That was a bit of a hoot.



Trending Topics

One other feature that I really like is how trending topics are incorporated. If you click on "Technology" for example, under that heading a list of the current trending topics related to tech are displayed. This is a great use of their search data and very useful.



So check it out, it is another good data point when looking for the latest news in tech.

Duck Duck Go, a Retro Search Engine

Do you miss the good old days when your search engine just searched? When it only searched for information on the Internet and didn't try to show you localized information? Or social information?



Then DuckDuckGo.com may be the site for you. It is a retro style search engine that doesn't track you. Simple, easy to use. Check it out, its worth a look.



In fact, the site has been doing well, check out the story on SearchEngineLand.

Sky Drive and Google Drive take on DropBox

Big news in the cloud computing world. Yesterday Microsoft announced new updates to its Sky Drive and today Google announced Google Drive. Both of these products are direct competitors to Dropbox which is one of my favorite Internet products.



How the Products Work

Installing the software sets up a special folder on your hard disk. Any files copied to this folder are synced to the Internet. So I have an online backup, big deal. Right? But what happens when I install the same software on my iPhone, my iPad, my second laptop? Suddenly all my devices are automatically synchronized with all my data. Powerful stuff.



What do SkyDrive and Google Drive do better than DropBox?

Well first, both services offer a lot more disk space than Dropbox. For $120/yr, Dropbox gives you 50gb of disk space. Google and Microsoft are offering 100gb for around $50/yr. That is quite a discount.



Google Drive offers Google Docs integration. You can edit Word and Excel files on the web and then have them synced to your devices. In addition, Google Drive looks to have some very interesting photo and video sharing features that seem to be unique.



SkyDrive offers Microsoft Office integration with their online office offering.



What don't SkyDrive and Google Drive Offer?

First off, Dropbox offers support on pretty much all mobile devices (iOS, Android) and operating systems (Windows, OS X, Linux). The new contenders do not. Issues include:

• Neither new product supports Linux


• Google supports Android but not iOS, though it is coming soon


• SkyDrive supports iOS and Windows Phone but not Android


• Google docs can only be edited from the Web. You can't edit them from your local copies. In fact, you only get links to your docs and no local copies.


• Sharing features for SkyDrive do not work on the Mac OS X version

Bottom Line

These moves are gonna shake things up both for the cloud drive market and for the online backup market. Dropbox is still way easier to use and is much slicker than its two rivals. I would expect a price cut or a storage increase very quickly from Dropbox.



Apple has everything in place to be a competitor in this space. However, if they stay isolated in their ecosystem, they surrender this market to their competitors.



In the end, this means more options and better deals for us end users. Hooray for that!



Reviews and General Posts

The Verge: Hands On

Google Drive FAQ



Cloud Drives Compared

Here are the articles comparing cloud drive features.

PCWorld: Google Drive vs the Rest

Laptop Mag: Cloud drives compared

The Verge: All the Cloud Drives Compared

Engadget: Google Drive vs the Rest



Google Terms Controversy

Late in the day there was some controversy about Google Terms of service. My take is it was much ado about nothing. Once your read Google Terms of Service everything looks ok. But if you want to make up your own mind check out these links.

ZDNet: How far do Googles terms of service go?

CNET: Who owns your files?

Google Terms of Service

Posting Links through Twitter

I have been working heads down for the last few months and have been neglecting my blog a bit. So I just realized, Google Reader is no longer auto posting links of interest to the blog.



How I Find Stories

I find stories of interest using Reeder on the iPad using the "Star" feature of Google Reader to feed those stories via RSS to my blog. Apparently Google has dropped the RSS feed for starred stories, so a new method is required to record stories of interest.



Twitter linked to Facebook

Since I can link my Twitter posts to my blog and then to Facebook, I am going to go that route. So now, any stories of interest will be posted on Twitter which will show up here on the blog and in my Facebook wall. And of course, I will be posting links to these posts. So Hopefully this will work better.



Linking your Twitter Account to Facebook

Google Goes with the Flow

I'm not sure I really understand this story, but Google is using an open source network management system that has essentially doubled their throughput. Wired has the story.

Twitter Let's Inventors Stop Patent Trolls

Twitter has come up with an inventive way to fight patent trolls... Allow the original inventors to in essence veto any improper use of the patent they invented. Sounds like a great idea to me, hope it works.



Tech Dirt has the story.

John C, Facebook and Instagram

Check out John C Dvorak's write up on the Facebook purchase of Instagram. I pretty much have to agree with his conclusions. This seems like an awful lot of money to pay for a company that is not yet making any money.



Heck I am not convinced that Facebook still has a broad appeal to most people. It still feels to me like no one has really gotten social right yet.

Follow your Enemies on FaceBook?

Just what we need, a FaceBook application for tracking your enemies? As if we already don't have too much personal information on the Net. Be afraid, be very afraid. Get the whole story on ReadWriteWeb.

Windows DNS Tricks

Did you know you can view your Windows DNS cache? You can very easily with the following commands. Note that on Windows 7 or Vista, you must open your command prompt as Administrator for this to work. You can do this by right clicking the Command Prompt icon and selecting Run as Administrator.



To view the DNS cache type:

ipconfig /displaynds



This prints a lot of information for each entry. To just see the host names try:

ipconfig /displaydns | find "Record Name"



To search the for just the .com host names try:

ipconfig /displaydns | find "Record Name" | find ".com"



To clear the DNS cache use:

ipconfig /flushdns

Awesome CSS Resource from the Mozilla Foundation

The folks over at the Mozilla foundation have created an awesome CSS resource for the Internet.







Main Page

CSS Reference

CSS Tutorial



Obviously a lot of work went into this. It has a nice UI and a lot of examples, which are often missing from a lot of CSS references. Anyway, it will be a welcome addition to my list of resources.

Cyberduck Drag and Drop stops working

Problem: Using Cyberduck on Windows and suddenly drag and drop does not seem to work. When I drag a file or folder to Cyberduck, I get a "Not Allowed" icon and nothing happens.



Cyberduck is a great SFTP, FTP, and WebDAV client for Windows and Mac.



Solution: Have you been using VPN? In my case I had just used Cisco's VPN software to connect to the corporate network. Depending upon how the VPN software is configured, it may cut off all access to the local network. That should be cleaned up after you exit VPN. But apparently, it does not clean up everything. Just reboot your machine and that should fix the problem.

3 Great New Tech Sites on the Web

Three cheers for corporate bureaucracy! Thanks to a few buyouts and mergers a few web sites have been spawned much to our benefit.



The Verge

Josh Topolsky and these Engadget refugees have set up a really nice gadget and tech web site. A different kind of design for their site, but I like it. It sort of melds a newspaper layout with a web page. I like the look and the content.



PandoDaily

Sarah Lacey left TechCrunch to create this site. The focus is on cool new web sites and businesses. A nice clean interface and a lot of good information.



ANewDomain.net

Gina Smith left the new Byte.com to start this site. Thanks corporate overlords for unleashing Gina and gang. Lots of good writers (including John C Dvorak and Jerry Pournelle) and good stories.