Open Source Archives - Page 3 of 4

Device Manufacturers and the fleecing of consumers

June 13, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

I’ve recently had cause to wonder if device manufacturers purposely make sure their devices are of limited use to people who buy their products. A few examples:

I recently bought a couple of NAS devices and each one of them failed woefully to do what was advertised.

First is what I actually started calling the Great White Turd. It is the Netgear sc101T. I have come across ridiculous devices before, but this one takes the cake for its total uselessness as a NAS device. What is the point of hard coding a “NAS” to use DHCP and no option of setting a static IP address. What part of “network” was missing during the development of the product? The SC101T forces you to install a client software on all computers that may need access to the device. The software cannot be installed on a server class Operating System like Windows Server 2003 or 2008. You have to mount the drive and share it to be accessible but since it is assigned a DHCP IP address, anytime you restart the computer, the drive mappings are shot to hell and you have to do it all over. For a product that retails for $180, I am almost tempted to start a class action lawsuit so we can recover some lost revenue due to emotional distress caused by this piece of crap.

Backup Options for Small Business Owners

April 6, 2016May 26, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

You’ve heard it a thousand times: backup your data. But I still find it rather amazing to walk into a client’s environment and ask, “so what do you do for backup?” and get a blank stare or “oh, we are doing ok”.

The “it will never happen to us” syndrome is prevalent in the small business environment. The result is a constant break-fix scenario that ultimately turns out to be very costly.

The cost of hard drives has fallen so dramatically that it is inexcusable for a small business owner not to have at least, a removable USB drive for backing up critical data. There are even “cloud” offerings that are pretty reasonable, although they tend to be very slow especially if you have multi-gigabyte files to backup.

For example, Carbonite will back up any amount of data you have for about $55 a year, while Mozy (owned by Iomega/EMC) offers 2 gigabytes of free storage for those who purchase an Iomega external drive.

Is Ad Blocking Unethical?

May 12, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

There has been a raging debate in the open source community surrounding adware, spyware, Web page framing, and the user’s ability to control his or her computing environment. At the heart of this conflict is the advertisement blocking add-on for the Firefox web browser called AdBlock Plus. This utility makes it possible for users to … Read more

Oracle, Sun and the SMB Market

April 20, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

With the announcement today of the multi-billion dollar acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, the database market has suddenly been thrown into a state of flux. The earlier rumor was that IBM was interested in buying Sun.

This is especially significant because of the myriad of products owned by the merged company.

Sun has over the years positioned itself as a systems company and has expanded its sphere of influence in that arena. So what is the driving force behind this purchase? Some have argued that is is driven by the new move toward integration. According to CNet, this idea dates back to a concept called Raw Iron. In other words, it is an attempt to move Oracle from the horizontal market space it has been stuck in into a vertical market where Sun has made its mark, kind of.

Why Microsoft will continue to have piracy concerns

April 19, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

Little things usually cause people to make very drastic decisions, sometimes not because they want to, but mainly because they are driven by disgust. Take my experience with Windows Vista for instance. I just got a new computer that came preloaded with Windows Vista 64-bit Home Edition “Premium”. So far, so good. Of course, since the computer came with no productivity software, I had to shell out a few hundred bucks to buy those and install them. As a consultant, you have to know what you are supporting, so the Windows platform is a necessity especially since many business environments have the “Home” edition of Microsoft’s Operating System. I have been using Linux as my main desktop for some time now, and I recently installed Linux Mint 64-bit with OpenOffice 3, Evolution Mail, and about 75 other pieces of software for CRM, project management, network penetration testing, file encryption etc for $0. Naturally, I was probably a little testy with the Operating Sytem than most “regular” users – the ill-advised decision to remove the ability to disable your network adapter with a single right-click, for example, or the contant request for validation even to do relatively minor things.

Web Filtering for Kids

April 6, 2016April 1, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

I have been encouraging many friends with kids to try the Linux Operating System mainly because of one major advantage over the other Operating Systems – free software for kids.

Take the Debian distribution with over 25,000 applications for example. There are all kinds of games and educational software that comes bundled with these distributions that it adds up in terms of savings when you consider that a computer game for a Windows Operating Sytem averages about $20.

But the challenge we had was how to protect the children from the dangers of the internet now that everyone pretty much has broadband connection. That is when we ran into some problems. There were not a whole lot of click and install web filters as is available in the Windows market.

So I started searching and spent the most of two days poring through very tedious instructions for what I thought should be a simple solution. I am not a code writer, but I am very comfortable with the Linux command line interface so editing some scripts was not the problem.

I kept thinking, this should not be this difficult. I especially did not want to go through the whole process of installing a full blown filtering application like ClarkConnect, Untangle or Astaro. So I kept searching and I am glad I did.

I finally found a solution so simple it was exhausting just thinking about it. Unfortunately, in my excitement, I failed to note the web site of the author but I will try to locate that document again and give the author full credit.