Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

  • HOME
  • REVIEWS
  • TUTORIALS
  • HOW-TO
  • CONTACT
>> Home / Technology

Technology

CMS, computers, HTML-XML-CSS, eLearning, open sources

CMS, computers, HTML-XML-CSS, eLearning, open sources

PC Hacks

May 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

100 Industrial-strength Tips and Tools

This is a technical guide on how to configure, customise, and upgrade your PC: how to crank up the speed at which your CPU runs; how to make your memory run a bit faster and optimise your memory usage; how to configure and partition hard disks; and how to protect yourself by making backups and safeguard your system against viruses and spyware.

PC HacksIt starts off at the ground floor of the computer system with the motherboard and the basic BIOS setup program, then works its way up through memory, hard disk, and peripherals. Each of the hacks is given a rating, so you can choose if you want to tackle the suggestions at beginner’s, intermediate, or expert level. Author Jim Aspinwall even lists the tools you will need for each procedure. If any of the hacks are going to be risky, he gives plenty of warning and tells you how to recover.

Actually, one of the most important tips he gives is the very first – which is that you should back up your system and your data regularly:

Backups, system restore points, software and hardware installation disks, and printouts of hard-to-remember or obscure details are very handy to keep safe but close at hand should you need them.

There are also lots of clearer-than-usual photographs showing the parts of the innards on which you’ll be working. There’s a whole chapter devoted to squeezing more speed out of your system. I was surprised to see that in some cases (with a Pentium II for instance) it’s possible to achieve 550% increases.

It’s unlikely that most people will want to start tampering with recently purchased systems, but anybody who has been using computers for more than a few years is probably in possession of more than one machine. [Come to think of it, I’ve got three desktops, two laptops, and two Palm Pilots – one dead.] Quite a lot of his advice has its eye on the fact that you might want to use that old 486 as a backup to your current system.

His language is fairly uncompromisingly technical. This gives you a flavour:

If you need Gigabit Ethernet (1000BaseT), you should use a motherboard that has it built in. If you install a 1000BaseT PCI card, it will likely saturate the PCI bus, leaving no bandwidth for other PCI cards. Onboard 1000BaseT uses a separate bus to talk to the CPU and memory.

Even if, like me, you’re a bit shy of replacing the heat sink on a CPU or partitioning your hard drive, there’s still plenty of useful information here. I learned quite a lot about memory management and file allocation systems – which is how information is arranged and stored on your hard drive. This is in addition to really useful general tips, such as his suggestion that you install the drivers for new devices before installing the hardware.

For those who are really ambitious, he shows how to run two different operating systems on the same machine. So if you want to make steps into the open source software movement (OSS) you can have a version of Linux (which is free) running alongside Windows XP.

This is yet another in the successful series of O’Reilley’s Hacks titles. They are written by experts, well designed, and terrific value for money.

© Roy Johnson 2004

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Jim Aspinwall, PC Hacks, Sebastopol CA, 2004, pp.285, ISBN 0596007485


Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: Computers, Personal computers, Technology

PDF Hacks

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

100 industrial-strength tips and tools

Many people think that PDF files are a proprietary Adobe Acrobat format, but in fact they are now a standard for other applications as well. Ghostscript and Open Office are open source (that is, free) programs in which you can create and modify PDFs, and even in Microsoft Word there is an option to save your work in PDF format. It’s also commonly thought that PDF files are simply for printing off onto paper – because that’s what they were first designed for. This book is designed to show you all the other possible ways of working with PDFs. Sid Steward also tells you about lots of other helpful associated tools and products. These include customising PDF viewers to make reading files more comfortable; speeding up Acrobat by controlling its many plug-ins; and shrinking down huge PDFs into much smaller files.

PDF HacksHe also shows you how to create your own PDF files using a variety of different software programs; how to give your PDF files advanced navigation and interactive features; and how to integrate PDF files with existing web sites. He reveals lots of Acrobat’s hidden features, and shows you how to control and even improve them – though this is not stuff for the faint-hearted. Some of the hacks he describes require quite a bit of technical expertise, but he’s certainly very thorough – describing what’s required for all recent program versions and across different operating systems.

PDF files now come in three flavours – which he describes as dumb (electronic paper) clever (a loose sense of the original structure), and smart (full sense of structure) – with of course an increasing file size for each degree of smartness. He strongly recommends using style sheets to keep your master document as smart as possible. Style is separated from content: then you can generate the document in different forms.

Suddenly after a lot on scripting and other technical stuff, there’s information on what many people will want to use PDFs for – printing and publishing their own work. This is a gold mine of good advice, with listings of free resources thick on the page.

He even goes into the detail of how to convert PDF files for reading in Palm-type handheld devices (using a tool called Plucker); how to embed special fonts without causing file bloat; and there’s quite a lot on indexing and running searches on PDF files, as well as making the results available from within an HTML page.

He ends by showing you how to add interactive forms to PDFs, how to download and use all the free software programs for doing all these tasks, and even, if you feel up to it, how to get under the bonnet to re-program the Acrobat software.

This book was something of an eye-opener for me. Like many people, I had no idea you could do so much with the PDF format. The little-known tips and tricks in this book are ideal for anyone who works with PDF on a regular basis, including web developers, pre-press users, forms creators, and those who generate PDF for distribution

© Roy Johnson 2004

pdf hacks Buy the book at Amazon UK

pdf hacks Buy the book at Amazon US


Sid Steward, PDF Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2004, pp.278, ISBN 0596006551


More on technology
More on digital media
More on online learning
More on computers


Filed Under: Computers Tagged With: Computers, File formats, PDF, PDF Hacks, Technology

Peter Norton’s Inside the PC

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

encyclopaedic practical guide to the working of computers

Have you ever started to wonder how your computer actually works? We’ve all been using them for some time now, and it’s possible to get along without knowing what goes on under the bonnet (just as we drive cars without becoming motor mechanics). But when the man who cleans my windows revealed that he had built his own, I thought it was time to open the tower case and see what was inside. I did just that, closed it again quickly, and bought this book instead. John Goodman is the real author here: (Peter Norton is now a sort of trademark name).

Peter Norton's Inside the PC He starts with an explanation of bits, bytes, and binary coding to establish the basis on which it all works. Then he gets down fairly quickly to an explanation of what’s inside your PC – from motherboard, disks, and memory to the CPU how it works, plus why it’s called a 386, 486, or a Pentium. The most important feature of this approach is that you’re given an explanation of how these features have evolved, and what’s likely to be the next step.

For this reason, there are plenty of good tips for people thinking of upgrading their equipment. He writes using a very conversational style, the advantages of which are ease and approachability, and the disadvantages padding and occasional redundancies. The result is slow reading, but a very detailed treatment of every topic. This is intermediate to advanced stuff, and the opposite of the “Dummies” approach – deep, slow, and thorough, rather than quick and shallow.

There’s a lot on disks – floppy, hard, zip, and CD-ROM – and he explains such detailed but vital matters as file allocation tables (FATs) and the differences between static and dynamic memory (SRAM and DRAM). He even covers keyboards, mice, monitors, and printers, which make this a useful resource if you want to understand how these peripherals talk to each other.

But the section I found most interesting was that on operating systems, because this gives him the chance to explain the continuing importance of our old friend DOS (“Windows is simply DOS in a dress”). This leads naturally into a discussion of OS futures and his guess that Win95 will be around for some time yet, Win98 is a mixed blessing, and Windows NT is a ‘safe choice’ but ‘finicky’. He even explains how to run more than one OS on a single machine. He finishes with a consideration of speech recognition software, multimedia, and 3D modeling, laptops, modems, then sign off with a quick tour of issues raised by the connection of PCs to the Net. As you would expect from a serious work of reference, there’s also a huge index.

So – he starts from the almost mathematical origins of ‘what makes a computer more than a calculator’ and takes you through every part of a PC, explaining how its parts work and relate to each other. I’m still not sure that I understand every detail of BIOS systems and interrupt vector tables, but now that I feel a lot more confident, I’m going to have another look inside the box.

© Roy Johnson 2003

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Peter Norton and John Goodman, Peter Norton’s ‘Inside the PC’, (eighth edition) Indiana: Sams, 1998, pp.721, ISBN 0672315327


More on technology
More on digital media
More on online learning
More on computers


Filed Under: Computers Tagged With: Computers, Peter Norton's Inside the PC, Technology

Plan and Manage E-learning

July 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Plan and Manage E-learning looks at the practical steps that need to be taken to create E-learning courses and the infrastructure that supports them. It covers all aspects of this process – including planning, course design, materials creation, course delivery, and tutoring. Lewis and Whitlock take a Web-oriented approach to their exposition. Each step is broken down into manageable chunks, and they use a wide range of examples and plenty of checklists to make this a very practical route map in course design.

Plan and Manage E-learningDespite its reliance on technology, E-learning is heavily dependent for its success on personal interaction, and they spend a lot of space offering support for teachers and learners. This is the part of online learning which is often forgotten by people racing to get onto the technological bandwagon. Much of their content is a sensible and practical approach to course planning – every step geared to think carefully about aims and how they are to be achieved. There are lots of checklists of things to take into account when planning, designing, and running a learning program.

They even deal with tricky issues such as online assessment and moderation, as well as the costs of development time, making the materials cost-effective, and cost-recuperation via clever marketing.

This book will be of most use to course designers, heads of department, or training managers who have been given the task of organising learning programs by people who think it’s just a matter of transferring information quickly from paper to screen.

© Roy Johnson 2004

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Roger Lewis and Quentin Whitlock, How to Plan and Manage an E-learning Programme, London: Gower, 2003, pp.185, ISBN 0566084244


More on online learning
More on technology
More on digital media
More on web design
More on computers


Filed Under: Online Learning Tagged With: Communication, Education, eLearning, Online learning, Plan and Manage E-learning

Release 2.1

June 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

social, moral, and political issues raised by the Internet

Esther Dyson is renowned for her digital savvy and is much syndicated as a sybil of cyberculture. She aims to bring us all out of the dark ages into the Brave New World of the digital age. This compilation is the hardback version of her electronic mailing list – Release 1.0. It’s a populist text aimed at the ‘beginner’ and the small businessman, which addresses general topics such as communities, work, education, Net governance, intellectual property rights, and privacy. Her purpose is to reveal how information technology is affecting all aspects of our lives.

esther dysonHer approach is to pose questions – ‘What is the right size for a [Net] community?’ or ‘What kinds of investment can one make in a community?’ This appears to be a communicative and intelligent approach to discussing problems of the Net, but when you begin to think about it these are actually non-questions. What’s more they are followed by non-answers, and these in turn are followed by non-predictions. For instance, “Those who succeed will be those who are good at getting their new designs or themselves noticed”. When was this ever not the case, one wonders?

She poses too much of her argument as speculation and questions about what might be the case, what could be – not what is the case.

On the subject of employment she speaks of people working in ‘co-operative teams’ and paints an almost ridiculously rosy picture of commercial life – completely ignoring the nasty and competitive side of work, even though she’s part of it. At one point she gives something of the game away by casually mentioning that part of her brief is to advise companies on ‘which people to fire’.

It’s the same when it comes to education. She sets up Utopian notions of teachers emailing parents to discuss students’ progress – but then pulls them down again with finger-wagging paragraphs of caution. The result is dampening and very, very conservative. She warns us: ‘Kids can find one another, talk about their parents – or drugs or sex – in a medium inaccessible to many parents and teachers’. She assumes that this is a Bad Thing and ignores the fact that they could do this just by talking to each other, either on the telephone or even in the playground. On this score, she’s the Norman Rockwell of the Net:

Your English teacher does more than force you to read and discuss novels. He encourages you to think; you’re eager to win his approval and so you work a little harder, think a little longer…you kind of like him…and he’s … well, he’s a role model.

On Net governance she’s a little more objective, and less dewy-eyed, if rather descriptive. There’s not much here that most Net enthusiasts won’t already know. She deals interestingly with Spam – but it’s difficult to repress a sneaky suspicion that she doesn’t know much about the technicalities involved. In technical terms for instance, she doesn’t make any clear distinctions between email, the Web, newsgroups, mailing lists, and FTP – it’s all called ‘the Net’. Her generalizations look shallow compared with the impressive close-reading skills that are common amongst analysts of message headers in on-line groups.

A chapter on privacy deals with the right of consumers to protect themselves against cookies. She argues that consumers should have choice and be able to trade information about themselves with agencies who reveal up front what they will do with the information. On these issues she takes a reasonable and libertarian position, and the answer to all these issues that she offers is sensible: maximum transparency.

As we draw nearer to the world of business in the section on copyright she seems to be on firmer ground – but still doesn’t supply the sort of detailed evidence which would demonstrate intellectual rigour and make her suggestions more convincing. Unfortunately, it’s not long before the Net disappears more or less altogether and we’re in the world of advertising and PR consultancy where she obviously feels at home.

This compilation of market-speak reaches its nadir in a section on the organisation of conferences where people pay steep fees for the privilege of rubbing shoulders with self-elected experts. This might be where she makes her money, but it has very little to do with ‘living in the digital age’, and she seems unaware of the contradiction between assembling people at conference centres and preaching the advantages of digital technology.

She comes up with completely unconvincing arguments about ‘the need to be there’ at these events and even descends to enthusing about the marketing opportunities for spin-off T-shirts! Just imagine – all those keynote speeches could be zipped into a 50K text file and made available the day they were written. Instead, people traipse half way across a continent, dragging their atoms to a conference centre for two or three day’s expense-account junketing. But this is what keeps her in business.

There’s rather a lot of first person address which at times comes close to egomania: “Central and Eastern Europe needed me” and “a group of ‘big thinkers’ (including me)”. But for somebody who seems to be well connected in the commercial world and who drops hints about her investments, there is remarkably little here about hard finance. Her arguments are vague political wish-fulfilments peppered with occasional anecdotes [I met a man once who said…] and all the time, the really exhilarating developments on the Net go unexamined.

If you think this is a harsh judgement, remember that this is a woman who has founded a business empire and is syndicated world-wide as a futurist and guru of the digital world: and for someone offering advice on the bleeding edge of technological developments, it is a little disconcerting to see occasional practical examples pop up, only to be left behind, unexamined.

There is a reasonable index, only very rare references to sources, no bibliography, and a short list of URLs is not annotated in any way. All this suggest that she is not in the habit of scrutinising her claims carefully – and keep in mind that she makes her living by selling advice to other people. She might have an impressive track record as an investment analyst, but on the strength of this, I don’t think I would take her technological advice on which brand of floppy disk to buy.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Release 2.1   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Release 2.1   Buy the book at Amazon US


Esther Dyson, Release 2.1: A design for living in the digital age, London: Viking, 1997, pp.307, ISBN: 0670876003


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Techno-history Tagged With: Computers, e-Commerce, Release 2.1, Technology

Remix: The Copyright Wars

December 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid  Economy

Lawrence Lessig is a lecturer in law at Harvard University and a leading authority on copyright and intellectual property rights in the digital age. He helped to found the Creative Commons movement, and he’s a former member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. His works are a passionate defence of the rights of the individual to the creativity of the past, and a crusade against those forces which try to limit the free exchange of information. Remix: The Copyright Wars is his manifesto on the topic.

Copyright warsThis is the latest in a long line of books he has written in support of such causes – explaining in non-legal language the way in which human rights have been eroded by the vested interests of big business. Whilst upholding the right of all content originators to make a living from what they create, he believes that the current copyright laws restrict the free exchange of information. He also argues that all creativity builds on the creativity of the past, and it is modern technology which has democratised and speeded up the process.

In the past, you could own the ‘source code’ to Shakespeare’s works, but only printing press owners could make copies. Now, as soon as something becomes digitised, any kid in his back bedroom can copy at will. This has given rise to a panic over copyright, which he explores in some depth.

First of all he examines the ‘war against piracy’ in the American courts by a close inspection of the terms in which it is commonly pursued:

In my view, the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously. At least when the war is not about survival, the solution to an unwinnable war is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to achieve without war the ends that the war sought.

You would almost think he was talking about the Americans in Afghanistan – but no, this is the ‘copyright wars’.

He cites many examples where companies have paid out legal fees ten times greater than the lost revenue they were seeking to recoup.

He agrees with Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow that the Nay-sayers and prophets of doom on all this are wrong. The future is not likely to be an either/or choice between prohibition and control versus unbridled anarchy. It’s much more likely to be a creative symbiosis of past and future technologies.

He then addresses the central theme of the book – how much is it possible to quote from someone else’s work in a new work for private or public consumption? The rules and general practice are quite different, depending on the medium. With printed text it is a perfectly normal, accepted practice to quote from someone else’s work. In fact academic writing specifically requires a knowledge and accurate quotation of previous works in the same subject.

But use the same approach with audio recordings and you’ll end up with a solicitor’s ‘cease and desist’ letter from Sony or Decca. And his argument is that this restriction is a brake on both creativity and freedom of information.

On mixed media he also makes the very good point that the sort of well-edited video clips with over-dubbed sound tracks shown in TV political satire (and now on blogs) are more effective than long-winded essays taking 10,000 words to make the same point.

Most people today don’t even have time to read long articles. They get their information in much shorter chunks. As he puts it, very pithily – “text is today’s Latin”. It’s an extreme view, but you can see his point.

A propos of which, he also practices what he preaches. He developed a style of presentation which uses rapid display of short, memorable phrases or pictures. Here’s an example which takes a while to load, but is well worth the wait. It’s quite old now, but it demonstrates a technique of presentation which will not date: sound and text being used together for maximum effect.

One thing about his writing I found quite inspiring is that for every bold proposition he makes, he looks at the possible objections to it. (In fact a whole section of his web site is devoted to criticisms of his work.)

He makes a profound distinction between what he calls read-only (RO) and read-write (RW) culture. Both are important, but they have the difference that RO encourages passive reception, whereas RW encourages a written, that is a creative response. This leads him to argue for the enhanced value of all ‘writing’ – by which he means not only text, but the manipulation of other media, such as the audio and video files which are the stock-in-trade of the mashup artists.

His point is that these collage-type works are definitely not examples of parasitic imitation, and that in almost all cases they reveal a skilled appreciation of the medium.

The second part of the book is an investigation of eCommerce – conducted at a level just as radical and profound. He looks Google, Amazon, and Netflix as examples of businesses that have become successful by defying the normal laws of commerce. They allow other companies to share their information, and in Amazon’s case they even allow competitors onto their site. By doing this they make more money, and they control more of the field.

For the sake of those people who didn’t catch it first time round, he explains Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Principle. He then looks at the ‘sharing economies’ to which the Internet has given birth – the Open Source projects and the Wikipedias which exist on the voluntary efforts of volunteers.

Next he passes on to what he calls the ‘hybrid economies’ – companies such as Slashdot and Last.fm who offer a community but make money by advertising revenues. The subtle distinctions between these different models have to be handled carefully – otherwise sensibilities (and revenue streams) might be affected.

He looks at the ethical and practical conflicts between Old and New economies – those based on greed and naked competition, and those based in the ‘hybrid’ sector of sharing and cooperation. Eventually this takes us back to the issue of copyright, where he has some radical proposals for reform.

The first is that basically all genuinely amateur use of copyrighted material should be exempt from prosecution. It is pointless issuing legal writs against some kid sampling and posting on YouTube. The second is a suggestion that copyright is returned to its original status – a fourteen year term which is renewable if the owner so wishes.

Next comes a suggestion called ‘clear title’ – which means that the item being copyrighted needs to be clearly defined. Then comes the de-criminalisation of P2P file sharing, and the end of prosecuting sampling and mashups. As he suggests, supported by people in the pop music business, there is no evidence to prove that a sample or mashup detracts from sales of the original. All of these seem perfectly reasonable – though I suspect vested corporate interests would think otherwise.

This is a passionate and thought-provoking book on the ethics of copyright and creativity in an age of rapid technological change. It is radical, free-thinking, and a challenge to anyone participating in the digital world right now. Lawrence Lessig is a voice to take note of. But you’ll have to move fast. He seems to be in a permanent state of rapid development, and by the time you’ve read this, his latest book, he’ll have moved on elsewhere. If you go to his official site at lessig.org you’ll see what I mean.

Remix: The Copyright Wars   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Remix: The Copyright Wars   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, London: Penguin Books, 2008, pp.327, ISBN: 0143116134


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Media, Open Sources Tagged With: Business, Copyright, e-Commerce, Media, Open Sources, Remix: the copyright wars, Theory

Search Engine Optimization

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to maximise page rankings with search engines

I bought this book on search engine optimisation (SEO) because I trust Peter Kent’s work. His best-selling 2000 work Poor Richard’s Web Site was well-written, clear and friendly advice, and he spells out technology in a way which is easy to understand. He starts out here by explaining how search engines do their work, then provides a quick overview of how to optimise pages. This is an intelligent approach, because the details of SEO can become quite complex, and people fixing their own sites rather than paying an SEO agency will want to get on quickly with the job.

Search Engine Optimization The process is one of gradual adjustment and refinement. It involves choosing the best keywords, creating good content, making submissions to the SEs, and generating incoming links. Each of these topics is then explained in greater detail. He always offers suggestions of free software and services where possible, and the resources mentioned are all listed at the book’s own web site. The only paid-for software he recommends is WordTracker which helps you to identify the most appropriate keywords for your site.

Most of the advice is perfectly straightforward and easy to follow – though it requires a great deal of your patience and time. It involves giving pages accurate descriptive titles, creating content which matches the description of what’s on offer, and avoiding tricks and anything which tries to put one over on the search engines

On the use of frames he is quite unequivocal. Don’t do it! But just in case you have done so, and can’t really change your site, he shows you how to eliminate the worst problems. The same is true for dynamic pages generated from databases, and for cookie-based navigation systems.

But then just to prove that he’s not being unnecessarily stuffy, he does have a chapter on how to trick the search engines – albeit after listing several reasons why you should not use them. These include stuffing keywords, making text and links hidden on the page, duplicating pages, making doorway pages, plus tricks with redirects and cloaking.

Next he deals with the business of submitting your site to the search engines – putting a lot of his emphasis on creating a sitemap. Once again he gives lots of convincing reasons why you should use the free submission systems and avoid the paid-for services.

He explains the way the system of page ranking works and why it is important that the pages of a site contain as many links as possible. This leads naturally to the difficult business of finding people who will link to your site. We get several link-swap offers a day on this site, but most of them turn out to be from what are called link farms – which search engines don’t like.

By the time he reaches the shopping directories he has to admit that all this link-building and site-promotion is a labour-intensive business. So there’s a section on how to get other people to do it for you!

© Roy Johnson 2010

Search Engine Optimization   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Search Engine Optimization   Buy the book at Amazon US


Peter Kent, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, Indianapolis: Indiana, Wiley, 4th edition, 2010, pp.382, ISBN: 0470881046


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: Computers, e-Commerce Tagged With: Business, e-Commerce, Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Web design

Smartphones for Internet Access

April 11, 2012 by Roy Johnson

T-MobileToday’s Internet users are relying on their smartphones or tablets for quick and easy Internet access, rather than laptops and desktops. And no wonder. It’s simply more convenient and portable. However, those with tight finances haven’t always been able to enjoy the benefits of 4G connectivity. But this will all change with the announcement of T-Mobile’s reinvigorated challenger strategy. This offers more affordable options to cash-strapped customers. When subscribers to T-Mobile compare cell phone plans with those of other service providers, T-Mobile comes out on top as one of the most affordable cell phone carriers with reliable service.

With mobile devices increasingly imitating each other’s features, it’s the quality and cost of the service that will determine user choice. T-Mobile’s challenger strategy, outlined by CEO and President Philipp Humm recently, focuses on making 4G services affordable and establishing growth for the business by investing $4 billion on network modernization and 4G evolution.

"We want to be known for delivering the best value in wireless because of the advanced technology we deliver at an affordable price," Humm said. "Over the next two years, we’re prioritizing and investing in initiatives designed to get T-Mobile back to growth in the years ahead—beginning with the transformation of our network."

Over 90 percent of T-Mobile device sales in the fourth quarter were from 3G and 4G smartphones, and data usage as well as smartphone adoption continue to accelerate. This has prompted the telecommunications giant to improve its data services to keep loyal customers happy as well as attract new subscribers.

"Today we operate America’s Largest 4G Network delivering a fast and reliable 4G data experience with Evolved High Speed Packet Access (HSPA+)" T-Mobile Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray said. "Launching Long Term Evolution (LTE) next year lets us take advantage of technology infrastructure advancements and benefit from a more mature LTE device ecosystem, while continuing to meet the growing demand for data with a powerful 4G experience."

T-Mobile plans to deliver better performance and coverage to its customers by improving its 4G network infrastructure with "new antenna integrated radios on many of its cell towers." The company may even be the first carrier in North America to accomplish this feat.

These technological developments should give users access to much higher rates of data transfer, and a smoother user experience. For instance, they can produce significant improvements to battery life, and quicker wake-from-idle time. This will be similar to an always-on connection. That’s the sort of service mobile device users increasingly expect in a fully-connected environment.


More on technology
More on digital media
More on online learning
More on computers


Filed Under: Computers, Media Tagged With: Communication, Media, Mobile phones, Smartphones, Technology

Test Driving Linux

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

try out Linux without installing it on your hard disk

Linux is the completely free operating system which has been developed as part of the Open Source Software movement. It offers a powerful and safer alternative to Windows XP, which many people cannot afford, particularly where multiple installations are concerned. But switching from a well known operating system to something new can be a scary experience. Wouldn’t it be good if you could take a test drive first. That’s where the clever idea behind this book appears. It comes with a CD that lets you run Linux off the disk, without installing it onto you hard drive.

Test Driving Linux It will run more slowly off the CD, but you get to try Linux without taking any risks. David Brickner even supplies the neat wrinkle of saving your settings onto a USB flash disk so that you don’t need to reconfigure Linux each time you boot up. The CD also comes with a full copy of OpenOffice, the free alternative to Microsoft Office, as well as free browsers, graphics editing software, and hundreds of other applications for every type of daily computer task. The desktop interface which comes on the CD is called K Desktop Environment (KDE). He explains how this works and shows how a variety of applications run in it. KDE also has a number of key features of its own – such as the ability to run virtual desktops.

After guiding you through KDE (which works in a similar way to Windows XP) he offers a tour of the free Linux software applications which come on the CD – Konqueror web browser and file manager, Totem multimedia player, Kontact personal information manager, GIMP image editor, and OpenOffice.org. This is a fully featured suite of word processor, spreadsheet, and presentations programs which can open any files from Microsoft Office and save back into that format.

If you don’t like these particular applications, you can just as easily download the Firefox browser or the Thunderbird email client. Almost all these programs are more bug-free and more secure than their Windows counterparts.

The book’s subtitle is “from Windows to Linux in 60 seconds”. You might boot up from the CD in that time, but you’ll want to spend a while using all the programs and trying out the software provided.

If when you’ve finished you feel like making the switch to Linux or running it alongside Windows on a dual-boot system, then he has a very useful conclusion which explains the advantages and shortcomings of the many versions of Linux available.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


David Brickner, Test Driving Linux, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005, pp. 341, ISBN: 059600754X


Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: Linux, Open Sources, Operating Systems, Technology

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

July 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

socio-political manifesto of the free software movement

Forget the enigmatic title of The Cathedral and the Bazaar for a moment. This is essentially four long, polemical essays on the open source movement, written by one of its prime movers in the period between 1992 and summer 1999. ‘Open Source’ is a term used to describe the idealistic notion of freely sharing technological development – particularly the software code written by computer programmers. The first and earliest essay sets out the principles of the open source movement. The second inspects the attitudes and moral codes of its members (the hackers) who submit their work to peer review and what Eric Raymond claims is a ‘gift culture’. The third looks at the economic conundrum of how the open source movement sustains itself without a regular income. The last essay is an account of activism relating to the Microsoft anti-trust case.

The Cathedral and the BazaarBasically, it’s an impassioned argument in favour of a new strategy in software development which has arisen from the decision by Linus Torvalds to release the source code of his operating system Linux. He released it not only for free use, but also invited volunteers to help him develop it further. Raymond argues that this represents – dare one say it? – a paradigm shift – a democratic sharing of ideas and repeated testing rather than the development of a product in commercial secrecy.

This is where the title comes in. The ‘cathedral’ is a metaphor for work ‘carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time’. The bazaar represents an open free-for-all approach ‘differing agendas and approaches…out of which a coherent and stable system [can] seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles’.

He inspects the arguments which have been made in criticism of the open source movement, and whilst I wouldn’t say that he demolishes them exactly, he does come up with some interesting points about a system which he is presenting as a revolutionary alternative to the common commercial model. ‘It is often cheaper and more efficient to recruit self-selected volunteers from the Internet than it is to manage buildings full of people who would rather be doing something else’. If the principles of the open source movement really do work in the long term, this will stand a lot of MBA wisdom on its head.

However, his arguments for the advantages of releasing open source on Netscape (in autumn 1998) seem to evade the issue that NS was under intense pressure from Microsoft. He’s making an argument from technological altruism, when deep down the motive might have been economic. But he does explain how a company such as Red Hat can sell open source code (Linux) for a profit, when it’s free for anyone who wants it. They sell – ‘a brand/service/support relationship with people who are freely willing to pay for that’ – and other companies are free to do the same thing if they wish.

As the book reaches its breathy conclusion, the fourth essay becomes a rather personal and excited account of how the open source movement was established in 1998/9 – largely to support Netscape in its fight against Microsoft. No doubt there will be updates to this statement issued at the appropriate web site [www.opensource.org] following each stage of the fight in court.

Some of the anthropological parallels and excursions into political economy seem slightly fanciful, and at times his polemic becomes a sociological study of hackers’ motives – a trap which in literary studies is known as the ‘intentional fallacy’. That is, we shouldn’t judge outcomes on the strength of what we perceive to be the author’s intent. It’s also very idealistic – though the latest edition of WIRED carries an article about open source warriors selling their services on the open market, and Raymond argues that there is no necessary contradiction in this.

It’s the first book on high-tech developments I’ve come across which provided the slightly bizarre experience of a text printed with double line spacing and one-sentence paragraphs. This I imagine reflects the influence of the email originals written for reading on screen. Another interesting feature is that the majority of the bibliographical references are to articles on the Net, not to printed books – though I still think he should have tried to produce an index and bibliography.

He claims that even this book is in a state of evolution via updates following peer review – and that’s exactly as it should be for such a subject. It’s written in a concise, deeply compacted style, with few concessions to an average reader’s technical knowledge, and he’s occasionally cryptic to the point of obscurity: ‘Before taxonomising open-source business models, we should deal with exclusion payoffs in general’.

This is a crusading text, and anyone concerned with the sharp end of software development and the battles of operating systems will be fascinated by his arguments. This revised and expanded paperback edition includes new material on recent technological developments which has made it one of the essential texts on Open Sources

© Roy Johnson 2000

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 1999, pp.268, ISBN: 0596001088


Filed Under: Open Sources Tagged With: Linux, Open Sources, Technology, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Theory

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • Next Page »

Reviews

  • Arts
  • Biography
  • Creative Writing
  • Design
  • e-Commerce
  • Journalism
  • Language
  • Lifestyle
  • Literature
  • Media
  • Publishing
  • Study skills
  • Technology
  • Theory
  • Typography
  • Web design
  • Writing Skills

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016
  • About Us
  • Advertising
  • Clients
  • Contact
  • FAQ
  • Links
  • Services
  • Reviews
  • Sitemap
  • T & C’s
  • Testimonials
  • Privacy

Copyright © 2025 · Mantex

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in