Archive

Asking a seasoned Linux user what music player you should use is akin to bringing up questions about religion or politics with your drinking buddies. A much safer strategy is, don't ask and don't tell. But if you insist, let me throw a suggestion into the fray. Uncage Songbird. You might be pleasant...

Amid the many predictions for 2012 regarding Linux and open source software, including my own forecast of Linux domination, there is a larger, wider embrace of open source software taking place not only in the technology and other industries, not only in North America, Europe, Australia, Asia and So...

At the Consumer Electronics Show on Sunday, Lenovo unveiled a smart TV it says is the world's first to run Android 4.0, or Ice Cream Sandwich. Powered by a QualComm 8060 Snapdragon dual core CPU, the smart device -- called the "K91" -- features a 55-inch screen, a gamepad, and a user interface that ...

I've always been a fan of antivirus maker AVG. That's primarily because of the intense pain I felt when renewing staple Norton Symantec AntiVirus subscriptions back in the day, when the PC was our sole method of connectivity and Norton was our sole method of antivirus protection. AVG came along in d...

YouTube is a great source for watching an eclectic collection of videos on music, human stupidity and worldly comedy. But I find it much too easy to go far afield as I click on "also watched" videos when viewing a particular topic line. Minitube solves that problem for me. Not only does Minitube bet...

Backing up data and restoring a crashed computer are two of those "I wish I hadda" moments in the life of every computer user. When you maintain a collection of computers for your job or organization, those tasks can be critical. One of the fastest and most reliable ways to restore an afflicted comp...

My interest in desktop eye candy vacillates with the seasons. The added productivity it brings to a particular desktop design is also a factor. Now that GNOME 3 forces a desktop without icons, I took a look at how useful the gDesklets Project might be. When it comes to little desktop applets or widg...

British Telecom has filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming the Android operating system infringes of six of its patents. The suit attacks Google on a number of fronts, including Google Maps, Google+ and Google Music. While the technology in question has been used by Google for years, it may have t...

As Android continues its breathtaking rate of growth, malware directed at the platform is keeping pace. Studies from McAfee and other antivirus software providers warn that Android is a breeding ground for malicious software. Google has come under fire as a result, with security experts pointing to ...

Last month, I succumbed to a peculiar urge to go out to my local, friendly big-box consumer electronics retailer and drop almost a hundred dollars on a product that had been panned by the critics on launch, had a dubious life expectancy because of that, and had been almost universally rejected by th...

Well December is halfway over for another year, and that means 2011 is drawing to a close. It's been a tempestuous year, most would surely agree, and one that wrought momentous change in this already fast-paced industry of ours. Which were the biggest, most monumental events here in the world of FO...

Text editors are usually replacements for full-fledged word processing suites. They can offer very simple one-trick functionality such as Leafpad or multi-functional tabbed writing tools with even some semblance of character enhancements like Gedit. Or they can offer something completely different a...

HP's decision to open source its webOS mobile operating system may have met with some early cheers from observers glad to see the company's indecision come to an end, but much of that relief has been increasingly tempered by sentiments of a darker kind. "WebOS is doomed to fail" read one headline. ...

Linux continues to grow both its reach and credibility among enterprise IT users and customers, bringing competition, price and time-to-market pressure and options to key markets such as cloud computing and mobile software. Looking at the coming year for Linux, these are the key areas to watch: clou...

HP announced Friday it will contribute webOS to the open source community. The decision seals the fate of the operating system, which HP acquired when it purchased Palm for $1.2 billion in April 2010. Since then, the Pre smartphone line running webOS flickered out, and HP's TouchPad tablet, launched...