Jason Brooks

For an office productivity application space thats been awfully staid since Microsoft smote its early office suite rivals, 2007 has been a year of significant upheaval. Between format standardization wars, the emergence of new office application players and the re-emergence of some old faces, theres no shortage of suite buzz. Whats not yet clear is […]

San Francisco free Wi-Fi is dead. Long live San Francisco free Wi-Fi! EarthLink, the Internet ISP and erstwhile municipal Wi-Fi build-out partner for various U.S. cities, has hit upon some rough financial times—rough enough that the company has recently opted to slash half its work force and dramatically scale back its muni Wi-Fi ambitions. My […]

Microsofts ISO standardization ambitions for its Office Open XML file format have hit a rough patch, as OOXML recently failed to garner enough votes for fast-track ratification. ODF (OpenDocument Format) advocates are pleased, but theyre fooling themselves if they think that the lack of ISO standardization for OOXML is going to put any kind of […]

San Francisco free WiFi is dead. Long live San Francisco free WiFi! Earthlink, the Internet ISP and erstwhile municipal WiFi build-out partner for various US cities, has hit upon some rough financial times–rough enough that the company has recently opted to slash half its workforce and scale back dramatically on its Muni WiFi ambitions. My […]

Eugene Ciuranas focus at LeapFrog Enterprises is building infrastructure for the companys Web-enabled product initiatives, but his role also has allowed Ciurana to get involved with the One Laptop Per Child organization. The OLPCs XO laptop and the open-source Sugar interface that runs on the system have drawn the attention of many in the IT […]

Are you waiting for Service Pack 1 before deploying Windows Vista? Based on Microsoft’s raft of Windows announcements this morning, it looks as though companies sold on a “better SP1 than sorry” deployment strategy will be hanging tight until Q1 of 2008. Here’s the word, straight from the keyboards of Microsoft’s Windows PR team: ““Windows […]

LeapFrog Jumps into Open Source”> Leapfrog Enterprises, maker of childrens learning toys and electronics, is in the process of ramping up its Internet operations to serve a new series of Web-aware educational products. At the same time, the companys best-of-breed infrastructure planning strategies are leading the company in the direction of open-source software. Until the […]

Last week I came across a video presentation of Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan’s “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing,” a method for resizing images by slicing out or padding uninteresting strips of pixels. If you haven’t seen this presentation on YouTube already, watch it here right now. I’ll wait. OK. Wasn’t that sweet? Personally, […]

When Microsoft announced its plans to build a brand new hypervisor into a future version of Windows Server, it seemed to me that a much simpler path to baking virtualization into Windows would be to join the ranks of vendors developing and shipping products around the open-source Xen hypervisor project. Microsoft must have judged that […]

When Microsoft announced its plans to build a brand-new hypervisor into a future version of Windows Server, it seemed to me that a much simpler path to baking virtualization into Windows would be to join the ranks of vendors developing and shipping products around the open-source Xen hypervisor project. Microsoft must have judged that relying […]