Jason Brooks

I was surprised yesterday morning by a message I received from a Red Hat mail-bot announcing that if I upgraded to a paid RHN subscription, Id have download access to Red Hat 9 a week before it hits FTP servers and retail shelves everywhere. The early-access-for-paid-subscription deal wasnt strange to see. Giving paid subscribers to […]

Word processing remains one of personal computings killer applications, but word processing programs seem to have grown so engorged with desktop-publishing-oriented features that they make straightforward text creation and manipulation more difficult than it needs to be. Here at eWeek, once content leaves our PCs, its promptly raided for its words and piped into Quark […]

Our cell phones are getting smarter, but its not clear wholl ultimately win the struggle to give handsets their brains. With the 3GSM World Congress and CeBIT wrapping up, and with CTIA now under way, the air is thick with smartphone announcements and releases, and platform diversity seems to be the overall theme. Sprint has […]

Office Embraces XML Make a Note of This”> When Microsoft Corp. releases a new version of its Office productivity suite, the software tends to be somewhat more approachable, functional and Internet-connected than the last. However, when it comes to staving off enterprise defections to open-source alternatives or coaxing stalwarts of previous Office versions to upgrade, […]

The smoothest way to install a new desktop environment, such as GNOME, is to wait for the distribution-blessed packages —or, failing that, depend on the kindness of strangers whove compiled binaries for your platform and have made them available for download. However, for those who would rather not wait or whod otherwise prefer to take […]

One of the cardinal virtues of open-source software is its penchant for preserving choice. Its no surprise, then, that theres more than one good option available when it comes to the desktop environments through which users interact with Linux and similar operating systems. Among the best and most actively developed of these desktop options is […]

Sometime around this summer, Microsoft will release the 2003 version of its Office productivity suite, with hopes that companies and individuals will find enough value in it to undertake the upgrade. What most impressed me about Office 2003, the Beta 2 release of which we reviewed in this weeks issue, is the way that Office […]

I have an inkjet printer at home that I rarely use. The things always out of ink, and when I go to my local office supply superstore to buy cartridges for it, Im always too dumbfounded by the cost of those little plastic boxes of ink to buy more than one at a time. Usually, […]

I generally dont get too excited about notebook computer releases, because as useful as these systems are, they never seem to deliver quite the mix of attributes Im after. Recently, though, a new notebook has emerged that really grabs my interest, and it isnt the 12-inch PowerBook we review in this weeks issue. The notebook […]

In a bid to shift a greater share of its computer sales to portables, Apple Computer Inc. extended its PowerBook product line further into the low and high ends of the notebook space, with the introduction of 12-inch and 17-inch models at Macworld Expo last month. eWeek Labs has been testing the $1,799, 12-inch PowerBook […]