Jason Brooks

There’s been a lot of ink spilled over Lindows, the Linux-based operating system with the Windows-y name that saw its media fortunes spike when Microsoft took the firm to court over naming mimicry. These, however, are the first words I’ve written about Lindows. The Lindows Insider program, in which individuals pay a $99 subscription fee […]

In September, the KDE project made available Version 1.2 of KOffice, an open-source productivity suite packed with new features, including an English thesaurus and mail-merge capabilities in its word processing application. However, although Im a KDE user, Im going to stick to OpenOffice.org because the Microsoft Word import filter in the KWord component of KOffice […]

OK, so it isnt anywhere near as silly as what Amazon tried (successfully) to pull with one-click ordering. Still, RIMs recent moves to lay the smackdown on Handspring and Good Technology for patent infringement have left me scratching my head in confusion. Last Tuesday, RIM received a U.S. patent for “a hand-held electronic device with […]

As I wrote in Pings & Packets recently, finding attractive screen fonts for Linux can be a challenge, but thats not the final font challenge facing the desktop Linux user—it can be just as tough to get applications to recognize and use the fonts youve installed. Enter Fontconfig 2.0, by Keith Packard, which automatically discovers […]

This morning at the SunNetwork 2002 conference in San Francisco, Sun Microsystems announced its intentions to begin marketing 32-bit, Linux-based enterprise desktop computers, beginning in early 2003. According to Sun boss Scott McNealy, the firm believes that this effort, named Project Mad Hatter, can boost innovation and value in enterprise desktops, and can do so […]

From cell phones to personal digital assistants to telematic systems in automobiles, mobile computing surfaces in so many different forms that application development across disparate devices is a difficult task. This is why Web services—which are by definition interface-agnostic—are particularly well-suited to mobile devices. Whats more, Web services enable typically resource-constrained mobile devices to smoothly […]

For many IT administrators, a piece of Microsoft Corp. software—particularly one as central to an enterprise as Windows—isnt ripe for rollout until the first service pack is released. Judging from the number of security and bug fixes addressed in Service Pack 1, it paid to be cautious with Windows XP. Among the service packs 308 […]

On Monday, Intel introduced its development forum attendees to LaGrande, a trusted computing technology slated for inclusion in future Intel processors, perhaps as soon as the middle of next year. Intels LaGrande-based processor chips (AMD plans to include similar features in its own chips) are supposed to team with a future Microsoft OS technology called […]

SAN FRANCISCO—In a keynote address here Tuesday at Seybold San Francisco 2002, which was largely devoid of new announcements, Apple Senior Vice President Phillip Schiller spent an hour teasing out the new “print, publishing and design” features of Apples recently released OS X 10.2 operating system. While there was some news—Schiller mentioned new support for […]

The Linux and open-source communities have done a pretty good job of coming up with open-source analogs of the proprietary components necessary to get things done with your computer. However, there is a particularly high-profile exception that leaps to mind: fonts. Although the basic appearances of such fonts as Times New Roman and Arial have […]