Practical Technology

I’ve been using Google Music since it was in beta. At first, it didn’t interest me that much. Yet another way to save my music to the cloud? How much good really was that? Well, after using it for several months, and now that Google Music is open for everyone in the US to use, [...]

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It had to happen eventually. Open source software is all about letting anyone have access to the source code, and Apple is all about restricting any software access on its platforms. So when questions began to be raised about whether VideoLAN’s popular VLC Media Player, which is licensed under the GPLv2, could legally be sold [...]

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Some people hate the idea of adding proprietary software to their desktop Linux. For these people, there are Linux distributions such as gNewSense that use only free software. For the rest of us, who use distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu, there are times we either want to, or feel forced to, add proprietary [...]

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I was very pleased to see Apple’s new Mac OS X Snow Leopard patch this morning. It fixed numerous minor, but annoying problems with my Mac Mini and my wife’s MacBook Pro. It also cleaned up numerous security problems. That’s the good news. The bad news is it also introduced a serious security bug by [...]

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I recently suggested that, given Apple and Adobe’s growing war over iPad and iPhone applications, it would make sense for Adobe to move not only its end-user applications, but its Creative Suite development stack to Linux. While I don’t know if Adobe is considering it, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, would welcome Adobe. Gerry [...]

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