Practical Technology

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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Am I the only who finds Forrester analyst JP Gowdner’s blog proclamation that “Office 2010, Microsoft’s latest release, will continue to succeed with consumers” and “In terms of usage and penetration, Google Docs remains a failure” on the eve of Office 2010′s arrival to retails stores be a little… suspicious? Could it have anything to [...]

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Is there a worse IT job in the world than being a Microsoft security fixer-upper? First, you have to deal with the fact that Windows itself is insecure by design. That’s bad enough. But, then when you do get something right, like this week’s Patch Tuesday pack of patches, you’re hit on the same day [...]

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The deal is done. Oracle now owns Sun. Oracle’s main message to Sun’s customers seems to be “Don’t worry, be happy.” That’s not easy when Oracle is not explaining in any detail what it will be doing with open-source software offerings like MySQL, OpenOffice, and OpenSolaris. In general, we know that Sun’s software product catalog [...]

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Windows goes rental Microsoft has quietly made it possible to, sort of, to rent both Windows and Office. While you were probably having great fun on New Year’s Eve, Microsoft was quietly making it possible for businesses to rent Windows and Office. This stealth move has the potential to make big changes in how businesses [...]

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