Jun 29th, 2009 - If Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, gets his way, blog postings like this one could be illegal. On his blog, Posner recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded. "Expanding copyright law to bar online access... (Read More)

Jun 26th, 2009 - It's said that the Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. Maybe, but it barely survived the death of Michael Jackson. A series of web sites fell like dominoes as Boomers and GenXers raced to verify the truth of the Jackson death rumors yesterday. Twitter, Wikipedia, tmz.com,... (Read More)

Jun 18th, 2009 - Raising privacy and civil liberties issues, job applicants to the city of Bozeman are not only required to list all their social media accounts, but their passwords as well. “Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat... (Read More)

Jun 17th, 2009 - Following the lead of John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, President Barack Obama had mentioned in his campaign platform a "Craigslist for Service" (which met with the full approval of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark). It has now come to fruition with what Obama is calling "the summer of service."... (Read More)

Jun 15th, 2009 - "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in 1993. In the same way that people in Mumbai used Twitter last fall to publicize news of terrorist attacks in that Indian city, Iranians are using Twitter to let the... (Read More)

Jun 28th, 2009 - Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they're referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS (Common Internet File System aka Samba) and NFS. A filesystem is a... (Read More)

Jun 25th, 2009 - Ok, so we all know that I've been giving Fedora a bit of a black eye lately with my BaitNSwitch and Is Fedora Still Relevant posts so I've decided to give them some positive press and enter their Spins Zone. Spins are live Fedora CD images designed with a specific purpose or function in mind. ... (Read More)

Jun 22nd, 2009 - Prejudices and opinions aside, at some point in your career you'll be asked to select a viable Linux distribution for your corporate network. How will you choose? Will you use the same distribution that you use at home or will you do some research and find something that's corporate-ready? Are you... (Read More)

Jun 19th, 2009 - I've been in discussions with a group of other writers, Linux distribution watchers, Linux community leaders and developers in the past few days concerning Linux commercial vs. Linux community versions and some of us came to the conclusion that Fedora's relevance has waned. In fact, it might be... (Read More)

Jun 16th, 2009 - Today, I'm announcing my new Linux company, HookLineNSinker, Inc. (HLNS) which will produce a new commercial Linux distribution: Pricey Linux. HLNS products include Pricey Linux Enterprise, Pricey Linux Small Business Server and The Pricey Linux Desktop. There are also Pricey Linux Support options... (Read More)

Jun 13th, 2009 - Back in October '08, I wrote "5 Things I Wish Linux Had" but never realized that it would inspire the heated debate (Read the comments) that it did. I also didn't realize that it would inspire an actual operating system. One of my readers commented briefly that he would take on the project. With... (Read More)

Jun 11th, 2009 - FireFox 3.5 is due out by the end of June and includes some pretty interesting new features--and not a moment too soon. Some of these new features include the ability to play videos in the browser without the need to download and install a third-party plugin. It also includes TraceMonkey, which is... (Read More)

Jun 9th, 2009 - Yesterday, Apple announced significant price drops on many of its consumer products including the iPhone and Mac Air. This is an unusual move by Apple since it carefully controls its pricing--so much so that rarely, if ever, do its products go "on sale." So what's up with this big price drop? Is... (Read More)

Jun 8th, 2009 - Have you bought a Kindle or Kindle 2 yet? Don't--at least not until you check out the COOL-ER ebook reader. It's about the same size and weight of a Kindle--so what makes it so much cooler than the Kindle? It could be your choice of eight cool colors, its magical portrait/horizontal page... (Read More)

Jun 28th, 2009 - Generally speaking I would not recommend reading a newspaper in the hot tub. If that hot tub happens to be of the spa-jet variety then that only makes it worse. If the newspaper is a rare item from the 19th century then surely only a fool would consider it. Yet this weekend I have been doing just... (Read More)

Jun 25th, 2009 - I am probably showing my age here, but I can recall when relationships started as a result of face to face meetings. If those relationships came to an end, they ended the same way as a rule. OK, a few cowardly types might have resorted to a 'Dear John' letter or even a phone call, but only a few.... (Read More)

Jun 23rd, 2009 - Over the years there has been plenty of speculation regarding the sanity of Steve 'Monkey Dancing' Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO. But what is it with Microsoft and this obsession to pursue the search supremacy dream at any cost? Sure, I know Ballmer has sworn to kill Google before but the truth is... (Read More)

Jun 19th, 2009 - Seems like a silly question, right? But $80,000 per track is exactly how much Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother from Minneapolis, has been charged. Well, I say charged but actually she was fined this amount for each of 24 songs downloaded via a file-sharing site at the end of a jury trial which... (Read More)

Jun 9th, 2009 - UK iPhone 3G users hoping that the network operator with the exclusive contract on the new iPhone 3GS might see sense and let them upgrade have been dealt a body blow as O2 confirms they can go and swivel on Twitter. The iPhone 3GS will be upon us in a week or so. Brilliant stuff, especially... (Read More)

Jun 28th, 2009 - How come I can't let go? I'm between two worlds ~Tom Petty, Between Two Worlds As I watched vendors navigate the changing software world last week at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, it struck me that the old companies are trying desperately to hold onto to the markets they have dominated for so... (Read More)

Jun 26th, 2009 - On June 15th, less than two weeks ago, the Apple Insider blog reported that Apple sales continued slipping in May. Mac sales were down, perhaps not as much as expected but still down, and more surprising, the previously recession-proof iPod sales were falling. Could it be that the economy was... (Read More)

Jun 21st, 2009 - Speaking about consumer search last week, Steve Ballmer said he now regrets that Microsoft quote "didn't start earlier" unquote. But it seems to me that Microsoft has been all in for a long time and they just haven't been very successful at consumer search. It wasn't so much they gave in, as... (Read More)

Jun 18th, 2009 - One of the big rules of online advertising as I understand it is that you count success to a great extent based on how many people click through to your site. It's really the basis of how people get paid by Google for Google AdSense. If you get click-throughs you get paid and advertisers pay Google... (Read More)

Jun 15th, 2009 - I've seen a lot of love for Microsoft's newly branded search engine, Bing lately and frankly I just don't get it. Bing landed a couple of weeks ago with a huge ad budget (as I wrote in Microsoft Ad Wars Turn to Google) and a big splash, but I've used it and I don't see anything new here, but a... (Read More)

Jun 12th, 2009 - Sherri McLeish from Forrester reports that 80 percent of enterprise customers still use Microsoft Office. While this is down significantly from the 95 percent reported in this 2006 BusinessWeek article, it still makes me wonder why so many companies would continue to use Microsoft Office given the... (Read More)

Jun 11th, 2009 - Apple kicked off its annual World Wide Developer's Conference on Monday, and it proved something very important; it could generate plenty of excitement without Steve Jobs on stage. I know that I along with many others watch with anticipation as live bloggers on the scene gave us the blow by... (Read More)

Jun 8th, 2009 - As usual Apple put on quite a show at the WWDC 09 Keynote on Monday, but what struck me was the undercurrent of derision for its exclusive carrier AT&T. Tucked in among the big announcements of faster, cheaper Mac Books, $29 Snow Leopard upgrades, the long rumored $99 iPhone and of course the all... (Read More)

Jun 26th, 2009 - I hate bloggers and Twitter users that bandwagon something like the tragically early demise of Michael Jackson. This isn't the right platform for tributes even if I were his biggest fan anyway. Nonetheless, there is a lesson to be noted in terms of technology. The fact is that the Internet had... (Read More)

Jun 25th, 2009 - You might have seen the announcement yesterday that Microsoft is going to start offering free antivirus protection to its customers. The initial reaction is no doubt going to be reasonably positive, and speaking as someone with a family member who's been hit by a computer virus fairly recently, the... (Read More)

Jun 24th, 2009 - There's a new campaign on Twitter about fixing Microsoft's flagship email program, Outlook. Outlook 2010 will be coming out next year (just say if I'm going too quickly) and it renders emails oddly if they're in HTML. There are details here. Let's ignore the fact that the Fixoutlook page is one... (Read More)

Jun 22nd, 2009 - I've been doing a lot on social networking lately, mostly because of the book I've been writing on the subject. Social media is a real market-changer. Something else that's been happening quietly and in the background is the emergence of games as a serious computing application. A new study says... (Read More)

Jun 18th, 2009 - Twitter was all a-twitter overnight (UK time) about the iPhone version 3.0 software upgrade. It was falling over, people weren't able to download, it was agony and then it wasn't working apparently. I hope you don't enjoy reading that sort of stuff. I'm not able to write it, you see; it works here,... (Read More)

Jun 16th, 2009 - Now here's a thing. The web browser Opera is coming out in a new version, Opera Unite, and it's going to let you host all the music, photos and social media you want. On your own computer. Here's the Reuters report. Initially I can see this will look like a good idea. In the right (as in... (Read More)

Jun 15th, 2009 - I think I must be turning into some sort of freak (fill in the kneejerk comment of your choice at the end of this blog, there are plenty to choose from). I've just read this interesting story that says Google is going to launch a microblogging search engine. It's here. You're going to be able to... (Read More)

Jun 9th, 2009 - I have to confess my initial reaction was the same as that of Daniweb colleague Bill Andad; the lack of a coherent upgrade path for the new iPhone 3G S is some sort of idiocy by UK operator 02. But then I got to thinking. And it's not. It's unfortunate and I wish they'd change their minds, but I... (Read More)

Jun 25th, 2009 - Am I surprised that many 'IT Security Professionals' appear to have had a common-sense bypass when it comes to the security of their own mobile devices? Nah, not really. Look, we already know that 88 percent of web users are morons and 93 percent of IT Admins are idiots so why should IT security... (Read More)

Jun 21st, 2009 - The privacy invading nonsense that is the controversial UK ID Card Scheme could be scrapped by this time next year. With the chances of the Labour Party being returned to power looking very slim indeed, the chances are that a Conservative Government will be voted in. Which is good news for privacy... (Read More)

Jun 16th, 2009 - There is little doubt that when it comes to consumer satellite navigation devices, TomTom pretty much rules the roost. There is equally little doubt that in the past it has made some pretty serious mistakes, such as introducing the world to the first virus infection distributed by a satnav device.... (Read More)

Jun 11th, 2009 - Everyone knows that China is not exactly the most Internet friendly country, in fact the Chinese government pretty much hates it. Despite being a truly connected superpower, the Chinese government has already declared war on Internet porn. Of course, the Internet is a cool tool when used as a... (Read More)

Jun 9th, 2009 - Hackers managed to get root access to a large Internet Service Provider, reportedly via a zero day vulnerability over the weekend, and destroy data from 100,000 websites as a result. The UK-based ISP, VAServ, has stated that the attackers apparently exploited a vulnerability in virtualisation... (Read More)