Hardly a week goes by that I don't hear from a friend or colleague with a monumental Windows problem. […] I tell them I'm glad to help, on one condition: Next time they buy a computer, they agree to consider a Macintosh.
Apple Computer has applied for a trademark for Rosetta, the translation technology that will act as a bridge as Apple moves to Intel chips beginning next year.
Bob Young is, arguably, one of the most influential figures in the development of Linux and open source. By co-founding Red Hat with Mark Ewing in 1993, Young helped turn Linux into a household name. After being involved with Red Hat for more than 12 years, Young recently stepped down from Red Hat's board of directors. We caught up with him to see what his plans are, and what his thoughts are on Red Hat and the future of open source.
The Ubuntu Below Zero conference is in full momentum this week and Kubuntu has been prominent throughout. In his opening remarks at the start of the conference Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was now using Kubuntu on his desktop machine and said he wanted Kubuntu to move to a first class distribution within the Ubuntu community. The large number of Kubuntu users at the conference was evidence as the need for this. Free CDs for Kubuntu through shipit should be available for the next release if the planned Live CD Installer removes the need for a separate install CD.
When you talk about graphics software, the components of Adobe Creative Suite 2 almost certainly are the first to come to mind. Being the longtime leader does not always mean a program is the best out there, of course, but it at least means the company is doing something right. To get to the bottom of whether Photoshop and its siblings are as good as their market numbers would indicate, OfB Labs took two moderately experienced graphics software users who had not used Adobe's products before, and tracked the experience of using the CS suite.
Visual effects, to varying degrees are often negated from being a key component of usability. I can, for the most part, concede that to be the case. While well-designed effects can improve productivity by providing visual cues to what is going on, many only provide minimal benefits. Icons are not such a case, and that's why I think the Tango Project is more important than it might first seem.
Determined, marketing savvy, pushing the limits, glitzy. These are the kind of phrases that one thinks of when describing “in” companies that focus on consumers. While the types of actions that fit these labels originally made for controversy when applied to the GNU/Linux segment, Linspire plowed ahead on the new frontier of the GNU/Linux average user and is using its real world savvy to accomplish its single minded goal: desktop Linux for the rest of us. To find out more about this fascinating mover-and-shaker in the sector, OfB's Timothy R. Butler talked with Linspire's new CEO, Kevin Carmony, a few weeks ago about some of Linspire's choices and the future of GNU/Linux.
Just over a year ago, I wrote an article, “Why GNOME's Got it Right,” which outlined why I thought the GNOME Project was clearly the Free Software desktop project with the best vision of the future. KDE's Appeal Project, which has been brewing for some time now, looks to a different set of issues that need solving and has some very smart minds at work on solving those problems. In a few words, KDE's got some of “that vision thing” too.
Trusted Computing is generally associated with Microsoft, and, as of a short time ago, now Apple as well. On the other hand, little time is spent on the idea of integrating Trusted Platform Module support deep into GNU/Linux and other Free Software desktops. Maybe it is time for that to change.