With just a short time before Christmas, you may be wondering what little stocking stuffer you can get for your technically obsessed co-worker, computer savvy boss or geeky family member. It is not too late to pick out a gift that will stay out of the closet of useless gifts after the party's over. OfB's Timothy R. Butler looks at five great gift ideas below.
Perhaps in the long term, the MSN Music Store will come to overshadow Apple's iTunes Music Store. But even if it does, Apple already made it's mark on the industry. Many analysts compare today's music battle with Microsoft's war against the Netscape Web browser, which was seen as a challenge to Windows. Microsoft feared that software engineers would gravitate to developing applications on Netscape, thus circumventing Windows. The same possibility with iTunes is throwing a shadow over Microsoft's media hub plans for Windows.
I have been experimenting a lot with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) lately to see what can be done in designing a simple Web site. If you are using Apple's Safari 1.1 or later, you are seeing things on this Web page that people using Camino, Firefox, Internet Explorer and most other browsers don't: text shadows. Using shadows for story headlines is nothing knew; people have used Photoshop for years to make graphics with sophisticated layers and drop shadows, but the text shadows you see on this page are all done with CSS — not a graphic in there at all.
A growing number of computer users, fed up with the attacks on Windows computers, have been buying or at least taking a look at buying Macintosh computers from Apple Computer. Even USA TODAY's own tech columnist, Kevin Maney, recently wrote about how his Windows computer was taken down by malicious code.
The well publicized Xserve clusters at Colsa and Virginia Tech, have helped Apple overcome its reputation as the high-priced option, but it's the smaller customers that really matter, according to analysts.
PRESS RELEASE: With the
release of Mandrakesoft's new Move, Linux becomes a viable option to
millions of first-time Linux users. A « live » Linux system that teams
up with a USB key, Move lets beginners get a first taste of Linux and
gives advanced users a full Linux system they can take anywhere.
PRESS RELEASE: Griffin Technologies, LLC, a
leading provider of information security solutions for software protection and
user authentication, today announced it has begun shipping SecuriKey® for
Macintosh Professional Edition, the first-ever USB-based authentication
solution for individual Macintosh users. Featuring a USB token that acts like
an 'ignition key' for any desktop or portable Macintosh, SecuriKey for
Macintosh is the most convenient and reliable way yet to protect Macs from
unwanted use.
At aKademy I had the chance to talk to Chris Schlaeger about SUSE, its relationship with the KDE community, his view of the Linux enterprise desktop and the speed of development of several key features in KDE.