Jason Brooks

Last week, Microsoft made two major online services announcements, both focused on initiatives intended to address data accessibility pain points by knitting together the devices you own with Web-based services that Microsoft provides and promises to maintain.What should be giving users and developers pause, however, is that only one of these two big bulletins, that […]

Canonical has marshaled the best of what the open-source world has to offer in Ubuntu 8.04, a Linux-based operating system that’s capable of mounting a serious challenge to Microsoft Windows on mainstream desktops and notebooks.During my tests of Ubuntu 8.04, both in its final form and in a series of test releases that led up […]

Due to the broadening popularity of Apple’s desktops and notebooks-and, to a growing extent, of its iPhone-IT administrators at many enterprises are faced with providing updates, core applications and network authentication services to greater numbers of Apple computers and devices. Fortunately, as Apple’s computing fortunes have risen, an array of options for integrating these systems […]

Now that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has enjoyed a few weeks in the limelight in which to entice the “wait-for-SP1” IT shops to jump to Microsoft’s latest and greatest client operating system, it’s time to introduce the OS upgrade we’ve all been waiting for: Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Windows XP […]

Recently, I came across a blog post about how to install a LiveCD version of Red Hat’s upcoming Fedora 9 release onto a USB stick, leaving space on the stick for data to persist between reboots. Impressed by the persistent USB LiveCD fun and partition encrypting installer improvements, I chose to throw caution to the […]

Gartner made news April 9 by contending that Windows is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. According to Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald, radical changes to Windows are required. Their prescription: a more modular Windows. Windows is a massive piece of software, and even though it’s not presented as such externally, […]

Five years ago, Red Hat sent a shock wave through the Linux community when it announced a new bleeding-edge development pace for its flagship distribution, Red Hat Linux. Starting with Red Hat Linux 9, which was soon rebranded as Fedora Core, Red Hat forced its users to choose between the stable, supported and per-system fee-toting […]

I came across an interesting item on OSNews today — a link to a Computerworld story in which Terri Forslof, manager of security response at TippingPoint, explains why Ubuntu Linux was the only OS left standing at the pwn2own contest her firm sponsored at CanSecWest. ““There was just no interest in Ubuntu,” said Terri Forslof, […]

Today, eWEEK’s Clint Boulton is reporting on the latest efforts to save the Sprint-Clearwire nationwide WiMax wireless data network scheme. Back in July, Sprint and Clearwire struck up an arrangement in which the two companies would work together to build out and maintain a nationwide wireless network based on the years-old, often-demoed-but-too-seldom-spotted-in-the-wild WiMax technology. In […]

With the dramatic cost savings and management benefits that server virtualization delivers for enterprises, just about every IT problem area is starting to be cast as yet another nail to be driven by the hammer of virtualization. The IT industry’s largest vendors are scrambling to outfit enterprises with a virtualization tool for every occasion. And, […]

At Novell’s recent BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, company executives laid out their vision and strategy under the banner Project Fossa. What does “fossa” mean? According to Wikipedia, a fossa is either an agile, mongooselike creature from Madagascar, or a term describing a depression or hollow. Based on the search I conducted for the […]

Apple’s announcement yesterday that it plans to add support for Microsoft’s Exchange groupware server on the iPhone and the iPod Touch devices has gotten me thinking about Exchange support (or lack thereof) on other platforms, such as Linux and, strangely enough, Apple’s own OS X. It’s possible now to link up pretty much any mail […]