Jason Brooks

Eugene Ciuranas focus at LeapFrog Enterprises is building infrastructure for the companys Web-enabled product initiatives, but his role also has allowed Ciurana to get involved with the One Laptop Per Child organization. The OLPCs XO laptop and the open-source Sugar interface that runs on the system have drawn the attention of many in the IT […]

Are you waiting for Service Pack 1 before deploying Windows Vista? Based on Microsoft’s raft of Windows announcements this morning, it looks as though companies sold on a “better SP1 than sorry” deployment strategy will be hanging tight until Q1 of 2008. Here’s the word, straight from the keyboards of Microsoft’s Windows PR team: ““Windows […]

LeapFrog Jumps into Open Source”> Leapfrog Enterprises, maker of childrens learning toys and electronics, is in the process of ramping up its Internet operations to serve a new series of Web-aware educational products. At the same time, the companys best-of-breed infrastructure planning strategies are leading the company in the direction of open-source software. Until the […]

Last week I came across a video presentation of Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan’s “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing,” a method for resizing images by slicing out or padding uninteresting strips of pixels. If you haven’t seen this presentation on YouTube already, watch it here right now. I’ll wait. OK. Wasn’t that sweet? Personally, […]

When Microsoft announced its plans to build a brand new hypervisor into a future version of Windows Server, it seemed to me that a much simpler path to baking virtualization into Windows would be to join the ranks of vendors developing and shipping products around the open-source Xen hypervisor project. Microsoft must have judged that […]

When Microsoft announced its plans to build a brand-new hypervisor into a future version of Windows Server, it seemed to me that a much simpler path to baking virtualization into Windows would be to join the ranks of vendors developing and shipping products around the open-source Xen hypervisor project. Microsoft must have judged that relying […]

As my Linux-Watch colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is reporting, SCO’s four-and-a-half year crusade to undermine the credibility of the Linux platform is now in its final throes. I realize that this choice of phrase doesn’t exactly convey supreme confidence that Linux is ready to leave its intellectual property FUD troubles behind, but that’s because the […]

Last month, Fortune magazine ran an interesting article about how Microsoft got its groove on in the massive Chinese market by striking deals with Chinas government and how Microsofts success in China appears to be coming at the expense of Linux and open-source software. The Fortune article points specifically to Chinas homegrown Red Flag Linux […]

VMware Fusion Melds Apple OS X with Windows While Apples OS X enjoys a healthy and broad software ecosystem of its own, theres no avoiding the fact that many vital applications, both commercial and in-house, will run only on Microsoft Windows. Enter VMware Fusion, a new product that enables OS X users to work around […]

As my LinuxDevices.com colleague Henry Kingman reported this morning, Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to acquire thin-client vendor Neoware. This looks like a smart move for HP. Endpoint security problems, including lost, stolen or otherwise subverted client systems, remain a major problem for enterprises, and thin clients offer one of the best solutions for limiting client […]

Recently, theres been a great deal of hand wringing over the possibility that Microsofts Office Open XML document format might be ratified as an ISO standard. The critics also have pointed out that the specification was crafted by Microsoft not as a standard but as a means simply of representing its legacy office file formats […]

When Microsofts Windows XP went gold back in the fall of 2001, the platform was, practically speaking, the only desktop operating system game in town. But is this town now big enough for Windows and Linux? When XP first appeared, Microsoft Office had won the productivity suite wars, Internet Explorer had driven Netscape out of […]