Jason Brooks

When Apple began not only encouraging people to Rip. Mix. Burn their favorite CD tracks, but also selling them the tools that made it all easy, the different-thinking computer company seriously ticked off the record business. You could imagine an Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man sitting somewhere clucking that Steve Jobs and Co. would […]

As in previous years, the desktop & handheld hardware category this time around included a diverse group of product contenders, ranging from low-profile desktop systems and LCD displays to wireless communicators and Tablet PC systems. Mobility was the common thread among the products that made it to the final rounds of judging. WINNER TravelMate C100 […]

OpenOffice.org released a 1.1 beta version of its open-source productivity suite late last month, and I fired up the Linux version for a test drive. (Versions for Windows and Solaris are also available, but the Mac OS X release is still at Version 1.0.1.) Among the features in Version 1.1 is support for saving documents […]

Ive written in the past that I prefer KDE to GNOME as a desktop environment, and after reviewing the latest versions of these two environments, both in their vanilla and Red Hat-tweaked forms, my preference for KDE has held fast. The projects that provide Linuxs two most prominent graphical faces follow separate philosophies, which seem […]

“Better working through XML” is the prevailing theme for Microsoft Corp.s forthcoming Office 2003 productivity suite, and none of its components carries this banner more prominently than InfoPath, a new application for designing and filling out XML-based forms. eWeek Labs tests of InfoPath Beta 2 showed that, unlike its other Office siblings, this application eschews […]

“Release early and often” is an open-source mantra, but it has anything but a calming effect on enterprise IT administrators more concerned with maintaining stability in their infrastructure than staying on softwares bleeding edge. In a bid to court these enterprise customers without relinquishing its Linux leadership role, Red Hat Inc. has split its operating […]

When last weeks column hit the Web, wed just learned that Red Hats next Linux release would carry a full version number jump, from 8.0 to 9—an uncharacteristic move for Red Hat, since three point releases came between versions 7.0 and 8.0. Quite a few of you e-mailed me expressing dread over the release number […]

“Release early and often” is an open-source mantra, but it has anything but a calming effect on enterprise IT administrators more concerned with maintaining stability in their infrastructure than staying on softwares bleeding edge. In a bid to court these enterprise customers without relinquishing its Linux leadership role, Red Hat Inc. has split its operating […]

I was surprised yesterday morning by a message I received from a Red Hat mail-bot announcing that if I upgraded to a paid RHN subscription, Id have download access to Red Hat 9 a week before it hits FTP servers and retail shelves everywhere. The early-access-for-paid-subscription deal wasnt strange to see. Giving paid subscribers to […]

Word processing remains one of personal computings killer applications, but word processing programs seem to have grown so engorged with desktop-publishing-oriented features that they make straightforward text creation and manipulation more difficult than it needs to be. Here at eWeek, once content leaves our PCs, its promptly raided for its words and piped into Quark […]

Our cell phones are getting smarter, but its not clear wholl ultimately win the struggle to give handsets their brains. With the 3GSM World Congress and CeBIT wrapping up, and with CTIA now under way, the air is thick with smartphone announcements and releases, and platform diversity seems to be the overall theme. Sprint has […]

Office Embraces XML Make a Note of This”> When Microsoft Corp. releases a new version of its Office productivity suite, the software tends to be somewhat more approachable, functional and Internet-connected than the last. However, when it comes to staving off enterprise defections to open-source alternatives or coaxing stalwarts of previous Office versions to upgrade, […]