Jason Brooks

The drastic drop in the cost of WLAN (wireless LAN) gear, along with the great extent to which 802.11b networking is now being built into notebook and handheld computers, virtually guarantees that wireless networking will secure a spot on your agenda—whether youve placed it there or not. IT administrators would do well, then, to head […]

Since I spent two columns bemoaning the absence of “Knight Rider” from the small screen, first in criticism of broadcast TVs use of free spectrum, and second while questioning the approach of content owners toward file sharing, I feel compelled to report that the exploits of everyones favorite man who does not exist are again […]

No matter how sleek and shiny a mobile computing device may be, its the applications that separate the sought-after productivity boosters from the desk-drawer cobweb collectors. And increasingly, effective mobile applications require wireless. Even as portable memory cards stretch their storage capacities ever upward, theyll never approach the Internets wealth of data. Recently, Ive been […]

The atmosphere at the opening Macworld keynote earlier this month was reminiscent of a big-tent religious revival, complete with a keenly rapt and vigorously head-nodding congregation. I showed up for The Steves sermon with a markedly more agnostic mindset, and I must say that I was impressed anyway. Thats because rather than just trumpet speed-and-feed […]

Just before Christmas, Red Hat released the latest beta version of its Red Hat Linux distribution, code-named Phoebe. Phoebe comes packed with all the bleeding-edge packages youd ever want, including a release candidate version of KDE 3.1 and the latest beta version of GNOME 2, as well as a release of Mozilla with support for […]

The content management services we evaluate this week (see story, Content Services) offer companies a simpler and less costly route to publishing materials on the Web than software systems. However, these virtues come in part at the expense of some of the flexibility that more expensive, self-hosted solutions can deliver. Open-source CMSes (content management systems)—such […]

High-speed wireless data services, and the clients outfitted to consume them, are subject to a sort of networklike interdependence. The value and success of each depends on the success of the other. Complicating matters further is that we have multiple vendors building different types of clients to operate on different types of networks built out […]

Maybe the browser wars arent over, after all. Last June, Netscape Communications Corp.s expedition into the land of open source bore fruit in the form of Mozilla 1.0, a Web browser that arguably unseated Microsoft Corp.s Internet Explorer—certainly not in popularity but in overall excellence. At last weeks Macworld Expo, however, Apple Computer Inc. launched […]

Last week we talked about how Sun got its temporary injunction forcing Microsoft to ship an up-to-date Java virtual machine with Windows, and how, in my opinion, having our courts make product distribution decisions for the software industry was a bad idea. Many of you were kind enough to respond to my call for comments, […]

As much as Linux is pitted against Windows in the popular imagination, Linux has enjoyed perhaps more success supplanting Unix in the enterprise. The SCO Groups SCO Linux 4 (brand-new, despite its enumeration) can provide companies with an effective path to such migrations, particularly at sites that are running SCOs UnixWare. Although SCO traces its […]

U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz handed Sun a win, Microsoft a setback, and all of us something new (or old) to talk about when he recently granted Sun the preliminary injunction it had sought in its private antitrust lawsuit against everyones favorite Redmond-based computer monopolist. The specific terms of the order have not yet […]

In my last eLAB, I talked about Microsoft and about what chance there was that wed be seeing our favorite monopolist build server software for Linux some time in the next few years. That column drew a good deal of e-mail, and with the busy holidays fast approaching, this seemed like an excellent time for […]