Jason Brooks

The most recent chapter in Microsofts antitrust saga has ended, at least for now, and it shouldnt be much of a surprise that the software giant from Redmond came out on top. Microsoft has already implemented much of what the ruling requires of it in the latest service packs to Windows XP and 2000. The […]

Todays high-end handheld devices pack 400MHz processors and 64MB of RAM—numbers that fall scarcely short of what youd expect from a typical desktop system. The big difference, however, is that users expect much more than swelling speeds and feeds from mobile devices. With a mandate to perform un-plugged and in a pocketable form factor, smart […]

Last week I wrote about Microsofts Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and the role the pair can play in bringing some order to your desktop. But as cool as Bluetooth peripherals may be, they can only play a very small role—a cameo, really—in getting and keeping your workspace organized. After all, my computers desktop is always […]

My desk is usually a total mess, and (apart from my ragged organizational habits) I dont know whether most of the blame belongs to the piles of press kits and collateral materials that accompany the products I review, or to the various cables and connectors that those products require. I can always forward collateral materials […]

Key to the success of Red Hat Inc.’s desktop-user-inclusive Linux release is the out-of-the-box polish and completeness that will enable mainstream users to get right to work without an intervening layer of arcane configuration tasks. Achieving this completeness, as Microsoft does with Windows and Apple does with Mac OS X, isn’t easy, so it makes […]

Its safe to say that Microsofts leadership role on the home desktop reinforces its grip on the corporate desktop, and vice versa. If Linux is ever to capture a chunk of the desktop market, the open-source operating system will have to stake out a space in the home, as well as in the enterprise. Enter […]

After insisting for years that the open-source operating system was not yet ready for the corporate desktop, the biggest name in Linux has thrown its Red Hat into the desktop space. eWeek Labs tests of Version 8.0 of Red Hat Inc.s eponymous Linux distribution, which shipped late last month, showed this operating system raises the […]

A while back, in a column advocating the end of broadcast television, I bemoaned the absence of “Knight Rider” on television—broadcast, cable, satellite or otherwise—but wrote that the absence of David Hasselhoffs epic adventure show would have to remain fodder for some future column. This is that column. “Knight Rider” isnt on TV right now—at […]

Combining a thoughtfully designed user interface with components culled from the open-source community, Apple Computer Inc.s BSD-based Mac OS X 10.2 operating system will probably fit into the mainstream enterprise desktop space better than any other Unix-based system. The biggest stumbling block facing wider corporate deployment of Mac OS X is that it runs only […]

Recently, I took for a spin the Pocket GPS Portable Navigator, a GPS-enabling Pocket PC add-on from Pharos Science and Applications. What stood out immediately for me about the Portable Navigator was its CompactFlash connector—a couple of years ago, I tested a Pharos GPS product that hooked up to specific Casio handhelds across the synchronization […]

There’s been a lot of ink spilled over Lindows, the Linux-based operating system with the Windows-y name that saw its media fortunes spike when Microsoft took the firm to court over naming mimicry. These, however, are the first words I’ve written about Lindows. The Lindows Insider program, in which individuals pay a $99 subscription fee […]

In September, the KDE project made available Version 1.2 of KOffice, an open-source productivity suite packed with new features, including an English thesaurus and mail-merge capabilities in its word processing application. However, although Im a KDE user, Im going to stick to OpenOffice.org because the Microsoft Word import filter in the KWord component of KOffice […]