Jim Rapoza

Ive been writing Tech Directions for a long time now, and it recently occurred to me that theres a lot of diversity in this column. In fact, to refer to Tech Directions as “one product” would be completely incorrect. When you think about it, there are actually many different versions of Tech Directions: There are […]

As I write this column, Oracle has just acquired the open-source company Sleepycat and its embedded database, Berkeley DB. By the time you read this, its quite possible that Oracle will have acquired even more open-source companies. There has been plenty of discussion about the effects of Oracles Sleepycat acquisition on the database market and […]

Boy, its been a tough few weeks for me. Ive heard from some readers whove said they are unhappy with my columns and/or will stop reading them altogether. Why are these readers unhappy? Ill let one of the letters I received tell you: Dear Mr. Rapoza, Ive been a longtime reader of your Tech Directions […]

Guess what? Ive been given the opportunity to try out this new, cutting-edge car design. The car includes all kinds of new features for automatic pilot, collision avoidance and speed control. The auto manufacturer has quietly implied that this car is really just for testing purposes and that I shouldnt take it off a controlled […]

Microsofts slow march to regain momentum in the Web browser market continued in late January with a preview release of Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7. The beta shows a lot of good progress, but, as weve said with almost every new IE release weve reviewed, its still playing catch-up. The Beta 2 preview release […]

You can call me Jim Rapoza, the Peter Coffee Killer. Well, not literally, but Im a killer of his Epicenters columns. Surely, now that youre reading my columns, youll soon find that you no longer need to read his columns—or the columns of any other tech writer, for that matter. Soon our own Eric Lundquist […]

Just when you thought you had it all figured out—that Sea-Monkeys were really brine shrimp—along comes SeaMonkey. Another instant pet? No, this SeaMonkey is basically the Mozilla Internet suite with a new name and a new logo. I have always liked the Internet suite model, and thought it was actually a better fit for corporate […]

Microsofts slow march to regain momentum in the Web browser market continues with the Jan. 31 preview release of Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7. The beta shows a lot of good progress, but, as weve said with almost every new IE release weve reviewed, its still playing catch-up. When the first beta of Windows […]

Youre the greatest! Well, maybe youre not the greatest, but, in my book, youre pretty OK just for regularly reading my columns and reviews. Now I have to come clean about that opening statement—its simply a shameless attempt on my part to get people to really like my columns. Why would I do this? Because […]

Camtasia Studio 3.1 from TechSmith Corp. is a very intuitive tool for creating attractive application demonstrations and presentations. In fact, its probably one of the best products eWEEK Labs has seen for creating sales-oriented product demos and tutorials, although its not as useful for complex training and coursework applications. Click here to read the full […]

Calling SoftSim a software simulation tool is sort of like calling Microsoft Corp.s Visual Studio a code editor. But, come to think of it, a high-end development environment is a pretty good comparison because SoftSim provides similar features, including check-in/check-out, embedded reviewer comments and shared content servers. Click here to read the full review of […]

Woo hoo! Patent reform is finally here! With the help of companies such as IBM, Novell and Red Hat, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is putting in place a plan to make sure that bad software patents dont happen and open-source software is protected from the threats of patents. Its just what weve always […]