Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

I hadnt seen so much excitement about a software alliance announcement in ages. There was Sun, with the most popular open-source office suite in the world. There was Google, the one technology company big enough to go mano-a-mano with Microsoft and win. Together for the first time. The caged tag-team death match between Eric Schmidt […]

It may first appear that Dell is offering small office/home office buyers a Linux-based PC, but what the company is actually offering is simply a PC without a Microsoft operating system. Dell Inc.s new Dimension E510n PC is shipped with an empty hard drive and a copy of the obscure, open-source FreeDOS operating system. FreeDOS […]

This is annoying. No sooner, no sooner I tell you, do I write a column about there being too darn many Linux distributions, then Michael Dell of Dell says, in a NYC press conference, to Jacqueline Emigh of Linux Today, that, in looking into offering pre-installed Linux, there are “literally hundreds of distributions” of Linux—and, […]

The Streamlined Sales Tax Project may sound to some like the states are getting ready to start charging state sales tax on all e-commerce purchases, but the reality isnt that simple. What the SSTA (Streamlined Sales Tax Project), a group of U.S. states united in trying to simplify state and local tax collection, is doing […]

What is Microsoft up to, anyway, with its sudden plan to finally support PDF? It wasnt announced by Bill Gates loudly to the world at the Professional Developer Conference a few weeks ago. It also wasnt proclaimed to the Microsoft faithful at its recent Most Valuable Professional Global Summit. No, instead, Microsoft quietly squeaked out […]

There are times when you really, really want to make sure that theres not one shred of readable data left on your drives. For those times, you need a blast furnace. But, if all you want to do is be 99.9999% sure that theres no data left on your drives, DBAN (Dariks Boot and Nuke) […]

By my count, there are one million, two hundred and seventy thousand, and four hundred and seventeen Linux distributions. Nah, Im kidding. There are only, by my quick count, one hundred and forty-one Linux distributions. Currently shipping. For the Intel platform. In English. Is it just me, or is something wrong here? /zimages/7/28571.gifWindows beat Unix, […]

Red Hats cash flow jumped by 48 percent year-over-year to $45.8 million in its last quarter, and its stock followed it skyward on Thursday. Red Hat Inc., announced its financial results for its fiscal second quarter, which ended Aug. 31, on Wednesday. Its total revenue for the quarter was $65.7 million, a year-over-year increase of […]

Recently, there was quite a flap about a Symantec study, which showed that—horrors!—Firefox had more security holes than Internet Explorer. But, what did Symantecs Internet Threat Report really show? I asked Elias Levy, aka Aleph One, former moderator of Bugtrac and today, a Symantec architect. He told me that Symantec reported on the number of […]

StarOffice 8 may be getting the lions share of attention, but Corel insists that its WordPerfect Office is also a leading contender for office suites and that it will soon be supporting the OpenDocument format. “WordPerfect Office is the clear leading alternative to Microsoft Office today—despite Suns download-based claims regarding StarOffice and OpenOffice,” said Greg […]

MEPIS recently released the latest beta of its lightweight Linux distribution MEPISLite 3.3.2-test01, thus making it the first vendor to release a Linux based on the Debian Common Core. The DCCA (Debian Common Core Alliance) is a group of Debian Linux vendors and nonprofit organizations that are seeking to create a common Linux base, the […]

SSH Communications Security Corp., a provider of enterprise security solutions and end-to-end communications security and the original developer of the Secure Shell protocol, announced this week the availability of Version 5.0 of its SSH Tectia client/server solution and SSH Tectia Manager 2.0. Secure Shell programs provide a transport-level protocol for administrators and remote users to […]