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Written by Stan Beer
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Friday, 23 November 2007 |
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The market has spoken and it clearly wants a consumer Linux computer. The sub-notebook Asus Eee PC has not been able to meet demand and is predicted to sell up to 5 million units worldwide next year. If that comes true a single product will have on its own shifted consumer Linux market share upwards a notch or two. However, there is a threat on the horizon for this break-through Linux product - and it comes from Asus itself.
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Written by Stan Beer
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Friday, 23 November 2007 |
The market has spoken and it clearly wants a consumer Linux computer. The sub-notebook Asus Eee PC has not been able to meet demand and is predicted to sell up to 5 million units worldwide next year. If that comes true a single product will have on its own shifted consumer Linux market share upwards a notch or two. However, there is a threat on the horizon for this break-through Linux product - and it comes from Asus itself.
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Written by Stan Beer
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Thursday, 22 November 2007 |
Last night I downloaded the latest beta release from Mozilla, Firefox 3 Beta 1, meaning to just have a look-see so that I could pen a few impressions. Since then, I haven't bothered to load up Firefox 2 because, even though it's a pre-production test version, Firebox 3 Beta 1 is a mighty fine browser.
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Written by Stan Beer
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Thursday, 22 November 2007 |
Now German carrier T-Mobile has been forced to offer unlocked iPhones for sale, it is using its visual voicemail service as the carrot to lure buyers to its iPhone service plan. It needn't bother. Nobody is going to pay nearly US$1500 for a phone in Europe that's not even 3G when they can get one across the Atlantic for a bit more than a quarter of the price. This is a cynical exercise which thumbs its nose at both European laws and consumers.
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Written by Stan Beer
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Thursday, 22 November 2007 |
Today I've finished installations of two very different operating systems, Vista and Kubuntu. Both are essentially trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to provide desktop users a satisfying and relatively seemless desktop computing experience. Both succeed to a certain degree and both fail in some important areas. The question is why?
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Written by Stan Beer
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Tuesday, 20 November 2007 |
As my colleague Sam Varghese has written , after nearly two weeks of flawless operation, my first Ubuntu Linux installation unexpectedly became unstable, crashed and was unable to be booted. Puzzled that an OS with the reputed stability of Ubuntu could behave like this, I searched forums and user groups for an explanation. What I found led me to believe that an open source package manager called Automatix that I installed was the cause. As a result, I am going to try an experiment: same computer, two disks, two clean installs, two operating systems - Vista and Ubuntu. But is there an issue with Linux and video codecs?
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Written by Stan Beer
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Monday, 19 November 2007 |
As the success of J K Rowling will attest, reading is still one of the most popular inter-generational pastimes. Now Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, is attempting to do for books with a product/service called Kindle what Steve Jobs has done for music. Is the analogy between Kindle and iPod/Itunes valid or are there enough significant differences to cast doubt on Bezos' dream?
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Written by Stan Beer
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Sunday, 18 November 2007 |
There's no question that the era of the all-in-one PC is upon us now that Dell has announced its answer to the Apple iMac. While reviewers wax lyrical about the fantastic sleek design of Dell's XPS One and compare the hardware to that of the iMac, the most important question has been largely ignored. What happens when you turn it on?
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Written by Stan Beer
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Thursday, 15 November 2007 |
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Just as as I was getting comfortable using Ubuntu on my desktop, enthusiastic readers have assailed me with stories about how I should give other Linux distros a try - particularly the KDE pair PCLinuxOS and SimplyMEPIS. I'm lucky to have four different computers at my immediate disposal so I tried the live CDs of the three distros on three of them to see how plug and play they were for wireless networking. The results were quite surprising.
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Written by Stan Beer
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Tuesday, 13 November 2007 |
As I've mentioned in previous articles I currently have all the applications I need on my Ubuntu Linux desktop so I never need to use Windows. However, there are unfortunately still plenty of applications that some users need which are not available under Linux and have no equivalent. Adobe's Flash and Photoshop spring to mind, Turbotax is another that some miss, how about iTunes? Luckily for those users there are at least three options that will allow them to run the software they need while retaining Linux on their desktop. But which is the best one?
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Written by Stan Beer
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Monday, 12 November 2007 |
As I was doing some research for another article, I ran across a forum in which small business users were discussing why they wanted a particular software product (Quickbooks) ported to Linux. One poster's comments caught my attention. What he said convinced me that all small businesses should be running Linux on their desktops.
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Written by Stan Beer
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Sunday, 11 November 2007 |
As those poor weather beaten Londoners queued up for a chance to get their very own Apple iPhones a day or two ahead of ordinary consumers last week, I was having a quick play with a 3G HTC TyTN II touch screen phone that a colleague recently picked up from a local 3 shop. Now that I've had a chance to play with both of these devices, I get the feeling that Apple is once again up against Microsoft and history may repeat itself.
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Written by Stan Beer
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Sunday, 11 November 2007 |
Linux desktop users looking for good financial software to run natively can forget about Quicken and Quickbooks. One glance at Intuit's website should be enough to convince even devout users of that company's products that despite Quickbooks for Linux servers showing strong growth, a port to Linux desktops is a long way off and a Linux version of Quicken is not even on the radar. So what are the alternatives?
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