Update [July 9, 2004]: thanks for all the feedback. Some minor corrections added. --Eduardo
Everyone loves fireworks, right? Well, at least most everyone does. If money and a safe place were not considerations and you were free to produce the show of your dreams, what kind of show would you produce? Would you want to plan it down to the minute details or would you prefer just to select the varieties of fireworks? This fourth of July, what if you could do all of that — on your Macintosh computer? Read on to find out how.
With new security holes appearing every day and spy/ad-ware spreading rampantly, the combination of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are becoming increasingly dangerous choices for safe web browsing and e-mail. Yet what is one to do if they can't or won't switch from Windows to another operating system? It's simple: bring the security and power of Open Source applications to Windows. The Mozilla Project's Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client do just that, and do it without sacrificing the easy-to-use, clean interface users demand. As associate editor Ed Hurst noted in his OpenCD review earlier this year, many of the Open Source community's best applications are available conveniently packaged for Windows, and the Mozilla Project's applications are no exception.
A few months ago, we looked at the IOGear Miniview Extreme series of keyboard, video and mouse switches (KVM's) that can be used to control multiple computers without the clutter of multiple input and display devices. Unlike many KVM's, however, the IOGear unit provided multimedia support — speaker and microphone sharing — in addition to its abilities to share the normal stuff people expect KVM's to work with. Like the IOGear units, Avocent's creatively named SwitchView USB 4-port (Audio) Switch, is one of these new “KVMP” multimedia switches.
Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Computer Inc., was the first rock star of the technology business. In 1977, with his partner Steve Wozniak, he developed the first successful mass-market personal computer, the Apple II. Then, in 1984, he reinvented the personal computer by leading the development of the Macintosh.
Helix Player and RealPlayer [for Linux and other Unixes] have reached Beta. You can get them at Real's web site.
Hewlett-Packard has signed an agreement to sell Sendmail's e-mail software, the latest move by the longtime Microsoft ally to also woo open-source players.
Novell is an interesting company, and has only become more so since it decided to dive head first into GNU/Linux last year. Nat Friedman, formerly of Novell acquired Ximian and now the veep of Novell's Linux Technologies Group took some time to answer our questions about exactly where the company is heading with GNU/Linux.
FreeBSD is very much a source-based system. The operating assumption of the architects of FreeBSD is that you will compile most things from the source code. The system is designed to work that way, and does it exceptionally well. The famous "Ports Collection" is rather unique in making a large number of packages available ready to build and seldom requires anything but a few commands in a terminal window. Having tried to build specialized applications on several different versions of Open Source operating systems, I can assure you that compiling on FreeBSD is about as easy as it gets.