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In our previous articles, we have looked at other music sources besides the iTunes Music Store as well as other iPod management tools. Today, we are going to look at yet another iPod manager, the Yamipod.

Lately, I’ve found myself troubled with the changes taking place with Xandros. As many of you probably know by now, Xandros has gone through a reorganization that meant that they had to layoff roughly five employees.

Have you ever wondered why a company with the size, power and resources of Microsoft can't seem to get a handle on the never ending security fixes? Have you ever considered the insanity of offering "patches" to some security holes so obvious that not seeing them until later is suspicious at best?

Have you ever wondered why Windows rose from the ashes while other operating systems of yesteryear fell behind and eventually disappeared for good? Money and the distribution of generated revenue, of course. Not just in capital funds to make Microsoft's R&D a reality mind you, but the mindset behind a system of voluntary servitude based on people rushing to what turned out to be a virtual gold rush.

You know, the barrier that used to divide operating systems is almost a distant memory now. It’s no longer this or that, but it’s this and that. Thanks to virtualization solutions and Boot Camp, Intel Macs can now run any PC operating system, and the ability to have one machine that does it all is definitely something that appeals to many reasonable consumers.

Which Linux distribution is the easiest to install and use with as little tweaking as possible? On the KDE front, two of the key choices are Kubuntu and Simply Mepis. Yes, I realize that some users consider SuSE to be a player, and that's great, it has some great features. However, it’s simply not an “out of the box” friendly option as the previously mentioned distributions. After receiving enough SuSE 10.1 update errors, you will likely find yourself agreeing with me. Moving on...

When I first heard the announcement that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was added to Apple's Board of Directors, I, like many others, instantly went into brainstorm mode about what this collaboration could mean for the future of Google and Apple. When you take two massive companies and combine them in even the smallest way, then you're sure to see some interesting results.

In recent months, there is one thing that’s on my mind - open source revenue vs. revolution. Seriously, while the revolution is well underway within the open source community, one has to question which of these two previously mentioned ideologies will, in the end, be the deciding factor on the future of software and OS' as a whole.

It’s been amazing to watch how the open source movement has grown from something that only a fanatical few were aware of or involved with into something that Joe and Jane Everyday User are beginning to be familiar with. Now, I’m not saying that these everyday users fully understand open source and truly get what the benefits are of this development approach, but at least we’re beginning to break down the barriers to understanding.

With the next version of Ubuntu set to release in the near future, I found myself curious about the general consensus of the average user population. Early on, I made a conscious decision that I would not review this upcoming version of Ubuntu until it had been released in a non-beta format.

Every business faces competition, at least to some extent. Even if you’re currently the only provider of a certain service in your field of expertise, that doesn’t mean there aren’t people on the sidelines trying to secretly improve on what you’re doing and eventually lead your customers away from you. You may not see them, but they’re probably there.

We’ve been talking about security a lot lately, and for good reason. Every one of us has been forced into a position where we have to think about it, and if we don’t, then we’ll pay the price for it. Many of us have become so lazy that we sometimes skip installing system updates or new antivirus definitions even though all we may really need to do is click a button and wait a little while.

As the battle between Microsoft and software vendors continues to rage on in the foreground, it seems like a lot of people have completely forgotten about the common user and their experience with the OS.

What can we say? Some people need that Frontpage feel when editing a website. We know speaking such words at MadPenguin ought to get us sectioned and quartered for sure. But before you break out the big guns, just bear with us for a minute here.

Ask any Linux user and they'll likely point out that one of the key challenges they face these days is showing beginners how to accomplish specific tasks with any given distribution. Think about it, how many times have we simply shuffled them off to the community forums rather than making time to show them step-by-step “how to get things done?”

I've tried, I really have. For a couple of years now, I have been attempting to dump my destructive tendency of using MP3 as my audio format of choice and have instead, been working very hard to get onboard with OGG Vorbis 100 percent. However, this is very difficult when you own an iPod Nano and a Dell Pocket DJ.

We’ve been talking about security a lot lately, and for good reason. Every one of us has been forced into a position where we have to think about it, and if we don’t, then we’ll pay the price for it. Many of us have become so lazy that we sometimes skip installing system updates or new antivirus definitions even though all we may really need to do is click a button and wait a little while. If it’s not streamlined and automatic, then we’ll somehow find a way to miss out on these important updates.

Even though there is still a lot of frustration in regards to the CNR client, thanks to the issues that are yet to be resolved, I’ve begun to see a glimmer of hope.

If you are anything like me, you have likely found that running WINE powered emulation software is more trouble than it's worth. Blasphemy you say? Nah, because by playing Windows games, you are in fact supporting games designed for Microsoft.

A while back, I stumbled upon something called the Municator PC from YellowSheepRiver Municator, Inc. At first, I thought this had to be yet another hoax, but as I looked deeper into it, I found out that China has done a fairly nice job of taking the distribution, known as RPLinux, and integrating it with Chinese made hardware.