Showing headlines posted by tracyanne

I'd love to run Linux. I'm ready for Linux. But Linux isn't quite ready for me. Or perhaps even you. But it's getting closer.

Summary: I tried to activate Windows XP Home and it didn't work. Thus began a phone saga with Microsoft support, ending in failure. Until I fixed it myself. I'm trying to activate Windows XP Home. I've just performed a clean setup, and Windows now won't let me even login until I activate. The network card has apparently not yet been configured, so I can't activate over the 'net. When I do the phone activation, the "installation ID" I'm supposed to give the Microsoft representative is blank. What do I do? That question wasn't posed by just any reader. This time it was me. And after an hour and a half on the phone, I was no further along. And yet, left to my own devices I had the machine activated in about 10 minutes. This is not good. Not at all. In fact, it's downright depressing.

Adobe today changed everything again with the launch of Photoshop Express, a new Web-based application that allows you to edit photos in a Web-browser. The application was launched in beta form yesterday and is heavily dependent on Adobe’s flash technology.

The good folks at SlySoft announced last week that they’d broken the BD+ copy protection scheme:

This FUD which has been floating around for some time has raised it's ugly head once again.

The second release candidate, codenamed Aceras, for Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (2008.1) is now available.

Given this reality, how is it possible for Linux ever to be substantially less expensive than Windows? (Over the typical corporate time period.) - Anton Phildor (poster on ZDNet)

After the success of Ubuntu 8.04 on my Asus EEE PC it was brought to my attention by Klopus there are interesting happenings going on over at Mandriva. I was directed to a thread on the EEE PC User Forum discussing Mandriva on the EEE PC. After reading through the thread I was convinced I would give Mandriva a try. A swift download/burn/format/install later Mandriva was installed on my EEE PC.

I am not aware of any other entity, group or idea that matches these five primary characteristics of the open source movement as exactly as terrorist organizations.

While viewing the SEO presentation from Microsoft's Mix08. I noticed that the presenter preferred Firefox when ever he need to do anything really useful.

Taiwanese PC manufacturer ASUS is planning to release a version of its educational UMPC, the Eee PC, running Windows XP this month. ASUS has released a statement saying the Windows XP version of Eee PC will be available to educational institutions through a special tender, and through retailers.

[Makes you sick don't it. - Tracyanne]

Selling FOSS – most customers don’t care if its FOSS or proprietary – they just want to get the job done. So its easy to pitch to small/medium scale business. The low-up front costs is useful, and think about the insurance aspect (i.e. Others can work on it, even if you exit the industry).

While Dell is yet to make an announcement for Australia, the PC maker's UK office has declared: "Dell Answers Customer Calls For Linux In Europe". Unless of course you live in Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey ...

Moving to Linux used to be a big deal. Sure, it was cheaper, more reliable, and more flexible -- but who did you turn to when things went wrong? In an enterprise world that had grown up with the idea that Unix needed to be complex and expensive -- and that Windows was a quick-and-dirty Plan B -- the idea of getting a robust, scalable operating system for free just didn't click for many years.

Ubuntu is the favourite distribution of Linux for use on both desktops and servers, according to a poll of Australian open source enthusiasts.

The long-awaited KDE4 is finally out the door after an extended gestation and a rescheduled launch date. In this inside look at KDE4, we see what all the fuss is about.

Australian SMEs aren't paying nearly enough attention to Linux considering the top priority for their IT managers is to "reduce costs", but despite the prevailing attitude, it won't take much for open source to have a far greater impact in the near future, according to research released today.

The Mozilla Firefox 3 development team expects to freeze the beta 4 code tonight as planned but will likely have to release yet another beta to address some of the outstanding bugs and blockers in the code.

Dubai Internet City is a strategic base for companies targeting emerging markets in a vast region extending from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent, and Africa to the CIS countries, covering 2 billion people with GDP $ 6.7 trillion.

[Not exactly Linux, but the website certainly seams to be powered by Linux. It's pretty damned impressive. - tracyanne]

A newly published and quite intriguing Patent application from Microsoft describes technology for hand-activating page turning of Microsoft documents.