I answer questions about Palm handheld computers, custom XP & Ubuntu computers, the AVG update outage (relax, you are protected), resizing photos for email, freeing up disk space and more. This episode is brought to you by: Gail, Gene, Salma, Jason, Jean, Elizabeth, Greg, Rajesh, Laurie, J, and Joe.
Oh, and I also reveal who I voted for in Tuesday’s presidential election…but you have to watch!
Open Source software began soon after computers became main stream in offices and then homes. In a nut shell, Open Source refers to software developed under a set standard of rules that developers agree upon to make the software freely available, no penalties for copying or sharing the programs (in fact, it is encouraged to share the software), the source code (programming) must be made available to anyone, and the software must also have no restrictions on others making variations of the software. You can read an exact definition and read the licensing information at the Open Source Initiative web site here.
Open Source software seems to be gaining more and more traction in the computer world as budgets start to tighten in an uncertain financial climate. This week, OpenOffice.org released the newest version of their Open Source office suite software. I’ve been using the beta version of the software for a couple of months and find it to be quite good. OpenOffice is considered one of the bright lights in the Open Source software world and for good reason. It offers an extremely
If you would like or might even need a new computer, but aren’t crazy about spending $500-1500 in our current financial environment, consider upgrading your computer for free. Yes, I said free. The only investment you will incur is some time. “How”, you ask? By upgrading your computer’s operating system to one of the many Linux options. As many of you know, I started dabbling and learning more about Linux a little more than two years ago. Linux offers a secure, completely functional, modern operating system for free. Linux falls under the guise of Open Source software (available for free and developed by a collaboration of many programmers) and has spawned many different versions to suit all sorts of users.
The most popular version of Linux the past few years, and the one that hooked me, is Ubuntu. Ubuntu has risen to become, arguably, the leader in Linux operating systems. Ubuntu’s popularity stems from the solid community behind the product that supports and develops it, the incredible array of software that comes installed automatically including full Office compatiblity, networking, photo and multimedia tools, and even games. To get the equal functionality that Ubuntu gives users upon installation, a Windows user would have to shell out nearly $1000 for software alone. Ubuntu throws the knockout punch by offering all this for not only free, but also in a package written well enough that it installs in under 20 minutes and runs on hardware that would buckle under the weight of
Over the past few days, the tech news sites and blogs have carried a story centered on a quote from a NetBook (tiny laptop) manufacturer stating that the company receives 4X the returns of Linux based systems versus Windows systems. The more often I saw this headline and read the articles, the more irritated I became.
Computers are still in their infancy compared to much of the technology we use today. Americans have had indoor plumbing for 75 years, electricity for almost 100 years, telephones for almost 100 years, televisions for 50+ years, and radios for 70 years. Computers, however, have been around just over 15 years en masse, and even today they only exist in about 70% of American households.
My point is that computer technology has not matured enough to
In this edition of my videocast, I answer questions about wireless problems with Ubuntu, sending faxes via the Internet, WinAntivirus 2009, and many others. Take a look and listen…I’m starting to integrate more video with the answers so the answers have even more meaning.
Lot’s of great questions today ranging from Cameroon pet scams to Ubuntu to recycling old computers and much more. I think I packed 10 or 12 questions in this week’s edition of the email video answers. Have a look and listen!
I had some trouble syncing up this video with the narration today, but there are at least 11 questions answered in this episode. Questions in this edition include questions about Ubuntu, printers, a proposition (?), Windows Media Player, Firefox, and two questions I couldn’t fully answer. No AVG questions this time around.
Enjoy!
In today’s episode, I answer a lot of AVG and Firefox questions. An Ubuntu question slipped in as did some AOL questions, HTML questions and others. Here you go…thanks for writing and keep those questions coming!
I’m in the middle of a pretty major house refurbishing right now and am making frequent trips to the hardware stores and elsewhere. Today, while asking a Lowes rep a question, I glanced at one of the computer screens and saw Firefox for Lowes on the title bar. I was blown away that a major corporation had the good sense to use Firefox, then as I scanned the monitor, there was no sign of a start button. Instead, I immediately recognized a Linux like Start button that looked similar to the Xfce desktop that Xubuntu uses.
Adobe released version 9 of their PDF (Portable Document Format) Reader program. Once the king and almost sole PDF reader on the market, it, like so many other mainstream programs, has become bloated beyond recognition. This software bloat slows down the performance of even the fastest computers, and for this reason, I firmly stand against software bloat.