In the cover story, Gates, then only 35, and Jobs, 36, spoke of the future of the personal computer. To put things in perspective, Windows 95 was still four years away, and Jobs had been kicked out of Apple and struggling with his workstation company, Next. The iPod was still 10 years away. It was, as far as I can tell, the last time the two industry icons were interviewed together, until the All Things Digital 5 conference last May 30–or some 15 years later–organized by the venerable Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal.

A copy of the session is available free as streaming video on the D5 site (http://d5.allthingsd.com) or as one whole MP4 file from the Apple iTunes store (almost 1 gigabyte). An audio file (83.3 megabytes) is more manageable. In any case, it’s well worth listening to these industry pioneers talk about the past, present and future of computing.

The video is also an interesting study in contrast, not only between Gates and Jobs today, but between how they viewed the industry, then and now.
In 1991, the issue of competition–and Microsoft’s domination of operating systems–was clearly on Jobs’ mind. When the discussion turned to pen computing and the pioneering Go Corporation, Jobs predicted–correctly as history shows–that the company would be crushed. That prediction came true when the company closed in 1994 in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Pen Services for Windows.

In 2007, however, an older Jobs talks of acceptance. “You know, we don’t have a belief that the Mac is going to take over 80 percent of the PC market,” Jobs says at one point. “You know, we’re really happy when our market share goes up a point and we love that and we work real hard at it, but Apple’s fundamentally a software company and there’s not a lot of us left and Microsoft’s one of them.”

Curiously, 15 years after the Fortune Magazine interview, Gates is still talking about pen computing, calling himself an “unrepentant” believer in the tablet form factor.

“I think you’ll have voice [activated commands]. I think you’ll have ink. You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that,” Gates says of the future tablet PC.

While Jobs expects computers to evolve and become more mobile, he also talks about an explosion of “post-PC” devices such as the iPod and iPhone, where people “are inventing things constantly.”

Neither Gates nor Jobs, however, see an end to the general-purpose personal computer.

Unlike in 1991, if there were any animosity between the two, it did not show. In 2007, Gates and Jobs appeared like old friends, sharing reminiscences and the occasional jibe, but all in good humor.

“His mother likes him,” Gates quips about the PC guy in Apple’s now-famous “I’m a Mac” commercials that poke fun at Windows computers.
This was all entertaining and informative, but Mossberg, Swisher and the other participants who joined the short question-and-answer session afterwards, missed a great opportunity to ask Gates and Jobs about how they see free and open source software will affect the industry.

Mossberg may not see it yet–perhaps he has not installed a user-friendly Linux distribution such as Ubuntu–but there is a sea-change coming that will see more companies and individuals, especially in the developing world, choosing free and open source software over proprietary solutions such as those offered by Microsoft and Apple. It’s a pity nobody in the conference thought of asking Gates and Jobs about it.

As you might expect, while both men are excellent communicators, it was Jobs who struck a chord that resonated with his generation. Summing up his relationship with Gates, he quoted a 1969 tune entitled Two Of Us: “There’s that one line in that one Beatles song, ‘You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.’ And that’s clearly true here.”

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Canada duty

A few weeks ago, the research company Gartner jumped the gun on everyone and offered its 10 top predictions for the years ahead.
Blogging, Gartner said, would peak at 100 million Web journals this year then level off.

The company also predicted that Vista would be the last major version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system and that by 2010, the cost of owning a personal computer would drop by 50 percent.

The numbers tend to bear Gartner out, at least on the number of blogs. By the end of 2006, blog watcher Technorati was tracking 63.2 million Web journals. Since about 175,000 new blogs are created every day, some 5.25 million are added to this figure every month. At this rate, we ought to hit 100 million blogs by July 2007.

Gartner’s prediction that these numbers will taper off is a bit trickier, as it assumes that the number of blogs dying off will reach or exceed 175,000 a day after July.

I was surprised to read Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer explain it this way: most people who would ever start a Web log have already done so. Those who love blogging and are committed to keeping it up, while other have become bored and moved on.

“A lot of people have been in and out of this thing,” Plummer told the BBC. “Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

The explanation is facile, and the suggestion that very few new Internet users would want to start a blog seems ridiculous.

As with all such predictions, only time will tell. But soothsayers work at an advantage. Few people bother to come back later to check if they were right. If their prognostication proves accurate, they can beat their own drums. If not, they can just keep quiet about it, and usually, nobody will notice.

Some predictions, however, come back to haunt the people who made them.

For example, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2004, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates predicted that spam or unwanted commercial e-mail would be a thing of the past in two years.

Now we all know that’s just not true, but what do the figures say? Commtouch, an e-mail security company, reports that spam accounted for 87 percent of all e-mail traffic in 2006, a 30 percent increase over 2005. In other words, spam hasn’t gone away; it’s become worse. Oops.

Here’s another example.

In 1995, Oracle Corp. head honcho Larry Ellison predicted the death of the PC and the rise of cheap Network Computers that would draw applications and data from the Internet. Today, 12 years later, people are finally delivering some software as services over the Internet–but they’re doing so onto PCs, not Ellison’s stripped-down, disk-less machines. In fact, Ellison’s Network Computer company tanked.

But probably one of the least successful prognosticators was Bob Metcalf, the inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and one-time columnist of InfoWorld. In 1995, he predicted the Internet would collapse catastrophically in 1996 as too many people tried to connect to it. In an act of public contrition when his prediction didn’t come true, Metcalf put his column and some water into a blender and literally ate his own words.

Four years later, Metcalf was still at it. In his InfoWorld column, he predicted Linux would soon be killed off by Windows 2000. His reasons: “The Open Source Movement’s ideology is Utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology.” He must have known something Microsoft didn’t. In 2003, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer fired off a memo to employees clearly identifying Linux and open source as a growing threat to the company.
Back when Metcalf predicted its decline, Linux was primarily seen as a server operating system. These days, more and more people, especially in developing countries, see it as a viable alternative to expensive, proprietary operating systems on desktop PCs and notebooks.

Predicting the future is a tricky business. Maybe that’s why Metcalf stopped writing his column–and became a venture capitalist.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Low-volume PCB Assembly

Now, more than half a year after switching to Linux at home and Mac OS X at the office, I’ve yet to encounter a single virus on either platform, despite running both without any kind of software protection.

The old Windows user in me wonders: Am I being reckless?

The numbers say the odds are in my favor, at least for now. There are far fewer Linux viruses and those that exist have caused very little real damage.

In a November 2005 interview with Computerworld Hong Kong, security expert Mikko Hyppönen says there are over 140,000 viruses for Windows and only 30 for Linux. None exist for Mac OS X, he says.

Is this a matter of superior software design or simply a matter of market reality?

The conventional wisdom–a view I accepted for many years–is that there are more Windows viruses simply because there are more users on that platform. People who write viruses want the biggest bang for their buck, so they target the most popular operating system. And viruses written for Windows, like any other programs, will not run on Mac OS X or Linux.

The follow-on argument to this dominant-platform theory is that if Mac OS X or Linux became as popular as Windows, you’d see more viruses written for them as well.

But months spent using both operating systems have convinced me that this isn’t necessarily so.

Because Mac OS X and Linux are both based on Unix, they work on a system of permissions that allow only the administrator–also called the root–to change things on a system. In practical terms, that means you must enter the administrator’s password every time you want to install software–and that includes accidentally installing a virus or worm you downloaded from the Internet.

In contrast, Windows users have been accustomed to running as the administrator by default for years and expect to be able to download and install software on any personal computer they use. I know. I used to be one of them.

Unfortunately, this setup makes it devastatingly easy for careless users to unwittingly install viruses or spyware on their computers.

Windows Vista is supposed to address this problem with its own system of permissions and by encouraging people not to log in as administrators. Only time will tell, however, if end-users– especially those at home or in small offices–will heed this advice or simply keep doing what they’ve been doing since Windows 3.1.

Related to this concept of permissions, both Mac OS X and Linux keep their system files separate from applications and user data and require administrator privileges to change them. On the Mac, in fact, the system files are hidden by default, making it difficult for ordinary users to mess up the operating system.
On a Windows PC, the operating system, the applications and the user data aren’t kept apart and even non-administrators can add system files that could do serious damage.

In an article for The Register, Scott Granneman argues that even if Linux were to become the dominant desktop platform and if Mac OS X continued to grow, these operating systems would never experience all the problems with e-mail borne viruses in the Microsoft world.

“Virus writers use social engineering to convince people to do stupid things, like open attachments that carry viruses and worms,” he writes. “Poorly designed software makes it easier for social engineering to take place… Together, the two factors can turn a single virus incident into a widespread disaster.”

In Windows, it’s easy to run an executable program, Granneman says, noting how simple it is for users to click on an e-mail attachment to run a virus or worm disguised as a steamy screensaver. In contrast, a Linux user would have to save the attachment, give it executable permissions, and then run it. Every extra step is added protection.

Of course, just because an e-mail-attached virus won’t run on a Linux or Mac system doesn’t mean you can’t pass it on and infect other Windows users. But that problem is probably better handled on the level of mail servers, anyway.

For now, I’m convinced that I won’t need any anti-virus software on my iBook or my Linux PC, despite what McAfee or other vendors of such products say. This doesn’t mean I can afford to be careless or reckless because there is no perfectly safe operating system. Prudence dictates that I make sure I download and install software only from trusted sources, be careful about typing in my password and take other sensible precautions. After all, security is a process, not a product.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Humorous photo captions

On a visit to China last April, he announced a program that would sell a $3 bundle of Windows XP and MS Office to governments in poor countries that subsidize computer purchases by students.

“All human beings deserve a chance to achieve their full potential,” Gates said in announcing Microsoft’s latest program to bridge the digital divide.

It was a public relations coup and a shrewd business move besides.

Now $3 is a great price for MS Office 2007, even though it’s the Home and Student Edition that doesn’t have PowerPoint. But Windows XP Starter Edition is a crippled version of a five-year-old operating system, with networking disabled and multitasking severely limited.

So the software isn’t great, but it’s good enough to do the job.

Unfortunately, the “job” isn’t just personal productivity, it’s technology lock-in. It’s all about creating a new generation of computer users who are hooked on Windows and programs that run under the proprietary operating system.

Microsoft isn’t shy about this goal of “reaching the next billion” computer users and tying them in to its technology.

“Many of these people we think are going to be consumers down the road,” said Orlando Ayala, senior vice president for Microsoft’s emerging segments market development group.

A closer look at the $3-deal also exposes software pricing as an artificial and arbitrary affair. Why sell software priced at hundreds of dollars for just $3. Why not $2? Or $5?

Even the Starter Edition is an arbitrary, marketing-oriented creation that artificially limits the functionality of software. It harks back to the day when some marketing geniuses at Intel decided to sell a version of the 486 processor with the math co-processor disabled, simply so it could sell the same chip at a lower price–without having customers who were willing to pay more for it complain. Crippling a piece of software so you can sell it cheaply makes just as much sense.

Significantly, Microsoft’s $3 offer comes at a time when the open source Linux operating system is becoming increasingly popular as a free alternative to Windows on desktop and notebook computers. By aiming its program at developing countries, Microsoft seems determined to head off Linux in markets where the free alternative is most likely to thrive at Windows’ expense.

But in the same week that Gates announced the $3 subsidy, a major software milestone passed without fanfare.

There was no Times Square countdown. No whiz-bang demo by an aging technology guru. No big advertising campaign or clever TV commercials. With a refreshing lack of marketing hype, the latest version of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, was released to the general public on April 19.

On that day, the Ubuntu home page was replaced with a bare page under a headline that read “Ubuntu 7.04 – Well Done.”

There were just two sentences under the headline: “Thank you to everyone who has helped make Ubuntu 7.04 a reality. Thousands of you have helped code, test, translate and promote Ubuntu and everyone can celebrate today’s release.”

Below the note were links to servers in 30-odd countries where the 700MB file (an ISO disc image) could be downloaded.

The lack of hype wasn’t the only thing that set Ubuntu apart.

Bucking industry trends, Ubuntu developers delivered the latest version of the operating system on time, as promised. In stark contrast, Microsoft missed numerous launch targets on its five-year road to Windows Vista, and even Apple has had to push back the June release of Leopard, the new version of the Mac OS X operating system.

The on-time delivery of Ubuntu 7.04 is yet another sign that the open source approach to software development works. Unlike the traditional approach in which one company hires all the programmers and controls product development, open source projects are farmed out to volunteer programmers around the world, working cooperatively over the Internet.

And Ubuntu 7.04, code named Feisty Fawn, is not crippled software. It’s a sophisticated, fully functional, modern operating system that is more secure, and arguably more efficient than Windows Vista. It also comes with a boatload of excellent software, including an office suite that does what MS Office does–all for free.

So why would a developing country want to pay $3 per PC when it can get a much better deal for free? The real cost of Microsoft’s $3 offer to developing countries is much higher than its price tag suggests. The real cost is getting sucked into a proprietary world and the loss of choice that open source software would bring.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Latest trends in mobile phone

Webopedia defines undo as a return to a previous state by undoing the effects of one or more commands. For example, if you’re working on MS Word or OpenOffice Writer and accidentally delete a block of text, you can quickly recover it by going to the Edit menu and choosing “undo” or typing its keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Z, or Command+Z on a Mac. Conveniently, this feature works on multiple levels, so you can go back and undo a number of commands starting from the latest to the earliest.

Multiple undo is particularly handy for graphics programs such as Adobe Photoshop, where using the wrong filter can quickly turn a promising photograph into a gray mess. On Corel Draw, having multiple undo levels encourages users to experiment with different visual effects, secure in the knowledge that if they screw up, they can always retrace their steps to an earlier stage of the illustration.

It wasn’t always that easy to recover from mistakes.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the most popular word processing program, WordStar, had no undo command. Before Version 6, MS Word had only one level of undo. And strange as it may seem, Photoshop didn’t have multiple undo until 1998.

Today, multiple undo is built into most applications but operating systems feature only the most rudimentary forms of the command. If you delete a file by mistake in Windows or Mac OS X, you’ll be able to recover it by pressing Ctrl+Z or Command+Z, but only if the file is still in the trash or recycle bin. Ubuntu Linux has no similar command. To recover a file, you must click on the wastebasket and drag the file out.

Operating systems take a different approach to keep users from doing serious damage. For example, if you try to format a hard drive, Windows XP and Mac OS X will pop up a dialog box that asks if you’re sure you want to erase all the data on the disk. In addition, Linux and Mac OS X will ask for an administrative password to make sure the user is authorized to make such drastic changes. Somewhere along the line, so the theory goes, the user will actually think about what he’s going to do before he does it.

But the late Jef Raskin, who designed the original Macintosh interface, held that confirmation dialog boxes were a bad idea because people eventually click on “yes” or “OK” by habit, without understanding what’s going on–until it’s too late. It makes more sense, Raskin said, to have a general undo command that worked consistently throughout the system.

Anyone who has mistakenly overwritten a file and realized it the split second after clicking “OK” will appreciate Raskin’s point of view.
Raskin left Apple in 1982 after Steve Jobs took control of the Macintosh project and went on to design a computer called the Canon Cat, which featured a prominent “undo” key where the backspace key is on most modern keyboards.

Unfortunately, the Cat didn’t catch on–and neither did the undo key.

Nobody seems to know when undo became a standard feature in software. Alan Dix of Lancaster University, has studied human-computer interfaces extensively and notes that as early as 1984, undo was already considered an important part of most sophisticated systems.

Beyond the obvious task of returning a document or file to its previous state, undo is really designed to reduce risk by helping users recover from errors, Dix writes.

The problem is that undo doesn’t always work the way users expect it to. Certain commands cannot be undone, and sometimes, you can lose track of where you are in the undo history. I imagine these problems become even more challenging at the operating system level.

Still, some undo is better than no undo. I’ve often wished for an undo switch that worked in the real world–but that’s another story.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital TV, HDTV, Satellite TV

“Microsoft is running a business and trying to make money while competing with free alternatives and pirated software,” wrote one reader who chose to remain anonymous. “Who stops schools from using Ubuntu? It’s just the ease of use that makes people go towards Windows. Don’t blame Microsoft where they don’t deserve it. And this comes from someone who runs OS X.”

Nobody disputes that Microsoft is running a business. In fact, that was the premise of the entire piece. The company would be foolish indeed if it didn’t realize that much of what it does today with Windows and MS Office is threatened by free-and arguably better–alternatives such as Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions for desktop and notebook computers and OpenOffice.

Who stops schools and other institutions from using Ubuntu and other open source software? The naivete of the question surprised me.

A group calling itself the Initiative for Software Choice has been lobbying against open source since May 2002. Its biggest backer, CNet reports, is Microsoft.

Software Choice is one of those misnomers like the Patriot Act in the United States, which cloaks the blatant violation of civil liberties behind a fancy name, or the Clear Skies Initiative, which actually weakens existing air pollution standards.

Just recently, the UK-based Inquirer reports, Software Choice lobbyists warned the European Commission about “the dangers” of open source software. In particular, Software Choice tried to discredit the findings of a study conducted by researchers at the United Nations University in Maastricht, Netherlands, that found that open source software is indeed cost-effective.

That study, available on the European Commission Web site, notes that it would cost companies in Europe 12 billion euros and 131,000 real person years to internally reproduce the existing base of free and open source software that they already use.

Researchers also found that the use of free and open source software saves companies more than 36 percent in software R&D investments that can result in higher profits or more funding for innovation.

But Software Choice said the study “does not holistically reflect the full dynamics now occurring in the vibrant software marketplace.” The group also complained that the report “fails to consider the achievements of various other forms of software licensing and business models.”

The group argued that companies like Microsoft can develop better products because they can spend more on R&D, but failed to mention the numerous delays in the development of the company’s flagship Windows Vista operating system, or the many security holes in its other products like Windows XP and Internet Explorer.

On its Web site, Software Choice says governments should procure software on its merits, not through categorical preferences. “Governments are best served when they can select software from a broad range of products based on such considerations as value, total cost of ownership, feature set, performance and security,” the group states.

It is an attractive but deceptive argument that is clearly aimed at governments that want to pass laws favoring free and open source software.

While speaking of the freedom to choose, Software Choice does not address the use of proprietary file formats that lock users in rather than giving them a real choice. Nor does it speak of the near monopoly that Windows enjoys on desktop computers.

Software Choice also ignores the fact that opting for open source is a choice of direction rather than of specific products that any government should be free to make. Governments do this all the time when they pick a standard by which all their suppliers must comply. If a government decides to go open source, then Microsoft and other commercial software developers may either comply or seek business elsewhere.

It is curious that Microsoft plays the choice card when it is at the forefront of industry groups that restrict end-user freedom. For example, it is the driving force behind the Business Software Alliance, whose main mission is to browbeat governments into enforcing copyright rules that force customers to pay through the nose for commercial software. Now that these heavy-handed tactics have backfired and driven people toward open source, Software Choice wants to herd them back toward expensive, proprietary software.

All this lobbying shows that Microsoft is running a business, all right, but it’s also running scared because of FOSS. And it should be. Open source programs are often better and always cheaper than their proprietary counterparts. And they’re getting easier to use, too. What choice could be simpler?

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Programmable pressure cooker

The software was called QDOS, short for Quick and Dirty Operating System, and Microsoft needed it for the personal computer that IBM was developing. Various accounts say Bill Gates’ partner, Paul Allen, bought QDOS from programmer Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products for between $50,000 and $100,000. Microsoft then parlayed that into billions of dollars by charging IBM a license fee of up to $50 for every copy of the operating system–renamed MS DOS– that was sold with millions of its new PCs. The billions that DOS funneled into the upstart company gave it the financial muscle to develop many other products that followed, including MS Office and Windows, and allowed it to dominate the PC software business in decades to come.

Of course, many young computer users who grew up using Windows never experienced DOS or character-based computing.

In 2001, when Gates launched Windows XP, he also declared the end of the DOS era. Unlike all earlier versions of Windows, XP would no longer have DOS running underneath.

Still, old habits die hard, and a surprising number of people still run DOS applications even today. Some of them are tailor-made applications like point-of-sale programs that do just one specific task reasonably well–and cheaply. Others are more general programs like word processors that users have grown accustomed to.

When I first came to Manila Standard Today, for example, one of the senior editors was still running Wordstar in a DOS window on a Windows PC. From the editor’s point of view, the solution made perfect sense–he could write and edit efficiently using a word processor that he had mastered long ago. Instead of fiddling with new formatting commands, he could concentrate on typing.

On the Web, I found a 1996 essay by science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer, extolling the virtues of Wordstar for DOS. Ten years later, he’s still using Wordstar 7.0, running in a DOS window in XP–and writing his 19th book with it.

I know where he’s coming from. I, too, was a Wordstar for DOS (Version 5) holdout many years after it became fashionable to use MS Word for Windows, though I finally had to give it up.

If you’re running XP, you can still get a taste of DOS. Just go to START, RUN, type COMMAND and hit Enter to get a simulated DOS window.

I was pleasantly surprised to find you can also run old DOS programs on a Linux or Mac OS X machine. An open source program called DOSBox emulates an Intel X86 PC –complete with sound and graphics–to enable users to run old DOS programs that probably wouldn’t run on newer Windows PCs and would never have run on other machines such as Macs.

Versions of DOSBox are available for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and Mac OS X, so I gave it a whirl on my Ubuntu Linux desktop PC and my Mac iBook. Both versions were easy to install and use, especially if you remember some old DOS commands. Unlike the original DOS, you do need to mount a virtual C: drive by pointing DOSBox to a directory on your hard disk where you’ll store your DOS programs.

In five minutes, I was typing out a document on an old copy of Wordstar that I scrounged up. Rather quickly, the old commands like Ctrl KB and Ctrl KK to mark a block of text–came back to me. Only now I was typing them on a Mac. Wordstar ran on the Ubuntu PC without a hitch, too, though I’m sure trying to print from either would be a significant challenge. After all, one of the biggest pains about DOS computing was the need to install device drivers.

A search for free DOS programs brought me to an excellent site called Interesting DOS Programs based in Trinidad and Tobago. The site also has an extensive page of links to other DOS-related pages.

If you have a hankering to play the old PC games, there are DOS Games and DOS Games Archives. A free adventure game I downloaded, Lure of Temptress–the first from Revolution Software–ran perfectly in DOSBox on the iBook, but I haven’t yet figured out how to configure the sound to work on Ubuntu.

Going through long lists of applications and games available online, one thing became apparent. Notwithstanding its official demise in 2000, DOS lives on–even without Microsoft.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asia’s first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Cool mobile gadgets

The best program I found for doing this was PortableApps, free software that packs a suite of open source applications–including OpenOffice–into a handy menu that runs straight off any USB flash drive.

This approach to portable computing enables you to take the programs and data files you need with you when you’re away from the office, or when you don’t have your notebook computer. It’s particularly handy when you must make do with a new, barebones computer that has only the operating system installed.

I’ve also found PortableApps to be useful because it lets me run my personalized version of Firefox –with all the extensions I need already loaded–on somebody else’s computer or in an Internet cafe where they might not have the browser installed.

Running programs off a flash drive when you’re outside the office makes for good security, too. After you quit, nothing–no data, cookies, backup files or cached browser pages–is left behind on the computer you used. All that’s safely tucked away in your flash drive.

PortableApps runs on Windows, making it usable on 90 percent of computers that run one version or another of Microsoft’s operating system. Portable applications for Mac OS or Linux wouldn’t be all that practical, since the two operating systems account for only about 10 percent of the market.

Curiously, I found that you can run PortableApps on a Linux computer as long as you do it through Wine, a program that interprets Windows commands and executes them in Linux. When I ran it on my Ubuntu Linux PC in this manner, the program behaved quite well, hiding itself away as a clickable icon on the top panel on my desktop, much like it would on the system tray in Windows.

Of course, Wine isn’t installed by default on most Linux distributions, so running PortableApps this way would still be a hit-or-miss affair. Wouldn’t it be simpler if you could run the operating system right off a flash drive and bring the programs and data you need on the same stick?

As it turns out, it is possible.

For the longest time, I’d heard of people running Damn Small Linux (only 50 megabytes!) or PuppyLinux on flash drives. But a cursory look at these distributions convinced me they were a bit more spartan than I would like.

I found a tutorial on installing Ubuntu on a flash drive, but the process was complicated and entailed using a modified version of the operating system.

One of the easiest approaches I found came from a Web site called Pendrive Linux (http://pendrivelinux.com/), which documents several ways to run a variety of Linux distributions on portable USB devices. The one I chose was Pen Drive Linux, a package based purely on Debian Linux, which is also the basis for Ubuntu. To install Pen Drive Linux, you need three things: a USB 2.0 flash drive with at least 1 gigabyte, a copy of Pen Drive Linux (402 MB, available on the site); and a Linux PC.

There are two caveats. First, you will have to use the command line or terminal, but this isn’t difficult if you follow the instructions step by step. Seccond, and more importantly, you could accidentally wipe out your hard disk instead of formatting the USB drive if you’re not careful–so you really have to be aware of what you’re doing.

Creating the boot flash drive took about 10 to 15 minutes. The last step was to set up my PC to boot first from the USB flash drive (instead of the hard drive or the CD-ROM drive) – something that most modern PCs motherboards will let you do through the BIOS setup.

Eagerly, I restarted my PC with the flash drive plugged in–and in a few minutes, I was up and running using Pen Drive Linux, which looks a lot like Ubuntu. Performance was snappy, and I hardly noticed that I wasn’t running off the hard disk.

I changed the desktop wallpaper and screen saver, installed some software and tweaked Firefox (called Iceweasel, for some strange reason), then rebooted to see if the changes would stick. They did, so now I have a portable yet feature-rich Linux system in my pocket that I can boot on most PCs–even if they have Windows installed.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Import duty tariff

Windows and menus have a glassy, translucent look, buttons glow when you run the mouse pointer over them, miniature preview screens pop up from the task bar as you point at the tabs, and you can scroll through and select open windows stacked in three dimensions.

The star of the Vista eye candy show is Aero, the new graphical user interface that makes better use of today’s powerful graphics hardware. You need a minimum of 128MB of video memory on your 3D graphics card, 1 gigabyte of system memory and a processor running at 1 gigahertz to enjoy the show. Otherwise, Vista will kick you back to what it calls Windows Vista Basic, which is the operating system minus the bells and whistles.

As far as visual effects go, Aero is far more impressive than its predecessor, Luna, the interface used on Windows XP. Long-time Mac users, however, will no doubt draw comparisons to Aqua, the user interface that made its debut in 2000 Macworld Expo in San Francisco, featuring translucent menus, gel-like or glassy elements, a colorful dock for launching applications and animated windows.

For years, these features were the envy of non-Mac personal computer users and became the foundation of an entire sub-industry–programs that enhanced Windows XP.

On the CNET download site, there are more than 4,000 such products. By far the most popular is WindowBlinds, a program that allows users to personalize almost every aspect of the XP interface. With WindowBlinds, you can even dress XP up to look like the Mac.
Another product, ObjectDock–available free–mimics the Mac OS X dock, right down to the bouncing, animated icons.

The company that created WindowsBlinds and ObjectDock, Stardock, did such a good job that Apple at one time threatened to sue them for copying Aqua’s “look and feel.”

But people who use glassy menus shouldn’t throw rocks. When Apple introduced attractive desktop accessories called widgets in the Tiger release of OS X., it was widely accused of ripping off the concept from Konfabulator, a program created by a former employee. Never shy about going with somebody else’s good idea, Microsoft has added widgets to Vista–but it calls them “gadgets.”

Of course, who copies what is important only when somebody gets sued. Otherwise, imitation is simply how the industry moves forward. Somebody does something that works and others follow suit but try to do better.

Now the scuttlebutt is that Apple will finally replace Aqua with a new interface called Iluminous at Macworld 2007, in the hopes that it will be “shiny” enough to upstage Aero.

In contrast to Windows and Mac OS X, most Linux desktops have been rather eye-candy-poor. The highly configurable KDE platform–with its bouncing icons–is probably the flashiest. Because I tend to get distracted by all the bling, I favor the simpler Gnome environment.

Call it a personal weakness, but I like to futz with a PC like some guys enjoy working on their cars for hours. In the old Windows 95 and 98 days, I could spend an entire afternoon trying to tweak my PC, modifying desktop themes to get just the combination I wanted.

No matter what Apple and Microsoft tell you, this kind of futzing has very little to do with productivity.

Over the weekend, curiosity got the better of me and I installed the still experimental Beryl windows manager on my Linux desktop PC. It took some doing, but when I finally got it going, it blew my socks off. This is eye candy you haven’t even seen on Vista or Mac OS X.

Beryl offers a wide variety of translucent, glassy windows skins and animated effects, and lets you glide through different workspaces wrapped around a 3D cube that spins rapidly with the flick of a mouse wheel. It will also give you a live thumbnail view of all running applications–including any videos that are playing, much like Mac OS X does with Expose. Click on a window to jump to it.

Oh yes, it will also give you wobbly windows that you can wave around like a flag when you move them around the screen.

But all such eye candy comes at a cost. The price I paid: I’m finishing this column on a Sunday, when it should have been done a day earlier. Must have been all the windows-waving.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Excise Tax

Many Web designers, graphic artists and bloggers might consider the answer to this question crucial when considering a shift from Windows.

After all, while there are many excellent open-source alternatives to common office and multimedia applications, the defacto graphics program on Linux, the unfortunately-named Gimp, hobbles a generation or two behind the market-leading Photoshop, which is available only for Windows and Mac OS X.

Years of speculation and wishful thinking have not yielded a Linux version from Adobe, nor does one look likely to come anytime soon.

As they are often wont to do, users have taken matters into their own hands, using free and open-source software called Wine to run Windows programs – including Photoshop – in Linux.

A group of hackers began the Wine project in 1993 as a way to run Windows 3.1 programs on Linux. Over the years, Wine has been expanded to include programs running under later versions of Windows, including 95, 98, 2000 and XP.

Wine, short for “Wine Is Not an Emulator,” is software that translates Windows commands into their equivalent in Linux or Unix.

While the project is more than a decade old, Wine is still under testing, with the latest beta version being 0.9.18.

“Wine is still under development, and it is not yet suitable for general use,” the official Web site (http://www.winehq.com) says. “Nevertheless, many people find it useful in running a growing number of Windows programs.”

Intrigued by the possibilities, I did some research and found a 2003 article in eWeek about how Walt Disney’s animation unit and two other competing studios jointly funded a project with CodeWeavers, the leading corporate backer of Wine, to develop a solution that would allow them to run Photoshop on Linux.

The project cost Disney less than $15,000, but saved it more than $50,000 a year in Windows licenses, eWeek reported. At the same time, CodeWeavers was able to incorporate the technology into Wine and its commercial version, CrossOver Office.

A quick check with the Wine Web site showed that Photoshop was indeed among the 4,398 Windows applications that would run under Wine.

Setting up Wine and using it isn’t rocket science, but it’s probably complicated enough to intimidate the typical Windows user.

I downloaded Wine (using the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu Linux) then configured it by using the winecfg utility (type “winecfg” in the Terminal command line). Doing this the first time creates a fake “Drive C” in the hidden .wine directory of your home folder. This is where Wine installs all Windows programs.

To install a Windows program, pop in the install CD and type this into the command line:

wine /media/cdrom0/setup.exe

The Windows installer will come up and install the program.
Theoretically, to run the program, you’d type the following:

wine “C:Program FilesAdobePhotoshop 7.0Photoshop.exe”

Sadly, this did not work. Further research showed I needed to tell Wine which dynamic link library or DLL file to use. This line from an Ubuntu forum does the job:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES=wintab32=n wine “C:Program FilesAdobePhotoshop 7.0Photoshop.exe”

To save myself some typing, I created a script that executes the command when I click on an icon.

So how does running Photoshop in Linux measure up?

In general, I was pleasantly surprised by the program’s responsiveness. There was none of the sluggishness that I expected and most of the features I use heavily work.

There are some major caveats, however.

1) Right-click menus do not work. In fact, they can lock up the program. This is a pain, because I’m used to right-clicking on items in the Layers palette to manipulate them. Fortunately, there is a work-around for this, using the menu bar at the top of the window.

2) Resizing the Layers palette will also crash the program.

3) Alt-clicking on an area does not work for the Clone tool. Instead, you must hold down the Shift key while doing the Alt-click.

4) The Tools and other palettes will remain on screen even when you minimize Photoshop.

These are pretty serious problems because you could lose a lot of work. On the other hand, if you’re careful to avoid these pitfalls and save your work periodically, you ought to be able to run Photoshop productively under Linux.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asia’s first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Cellphone news