Stories about: Intuit

The bad news just doesn't seem to end for Yahoo. As the Internet portal prepares to fend off a proxy fight by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, new research from comScore concludes that for the first time, Google has overtaken Yahoo as the most-visited Web site in the US.

For many users, getting started with Linux is surprisingly easy. New, friendlier versions of the free operating system, such as Fedora and Ubuntu, feature straightforward menus and automated installations that make switching from Windows to Linux a relatively simple process.

Web database vendors claim they aren't worried by Microsoft's just-announced SQL Server Data Services offering, saying their services are sufficiently established, different, and/or better than Redmond's to enable them to thrive when SSDS is released -- according to the current schedule, in the first half of next year.

Mostly lost among the flock of announcements at Microsoft's Mix08 Web developer conference last week was the news that Redmond is starting to test a Web database service based on its popular SQL Server database management software.

It's the rare Web 2.0 start-up that has the guts to brag that it's resisting a jump onto the Facebook application bandwagon.

Engineers at Sun are eyeing May for the release of a 1.0 version of JRuby, which provides a Java implementation of the Ruby language.

Are you looking for a Windows alternative for serious office work? Many people are starting to wonder about their non-Microsoft operating system options, especially given Windows Vista's hefty hardware demands, upgrade costs and license restrictions. We've already examined using Mac OS X in the workplace; now, I take a hard look at Linux by using an enterprise distribution exclusively at work. I'm not simply playing with a test machine; I've been using Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10+ day in, day out to do my job as Computerworld's online managing editor in the U.S.

Microsoft Tuesday said that reports published last month claiming that Google profited from sites pimping pirated movies and software show why copyright holders shouldn't trust the search company.

Graham Glass wrote a blog entry this week that touched on two of my favorite themes: open source and education. In the middle of a project based on the red-hot Ruby on Rails platform, he took time out to explain how he found, and worked around, a Rails limitation. Digging down to the roots of the problem took six hours of investigation. Crafting the work-around took just six lines of code.

Linux has made major inroads on servers and in data centers running both open-source and proprietary applications on millions of computers worldwide. We've recently seen the rise of Linux on mobile devices. But the Linux desktop remains elusive. We know it's out there, but it only now seems to be approaching the tipping point.

Many self-avowed Microsoft haters have stopped short of switching to Linux when they realized the pain involved with abandoning all of their favorite Windows software.