Features

If there is truly a gray zone in the struggle between online good and evil, anonymous proxy servers live there.

As we've seen time and again, in an increasing number of enterprise software categories, open source has become a promising alternative to commercial software. But there's no free ride.

Over the last few years, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other organizations looking to eliminate the illegal swapping of digital media files have attacked the problem through the courts, publicity campaigns, and other means. But while they've managed to close down some peer-to-peer operations, and have successfully (and not so successfully) sued individuals who were uploading movies and music to the Web, there is one part of the Internet that has, until now, been operating under their radar: Usenet.

It's the afternoon of September 30th and for reasons beyond my understanding the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) is up more than 3.5 percent after yesterday's financial fiasco. Hello, Wall Street, what part of "No one has a new bailout deal; the House hated the old deal, and it's the week of Rosh Hashanah so it won't be a full week at Congress anyway" do you not understand? Even if you believe the bailout will magically work wonders for the economy -- I don't -- it's not going to happen this week.

Sooner or later, we all end up installing new software on our computers. Whether it's a new version of Firefox, or a cool game, or a video editing package, there comes a time when you want to make your system do more than it can do now.

The collapse of Wall Street may help make computer science and IT careers attractive to students who abandoned these fields in droves after the pop of the last big bubble, the dot-com bust of 2001.

Oracle's annual OpenWorld show is usually a showcase for its enterprise software. This year, however, it was all about hardware, as CEO Larry Ellison introduced a new family of database/storage products last week that it had been working on with partner Hewlett-Packard for three years.

To a lot of people, Ubuntu represents the most end-user-friendly nongeek-compatible Linux distribution. But there are other commercial distributions that work even harder to create a desktop experience that is, frankly, Windows-like. The two most well-known of these are Xandros and Linspire (formerly Lindows). Since Xandros recently acquired Linspire, that leaves it pretty much in sole possession of that segment of the marketplace.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

Trying to boost the IT capabilities at his digital forensics company, Brian Dykstra invested in a quad-core processor-based server. After all, he figured, more cores means a more powerful machine that can do far more work than single-core systems.

Over the past two years, running Windows and Windows apps virtually on Apple hardware has become a popular way for consumers to dump their PCs in favor of Mac gear.

Google's Chrome is a stripped-down, no-nonsense browser. Unlike Firefox, there isn't an array of add-ons available to change its behavior. So at first glance, you might think there's not a lot you can do to hack Chrome or bend it to your will.

By combining business intelligence and two foundations of Web 2.0 -- search and mapping -- a police department in the US state of Kentucky has built a brand-new window into crime. This Web-based BI portal allows patrol officers to enter data -- or even pieces of data such as a few numbers from a license plate -- into a simple search interface and retrieve information from their own databases and those of neighboring towns.

Late last year, Google announced that it would give US$10 million worth in prizes to software development companies to develop innovative and useful applications for their open source mobile Android platform.

Developers who adopt the Google App Engine for their cloud computing platform today may fear data lock-in, since the only way to import or export data is using a Python-based API. Google is working on a tool to improve data exchange to improve data portability.