IS book reading dead? Apple CEO Steve Jobs seems to think so. In an interview with the New York Times last January, Jobs answered a question about Amazon’s $399 electronic book reader, the Kindle. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” Jobs said. “The fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the US read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” Was it just another one of Jobs’ classic put-downs of competing technology? Or did he really believe that people have stopped reading books? Or did Jobs have another agenda, as other observers speculate?
Outside the electronics shop window, several dozen Cubans, faces pressed against the glass, gawked at the wares inside. Others fell in line to get in. It wasn’t the latest game console or smart phone they were straining to see. It was a personal computer. Strange as it might seem, up until Friday last week, it was illegal for Cubans to buy a PC for home use. But after assuming power from his ailing brother in February, the new president, Raul Castro, promised to remove many of the restrictions that Cubans have lived under for years, including a ban on cell phones, DVD players, motorbikes—and personal computers.
The free and open source Tellico does a great job of keeping track of your collections.
I KNOW it’s not true, but sometimes, it feels like I’m the only one left in the city that still buys audio CDs. Most people these days seem content with bringing their entire music collection—and listening to them—on their iPods. This situation has no doubt hastened the decline of local music stores, which were never very well-stocked, even in better days. Now, it seems, most of them survive by devoting half their display space to movies, and the other half to pop pap. Still, I have managed to amass several hundred audio CDs over the years—and I have long since given up trying to keep track of them on a spreadsheet. Entering data in this manner—especially individual track information—was simply too tedious.
How best then to manage my music library?
Steve Jobs announcing the end of the official clone program in 1997.
WHEN news surfaced last week that a company in Miami was selling an unauthorized $399 Mac clone, I was skeptical. We’ve been down this road before, and each time it led nowhere.
TWO years after I started writing it, Reporting on ICT is finally off the press. Published by the Konrad Adenauer Center for Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University, the textbook is aimed at helping practicing journalists who want to report on technology. The 211-page volume includes a short history of the computer industry, an explanation of basic terms, and a discussion of major issues that affect the industry. Aside from the huge psychic reward that completing this project brought, Reporting on ICT also financed my first Mac, a G4 iBook that I eventually traded in, months before the book rolled off the press.
As affordable as hard disks and other media have become, there is an even cheaper way to store your data these days. In fact, if you know where to look, you can get your storage free. Online storage sites usually charge a certain amount per gigabyte of storage. A good number of them, however, offer free accounts, often as a come-on to paid services that include support, added security and more storage space. Other sites offer the online storage completely free and hope to earn from advertising.
WHAT’S your home page? One of the first things I do when I install a browser upgrade is to reset the first page that Firefox loads when it starts. The act, akin to changing the wallpaper on your desktop PC, reflects individual tastes and preferences as they apply to surfing the Web. It also forms a basis for efforts to sell online advertising on popular Web sites. At a press briefing in Singapore last week, Yahoo promoted its Web sites as the starting points for most users on the Internet. The business model that the company pursues should be familiar to traditional publishers: develop a loyal following by offering relevant and trusted content.
Photoshop Express running under Firefox 3.0 in Ubuntu 8.04.
IT’S a testament to Photoshop’s popularity that Adobe’s free online service for storing, editing and sharing photos, Photoshop Express, has generated so much buzz, despite its late entry into a crowded field.
SAN FRANCISCO - The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference. Earlier this week, contest sponsors had put three laptops up for grabs to anyone who could hack into one of the systems and run their own software. A $20,000 cash prize sweetened the deal, but the payout was halved each day as contest rules were relaxed and it became easier to penetrate the computers.
After checking out several possible solutions to my sound problems in Hardy Heron, I finally found one that worked for me. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to carry out, too. Just went to Synaptic and installed Linux-386 and rebooted. I hope this helps somebody out there and saves them hours of looking through the forums. Not really sure why the Linux-386 kernel was missing, but why look a gift horse in the mouth?
THE devil made me do it. This famous line from the 1970s comedian Flip Wilson kept playing through my head as I watched a progress bar crawl imperceptibly across my screen. The message on the bar did not provide much by way of assurances, shifting between “20 hours left” and “2 hours left,” to reflect the wildly fluctuating speed of my broadband connection. I wanted the installation to finish sooner so I could see if my desktop computer, which I had so painstakingly tweaked to near perfection in the last few months, would survive the upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu Linux.
BACK when I edited a computer magazine, one of my favorite tasks was editing a column called Utilities Man. I must admit to a certain amount of bias: my older brother Po wrote the column and I got to do the cheesy cartoon that went with it every month. But the really cool thing about Utilities Man was that the column would unearth really useful, free programs that made computing life just a little easier. The programs weren’t full-blown or very complex applications. Usually, they did just one thing that Windows left out, like the ability to rename multiple files in one go, or to compress files for archiving. The column was retired some years ago, but I still keep an eye out for free programs that would warm Utilities Man’s heart. Here are some that he would have been eager to share.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2007 Chin Wong.
The free and open source Tellico does a great job of keeping track of your collections.
TWO years after I started writing it, Reporting on ICT is finally off the press. Published by the Konrad Adenauer Center for Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University, the textbook is aimed at helping practicing journalists who want to report on technology. The 211-page volume includes a short history of the computer industry, an explanation of basic terms, and a discussion of major issues that affect the industry. Aside from the huge psychic reward that completing this project brought, Reporting on ICT also financed my first Mac, a G4 iBook that I eventually traded in, months before the book rolled off the press.
Photoshop Express running under Firefox 3.0 in Ubuntu 8.04.
After checking out several possible solutions to my sound problems in Hardy Heron, I finally found one that worked for me. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to carry out, too. Just went to Synaptic and installed Linux-386 and rebooted. I hope this helps somebody out there and saves them hours of looking through the forums. Not really sure why the Linux-386 kernel was missing, but why look a gift horse in the mouth?
BACK when I edited a computer magazine, one of my favorite tasks was editing a column called Utilities Man. I must admit to a certain amount of bias: my older brother Po wrote the column and I got to do the cheesy cartoon that went with it every month. But the really cool thing about Utilities Man was that the column would unearth really useful, free programs that made computing life just a little easier. The programs weren’t full-blown or very complex applications. Usually, they did just one thing that Windows left out, like the ability to rename multiple files in one go, or to compress files for archiving. The column was retired some years ago, but I still keep an eye out for free programs that would warm Utilities Man’s heart. Here are some that he would have been eager to share.
