Sony Gets Over Its Netbook Aversion

Tuesday - July 7, 2009

Sony joined the netbook race on Monday with a new line of Vaio models. The move comes nearly a year after the Sony executive in charge of the Vaio line derided the diminutive computers as part of a damaging "race to the bottom" for computer manufacturers. Retailing for about $500, the Vaio W series isn't quite at the bottom of the netbook market, which floors out under $300. However, it's part of an inescapable trend in the industry, whether PC makers like it or not, said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at the NPD Group. [More...]

Firefox 3.5 Streaks Onto the Web

Tuesday - June 30, 2009Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5, the latest edition of its open source browser, one year after its release of Firefox 3. The update went through four betas, incorporating JavaScript fine-tuning and other improvements, resulting in the fastest version yet, according to Mozilla. [More...]

Is Software Installation on Linux 'Broken'?

Thursday - July 2, 2009You know a controversy is a big one when none other than RMS weighs in with his opinion, and sure enough, that's what happened in the Mono debate late last week. "Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction," RMS wrote on the Free Software Foundation's site. Of course, rather than settling the debate, Stallman's proclamation only fanned the flames higher, resulting in a raging inferno. [More...]

They Tweet, You Decide

Sunday - July 5, 2009Cassy Hayes and Jasmine Coleman were among the first fans to arrive outside the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles where Michael Jackson was brought and later pronounced dead. How had Hayes, 25, and Coleman, 21, heard the news so quickly? Twitter. The two young women had learned about Jackson's health like so many who get their news nowadays: by reading the ever-flowing feed of real-time information on the microblogging service. Jackson's unexpected death at 50 was just the latest major news event where Twitter played a central role. [More...]