Software

Almost everyone uses MySQL, if no where else on your favorite social network, but the wildly popular open-source database manager hasn't so much forked as fragmented.

A Linux newbie is frustrated by a widespread Ubuntu bug and goes straight to the source in London to get the story about how they're fixed.

Within the last few days Microsoft quietly announced it is killing its Encarta encyclopedia, with the actual date of death October, 2009. What it hinted at, but didn't quite say, was that Wikipedia killed it.

Worried about Conficker? You don't have to be. There's a software patch that will get rid of all your Conficker worries once and for all! Better still, it will also rid you of 99.9999% of all your malware concerns once and for all. Its name is Linux.

The education crisis is bad and getting worse. The US spends more on education than any other nation, so the problem is not (as commonly portrayed) a funding crisis. The causes for this sorry state of affairs are many, but one major failure is that too many teachers, schools, and districts reject powerful, free technology solutions that are handed to them on a silver platter.

I'm talking about mobile technology, the mobile Web and the Web 2.0.

The story on 60 Minutes about the Conficker worm missed the larger picture.

Free support for Windows XP ends on April 14th, and the Windows 7 release candidate arrives in May, coincidence? I don't think so.

Microsoft has unveiled a new ad campaign designed to hit Apple where it hurts: In people's wallets. A new ad shows real people trying to buy affordable laptops, and ending up buying PCs rather than Macs because they can't afford high-priced hardware. The campaign even uses jujitsu against Apple coolness, saying that cheap is the new cool.

In Friday's IT Blogwatch, we wonder if we'll be Skyping from our iPhones soon. Not to mention Atari 2600 powered by hope ...

Windows users essentially pay a Microsoft tax for every PC they buy --- the cost of extra security software they need to buy every year, plus the time it takes to rid their PCs of "crapware" and other software junk. But there's no need to pay that tax --- I've got advice on the best free security software and de-crapifying software so you won't have to pay a dime or waste a minute.

Deliver a great Linux distribution, add quality middleware, steer clear on proprietary entanglements, and be named Red Hat.

In Thursday's IT Blogwatch, we read while we wait to watch Obama answer questions from around the Interwebs. Not to mention never gonna give you up ...

You might not want to run any of these operating systems today, but in their time and in their place, they were great.

In Wednesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches Google offer "semantic" Web search. Not to mention more "pet picture portfolios"...

Needless to say, I love gadget blogs. I read hundreds of them, and even write one or two. We gadget bloggers do a lot of things well, I think. For example, I think many sites and blogs are good at boiling down complex feature sets into concise, meaningful nuggets of useful information. Many are very good at conveying a sense of which products and features are most important, and which are not. Some excel at breaking stories. Others find and expose products nobody else seems to have known about.