Cyber Cynic

Choosing between the two main players in mobile depends on what features and specs are most important to you. Here's what you need to know to make the right decision.

The story behind the story is that Linux has become totally mainstream. You may not have a Linux desktop in front of you the way I do, but if you spend most of your day visiting Google, Facebook or Twitter, you're using Linux. That...

A friend of mine recently got a surprise. She was setting up her brand new Dell Inspiron m101z with its dual-core AMD Athlon processor, 4GB RAM and Windows 7 Home Premium. She wasn't happy because it was already slower than her...

We're beginning to see who owns Unix and other intellectual property in the Novell deal. Hint: Microsoft did just fine for itself. The bare facts of the matter are that the almost forgotten software company Attachmate has bought...

Who really bought Novell? Of course, I know that Attachmate is the company that's on record as purchasing Novell for $2.2-billion, while Microsoft shelled out $450 million for some Novell intellectual property. But tell me, where did...

VMware wanted to buy Novell, but the virtualization company didn't want to buy everything that Novell's board wanted to sell. At the same time, Microsoft had made it clear that it hated the idea of VMware, a Microsoft rival, ending...

Linux is fast. That's why 90%+ of the Top 500 fastest supercomputers run it. What some people don't realize is that Linux is much better at delivering speed for servers and supercomputers than it is on the desktop. That was by...

When I first saw that Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, was dumping the X Window System, which is the networking windowing system that's the foundation of almost all Unix and Linux graphical desktop, for Wayland, an OpenGL-based...

Red Hat announced today, November 10th, that long anticipated release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6. The announcement itself was anti-climatic. Everyone in Linux circles knew that RHEL 6 was coming. What I did find...

Apache is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It can't certify that its open-source Java, Harmony is Java compatible. Oracle, like Sun before it, won't release the needed certification tests. Without that Apache can't certify that...

The Linux desktop has been around for more than a decade now. Despite its best efforts, and Microsoft's dumbest missteps -- I'm looking at you, Vista -- it's never owned more than a fraction of the market. Canonical, Ubuntu's parent...

I didn't see this coming: Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu backer Canonical, has announced that somewhere down the road, Ubuntu will be switching Ubuntu's base graphics system from the venerable X Windows System to Wayland. In...

I have no doubt that Linux-based tablets will eventually be winners. I've been unimpressed though at how slowly the Linux tablet OEMs have been about getting their products to market. Those that have made it tp store shelves, like...

It had to happen eventually. Open source software is all about letting anyone have access to the source code, and Apple is all about restricting any software access on its platforms. So when questions began to be raised about whether...

GNOME, the popular Linux desktop interface, took a hit today. Its popular leader Stormy Peters left GNOME for Mozilla to work on the open Web. GNOME, which has been struggling with getting its critical 3.0 release out the door, will...

Ubuntu's new Unity Linux desktop interface is the change that everyone is talking about, but it was far from the only change that Canonical and Ubuntu's developers are making to Ubuntu's desktop. In fact, even without the change from...

If you want a really, really fast computer, there are all kind of ways to build the hardware architecture, but one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they run Linux. The top spot now appears to belong to the...

ORLANDO, FLA.--As Debian is to Ubuntu, so GNOME is to Unity. What do I mean by that? Well, once upon a time there was an operating system called Debian. It was, and is, a powerful version of Linux. Outside of the Linux community,...

ORLANDO, FLA. -- Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and the company behind it, Canonical, surprised the hundreds of Ubuntu programmers at the Ubuntu Developers Summit when he announced that the next release of the popular Linux...

Linux has security problems like any other operating system. Most of them aren't that big a deal though. Many of the more serious ones require local user access to cause any real trouble, and except for Linux desktop users that's not...