Since it began life as a bare kernel intended for educational purposes, Linux has steadily accrued higher-level stack layers, which now include the capacity for hosting virtual instances of itself or other operating system environments. It stands to reason that Linux should continue scaling up, into a building block for any number of private, public or test clouds, each bearing their own set of the slight adaptations through which all technologies evolve. As it turns out, the Linux world’s most…

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 20 tech-related things, facts, habits or ideas about yourself. At the end, you will tag no one, since you should have forsworn chain letters years ago. However, if you want to share your tech idiosyncrasies, you can reach me at jbrooks@eweek.com or leave a comment below. 1. In 1998, I spent way too much of my meager salary on a Psion 5 handheld computer. The maddening orphaning…

The desktop hasn’t reached its end of life, but the desktop does appear to have shifted into maintenance mode. These days, the center of application innovation has moved to the Web. What’s missing from the desktop world, but alive and well on the Web, is the sort of fierce competition that arises from an open platform that is governed by standards but accessible to a diversity of hardware and software components at every layer of the stack.

The problem with having a big and bountiful network of Twitter friends is that once your friends list grows beyond a fairly small number of people, it gets really tough to pay attention to what people are saying. However, I think I have a plan for keeping Twitter useful to me, even as my friends list continues to grow.

Among the rougher edges I’ve found during my recent OpenSolaris tests has been system’s font rendering within the Firefox Web browser. Many of the pages I come across on the Internet render with chunky, pixelated looking fonts that remind me of Linux+Mozilla back when I was a fresher-faced analyst based out of eWEEK’s one-time Medford location on the shores of the Mystic River.

Should the government boost its use of open-source software? It seems obvious that if the government can satisfy its IT needs more efficiently through open source, it should do so. However, as recent debates over industry bailouts and stimulus packages remind us, government spending decisions must be guided by more than bargain-hunting concerns. We must also consider what the impact of fewer government dollars will be on the software industry, much of which is wedded to proprietary licensing and business…

As somebody who enjoys blowing away his notebook computer to install a new operating system every six weeks or so, I have a special appreciation for the way that software as a service lets me leave my key applications and data, accessible and undisturbed, in the cloud. At least, “accessible and undisturbed” describes the way that things are supposed to be with SAAS, when the chain of components from browser to operating system to client hardware to Internet connectivity to…

For those who disagree with the case I’ve made for open-sourcing Windows, one of the more common points of contention involves a fear of forking–the idea that an open-source Windows would be too fragmented. If Microsoft open-sourced its operating system, would the Windows world lose its center of gravity and go flying apart in all directions, tearing apart the PC ecosystem on which so many of us depend?

Microsoft isn’t getting knocked off its computing platform perch any time soon, but there’s no question that Microsoft faces some very real challenges to its platform throne, the most daunting of which is the Web, where a seemingly omnipresent Google is working on relocating computing’s center of gravity toward the browser and away from Windows or any other particular operating system platform. Though it may sound crazy, I contend that the best move Microsoft could make to broaden the reach…

For now, Microsoft is operating, tentatively, at the margins of open source, with an agenda marked more by toleration than adoption of open source. I contend that if Microsoft approached open source aggressively, the company could solidify its prominence in computing potentially for decades to come.