Articles by Jack M. Germain

The PDF format is now the standard for publishing and print-basedindustries. As you would expect, numerous free and inexpensive PDFreaders are available, but relatively few inexpensive PDF creator apps exist ...

Linux provides more than one way to listen to music collections. Thebare-bones solution is to click on a music file from within a filemanager app. The high-end approach is to playback music with Amarok Amarok is a sound-system-independent audio player with a flexibleinterface that uses a browser-like design. Amarok does what a simplefile manager ca...

The Linux world is filled with numerous capable packages for justabout every computing category. Graphics manipulation applications areno exception. In any list of able-bodied graphics candidates, GIMP 2.6 should be one of the top three contenders ...

Symantec announced on Tuesday four newsecurity and compliance software suites that it claims remedy the most commonsecurity shortcomings exploited by today's targeted attacks These latest softwaresecurity products complement the company's four-pronged approach basedon the phases of a targeted breach attack versus a more tradition massattack. The se...

Text editors are becoming more essential in today's Web-basedcomputing world. Gone are the days when users need hard-copy versionsof their documents. Also gone are the days when documents need to begussied up with fancy fonts and fanciful page formatting Now HTML handles the visual tune ups for online document displaysconverted from text documents....

The file manager utility more than any other system app on anycomputing platform is the workhorse of daily computing tasks. Linuxusers have numerous file managers as choices. Depending on the distro, usually one or two default apps are preinstalled -- but thesemight not be the best options Thunar and Rox Filer offer flexibility and features not fou...

The economic hardships hitting businesses worldwide over the last several months have compelled may an IT department to steer costly new initiatives into indefinite holding patterns. However, these stalled technology upgrades are beginning to find new corporate support. A new survey by Robert Half Technology reveals some organizations are finally planning to implement projects that earlier had been shelved due to the recession...

Word processing is perhaps one of the most essential uses for acomputer on any platform. The Linux OS offers more obscure wordprocessors than other OSes; however, few of these apps offer usersthe staying power of AbiWord ...

Toyota's recent fiascoes with runaway acceleration illuminate the sorry lack of software standards to establish minimum quality levels for technologies crucial to the operation of transportation systems. Toyota has rejected accusations that its software systems are the culprit Toyota recalled 3.8 million Toyota and Lexus models in October 2009 over...

The Linux OS offers users a variety of applications for taking notesand keeping information accessible in one place. Two popular choices,Tomboy Notes and Xpad, provide quick and easy ways to coral a stampedeof wild notes and information ...

Some system utilities do a variety of things well. They come withtools to give users lots of solutions in one package. Other systemapps like the Atol File Manager perform a dedicated functionflawlessly without adding other specialties. Atol took a while to growon me, but now this app is one of my most-used Linux tools ...

Cisco Systems announced on Tuesday the CRS-3 Carrier Routing System, a new Internet networking architecture that is designed with the huge growthof video transmission, mobile devices and new online services in mind The Cisco CRS-3 provides more than 12 times the traffic capacity ofthe nearest competing system, according to John Chambers, chairman a...

Given the growing popularity of mobile devices and the great manyapplications to go with them, you would think that this new niche hadplenty of room for newcomers. Many of those newcomers, though, will find it difficult to capture a great deal of consumer attention. Places like the Android Market and the Apple App Store are popular and growing fast, but they're awash in apps that struggle to stand out from the crowd.

I am an avid user of open source software and a firm believer in the benefits of FOSS. I have a choice of operating systems at my disposal, but I now cringe whenever I have to work in the Microsoft world. I much prefer the vast array of Linux apps. Why? They are bloat-free problem solvers. Take, for example, the gFTP File Client I stumbled upon the...

Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems,announced on Wednesday the acquisition of Paglo, a remote supportservice provider ...

As communication becomes more Web-centric, text editors become moreessential writing tools. Blocks of text get tweaked with HTML codes toprovide a more graphical appearance. So good text editors are thosewith many of the same features found in word processors, only withoutthe added formatting and graphic components ...

Lenovo on Tuesday introduced six new products to set the stage for thePC maker's Think platform for 2010. The additions to the Thinklineup include five laptops and a server, all of which target bothenterprise business and SMB users The line boasts a new ultraportable laptop and a servercosting under US$400. The new models include built-in webcams, ...

Virtual private networks, or VPNs, have been around for about a decade. They provide secure data exchange between two locations using an encrypted connection VPN technology has changed little over the years. A newer version of VPN software, known as SSL-VPN, taps into the common IP circuitry of Web browsers to make secure connections with less reli...

To be really useful, a note-taking program needs more than the ability to simply put letters on the screen. It requires adatabase mentality with a quick and simple user interface. NoteCaseManager is designed with all thefeatures needed to be a true digital note-processing system ...

Krusader is one of those must-have computing toolsthat turns difficult or tedious computing tasks into easy,point-and-click operations. It's an advanced twin-panel file managerthat's loaded with features ...