America's Newest Addiction: The Internet?

A recent survey from Intel suggests that Americans are hopelessly addicted to the Internet . OK, maybe it doesn't suggest that, but that's sort of how we feel ourselves sometimes. The proliferation of wireless routers into every home that allowed for the deadly TV-Internet combo, combined with the spread of high-definition TVs, might have been the most important development in the last half of the 20th century. Well, maybe not More

Posted by Lee Pender on 12/17/20080 comments


Reader Responses: Dynamics and TAS

We're huge fans of acronyms here at RCPU -- we even refer to ourselves as an acronym -- so we were very impressed to get the following e-mail from frequent contributor Jon in response to a brief but acronym-laden post :

"You seem to be enjoying acronyms in today's RCP Update. Here we have many acronyms that start with the same letter as the name of the company, which has resulted in a few that sound very similar. So we invented another acronym:  TAS -- Tangled Acronym Syndrome."

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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/17/20080 comments


Microsoft Launches iPhone App

Whether anybody cares about this or not, we have no idea. But, hey, it's a slow news...month.

Posted by Lee Pender on 12/16/20082 comments


IE Getting Hammered by Attacks

You might know this by now, but IE is getting hit pretty hard by hackers these days.

Posted by Lee Pender on 12/16/20080 comments


Your Top 10...for 2009

It's that time of year when news slows to about the pace of current returns on an investment with Bernard Madoff , and everybody in the press fills Web site space with top-10 lists.

There are top-10 lists of every conceivable nature, from the top 10 Microsoft stories, to the top 10 Linux stories (or at least the top Linux stories -- we didn't count them...or read them), to the top 10 Internet stories, to, as far as we can tell, the top 10 stories, period, at least from a technology-industry perspective. There's even a list of the 10 most influential "biztech" leaders of 2008.

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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/16/20080 comments


Patch Tuesday Falls a Patch or Two Short

This month's Patch Tuesday effort was enormous , but apparently it still wasn't quite big enough .

Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/20080 comments


Microsoft, HP Invite VARs To Host

In case there was any lingering doubt, we can confirm this week that Microsoft is serious about this SaaS -- or even Software Plus Services -- stuff after all. And despite some early concerns, it's becoming clearer that partners won't be as shut out as they might have thought.

This week, Microsoft and HP revealed an initiative aimed at preparing VARs to undertake what's called private-label hosting. Basically, VARs resell applications hosted in datacenters by Microsoft-approved managed service providers (or MSPs, of course); HP and Microsoft provide some technical infrastructure and handy tips for getting started.

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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/20081 comments


HP To Offer Linux Desktop

One of the Compaq PC lines will have Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED, in case you needed another acronym) pre-installed .

Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/20080 comments


Microsoft To Offer Office Online for Free, Apparently

We were wondering when this would happen. We've asked here many times over the last couple of years whether we'd ever see a true hosted version of Office from Microsoft -- and unless Stephen Elop somehow falls from power and Microsoft changes direction dramatically in the months to come, the answer appears to be yes.

Yes, we will see a hosted version of Office, that is. Elop said as much this week, and he didn't stop there. Apparently, Redmond is looking at offering multiple pricing models for hosted Office, including the one that attracts us the most at first glance: free.

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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/11/20080 comments


Google Seeks To Bridge App Gap with NaCl

It's apparently -- chemistry majors we were not -- the symbol on the periodic table of for sodium chloride. In any case, NaCl, or Native Client , is Google's effort to bring Web applications up to the same level of performance as desktop apps. And already ink-stained (if we can still be called that in the Web era) journalists are predicting that it could someday spell doom for Microsoft. From the More

Posted by Lee Pender on 12/10/20080 comments


Another UC Software Package, But At Least It's Free

UC still remains (mostly) a mystery to us, but the price tag on this new effort at least makes it interesting.

Posted by Lee Pender on 12/10/20080 comments


The Press and the Global Economic Freak-Out

And so we come back to this because it just won't go away. Despite a recent improvement in the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, there's still a global economic freak-out in full swing...and journalists and newsletter writers (ahem) aren't exactly keeping a balanced perspective about it. It's time for a little mea culpa .

Wrote reader Dennis back in November in response to RCPU's most grievous freak-out:

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Posted by Lee Pender on 12/10/20080 comments


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