IT’S the kind of news that should strike fear in the hearts of chief executives and MIS managers who condone the use of unlicensed software in their companies. Earlier this month, police raided the Makati office of a large construction company, seizing 24 computers loaded with pirated software.
IN the Internet age, you can access any content you want, right? Wrong. If you have ever tried to watch full episodes of popular American TV shows on Web sites such as Hulu, or buy songs from iTunes, you’ll quickly realize that not everything that technology makes possible is doable. Often, it is licensing problems that get in the way. At other times, the technology choices that content providers make can severely limit your ability to access their material—or even lock you out. Unfortunately, this is more likely to happen if you run on an open source operating system such as Linux, than a closed system like Windows or Mac OS X.
I never took to MS Office 2007. Having used earlier versions of MS Word for years, I was frustrated when I couldn’t easily find the menus or commands where they used to be on its newfangled ribbon interface. I also disliked that its applications wrote by default to a file format that was unreadable by earlier versions of MS Office. So this week, when I heard that a new version of my favorite free MS Office replacement, OpenOffice, would be released, I greeted the news with some reservations.
With Fring installed, you can make free voice calls or send instant messages to registered users of Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, and networks based on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) from your mobile phone. If your phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network, then the call is absolutely free. If no Wi-Fi signal is available, you can connect to a 3G network and pay only for the Internet access, which these days is about P10 for 30 minutes—which is cheaper than the cost of a typical GSM phone call.
There is a tendency to equate the Asus Eee Box with the Eee PC, but it would be a mistake to think of the two as desktop and portable equivalents of one and the same machine. Despite the similarity in name, the two are configured differently, making them suitable for different tasks.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
Made the switch to Linux? Tell me about it here and get your own penguin! Click here for a high-resolution image.
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