How to Use Windows

Alright, I’ll admit it.  I finally got hit with a virus. Well, sort-of. I first thought that the strange “YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT PROTECTED” icon in my taskbar was some indication that my antivirus software of-choice had finally flipped out for good. Double-clicking on the icon brought up an obviously fake replica of Windows Security Essentials that, more annoyingly, wouldn’t close no matter how many times I clicked on it. Over and over, my machine would be assaulted with “*.exe is not secure!” messages

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Mozilla this week made available the first beta of Thunderbird 3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Codenamed “Lanikai,” the latest release introduces a few changes to the open-source email client, many of which take place under the hood. Built on top of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform (the same engine powering Firefox 3.6), Mozilla says you can expect improvements in stability and memory, fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2, fixes for auto complete, tabs, and activity manager, and several design improvements and corrections to the interface. As with any beta software, you should expect a few bugs, and there are a handful of known issues in Thunderbird 3. Kaspersky’s Anti-Spam extension is disabled, for instance, and you may run into some SMTP issues

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So AT&T finally has their first Android phone, the Motorola Backflip. Whether or not you like the unusual design and Yahoo search (really?), it runs Android and it’s on AT&T. That by itself is remarkable. Now that the phone is available, users are finding yet another surprise that separates this from all the Android phones that came before it. It turns out that the option to allow apps from non-Android Market sources has been disabled .

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WordPress is the world’s #1 publishing platform. Today’s web designers, from beginners to seasoned pros, are picking WordPress to get the job done. As for myself, I’m on the bandwagon and I think you should be too. But this proliferation isn’t all puppies and roses. With any platform with a community of this size, it begs the question: what’s this doing to the web?

The full story can be found on Tech Radar

During a visit to Google’s London HQ we grabbed some time with Chris DiBona. He’s the Open Source Programs Manager for Google, overseeing everything the corporation does that’s open sourced and making sure it’s “correct and useful.” We talked Google Chrome and, later, Android. We put to DiBona the issue that if users buy a netbook, they still tend to expect Windows on it, so will they take to Chrome OS? “Yeah

The full story can be found on Tech Radar

The Linux faithful should see quite a change when they download the next major release of the popular Ubuntu distro. Version 10.04 is expected to come with a heavily revamped default theme . Yes, gone are the days of the brown default theme that has graced Ubuntu installs since its introduction in 2004. Canonical has evolved the look ever so slightly as the OS has gone through revisions. The look has been getting decidedly brighter as time went on with oranges creeping into the desktop color scheme

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Open-source is not about the money. The software world has gotten this point pretty well by now.  Sure, you can wrap additional elements of a larger business plan around an open-source offering.  But even at its core, the concept of open-source isn’t really designed around capitalistic ideals.  If anything, it’s more communistic in its focus : everybody shares an equal stake in a project, and anybody is free to assert their individual ownership in a piece of work by advancing it toward a new direction as they see fit. But these… these are just the tools of the revolution, as Marx might have said.  When it comes to actual content itself–the very bits and bytes of progress that open-source tools help create–the current crop of major content creators and distributors are behaving like dictators in an open world.  And it’s costing both them and us rather greatly. Instead of reaping the success of a community-driven groundswell for their assets, these companies would rather lay down the hammer and stifle all innovation in an attempt to control their futures to a “T.” Two recent examples from Lawrence Lessig and the band OK Go really hit home the biggest elements that are wrong with our current system of open information distribution on the ‘net.  If it’s not the owner of the content acting like an idiot, it’s the system we’ve allowed to propagate that virtually criminalizes content sharers without a second thought.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you know that 3D is this year’s entertainment buzzword. With 3D blockbusters like Avatar scoring megabucks in the theaters, 3D cinema’s jump to the living room is all but a foregone conclusion. But where does that leave all your old 2D files and DVDs?

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For awhile there, things were looking pretty grim for T-Mobile G1 owners (aka HTC Dream). There was a lot of talk that insufficient internal memory would halt OS updates at Android 1.6 (Donut), where the only workaround would be to take matters into your own hands and hack/root the G1. According to Taylor Wimberly of Androidandme.com, that’s no longer the case.

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Even as the economy picks up, it’s a touch tech market out there, especially as company’s look to trim staff and their IT budgets. What’s a geek to do? Learn Drupal . Drupal, as you’re probably aware, is a free and open source content management system (CMS) that has been gaining traction in the last few years. According to CNET, Drupal has been downloaded more than 2 million times and is now found powering sites for some heavy hitters, including the White House, Warner Brothers, and right here at Maximum PC

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