BRUCEB NEWS
Dropbox Smart Sync Included With All Paid Plans
Dropbox Smart Sync is now included with all paid plans for individuals and businesses. It's not a feature of Dropbox's free account, but that plan is so limited that the lack of Smart Sync doesn't matter. Let's take a minute to unpack that. This might be interesting...
LINUX UNDER ATTACK
The Linux community is quickly realizing that Linux faces a serious threat to its very existence. SCO Group owns various copyrights and patents for Unix, and it has filed...
COMICS BY E-MAIL
Looking for an interesting kid present? Think about a subscription to comics by e-mail. Ten bucks buys a year of daily e-mails from one of the largest comics syndicators. You...
CELL PHONE CONFUSION
If you’ve shopped for cell phone service lately, you’ll sympathize with the points in this article: the offers and services from the competing carriers are so complex that it’s...
WAL-MART TAKES OVER THE WORLD
Every so often some business kowtows to Wal-Mart by changing the cover of a book or magazine or releasing an alternate version of a CD with family-friendly lyrics or the like....
THE GREAT REBATE SCAM
Like most people, I’ve never liked rebates, but I take it seriously - I will pay more if that’s what it takes to avoid a rebate. Slate has a good article about the rebate game –...
DOWNLOAD CAPS ON CABLE BROADBAND
Time Warner has begun tiered pricing for cable Internet access in a few areas. The idea is that a cable subscriber chooses a monthly download limit – 40Gb, for example. If you go...
TIME MATTERS 5.0
Time Matters and Amicus are the market leaders for law office case management. Time Matters just rolled out its first new version in two years, version 5.0, along with a new...
COREL ACQUIRED BY VECTOR CAPITAL
Corel announced today that it has agreed to a takeover bid by Vector Capital, a San Francisco-based company that already owns a substantial stake in the company. At $1.06 per...
AMAZON, APPLE, AND MUSIC
Amazon has been eyeing the market for downloadable music for years, wondering how to jump in. The issue isn’t technology, it’s the business model, availability of content and...
HARDWARE WARS
Dell continues to dominate the computer market, of course. Here’s what some of the other players are doing. Sony just announced its summer lineup, loaded with multimedia...
FIBER TO YOUR HOME, AND OTHER PIPE DREAMS
The phone companies – Baby Bells and Verizon – got a lot of press today for their announcement that they’ve agreed on a “standard” for rolling out fiber to your homes, enabling...
BROADBAND SERIES PRESERVED FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
I wrote some notes a couple of weeks ago about choices for broadband access in rural Sonoma County. It’s scrolling off the news page now, but it’s such stunningly lucid prose...
HISTORY LESSON
Mark Minasi occasionally writes a column for a newsletter from Windows & .NET Magazine. Today he makes an interesting point to support his contention that Windows NT 4.0...
MEDIA MONOPOLIES
I was looking for this the other day - here’s a list of the companies owned by AOL Time Warner. It’s extraordinary. You can get similarly chilling information about other media...
MICROSOFT TO PAY AOL $750 MILLION
You might have seen the news that Microsoft will pay AOL $750 million to settle AOL’s antitrust lawsuit. AOL acquired Netscape in 1998 and sued Microsoft in early 2002 for...