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A Digital Crime Wave

The Windows computing platform is in a genuine crisis. Windows computers are being attacked, every day, by an international army of digital criminals who seek to spy on users, turn their own computers against them and deface, corrupt or destroy their data.
There have long been computer viruses, but until the past couple of years, they [...]

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Room At the In-Box

For the most serious email users, there’s no substitute for a sophisticated, powerful program such as Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows, or Entourage and Apple Mail on the Macintosh. These programs reside on your computer’s hard disk and store e-mail there. They offer a host of deep features and are very fast. But there’s [...]

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Computer, Search Thyself

The graphical user interface has been a success in the mass market since the Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984, and it has dominated computing since Microsoft Windows went mainstream around 1990.
Its visual display of files stored in a nested hierarchy of folders has worked pretty well — until recently.
In the past few years, computer hard [...]

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Mnemonic Devices

The wild success of Apple’s iPod music player is based on lots of ingredients, but one of the least obvious of them is about to give a boost to some other portable devices and may just turn these gadgets into competitors to the iPod itself. I’m talking about the little hard-disk drive at the iPod’s [...]

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Rent vs. Own

When you think of legal music downloading on the Internet, you naturally think of Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store. The first successful legal music service to offer the catalogs of the major labels, iTunes has roughly an 80 percent share of the legal market, according to Apple. It offers 1.5 million tunes, about 50 percent [...]

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Blogging For Beginners

About a decade ago, when the World Wide Web took off, it meant a dramatic lowering of the barrier to entry for publishing. Because anyone with a little technical knowledge, or technical help, could publish
a Web site at low cost, some analysts compared the moment to the invention of the printing press. Millions of Web [...]

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Surfin U.S.A.

For years Americans who accessed the Internet via cell phone networks looked across the ocean to Europe with envy. The speed of American cell phone networks badly trailed those in Europe.
But not anymore. Gradually, and with relatively little fanfare, Verizon Wireless has deployed a nationwide cellular data network in the United States that blows away [...]

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Tempted By the Apple?

Apple’s Macintosh computers claim only a tiny share of the overall PC market, but they are getting more consideration from Windows users thinking of switching than at any time in many years.
The daunting security problems that have plagued Windows have also prompted many of its users to take a serious look at the Mac. This [...]

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Handheld Hollywood

Apple Computer caused a big splash recently by introducing a new iPod that can play videos and by starting to sell videos, as it does songs, at its iTunes Music Store. This new iPod will very quickly become the bestselling handheld video device, mostly because people will buy it mainly for its music capabilities.
But as [...]

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Hasta la Vista

When it came out in 2001, Windows XP was a very nice operating system, far slicker and more reliable than previous versions of Windows. But XP is getting long in the tooth. It has been patched so often to plug egregious security flaws that it is barely recognizable as the sleek, stable product that debuted [...]

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Word in The Hand

As smart phones and personal digital assistants become more like little computers, they have begun to compete with laptops as portable digital workstations. For short or light-duty business trips, you can now leave the laptop at home and rely instead on a smart phone with a keyboard, such as a BlackBerry phone from Research in [...]

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Off the Beaten Browser

When the vast majority of the world’s PC users want to surf the Web, they fire up Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the free browser that comes included with Windows, now in version 6.0. They may not even know its name, since it’s usually the only, or at least the preset default, choice for browsing on a [...]

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Seeing Is Believing

When you think of videoconferencing, it might conjure up images of a cavernous corporate boardroom, its stiff executives sitting perched in front of costly cameras and viewing a slick video feed of colleagues in, say, Tokyo. Or perhaps you think of Joe Average staring into a cheap Webcam while squinting to make out a garish, [...]

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Apple’s New Core

Apple Computer is gradually replacing its entire Macintosh lineup. The cutting-edge company, which turned 30 in April, already makes the best-designed hardware, the best operating system and the most-secure machines in the consumer-PC market. Now it’s performing a brain transplant on the Mac.
Starting in January, six months earlier than promised, Apple began switching the Mac [...]

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Opening The New Vista

The release of a new version of Microsoft Windows is like the launching of a new aircraft carrier. It’s a major, ponderous event whose ripples affect everything around it. So Microsoft’s planned launch of the next version of its Windows operating system, called Windows Vista, currently set for January 2007, will be a big deal.
Vista [...]

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