Viewing profile — jbrodkin

When you cover a beat, a lot of times there are small stories that are worthy of a few paragraphs. But you often come across those stories while researching your beat and working o…

Either you work for PandoDaily or this is a very elaborate tongue-in-cheek comment. I'm certain you're the first and last person to ever say "Pando is to tech, what The Economist i…

That's true. There was a time when it wasn't easy for regular folks to find press releases and announcements, so there were all these magazines marketed to IT pros and tech executi…

I'm a tech journalist (for Ars Technica) so I figured I'd weigh in. First of all, I totally agree that there is tons and tons of awful tech journalism, and I regularly make fun of …

Great article. I would have spent 99 cents to read it.

The e-mail client in Windows 8 is the shell of a potentially good application—but Microsoft hasn't given it the proper care it deserves. With less than a month before Windows 8 hit…

Best Buy's surprisingly insecure setup process for new PC buyers involves customers writing down their desired login passwords, and handing them to a Best Buy employee.

Facebook is trying to expand its trademark rights over the word "book" by adding the claim to a newly revised version of its "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities," the agreeme…

Any update from Iranian users on the current situation? Are the blockages still in force? I covered this issue for Ars Technica on Friday: http://arst.ch/sg1 and would like to be a…

Microsoft is still a giant no matter how you measure it, but its position as the world's dominant provider of software to consumers is at risk. The primary factors (cough, Apple an…

More than a dozen Adobe products are not working properly on Mac OS X Lion, Apple's new desktop operating system, continuing Adobe's struggles to make its software compatible with …

Assuming you don't use applications that require PowerPC, upgrading from Mac's Snow Leopard to Lion could very well be the easiest OS upgrade you've ever met. Here are the results …

It was recently reported that Microsoft is now one of the top corporate contributors to the Linux kernel. But the reason for Redmond's recent flurry of contributions lies in the fa…

Microsoft's mobile chief Andy Lees turned a few heads this week by declaring that a tablet is just another PC, and that Windows 8 tablets will do everything Windows 8 desktops can …

You may already know Microsoft has forced five Android vendors to pay royalties each time they ship a device, and is suing Motorola and Barnes & Noble in cases that claim Android s…

One of Microsoft's hottest new profit centers is a smartphone platform you've definitely heard of: Android. Google's Linux-based mobile operating system is a favorite target for Mi…

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is a big fan of Google Chrome, and says the browser could replace the standard Firefox in future versions of Ubuntu Linux. "We looked at it clos…

25 years after it came out, it's still possible to run Windows 1.0 in a virtual machine. While you can't connect to the Internet, you can play Reversi and see the first version of …

Google's calendar service for home users and businesses has been plagued with missed email reminders for years, and Google is still struggling the fix the problem, according to sup…

With Red Hat on the verge of becoming the first billion-dollar company focused exclusively on open source software, it has attracted quite a bit of attention — from lawyers waving …

Despite concerns that Oracle would be unfriendly to open source projects acquired through the merger with Sun, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos says the MySQL code base is in fantast…

Microsoft raked in $16 billion in revenue and more than $5 billion in profit - but it wasn't enough to top Apple which is more profitable than Microsoft for the first time in a lon…

Facebook and HP have joined IBM and Red Hat in a Linux patent protection network that is acquiring rights to patents to prevent Linux-using members from being sued. The group is al…

Without much fanfare, Amazon officials last year built a supercomputer on the EC2 cloud service that placed 231st on the most recent Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomput…