Chutzpah: n. (Slang) — 1892, from Yiddish khutspe “impudence, gall” from Heb. hutspah. The classic definition is that given by Leo Rosten: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”

You would be hard-pressed to find a corporation that [more...]

You know those ubiquitous TV commercials for Windows 7?

The ones that feature “regular people” claiming that Windows 7 was their idea?

Well, if Microsoft would actually ask some real “regular people” what they want, they might find out that most people don’t really care about [more...]

With everything that we’ve learned over the years about its never-ending list of serious security vulnerabilities, I find it really hard to believe that anyone would choose to run Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser any more.

Personally, I switched to Mozilla’s much-more-secure, free and open-source Firefox browser — first in Windows, and then in Linux — on the [more...]

Regular readers of this Journal know that I’ve enjoyed the freedom, power and security of using Linux full-time instead of Windows since July of 2006.

And that I’ve been happily using Debian Linux since December of 2007.

Specifically, I use the Debian “Squeeze” (Testing) branch with the [more...]

As the year — and the decade, depending on when you think it started — draws to a close, it seems like everybody’s churning out lists of what they think were the best and worst things of the year, decade, lifetime, etc.

Here are a couple of the latest ones: [more...]

Every once in awhile, someone asks me for help, but I can’t really help them.

A perfect example of it happened this morning.

A woman I know logged in to the State of Florida’s [more...]

After all of the advertising hype.

It’s really all about money.

Their job is to figure out ways to turn [more...]

Today, Microsoft Windows 7 is officially released to the public.

The Windows Secrets Newsletter has a whole bunch of reasons why you should switch to Windows 7. [more...]

Regular readers of this Journal know that I don’t have much good to say about “cloud computing.”

At the top of the list of other criticisms that I’ve described here in the past, I see cloud computing as a [more...]

It’s not Microsoft’s first effort at releasing a Windows security application, but it may be the company’s best effort so far.

Or it may be a useless piece of junk that’s going to put users at risk by [more...]