Feature Articles
Web Site Myths
In the modern world, a company without a web site is like an office without a telephone—you’re constantly out of touch. But there are many myths and misconceptions regarding the design process and unrealistic expectations about what a web site can and cannot do for a company. More...
Who Owns Your Computer?
When you purchased your computer, you paid for the monitor, the keyboard and the optical mouse. You also bought a box that contains your CPU, floppy, hard and CD-RW drives, with just enough RAM to make it all work.
No one disagrees; you own your computer’s hardware; “Your” operating system (OS) and software operate under different rules primarily because of a hard choice faced by IBM in 1980. More...
The Future of Windows
This past August, Microsoft's new version of Windows, Vista, went into its first beta release—many of its features are subject to change—so its not a bad idea look at the road ahead and get a sense of what we’ll need to do to get ready for this new operating system (OS). As always with a major Windows’ release, users at home or in small office/home office (SOHO) settings will have to weigh the costs of implementation versus the benefits. More...
Why Web Standards Matters
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the group that establishes the standards for web pages—rules for the syntax of the code, rules for how the site should be structured, rules for how heading tags should be used...
There are a lot of rules. More...
Technophobia
You never forget something that scares you and I was terrified.
It was 1988 and what petrified me was that new computer sitting on my desk, blank monitor staring at me, daring me to fail.
It was my first, an IBM-compatible PC-clone, as we called them in those days, made by Samsung. It had an 8088 chip, about 500 kilobytes of memory and, this is why it seemed like such a modern, nearly cutting-edge machine: it had a hard drive. A 36-megabyte hard drive that just seemed huge.
The monitor was in color—two of them: amber and black. Also fairly modern was the operating system: MS-DOS 3.3. Made by Microsoft, who had just stopped spelling their name MicroSoft, it was not user-friendly, a term that did not exist in those days, nor was it easy. More...
My Computer, Part I: Hardware
I offer the following material not to brag (though, ain't she purty?), but as a source of information. The computer I use is a perfect embodiment of the guiding principles of NextTech Magazine. This computer is strong, fast, durable and damn pretty. More...
Updated: November 18, 2005