Minimal IT newsletters - open standards and free and open source software
Free and open source software is a viable alternative to commercial products. Once you have switched to free software, you are unlikely ever to switch back.
Cheap IT helps small companies compete on a technologically equal basis with large companies. As well as cutting costs, cheap IT helps you beat your competition with innovative products.
Are you stuck for ideas for presents this year? Give your loved ones Linux!
What do Ozzy Osbourne and Tim Berners-Lee have in common? Whatever it is, it could be disrupting your IT department very soon.
Big documents like user manuals are really hard to write using Microsoft Word. DocBook is a well-established standard that makes writing big documents much easier.
Inkscape and The Gimp are full-featured open source graphics programs. Even if you are not a professional artist or designer, they have plenty of features that you will find useful.
I use free and open source software all the time, but I have not open sourced my own products. Am I an open source hypocrite?
Offline electronic forms are a useful part of many IT solutions. The XForms standard meets requirements that many commercial products do not meet.
If you develop or manage web sites or IT systems, you need to know about XForms.
Standards are too important to be monopolies. We need to introduce more competition into standards so that they can be adopted more widely.
If you do not use a password manager like KeePass, you should.
The latest formats make it much easier to export data and reports to Excel, even if you do not use Microsoft technology and do not have the latest versions of Microsoft Office.
The XML processing language XSLT is a powerful and flexible solution to many development needs.
Latest newsletter:
Don't ignore your database, use it
Programmers beware - you will suffer serious performance problems if you ignore the database and do too much data manipulation in the code.
Read full newsletter
System quality management
System quality management helps you implement high-quality systems, manage
existing systems proactively, and improve failing systems.
Find out how
Copyright © 2005-2008 Minimal IT Ltd. All rights reserved.
Minimal IT: research, training, consultancy and software to reduce IT costs.