R.J. Howard Computing

R.J. Howard Computing is a web development firm catering to small businesses and non-profit organizations.

We cover the following geographical areas:

• Western Coachella Valley (Palm Springs to Palm Desert, plus DHS)

• Morongo Basin (Yucca Valley and surrounding communities)

• San Gorgonio Pass (Banning, Beaumont, Cabazon)

Areas of expertise include:

• Web Site Design & Development

  • General Information Sites

  • Club & Non-Profit Sites

  • WordPress (either as a blog or CMS)

  • Art and Photo Galleries

  • Classified Advertising

  • E-Commerce

• Web Site Hosting

• Pay-Per-Click Advertising Support

• MySQL Databases (for web sites)

Don’t you deserve a degreed, certified, experienced professional developing your business’ web site?

Apple put a charge in its iPod line Wednesday, but it remains a holdout in the "all you can ear" music subscription market. Apple revamped its flagship player, the iPod touch, so it's now essentially an iPhone without the phone. It also brought buttons back to the iPod shuffle and a touchscreen to the iPod nano. In addition, while the company remained true to its a la carte mode of delivering music, it is dipping its toes into social networking with the new Ping service it added to the latest version of its music software, iTunes 10.

Samsung has unveiled its much-discussed Galaxy Tab Android-powered tablet at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, Germany. The device runs Android 2.2, has a seven-inch display, and focuses on connectivity and entertainment. It also enables video conferencing and can be used as a mobile phone. "This is a true alternative to the iPad and is vastly more capable," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld. "It showcases what Android devices can do and is a strong counterpoint to the built-in limitations of the iPad."

"What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?" That's the question Alice asks at the beginning of Lewis Carroll's classic adventure. Perhaps Mr. Carroll knew more than he realized. 3D Movies. Multitouch screens. iPads. Everywhere you look, consumers increasingly demand more of an "experience" when engaging with their content, be it a book, a movie or their computers. This change in expectations has put pressure on the print world to deliver a similar experience in that medium.

You can't win them all, as the saying goes, and that apparently includes Linux fans. To wit: Despite the best hopes of many of us in the community, the man suing Sony over the removal of the "other OS" feature from its PS3 has apparently lost his case. The bad news is that the man won't get the money he had requested to compensate for an upgrade to his newly crippled PS3; the good news is that he reportedly wasn't forced to pay Sony's legal bill to boot. Linux bloggers were none too pleased with the news.

Apple on Wednesday made a host of announcements focused around music and entertainment. These included a revamped version of its Apple TV device, iTunes 10, a refreshed iPod family and new versions of its iOS mobile operating system. Overall, the announcements came as relatively little surprise, as most major points conformed with speculation and rumors that had arisen on the Web over the past few weeks. Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs drew cheers from the audience repeatedly as he made the announcements on stage, Cupertino may still face a long struggle ahead.

HP on Wednesday announced a restricted beta release of webOS 2.0, the operating system it acquired when it purchased Palm earlier this year. This is open to developers belonging to Palm's Early Access program. The beta adds several new features, and apps built with it will be released to all carriers that offer Palm devices, Palm spokesperson Alex Hunter told TechNewsWorld. Hunter added that webOS 2.0 will be available by the end of the year and "will be the most significant update we've done since launch."

The number of businesses moving toward virtualization is growing constantly, and together they will lead to an important change in the face of IT, according to to VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz. Speaking at his company's VMworld expo on Tuesday, Maritz told his audience that the focus will change from hardware efficiency to operational efficiency, that a new infrastructure will evolve, and that IT must figure out how this infrastructure will be consumed and paid for, among other things.

Cloud computing, technology delivered over the Internet, has become a hot area in the last few years. The technology marketplace moves at breakneck speeds, but it is still shocking when innovation almost completely wipes out squabbles like those over open source vs. proprietary software. "In a cloud world, source code is almost irrelevant," Matt Asay recently wrote at GigaOm. Tim O'Reilly was among the first to point this out in 2008, when he said that "Architecture trumps licensing any time."

In my dumber days when I ran Microsoft Windows, I was more concerned with backup programs. After I moved into the Linux desktop, I became much less paranoid about system failures. The Linux environment just never crashed. That does not mean that I never make backup copies of my critical data files. It's just that I do not worry about the Linux OS crashing to the point that I have to reinstall everything from scratch. That was the nudge with Windows that pushed me to migrating to Linux.

Google is reaching out to help those who just don't have the time to wade through hundreds of emails each day. The company unveiled Priority Inbox, an application that aims to automatically identify important incoming messages and separate them from more general, tedious emails. "It's about time," said Scott Steinberg, president and CEO of Digital Trends. "The vast majority of our emails are not pressing concerns. It shouldn't be difficult to prioritize these."