A salesperson walks into your office today and tells you that you have to buy a new, pre-built, expensive desk for every one of your employees. You have to buy a new desk today and replace it every three to five years. You see, you don't really own the desk; you're simply purchasing a license to use the desk.

Unless you have fully embraced the virtualization movement, you probably have more than one machine in your home or office, particularly if you run more than one operating system, and you probably have more than one keyboard and mouse on you desk. If you would like to regain some desk space without having to purchase a KVM switch, x2x may be the solution.

In part III today, we focus on the desk accessory, popularly known as the widget, applet, mini-app, gadget, or whatever the fashionable term is these days.

A customer service trouble ticketing (or help desk) is an information and assistance resource that helps the resolution of computer related problems.

OTRS is an open source software system for managing a wide range of business processes, from Help Desk to Support Center to IT Service Management. Based on a set of functions built on a "trouble ticket," OTRS is built to allow support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, support desk and many other departments to react quickly and responsibly to inbound inquires.

The Front Desk will be manned by volunteers to act as mentors and advisors for derivative developers asking how to contribute work back to Debian.

Do you have multiple computers on your desk? Is one of them a laptop that is sat off to the side a bit? Have you ever wished that you could get rid of all but one of the keyboard / mouse combos that clutter your desk or that your laptop was easier to control? If so then Synergy is the answer to your woes.

About five years ago, it was clear to me that personal computers would disappear… in our pockets. Along many other analysts, I could see computers getting smaller and smaller, and mobile phones getting busier and busier. Eventually, my dream-prediction said, it wouldn’t quite be “one computer on every desk” but a much more exciting “one computer in every pocket, and one monitor/keyboard paid on every desk”.

Last week, my fellow Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall published a piece headlined The cost of free, in which she called it "ironic" that "advocates of free online content" (including me) "charge hefty fees to speak at events". […]
You see, the real mistake Lindvall made was in saying that I tell artists to give their work away for free. I do no such thing.