Opinion

Microsoft wares can help you muzzle the gas guzzle

Put a dent in your travel expenses with technologies for remote desktop administration and collaboration

By J. Peter Bruzzese

Aug 20, 2008 6 mins

The RIAA’s comic crusade

The recording industry and its allies are using a new tactic to shape the minds of would-be file swappers: comic books. No, we're not kidding. Cringely has more.

By Robert Cringely

Aug 20, 2008 5 mins

Microsoft makes great strides with virtualization licensing and support

After years of pressure from the virtualization community and quite a few digs from VMware via blogs or report write-ups, Microsoft officially updated its licensing and support rules to be more "virtualization-friendly."

Aug 20, 2008 4 mins

Xen Community proposing the latest feature set for 3.3

The upcoming release of Xen 3.3 is near and the Xen Community is sharing some of the latest features for review. The open source Xen hypervisor continues to attack the challenges being faced in the virtualization community.

More Joel On Software

Apress publishes another collection of essays on software development

Leveraging Web APIs for SOA

Download file…

Aug 19, 2008 1 min

Cheap labor? You get what you pay for

In the early days of Java development, we all watched as many consulting companies around the globe sprouted like weeds along a busy highway. They all enticed their potential clients with prospects of less expensive and better designs. Who wouldn&#03

By InfoWorld Anonymous

Aug 19, 2008 3 mins

Data Management

Is Microsoft finally throwing in the towel on Vista?

The signs all point to Microsoft abandoning Vista and moving on to Windows 7.

By Randall Kennedy

IT needs to get lean on manufacturing

It's time for MRP to turn down its reliance on forecasting and get real

By Ephraim Schwartz

Aug 19, 2008 5 mins

E-mail deliverability: when critical isn’t reliable

Your e-mail may go undelivered and you'll never know it … and you may not be able to figure out why!

By Stephen Hultquist

Careers

Exchange advice is everywhere … so where should you turn?

I've been looking into the world of Exchange for quite some time now. You begin to see the real solid locations you can go to for free advice, the locations where it is worth it to pay a bit to get the knowledge you need … even the books and D

By J. Peter Bruzzese

BusinessWeek on Open Source at Red Hat

Whitehurst is focused on growing Red Hat's top line; will open source purists cheer him on?

By Savio Rodrigues

REST and XML Web services

Tim Bray is clarifying his position on REST versus XML Web services and SOAP

By Martin Heller

Interview with Brad Rowland on Symantec’s Endpoint Virtualization

Symantec sees the opportunities available within the virtualization market. The company acquired Altiris SVS and AppStream to create its Endpoint Virtualization Group, and they've recently acquired nSuite to help round out their offering. I sp

Aug 18, 2008 10 mins

Legal teeth for open source license

Artistic license terms enforced by US Court of Appeal

Aug 18, 2008 1 min

When customers aren’t particularly important

Architectural lock-in can make pleasing customers irrelevant to business success.

By Bob Lewis

Modern times

I'm writing this while I'm on vacation. Sound familiar? Too many of us in the industry agree to stay tethered to our jobs under any circumstances. Me, I'm just being dumb — I could have delegated the writing of this…

By Eric Knorr

Aug 18, 2008 3 mins

Bursting the Vista sales bubble

Our Windows Sentinel tracking data shows that 35 percent of mainly enterprise-class users "downgrade" their Vista systems to XP

By Randall Kennedy

Aug 18, 2008 3 mins

SOA Governance Monday: It’s not about technology

The fact of the matter is that SOA governance is really a people-and-process thing.

Aug 17, 2008 3 mins

San Francisco adds to new gaffe, password-protects previously open internal site, but not all of it.

After I reported on the publicly-visible internal DR site for San Francisco's IT department, they added authentication requirements. Sort of. It's a Microsoft SharePoint site, and the SharePoint extensions are still visible. If it were me,

Aug 17, 2008 1 min

How and when to speak ManagementSpeak

Adding diplomacy to difficult messages.

By Bob Lewis

Aug 16, 2008 4 mins

The Terry Childs case on pause, and an apparent new security issue for the city of San Francisco

The city and Childs' lawyer are in their respective corners, preparing for the upcoming trial

Aug 16, 2008 2 mins

VMware completes a patch fix; Surgient eyes the future

One of the big news items this week had to be the startling revelation many folks had on the morning of August 12th — their VMware ESX virtual machines couldn't be powered on. And they couldn't figure out why! As VMware worked to complete

Aug 15, 2008 1 min

Microsoft goes for the gold

Microsoft achieved Olympian feats in Beijing this year — but not exactly what they intended. Cringely has more.

By Robert Cringely

Aug 15, 2008 1 min

Speaking gigs this fall

Where to catch David Linthicum live on stage.

Aug 15, 2008 1 min

Where to place your bets on SOA governance

SOA governance is going through a bit of a, let’s say, normalization.

Aug 15, 2008 2 mins

Court rules that open source software is protected under copyright law

Could the ruling open the door to open source companies joining the anti-piracy Business Software Alliance?

By Savio Rodrigues

Aug 14, 2008 1 min

Smartphones, SaaS, cloud computing and Bigfoot

Companies like Soonr are demonstrating next generation mobile collaborative apps

Aug 14, 2008 2 mins

Empowering the software auteurs

Can Mozilla Labs harness the creative spirit to breathe new life into open source software?

By Neil McAllister

Aug 14, 2008 5 mins

Apple, Amazon cloud snafus leave Microsoft sitting pretty

When MobileMe falls on its face, and The Linkup goes belly up, Microsoft gets the last laugh — and the outlook for cloud computing gets a bit cloudier.

By Bill Snyder

Aug 14, 2008 5 mins

Fight rising fuel surcharges with e-signatures

Fidelity's adoption of e-sigs is a ringing endorsement of the technology's waste-reducing business benefits

By Ted Samson

Aug 14, 2008 5 mins

Microsoft creates virtualization launch event and user group

Microsoft's Hyper-V and its other virtualization technologies help push the company further into the virtualization community — a new product launch event and user group could be the start.

Aug 14, 2008 2 mins

Web 2.0? The APIs/services are here today for SOA

Learn how to find the APIs/services you'll need.

Aug 14, 2008 2 mins

Programming Amazon Web Services

Martin recommends James Murty's book *Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB* in addtion to Rick Grehan's article and the AWS documentation

By Martin Heller

Aug 13, 2008 1 min

Intel engineers stage CPU coup

The Intel Developer Forum debut of the Nehalem CPU sets Intel up for some well-earned engineering props. Nehalem isn't just catch-up with AMD's Barcelona. It's Intel back on track, engineering again as though it has competition

By Tom Yager

Aug 13, 2008 4 mins

No business like show business

There's yet another silly fight brewing in the blogosphere, as TechCrunch and Demo launch dueling beauty pageants for Webbish startups. Is this good for anyone (other than Demo and Michael Arrington)? Cringely has a few thoughts.

By Robert Cringely

Aug 13, 2008 3 mins

Ben’s next gadget…

What's the perfect ultra-portable?

Aug 13, 2008 2 mins

Test-driving desktop software as a service

With Vista and desktop apps accessible via the browser, it's only a matter of time before MS reigns the space

By J. Peter Bruzzese

Aug 13, 2008 6 mins

A complaint about Microsoft’s poor documentation

It starts with a difference between how engineers and business executives see the world

By Bob Lewis

Aug 13, 2008 3 mins

IaaS PaaS Software Development

Hooking your apps into Amazon Web Services

Unsure how to get started with AWS? Some sample code will illustrate its relative simplicity

By Rick Grehan

Aug 13, 2008 5 mins

When Thinking Service Design…

Within the world of SOA, services are the building blocks, and at the lowest level of the stack.

Aug 13, 2008 5 mins

VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 bug causes morning jitters

VMware customers woke up this morning to one of their worst nightmares: Virtual machines on their ESX or ESXi 3.5 servers with Update 2 would not power on or VMotion because of a bug in the update software.

Aug 13, 2008 4 mins

Pimp my datacenter wrap-up: Photos and words II

<p> There's more to see from the Pimp My Datacenter project. In this slide show, Brian Chee walks you through the highlights of the electrical upgrade </p>

By Curt Franklin

Aug 12, 2008 1 min

This is why we have labs

If you haven't heard that VMware ESX 3.5 U2 inadvertently expires globally today, you probably aren't running VMware. It appears that VMware mistakenly left a hardcoded timeout in the U2 code. It should have been stripped before the code we

Aug 12, 2008 2 mins

Is open source really unusable?

Why generalizations about open source product usability don't apply to vendor-sponsored open source projects

By Savio Rodrigues

Aug 12, 2008 3 mins

The day small business changed

Today is a big day in small business computing history: it's the 27th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM 5150 — the IBM PC.

By Curt Franklin

Aug 12, 2008 1 min

Upgrade complete

The answer to my SQL Server 2008 x64 upgrade problem

By Sean McCown

Aug 12, 2008 3 mins

Databases

Working with Vista, revisited

So after spending a week tied to an HP Compaq 2710p tablet running Vista Business Edition, I can say that it's actually quite usable and that overall, I've enjoyed the experience. Vista on this laptop has been relatively stable, ab