Opinion

OSS helps hedge funds facing difficult times

Open source Marketcetera Trading Platform allows hedge funds and trading institutions to maximize control and minimize cost

Jul 15, 2008 2 mins

New apps for the iPhone

Looks like there's been a slew of new applications enabled by Apple's new iPhone, SDK and app store. While a lot of the emphasis is on communications and games, there's a surprising number of good business applications. First to market

Jul 15, 2008 2 mins

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition beta book

Sam Ruby is updating Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition for Rails 2.1 in multiple passes. His progress reveals something about the issues that others updating Rails 1 applications to 2.1 will need to address.

By Martin Heller

Jul 15, 2008 1 min

SOA. The Good and the Bad.

Download file…

Jul 15, 2008 1 min

Ooops, wrong switch

The foot patrol officer should have been an ally. Instead, he was our biggest security problem.

By InfoWorld Anonymous

Jul 15, 2008 3 mins

Data Management

“Workstation” 2008 – four months later

It's been a little over four months since I made the switch to Windows "Workstation" 2008 as my primary OS environment. Previously, I had struggled to make the generally sluggish and disappointing Windows Vista perform adequately as a

By Randall Kennedy

Jul 15, 2008 3 mins

Sole-sourcing: The art of the no-bid contract

No-bid outsourcing, aka 'sole-sourcing,' can expedite projects while cutting down expenditures

By Ephraim Schwartz

Jul 15, 2008 4 mins

The suspicious death of XP support

<P>As Microsoft slowly kills off Windows XP itself — <A href="/article/08/06/25/26NF-xp-plea_1.html">over the protest of many users</A> — it's still unclear exactly when Redmond will formally

By Ed Foster

Jul 15, 2008 5 mins

A hostile work environment in a foreign country

Dear Bob …I work as an English teacher in an Asian country.I am a middle-aged American. At the workplace, all the teachers are male, except me. I many times hear sarcasm and bashings by different teachers … about my religion, age and Americans ..

By Bob Lewis

Jul 15, 2008 4 mins

VMware changes affect the market and possibly partnerships

VMware's CEO has changed, Microsoft is leaping into the virtualization market with Hyper-V, VMware's stock price falls, so what are analysts and partners saying?

Jul 15, 2008 4 mins

OSS rescues lost laptops

Very cool OSS project for tracking and recovering your lost or stolen laptop. It’s a project from the University of Washington. This app sounds like a great way to address the 12,000 laptops lost per week at US airports. The UW website states:

Jul 14, 2008 2 mins

Microsoft Visio 2007 add-in for virtualization

Microsoft offers free Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Professional add-in for rack server virtualization to help you save on space and power.

Jul 14, 2008 2 mins

iPhone’s second coming in need of salvation

Apple's iPhone 2.0 launch was a disaster from start to finish. Does the '3G' in the phone's name really stand for 'greedy, ghastly, and godawful'?

By Robert Cringely

Jul 14, 2008 3 mins

Apple’s special sauce

The iPhone 2.0 and its App Store roil the multitudes while we get serious about Mac security

By Eric Knorr

Jul 14, 2008 3 mins

Whether upgrades are more than just vendor revenue streams

Dear Bob …In your column on progress ("A progressive view of IT," Keep the Joint Running, 6/23/2008) you said, "I've worked with quite a few companies that avoid application upgrades in much the way campers avoid rabid badgers,

By Bob Lewis

Jul 13, 2008 1 min

Sanbolic adds storage solution to Hyper-V

Sanbolic frees up Hyper-V storage with its Kayo File System

Jul 12, 2008 2 mins

VDIworks integrates with Microsoft Hyper-V

ClearCube spinoff VDIworks offers new desktop integration with Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center

Jul 12, 2008 3 mins

21 characters to paradise

Powershell gives SQL Server a huge boost

By Sean McCown

Jul 11, 2008 4 mins

Databases

Helping one of our own

This is an unusual request, but I hope you will take the time to read it and consider helping out. Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer located in Ukraine, has asked for help from MySQLers and I've decided to open this up to the community at

Jul 11, 2008 2 mins

Diane Greene’s removal and the aftershock

If you are tired of reading about the removal of Diane Greene as VMware's CEO, the good news is right now you don't have to read about it, but I will ask you to listen, just for a bit. You have to admit, this is probably one of the top virt

Jul 11, 2008 1 min

Who would buy Sun?

As Sun's market cap continues to decline, is a merger or acquisition with Fujitsu or HP in the cards?

Jul 11, 2008 3 mins

Is the Do-Not-Call list not working?

<P>Readers increasingly fear that the Do-Not-Call Registry is losing its effectiveness as telemarketers come up with more and more tricks to avoid being penalized. A reader's recent experience left a trail back to one culprit — his cable

By Ed Foster

Jul 11, 2008 3 mins

Microsoft to Zone Alarm: Bite me

Windows Update breaks Zone Alarm; Check Point issues a fix

By Robert Cringely

Jul 11, 2008 2 mins

Still more Rails profiling

37signals has been using New Relic RPM to profile its Ruby on Rails application performance and reduce their response times

By Martin Heller

Jul 10, 2008 3 mins

Make the perfect laptop greener

InfoWorld's proposed WorldBooks could set a higher standard for green computing I've got to hand it to InfoWorld Chief Technologist Tom Yager: He's come up with very slick, innovative designs for two laptops, the InfoWorld WorldBook Et

By Ted Samson

Jul 10, 2008 5 mins

Incentives for service reuse. Not good?

Todd Biske pushes back on the issues of incentives for reuse on my podcast covering Joe's blog post from last week. "The word in there that concerns me is 'incented.' Many advocates for reuse also recommend some form of incentive

Jul 10, 2008 2 mins

The road to mastery

I happened to pick up a copy of the book "Mastery: The Keys to Success & Long Term Fulfillment" by George Leonard recently after reading about it on a music blog. The book was first published in 1992 as a follow on to an article publish

Jul 10, 2008 4 mins

May I borrow those rose colored glasses?

Most days Matt Asay's blind love for OSS makes me laugh. Today is no different. In giving advice to Ballmer, Matt has the following particularly hilarious quotes: "Ballmer lacks the imagination to conceive of a world where Microsoft could o

Jul 10, 2008 2 mins

The Web development skills crisis

The proliferation of Web technologies has been much on my mind lately. Last week, I talked about the continuum of Web development tools, ranging from traditional browser-based technologies all the way to applications deployed as binary executables. T

By Neil McAllister

Jul 10, 2008 4 mins

Battle of the Steves redux: Microsoft targets VMware

VMWare may be about to face the Microsoft juggernaut, and perhaps become a boutique player like Apple.

By Bill Snyder

Jul 10, 2008 4 mins

Savor the fruit of others’ green IT success

Organizations are contributing to the greater good by making their datacenter best practices transparent

By Ted Samson

Jul 10, 2008 7 mins

SOA Successes out there? Good news, bad news.

I urge you to check out this article in Tech Target by Michael Meehan covering a recent report from the Burton Group. In essence, SOA is going well, sometimes, but it is not going well all of the time, and people are the issue. We've heard this

Profiling Rails

When I was comparing Rails IDEs, one of the things I looked at was profiling capabilities. The professional version of Aptana RadRails has a profiler; so does NetBeans. I didn't make too big a deal about profilers in IDEs, however, for two reaso

By Martin Heller

…and justice for all

If you've been following my tale of Google AdSense woe, you know that just under a month ago, Google disabled my AdSense account for no apparent reason. I didn't even notice for four days, as I was traveling at the time and buried in the mi

By Paul Venezia

Jul 9, 2008 4 mins

VMWare feels the heat

VMWare announced that their 2008 revenue growth outlook would be "modestly below" its earlier stated target of 50% and that CEO and founder Diane Greene would be resigning immediately. That double whammy sent VMWare stock tumbling by more t

Jul 9, 2008 1 min

Everybody’s got something to hide (except for me and my YouTube)

So a New York judge last week ordered Google to hand over 12 terabytes of YouTube user information to Viacom. Yes, we know what you watched last summer, or at least Viacom's attorneys soon will. The owners of Comedy Central and VH1 are

By Robert Cringely

VMware CEO replaced and the stock market reacts negatively

If you thought the news about Microsoft's Hyper-V release lit up the virtualization news wire, who would have expected what happened next? VMware's board of directors decided to take action and announce that it made a change in the VMware l

Fighting spam with Exchange 2007

Spam sucks. We all know that. There is no better way of putting it — especially if your company has ever been hit with 10,000 pieces of spam in a single day. It's not too far-fetched a scenario: According to Jupiter Research, the average e-mail

By J. Peter Bruzzese

Jul 9, 2008 4 mins

AT&T lays down the law for Apple

Apple, welcome to the handset business. Apple's sweetheart deal with AT&T, which grossed Apple an extra $360 for every iPhone sold, is over. AT&T will buy iPhone 3G wholesale, mark it up and discount (subsidize) it for new customers buyi

By Tom Yager

Jul 9, 2008 7 mins

Software Development Technology Industry

Microsoft vs. VMware: Rumble in the virtual world

As Hyper-V marks Microsoft's entry into virtualization, market leader VMware must consider new strategies for survival against the software behemoth

By Tom Kaneshige

Jul 9, 2008 5 mins

Nokia’s open source play

I didn't have a chance yet to write about this due to some recent travel, but better late than never. About 10 days ago, Nokia acquired the remaining 52% of Symbian that they didn't already own for a cool $410 million. Nokia also announced

Microsoft’s new tool secures offline virtual machines

For those of us in IT who lean more to the security side of things, Microsoft announced a new tool to help out within our virtual environments. The Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool allows IT professionals to update offline virtual mac

Stormy moves to GNOME Foundation

Via Luis Vila's blog: Stormy Peters has taken a new role at the GNOME foundation. With Stormy gone, who will convince Rod & SpringSource to join the newly announced OpenLogic's Partner Program? 😉 Best wishes to Stormy in her new r

Jul 8, 2008 1 min

SnapLogic heads into the clouds

Zack covered SnapLogic a few months ago. SnapLogic announced that SnapLogic for Amazon EC2 is now available. I wasn't completely sold on the need for a data integration solution "in the cloud". I mean, it's cool, but is there a cu

Jul 8, 2008 1 min

OpenLogic evolves their business model

OpenLogic announced an evolution to their "aggregated open source support" model today. According to the press release: "OpenLogic provides front line enterprise-grade support across the 400 open source packages in its certified librar

Is it SOA, or Not?

Download file…

Jul 8, 2008 1 min

Microsoft innovation, or not

Dear Bob …I have to take issue with your current column and the parallel it drew between Apple's use of PARC Labs' GUI and Microsoft's use of Apple's GUI ("Barbarians at the Gates," Keep the Joint Running, 7/7/2008).Ap

By Bob Lewis

Jul 8, 2008 4 mins

Krugle might be on to something

News of the Krugle Enterprise appliance product announcement making it to the "Top Stories" list on InfoWorld left me scratching my head. Like many of you, I knew Krugle to be a search engine for code snippets from open source projects. As

Admin pretends college IT security exists

In 2005, I attended a public gifted school. The school's computer admin decided we needed an update in the software used to select our classes, so he created a simple program where you type in your Social Security number as the password, then se

By InfoWorld Anonymous

Jul 8, 2008 3 mins

Data Management

A FOSS manifesto: We don’t need no stinkin’ users!

They make it so easy! Just when I think I've run out of story ideas for lampooning the FOSS movement, along comes some idiot with a taste for shoe leather to reenergize my rant engine. This time around it's Jason Harris, a developer in the

By Randall Kennedy

Jul 8, 2008 3 mins