Opinion

Neocleus secures $11 million with endpoint virtualization

Endpoint virtualization security solutions provider Neocleus said it has raised an additional $11.4 million round of funding led by existing investors Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds. The company plans on using that additional funding to hel

Microsoft’s Application Virtualization 4.5 reaches RC status

The latest version of Microsoft's application virtualization technology is now ready after reaching release candidate status. The technology comes from the 2006 acquisition of Softricity and their SoftGrid application. And with this new 4.5 rele

ROI, not eco-friendliness, a bigger selling point for green tech

Interest in green technology is out there, but price remains the No. 1 barrier to wider-spread adoption, far more so than skepticism that green tech is really good for the environment. Those are among the survey findings released this week by Green F

Hyperbac is the bomb

After all these years of using Quest LiteSpeed for my backups in my InfoWorld lab, I've made the decision to switch to Hyperbac

Memo to Broadcom sales

FROM: Broadcom Human Resources Team TO: Sales management I hope everyone had a good time at our recent offsite meeting and no one got arrested! Ha ha, just kidding about that. At any rate, I wanted to summarize some of the new changes in policy that

Worst registrar Xin Net finally starting to respond

My posting Worst registrar Xin Net crackdown requested generated some email I'd like to share with you. First, a note from Dick, a security professional, about these illicit pharmacy sites: Amen, Martin!  A search for &#822

Geek Week: Firefox security nixed, Apple Safari fixed

Download this. Eight million Mozillians woke up the morning after Download Day to find they'd developed a killer hangover — >a security flaw in Firefox 3.0 that could allow hostile code to take over their PCs. It took a grand total of five h

When to blow the whistle on a security violation

Dear Bob …I recently started a new position as a contractor. I've only been here for a month and so am still learning the environment, the people, and so on. I'm not in a position where it would be wise to rock the boat.However, another t

Teleblend’s terrible terms

<P>In our continuing search for the worst Terms of Service (ToS) on the Internet, we've seen some pretty nasty legalese. Now a reader points out VOIP provider Teleblend's "<A href="http://www.myteleblend.net/tc.htm"&

TechEd Reflections: Microsoft, SMB, and success

Having a few days to reflect on the events at TechEd Professional this year, there are a few things that stand out -– some are fairly obvious, and some less so. 1. Microsoft has done some very good things for small-business IT I've been wo

The new CIO playbook

According to a Smart Enterprise Magazine CIO report, three-quarters of today's CIOs help their companies develop new products or services. In my previous blog I noted that in Gartner Group's 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs, 85 percent of CIOs

TechEd 2008 Product Highlight: K2

There were a few booths at the recent TechEd 2008 held in Orlando Florida that caught my attention. One that stopped me in my tracks (thanks to a really cool robot standing out front) was a company called K2. I had a chance to chat a bit online after

Sun, employees find big savings from Open Work telecommuting program

Sun recently released some rather interesting data about the success of its Open Work Program, whereby employees work from home or a flexible office, either part-time or full. The findings further make a believer out of me that organizations, employe

SOA governance Dos and Don’ts

SOA Governance is one of those things in the world of SOA that's largely misunderstood. I can understand why, as the vendors are defining it differently. However, as SOA problem domains become more complex, typically more than 50 services, the n

RMS & Clipperz offer freedom in the cloud

I previously wrote about Clipperz because I really think Marco and the team at Clipperz have a great idea. To summarize, Clipperz has technology for "zero-knowledge web applications" which they have applied to an online password manager as

Musings on AdSense and DoS attacks

So 72 hours have elapsed since I contacted Google about the abrupt suspension of my AdSense account, with no response. I've gone through the logs on the servers that run the three sites I had AdSense ads on, and the statistics are underwhelming.

Red Hat the latest proof that cloud computing is serious business

You know a technology is getting some traction when imitators jump into the game. That's the case these days with cloud computing. Just this week, Amazon added Red Hat's JBoss to its EC2 cloud computing platform, and an established hosting

Nokia: Open source developers should play by our rules

I was a little surprised to hear Nokia vice president of software Ari Jaaski's comments last week. Not long ago, Nokia got off to a great start by embracing open source for its mobile device business. But now, according to Jaaski, it's the

Are green IT premiums worth the cost?

Organizations are investing in green computers — that is, machines that are energy efficient and built in an environmentally responsible manner — at ever-increasing rates. Sometimes they pay a small premium to do this. Is it worth it? They seem to

Imation SSD versus Western Digital SATA: Performance test results

In today's shootout between Imation Pro 7000 solid state drives and Western Digital's VelociRaptor SATA disk drive (see "Product review: High price makes high-speed Imation SSDs a tough sell"), Mario Apicella finds that SSD is in

SOA Lite?

Download file…

Parallels announces the first Mac server virtualization platform

On Tuesday, Parallels Inc. released Parallels Server for Mac, the first server virtualization solution for the Intel-based Mac. This talked-about product has been in development for more than a year now, and it runs on any Intel-powered Apple hardwar

Worst registrar Xin Net crackdown requested

Garth Bruen of KnujOn recently sent me the following note: Martin, For the reasons detailed in the attached memo I have respectfully recommended to ICANN that the Registrar Xin Net Technology Corporation be issued a Breach Notice and be prevented fro

Do no evil, continued

So it's been six days since Google disabled my AdSense account without warning, and 48 hours since I filled out their response form. I've heard nothing from them in that time. Based on a comment on my original post, I started digging around

Andy Bechtolsheim at the EBC

Now that MySQL is part of Sun Microsystems, I occasionally get invited to present our overall strategy to customers at the Sun Executive Briefing Center. Like everything else at Sun, it's usually referred to by it's TLA (three letter acrony

Reddit goes open source

When a PR contact from Reddit contacted us about "exciting news", a mixture of workload and getting sent press releases not remotely related to open source led me to ignore the request to meet with Reddit. My bad. The news is that Reddit ha

Weighing Hyper-V against VMWare

The buzz about Hyper-V, Microsoft's entry into the world of serious server virtualization, has been building for quite some time. This past week at Microsoft's mammoth North America TechEd 2008 conference held in Orlando, Fla., there was a

Bloggers to AP: I got your feed right here

Those darned bloggers. They just keep messing everything up. Now it's the news industry that's unhappy with them. To quote MSNBC's Helen A. S. Popkin, The Associated Press took a grandiose Facebook-style faceplant last week when it att

Digital TV foreshadows erosion of Internet rights

With regard to the free exchange of information over the Internet, we, the people, have mostly managed to hold our ground. We can thank activists, hacktivists, legislators saying "no, thanks" to money from the entertainment lobbies, and for

Ed Foster isn’t the only one allowed to gripe

No questions, no answers, just some griping:1. This shouldn't annoy me but it does: Every time I go to Microsoft's site it invites me to install Silverlight. Can't someone invent a "No" cookie to respond to all offers unless

Is open source only good for undermining competitors?

I usually try very hard to not write about IBM. But the following from Matt Asay requires a reply. Regardless, IBM isn't in the habit of open sourcing technology in which it has a lead or at least a strong position, such as it does with DB2. IBM

IBM to open source DB2?

There's a story on CNet about IBM considering open sourcing DB2. While there are no immediate plans, IBM UK's director of information management software Chris Livesy has said that market conditions may make it unavoidable. "Looking at

Microsoft updates SCVMM 2008 infrastructure planning and design guide

Microsoft's SolutionAccelerators series has updated its Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) Guide for its virtualization management solution: System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008. If you aren't already a member of the IPD

Lies at the laser printer

A company I used to work for printed its invoices on a laser printer using preprinted forms. It was one of my staff members' responsibilities to make sure these were printed and delivered to accounting every morning, so they could be mailed out.

Handicapping the Windows 7 alternatives

It's been an interesting couple of weeks on the desktop OS front. Microsoft's big reveal regarding Windows 7 and its Vista heritage sent many of my blogospheric contemporaries scrambling to justify their myriad off-base predictions. Having

Report refutes claims of dire need for more H-1B visas

In an address at the National Society of Black Engineers Region VI conference, Bill Gates perpetuated the belief that the United States is not graduating enough science and engineering majors and that that the overall performance of high school stude

Five lessons of a datacenter overhaul

A datacenter makeover and migration can go wrong in many ways. Do as we suggest, not as we did.

Pimp my datacenter

What happens when you build the datacenter you really want?

Standalone OSS revenue to reach $4.8B by 2012

Dave reports that IDC's latest report "Worldwide Standalone Open Source Software 2008–2012 Forecast: A Preliminary View" estimates that the stand-alone OSS market will grow from $1.73B in 2007 to $4.83B in 2012. That's a 23

The Open Source Census gets a shot in the arm from Microsoft

I was pretty excited when OpenLogic announced the Open Source Census. A key feature of the census was a tool that scanned respondents' servers to determine which open source products/packages were actually being used. Anonymous data from these i

Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.1 Beta

As Microsoft continues its virtualization journey, one of the valuable tools that they provide virtualization consumers is the free Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit. And now, the toolkit is being upgraded to Version 3.1 — currently in

Finally, additional virtualization certifications on the way

As virtualization continues to advance its way into the datacenter, one common complaint that many organizations raise is the fact that there aren't a lot of "virtualization experts" in the industry. And more to the point, there aren&#

Do no evil?

Like many, many folks the world over, I've taken to using Google as my one-stop shop for Web elements. Ads through AdSense, advertising through AdWords, and analytics through Google Analytics. The tools are very well designed, fast, and provide

Buck and Dan

So I went to TechED last week and had a really good time

East Coast vs. West Coast

I can’t believe I just did that

I've had my share of stupid moments. Abandoning the wrong doc file. Frying a sound card by creating a feedback loop (I think I still have hearing loss from the shriek). Altering a router configuration until Vista considered the router…

Spyware bill cloaks a mini-UCITA

<P>The holy grail for the software industry's political muscle has long been what in <a href="/articles/uc/xml/02/01/03/020103ucwhatis.html">UCITA</A> was called "electronic self help&quot

A conference cynic gets a TechEd boost

I can remember my first conference. It was wonderful! So many sessions, so much to learn, exhibitions of different new products, meeting speakers and having them sign their books … . It was an exciting time for a tech geek like myself. So, what has

Virtualization users looking forward to Mac OS X guests

The day is near for consumers to be able to virtualize multiple copies of their beloved Mac OS X Leopard Server operating system on top of a single Intel-based Mac machine. The VMware Fusion team announced on its company blog that VMware Fusion 2.0 i

Jurists gone wild

A federal judge in Los Angeles has recused himself from a obscenity trial after a trove of dirty pictures were found squirreled away on his personal web site. Sounds scandalous, no? But the reality is both more complicated and more interesting. First