Opinion

Xenocode brings Virtual Application Studio to the application virtualization market

Hardware virtualization is hot right now, there is no question about it. And with everyone buzzing and talking about "virtualization" in general, hardware virtualization is still getting the lion's share of the headlines. In many cases

Jun 6, 2008 3 mins

Windows 7: R.I.P.

Death throes. That’s how I’d describe the latest barrage of white papers from Microsoft. The company’s flagship, Windows Vista, is thrashing around in the shallows like a wounded animal, fighting in vain to escape the inevitable. As

Jun 5, 2008 3 mins

StackSafe updates its Test Center sandbox application

One of the more difficult challenges that an IT department faces is releasing a new or updated application into the wild. Placing an application into production requires a lot of time and money invested in order to ensure that everything plays well t

Jun 5, 2008 2 mins

Can Palm regain its developer edge?

Palm isn't dead yet! That's the word from Palm CEO Ed Colligan, speaking at the recent media launch of the Palm Centro in Australia. To hear him tell it, the once-pioneering handheld maker is set to come roaring back onto the stage with new

By Neil McAllister

Jun 5, 2008 5 mins

Mobile CRM: Beyond the BlackBerry

Mobile CRM has been a marginal technology for years. Once a user developed an appetite for more than the basic calendaring and address book functions of the RIM BlackBerry, additional sustenance was in short supply. But now, a Silicon Valley startup

By Bill Snyder

Jun 5, 2008 4 mins

Hail to the energy chief

Who should be responsible for your company's energy initiatives? Your organization may be grappling with the answer to that question. Controlling IT energy consumption has become a high priority for many companies as a way to lower costs, mainta

By Ted Samson

Jun 5, 2008 5 mins

HP: Goodbye copper, hello lasers

Imagine, if you will, an IT system connected not by copper-based electrical wiring but by optic laser communication links. Called photonic interconnections, the technology would make it possible to eventually fit hundreds of processors on server syst

By Ted Samson

Jun 5, 2008 2 mins

Risky Business: Predicting that open source vendors will ultimately win

I wrote this a few weeks ago and held it back until now. I decided to publish this somewhat in response to Roberto's post. While Roberto is trying to find a band-aid to the problem, I think we need to rethink the root cause of the problem. I&#03

Jun 4, 2008 3 mins

Going Git

Those of you who are open source developers have probably already figured out that I'm going to talk about Git, the version control system, and that no, I don't actually mean "Git going" for most of you. If you're already usi

By Martin Heller

Jun 4, 2008 3 mins

Flex 3 Cookook

O'Reilly's Flex 3 Cookbook seeks to help developers put their arms around the massive Flex development environment that is touted to help web developers embed flash tools without the pain of learning to develop in native Flash. Designed to

By Brian Chee

Oracle Database 11g Advanced Compression testbed, methodology, and results

Available as a separately licensed option for Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, Advanced Compression is a way of writing data to disk so that it takes up less space

By Sean McCown

Jun 4, 2008 15 mins

Databases

Gates’ final farewell

Bill Gates gave what will likely be his last public speech this week at Microsoft's Tech-Ed developer conference in Orlando, Florida. You can view highlights of the presentation online here. While I don't think there was anything particular

Red Hat exec named EnterpriseDB CEO

Former VP and GM of North American sales at Red Hat, Ed Boyajian, has been named CEO of EnterpriseDB. Current CEO, Andy Astor, will be shifting roles to lead EnterpriseDB's business development as EVP. Very interesting that EnterpriseDB was able

A question about Agile Business Change

A bit of context: The following inquiry asks about the "Agile Business Change" methodology I introduced in Keep the Joint Running, ("Fruitful business change," 5/26/2008). It's an attempt to extend Agile-style software develo

By Bob Lewis

Jun 4, 2008 2 mins

Do not attempt to adjust your Internet

It's been a wild week here in Cringeville. My blog posts on YouTube v. Viacom and the FCC's proposal for a pørn-free wireless Internet have inspired raging debates about copyrights and corporate rights, free speech and free sex. He

By Robert Cringely

Jun 4, 2008 4 mins

Pay-as-you-go SOA

Download file…

By Dave Linthicum

Hone Active Directory for efficiency before deploying Exchange 2007

An efficient Active Directory topology is a must if you're planning to deploy Exchange 2007. Unlike its predecessors, the latest version of Exchange doesn't use Routing Groups to handle messaging traffic; rather, it works directly off of th

By J. Peter Bruzzese

Jun 4, 2008 5 mins

AMD shakes PC notebook status quo

At the logic level, MacBook, the benchmark for success in mainstream notebooks, is unremarkable — indistinguishable from every PC notebook built on Intel Core 2 and its chipset-integrated graphics. Why, then, can't anyone with the same parts li

By Tom Yager

Jun 4, 2008 4 mins

Relieve gas pains with telecommuting

With gas prices continuing to soar (they've already crossed the $4 per gallon mark in my area), some companies are trying out a new strategy to help employees save some money while reducing their carbon emissions, according to Reuters: offering

By Ted Samson

Jun 3, 2008 1 min

Auctions vs. fixed price buying

Very interesting post from Nick Carr regarding eBay's auctions vs. fixed price selling. In a nutshell, Carr, and BusinessWeek, state: "…eBay's auctions are "a dying breed." Buyers and sellers are reverting to the traditiona

Jun 3, 2008 2 mins

MidnightDBA

I've posted this a couple times on my other blog, so I thought I'd go ahead and plug it here too. I've started up a new site with screencast tutorials on SQL Server and windows related topics. It's completely free so go download a

By Sean McCown

Jun 3, 2008 1 min

Databases

Getting into consulting

Dear Bob …I too am trying to get in to the consulting business … well a type of consulting I guess. I have a side-business aside from my day-to-day job where I repair computers/networks and consult on the addition of technology in to an organizat

By Bob Lewis

Jun 3, 2008 3 mins

Disaster recovery combination and Xiotech’s Virtual View

For many of us, we've moved beyond server consolidation and we are heading toward using virtualization to help with disaster recovery. And also working toward that goal, three products were recently combined to run just such a test – using DataC

Jun 3, 2008 1 min

Is it hot in here or is it me?

Like a lot of IT groups we don't manage the physical plant (building, physical security, power, and such). We are lucky enough to work very closely with our facilities department, though, and have them set up with our paging system. When our tem

By InfoWorld Anonymous

Jun 3, 2008 2 mins

Data Management

Desktop Windows: Is it time to “cut and run?”

Cutting and running. A bad idea for chainsaw massacre movie villains, scissors-wielding grade school students and the occasional foreign incursion. But what about IT? At what point does further investment in a platform or technology cease to make sen

Jun 3, 2008 3 mins

The essentials of global team building

Most of the talk about globalization focuses on the promise of expanding markets and opportunities. But unless part of your global go-to-market strategy includes something called "cultural competence," your plans could go awry. I spoke with

By Ephraim Schwartz

Jun 3, 2008 4 mins

Barracuda sneakwrap has a nasty bite

<P>Can hardware be licensed? More specifically, can a hardware vendor validly bury usage restrictions like resale prohibitions deep in hidden sneakwrap licenses? And what if that hardware comes with a hefty helping of open source software – do

By Ed Foster

Jun 3, 2008 5 mins

Hard to make a living in tools

In recent years, the software tools business has been a tough one. While Borland was a high flyer in the 80s and early 90s, the tools business was commoditized by and large by Eclipse over the past few years. The company is a shadow of its former sel

Jun 3, 2008 3 mins

SMB system management SaaS-style with Paglo

Another day and another conversation with an interesting company offering large-company services to a small-business market. I've already written about Splunk, and there will be more to come soon, but Paglo is doing the same sort of thing throug

By Curt Franklin

Jun 2, 2008 5 mins

OpenLogic and SourceLabs should merge

I haven't really followed SourceLabs for a little while now, and yet, strangely enough, they've been doing new and interesting things even without me watching ;-). SourceLabs "Self-Support Suite for Linux and Open Source Java" cau

Win a Kindle from Concentrated Tech

You would have to be living under a rock to not know about the Amazon Kindle… and yet I finally got the chance to play with one last week. Oddly enough, it wasn't at all what I expected (in other words, it wasn't another LCD eBook device)

By J. Peter Bruzzese

What happened to that e-payment?

On Friday, I mentioned that a Web hosting provider locked a pro bono client of mine out of its Web site for non-payment and scoffed at the client's receipts from PayPal. My client thought they had paid; the provider thought they hadn't: it

By Martin Heller

Get ready for the (pørn) free Internet

It seems obvious now that Google is not going to save us from the rapacious clutches of the Phonecablopoly. After securing a safe haven for its Android operating system, the goo-goo-Googlers bowed out of the FCC's wireless spectrum auction, leav

By Robert Cringely

Jun 2, 2008 3 mins

VMware goes after virtual machine performance with B-hive acquisition

VMware has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire California-based B-hive Networks for an undisclosed amount, although some have reported that the deal was in the tens of millions of dollars. The acquisition is expected

Innovation through IT architecture

An interesting statistic was recently provided in the Gartner Group's 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs – 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward "IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy." This serves the theme of th

By Tony Bishop

Jun 2, 2008 5 mins

The carrot and the stick

My, how tech culture has changed. A decade ago, the archetype of success was the audacious hero at the vanguard of a limitless technology boom, hatching brilliant schemes and basking in the spotlight. But if this year's InfoWorld's CTO 25..

By Eric Knorr

Jun 2, 2008 3 mins

The myth of “MinWin” and a thinner Windows 7

Urban legends are strange creatures. Even when they're exposed for what they are – tall tales seemingly "legitimized" through frequent retelling — people continue to believe the lie. Case in point: "MinWin.&

Jun 2, 2008 5 mins

VMware updates VDI solution – Virtual Desktop Manager 2.1

VMware has recently announced a minor update to its connection broker solution, VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.1. VMware has been working on the update for the last few months after initially launching the product earlier this year. The techn

Leostream drops P2V and focuses on the connection broker

After receiving a $3 million Series A round of funding, Leostream seems to be making a few more changes within the company. Until recently, Leostream was customer-funded. And according to the company, the decision to raise a relatively small round of

Jun 1, 2008 3 mins

Is BPEL irrelevant?

Some time ago I wrote about the issues with the new 2.0 version of BPEL, namely backward capability. Many of those issues, according to people using the technology, came true. The movement to 2.0 was somewhat of a challenge. However, the challenges a

By Dave Linthicum

Jun 1, 2008 2 mins

Evolutionary differences between men and women

Dear Bob …Nobody has mentioned this (in the discussion about diversity in the workplace):In general –1) Men are more aggressive, and women are more defensive2) Men crave power and women crave attention. This was brought about by evolution.To prote

By Bob Lewis

Jun 1, 2008 2 mins

Put my data in the cloud? Let me think about that…

It was brought home to me recently, once again, how vulnerable we are to data loss. This time, it isn't a local hard disk crash: it is most likely a problem with a hosting provider's accounting system. In any case, the provider locked my (p

By Martin Heller

May 30, 2008 2 mins

A slightly crippled printer

<P>When you find a product you really like, it can be a real downer to discover that a feature you had every reason to believe was there has deliberately been withheld. Such is the experience of one reader with the Dymo LabelWriter 400 printer

By Ed Foster

May 30, 2008 3 mins

Geeks in heaven at Google I/O

Everyone's favorite search engine wrapped up its Google I/O developers' conference Thursday, and what a show it was. Over the two days of the conference, new tools were unveiled, new services were launched, and enough Google Kool-Aid was se

By Neil McAllister

May 30, 2008 3 mins

Geek Week: Comcast’s hit by vandals; an end to HP spying scandal

Throttle this. Bit Torrent blocking Comcast got an education in the ways of the Net this week when hackers gained access to the ISP's domain name records and redirected Comcast.net traffic to a vandalized site. Teenage hackers with the handles &

By Robert Cringely

May 30, 2008 2 mins

Is American Airlines more boneheaded than United?

In the race to provide the worst possible customer service, American Airlines has announced a policy that is so boneheaded they make United Airlines look absolutely mediocre. Back in February, United announced that they would start charging passenger

May 30, 2008 1 min

SOA Gets SaaSy?

Joe McKendrick does a great job in following up on my post on "Pay-as-you-go SOA." "There are some examples of the on-demand model for SOA-enabling tools and platforms emerging. In a podcast last year, Dana Gardner, along with Anrai O&

By Dave Linthicum

May 30, 2008 2 mins

Xen Trademark policy is being updated again

If you've been watching Citrix lately, you have probably seen the Xen branding and the product push with the XenApp, XenDesktop, and XenServer product lines. Good marketing to be sure, capitalizing on the Xen name in the virtualization space. Bu

May 29, 2008 5 mins

Microsoft to logo applicants: Support Windows 7…or else!

Lessons. Lessons. Everywhere you look, there are more lessons to be learned from the Vista debacle. Don't overpromise. Don't under-deliver. Get the ISV/IHV community involved early and often. And most importantly, make sure that whatever ch

May 29, 2008 2 mins

Living with my Palm Centro

After two months of living with my Palm Centro, I am finding that it just doesn't have the battery life to get through a full day of travel. If I'm in the office, or out at a couple of customer or partner meetings, no problem; I can survive

May 29, 2008 1 min