Opinion

How Microsoft lost the office file format battle

Score one for the good guys: Last week, Microsoft announced that not only would Office 2007 Service Pack 2 support the ODF (Open Document Format) standard, but the productivity suite would not offer support for the ISO standard version of Microsoft&r

By Neil McAllister

May 29, 2008 4 mins

Pointing fingers: The darker and lighter sides of Windows 7

It's a classic "good news, bad news" kind of story. Microsoft is finally giving us some hard information about what Windows 7 will look like. And there's much of interest, including wider use of touch-screen technology (more about

By Bill Snyder

May 29, 2008 4 mins

The path towards a language specification for Ruby

I've been a little out of touch lately — crazy accounting project for school — but was able to carve out a little time to chat with the guys at Engine Yard who are doing some cool things with Ruby. Engine Yard employs Evan Phoenix, the founder

May 29, 2008 2 mins

The million-dollar datacenter question: Tier II, or not Tier II?

Imagine, if you will, that you're planning a brand-new datacenter. Ah, the excitement! The anticipation! But oh, the costs … Yes, they're going to be high, but at least you're now in an enviable position: You can determine your reali

By Ted Samson

May 29, 2008 5 mins

Citrix Synergy was filled with virtualization excitement

I was fortunate to attend the inaugural Citrix Synergy conference in Houston, and I was amazed with all of the virtualization news that came out of the conference. It was full steam ahead virtualization, covering desktop, application and server virtu

May 29, 2008 1 min

Is open source really a more disruptive competitor than Google to Microsoft?

I just read Mary Jo Foley's post titled: "Ozzie: Open source a more disruptive competitor than Google". In it, she quotes Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: "Microsoft has built up a culture of crisis," Ozzie told conference attende

May 28, 2008 2 mins

Curl 6 outperforms Flex 3 on CPU-intensive benchmark

As I've discussed in the past in my reviews of Curl 5 and Curl 6 and in this blog, the Curl RIA environment compiles its code to give it near-native performance. A year ago I thought that Adobe Flex 3 might be efficient enough to close the gap w

May 28, 2008 3 mins

The upside of discrimination

Dear Bob …Regarding "Diverse views," (Keep the Joint Running, 5/19/2008), good message. There is even more value in having diverse views. Imagine the enormous talent and contribution potential lost from narrowing the pool of talent applie

May 28, 2008 1 min

Whose Tube is it, anyway?

Frankly, I thought Viacom's $1 billion law suit against YouTube was dead. YouTube has been kicking people off its site left and right for posting copyrighted material, even if they didn't always deserve it. And Viacom had started allowing i

May 28, 2008 4 mins

It's 8:30 am. The night before was the Wild Wednesday conference party where drinks were free until the wee hours of the morning. For all intents and purposes, the conference attendees should all be sleeping late. But here I stand in a room pack

By J. Peter Bruzzese

May 28, 2008 4 mins

One switcher’s tale: Once you go iMac, you never go back

I've been relating the story of a professional colleague who, some months ago and under semi-voluntary circumstances, made the switch from Windows to the Mac. Her twisted arm now nicely healed, she has not only switched, she has an unshakable c

By Tom Yager

May 28, 2008 5 mins

Microsoft, Home Depot pull a GM with its failed book-scanning effort

They say give a man a fish and he has food for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will have food for the rest of his life. Well I say, teach an American car company how to make an SUV and it will have lots of money for a day, a year, or even several y

By Ephraim Schwartz

May 28, 2008 4 mins

Windows 7 gets all “touchy-feely”

What a difference a week makes! Just last Friday I was dissecting Microsoft's latest pro-Vista marketing spin and lamenting the lack of corroborating evidence to my "ready for Windows 7" missive over at the Windows Sentinel blo

By Randall Kennedy

May 28, 2008 3 mins

Motorola holds U.S. patent for solar cells in wireless device displays

Apple has filed a patent for "integrating solar cells into portable devices by placing them underneath the layers of a touch-sensitive display," according to the IDG News Service. It certainly sounds like a promising application of solar en

By Ted Samson

May 27, 2008 1 min

Isn’t being a loner okay?

Dear Bob …While — as usual — you make a fair number of good points (in "Diverse views," Keep the Joint Running, 5/19/2008), there's one big thing I think you're overlooking: not everyone wants to have a sense of belonging in w

May 27, 2008 3 mins

Microsoft to support open formats

Microsoft has pledged to support the ODF file format as well as Adobe's PDF file format in forthcoming versions of it's Office suite expected in the first half of 2009. While this is good news for improving compatibility between office suit

By Zack Urlocker

May 27, 2008 1 min

New research report shows increased spending on virtualization

Despite a sharp slowdown in U.S. business software spending, an April 2008 survey report from ChangeWave Research shows that virtualization may be spared as virtualization software spending has increased. The fact is, a troubled economy is probably y

May 27, 2008 2 mins

Security Technology Industry

I can’t fix stupid

I was called to work on a Windows 2003 server for a customer. When I got on site, they explained that the original server setup was an 80GB hard drive with 2 partitions. They set the system partition at 8GB and used the rest for storage. Not too bad,

By InfoWorld Anonymous

May 27, 2008 3 mins

Data Management

Open source on the wire

It’s already on your servers, why not running your network?

By Paul Venezia

May 27, 2008 10 mins

You can book a victory for resale rights

<P>We all basically understand how we are legally allowed to treat one type of copyrighted product: a book. With software and other digital products, though, it's not so clear. But a terrific court decision last week at least suggests that

By Ed Foster

May 27, 2008 5 mins

Limits to diverse thinking

Dear Bob …I've been part of my company's internal Employee Opinion Survey process, working with rank-and-file feedback to develop action plans intended to improve survey results. I have reservations about our methodology for the whole pro

May 27, 2008 3 mins

Microsoft expands desktop virtualization after finalizing Kidaro acquisition

Microsoft has finalized its acquisition of Israel-based desktop virtualization startup Kidaro and said that it plans to incorporate Kidaro's technology into the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) during the first half of 2009 under the n

May 26, 2008 2 mins

Memorial Day parade

In Andover, Memorial Day still has some meaning, even if it does always fall on a Monday. My two favorite images from today's parade: Revolutionary war re-enactors firing a round always leads to spectators covering their ears, or their children&

May 26, 2008 1 min

Parallels launches a software certification program

No matter what virtualization platform or technology is chosen, a common question most adopters ask is, "What exactly can I virtualize?" As virtualization technologies become more mainstream, the question gets asked more and more, "Wil

May 26, 2008 3 mins

Turns out Twitter’s not so ‘tweet’

Bad news for Twitter. The original micro-blogging service (now available in brief, mega-terse, and vowel-free versions) has been accused of aiding and abetting bad behavior on the Web. I am shocked, shocked I tell you. In case you've n

May 26, 2008 3 mins

The Pay-as-you-Go SOA Challenge

One of the things I've been thinking about this holiday weekend is the way that people are paying for SOA technology. I mean, if you've selected a vendor, you're paying for the technology before you know it's both the right fit an

By Dave Linthicum

May 26, 2008 2 mins

Take the InfoWorld Tech Celebrity Trivia Quiz

Our first question: Is "tech celebrity" a contradiction in terms? Answer: Could be. The continual lament of all of us who work in this industry is that no one understands us — with mainstream coverage like David Brooks' "The Alph

By Eric Knorr

May 26, 2008 2 mins

Microsoft trashes Windows XP

It's like politics. You start out by focusing on your ideas, how you want to improve things, maybe change the world a bit. But as the campaign slogs on, or as the legislation stalls, or the opinion polls begin to dip, you lash out. First at the

By Randall Kennedy

May 26, 2008 3 mins

ICANN notifies “worst spam offenders”

I've posted twice, here and here, about the KnujOn research into registrars that harbor the bulk of Web sites advertised in spam emails. Now ICANN has published an announcement about the actions it is taking in response to KnujOn's reports:

May 25, 2008 3 mins

With virtualization growth comes increased demand for jobs

Virtualization continues to be a hot topic around the IT industry. If you aren't at least aware of it, you probably haven't picked up a magazine or a newspaper in the last three years, don't use the Internet much, or you have little to

May 25, 2008 3 mins

LinMin provisioning and Marathon Technologies HA

This podcast edition takes a look at bare-metal provisioning from LinMin – used to try and reduce energy footprints and minimize labor costs. And then we'll take a look at what Marathon Technologies is up to on the high availability, fault toler

May 24, 2008 1 min

On blog comments…

After reading the comments to Tom Yager's discussion of the AMD roadmap, I was going to rant, but xkcd says it all. (This is from http://xkcd.com/202/)….

May 23, 2008 1 min

Negative Feedback on EBay’s Feedback Changes

<P>It takes both buyers and sellers to make a market. But many experienced eBay sellers are up in arms this week over changes eBay has implemented to its feedback system that appear tilted heavily in favor of buyers, and perhaps also in favor o

By Ed Foster

May 23, 2008 4 mins

Matt Asay gets frustrated

In The Register's Open Season podcast #17, Matt Asay admits he's beccome frustrated with the amount of venting that occurs periodically in the open source community. Matt's been a champion of open source for years, yet he still got fla

By Zack Urlocker

May 23, 2008 2 mins

Geek Week: Apple fans want 3G now, iPhones get ‘wow’ed

Slouching toward Cupertino. It's not every day the Second Coming gives you advance notice, but the resurrection of the Jesus Phone — in 3G, for the first time ever! — is now (unofficially) slated for June 9. Or so says gadget blog Gizmodo, quo

May 23, 2008 3 mins

My kid could code that

If you believe some major tool tools vendors, programming is a thing of the past and computing is as effortless as riding a bike

By Neil McAllister

May 22, 2008 4 mins

Why open source needs an attitude adjustment

Recession be damned. The first quarter of the year saw a record $203.7 million of venture capital flow to young open source companies. You'd think that would be a cause for celebration, but for too many members of the open source community money

By Bill Snyder

May 22, 2008 4 mins

Cassatt links server-power management with real-time demands

Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the high costs of maintaining and cooling servers: A mid-tier $2,500 server can cost as much as $2,020 to power and cool annually, according to the Uptime Institute. Thus, demand for ways to curb those exp

By Ted Samson

May 22, 2008 5 mins

Microsoft and ODF

Interesting commentary from Microsoft's Jason Matusow and Doug Mahugh, and IBM's Bob Sutor on today's announcement that Microsoft will support read/write to ODF 1.1 in Office 2007 SP2. Jason writes: "For years, I have vocally disa

May 22, 2008 3 mins

Apatar’s open source data integration and ETL

I just spent some time looking at Apatar, a company that's offering an extract, transform, load (ETL) and data integration solution under the GPL (with commercial support subscriptions available also). The really cool thing is that Apatar provid

May 21, 2008 2 mins

Bungee Connect: Platform-as-a-Service

On Tuesday, I had a long telephone conversation with Lyle Ball, VP of Marketing, and Brad Hintze, Director of Product Marketing of Bungee Labs, who also gave me a Web demo of Bungee Connect. I've been on the Bungee Connect developer beta since M

MokaFive launches its virtual desktop solution

The desktop virtualization market has a new solution in the mix from California based startup MokaFive. On Tuesday, the company launched its MokaFive Virtual Desktop Solution (formerly LivePC). The product has been in development in one form or anoth

RIM’s bold move

Ok, the headline's a cliché. I apologize for that. But given RIM's announcement of the new Blackberry Bold (AKA Blackberry 9000) at their developer conference, what would you expect? RIM has had the number one position in Smartphones

By Zack Urlocker

May 21, 2008 2 mins

Mashups/SOA Pushback

Wow, you never know until you post. I had a couple of e-mails…okay…let's call them nasty grams around my last post, people who did not want the term "mashups" sullied with the term "SOA." Nobody would go on the

By Dave Linthicum

May 21, 2008 2 mins

Wall of shame: 10 worst registrars

My posting 20 registrars control 90% of illicit domains, says Knujon last Monday drew quite a bit of approval, and also a criticism of KnujOn's report for being incomplete. A more complete report that includes the methodology, the statistics, an

May 21, 2008 4 mins

A statistical view of reverse discrimination

Dear Bob …I'd like to propose a (serious) hypothetical case for a moment [on the topic of diversity, introduced in the most recent two Keep the Joint Running entries: "Managers who have discriminating tastes," 5/12/2008 and "Div

May 21, 2008 4 mins

AMD’s server roadmap burns through Intel’s fog

Intel CEO Paul Otellini's memorable "shame on us… mea culpa, we screwed up" March 2007 speech to Morgan Stanley investors came after his company's marketing fog machine could no longer conceal the truth that, depending on your

By Tom Yager

May 21, 2008 7 mins

Unleashing the power of PowerShell

A primer on how Microsoft's command-line interface can help Windows admins better manage, well, just about anything

By J. Peter Bruzzese

May 21, 2008 4 mins

Is SaaS just throwaway software?

Is SaaS (software as a service) really destined to replace on-premises software in the enterprise? The smart money seems to say so. Industry analysts certainly say so, and if you've noticed all the on-premises vendors launching SaaS versions of

By Ephraim Schwartz

MicroHoo, Facebook and You

Don't look now, but there's a secret cabal at work conspiring to lock you out of the public Internet. That, at least, is the hyperventilated opinion of Robert Scoble, who not so long ago was just another Microsoft employee with a