Opinion

Access encourages stupidity

I saw an HBO special called 'Hacking Democracy' the other day, and it talked about this lady who was able to get a hold of Diebold's source code for the software that runs its voting machines. Actually, this is a move that may land Die

Ruby on Rails IDEs

I'm gearing up to write a comparative, multi-platform review of Rails IDEs. Before I freeze the list, I'd like to know what other people are using themselves to develop Rails sites. Currently I'm considering these 8: Ruby in Steel Apta

Summer tech conferences

There are a ton of good technical and open source conferences coming up in the next few months. If you haven't made plans, this is the time to go to your boss and make your case! Here are a few of the upcoming conferences. The only problem is th

Are you ready for Windows 7?

Don't expect a slimmed-down OS: If you can't run Vista, you won't be able to run Windows 7

Mashups exploding: SOA is along for the ride

It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that the mashups are moving from something that's conceptual and fun, to something that's productive and businesslike. The fact is developers are leveraging mashups to solve all sorts of bus

It isn’t only men who create harassing environments

Dear Bob …Commenting on your recent article, "Managers who have discriminating tastes," Keep the Joint Running, 5/12/2008) I really like working with women engineers as most of them are very detail oriented (a must-have attribute for engi

The realities of SOA

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Captain Obvious and his ship of fools

I work for a company that acquired two of its competitors about a year apart. The first purchase was a company much like us that I'll call GoodCo. The integration was not without issue, but overall, it went smoothly. And so I was lulled into a f

Are you ready for Windows 7?

"Hold the line!" That's the new rallying cry for the core Windows development team. Add new features. Tweak existing ones. But whatever you do, don't make Windows 7 any slower or fatter than Vista. [ Monitor your own Windows perfo

It’s a bumper crop of VM goodness!

Life in the blogosphere has its ups and downs. Some weeks there's little to write about. Others, you're inundated with too many juicy story ideas to count. Last week was all about virtualization. After savaging Microsoft's Hyper-V Achi

Encourage community growth around a healthy OSS project?

I just posted this as a comment to Josh's reply to my reply to his JavaOne 2008 pitch: Josh, come on dude, you're lumping me in with VCs now?? 😉 About 1.5 years ago, I used to argue that a project isn't "a true OSS project"

VoIP for SMB: A conversation with Speakeasy

My conversations with vendors, suppliers, and partners continues with a telephone call (a traditional POTS telephone, in my case) with Bruce Chatterley, CEO of Speakeasy. VoIP, either on its own or as a key component of unified communications, is an

HP, AMD, and XP SP3 — three things that don’t go well together

Microsoft finally released XP's Service Pack 3 to the masses last week, which is a bit like telling someone on death row you finally got around to fixing their car. Then it turns out your car may not really run, and if you have the wrong model y

More on motivating a clock puncher

Dear Bob …Publicly flogging the clock-watcher (see "Rights, privileges, fairness and equality," Keep the Joint Running, 5/5/2008) by denying him a Crackberry is unlikely to get the improved performance you seek. Likewise, explaining to th

Enterprise startups of choice

We're highlighting this year's batch of top enterprise tech startups at an interesting time. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, equity investments into venture-backed companies stayed above the $7 billion mark in the first quarter of 2008

Criminalizing ToS Violations

<P>Many of us question whether sneakwrap agreements like the Terms of Service (ToS) of most websites should be considered a binding contractual agreement. But several stories in the news have shown a disturbing trend that goes even further — t

Dell and HP workstation performance and power consumption

In the world of quad-core workstations, the high end truly reflects no compromises — price included. These systems are so capable, many use cases will be perfectly satisfied with the high value low end.

Dell and HP workstation features at a glance

HP xw4600 HP xw6600 Dell Precision T5400 Dell Precision T7400 Processor Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5430 2.66GHz Intel Xeon E5430 2.66GHz Intel Xeon 5482 3.2GHz Number processors 1 2 2 2 Cores per processor quad quad quad quad L2 cach

5 components of an IT economic model

One of the steps identified in Real Time Enterprise Blog “9 Steps to a Virtual Oriented Utility” was the requirement to create an economic model. As we have been working with many CIO’s, we are finding that the discipline of creatin

Check Point now offers virtualized browser protection

In the virtualization world, 'security' is a word that is coming up more and more these days. And there are many companies showing up that are attempting to marry the two together. Check Point Software Technologies is one such company, anno

Microsoft updates Virtual PC and Virtual Server products

Around the same time that VMware updated its Workstation product with a new refresh build, Microsoft also updated both of its hosted virtualization platforms, Virtual PC 2007 and Virtual Server 2005 R2, with Service Pack 1 updates. As we all know, Mi

VMware refreshes Workstation 6.5 Beta 1

In case you missed it, it was only a few days ago that VMware updated their popular desktop virtualization platform, Workstation, to a newer Beta release – Workstation 6.5 Beta 1 Refresh. With the new Beta 1 Refresh comes a new Community Portal page

Tricks from the Vista masters

Did you know that roughly 400 tons of dirt, gravel, rock, and sand have to be searched to locate 1 carat of diamond? And that diamond, when located, must be cut by an expert and polished just right before being placed in a setting that complements it

SQL Injection stuff

There's a fabulous videocast on SQL Injection on SSWUG.org. Stephen has a regular online TV show he does, and this week, he's talking about the SQL worm that's been going around that destroys data. If you don't know much about SQL

Legit sites imitate phishy behavior

<P>It's getting next to impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys on the Internet. And, as several readers have pointed out recently, it's not just because the scammers are getting better at masquerading as legitimate entitie

Geek Week: CNET gets swallowed, Yahoo proxy fight to follow

I think, therefore Icahn. Just when you thought the Yahoo-Microsoft deal was kaput, in steps everyone's least favorite uncle Carl Icahn to muck things up. In a letter to the Yahoo board, the curmudgeon billionaire scolded board members, then ann

Dell and Sun offer new servers for virtualization with AMD Quad-Core processors

Virtualization platform vendors like Citrix, Microsoft, Parallels and VMware are constantly trying to update and increase the capabilities of virtualization, but they aren't alone. Hardware manufacturers are also taking a stab at improving virtu

Avoiding Vista?

InfoWorld recently ran an article by Eric Lai of our sister publication ComputerWorld called Developers explain why they're avoiding Vista. I'm afraid that for me, and probably for most of you, this falls in the &quot;D'oh&quot

Dissecting the AT&T memo on the iPhone limit of one to a customer

By making a few assumptions here and there let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on behind the scenes at AT&T and Apple as it concerns their iPhone strategy. The internal memo, shown on the AppleInsider site, says that customers

Winning with the family

Last week I learned that Sun has put its 3 database groups (Java DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL) under Marten Mickos. First off, who knew Sun had such a broad database portfolio???? Second, smart move putting them all under Marten. In speaking with Marten&#03

Why Fake Steve Jobs is worth reading

Every now and then I wander over to Dan Lyons' Fake Steve Jobs blog. If you haven't you should take a look some time. Whether you think his caricature of Steve Jobs as a tyrianical artiste is funny or not, you may be surprised by the insigh

Part II: SOA vendors focus too much on integration and not enough on architecture

I seem to have hit a nerve with my last post "SOA vendors focus too much on integration and not enough on architecture." You can read the comments, but the reaction was: Vendors…no like (based on IP addresses). End users…confu

Parallel processing calls for a Fortress mentality

When you're the inventor of one of the most successful and influential programming languages of the last decade, what do you do for an encore? Judging by demos at the recent JavaOne conference, if you're Sun Microsystems, you invent another

Green IT numbers don’t lie

Stark statistics shed light on the needs driving green computing If a picture's worth a thousand words, how many are statistics worth, I wonder? I have some numbers this week that speak volumes as to why so many companies have green IT on the br

A conversation with Numara Software

One of the interesting things about my job is that I get to talk to many people from a lot of different companies. Some of these conversations will turn into Test Center reviews; many won't. It dawned on me that I was being selfish in not sharin

Is “the community” hurting the OSS business model?

I had an interesting discussion with Marten Mickos at JavaOne last week that I've been meaning to blog about. I was disappointed that MySQL decided to put encryption and compression backup into MySQL Server (GPL license), versus including those

How badly do you want a MacBook Air?

At least partially in response to my coverage of TopCoder last week, I have been getting a spate of programming contest and community announcements. ZocDoc is an API for doctor appointments. Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) is a grid-base

Is Apple eating into Vista?

Interesting to note that Apple recently posted 51% growth year-over-year in their computer business. While Apple still has a modest 6% market share in the computer business according to IDC, that's double what it was a few years ago. Under Steve

IT spooning

Have you ever been working on a problem and had a colleague pull his chair over to watch you? And the more you do, the closer he gets because he has to see your screen. And you actually end up spooning in your chairs. Well, let me tell you, it's

YouTube, copyrights, and copy wrongs

The longer I stay in this business, the more I think I should have listened to my mother and become a copyright attorney. Don't get me wrong — I love digging for dirt and punishing the technologically wicked, but just think of the employment op

Motivating a clock puncher

Dear Bob …I agree with your perspective on clock punching Jim ("Rights, privileges, fairness and equality," Keep the Joint Running, 5/5/2008). But in the best of all worlds (which seems rare to me), the manager would be proactive instead

Microsoft opens Beta of its Offline Virtual Machine Servicing tool

Microsoft has opened up the Beta program for one of its latest virtualization tools, the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool. The tool aims to address one of the new IT challenges created by virtualization – how do I keep my offline, stored or tem

It’s quiet, it’s green, it’s the rack o’ my dreams

When I refer to my lab, I use the term loosely. It's a 10-by-10-foot working space whose smooth walls channel the sound from every device with a fan straight into my ears. I share that room with every server I use and test. Of these, an 8-core

Hopes for the future of Office 2007 collaboration

The new Office servers I've discussed in recent weeks are diverse, opening up a wealth of opportunities: online forms, anywhere/anytime collaboration, advanced presence detection and VoIP technology, project management solutions, business intell

Microsoft + Yahoo => Google?

Visual Studio 2008 SP1: To beta, or not to beta?

As I mentioned in An old Visual Studio problem rears its ugly head back in February, I've been looking forward to SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and NET Framework 3.5. Why? These are supposed to fix most of the problems I've been having with Vi

SOA vendors focus too much on integration and not enough on architecture

We've seen the hype: "We're a SOA tool, and we're here to help." However, most SOA vendors out there don't understand the value of SOA, nor how to approach SOA. They focus on the tactical, and not the strategic. Why? Bec

Looking at enterprise architecture

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What is it you do again?

In the late 1990s I worked for a Midwestern manufacturer. We ran a very small IT shop for the size of our corporation (8 people for a company grossing a third of a billion dollars annually, across 10 locations), and all of us in IT were expected to w

Hyper-V’s Achilles’ heel

Update: Since first posting this entry I've been in communication with Microsoft about the BSOD I encountered with the ATI installer. In an effort to assist them in their investigation, I recreated the scenario that caused the failure and procee