Opinion

IT benefits from big vendors’ slow on-demand plays

I won't exactly eat the words I wrote when I said the spate of BI acquisitions a several months back meant boutique vendors were on their way out, leaving IT with far fewer choices in the future. Instead, due to the fast maturing SaaS side of th

Suing Sony

Trying to get your warranty honored on a laptop with a cracked LCD display is generally as easy as running through a brick wall. The presumption by the manufacturer is always that the damage is due to customer abuse. But one reader recently succeeded

Marc Fleury’s next project?

Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss and former open source bad boy posted an intriguing update saying he's hanging out with Digium co-founder Mark Spencer, who is now CTO. Who knows what they're up to, but I have a sense it's more than just

The vendor that could

It was recently brought up to me that while this blog is listed as a general DB blog, I tend to write more about MS than any other vendor. I agreed that that was the case. Then the person asked why, since there was so much other DB news out there. To

Stupid marketing tricks

So my phone rang one day last week and, naturally, there was a computer on the other end. But this wasn't a political robo-call trying to confuse me into voting for the wrong candidate. This was a commercial robo-call from a Web site called Merc

Laws to allow hands-free use of cell phones while driving will increase accidents

After watching a driver blithely drive down the wrong way on a one-way street while said driver was also talking on the phone, leads me to believe people aren’t as multifunctional as they would like to believe. So it is with grim terror that I

20 registrars control 90% of illicit domains, says Knujon

I recently received a note from Garth Bruen, who with his father runs the anti-junk-mail site Knujon (no junk, backwards). Knujon has so far shut down over 50 thousand junk mail sites. The complete message follows: Martin, KnujOn is preparing for a

SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards

SourceForge.net is opening up its awards program to all open source projects this year for the first time (vs. only projects at SourceForge.net). The open nominations period runs until the middle of June. Finalists will be announced and voting will c

Are lateral assignments a good idea?

Dear Bob …I think you expressed the point about "Jim", the marginal employee well (see "Rights, privileges, fairness and equality," Keep the Joint Running, 5/5/2008).What about the flip side where management only grants "la

The long good-bye to the browser

I can't believe I'm still using a Web browser. I spend as much time peering into its depths as I do reading and writing e-mail in Outlook — maybe more now that certain Google apps have become part of my…

Microsoft Response Point: A phone system for the small business

Sometimes, small business seems to be neglected in many offerings that Microsoft provides. True, the Small Business Server is an attempt to fill those needs, and you may want to take note of the two 2008 items set for a release later this year. But a

Microsoft releases an integrated virtualization ROI tool

One of the hurdles keeping organizations from fully embracing virtualization is cost justification. To combat that, virtualization providers have been developing and offering their own ROI and TCO calculators, and many of them are quite good. It was

VMware announces a new virtualization certification

Even as competition continues to heat up in the server virtualization world, virtualization market leader VMware continues to dominate in yet another area of the technology – certifications. Love 'em or leave 'em, those pieces of paper in t

Amazon EC2 and Sun OpenSolaris VMs together in Beta

Sun Microsystems announced the initial version of its opensource OpenSolaris operating system, previously only available in a developer preview release. The OpenSolaris operating system is available as a free download for developers to develop, test,

Services organizations are helping the virtualization push in the datacenter

If you haven't started down the path of adding virtualization into your datacenter, what's stopping you? There are so many different benefits offered by the technology, like server consolidation, disaster recovery & business continuity,

Creating a big company with the trust of a small one

Dear Bob …I think you're right on the money about community size, rules, trust and treating people fairly [from "Rights, privileges, fairness and equality," Keep the Joint Running, 5/5/2008 – Bob]. It's true that as groups get l

ClearCube spins off software business to VDIworks

In January of this year, ClearCube introduced version 5.6 of its Sentral VDI Management System software. With this release, the company promoted the notion of "No Vendor Lock-Down", meaning that it would provide cross-platform support for h

Questioning Josh Berkus on how to encourage a community

Like Zack, I too enjoyed Josh Berkus' tongue in cheek session on how to destroy a community. Josh provided an anti-list for those who would like to encourage a community as follows: Familiar tools Discourage poisonous people Document everything

TopCoder: developer productivity and code quality through competition

Wednesday I had lunch with Mike Morris, Senior Vice President of Software Development at TopCoder. That's his picture at the left. He had an interesting story to tell. I was vaguely familiar with TopCoder through their programming contests. I wa

Geek Week: Another Google exec fled; librarian defeats Feds

Going, going — Google. The hejira from Google continues, as head Google spin doctor Elliot Schrage has taken a position with – who else? — Facebook. Schrage is the sixth top-shelf G-exec to fly the coop to Facebook over the last year. (Though

Microsoft’s backup compression

I still have a hard time getting jazzed about Katmai's backup compression. Again, it's probably because I've been using LiteSpeed for so long, and it's just not news anymore. Not to mention it still has licensing problems. I belie

Java One: diversity and freedom

While this was by no means my first Java One conference, I had not attended in the last four years. Just as the market has changed, so has Java One. Two observations struck me about the conference: it's more diverse than ever and secondly, there

Critical SMB Tools: what could you not work without?

I've seen a lot of products and services in the last couple of weeks, and it's started me thinking about the tools that make a real difference in the way I work — the tools I would really have trouble doing without. Not surprisingly, most

Virus outbreak at JavaOne

Java may be impervious to computer viruses, but not even the JRE sandbox can protect against viruses of the microbial kind. According to the San Francisco Department of Public Health, several persons who attended the JavaOne conference currently unde

Load Balancing SMB IT

On Tuesday, I had an interesting telephone interview with Kevin Mahon, CEO of KEMP Technologies. I have to admit that I don't usually think of load balancers as SMB product, but KEMP has been making a business in SMB load balancing for several y

Borland sells CodeGear to Embarcadero for $23 million

After more than two years, Borland has finally sold its CodeGear division to Embarcadero a database tools company for a mere $23 million. It's a sad ending to one of the great software companies of the 1980s and 1990s. And it shows just how badl

Are MCSEs too stupid to learn Linux?

That's the conclusion seemingly reached by the resident *NIX zealot on another news site. According to this joker, learning Linux, Solaris or any other *NIX derivative requires a degree of conceptual understanding that MCSEs are either unwilling

Database shoplifting

In my SSWUG newsletter this morning there was a short article on database shoplifting. It wasn't really an article as much as a musing. Anyway, Stephen goes to talk about how most data theft comes from within the company by trusted employees who

Bloggers beware

Developers vs. designers: Who wins?

It remains one of the thorniest problems in app-dev: How to get the folks in the blue shirts, khakis, and glasses to get along with their black-shirted, skinny-jeaned, faux-hawked neighbors down the hall? Like as not, your own answer largely depends

Out in the cold: small businesses’ ERP deficit

It took the United States just 45 months to defeat the combined forces of Germany, Japan, and Italy. It has taken SAP 48 months to get Business ByDesign, its SaaS (software as a service) play for the SMB market, off the ground. And it still isn'

SynapSense employs wireless sensors to monitor and map datacenter health

Apple Leaves Hawaiian Investor in the Cold

<P>You'd think a technology company would be able to figure out an online system to allow all of its investors to cast their proxy votes. But one reader reports that for years he's been unable to participate in proxy voting for Apple&

Leostream’s long virtualization journey reaches $3 million Series A funding

It has been reported by Private Equity Hub that Waltham, MA-based virtualization software company Leostream finally completed a $3 million Series A round of funding which was led by Meakem Becker Venture Capital. What's particularly interesting

Joyent has changed for the better, VP says

When I wrote about the Morph Application Platform on Tuesday, I carelessly tossed off a reference to my mixed experience with Rails hosting at TextDrive, now called Joyent. Kristie Wells of Joyent asked me to clarify my experience privately, and has

Microsoft developers trim code internally to cut costs

You likely know already what a resource hog Windows Vista is. The fat code has high system requirements and puts a heavy strain on your hardware, as evidenced by the data Randall Kennedy has collected through InfoWorld's Window Sentinel program.

Josh Berkus on how to destroy a community

It's been interesting to see a large number of non-technical open source presentations at Java One this year. It's a sign that indicates that not only has Sun embraced open source, but they are also attracting a new audience that is interes

The Green Delay: A timely proposal for IT energy conservation

"I hope I'm dead before I'm 50." This was said in an entirely unemotional, matter-of-fact fashion by someone who had gotten a poorly timed, age-appropriate, red state public school treatment of both sides of the global warming de

Stupid filter tricks

As I discussed yesterday, I signed up for a Morph Application Platform developer account, but ran into a snag subscribing to the DevCenter service. The snag was simple: my name is Heller. The second reply to my trouble ticket explained and fixed the

When interviewees volunteer off-limits information

Dear Bob …All this talk about interviews and illegal questions has me wondering …If I'm interviewing someone, and they disclose information about themselves without my prompting, what do I do?For example, a very realistic question "Why

Microsoft’s Enterprise Project suite isn’t just for the enterprise

Keeping track of a project — any project — can be an overwhelming task, especially if you're dealing with multiple teams, various funding expenditures, and the ever-popular string of setbacks and delays that haunt projects. Microsoft has conti

Malware r Us

If there were any doubt the underworld of malware and the universe of legitimate software were converging, it was dispelled last week, after researchers at Symantec uncovered a malware EULA (written in Russian) that was more restrictive than the kind

How Unix politics are killing OS innovation

It's frustrating. Each time I think I've found a viable long-term replacement for my Windows development and testing environment, along comes some stumbling block to trip me up. And while these hurdles are mostly technical, the &quot;ro

Wicked Cool PHP

  Wicked Cool PHP Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems by William Steinmetz with Brian Ward February 2008, 216 pp. ISBN-10 1-59327-173-5 ISBN-13 978-1-59327-173-2 $29.95 $17.95 PDF $35.95 PDF and Paperback I just love supporting

Rails, and now Java, in the cloud

I had a conversation today with David Abramowski, CEO of Morph Labs. We were supposed to talk about how Morph Application Platform, which uses Amazon EC2 and S3 for on-demand cloud computing and storage along with its own routing and provisioning inf

Ever wanted to create a Blu-ray disc?

I'm sitting here beside Sun's A. Sundararajan before the JavaOne keynote starts. He is one of the core developers on Sun's HDcookbook project. I didn't know this, but all of our Blu-ray players have a J2ME JVM inside. So, if you w

Backbase meets AIR

Backbase, &quot;The Ajax Company,&quot; announced today that it officially supports Adobe AIR in its development environment. This was implicit in last month's announcement of Version 4.2, but now it's explicit. Here's the full

Fortune’s 20 most profitable tech companies

A friend sent this to me…thought I'd share the list. Funny how vendors like Xerox, TI or even "MEMC Electronic Materials" (seriously, who are they??) get virtually no attention compared to the Yahoo's &amp; EBay's of th

RedMonk’s 2nd annual unconference rocked

I learned too much from the audience at last year's RedMonk Unconference at CommunityOne last year to not attend this year. I got there a little later in the day, so I missed some of the early sessions, especially on TaskTop ;-( The discussion o

People and SOA

Download file…