Opinion

Windows XP SP3: More than a simple Service Pack

Update: It appears that Microsoft is continuing to play games with the SP3 release schedule. First they make it available via MSDN, then they tease everyone with general availability (via Windows Update and direct download) only to pull the release h

Meeting demand in the on-demand era

Everything is in place, the ducks are lining up nicely. We have the great generational change from humans raised in an analog world and artificially inseminated with a digital gene to real live humans naturally born and bred into the digital age. Out

Taxing Software Experiences

<P>Every year I try to publish all the significant gripes I get about tax software before April 15th, in the hopes it will keep some last-minute tax filers from choosing the wrong program. But, except for <A href="http://www.gripe2ed.co

One more on why corporations exist

Dear Bob …[Regarding "The reason corporations exist," Advice Line, 4/20/2008)] the gambler analogy is particularly intriguing [the best businesses think of money as gamblers do — as a way to keep score — Bob] and, I would bet, the very

Which clan are you?

No, this isn't another dumb questionnaire. Bear with me. Recently I saw an article in which the author attributed the development of computers to people with Asperger's Syndrome. I can't seem to find it again, but no matter: I can find

Interop News: Netgear brings new products for SMB

The show floor doesn't open until tomorrow, but the press releases are already starting to come in. Netgear had a flurry of them this morning, with the upshot being that the company is pushing into SMB in an ever more serious way. Part of the pr

PaaS and the Web 2.0 Expo

 I'm back from the Web 2.0 Expo, actually got back Saturday morning. Meant to post a quick summary blog on Friday, but felt a bit under the weather which I found is twice as worse when taking the overnight flight. However, things are back

Guerrilla IT? Sounds like open source

Dan Tynan wrote a great story in InfoWorld recently about Guerrilla IT and how to leverage it by empowering your super users and implementing ways for folks to collaborate and share best practices. I couldn't help but think how so many good inno

Smart phones, stupid people

A Mexican press attache walked off with &quot;six or seven&quot; Blackberries belonging to US officials at a summit between the presidents of Canada, Mexico, and some guy named Bush in New Orleans last week. Press officer Rafael Quintero Cur

Black Duck Acquires Koders

In a move that makes perfect sense, Black Duck Software acquired Koders. Most of you know Black Duck as a company that helps businesses manage the legal risks around using OSS inside of their company or product. In many cases, Black Duck really helps

Steve Ballmer wants your “feedback” — so let’s give it to him

Last week we almost broke out the champagne. At an event in Belgium on Thursday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the company might reconsider its decision to stop selling Windows XP on June 30.

Desperately Seeking Interop 2008 Las Vegas

Sun Microsystems helps ISVs with SaaS model

Sun Microsystems introduced a new virtualization service called Solaris On Demand, a software as a service (SaaS) program created to help the independent software vendor (ISV) community. Solaris On Demand helps convert traditional installation applic

Looking at Interop

When I look at the press releases and phone calls that have come my way ahead of the Interop show, two phrases leap out: Unified Communications, and Network Access Control (NAC). It's not that there won't be anything else here at the show,

Desktone’s virtualization desktop-as-a-service

Massachusetts based Desktone is claiming that it is the very first provider of a system that enables delivery of virtualized desktops, calling it the Desktone Virtual-D Platform. The newly unveiled Desktone Virtual-D Platform is designed to enable se

Getting technical practice

Have you ever wondered how your intrepid Test Center editors spend their weekends? No? OK, good for you — you have a life. We, on the other hand, have networks to build. I'm in Las Vegas for the next few days, along with Test Center Senior Cont

Tidbits on Amazon’s Web Services business

This Wired story has some very interesting comments on Amazon's Web Services (AWS) business. The first point was news to me: "And the idea that AWS is mostly about wringing extra bucks (especially off-season) out of Amazon's data cente

A little green

Here at the end of Earth Day week, we can ask, &quot;What's the small business to do?&quot;  News stories are always about the mega-corporations saving multi-megawatt/hours with their green project, and we're glad they do –

Imote2 .Builder Kit makes creating wireless sensor networks a snap

I spent several hours today exploring the Crossbow Imote2 .Builder Kit, a "complete development environment for high performance wireless sensor networking (WSN) applications leveraging the Microsoft .NET Framework," as the company describ

Terms of Ridicule

<P><I>Dilbert</I> is a great comic strip, always good for a laugh. In fact, as one reader points out, there are even a few chuckles in Dilbert.com's <A href="http://www.dilbert.com/terms/">Terms of Use</A>

Trying out the iPod Touch

A buddy of mine just upgraded to an iPhone so he lent me his old iPod Touch to try out. I used it at the MySQL Conference along with my Palm Centro chick-phone to see if I could get away without dragging my laptop everywhere. And if I was successful,

One Fewer Excuse for Deploying Policy (aka NAC)

While most network staff give a nod to the general idea of policy-based networking, there have been a number of hurdles to its adoption, not the least of which is a need to understand the current state of the endpoints on the network. Without knowing

Geek Week: Microsoft’s XP spin, Yahoo says ‘come on in!’

Great eXPectations? Microsoft has made a multi-billion-dollar business out of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but lately it seems to be sharing the FUD about its own products. Take the burning question of when XP will shuffle off this mortal

An SP1 video spoof? Still funny though…

In scanning my favorite news/blog sites the other day, I came across this funny little video regarding Vista SP1 on Long Zheng's site. You can watch the video on YouTube. Is it real…? I don't know but someone went through an awful lot of

Going over to the dark side

A note from daughter #2, who had a choice of a Mac or PC laptop for her Ph.D. program next fall. &quot;SK&quot; is Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and SK largely uses Macs: I just confirmed with SK that I want

Why enterprise mashups aren’t as prominent as the hype

I still think "cloud computing" will win the coveted Snidley Buzzword of the Year award, but after checking out the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, it looks like "enterprise mashup" is running a close second. Don't get me wron

Empowering people for the greener good

Every day at the office, employees at your company face choices with implications for the environment and the company budget. "Am I going to power down my PC during my lunch break — or leave it running?" "Should I print this entire tw

Snaplogic’s latest update

SnapLogic has done some interesting work in their latest release being announced this week at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Their focus is on providing a simple approach to integration that is not unlike using RSS for data. It's a coo

VMware releases the official VirtualCenter plug-in guide

Last month, I reported that VMware was working on an "official" VMware VirtualCenter plug-in guide. And just that quickly, the company has released the guide – although only with "experimental" support. But that's more suppor

Web 2.0…It’s About Process Outsourcing

I'm at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, my 3rd time here. This is a cool show, and the only one I attend where I'm not speaking. Thus, more relaxing and more time to learn from others, rather than teaching. If there is a clear trend at this show

How tech firms can save the earth

Just in case you've suddenly emerged from a coma and hadn't noticed, yesterday was Earth Day here on our planet. And it seems like everybody is putting on their green. Even the US government has a site celebrating its efforts to ravage save

The Test Center guide to rich Web app dev tools

Frameworks for rich Internet applications can be lightweight or heavyweight, open or closed, and almost anything in between

The New Web and SOA

Download file…

VMware Q1 2008 revenues beat street expectations

VMware reported strong first quarter growth today, which seemed to calm many of the "buy and sell" folks over on Wall Street. The stock turned south earlier this year after VMware told investors that they wouldn't be able to double rev

AMD quad-core and Parallels Server Beta3

AMD is certainly doing their part to help push virtualization technology. The company just recently released to market their quad-core AMD Opteron processors which give machines an added boost in CPU power. And Parallels is pushing forward with their

Study: Lack of standards slowing green datacenter initiatives

Companies seeking to inject sustainable practices into their datacenter operations are hankering for clear standards to guide the way, according to results of a study conducted by Digital Realty Trust, a developer and manager of technology-related re

Clipperz, zero-knowledge apps, cloud computing and SaaS

Marco Barulli from Clipperz reached out to introduce their online password-manager. I'd been looking for a good solution for some time now. While their Password manager seems pretty cool, especially the Direct Logins feature, I'm more intri

For server power measurement, there’s only one shortcut

On this Earth Day, let us examine the criteria that IT brings to its purchases and arrange to make power efficiency a top priority. All it takes is the will, a little homework, and the embrace of the delusion that there's any fit and fair way to

Why corporations exist – a data point

Dear Bob …On your explanation of why corporations exist, Bob, ("The reason corporations exist," Advice Line, 4/20/2008) I don't think you're full of beans … on this one, at least :-)Just read an interview today with Jeremy Jae

Why WOA/SOA is Misunderstood

I figured this would happen. With the birth of a new three letter acronym (TLA), in this case WOA (Web Oriented Architecture), there are some that are pushing back and missing the point entirely. Case in point is a recent article by Michael Meehan &q

kannuu Developer Network open for business

What's kannuu? Basically, it's a novel input method editor for selection, which can reduce the number of button clicks needed to pick an item from a large but finite list using nothing more than a four-way selector. It looks like it might b

Go green the cheap and easy way

InfoWorld will be awarding its Green 15 awards today.My old friend Fitz should be on the list, but won't because his innovation took place too many years ago — back in the 1980s.What Fitz figured out, back when we both worked at the StarTribune

Veeam announces beta program for its Reporter Enterprise Edition

Veeam has come a long way since releasing FastSCP to the VMware community back in October of 2006. Launching a number of virtualization application solutions since that time, the company has most recently entered into the VMware backup application ra

Red Hat backs AMD virtualization

Red Hat is announcing Tuesday its support for virtualization capabilities offered by AMD processors in new HP servers. The company's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 platform supports AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology, for more eff

Public folders for Exchange are here to stay (a while)

With the release of Exchange 2007, the Microsoft Exchange team posted a statement in its blog that caused some panic: "We are 'de-emphasizing' public folders — which means that public folders may not be in our next major release after

Congratulations, you have been integrated

I work as a senior manager for a small high-technology engineering firm. We were recently acquired and integration is now being inflicted upon us. One of the early integration targets was corporate travel. For the first time since the genesis of Trav

India to trap outsourcers in tax net

Events unfolding in New Delhi could have far-reaching repercussions, as the Indian parliament deliberates changes to its tax code that could deeply affect businesses here in the States. Whereas some believe the pending legislation is "business-n

Sneakwrapped Medical Forms

<P>We are all increasingly inured to the daily assaults various institutions make on our rights and privacy through the sneakwrap terms in their forms, mail stuffers, warranties, monthly statements, etc. But some medical patients in one metropo

Zenoss grows customer base and sets up shop in Austin

Mark Hinkle, VP of Business &amp; Community Development at Zenoss reached out to bring me up to speed on Zenoss. Zenoss provides software for network, server and application management. Zenoss Core is a community offering licensed under the GPLv2

Note to Popular Mechanics: Leave the PC reviewing to us professionals

As a veteran IT professional, I often get a kick out of how the mainstream media views technology. Whether it's some pseudo-custom UI in a Hollywood blockbuster (take "True Lies" and the Arabic Mac-in-Windows, for instance) or a newsca