Opinion

Save the whales, save XP

The international movement to save endangered operating systems (aka Windows XP) has gained supporters in unlikely quarters. Cringester J. C. reports: Just got a call from my Dell rep: Dell will provide XP on business class computers (Latitude and Op

Is “professional software developer” an oxymoron?

I've been reading Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development by Scott Bain (Addison-Wesley, 2008, $49.99, 0-321-50936-6). I'm finding it a thoughtful book, which makes a good case for the adoption of patt

Forensics for real-time computing

Firms IT organizations cannot become real time in practice or reality – without instituting a systematic discipline to decomposing problems within their IT infrastructure. In our experience, we found that by leveraging a forensic sciences appro

RedMonk’s unconference at Java One

RedMonk, the analyst firm that seems to have the best understanding of developers in my book, is hosting an unconference at JavaOne. This will be held in conjunction with the overall Community One event on Monday May 5th in San Francisco. More info a

Fujitsu double encryption on mobile drives

Fujitsu, (I mean Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc) is announcing today the MHZ2 CJ series, a new line of  2.5 drives with FDE (full disk encryption) capabilities, joining rivals Hitachi GST (Global Storage Technologies) and Seagate

Decision times for Windows and Mac OS X

It's a time of change for operating systems, with the Mac OS gaining market share and IT as well as individual users wrestling with the decision over when — or whether — to migrate from Windows XP to Windows Vista….

The purpose of IT

openQRM 3.5 released, but Qlusters bids it adieu

A posting on SourceForge.net states that Qlusters has released openQRM 3.5 to the open source community. The 3.5 release succeeds release 3.1.4 and includes a set of new features based on input from various datacenters and test/dev labs. And while a

EMA virtualization research offers trends, forecasts and recommendations

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT management research and consulting firm, announced the release of its latest research report titled, "Virtualization and Management: Trends, Forecasts and Recommendations." EMA and its re

“Beryl” comes to Vista

I have to admit, one of the most attractive (to me at least) features of the Linux desktop has always been the famous Beryl/Compiz 3D "cube" plug-in. I first dismissed the feature as pure "eye candy," however, afte

The reason corporations exist

Dear Bob …There is some value in your description of the purpose of running a business ("Of businesses and marketplaces," Keep the Joint Running, 4/14/2008). But really there is only one purpose, to make a profit.Everything else is second

WaveMaker is a very cool visual AJAX tool

Chris Keene of WakeMaker reached out to me in response to my Freetard post. Since then, I've been reading his blog and have learned a thing or two about his thoughts on Web 2.0 and why WaveMaker is addressing the market in the way they are. Chri

SOA/WOA Continues to Gain Momentum on the Web

As I'm heading out to the Web 2.0 Conference this week, we seem to be riding a new wave…or the combination of two waves really…the Web and SOA. As Dana Gardner points out in his most recent post, the amount of thought leadership th

Without the tech, Web 2.0 sucks

Application usage summary: 4/18/08

In the first of our ongoing series on "who's using what" under Windows, we focus on the state of the Task List on our cross-section of instrumented systems: [ Monitor your own Windows performance with the new Windows Sentinel t

Geek Week: Vista rocks, Gates rolls

Blunder Road. A Microsoft music video by "Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band" has been causing a few chuckles and a lot of retching across the Net. In the video, a Born in the USA-era Springsteen impersonator sings: &qu

A Genuine Microsoft mistake

<P>Mistakes happen. But when software publishers make mistakes with their anti-piracy programs, it always seems to be the users who pay the price. That's certainly been the case with Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program

Virtualization and the desktop: HP with Citrix and Pano Logic

One of the hot topics that everyone loves to talk about is the datacenter and server virtualization, but the fact is, there are way more desktop machines out there than there are servers. And in some cases, those desktops could be small, shiny silver

An engine for change

Developers, developers, developers — you don't need to see Larry and Sergey jumping around like monkeys to get the picture, and neither does Steve Ballmer. Microsoft has been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since Google unveiled Google

DSM tool offers high developer productivity

I should have known better than to write about a vendor demo, as I did on Monday for Telelogic Rhapsody. Now everybody wants to give me a demo. As the organ-grinder's song from The Threepenny Opera goes, "Oh, the line forms at the right, de

You get no bread with one meatball…

The little man felt ill at ease, He said some bread sir, if you please. The waiter's voice roared thru the hall, You get no bread with one meatball. So the song by Ry Cooder goes as it talks about what you can't have. Well this song came t

Trixbox 2.0 spins up some new trix

I've been working with Fonality's Trixbox for a little while now. I've run Asterisk via the old Asterisk@Home code (later, Trixbox CE) for years, so taking a close look at the Pro version has certainly been interesting. Fonality just

First look at Red-Gate’s data generator

OK, I told you all that I'd do a Camtasia of Red-Gate's data generator, so here it is. Hope you like it. It's not showing up very well because of the right margin, but you can download the file below. Download file Watch my free SQL Se

The last 21 days

What to do when developers take code snippets with them

Every good carpenter has a box of tools he carries from job to job: a hammer of just the right weight, a selection of drill bits, and so on. As he gains experience, his toolbox gets heavier with new, and sometimes specialized, equipment. Similarly, p

5 tips for buying green desktop gear

You may very well prefer to postpone the task of refreshing your fleet of desktop systems and monitors, an exercise that can be both expensive and time-consuming. But inevitably, machines break down or your needs change, so you have to bite the bulle

Salesforce + Google > Microsoft?

Get your software counted in the Open Source Census

Just read about the launch of "The Open Source Census". This is the next step in OpenLogic's efforts to get a better sense of which OSS products are actually used in enterprises. Until now, the OSS product usage data we've seen ha

VKernel virtual appliance identifies virtualization bottlenecks

VKernel announced that it was ready to ship its Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer virtual appliance. The appliance is designed to help you with your VMware ESX environment by identifying current and future capacity bottleneck issues in order to help lower

Free VMware video education series now available

VMware is taking advantage of the popular video services provided by YouTube and Blip.tv by leveraging both Web sites to help educate and provide VMware users with free video training. Here at the VMware ELearning channel, the company's educatio

When does a product become a platform?

At the MySQL Conference and Expo this week, we've seen new storage engines popping out of the woodwork and it caused me to wonder at what point MySQL went from being a product to a platform. From a technical perspective, you could argue that MyS

SOA on Twitter…Linthicum on Twitter

On Twitter now, if you're looking to follow me. Search for DavidLinthicum. Twittering about SOA stuff daily. Join in….

Web 2.0 Here I Come

Off to the Web 2.0 conference next week in San Francisco. What does the new Web have to do with SOA? Everything. See you there….

MySQL Conference kicks off

This week is the annual MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara and I'm happy to report that we have hit record numbers with more exhibitors (over 50) and more attendees (over 2,000) than ever before. Monday was primarily tutorials as well as

Why I’m glad I don’t work for Microsoft

Speechless. That's how I felt when I came across this latest gem from the bowels of Microsoft's sales &amp; marketing organization. Never mind that they've completely dishonored &quot;The Boss&quot; – this whole production

If you see SaaS without Services…They are not SaaS at All

There are too many SaaS players to list these days, in fact I would say that you can find any application on-demand, including human resource management, business risk management, logistics and supply management, and of course customer relationship m

Can Google Apps crack large enterprises? Today’s IMAP outage casts doubt

InfoWorld just ran an article questioning the idea of Google Apps in large enterprises: Can Google Apps crack large enterprises? | InfoWorld | News | 2008-04-16 | By C.G. Lynch, CIO.com One of my small enterprises uses Google Apps (and pays for the p

Bloggers beware!

It's not all that often I get to shamelessly piggyback off of the work of someone else and boost my page hits at the same time so I ride it when I can. But this story from today's Simple-Talk newsletter was not only interesting, I find that

Dude, where’s my $60B?

Dave's writes about a new report from Standish Group that claims: FOSS is costing traditional vendors $60B in annual revenues. Having spent 4+ years doing market forecasts, I can think of two key methodologies that Standish used to come up with

Voting accidents and other avoidable tragedies

When I was in school I learned that the difference between comedy and tragedy is that one of them ends in death and the other in marriage. (But I could never remember which is which, which may be why I have such a hard time holding onto girl friends.

Web 2.0 use cuts costs during a recession

Why a change to an AutoCAD file format is throwing some WAN accelerators for a loop

An innocent change to an AutoCAD file format has cut sharply into the ability of some WAN acceleration solutions to speed the transfer of these files, and caused grumblings in some widely distributed AutoCAD shops over slowed WAN performance. The pr

Compiere releases V3.0 of its open source ERP package

Compiere just released version 3.0 of its namesake product with "well over 150 improvements". If you're not familiar with Compiere (hey, how many of us purchase ERP products), think of Compiere as an open source alternative to SAP or O

New Backbase version improves Ajax speed, features

Backbase introduced Enterprise Ajax 4.2 today. According to the company, the new framework version offers developers more technologies, allowing for choices between rich and lightweight Ajax functionality, between CSS and XPath, between JavaScript an

Help Desk metrics

Dear Bob …You've written before about Help Desks and how hard it is to establish useful metrics [for example "Another helpless desk," Keep the Joint Running 12/17/2007 — Bob].My question: What would be so wrong in having a simple me

Connecting Vista to MySQL

Geometry quiz: Can we draw a straight  that joins together Vista, virtual disks,   a new version of  Ajax development tools and MySQL?  Well, geometry has nothing to do with that but I would bet dollars ag

VMware helps developers with a new Virtual Disk Development Kit

Without any sort of major fuss or media blitz, VMware released a 1.0 version of its Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). The VMware VDDK is an open API and SDK that enables VMware customers and partners to develop applications that create and access

Will the real SharePoint please stand up?

Many admins don't know it, but SharePoint has two distinct faces: one quite costly, the other free. The pricey version is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, or MOSS for short. The free one is called Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), curre

Back to the Mac

Several months ago, I determined that my years-long fondness required reexamination. I quietly took a break from the Mac to get some perspective, to check out Vista, AMD, and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) untainted by Apple's PR and uninfluenc

Service orientation of IT

We are entering a new phase of IT where organizations must orient delivery of service across the entire IT supply chain to behave and operate in a real time manner. Those organizations that don’t embark on this transformational journey will not