Opinion

Everyone chimes in on VMware memory overcommitment and ROI

These past few days, we've seen some back and forth postings taking place on various corporate blogs around the topics of virtualization ROI and a unique feature found in VMware ESX Server called memory overcommitment. VMware's Eric Horschm

Mar 20, 2008 5 mins

It’s all about the business case

I spotted this article, by Rich Seeley, outlining some recent findings from Forester, showing that SOA is growing steadily all over the world. "In 2005, the survey found 53 percent of enterprises were 'using or planning to use SOA.' By

By Dave Linthicum

Mar 20, 2008 2 mins

Licensing rules for virtual machines

More about the legalities of running multiple virtual machines on the desktop:I did some research on Microsoft's website. The language seems quite clear: OS licenses are tied to physical machines, not virtual machines.In the current EULA for Win

Mar 20, 2008 2 mins

Windows Vista: Another Windows ME? I hope so!

Back in 1999, Microsoft sent yours truly a free copy of Windows ME. I installed it, played with it for a week — then uninstalled it and went to Windows 2000 Beta, which I liked a whole lot more. Why did I dislike ME? I can't quite put my finger

By J. Peter Bruzzese

Mar 20, 2008 4 mins

Carbon-measuring software evolves

How do you accurately and meaningfully measure the predicted carbon impact of a new project? After all, you don't want to discover — too late — that its environmental impact has made you Public Enemy No. 1 for Greenpeace. In an effort to aid c

By Ted Samson

Mar 20, 2008 4 mins

You can never have too many cores

Or be too young. Or too thin. Or too rich. It's a truism: Ever since the introduction of Windows 2000 Workstation – which was the first mainstream Windows client OS to support Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SMP) – desktop PCs have been in a positi

Mar 20, 2008 3 mins

Test Center Guide to the Vista and XP Service Packs

Windows Vista SP1 has arrived, and XP SP3 is soon to follow; here's the quick lowdown

Small and Medium Business Software Development Technology Industry

Mar 20, 2008 5 mins

Highlights of Windows XP SP3

Change/FeatureDetails Impact/Benefit Revised Network Stack"Black Hole" router detection; WAP2 Wi-Fi security support; NAP (Network Access Protection) supportImproved performance; works with newer wireless security standards; policy-based p

Mar 20, 2008 1 min

Highlights of Windows Vista SP1

Change/FeatureDetails Impact/Benefit Compatibility ImprovementsExpanded driver database on Windows Update; improved battery life for notebooksMore devices should work out of the box; mobile users will get more time between charges Performance Improv

Mar 20, 2008 1 min

Rod Johnson on Innovation

Rod had an amusing and interesting session at EclipseCON titled The Future of Enterprise Java. In the session he spoke about innovation in general and sources of Enterprise Java innovation in particular (more on this later in this post). He discussed

Mar 20, 2008 2 mins

Virtualization security and the NSA; and what are hardware vendors up to?

In case you hadn't already seen it, you should check out what InfoWorld found out about virtualization and security while speaking with a member of the NSA. Executive editor Galen Gruman wrote a really interesting article that you need to read c

Mar 20, 2008 1 min

Microsoft surprises industry with Hyper-V release candidate

Microsoft's virtualization hypervisor product has seen its share of delays, but now, it looks as though the product is right on track and could even be out sooner than last expected. Today, the company put out a release candidate of Hyper-V that

Mar 20, 2008 3 mins

Greenpeace adding energy-consumption criteria to green rankings

Toshiba and Samsung now top the list of Greenpeace's quarterly greener electronics ranking, with scores of 7.7 out of ten, as reported by the IDG News Service. Meanwhile, Nintendo scrapes the bottom of the barrel with a score of 0.3. But what&#0

By Ted Samson

Mar 19, 2008 2 mins

Microsoft at EclipseCON

Sam Ramji was the keynote this morning. Taking the cue from yesterday's keynote, Fake Steve Jobs, Sam announced that Microsoft was acquiring the Eclipse Foundation. This was obviously a joke! Sam went on to explain the work that his team has bee

Mar 19, 2008 3 mins

The real difference between SQL Server and Oracle

For years now there's been a constant war between Microsoft supporters and Oracle supporters. Oracle has these features, SQL Server has these features, etc. But that's not really where the real importance lies. Sure, functionality is a part

By Sean McCown

Mar 19, 2008 4 mins

Databases

Scientology, The China Syndrome, and my wiki ways

It seems I can't get wikis off my mind these days. And it's not just because of that juicy story about Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and his one night stand from Hell, Rachel Marsden. Just last month WikiLeaks.org was all over the blogosphe

By Robert Cringely

Mar 19, 2008 3 mins

The ROI of metrics

Dear Bob …I have long been a skeptic of metrics in IT. So many problems — measuring the right thing, the reliability and sensitivity of the measures, creating perverse incentives, and gaming the measurement systems for starters. As a CIO, the only

Mar 19, 2008 2 mins

Apple’s BlackBerry offensive

Apple's market power derives not merely from its technology, but from its adeptness at reframing a familiar market to limit the field of competitors. In the most extreme example, Apple portrays its sole competitor as itself. The competitive mess

By Tom Yager

Mar 19, 2008 7 mins

Test Center Tracker: Smart phones, safe VMs and the future of Open Source

The beauty and the beast. The personal gadgets battle seems to be polarized around the joust between Blackberry and iPhone, while other illustrious players may have lost ground before even starting to be popular, Tom Yager suggests in Ahead of the Cu

By Mario Apicella

Mar 19, 2008 2 mins

If the shoe fits

I was perusing the Presidential candidates websites today. Interestingly, they all look roughly the same, though Barack Obama's site is better designed than the others in my humble opinion. What was even more interesting was the OS choices, thou

By Paul Venezia

Mar 19, 2008 1 min

Another look at VMware’s VMsafe with Blue Lane and Catbird

Security in the virtualization space, or virtsec as its being called by some, is supposed to be a big deal. Why? For one, security is a huge topic of concern in the physical world. Consumers and businesses spend large sums of money every year to prot

Mar 18, 2008 7 mins

Improving on architecture

Download file…

By Dave Linthicum

Mar 18, 2008 1 min

Alpha Five Platinum looks useful for enterprise development

I mentioned last Thursday that I'd had a visit and product demo from Richard Rabins of Alpha Software. I was initially hesitant to take this meeting at all, because I remembered Alpha Five from the 1980s: it was essentially an easy-to-use variat

By Martin Heller

Mar 18, 2008 3 mins

OSBC future of open source survey

North Bridge, a leading Venture Capital firm has launched a survey on the Future of Open Source. Results from the survey will be announced at a panel session at InfoWorld's OSBC conference in San Francisco March 25-26. The session is hosted by M

By Zack Urlocker

Mar 18, 2008 1 min

How fast can you move a datacenter?

We had been with our datacenter provider for a little over two years and were planning to move out. We believe in partnering with our vendors so our intended move was no surprise to them. We agreed to go month to month rather than sign up for a 6-mo

By InfoWorld Anonymous

Mar 18, 2008 4 mins

Data Management

Test Center Tracker: Web services tied and tested

Free mashups: Built on an Apache Axis2-based application server, the WSO2 Mashup Server (in its 1.0 debut) lets you stitch together Web services, Atom, RSS, HTML, and other data sources, and share them with your inner or outer circle. Mashup Server i

Mar 18, 2008 2 mins

Will the iPhone force Apple to change course?

If you say your product is "enterprise-ready" within earshot of anybody who works for InfoWorld, you'd better be able to prove it. So when Apple claims "IT professionals" will be able to seamlessly integrate the iPhone into t

By Ephraim Schwartz

Mar 18, 2008 5 mins

Not a class Act!

P>Many people have mixed feelings about class action lawsuits, seeing as how the only real winners are usually the lawyers. But is such litigation more justified against a software company that keeps putting out a buggy product? That was the quest

By Ed Foster

Mar 18, 2008 5 mins

Adoption or Shareware/Trialware

I just got a chance to read Simon & Zack's individual replies to my question whether an Adoption-led market was very different from a Shareware market. I actually liked Simon's definition, but felt it was missing something about the

Mar 18, 2008 3 mins

Full circle: How Microsoft is trying to eradicate email

After all this time, all these spams, all the complaints from all over the globe, I can only come to one conclusion: Microsoft is trying to kill email. Let's take a look at some facts. Spam levels are as high or higher than they've ever bee

By Paul Venezia

Mar 17, 2008 5 mins

H-1B bill would stop use of visa for third party consultants

As reported in InfoWorld last Friday, Representative Gabrielle Giffords,[D-Arizona], introduced an immigration bill,[HR 5630]The Innovation Employment Act that would raise the cap on H-1B visas from 65,000 to 130,000 next year, and set aside the cap

By Ephraim Schwartz

Mar 17, 2008 4 mins

Was Vista DOA?

As if the commotion over Windows "Workstation" 2008 weren't enough, a recent survey of IT shops shows that over 70% of respondents will still be using their "current OS" in 2009. Since the overwhelming majorit

Mar 17, 2008 3 mins

EclipseCON News 3/17

I'll be posting interesting news from EclipseCON this week; as it happens and as I happen to hear it 😉 The first piece of news that Ian Skerrett and Mike Milinkovich shared was the introduction of a new runtime initiative at the Eclipse Founda

iPhone as a platform?

Apple's announcements in recent weeks around the iPhone SDK have the potential to transform the hottest consumer smartphone into a significant business productivity tool. Apple came into the smartphone market starting from scratch and in 12 mont

By Zack Urlocker

Diamonds are a CEO’s best friend

At the end of Friday's blog entry, I posited the question, "Is anything really worth $3000 an hour?" I was referring to Ashley Alexandra Dupre, aka "Kristen," the hard working and highly compensated escort wh

By Robert Cringely

Third-party Silverlight controls demo

Infragistics is one of the major ISVs developing controls for Microsoft platforms. I favorably reviewed their NetAdvantage controls for ASP.NET for InfoWorld in 2006. They have also released controls for Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Framew

By Martin Heller

Mar 17, 2008 1 min

Vista in eclipse

I'm happy to report that, as of last week, InfoWorld's Save Windows XP petition passed the 100,000 mark. This campaign has been a wild ride. Thousands of users not only signed the petition but also commented about their own reasons…

By Eric Knorr

Mar 17, 2008 3 mins

Test Center Tracker: Windows XP TKO’s Vista in 10 rounds

Here at Save Windows XP campaign headquarters, we're not all anti-Vista. Some of us, notably Test Center Chief Scientist Tom Yager, have begun to see the light. For Tom, if you like Windows Server 2008 you'll want Vista too, because only Vi

Death match: Windows Vista versus Windows XP

Does Vista have what it takes to knock XP off the enterprise desktop? Not by our scorecard. Point by point and blow by blow, we offer 10 reasons enterprises can skip Windows Vista and stick with XP

Mar 17, 2008 86 mins

Weird, wild, wonderful Windows “Workstation” 2008

For the self-reliant, a third Windows desktop option emerges: Build your own "Frankenvista" on Windows Server 2008

Small and Medium Business Software Development Technology Industry

Mar 17, 2008 4 mins

Clocking Vista and XP performance: About OfficeBench

The OfficeBench test script executes a range of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Internet Explorer tasks under any version of Windows and any version of Microsoft Office

Mar 17, 2008 3 mins

One of the big takeaways from VMworld Europe – management tools are needed

One of the big takeaways from my VMworld Europe trip was that VMware is definitely responding to the need for management tools. During the show, I couldn't escape from the word "management". VMware announced a number of management prod

Mar 15, 2008 5 mins

Legal challenges to virtual machines

Dear Bob …I talked with our PC support group about the topic you've been discussing the past few weeks [see for example "Getting to 21st century IT," Keep the Joint Running, 3/3/2008 – Bob].The overriding concern voiced is the liabil

Mar 15, 2008 3 mins

Finding out more about virtual networks from Altor Networks

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Altor Networks CEO, Amir Ben-Efraim, so that I could find out more information about virtual networks and what Altor Networks is trying to do with them. Q: So if you would, please tell us about Altor Netwo

Mar 15, 2008 7 mins

Microsoft expands its virtualization vision with Kidaro acquisition

With another bold move and strategic acquisition under way, Microsoft is continuing the aggressive advancement of its virtualization vision. It wasn't long ago when the company was being accused of moving at a rather slow pace after it had consu

Mar 15, 2008 4 mins

Are weekly status reports a good idea?

Dear Bob …What do you think of weekly status reports for developers?As an IT manager with a number of direct reports, I find it hard to keep track of work being done so I know when to assist some developers. More to the point, some developers tend

Mar 14, 2008 3 mins

MySQL at PHP Quebec

For many developers, MySQL and PHP go together like peanut butter and jam. MySQL has a long history of working with the PHP community and that's a commitment that will continue forever. If you've thought scripting languages weren't pow

By Zack Urlocker

Mar 14, 2008 1 min

Reader voices: subscription scams

<P>Magazine subscriptions have always been something of a racket, but they seem to getting worse both in scope and in the depth of their sheer fraudulent nastiness. But does the blame for this sorry state of affairs belong to the magazine publi

By Ed Foster

Mar 14, 2008 5 mins

Geek Week: AOL goes for younger breed, Spitzer girl gets ID’d

The kids are alright. Some folks hit middle age and buy sports cars, get hair plugs, or take up with $3000 an hour hookers. AOL has decided to celebrate its midlife crisis by buying Bebo, the third largest social network on the planet, for $850 milli

By Robert Cringely

Mar 14, 2008 3 mins

Considering services and orchestration

The best way to consider both notions of service and orchestration (and process integration in general) is to think of them as independent layers, where the process layer is the calling application to the services to extract both data and behavior ne

By Dave Linthicum

Mar 14, 2008 3 mins