Opinion

Open Microsoft APIs and Formats a Mixed Blessing

Be careful what you ask for: you might get it. That goes double when you ask Microsoft to release its internal APIs, protocols, and file formats. It has happened, as reported here. The E.U.'s reaction was guarded. Analysts speculated that this m

Geek Week in Review

Ignorance is truth. If George Orwell were alive today and working as a marketing wonk, he'd probably have a job at Microsoft. Case in point: MS's Aussie division is offering $15,000 in prizes to OEM channel partners who can dispel certain &

SOA…By Any Other Name

David Millman made some thought provoking points in his post, SOA – We Got the Name Wrong. "So to shift the focus, I am renaming SOA from Service Oriented Architecture to Solution Oriented Architecture, this moves the problem front and center no

Computer security’s dubious future

InfoWorld's Roger Grimes weighs in on why security expert Bruce Schneier thinks computer security won't get any better in the next 10 years

Is Microsoft using the “anti-lock-in” argument from OSS’s playbook?

I'm finally getting a chance to read up on the Microsoft interop news today. It really sucked to see the headlines all day, but not have a chance to read them until now. While the words "open source" are mentioned in the announcement a

Double-plus open Microsoft

Earlier today Microsoft announced with great fanfare the start of a more open attitude. They have defined a set of principles around interoperability, open connections, standards and data portability. And they'll be publishing detailed specs on

InfoWorld Green 15 nominations due Feb. 28

If your company completed a noteworthy green-tech project in 2007 and you haven't nominated it for the InfoWorld Green 15, don't worry: You still have about a week to do so. The InfoWorld Green 15 award will honor the top 15 green IT projec

TaxCut Takes Privileges for Granted

<P>One of the great beneficiaries of the TurboTax DRM fiasco of several years ago was H&R Block, as many TurboTax customers at the time fled to its TaxCut program. But one long-time customer thinks that TaxCut may lose its status as the mai

Hacking, The Book

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, Second Edition By Jon Erickson Second Edition  January 2008  Publisher: No Starch Press Pages: 480 ISBN 10: 1-59327-144-1 | ISBN 13:9781593271442 I picked up this book equally prepared to love it a

Talking to Myself

Sometimes it's like I'm just talking to myself. I just got a chance to poke around in the Katmai SSMS and I really hope it's not feature complete. I've talked before about crossing the finish line and how it's the little thin

Open source alternatives to 50 proprietary apps

Jimmy Atkinson sent me a link to his blog WHdb with an article that gives alternatives to 50 top proprietary applications. While the focus is more end user than IT infrastructure, it's a pretty comprehensive list. Who knew there were alternative

SOA and the New Web

Download file…

Is counting open source code contributions really useful?

If you're active in the open source world, Ohloh probably knows you. The Bellevue, Wash., software company has a database of some 70,000 developers working on nearly 11,000 of the world's major open source projects. After a year of building

Web host The Planet reaps big savings on small changes

Jeff Lowenberg, VP of facilities at Web-hosting company The Planet, can attest to the sweetness of low-hanging green fruit. By spending around $50,000 and three months' time implementing relatively simple best practices for datacenter cooling, h

How broadly will RHQ be used?

Sometimes it pays to be late with "breaking news" 😉 For those of us that weren’t at JBoss World 2008, here is a great presentation that explains the RHQ announcement: "RHQ is a combined effort to provide management infrastructu

Yes, Sun should compete against Linux

When I read Dana's post about leaving Jonathan &amp; Sun alone, I couldn't help but side with Dana. But then I read Amanda McPherson (Marketing director at the Linux Foundation) original post and now I'm torn. Then I read comments

Despite SP1, Vista is still slower than XP

So here I am, sitting in the main terminal at Dubai International, killing time during my six hour layover by sifting through the headlines surrounding the release Vista SP1. Over at a competitor's site, two prominent bloggers are really going a

New Katmai Install Notes

OK, I downloaded and installed the new Katmai CTP today. And for those of you who don't follow Microsoft that much, CTP is just a fancy way of saying beta. Actually, it's not really all that fancy is it? Oh well… Anyway, here are my insta

Virtualization continues to flow through the channels

The server virtualization market is continuing to grow year over year, where IDC currently targets the annual growth rate at around 60%. The key is to continue to get consumers onboard with the technology through education, increasing ease of use, re

Test Center Tracker: Like a pebble in your shoe

Like a pebble in your shoe Don’t we love technology? Of course we do, only a crazy person would otherwise put up with the persistent roller coaster of excitement and disappointments that comes with the territory when you practice IT on a daily

Microsoft turns Server 2008 RTM into Server 2008 SP1

A Service Pack 1 release has become known in the Windows industry as the time to finally implement Microsoft technology in the real world. You hear people say it all the time: "I'll wait until SP1 before I even consider it," avoiding

Vista SP1: Release to mob

Microsoft's community engagement for Vista Service Pack 1 spurs outrage, not gratitude I've learned in recent days that my perceived paucity of Vista in the wild may be impaired vision (of the ocular variety) on my part. The merest whisper

Look before you leak

I bet you thought people banked in the Cayman Islands because they serve fruity cocktails with tiny parasols in them while you're waiting for your checks to clear. Well, you're only partly right. The other reason people keep accounts in the

Green IT Machine

Equitrac aims at monitoring and cutting costly print waste

Although reducing energy consumption remains a high priority on companies' sustainability agendas, there are plenty of dollars and trees to be saved through better management of MFPs, printers, copiers, and the like. Chris Wyszkowski, VP of mark

Test Center Tracker: Get Your Reports Here

It's been a beautiful Tuesday across much of the land, the sort of day that makes you want to generate a truly comprehensive report. In the Test Center, we have reviews of two different report-generation packages and a Layer-7 switch that just h

iLinc reports CO2 spared through Web conferencing

Not long ago, I wrote about ways tech companies have been incorporating green-hued features into their offerings in innovative and sometimes unexpected ways. I have another company to add to the list: iLinc, a Web-conferencing company that pits itsel

High tech or high drek? iRobot the first of many robotics products

I’ve written about robotics before and my love of the technology so I decided this weekend to put my money where my mouth is and I bought the iRobot vacuum cleaner, Roomba. When I wrote about Asimo, the high tech Honda robot that delivered drin

Search and Replace

In writing some code this morning I found it necessary to make some major changes that involved search and replace in SQL Mgmt Studio. I was a little disappointed in the ability of both the SQL tools and Visual Studio to perform rich replace routines

Email wrong-number

If this is maturity, count this person out

Dear Bob …Responding to this week's Keep the Joint Running, "Capability Maturity Model revisited," 2/18/2008), perhaps I am being pessimistic. But when I start hearing things like "process acculturation" and "fundament

Symphoniq views SOA

Symphoniq is releasing Tuesday TrueView for SOA, to manage SOA environments by monitoring activity spanning from the browser to the application, server and service. Intended to ensure user performance levels, the product tags and traces transactions

Study ties sustainability to stock performance

Companies paying closer attention to embracing environmentally and socially responsible practices enjoyed higher stock-share growth over the past three years compared to do companies didn't, according to survey results released this month by The

Pano Logic fine-tunes LAN deployments with new software

Last month, Pano Logic closed a second round of funding of $12 million which the company said it would use to keep up with the growing demand within the enterprise for desktop virtualization solutions. Pano said the money would be used to accelerate

Veeam Software expands into VMware management

Veeam Software, well known for its widely distributed FastSCP tool, announced that it has entered into the VMware management market with a new suite designed to address many of the challenges facing ESX administrators. According to Veeam, the managem

Adobe upgrades Director

Adobe is announcing Tuesday an upgrade to its Director multimedia authoring tool for building interactive applications and rich content, featuring built-in Ageia PhysX technology to expand graphical display capabilities. Used for building interactive

Don’t lift a finger

A techie brings new meaning to 'by the seat of your pants' with this server save

Can’t get no outsourcing satisfaction?

Cost-conscious outsourcing could cripple your business for years if you don't hammer out innovation expectations up front

Storage and software in the virtual datacenter

Today, we take a look at storage and software in the virtual datacenter. DataCore Software, the virtualization SAN software company, released their latest software product into the market – Virtual Infrastructure Foundation Plus or VIF+. And Network

Replacing my Treo 650

I've been living with my Treo 650 for quite a few years. It's been a workhorse, but frankly, it's on a slow road to the glue factory. When I first got this phone it was state-of-the-art. In fact, it was the only smartphone available. I

Spy in the sky: What tech is the US trying to hide?

This whole "shoot the spy satellite out of the sky and win a kewpie doll" story is more interesting than it first appeared. It turns out Uncle Sam isn't particularly worried about the satellite landing in somebody's pool and/or sp

Yes, There Are DSGs

Mike Kavis, had some good thoughts around my posting yesterday. "I just read an entertaining post from Dave Linthicum called Do you Have a DSG (Dumb SOA Guy) Issue? A DSG refers to a person leading the SOA effort who has the political clout but

Crackpot tech: Virtual worlds

Crackpot tech: Enterprise supercomputing

Crackpot tech: Direct brain interfaces

Crackpot tech: The $100 laptop

Crackpot tech: Wireless power

Crackpot tech: Pervasive computing

Crackpot tech: Optical computing

Crackpot tech: Nanotechnology