Opinion

The return of crackpot tech

This week marks the triumphant return of crackpot tech, last year's smash hit, in which we rounded up a motley crew of technology ideas "so crazy they just might work." The reader response was terrific. Not only did we provoke…

An Apology on Disappearing Comments

<P>I wish to apologize to readers of the InfoWorld Gripe Line who may have posted or tried to post comments to my stories last week. InfoWorld recently began experimenting with a new comment engine called JS-Kit in my weblog. I should have paid

Agreeing to disagree about Service Level Agreements

Dear Bob …You were quite critical of Service Level Agreements in your recent column, "Run, IT run … but not as a business," (Keep the Joint Running, 1/28/2008), describing them as formal contracts between IT and the rest of the business

LINQPad Webinar 2/20

Readers of this blog might be interested in an upcoming O'Reilly Webinar on LINQPad. From the official announcement:&quot;Writing LINQ Queries with LINQPad — Happening Wednesday, February 20th at 2:00pm PST. In this webinar, Joseph

Do you Have a DSG (Dumb SOA Guy) Issue?

I get these about once a week, an e-mail from a Yahoo or Google e-mail account that talks about issues within a large enterprise as related to building their first instance of SOA. The fact is that most of these e-mails are not around proper approach

More about balancing strategic and tactical improvements

Comment on a previous Advice Line: "Balancing strategic and tactical improvements," 1/28/2008:I like this analysis and have used a similar method to prioritize projects, but I have one problem with Bob's version – Cost and Risk are not

Amazon’s S3 data storage service hit with outage

In 2006, Amazon.com launched several pay-as-you-go services that were aimed at the developer community: Simple Storage Service (S3) which offers unlimited Internet storage, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which lets developers create and manage virtual m

VMware community spices up VMware Storage VMotion

One of the things I like about being in the IT industry is the sense of community. And as both VMware and virtualization in general continue to expand in popularity, the virtualization community continues to grow around it. Case in point, VMware offe

Finally, Leopard

Summary: Make sure you uninstall SideTrack 1.5 before doing a Tiger-to-Leopard upgrade. Tolstoy: I'm not the kind of guy that leaps on new operating systems before the shrink wrap has shrunk. I like to let others take the lumps of a .0 release b

Novell’s open source collaboration play

Now that Novell has stopped bleeding and has put away some cash (nearly $1.9 billion), the company is looking to acquisitions as a growth strategy. Earlier this week it purchased SiteScape, an open source team collaboration outfit. Novell did not div

Kill all the lawyers (and start with Lerach)

I've long admired Shakespeare's simple solution to litigation: "The first thing, let's kill all the Lawyers," proclaimed in Henry VI Part II – Revenge of the Nerds. In Silicon Valley the sentiment against lawyers took a fever

Geek Week in Review

White knight, black heart. Here's a bit of chilling news: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is apparently in talks with Yahoo on ways to save it from the clutches of Microsoft. That's a bit like being rescued from a fire-breathing dragon by

How SOA and the “New Web” are Married

Another response from an e-mail question from a blog reader: "How is SOA and Web 2.0 related?" Here is a quick response: Web services were created around the notion that it's easier to discover and leverage somebody else's service

Is your Web site FIPS compliant?

FIPS compliance can be the key to working smoothly with servers and clients both in and out of government service

Tek-Tools Profiler for VMware: virtualization management suite

Tek-Tools Software, a provider of IT resource management software solutions, announced a new module for the company's Profiler Suite – Profiler for VMware. The new module is designed to optimize capacity utilization, performance, and availabilit

VPN Concentrators: IPSec vs SSL

I remember the days when you could set up dial-up modems and have users connect to your NT 4.0 Server using Remote Access Service (RAS). Combining multiple modems in a multilink to increase bandwidth … it seems so long ago, but it was only abo

Worthless processes

Nanowires could transform clothing into device chargers

Wouldn't it be nice if your on-the-go workforce could charge their BlackBerries and iPhones without having to pause and plug in to a spare socket? Nanotechnology researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) are developing a shirt tha

Nokia builds Remade phone vision around recycled materials

One man's trash is another man's cell-phone materials. That, at least, is the philosophy behind Nokia's Remade mobile device concept. Nokia revealed the Remade concept at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona. The idea is t

Microsoft’s mobile mistake

Buying Danger won't make Microsoft competitive with Apple and RIM in the phone zone By the standards of its $45 billion offer for Yahoo, Microsoft could have found the $500 million it is rumored to have paid Danger in Steve Ballmer's couch.

NComputing puts excess PC power to good use

NComputing CEO Steve Dukker doesn't just subscribe to the belief that the average PC packs more processing power than the average end-user needs; he's built his company's product line of virtual PCs around it. "I'm not saying

On setting goals

Everyone knows that I'm an IBMer in the software division that competes with JBoss. I have a lot of respect for the folks leading JBoss, and hope that has come through in my public interactions with guys like Bill, Sacha &amp; Shaun. I'

SourceForge.net marketplace vs. Guru.com?

Roberto recently spoke to SourceForge Community Manager Ross Turk. Ross gave a rundown on what SF has learned with SF Marketplace: "First, we learned that people are interested in the idea. People are responding to it in pretty large numbers; gr

Parallels Virtuozzo Containers offers 350 templates

Parallels will announce the availability of a Template Catalog for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers tomorrow. The company says it will offer a library of more than 350 software downloads that can be used to easily create and manage operating systems an

Rained Five Days

Last Friday I mentioned that I was singing the Update Blues. My version was too scatological to print, so I challenged you readers to write your own. What did I get? Limericks. Feh! The horrible weather we're having on the East Coast reminds me

HP makes MCS liquid-cooling rack twice a nice

HP has made a clever upgrade to its Modular Cooling System (MCS) liquid-cooling rack. In its previous iteration, the unit was designed to chill a single rack packed with high-density machines. However, the company found that many customers weren&#039

Why do cell phones suck so much?

On a recent Saturday night my wife and I went out shopping for cell phones. (I know, I know, doesn't sound like much of a date.) I'm going to replace my Treo 650 and my wife wants to replace her Motorola RAZR with something that's easi

The experts’ opinion of Carr’s prediction (that means you)

I need to be smarter about something. I'm electing you to help me. (Okay, really, I need to be smarter about everything. I have something specific in mind, though.)I've written two Keep the Joint Runnings ("Carr-ied away," 2/4/200

Clearing the Air

So apparently my MacBook Air review has hit both sides of the spectrum. There are those that think it's one of the most balanced reviews yet, and those that think I'm a fanboy. Nick Farrell's own definition of fanboy (posted in a comme

Test Center Tracker: On the desktop and beyond

On the desktop and beyond Today's Test Center Tracker pick is on the periphery of corporate IT, and begins by briefly circumnavigating the desktop then sailing toward the unexplored horizons of mobile computing. SUN courts the desktop The proxim

Borderline illegal: Your laptop is not your own

Planning to travel out of the country? Maybe you want to think twice about bringing your laptop, your cell phone, or even that iPod. (And if you're of Asian or Middle Eastern descent, that goes double.) Last week, the Washington Post ran a story

What is SOA Governance?

Download file…

Sun expands to the desktop with Innotek virtualization acquisition

Sun Microsystems announced that it will acquire German desktop virtualization vendor Innotek GmbH, the maker of VirtualBox, an open source x86 virtualization product that has been growing in popularity. The announcement comes on the heels of Sun&#039

iPhone slays Windows geek — but which device rules the enterprise?

InfoWorld's Peter Bruzzese lost his heart to the iPhone, but his head is still with Windows Mobile 6 when it comes to e-mail The woman behind the Verizon counter held out the latest in sleek devices. My response was, "I want no camera, no t

The mobile app gold rush

Adobe, AOL, Google, and Yahoo see smartphones as fertile ground for rich and hosted apps and services

Vizioncore releases the latest virtualization conversion tool

Vizioncore has announced the release of vConverter 3.0, a virtualization conversion tool that the company claims as the "fastest, easiest and most reliable tool" for performing physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) machine

Once upon a time there was an arp entry

So a short story for you… …once upon a time I was hosting a research server behind my firewall and had done one-to-one NAT to hide and protect it…however, the researchers decided they wanted their own firewall and moved

Sun’s Innotek acquisition a smart buy

It was bound to happen eventually. Somebody, somewhere, was going to see the light and snatch-up the last of the original virtualization pioneers, Innotek, makers of the VirtualBox Virtual Machine platform for Windows, Linux and Macintosh systems. Th

Getting Sick of SOA Governance Yet?

Is there a better way to say SOA governance? That is the question that Michael Meehan had in Tech Target article you can find here. "Yet let's be honest, the term 'SOA governance' sucks. It reeks of someone else telling you what t

IBM, Motorola back effort to control supply-chain carbon emissions

More big-name companies are joining forces to figure out ways to measure and control their supply chains' carbon emissions. This time, IBM and Motorola have joined the European Supply Chain Institute's (ESCI) Supply Chain Carbon Council. Th

Let the games begin

It seems that Nick Farrell over at The Inquirer isn't so thrilled by my MacBook Air review. Actually, he doesn't really mention the review, opting instead to summarize the sidebar with additional commentary. To clarify a few of his points:

Yet Another Computer Language

You can't know how much it excites me to hear that Microsoft is designing yet another computer language. Why, what a novel idea! It isn't like there were hundreds of new computer languages designed every year. If that were the case, there w

Should Nokia worry about Android?

Yesterday's unveiling of Android-based prototypes at the Mobile World Congress has brought Google's Android platform back into the spotlight. BusinessWeek has a story titled "Nokia vs. Google: The Battle Escalates", which suggests

Android will not be write once, run anywhere, says mobile developer

Someone once called Dave Rensin, now the CEO of Reality Mobile, the foremost expert in mobile APIs. Rensin began his career developing applications that would carry "sensitive" data over wired and wireless networks for the U.S. Army, the Tr

Appraise, then leave?

Dear Bob …I am a manager for an IT team for 17 years. I have just been given my separation notice and I am being asked to do performance reviews for my previous team. The team already knows I have been let go. I am struggling with whether I should

Interview with Nokia’s Olli Toivanen

I managed to score an email interview with Olli Toivainen, Nokia's director of product management and one of the key guys behind the N Series of Linux-based Internet Tablets. Although I couldn't get him to spill the beans on future products

Who really owns social media? Hint: not you!

Nothing cheeky about safety

The incident you are about to read about is entirely true in every single respect. There is no exaggeration anywhere, as any would be pointless. About four years ago, I was contracting to a large insurance firm in their IT department in City Centre D

Make way for mobile broadband

Five reasons why adopting cellular data access for laptops will be big for your business Mark my words: The enterprise will be moving away from relying on Wi-Fi hotspots in favor of mobile broadband connectivity. Say you're a salesperson making

Mobiles and virtualization with VirtualLogix and SIMtone acquires Aspeed

Moving beyond server virtualization, VirtualLogix showcases its virtualization solutions for mobile devices and networks while at the GSMA conference in Spain. And Simtone has announced that the company has acquired Aspeed Software in order to expand