Opinion

MS-Yahoo marriage could drive green SaaS innovation

I've been out of the country for over a week, and thus I'm a bit late to the Microsoft-Yahoo party. But I saw that The New York Times had an interesting take on the subject that spoke to my green-tech sensibilities. The idea is, Redmond&#03

Salesforce.com for sale?

Interesting rumor making the rounds this morning that Salesforce.com has approached Oracle and offered to sell itself for $75 a share. Wall Street is paying attention; shares of Salesforce.com have been trading as high as $10 a share above Monday&rsq

Continuous Training

Open source barometer II

Alfresco will tomorrow publish the second annual installment of their open source barometer report; basically an in-depth survey of their 35,000 users. That's not to say this is representative of the entire universe of open source users, but it

Test Center Tracker: Is MacBook Air all fluff?

Lighter than air: Steve Jobs elicted oohs and ahhs with last month's unveiling of the MacBook Air, the world's thinnest laptop by Apple's estimation. Test Center Contributing Editor Paul Venezia has taken the machine for a test drive t

Internet will go the way of Pay TV, aka cable

The Internet is free. Applications are free. The people have won! Baloney. The Internet is about as free as cable TV. No one seems to talk about the fact that we are already paying for the free Internet. What do you think you’re paying for when

Yahoo + Microsoft: What’s love got to do with it?

First a visit with the late great George Bernard Shaw: He: If I gave you a million dollars, would you sleep with me? She: Yes. He: How about for a dollar? She (outraged): What do you think I am? He: We've already established that, madam; now we&

Varonis adds Unix to data governance product

Varonis Systems Monday announced DatAdvantage version 3.5, providing data governance for Unix. Previously available for Windows, DatAdvantage provides visibility, auditing and recommendations to ensure unstructured Unix data is accessible for busines

Open source data integration tool offered

Talend is announcing availability Monday of version 2.3 of its open source data integration product, Talend Open Studio. The software connects to databases and business applications and features more than 30 new components, the company said. Users ca

Mobile madness: iPhones, MacBooks, and Androids

Last July, InfoWorld chief technologist Tom Yager wrote a review of the iPhone that drew, shall we say, a little flak. After he evaluated the iPhone as a device for enterprise users, Tom gave it a measly score of 4.9…

Laptop Searches And Insecure Borders

<P>One of the few things that all Americans can agree on these days is that we need more secure borders. But does that mean when entering the country we must all submit to a search not only of what's in our luggage, but what's in our

5 Things that SOA Vendors are Missing

SOA vendors are trying to figure out how to sell in this emerging marketplace. For most of them, things don't seem to be going very well. At the heart of the issue is the fact that SOA is an architecture (hence the "A"), and not a clas

The MacBook Air finds its Nietzsche

Quite often, less really is more. One staple of computing in general is the perceived need for options. Painting yourself into a corner a lack of options with hardware or software is never a good thing, but there's a difference between that and

Canonical to resell Parallels virtualization software

Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced the availability of Parallels Workstation for Linux through the Ubuntu Partner Repository – giving Ubuntu users the ability to quickly find, install and run Parallels software. The deal gives

VKernel gets $4.6 million in Series A investment

Virtualization giant VMware may have watched its stock price drop, but that hasn't stopped venture capitalist firms from investing money in VMware's partners. VKernel, a creator of virtual appliances that manage virtual server environments,

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 RTM: Hyper-V clock begins

Things must have been extremely busy over at the Redmond campus last week, what with the announcement of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 going gold or being released to manufacturing (RTM). Other than the obvious news that Microsoft is releasing a new

Cobra is an interesting work in progress

I'm grateful to Savio for mentioning the Cobra language in his Open Sources blog. I had a look at Cobra this weekend, and found it rather interesting. Microsoft has always touted the .NET Framework as being language-agnostic. In the early days o

Cobra, A new OSS language for .Net

I read about a .Net-based open source language project named Cobra. What is Cobra? Chuck Esterbrook, the creator of Cobra, gave this presentation at Lang.net. According to Chuck, the Cobra language takes the best of several languages and puts them in

Just how wrong is Nicholas Carr?

I received this prediction in response to my recent Keep the Joint Running, "Carr-ied away," (2/4/2008). I won't tell you I agree with it. I will say I find it as provocative as Carr's prediction that the application side of IT wi

IPTV to get video boost from IBM

What started out as an anti-establishment diversion, television or more properly broadcast video over the Internet, is suddenly getting to be serious business. How else to account for the announcement from no bigger establishment player than IBM that

Web 2.0 will create a new kind of “infrastructure application”

There’s a new term starting to make itself known in high tech that says a lot about where technology is moving. The term is "infrastructure applications." Now if the term existed before it did so as a way of designating applications o

To give thanks

Once in awhile, I reflect on some of the tools that I use constantly, and the fact that there's an awful lot of unsung heros out there. Last night I started thinking about it and compiling a simple list of tools and some specific people that fit

Microsoft’s Caligari acquisition triggers flashback

When I heard the news that Microsoft had acquired Caligari Software, makers of the trueSpace 3D modeling application, I thought for a moment that I had slipped through some rift in space/time. It was once again 1996, and I was fresh off a stint with

Singing the Update Blues

Today it was Firefox. Yesterday it was QuickTime. Next Tuesday it'll be Windows, Office, and Internet Exporer. I'm talking about critical bug fixes. It's worse for me than for a lot of people because I personally have 6 Windows compute

Geek Week in Review II

(Yes, the Cringe blog has two Geek News roundups this week instead of one. Don't like it? Blame Microsoft.) Spook for yourself. Don't look now, but your favorite virtual world may be a hotbed of actual terrorists and assorted criminals. Or

Pacific rubbish dump twice the size of America

This is frightening story from London's Daily Mail…. A rubbish dump twice the size of the United States has been discovered floating in the Pacific Ocean. The vast expanse of debris, made up of plastic junk including footballs, kayaks, Lego bl

I was wrong about IP assurance

I've asked a few times why IP assurance is a customer concern. But I'm not a lawyer, or one in training. Lucky for you, Luis Villa (a lawyer in training and OSS guy) jumped in to correct me. "…make what appears to be the same error:

Computer security: Why have least privilege?

Least privilege won't solve every security problem, but it's a significant step in the right direction

File sharing beyond the firewall

Box.net brings together online storage and Web services to ease the burden of sharing files across the b-to-b divide

More Games Rebate Baiters Play

<P>It's time once again for the umpteenth installment of our rebate bait-and-switch chronicles — the gimmicks companies use to keep from having to pay off on their rebate offers. As always, readers are finding that vendors have a few new

Sun’s utopia?

Cote is at Sun's analyst event and has two posts that caught my attention. Cote writes: "Sun’s story is the same and more eloquent than ever: telcos will accept open-think finally, emerging markets will leap-frog over using closed, he

Dear Apple, Never mind, someone already did

There are times that I need to get my hands dirty fixing problems all by myself, then telling everyone else how to do it. Then, there are times that I post a blog entry complaining about something or other, and the solution finds me. This, thankfully

Still Just Disappointed

OK, I downloaded Visual Studio 2008 a couple weeks ago. I've got a couple AJAX sites that I wanted to start working with in the new environment. I also wanted to get more involved in LINQ. However, I'm still just disappointed in VS08. It&#0

Application Compatibility Toolkit and Standard User Analyzer

In my post last week about why XP should be buried along with DOS and other outdated software (which amazingly received quite a number of angry comments… imagine that…) I mention some great features of Vista including User Account Control. Obviou

9 steps to a service utility

Virtualization is the topic du jour in IT today. The technology is cool, the attributes are slick and now the stock market even is tracking it. The adoption problem that is facing virtualization strategies stems from a bottom up IT driven approach ve

“Fake Steve Jobs” (Dan Lyons) at SugarCRM conference

SugarCRM has their developer conference going on this week in San Jose. Things started with a blast of electric guitar followed by CEO John Roberts' keynote presentation that reviewed the founding of the company, their strategic bet on open sour

More on the SOA Governance Thing

I had a few good responses to my blog post on SOA Governance. First, from Miko: "This is helpful for sure, but one of the things that's worth pointing out is the fine research by Gartner which suggests that making an artificial distinction

Dear Apple, please fix X11. Again.

I'll admit — I've been reticent to migrate my MacBook Pro to Leopard. The Tiger installation on that system has been stable and reliable, and I didn't want to visit any unnecessary demons on it if I could avoid it. However, I just rec

VMware looks to the desktop with Virtual Desktop Manager 2

VMware has been the dominant player in the desktop and server virtualization market with products like VMware Workstation, VMware Server and VMware ESX Server. And now, the virtualization giant has enhanced its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) so

Is Facebook the new Hula Hoop?

Social-networking sites are fun and even useful. But when it comes to attracting advertising dollars — or the interest of IT mangers and other execs — fugetaboutit. Sure, social networking is hot. Most of us get more invitations to make a connectio

Vista deployment secrets

Vista adoption may be slow, but numerous IT shops have taken the plunge. Find out why they did and how they've made the shift

IBM’s PowerVM virtualization for SMB customers

When we talk about virtualization and its history, we have to talk about IBM and the old mainframe days. IBM introduced virtualization technology to market some 40 years ago. And now, the company is repackaging its Unix Advanced Power Virtualization

New entries into the security and lab management virtualization market

As virtualization continues to gain in popularity, third-party companies continue to surface in order to try and fill the gaps found in virtualization. Entire businesses have been created, funded, acquired and continue to operate around different are

Open source video games, anyone?

Jimmy Atkinson emailed to point us towards his "Top 25 Linux Games for 2008" list. I'm not a big video game fan, and we hardly ever cover gaming on this blog. But alas, I decided to head on over. I'm glad that I did! Seeing #3 on

Is Big Consulting Killing SOA?

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Database Insurance

It's difficult having an IT shop these days. You have to manage different types of people along with different priorities from your wide-ranging customer bases. And as an IT director, you want to get the biggest bang for your buck. So you have d

Windows Server 2008: Redmond’s new server OS hits paydirt

Microsoft asked IT what it wants from a Windows server operating system. That OS is here. Windows Server 2008 (WS08) has been doing an excruciatingly slow public striptease for five years. Now that the last patch of linen has been peeled away, we&#03

Test Center Tracker: Drives, power and politics

Drives, power and politics What can possibly link small form factor drives, virtual desktops and the power of HPC? Nothing if not your interest, I believe is the correct answer. Today's column is a short but fascinating trip bordering some major

Writing Secure ActiveX Controls

This recent news story touches on a long-standing problem: Attackers zero in on Yahoo Jukebox's ActiveX flaw | InfoWorld | News | 2008-02-06 | By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service The fact is, writing secure ActiveX controls is an art, not a sci

What’s worse, MicroHoo or YaGoogle?

So it seems Google may be trying to stave off the shotgun wedding between Microsoft and Yahoo, showing up at Yahoo's window with a ladder and a bus ticket. Google itself can't make a competitive offer — even our current "monopolies ar