Opinion

Fear and loathing at Jobs World

I was on the edge of the desert just outside Cupertino when the drugs began to wear off. The last thing I remember was being in Las Vegas at the CES boondoggle, doing my best to purge the horror from short-term memory with my good friend Don Patron.

Retiring XP means wasteful upgrades to Vista-capable PCs

Every so often, an organization has to refresh some or all of its users' PCs. Perhaps the sales team's laptops are suffering from wear and tear and need replacing. Maybe the finance department requires more powerful desktops to run a newly

Linus says Linux isn’t a single community

In a recent podcast interview Linus Torvalds discussed with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation the notion of "community." (A full text transcript is also available.) Bottom line, there is no single community. Rather there are many different

SOA is Vertical? When Was It Not Vertical?

I got a kick out of this article announcing a new "vertical SOA offering" from IBM. "With the launch of something it calls the Retail Integration Framework (RIF), IBM this week gave prospective customers and its competitors a preview o

Save Windows XP

I vividly remember the first time I used Windows XP. My first reaction: Ugh, these primary colors make Windows look like kid's software. Then I started using it. It didn't take much mousing around to make me feel right at…

Social media measurement

Virtual Iron and FalconStor form virtualization alliance

FalconStor Software, specializing in disk-based data protection solutions, and Virtual Iron, provider of server virtualization software, announced the formation of a strategic alliance in order to help streamline storage and server virtualization sol

Lessons from Lambeau

Maybe this is a bit of a stretch.It's easy to over-use sports metaphors when writing about business. Among their many limitations: Sports is unambiguous. You either win or you lose. When you (for example) deploy a new IT application, assessing t

Financial Crisis in Second Life

Linden Lab recently came out with a new policy basically forbidding virtual world entities that aren't demonstrably financial institutions in the real world from acting like banks in Second Life. Last Thursday, there was a "Metanomics&a

Can Parallels become the one virtualization to rule them all?

Today, when people talk about virtualization, more often than not, they are doing so by discussing VMware. But the server virtualization playing field has greatly expanded in the last year, and more people are starting to take notice of competing tec

VMware buys Foedus virtualization expertise

VMware has acquired New Hampshire based virtualization consulting firm, Foedus. Does this help answer the question about whether or not you should train your existing staff or hire new employees with virtualization expertise to operate your virtual i

Adobe, Sears, and Spying Eyes

<P>Who is watching how you use your computer, and what might they be doing with the information they collect? Two oddly similar stories involving Adobe and Sears reveal that it's quite possible companies you've never heard of are keep

A New Way to Follow the InfoWorld Test Center

The Test Center has a lot of great information (and tons of new reviews, previews, and buyer's guides coming in 2008), but it can be tough to keep up with everything that's coming out. That's why we're going to use Twitter to let

Intel’s pain is AMD’s gain

On a day when tech stocks are taking a terrible shellacking, Advanced Micro Devices stands out as a big gainer on the news that Intel is being investigated by the New York Attorney General's office for possible antitrust violations. New York Att

Facebook Restaurant Application Also Tries to Feed the Hungry

Find a restaurant and feed the hungry? That's what the developers at ActiveState say you can do with their new Facebook application, Eat-A-Rama. From the press release: New tool helps friends find great restaurants and $10,000 donation helps fo

Is SOA a “Special Project?”

I had some interesting responses to my post yesterday relating to SOA projects, and cutting the budget. From Joe McKendrick's blog: "As I observed in a post just a couple of days ago, Brenda Michelson spoke to various SOA Consortium members

Security design: Why UAC will not work

Pinning all your end-point security hopes on UAC assumes that criminals are not as smart as they really are

Dell could best EMC in joint AX4 release

New Clariion array enters a crowded segment — precisely why Dell stands to gain more

Geek Week in Review

Porn to Run. Makers of our nation's blue movies may soon be making Blu movies – as in Blu-ray – following the apparent collapse of the HD-DVD format after major defections by Warner and Paramount. Though the skin flix slicks were ear

Antitrust lawyer explains the ins and outs ot the NY AG antitrust investigation of Intel

With the breaking news that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating Intel for violations of state and federal antitrust laws, I sat down with John Peirce, an expert in domestic and foreign antitrust law and a partner in the Washington

CES: HP pledges to cut PC power usage by 25 percent

Using the greener-than-ever CES as a backdrop, HP this week announced plans to reduce the energy consumption of its volume desktop and notebook PC families by 25 percent by 2010 — relative to its 2005 numbers. HP's strategy for achieving this g

Budget Cuts and SOA

There seem to a few companies that are cutting their SOA efforts due to the softening of the economy. No matter if you think its oil prices, the mortgage crisis, or other factors, in many organizations capital budgets, including IT, are being reduced

Coverity investigating open source security

Coverity Inc, a long time expert in code analysis, has announced their work with the US government Department of Homeland Security to indentify security and quality issues in 11 popular open source projects: Amanda, NTP, OpenPAM, OpenVPN, Overdose, P

RIA at the LOC

As I found out from a Microsoft press release, Microsoft and the Library of Congress (LOC) have recently started collaborating on interactive Web content, and have agreed to do more. The new site actually sounds useful. When I followed up on that at

Of grids and clouds

A contrarian view of “A contrarian view of process”

A comment on this week's Keep the Joint Running, "A contrarian view of process," which suggests that too much emphasis has been placed on process, at the expense of more important matters, such as establishing what Jim Collins calls a

Apple shines, while Intel gives itself a black eye

What's in a brand? Technology, of course, and a pleasing public face. Few companies are as adept at blending those ingredients as Apple and Intel. But this week, the two Silicon Valley heavyweights were a study in contrasts as Apple made an exce

InfoWorld Green 15 will celebrate 2007’s innovative green-tech project

Concerns over datacenter power shortages as well as global climate change seeded the green-tech movement some time ago, but it really started to bear fruit in 2007. I've made a sincere effort to highlight green-tech projects of note over the pas

Storage and virtualization: Onaro and NetApp, Hifn and QLogic

Storage management vendor Onaro provides a nice addition to NetApp's software line after the two companies agree to the acquisition. And a combination from Hifn and QLogic set out to optimize VMware performance using a Swarm Series of iSCSI stor

One step closer to a SoftGrid future

The release of Microsoft's MSI packaging tool for SoftGrid-sequenced applications signals a major step forward in the company's quest to establish its application virtualization technology as a new de facto delivery vehicle for Windows appl

FAST — Buy a Search Engine!

Two months after making its own search technology a commodity, Microsoft raised the ante today in the enterprise search space by going out and buying Fast Search & Transfer, an Oslo, Norway-based search software company for $1.2 billion. FAST giv

Consumer and business apps begin to blur due to Web 2.0

The shift from on-premise software to Web 2.0 or hosted software is a blurring of the lines between consumer and enterprise software that, if not surprising, is certainly faster than expected. This is not quite the same as the consumerization of ente

Apple, Google predicted as stock winners in 1Q08

Global Equities analyst Trip Chowdhry just published a note listing tech stocks that he believes will beat expectations this quarter, and Apple is right there. Chowdhry said iPod sales were the best in the history of Apple, probably north of 30 milli

Books for Learning C# 3.0

I was surprised at how much the additions to C# 3.0 have changed (and improved) the C# language. Yes, C# 3.0 is backward-compatible, so older C# programs will still work, but using LINQ and the other new features can make a big difference in your new

Eight-core Xserve puts Apple back in the majors

Apple's new Xserve is lean, mean, and green, like a Mac should be. What took Apple so long? Apple rarely lets any product sit still for long, so when something in Apple's lineup goes untouched for a while, it prompts speculation about Apple

TC Tracker: An Apple with eight cores

Want an Apple with eight cores? Care to learn about upcoming, fast, air-born data transfers? Would you rather hear the latest buzz on virtualization? It's all here in TC Tracker. New short, fat pipe from Sony One of my favorites from CES Is Sony

A greater good discussion

Two related Comments regarding my recent post, "Is looking out for the greater good reasonable?" (Advice Line, 12/29/2007), edited for length:"Everyone is supposed to look out for themselves first. Anyone who doesn't is a commie.&

Of CES, Billy G., and jumping sharks

So I managed to slip away from the chains that bind me to my InfoWorld hovel and schlep out to Las Vegas for the annual gathering of the geek tribes, otherwise known as the Consumer Electronics Show. Maybe I'm getting old (ok, that's a give

Business Objects Licensing Tool Doesn’t Deliver

<P>As if <A href="http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2007/5/1/01716/04641">Symantec</A>, <A href="http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2007/3/12/02312/3956">Adobe</A>, <a href="http://www.grip

New Study Profiles Virtualization Impacts, Needs and Benefits

A new study from Saugatuck Technology says server virtualization will have the single largest impact on budgets for IT hardware and support through 2010. The survey, titled "The Many Faces of Virtualization — Understanding a New IT Reality,&quo

InfoWorld names Technology of the Year awards

IDG's InfoWorld recently announced the recipients of its 2008 Technology of the Year honors, recognizing 45 products across 9 general categories. The selection process was handled by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers. The annual awards

Asterisk Gets Primary Fever

To preface, my home and lab phone systems are driven by Asterisk — technically an aging TrixBox installation running under VMware ESX 3. It runs two SIP trunks and two analog lines, handles all voicemail, routes calls through the cheapest service fo

JBoss Developer Studio: a product or subscription?

By now you've likely read my views on OSS 1 &amp; 2. Here's something you may find interesting. Red Hat released JBoss Developer Studio in early December 2007. InfoWorld reported: "While JBoss Developer Studio is available for a $9

IBM and all that Jazz

The fun thing about IBM is that although it is a giant corporation it sometimes laughs at itself and even tries to inject a bit of humor into high tech. For example, witness it giving the code name T-Rex to its mainframes after rival Sun Microsystem

Green Plug looks to cut energy waste and cable clutter

Power management plays perhaps the most integral role in the whole sustainable technology movement. Reducing energy waste means lower electricity bills (and/or greater capacity for adding new machines) as well as a smaller carbon footprint. In an eff

Microsoft tries an end run around Google

Credit where credit is due: Paul Kedrosky, an investor, columnist and educator who writes an informative blog called Infectious Greed, did a great job this morning connecting the dots between Microsoft’s just announced $1.2 billion purchase of

Test Center Tracker: Layer One Networking and a New Guide

We keep trying to figure out how do networking without a physical layer, but so far we haven't figured that out, yet. Until then, we'll need to worry about things like cables. Brian Chee has looked at the craft and art of cable lacing, as p

Red Hat takes aim against Oracle, Microsoft

Looks like new Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is wasting no time in taking aim against rivals Oracle and Microsoft, according to recent interviews in the Associated Press. "Here, we are the attacker. If you listen to all the squealing that Microsoft

Wiring and Cabling: How To Lace Cable Harnesses

Many have described Cable Lacing as a lost art and rightly so. With zip ties down in the $0.01 each range it doesn't make any economic sense to expend the labor on lacing. However, anyone that has had to troubleshoot a cable bundle has found tha

2008 SOA Perdictions Podcast

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