Opinion

Answer key: You don’t know tech

The facts behind this week

Circuit City and Black Friday

<P>Shopping for holiday bargains is getting so complicated that you might want to take your attorney and accountant along with you, just to make sure you understand the deal you're getting. That would seem to be the moral of one reader&#03

Easier IT Recruiting with Jobvite

Q4 is usually a time when you're doing your planning for the next fiscal year and looking at staffing up in Q1. The only problem is it always takes longer to hire than you would expect. Jobvite is an interesting potential solution. It's a s

Finally, A Service Pack Worth Deploying!

Thanks to the folks over at the exo.performance.network, we now have proof of a compelling reason to upgrade our systems with Service Pack 1: A roughly 3% improvement in application performance. Of course, the particular &quot;Service Pack 1&

Climate Savers green catalog proves unripe

I've had green hardware and gadgetry on the brain these past couple of weeks, no doubt thanks to the holiday season. If you're looking to stock your home or your office with some energy-efficient computing wares — not just PCs but also mob

Tech Stocks to Own in a Downturn

It's been a Maalox, or maybe even a Xanax, couple of months. Investors have been whipsawed by market tumbles sparked by the still out-of-control mortgage mess interspersed with tantalizing rallies. It's not going to get calmer anytime soon.

SPEC seeds future green-server benchmarks

Getting entrepreneurial in 2008

A fond farewell from an intrepid columnist, who exits offering shameless self-promotion for two adrenaline-boosting ventures

Microsoft Windows Home Server

Microsoft is stepping away from the traditional home server like those being offered by Infrant/NetGear, IOMega, Buffalo, and others. The pack is attempting to offer the SOHO environment a smaller version of the enterprise servers we're used to

The Book of PF (aka BSD Firewalls)

The Book of PF (No Starch Press, December 2007, 184 pp, ISBN 9781593271657 I've been using IPTables under Linux for quite some time now but with the poorly implemented firewall tool under Mac OSx Leopard, this book by NoStarch press has arrived

Small Business IS Big Business…

Was poking around over on the <a href="http://futureboy.blogs.fsb.cnn.com">Future Boy blog</a> and found a cool video.

Honda’s Asimo robot demonstrates advanced intelligence

Robotics has got to be simultaneously one of the most exciting and ignored high tech stories on the planet. I’m not talking about robotics in manufacturing which is currently being used worldwide across many industries, especially among the aut

Coding Tip: JavaScript isn’t Java, C++, or C#, No Matter How it Looks

This memo just crossed my desk, from the CTO of one of the companies for which I consult. Caveat coder. Looking at some of our JavaScript code it seems like the use of new Boolean() and new String() has been growing. This will get you into trouble.&a

Open Source Hardware

How do you disrupt a billion dollar hardware industry? Open source it. That's just what Sun has been doing, rolling out their latest OpenSPARC T2 processor with an open source design available under the GPL. You can download the design, specs, d

Fleury Gets an Office

🙂 Hey, that's what Marc's post says….Marc is becoming an advisor for RIA vendor Appcelerator. Fleury writes: "And finally, what sets them apart, at least for me, is that they are friends and a group of my favorite peoples. So let&#

How long should a discipinary freeze last?

Dear Bob …I read your recent Keep the Joint Running about compensation ("Poor Joe," 10/22/2007) and understand your point about raises being forever.But salary freezes as punishment for being "written up" are forever too, no? So

Sun’s $1M grant to Sun’s FOSS Communities

Simon (Chief OSS Officer at Sun) talks about Sun's $1 million dollar grant to Sun controlled FOSS communities. Net/net: Sun will take $1M and divide it amongst six Sun owned/controlled FOSS communities. The communities will propose how to use th

Analysis: Why I’ll Miss CompUSA

CompUSA will be closing its doors after the holiday season. Ephraim thinks that this is a sign of the times. Many commentators have described the chain's evolving financial troubles, and its often inscrutable management moves. For example, when

Where the SOA Technology Vendors are Falling Down

There seems to be a few core issues out there that are haunting most SOA vendors today. While the number of issues are complex and far reaching, I believe we can boil them down into a few key talking points, including: •    L

I’m so bo-o-o-red with the RIAA (but what can I do?)

So, just to be clear. We're all thieves here, right? That's the implication of documents filed by the RIAA earlier this week in Atlantic v. Howell, yet another file-swapping case underway in Arizona. At issue: whether simply putting a CD in

Test Center Tracker: From VM to the Web, almost

New processors performance, Web based applications and virtual OSes are all elements that can affect how you and your users work. Learn what's happening in those three areas in today's Test center Tracker. Now let's virtualize those na

VMware Announces Major Updates to its Flagship Product – VI3

VMware finally announced the general availability of its highly anticipated upgrade to its flagship product Virtual Infrastructure 3 – which includes VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. The company said the new release provides additional ca

Office Live Workspaces: Catching Up with Google Docs?

Microsoft's Office Live services are, for the most part, targeted at the smallest of enterprises. But Microsoft has unveiled the beta of Workspaces, a collaboration tool within Office Live, that may become the focus of its battle to beat Google

Bad luck has AMD cowering

Just when AMD had its swagger on, it turned common bad luck into a full-fledged stumble A recent analyst quip from a widely distributed story on AMD's chip delays included a non sequitur parting shot that would have made me sick if it weren&#039

SMB Blog This Week

A quick entry as I get ready for the rest of the week — the return of the Emerging Enterprise Podcast is set for late this week, and a review of Microsoft Small Business Accounting is coming soon. In the podcast, I've got an interview,some news

Test Center Tracker: A Little Green, a Lot of Testing, and a Dangerous Component

It's a small win for green computing, a balancing act for software testing, and the acknowledgment that the most dangerous component in any given computer system isn't the fault of either programmers or engineers in today's Test Center

Keeping My Business, My Business

Another reason people input false information into social networking sites…

Wall Street to Fed: MORE!!

Everyone in the world of finance who was paying attention should have read the writing on the wall: The Fed was planning to cut rates by one-quarter of a point. Indeed, a poll of economist by Bloomberg, I think, showed that better than 8 out of 10 we

Office 2007 SP1 Released on unwitting public

Microsoft has spit out the first service pack to Office 2007 today, well ahead of schedule. Whether or not customers are ready for it or not is another matter. Microsoft may have been hoping to prime the pump for rapid adoption of Office 2008 by the

Is Vista Hampering Office 2007 Adoption?

As Microsoft prepares to release Service Pack 1 for Office 2007, I've noticed a number of articles about the relatively slow adoption of the new Office in enterprise computing circles. Specifically, the authors of these articles point to the per

Eclipse-Based IDE for JBoss

Having worked on a broad range of IDEs for many years when I was at Borland, I'm always interested in seeing the latest developments in this area. To a large extent, I think IDEs and programmer's editors are largely a matter of personal tas

Green Grid announces tech forum in February

Datacenter energy-effiency enthusiasts, mark your calendars: The Green Grid consortium will hold its first annual general members' meeting and technical forum come Feb. 5 and 6 in San Francisco.

SlickEdit is Nice for JavaScript, Too

I've mentioned before that I like SlickEdit for editing C++ code, because it's the only tool I've found that can reliably refactor C++. In the last couple of days I have found that it's also a really nice tool for editing JavaScri

Are most surveys inherently biased? Could be

Tis the season to publish surveys. It seems that the end of the year is the perfect time to come out with a survey. Typically these surveys are shall we say somewhat self-serving in that they are commissioned by companies that benefit to gain from th

IBM offers complex systems tools

IBM is announcing Tuesday upgraded software products intended to take the complexity out of complex systems development while also improving developer productivity. Complex systems development involves systems such as cellular phones, airplanes, miss

Another Example of the Oversimplification of SOA

Download file…

Zinc whisker infestation

Tiles are tiles, right? What's a little galvanic corrosion among friends? I work at a small company (about 300 employees), owned by one of the largest in the world. Yes, of course the parent company is brutish, inept, inefficient and overall, a

Forecasting the future of business intelligence

Business analytics is experiencing a resurgence as enterprises seek more from BI Last week Business Objects signed a deal with SPSS to link its predictive analytics application to the Business Objects platform. This week SAP will announce a deal with

Low-Tech Warranty Bar Raised Higher

<P>It's not just high tech companies that are making it harder and harder for customers to claim their warranty coverage on defective products. Reader responses to our recent discussions concerning <A href="http://www.gripe2ed.com/

Technology around the globe

Virtualization and Storage: Taking a Look at NetApp and ONStor

When you start implementing your server virtualization projects within your organization, one of the things you grow to understand is the importance of your storage solution. NetApp is working its way into the virtualization arena by partnering with

The Corporate Jones’

This past weekend, I was invited to a colleague's holiday party. I found myself rubbing elbows with the CIO of a multi-national imaging corporation. When I explained that I'm a <a href="http://www.xynomedia.com" target="

Via packs power into teeny green Artigo PC kit

Beyond the sheer "wow" factor of such a powerful system in a diminutive body, the Artigo is a fine example of how PCs can become greener. For one thing, it's got a remarkably lower power draw: According to Via, a complete system would

The demise of CompUSA: it’s only the beginning

The news today that CompuUSA will close its remaining 103 stores, after selling off another 126 earlier this year certainly shows us how far high tech and computing in general has come in 25 years. Although I’m not privy to the CompUSA books my

A view to Google’s solar power

Google's headquarters, the Googleplex, has long been an architecturally pretty impressive building, but with the addition of 9,000-plus solar panels, it looks all the cooler. The search behemoth has posted pics of the installation on its <a h

Time to Wash Your Hands of Palm?

Palm is one of those companies I always root for because I’ve happily used its products for years and I admire its pioneering spirit and history. But that’s not reason enough to like the stock, and the developments of the last few days pa

Test Center Tracker: Office Live misses the mark

<b>Not quite dead:</b> At long last, the big Redmondian machine has raised the curtains for Office Live Workspaces, its online document-sharing solution. Contributed Editor Randall C. Kennedy <strong><a href="http://www.info

Installing Rails 2.0 on Windows XP

In response to Friday's news story that Ruby on Rails 2.0 had been released, I decided that it was time to update my installation. I opened a C-Shell on the Windows box I use for Rails development, typed "gem update", and promptly ran

Google’s Virgin marriage

Yet another billionaire bachelor bites the dust. By now, Google's Larry Page and his betrothed Lucy Southworth have been hitched on Richard Branson's private island in the Bermuda Triangle (actually Necker Island in the British Virgin Isles

Why re-using is harder than building for re-use

Dear Bob …I don’t agree with your point below: “…Exceptional performance? That means repeating the results of others, not having them repeat yours,” (from "Creating a learning organization," Keep the Joint Running