Opinion

Veterans Day

Originally, what is now called Veteran's Day was Armistice Day, commemorating the end of “the war to end all wars” on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. It has become just another three-day weekend,

Red Hat Reaches for Amazon’s Compute Cloud

Red Hat has launched a private beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud for those users who want to scale up their applications without

Electric Cloud and VMware Team to Extend Lab Manager

Electric Cloud's software production management solution is going to be integrated with VMware's Lab Manager product to help deliver dynamically provisioned virtual machines for the software build-test-deploy process. VMware and Electric Cl

More on SOA as a Corporate Responsibility

I had a lot of reaction around my post last week "Why Enterprise Architecture is a Corporate Responsibility." This is also the topic of my ZapFlash I wrote the week before. Mike Walker liked the post, and had a great follow up post here. I

The Ubuntu Plunge – Day 5: Show Stopper!

It’s the moment I’ve been dreading all week, when I realize that I’ve hit a wall with Ubuntu and can go no further. Today, the wall in question is ACPI support, which in version 7.10 is simply broken. Install “Gutsy” ont

Microsoft’s Free Search Server Express Reduces Search Competitor’s Air Supply

It looks like Microsoft is trying to do its best to cut off the air supply of its enterprise search competitors, at least within the Windows realm. Take a look at this review of Microsoft's free Search Server 2008 Express. For those who've

Virtual Management with Hyperic and Virtual Training with Surgient

Hosting firm Mosso uses VMware's ESX Server technology to help it provide the stability and scalability needed to power up and keep their customers running. And to help them manage the process, the company has turned to Hyperic HQ Enterprise. In

More about compensation

[The inquiry that follows is edited down from a longer version. I hope I've left its points intact. – Bob]Dear Bob …I've been enjoying your columns on compensation ("Poor Joe" and "Comp logic," Keep the Joint Running,

The greener — and darker — sides of MS’s refurbisher program

Microsoft has launched the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher (MAR)program through which companies that sell refurbished PCs can easily load licensed versions of Windows XP and necessary drivers on the systems they sell.

Rockin’ the Open Source Way

Last week, Hyperic hosted a gaming party at their offices, with plenty of open source people there from MySQL, MuleSource, JasperSoft and others. Ross Mason, co-founder of MuleSource, flew in all the way from Malta, just to play some Wii Tennis. (Ok,

Observations from the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum 2007

I'm back from NYC. Took the train back, which is always nicer than waiting for a delayed flight. However, trying to get my truck out of Union Station is always a bit of fun; the gates are so narrow I actually have to fold in my mirrors to get ou

Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed

Have you ever read a programming book and immediate discovered the answers to a dozen mysteries that had been bothering you? That happened to me yesterday when I opened up Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed, by Adam Nathan (Sams, 2007, 272 pp., $39.99, ISBN

Test Center Tracker: Taking the lead in green datacenters, end user security, adaptive infrastructure, and relational databases

Going for LEED Gold: LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, offers a certification for buildings that were constructed with environmentally friendly materials, make efficient use of water and energy, and provide a clean and healthy

Geek Week in Review

Ad nauseum. Facebook unveiled its spiffy new "social ads" concept this week, where Facebookers get to broadcast all their commercial preferences to their friends and get nothing but their ads in return. Want to just skip the whole thing? So

Living off the grid OS

3Tera extends AppLogic to bring automated appliance-style functionality to app management

Protecting the end-user

Sometimes security means protecting end-users from themselves

The Ubuntu Plunge – Day 4: A Small Detour

Those of you who have been following my exploration of Ubuntu as a Windows Vista replacement will note that I've become quite enamored of my newly adopted environment. The ability to “skin” almost every aspect of the UI &

Review: Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express breaks out SharePoint’s powerful query functions into a free, no-document-limit offering

Search vendors sometimes give away feature-constrained or capacity-clipped versions of their enterprise solutions. An example of the latter is IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition – a very good pick for intranets or moderate-sized Web sites. But it&#039

The Penguin Mothership

This week I visited Oracle headquarters for the first time. I've been writing pieces on Oracle for about 4-5yrs now and I've finally earned enough credits to be called in. Now what can I say about Oracle campus except it's nothing shor

Enterprise Social Computing

Big green event in the Big Apple — and it’s free

Concerns over rising energy costs as well as the state of the environment are spurring more organizations to develop sustainable game plans. While technology alone won't solve those problems — planning and corporate culturals shifts are essenti

What we can do to stop cybercriminals

I talked to Garth Bruen of Knujon on the phone today. You'll recall that I mentioned Knujon in Superbugs and Cybercriminals on October 31st; previously, I posted an email from Bruen. In Superbugs and Cybercriminals I said that I was going to fig

Phoenix Technologies Launches Into HyperSpace

You really shouldn't have to wait three minutes or more to use your laptop or desktop computer while it chugs along to boot up your Windows operating system. And if Phoenix Technologies CEO Woody Hobbs has anything to say about it, you won'

Taking the LEED on building green

Imagine, if you will, taking a 1917 Ford Model T, tearing out its old engine, and popping in a state-of-the-art, environmentally friendlier hybrid engine. The notion, while enticing from both technological and eco-friendly perspectives, would seem do

Q&A: From 90 years old to LEED gold

There's a tendency in our society to simply throw out the old and replace it with something shiny and new. Sometimes, that might be necessary; often, though, the old still has value, and chucking it results in costly and unnecessary waste. An ol

My Google phone hangup

Attention CIOs and IT execs responsible for mobile applications: Google is coming to save you!

The Ubuntu Plunge – Day 3: Epiphany!

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the web this morning. I had justed booted back into Vista x64 to check on a couple of schedule items when I noticed an alert coming from Windows Defender. It seems that the anti-spyware utility had been unab

Dell Support Upgrade Helps Support Dell Support

<P>Sometimes it seems like vendors are running their support operations purely as profit centers. That's certainly the impression one reader had after encountering some annoying problems with the Dell Support Center 2.0 software upgrade De

Red Hat & Virtualization

Red Hat put out a series of announcements showing how RHEL 5.1 has better support for virtualization using the Xen kernel and how RHEL can now be purchased "in the cloud" via Amazon's EC2 service. This is a good move by both companies

Grinding my gears

I've had an annoying day. It's one thing when the technology refuses to cooperate, it's another when it seems that human incompetence plays the key role. My woes today revolved around the fact that Ubuntu Server 7.10 seems to be terrib

Red Hat by the Hour

The move away from commodity boxes running Linux continues. It's nice to see Red Hat getting in front of this market trend. Very cool news about RHEL being offered through Amazon's EC2. "The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and

Reinventing Dell

Michael Dell has never been a big fan of acquisitions or radical shifts in direction. But since returning as CEO, itself a radical move, he and his company have looked outside itself for new strength. And none of the acquisitions has been more import

TODO: Notes to Myself

Update the rest of my Windows computers to the released version of Windows Live. (The upgrade went fine on this computer; I'm blogging with the released version of Windows Live Writer.) Look at the Infragistics Aikido CTP. This is a new Web Use

Govs pledge to buy greener hardware for state governments

If you're a hardware vendor and "energy efficiency" isn't high on your product-feature list, you're risking losing some valuable customers — perhaps as many as 50, with names such as Kansas and Minnesota.

Notes for SOA Executive Forum, Day 1

This is the 4th SOA Executive Forum I've spoke at. It always amazes me how quickly these guys can pull together this event, and still get the attendees. This event is packed, and has some new and interesting content. The highlight of this mornin

BEA previews app server

BEA Systems has posted a technology preview of the WebLogic Server 10.3 application server, which features Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 compatability. Also featured is Web 2.0 rich Internet application support and improved interoperability wit

Audio: Four industry experts discuss the green datacenter

At InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum in New York last September, I had the pleasure of leading a panel discussion about the green datacenter with four industry experts. Although I lacked equipment to record the event, Microsoft's L

Test Center Tracker: From Cupertino to Oslo

Cut short on backups What would you do if your laptop would die and there was no quick replacement in sight? That's what Tom Yager had to face when his MacBook Pro suffered a sudden demise. What can Tom do while waiting for a replacement to arri

CollabNet links Eclipse, ALM

CollabNet is announcing Wednesday the latest release of the CollabNet Desktop for Eclipse, providing Eclipse developers with access to CollabNet application lifecycle management (ALM) tools for distributed teams. CollabNet Desktop – Eclipse Edition 1

Catharsis via hypervisor

So for all the virtual infrastructures that I've built in the lab and in the field, for every time I've PXE booted a new VMware ESX server into a production environment, I hadn't virtualized my own core systems… until yesterday. It w

Penetrating the mysteries of IT budgeting

Dear Bob …OK, I like what you have said and the questions you have raised concerning employee compensation (in "Poor Joe" and "Comp logic," Keep the Joint Running, 10/22/2007 and 10/29/2007). I have a related issue you may like

The Ubuntu Plunge – Day 2: Customization

I'm feeling spoiled. After years of enduring one questionable Microsoft UI decision after another, I'm having a blast tweaking and re-skinning gnome under Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon.” To be sure, it's a buggy process. I&#039

Oslo: Microsoft’s SOAP opera, continued

Back in June 2000, I went to Microsoft's Forum 2000 event in Redmond, Wash., where the company rolled out its strategy surrounding SOAP and the .Net platform. It was Microsoft's first big step toward interoperability, taking the work of peo

The new road to recovery is worse than the old one

Now that an Intel-based Mac is a dead x86 PC, how do you bide your time until the replacement comes in? I always do my best to turn misfortune into opportunities for enlightenment, and oh, what enlightenment the past couple of weeks has placed within

The e-Jihadists are coming, the e-Jihadists are coming!

Stop me if you've heard this one: The Internet arm of Al Queda is targeting 15 anti-Islamist sites on November 11, urging its followers to download the new point-and-click Electronic Jihad 2.0 software and start their attacks. (Actually, you mig

Sun & Software

Matt Asay &amp; Larry Dignan question whether Sun can grow. Matt believes that Sun needs a stronger software story in order to grow. Sun grew 1% YTY in the most recent quarter. Yay for open sourcing everything?!? Sun has great hardware products.

IBM aims at trimming electric bills with Active Energy Manager

Management tools aimed at reining in datacenter energy waste — and associated high costs — continue to hit the market. The latest example comes from IBM in a software package called Systems Director Active Energy Manager (AEM).

Catalog Choice spares businesses and users from paper waste

E-mail spam is an irritant, but today's filters seem pretty adept at filing those unwanted messages in the junk mail folder. To me, junk mail of the tree-pulp variety is far worse. It doesn't match spam for sheer quantity or often distastef

Jim Starkey on Relational Databases

Jim Starkey, Senior Software Architect at MySQL, is featured in an online interview over at Dr Dobb's Journal. It's a short interview, but every question reveals insight into the Jim's thoughts on the relational model, SQL, security, s

Not just iSCSI

The sudden news of Dell putting on the table $1.4 billion in cash to purchase EqualLogic must have caught not only me but also many storage pundits by surprise. May be that's why so many commentaries seem to focus mainly on two easy to spot tech