Opinion

Click on this, Amazon

Amazon's patent on 1-click shopping has been done in by an Orc, or possibly a Goblin. Like many patents granted to high tech-firms for things that seem patently obvious (sorry), Amazon's 1-click monopoly always struck me as excessive. (I ha

Nokia N810 Tablet with Keyboard

Long time readers of this blog or my old one at www.theopenforce.com know I've been very interested in finding a portable internet device with a keyboard. Over the last 20 years, I've probably tried just about every pocketable computer ther

The Oracle/BEA Thing

Of course, the consolidation continues in the SOA space, and the rumors and published releases around Oracle's bid for BEA is the latest buzz. While the bloggers and reporters have been going nuts around this news item, the larger issues don&#03

Green capitalism grows up

There’s plenty of room to invest — or to find employment — in companies whose technologies could slow global warming. Wall Street is zeroing in on technologies that will help reduce the emission of greenhouse gases and slow global warming. Th

Factor sustainability into your SaaS decision

Virtualization remains, in my eyes, the poster child of sustainable technology for business. After all, it gives companies a way to do more work with fewer servers, which in turn frees up datacenter space and lowers energy bills. That's lean and

BEA vs. PeopleSoft: Top 10 reasons it’s different this time

Is Oracle’s Fusion Fizzling?

John Wookey’s surprising departure could be a sign that Oracle’s middleware push could be foundering. Betting against Larry Ellison’s acquisition strategy is always on the dangerous side. When he wanted to take plucky little Peoples

GoogleDocs and IT

Less Facebook, More Business…

<strong>When I started thinking about writing this blog, my initial thought was, "What will it be about?"</strong> Enterprises need to understand both what's going on with the social media landscape (trends and such), but

Are we witnessing the demise of the big “platform?”

Rumor has it Oracle is about to announce another delay in its Fusion platform. It's no secret SAP has had problems with NetWeaver and some say was the primary reason behind Shai Agassi leaving the company. Microsoft made it a point in its announ

Computing on the road

It's not exactly breaking news that computers are integral components in cars these days. They've been used since the 80's to handle various tasks such as fuel-oil ratios, performance tuning, transmission control, and so forth. What&#0

Ignoring the source code is akin to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand

Ben Chelf on Reliability in Complex Software Systems

Last month when I was covering ESC I asked how we can guarantee the reliability of complex embedded software systems. Ben Chelf, CTO of Coverity just emailed me a response that I think you might find interesting: Martin, I noticed your recap on the E

Cast Iron Systems forges integration appliance

Cast Iron Systems this week introduced its iA2000 integration appliance for small businesses, enabling companies to integrate with applications such as salesforce.com or Oracle. Use of the hardware appliance saves businesses from having to custom-cod

Test Center Tracker: Preview the future

Preview the future Today's TC Tracker is all about the future: a new OS, a new service pack and a new Linux machine with an intriguing storage twist. Enjoy. Waiting for Baby You may remember "Bringing up Baby" a delightful comedy with

Zonbu: Hassle Free Linux Box?

Hassle-free Linux box might be an oxymoron (like government efficiency), but it's an interesting strategy by startup company Zonbu. They have create a small form factor home PC, used a low-end Via CPU, based it on Gentoo Linux and a raft of open

Eating Your Own Dogfood

For the past six months or so, we've been running MySQL 5.1 for various internal and external applications. MySQl 5.1 has been in beta for quite some time and as we move closer to a GA release, I believe its important for us to "eat our own

A Message for the SOA Vendors

Download file…

The Gathering Storm

Got an email the other day that scared the bejesus out of me. It was a security alert from ThaiNetHost.com written entirely in Thai lettering, save for the names of three or four nasty Trojans and the words "Flash, "Internet Explorer,"

An excellent pickle

Dear Bob …I'm in a bit of a pickle — I've just received an offer from one place, and they want me to start on Monday. However, I've got another interview on Tuesday morning with a place that I like better, and I'd rather work t

Virtual Iron Bundles Server Virtualization Environments

In the early days of virtualization (and by early, I mean a few years ago), installing either VMware ESX Server or Xen virtualization was considered a difficult chore by many and thus a barrier to entry for many organizations. VMware and XenSource ha

Apple OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrade

Finally, a PC Unix that everyone can love. OS X Leopard is a triumph of customer-focused engineering Apple's announcement of the impending delivery of OS X Leopard (release 10.5 of Mac and Xserve operating systems) marks the public debut of an e

The Demise of Traditional Software – 3Q07

Some of you know that I've decided to track the demise 😉 of the traditional software market on a quarterly basis using IBM's WebSphere branded revenue as the basis. I use the WebSphere division for no other reason than it's the part

OpenJDK & Ice Tea

Because I've been a hermit over the past few days, I'm only now reading about Sun's open source event earlier this week. Sadly, I wasn't invited (likely because I work at IBM and I'm a peon in the OSS landscape). 🙂 Looks li

Microsoft Offers Planning and Design Guides for SoftGrid and Viridian

Microsoft is starting a new Beta program called Infrastructure Planning and Design that is part of the company's Solution Accelerators group. According to Microsoft, the Infrastructure Planning and Design guides are the next version of Windows S

XenSource More than Doubles Customer Base in Q3

With the help of the company's recent release of its new, feature-rich XenEnterprise v4 server virtualization platform back in August, XenSource was able to watch its customer growth nearly double in Q3. Today, XenSource reached new milestones a

Microsoft’s Unified Communications Move: Call Waiting?

Microsoft's rollout of its unified communications platform–Office Communications Server 2007–pushes Microsoft into the last unmolested part of the enterprise infrastructure budget untouched by the software giant in some way: telecom. And there

Virtualization Gets Real at Altiris ManageFusion 2007 in Orlando

Last week, I was once again lucky enough to be able to attend a premiere IT trade show – ManageFusion. The folks at Altiris must have a secret formula written down somewhere when it comes to events. From the facilities chosen, the food provided, the

The lie that is Voice over IP

In light of all the hoopla around unified communications–especially at today's Microsoft UC event in San Francisco –and in light of the fact that the backbone of any UC platform is VoIP [Voice over IP], I just thought I'd inject a brief n

OASIS approves e-business standard

OASIS has approved a messaging standard for electronic business as an official OASIS standard. Members have approved ebXML Messaging Services 3.0: Part 1, Core Features. EbMS defines a Web services-based method for reliable and secure exchange of bus

Office Depot offers one-stop shop for electronics recycling

Although I moved nearly nine months ago, I still haven't finished unpacking all of my boxes. Sad, but true. But I have tackled some over the past couple of days. In the process, I found plenty of papers to recycle, which is pretty easy. But I&#0

Report: Apple asserts iPhone meets eco standards

Facing a lawsuit for allegedly using toxic substances in the iPhone, Apple today told MacWorld that the device "meets the restrictions placed on hazardous substances."

Gates continue to talk about what’s needed in unified communications

Gates live — at Bill Graham Auditorium — talks about Microsoft's new unified communications offering. "Software innovation is being brought to the business phone call." Gates still continues to call it a phone call. Very old school.

Bill Gates — live from Bill Graham Auditorium, San Francisco

Screeching music, like the sound of the Blue Angels flying overhead, the lights flicker and a guitarist comes on stage playing notes to match the jet planes. I expect the curtain to be pulled back any moment, ala The Wizard of Oz, and a small, well-i

Preview: Oracle BI Suite sweetens BI for analysts and business-line users

Oracle has a logical argument why you should buy your business intelligence (BI) solution from the company. Having acquired ERP, CRM, and other data-intensive application vendors to pour data into the Oracle back end data store, why not analyze and d

Test Center Tracker: A Marriage of Convenience

Unified communications get a boost from a big backer, your web site is probably at risk, and there's a new iPhone lawsuit that has nothing to do with software updates. All in all, it's an exciting Tuesday here in the Test Center. New Micros

StrikeIron forges community for Web services use

StrikeIron, which offers an online marketplace for commercially available Web services, has launched a beta version of StrikeIron Developer Community, enabling developers to collaborate on business applications. The community, StrikeIron said, lets d

Future-proofing NetWare with virtualization

Amid what turned out to be a prophetic warning issued by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and the subsequent but completely unrelated federal lawsuit filed against Novell last week, the Provo, UT, firm quietly pulled NetWare into the present with an op

My kingdom for a RAID array!

Hardware was only one of many costs to consider when it came time to purchase more disk space. But that was the only one management focused on. In the early 90s, I worked as the IT manager for a hardware distributor on the East coast. They were a fai

Microsoft: The next AT&T?

Company unveils its unified communications platform, vies for "21st century dial tone" dominance Enterprises looking to step into the 21st century by dumping their legacy PBX systems have some big names after their wallets, as Microsoft tod

All Your Product Are Belong to Us

<P>It's as if an alien mindset has taken over the American corporate culture. They seem to think they own us. The latest example, and perhaps the worst, is Apple's deliberate use of an update to cripple iPhones that had "unauthor

Apple faces lawsuit over toxins in iPhone

It's a good thing Apple put such a high price tag on its iPhone. The company is going to need the cash to cover iPhone-related legal fees. The latest legal threat comes from The Center for Environmental Health in response to Greenpeace's re

Anti-Spam Wrap-up

To summarize where I am with protecting my own domain's email, SpamJadoo is now filtering out about 3,000 spam attempts a day, and passing less than a hundred emails a day to my server. This is a big improvement over doing the filtering on my ow

What To Do If You’re Disrupted

I wrote a couple of articles for www.ondisruption.com recently that I think could be useful to folks in IT. (Important disclosure: this site is run by my brother Mike, a disruption consultant. But luckily, he doesn't pay me, so I don't thin

Report: Toxic materials, unfriendly design make iPhone ungreen

Greenpeace International is once again calling out Apple, this time over the company's decision to use some unsavory toxic materials in the iPhone that other cell phone manufacturers have managed to eliminate. Moreover, the environmental organiz

Sustainability and the supply-chain

Whether you love or loathe Wal-Mart, there's no denying the company has embraced business practices to make it one of the most powerful and influential corporations of our time. Among those practices, the company is vigorously embracing sustaina

Test Center Tracker: Security, free, for you and me

Open source meets security: We've all been taught to be wary of free lunches. And IT admins, certainly, know to be cautious when choosing tools to protect their assets. But InfoWorld Contributing Editor Tom Bowers finds that there's an arra

Oracle to BEA: Better get a bucket

I have to admit things have been a little boring in Cringeville lately. SCO vs the world is so pathetic it's not worth mentioning. Bill Gates is almost out the door and Microsoft is trying to be a good Web citizen, despite the loony rantings of

JetBrains adds to Java IDE

JetBrains is offering an upgrade to its Java IDE, IntelliJ Idea 7.0, featuring Web development tools and backing for the Ruby language. Included are tools for developing complex Web applications, with Web services and dynamic language support. Advanc

Smart security testing on the cheap

A pragmatic open source testing methodology, and an abundance of excellent free tools, help you plug security holes without busting the budget