Opinion

Spyware and Copyright Punishment

<P>The comparisons between two news stories last week struck me as rather telling. You probably saw <A href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,138136-c,onlineentertainment/article.html">some of the coverage</A> about a jur

By Ed Foster

Oct 9, 2007 6 mins

Sun’s T-2 (Niagara 2) servers launch to an enthusiastic reception

In the high end of the server industry, where UNIX holds sway and demanding applications go for configurable firepower, Sun has struck a blow with two deceptively powerful servers that, of all things, pack all of their mutlthreaded into rack and bla

By Tom Yager

Oct 9, 2007 2 mins

Bill Hilf Adds Windows Server Marketing Responsibility

Networkworld is reporting: "The leader of Microsoft's integration efforts around open source software and its proprietary technologies is expanding his role by adding the title "general manager of Windows server marketing," furthe

Oct 9, 2007 1 min

Trapped by age

Dear Bob …I work for an Heir, a Psychopath and Protégé (see "More business archetypes," Keep the Joint Running, 10/1/2007). As you can imagine, projects are interesting and can drag on forever. I view myself as a mechanic. M

By Bob Lewis

Oct 9, 2007 2 mins

VMware Infrastructure 3.5 will power down unused servers

Virtualization, in and of itself, is quite the green technology: It lets companies use fewer servers to get the same amount of work done. But the forthcoming Version 3.5 of VMware Infrastructure, which will include the new VMware ESX Server 3.5 and V

By Ted Samson

ReMIX 07

I spent most of the day Monday at ReMIX07 in Cambridge, MA. I got there a little late, just in time for Miguel de Icaza's Linux/Moonlight demos near the end of Brad Abrams' keynote. Fortunately, Brad has already blogged a summary of his who

By Martin Heller

Steve Ballmer on Open Source, Online and Other

There is a very interesting video of Steve Ballmer speaking in the UK. As always, entertaining and a little bizarre. Talking about advertising "A lot of people don't like to pay for things." "Will online publications be all ad fun

By Dave Rosenberg

Hot jobs, high energy: The Web 2.0 startup

I’ll level with you. Sometimes my job, which involves lots and lots of talking, makes me tired. Really tired. Especially when I’m at an event where lots of people are vying for my attention, and I’m vying for the attention of many o

Green tech vs. sustainable tech

At the end of <a href="/video/Interviews/Virtualization/Hitachis-CTO-talks-green-storage/video_1709.html">my recent video interview</a> with Hitachi Data Systems CTO Hu Yoshida, he paid me what I thought

By Ted Samson

SAP’s Business Objects acquistion: The death knell for point solutions?

SAP, the company known for building rather than acquiring technology, did an about-face this week, announcing its intention to acquire Business Objects, one of the largest point-solution ISVs in the BI space. SAP does not usually acquire large compan

By Ephraim Schwartz

Infragistics offers toolsets for Windows apps

Infragistics announced Monday Infragistics NetAdvantage for .Net 2007 Volume 3, featuring toolsets for ASP.Net and Windows Forms. NetAdvantage for .Net is a suite of controls, components and tools for .Net. Developers can build user experiences in li

By Paul Krill

Oct. 12 – Legal Summit for Software Freedom

This must have been announced previously (?) but this press release was recently emailed to us… The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), will host a Leg

When SOAs Fail

Download file…

Service or Host?

One of the simple facts of my job is that I get a lot of press releases. Really. Tons of the things. Even before I got the opportunity to work with SMB IT, I started noticing an awful of press releases talking about one of two things. The first was s

By Curt Franklin

Test Center Tracker: Content management, the open-source way

CMS at an enticing price: free: Discontent with the state of your companies content? If, indeed, your data and documents are in disarray, a CMS (content management system) might warrant consideration — and there's no reason open-source options

By Ted Samson

Google heads north

Google is on the move, and I'm not just talking about its stratospheric stock price. (Let see, I have $600 to burn. I can a pretty nice desktop, a kick**s digital camera, or one share of Google Inc.) The Future of All Online Commerce ha

By Robert Cringely

A sampler of fresh startup jobs

Do you have what it takes? These positions are just waiting for skilled applicants to step up to the plate

Careers

How to avoid jobs ripe for outsourcing

Some jobs will stay an integral part of your company over the long haul; some are headed elsewhere. Here’s a rough guide to telling the difference

Careers Technology Industry

How to get a job at a hot startup

Yes, startups are back, big time. But the rules for finding a position in a dynamic young company have changed. Here’s what you need to know

Oct 8, 2007 8 mins

Careers

Finding that dream tech job

Startups are looking to hire, assuming you know what they’re looking for

By Steve Fox

Careers

DreamScene: The Nightmare Continues!

Back in February I posted my very first entry to this blog. Titled "DreamScene? More Like a Nightmare on Vista Street," my entry explained out how Microsoft's "motion desktop" technology was a huge resource hog that sapped bo

By Randall Kennedy

Windows XP’s Final Service Pack Goes to Beta

On Friday,Microsoft released a preview of its final update to the Windows XP operating system, Windows XP Service Pack 3. The service pack is essentially a rollup of previous hot-fixes to the operating system, and includes no new features. The final

By Sean Gallagher

A Report on Combining Virtualization and Business Continuity

The Aberdeen Group recently put out a research report titled "Are You Protected? Virtualization and Business Continuity" which states that virtualization continues to be a key IT strategy to enable new ways to solve old problems in the ente

Oct 7, 2007 2 mins

Stratavia Data Palette 4.0 Offers Intelligence to IT Automation

Denver based Stratavia introduced the latest version of its Data Palette data center automation software which expands on its core offering of database automation to now address servers, networks and other applications as well. Data Palette 4.0 inclu

Oct 7, 2007 2 mins

You Know your SOA Project is Going Well When….

Okay, a few pessimistic posts last week, so here is an optimistic post to balance things out. You know your SOA project is going well when… You have a clear understanding of the underlying information models you're dealing with. Yo

Oct 7, 2007 1 min

What militaristic management is really like

Dear Bob …Your first paragraph (in "More business archetypes," Keep the Joint Running, 10/1/2007) caught my eye. I think people who have never been in the military haven't a clue what it really like. Most people confuse the word &#03

By Bob Lewis

Oct 7, 2007 4 mins

Parallels Answers the Expiring Mac Boot Camp Issue

While the pending release of Leopard coming from Apple is something that Mac users are highly anticipating and waiting for, it also means that the current license for Boot Camp Beta expires soon. So if you are a Mac OS X Tiger user using Boot Camp, y

Oct 6, 2007 2 mins

Yankee Group on Virtual Desktops and Microsoft’s Plans for SoftGrid

Will virtualization of the corporate desktop finally end the laptop management that many IT folks face? One analyst firm said it just might offer such a solution. And speaking of the desktop, have you been following SoftGrid since Microsoft acquired

Oct 6, 2007 1 min

Core Value of a SOA is the Ability to Reuse Services? Not a Chance.

When considering the way SOA is sold within the enterprise, the notion of service reuse typically leads the charge. It just seems logical; a service-oriented approach means that we divide up applications into services, and then create a layer on top

Oct 6, 2007 5 mins

Compuware adds to business requirements app

Compuware plans Tuesday to announce Compuware Optimal Trace 5.0, a new version of the company's business requirements management software intended to make it easier to adopt a business requirements management solution. Version 5.0 enhances propa

By Paul Krill

Oct 5, 2007 2 mins

Danger Ahead: Insider Trading

A small item in today’s financial news raises a point that has bugged me for a long time. The news (as reported by the Associated Press): “Symantec Chief Executive John Wendell Thompson Exercises Options for 50,000 Shares.” Before I

Oct 5, 2007 4 mins

Geek Week in Review

Trial by wire. The RIAA has sued 26,000 people for file sharing, but this week marks the first time it's actually had to prove its case in court. A jury in Duluth has awarded the industry pariah — err, PR group — damages of $222,000 from Minne

By Robert Cringely

.NET Library source welcome, but not earth-shattering

With all due respect to the esteemed Senator from MuleSource, I wonder what Dave Rosenberg has been smoking. In this blog posting, Dave says that Microsoft's release of the source code to the .NET Libraries is "a patent trolling dream.&quot

By Martin Heller

How long does it Take?

OK, here we are quite a bit of time after Yukon SP2 and we still don't have an ordered list if SSIS packages. Seriously guys, how long does it take to put an order by clause on the end of that query? Currently, SSIS packages are sorted by import

By Sean McCown

Oct 5, 2007 2 mins

Databases

Test Center Tracker: Green storage, converged storage, and rich enterprise apps

Rotating green matter?: So while AMD and Intel have been shouting in our ear about how they are putting money in our pockets by making their processors more power efficient, storage vendors have been eerily silent. Now they're starting to get th

By Doug Dineley

Oct 5, 2007 2 mins

The land of fruits and nuts goes quiet

Matt Prigge sent me a link to this article on the sudden revocation of the ca.gov domain on Tuesday, and the chaos that ensued. I'm hoping that there's far more to this story than simply that the GSA just decided to pull the whole domain. E

By Paul Venezia

Oct 5, 2007 1 min

The Automatic Blog Pundit

In case you haven't guessed, I'm off line and wrote this week's blog entries in advance. To help round out the week, you get to create your own custom blog posting just by filling in the blanks below. How hard can it be? I think Matt A

By Zack Urlocker

HELP WANTED! Looking for Virtualization Experts?

Are you currently searching to find virtualization experts for your organization? If so, you aren't alone. This is a common request coming from IT shops around the world right now as they try to fill positions for developers, testers, administra

Oct 5, 2007 7 mins

All about the data

IT security starts with a data-centric worldview

By Roger Grimes

Oct 5, 2007 4 mins

Security

Storage arrays are dead; long live the tape library

Sun dishes out a death sentence to self-standing storage

By Mario Apicella

Small and Medium Business Software Development Technology Industry

Reader Voices: AOL Clueless Ones

<P>How does an Internet service provider protect its customers from spam without blocking legitimate e-mail? It's a tricky balancing act to be sure, but one thing my readers do agree on is that AOL's approach to the problem is clueles

By Ed Foster

Oct 5, 2007 6 mins

Scott McNealy’s Five Reasons for Going Open Source

In addition to today's BusinessWeek story on "Reinventing Sun" (not a lot of new info for those of us who have been playing along.) I came across this post from Jim Laurent outlining Scott McNealy's thoughts on why Sun went open s

By Dave Rosenberg

Oct 5, 2007 1 min

Open Season Podcast Episode Four–Mark Shuttleworth

Last week in-between all my pizza parties and chinese food (food is the only thing I miss about the east coast) we somehow managed to record Episode Four of Open Season, the podcast dedicated to making listeners laugh and/or retch. We had the honorab

By Dave Rosenberg

Oct 4, 2007 1 min

Test Center Tracker: California’s vision for an accessible Web, Microsoft’s blunted run at Flash

Opening the Web to everyone: The state of California has taken the long overdue step of enforcing Web site accessibility requirements. Developers, dev tool vendors, content creators and on-line advertisers should be making accessibility a priority i

By Tom Yager

Microsoft is Taking its Lead from OpenJDK

By now, we've all read that Microsoft is releasing the .NET 3.5 source under the Microsoft Research License (i.e. look but don't touch). I view this is but another step into the OSS swimming pool. I'm willing to bet a shinny new Loonie

User Responses to MSFT releasing .NET 3.5 Source

So far the views from Dave, whurley, Matt and others have been negative to handle with caution. After I heard that Microsoft was releasing the .NET 3.5 source under the Microsoft Research License (i.e. look but don't touch), I tried to find what

Spam Fighting, Revisited

Since my last posting on my battle against spam, I've made quite a bit of progress. I'll concentrate on my personal experience in this entry, and cover some broader issues in a future post. I needed to take several additional steps to make

By Martin Heller

Oct 4, 2007 3 mins

Rally round the blog, boys

It seems Our Beloved Government has been dipping its toes into the blogosphere. As part of its effort to blog them over here so we don't have to blog them over there, comes Dipnote, a blog from the US State Department. No, I am not making that u

By Robert Cringely

SOA needs Data. Data needs SOA. Now Repeat.

If you've been following me, you know I'm all about the data when considering SOA. Services are indeed important, however the understanding, management, and use of data is something that needs to be the foundation of your SOA, as with any a

Oct 4, 2007 1 min

Survey Says, SOA Good…But not how it’s done

As I mentioned a few times here, the PR folks have figured out that when presented with a survey, versus a press release, the analysts and press seem more likely to write about it. I have to admit I've been hooked in a few times considering the