Opinion

Virtual Machines Make Things Easy. What About Security?

With server virtualization and virtual machine technology being deployed across mainstream IT environments more and more, security is one of those things that often get overlooked. In a physical IT world, security is usually at the top of every admin

Novell and the GPL V3 Poison Pawn

This morning I read through an interesting translation of a 10 question written interview between members of the Brazilian Linux Community and Novell. Of course there are some revealing tidbits about Mono and ODF (two areas of strange attraction betw

Happier Wars

All of you who follow me, know that I've kept pretty good tabs on the backup wars as I was there not only from the beginning, I appear to have been a major player. And while I haven't kept you all up to date with what's going on now, I

Static Path Analysis and Embedded Systems

In my posting about embedded systems on the 19th, I asked how companies could guarantee the reliability of complicated embedded systems. One set of generic guidelines for this comes from Barry Boehm of USC: see, for example, the Software Reduction To

A New Shopkeeper in SMB IT

This is my first post as the new SMB IT guy. Before I start telling you about the latest in information technology for smaller companies, I thought I'd tell you a bit about myself and the point of view I bring to SMB IT. I grew up around small b

New Apple Tablet?

Interesting rumors surfaced this week at AppleInsider about a new Apple Tablet or PDA some are dubbing a return of the Newton. For those who missed it, the Newton was Apple's much maligned too-early entry into the handheld market and quickly ecl

Geek Week in Review

Kill me now. Microsoft, whose share of the search market is trending back towards single digits, has announced major changes to its Live Search, including quadrupling the number of sources that its search spiders query. "Search is the killer app

Cool tools for hacker trackers

A honeynet reporting site and the latest version of a solid hacking package help security pros

DataCore revs up apps with memory caching

DataCore's application accelerator puts a new, small business twist on the old trick of memory caching

Cognos Falls as Loonies Soar

Most of you are probably familiar with Cognos, one of the few remaining major, stand-alone providers of business intelligence software. But, I’d guess that a lot of you were puzzled by what happened to the Canadian’s company’s stock

Hello, Microsoft? It’s Vista: The sky is falling!

I just got through reading yet another "Microsoft must abandon Vista to survive" scare pieces at a competitor's web site. Talk about your lightweight content! This guy didn't even try to provide any sort of hard data. He just spew

OpenLogic opens up open source library

OpenLogic is now offering free Web access to its certified library of open source software. With the launch of OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) this week, the company is providing a Web site where companies can find and download enterprise-ready open source

AT&T Doesn’t Have to Care

<P>When is the Internet not the Internet? When your ISP can't be bothered to see to it that your e-mail traffic gets through, answers one reader, speaking about the company formerly known as SBC and now calling itself AT&T.<P>

The Password NIghtmare

There are several best practices for dealing with passwords, but one that gets overlooked a LOT is the one that says never use your personal account for services or processes. The reason usually given is because when you change your password, the pro

Budget Zen

Test Center Tracker: Don’t pass the buck

Does a brake shop say that you don't need new brakes? Architectural device from vendors turns out to be risky business, as David Linthicum points out in his latest blog on Vendor Designed Architecture. Just the phrase makes me shudder. It'

VMware Workstation VMM issues resolved in 2.6.22?

For those unaware, VMware Workstation 6 has been exhibiting some significant stability issues under some 2.6.19 and 2.6.20 kernels. VMware Workstation would run and behave normally for some period of time, then crash with a VMM (VM Monitor) error, an

Zend PHP Conference

Ok, I'm a little travelled out with recent trips to around the US visiting customers, the Gartner conference and a trip to Europe for our developer meeting in Germany. So I'm glad that the upcoming Zend PHP conference (Oct 8-11) is in the b

Open Season Podcast: Episode 3–Yahoo gets Zimbra’d and more!

The latest episode in our Open Season Meatcast is now online at The Register. This time we talk about Google, Yahoo, Salesforce and all your other favorite internet overlords. The next episode (#4) brings Mark Shuttleworth to the party. More on that

More Thoughts on VDA

That whole VDA thing is starting to pick up steam, including this post by Jonathan Kahn who provides some very elegant analysis of my assertions. "In Zapthink's recent article about avoiding Vendor Driven Architectures, David Linthicum make

Wal-Mart throws its weight behind a greener supply chain

Short-sighted as it may be, some companies may be undaunted by the fact that more U.S. politicians are taking carbon emissions seriously. After all, there's no significant federal legislation looming that would ding an organization that produce

Cut through financial BS

Crazy company valuations are back – and it's worth the effort to learn your way around the hype

Leveraging an On-Demand Platform for Enterprise Architecture

I typically don't plug my Webinars here, but there is a very interesting one I'm doing on Thursday (tomorrow)…Leveraging an On-Demand Platform for Enterprise Architecture. This is an essence the talk I gave at Dream Force last week i

Damage control, the Microsoft way

Stop me if you've heard this one: Microsoft has been secretly updating your computer, even when you tell it not to. This story first arose a couple of weeks ago, following a report by Scott Dunn in Windows Secrets. It seems Windows Update will u

Belated Notice Department: WORA vs WOTE

Way back in February, in response to an ignorant-sounding comment to a previous posting, I talked about how Write Once languages have never quite done it for me. As is often the case, I tried to restrict myself to my personal experience rather than g

What Have ICEs Come To?

When I first started paying attention to In-Circuit Emulators (ICEs), they were &gt;$10K devices, and not a lot of organizations could justify having them. Over the years, they have evolved dramatically: last year, TI sold 50,000 eZ430-F2013 emu

Microsoft’s Halo Effect

A few years ago, if you had said that Microsoft would someday release a product that was so hotly anticipated that over 1.7 million people would pay for it in advance without so much as a beta, somebody might have wanted to check your medication. But

Where to find a great second-in-command

Dear Bob …So, how do visionaries find seconds-in-command or generals ("Jung at heart," Keep the Joint Running, 9/24/2007)?I've been the "visionary" at two of the companies I've co-founded, but I haven't been able

VMware Battles Back with Fusion 1.1 Beta

Mac users seem to be getting a lot of attention these days what with Parallels and VMware going back and forth updating their Mac virtualization platforms in a relatively quick fashion as they battle for dominance in that market. If you are just join

Test Center Tracker: What not to do with backups – Got Macs?

Label me moron? I can't resist taking a shot at the latest "Off The Record" story where the anonymous (keep it that way, pal) writer narrates of a trouble with Monday backups. What put me off is not as much that person using scotch tap

InfoWorld Test Center Tackles Virtual Desktops, Application Virtualization and SaaS Delivery

InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy tackles virtual desktops and application virtualization by putting three of today's application virtualization products through the InfoWorld Test Center. Randall takes a look at Symantec's SVS Pro 2.1, Micr

More Mac sense and nonsense

Eight months since the switch to Mac, and it's no turning back Commenters on my Enterprise Mac blog have been begging for an update to my column "Mac sense and nonsense," in which I chronicled the early experiences of a friend who agre

The Tale of Two Cities: Red Hat & JBoss

Red Hat reported great numbers today. The stock was down in after hours trading, and I suspect it will be down tomorrow. The stock movement will likely be based on comments about the JBoss division by Red Hat's CEO. Forbes reports: "Sales c

Spectating the layoffs at Intel

Dear Bob …Did you catch this news over at Intel yet (link below)? It's about Intel's internal layoff process (called by Intel, 'redeployment'). The blogger I've linked to seems to be a manager that has to use certain criter

Time to Do Things Over, but Not Do Them Right?

Many companies balk at enterprise architecture because they feel that the returns doesn't necessarily justify the investment, but then again, most companies have never really done enterprise architecture before nor do they know how to really inv

The Sad Statistics

The image at left gives the SpamJadoo statistics for my personal domain on its second day of protection. (I wrote about setting this up yesterday. Previous spam-related posts are here, here, and here.) There was more total mail the first day, and mu

Test Center Tracker: Virtually Productive

The wheels on the I.T. model go round and round, and they're turning back around to centrally-managed, fully-hosted environments. Manageability, security, and economics all play into the push for a re-imagined virtual data center. Virtual Deskto

Green tech doesn’t reduce computational demands

During a briefing about AMD's energy efficient quad-core processor, a curious question arose. A journalist asked if AMD was worried that it would be ultimately hurting its own sales with the release of Barcelona. The reasoning: If AMD is selling

Veeam and Vizioncore Enhance VMware’s Products

VMware's VI3 product comes with any number of add-on products to enhance the ESX server virtualization platform, but its many of the third-party software companies out there that make the ESX server platform that much better. Case in point, the

Competing for Talent

If you're a private open source company, how do you compete against the likes of Google or VMWare for talent? At MySQL, we've found that one of the most attractive elements of the company is the fact that we are globally distributed. We hav

Label this tape ‘trouble’

Neither voodoo nor sabotage was behind the mysterious Monday tape overload problem. Nevertheless, it took a year to find a solution. Years ago, I ran a small VAX network for an engineering company. 8mm tape was just emerging as a backup technology, a

SOA meets open b-to-b integration

With all of the hubbub last week surrounding SCO's pending demise and IBM's open desktop play, you may not have noticed that the heavens have shifted just a tad. No, it had nothing to do with this weekend's autumnal equinox. That seems

SAP’s rocky road to on-demand

Can SAP make the transition to a services business model? Flak is already flying around SAP's Business ByDesign. And it's not entirely about the suite of online services itself. It's more a question of whether a stalwart ISV of the tra

Thinking SOA

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VMware Gives EMC a Ride

Not everyone was impressed when EMC bought VMware in 2004. A lot of people on Wall Street had problems understanding why an old-line storage giant would want to play in the highly specialized virtualization arena. Those days are over. Not only has VM

Too Much Choice with AJAX

Last week I spoke with Todd Hay, VP of Marketing at ActiveGrid. "Too often, we fight ourselves in the AJAX community. For customers, there is too much confusion between AJAX libraries such as Dojo, JQuery, Prototype or the tens and hundreds more

Spam, Spam, Spam, Eggs, and Spam

When I had mostly recovered from my Yom Kippur fast on Sunday, I went online to check my email, and found that the SpamJadoo people had set up a hosted anti-spam account for my domain. All I had to do was switch my MX records. In my slightly groggy p

PASS Disappointment

PASS last week was just a little disappointing. I heard somewhere through the grapevine that attendance was down by around 15%, but as it turns out, that was the lucky part. The Denvery convention center turned out to be inadequate for our crowd anyw

Microsoft’s Virtualization Endgame

Big companies often acquire small companies and their products for the underlying technologies, and Microsoft is no exception. The strategy is particularly effective when the target is one of a handful of players in a nascent product category. This w

Hardware vendors can learn from eco-friendly OLPC laptop

OLPC's $140 laptop is a model of green tech — one that hardware vendors will hopefully learn from