Opinion

Apple and Open Source?

Others may have pointed this out, but I was wondering why it is that Apple is often thought of so well in open source circles. I see tons of Mac laptops at open source conferences but any mention of using Windows and you can get flamed pretty quickly

Another bomb in Beantown

As you may have heard by now, MIT computer science student Star Simpson was arrested in Boston's Logan Airport last week for wearing an outfit that airport security thought was truly da bomb. The 19 year old was wearing a jacket she'd desig

Sun bolsters Solaris Developer Edition

Sun Microsystems is announcing Monday new support subscriptions and enhanced graphical user interfaces for its Solaris Express developer Edition, as part of version 9/07. The changes are intended to make it easier to install and use the product. &quo

Test Center Tracker: Let the virtualization begin

Virtualization and the City: Greetings from New York! Wish you were here — especially if you're organization is contemplating adopting virtualization to get more bang from your servers and platforms. But if you weren't able to make it out

Virtualization on the front lines

Five enterprises forge ahead with server virtualization – and live to tell the tale

Stonebridge Bank averts a capacity crisis

This small regional bank cut its server count by a factor of five – and reduced hands-on overhead through remote administration

Purdue pursues long-term cost savings

Deep cost analyses, including licensing costs, lead the university to believe the benefits will mainly be in easier administration

Credit Suisse plans virtualization a massive scale

A process of elimination cut half of the financial giant’s servers from consideration – but that still left 10,000 to virtualize

From big iron to white boxes, Nationwide goes virtualFrom big iron to white boxes, Nationwide goes virtual

A mix of platforms that includes Linux on the mainframe, plus a clever charge-back system, help virtualization pay offA mix of platforms that includes Linux on the mainframe, plus a clever charge-back system, help virtualization pay off

Transplace beefs up hardware for a virtual world

A transportation logistics company takes advantage of a big hardware upgrade to roll out a new virtualized infrastructure

Herd behavior demonstrated at Demo

There is safety in numbers — but not in our security quiz

HP’s $1,000 Latch

<P>It's the little things that get you, particularly when it comes to tech support. And when it comes to HP tech support, one reader has just discovered that even the must mundane of problems can cost you unwarranted time and money.</P&

Sun launches community for measuring, comparing GHG emissions

In an effort to help organizations get a handle on their swelling carbon footprints, Sun today is launching OpenEco.org, an online community providing free tools and resources for calculating, tracking, and comparing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. W

Starting a consulting business

Dear Bob …I am pursuing a career as an independent contractor in IT PM and have 15+ years of overall IT experience. I have primarily worked through recruiters, but would really like to be out on my own, generating my own business and keeping more $

AJAX and SOA…

AJAX has set the world on fire when you're considering creating a Web-delivered dynamic application, or what many call a RIA (rich internet application). With AJAX World occurring this week (which I'm not attending by the way), I figured it

Hitachi Brings Hypervisor to Xeon-Based Blades

Hitachi is making its Virtage embedded firmware virtualization feature available to Intel Xeon-based blade servers with its BladeSymphony 1000 system. In the first quarter of 2008, Hitachi plans to ship a Xeon version of its BladeSymphony 1000 system

CiRBA Releases Version 4.4 of its Data Center Intelligence Software

Canadian based CiRBA, Inc. announced the release of version 4.4 of its consolidation and virtualization analysis software solution. The company says that its solution enables organizations to simultaneously analyze critical business and technical con

Next Generation Connection Broker from Provision Networks

Provision Networks, provider of enterprise presentation and desktop virtualization solutions, announced the latest version of the company's VDI connection broker – Virtual Access Suite 5.9. "While many vendors are rushing to market with the

Solaris VDI Solution to Secure the Desktop

During VMworld 2007, Sun Microsystems, Inc. previewed its new software offering that helps to provide a more secure and manageable virtual desktop environment. Installed on the company's Solaris Operating System, Sun's Virtual Desktop Infra

Tech Still Strong say Oracle and PC Sales Reports

After unending streams of bad news about the economy, Oracle's robust first-quarter report and Gartner's bullish PC forecast are heartening. Software license growth in the quarter, which tends to be seasonally weak, was the strongest the da

Linux “Unforked!” Mea Culpa!

After much deliberation and review, I've decided to recant my previous blog entry. I no longer believe that the Linux kernel should be forked. In fact, I'm more convinced than ever that Linux needs *less* fragmentation, not more. It takes a

More about Battling Spam

There's a lively discussion going on in response to my Possible Solutions for Spam posting, which was a follow-up to my essay on how I'm currently battling spam. Most of the discussion is in the comments to Possible Solutions for Spam, so p

Geek Week in Review

Everybody must get stoned. German laptop maker Medion shipped between 10,000 and 100,000 Vista notebooks with a 13-year-old stowaway aboard — a variation of the stoned virus, last seen round these parts in the mid 1990s. Stoned dates from the era wh

Emulex and QLogic, Virtual HBAs and NPIV Technology

When scaling with server virtualization technology, local storage or DAS becomes somewhat tricky. SAN technology therefore becomes an important key element when working with server virtualization. Emulex and QLogic both have an answer for the storage

NetApp-Sun rivalry heats up

Litigation, acquisition, and an unholy alliance have everyone wondering what's brewing at Sun

Beware the browser within

For a more secure network, stop people from clicking on things they shouldn’t

It’s GPL lawsuit bingo night at the SFLC

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) triumphantly announced today that it has just filed what is apparently the first U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of GPL V2. The perpetrator, Monsoon. The plantiff, BusyBox. Apparently Mo

Off-topic: $ CDN at par with USD

They said it couldn't be done. (They who? I don't know, the Rosenberg's and Russo's of the world! 😉 For many years my American friends joked about Canadian money being worth slightly more or less than Monopoly money. Well, today

Cities reconsidering Wi-Fi coverage

It is always nice to be right. And so I patted myself on the back today after reading a story by Judy Keen, in USA Today,Cities turning off plans for Wi-Fi. that said Wi-Fi as a city service is running into roadblocks and many municipalities are hav

BT joins growing list of green consultants

More and more companies are grasping the importance of a green strategy to address swelling energy bills and power shortages, as well as to shrink their carbon footprints. The next logical step, of course, is planning a strategy to tackle the problem

Gartner: Ignoring Open Source Not An Option

Mark Driver, one of the organizers of Gartner's Open Source Summit capped his introductory presentation by telling IT managers that ignoring open source is no longer an option. He called open source "the biggest change in corporate IT since

BluePhoenix assists with Cobol migrations

BluePhoenix Solutions this week announced a solution for migrating mainframe customers from outdated or unsupported versions of Cobol to Cobol Language Environment (LE). Older Cobol compilers are no longer supported for DB2 V8 and CICS TS V3.1, BlueP

A Grueling Free Trial With Earthlink

<P>Earthlink has borrowed from the AOL playbook before in terms of luring users in with free trial offers and then making it hard to cancel the account. But one reader says Earthlink has added another offensive weapon — namely, harassing custo

Off-topic: How to pack for travel

Stephen O'Grady and I have been talking for at least a year about the best travel gear (including laptop bags). Today I found OneBag.com which gives you all sorts of guidance and suggestions of gear you need. I also just signed up for the Clear

Saving Power With Linux

Via Stephen Shankland at CNet – Very cool news about an effort to run Linux more efficiently on servers, laptops &amp; mobile devices. The effort was kicked off by Intel, but is open to all. According to Stephen's report: "On a current

TC Tracker: Lights on (we hope) on data protection

Progress with data protection Mike Heck takes for a ride Vontu version 7 and finds significant improvements over previous versions. If the name Vontu doesn't ring a bell, think of a modular suite of applications to help corporations preventing d

Giving presentations

Technology alone won’t solve your power problems

We at InfoWorld have alluded to a power crisis, as have other pundits as well as analysts, and the proclamation has been met with some arguably healthy skepticism. But with more and more research coming out showing that companies truly are struggling

The end of booth-babe culture?

IT isn't immune to the sexism rampant in other industries, but there's something you can do about that

Forking Linux: Shoot the Messenger?

“Moron! Idiot! Clueless shill loser!" As a professional journalist for over 20 years, I’ve taken my share of below-the-belt hits and personal attacks. After all, when you write about a topic – OS design and implementation &ndas

PlateSpin Introduces PowerRecon 3.1 Virtual Infrastructure Edition

Long time virtualization application provider PlateSpin announced an updated version of its award-winning PowerRecon data center planning and analysis solution. And although only a dot release increase, it offers powerful new features for managing, b

OpenVZ Available for Linux Kernel 2.6.22

The open source operating system (OS) virtualization software from the OpenVZ project, which is supported by SWsoft (OpenVZ is open source software that is used as the basis for the SWsoft Virtuozzo virtualization software product), is now available

VMware Offers Product Updates with Security Fixes

VMware has just released dot release updates to three of its virtualization platforms to address a number of security concerns. VMware has updated its free hosted server virtualization platform, VMware Server to version 1.0.4 and has addressed a numb

What’s more important, the license or the company behind it?

Yesterday I met with Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder and VP of Technology for WSO2 to discuss their current product set. Paul has been around this industry for some time, putting in a nine year stint at IBM, where he lead the WebSphere WebServices Gateway

Wall Street to Open Source: Huh?

It's very sobering to attend a high-energy, Web 2.0-oriented conference like this week's TechCrunch40 and then pull up a few stock charts. Simply put, Wall Street still doesn't get open source. Consider Red Hat, the most mature public

SAP SaaS solution is not just about technology

When a company like SAP unveils a new software service it is usually big news. This was the case today when SAP announced SAP Business ByDesign, a full suite of business solutions delivered and based on the SaaS [Software as a Service] model. Technol

SCO may shut down operations

Anyone surprised that SCO may have to fold? They should just do it quietly in hopes of ever having jobs again. "The revenue from this business has been declining over the last several years, primarily as a result of increased competition from al

Off-topic: Ten Most Polluted Places in the World

National Geographic is running a pictorial. Just be glad that you don't live in any of these places. Sumgayit, Azerbaijan; Linfen, China; Sukinda, India; Vapin, India; La Oroya, Peru; Dzerzhinsk, Russia; Noril'sk, Russia; Chernobyl, Ukraine

Remember when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?

Mystery Guest, Please Sign In

If you use Microsoft's Messenger service for instant messaging in your office — and Microsoft sure hopes you do– you may have experienced something unusual this week. Users of Microsoft Office Live Communicator 2005 and other Messenger clients