Opinion

Embedded Does Not Mean Small

I spent the day in Boston yesterday at the the Embedded System Conference. I was supposed to go back today, but I'm a bit under the weather, so I'm staying in my office. I worked on embedded systems years ago: those were the days when what

Persuading the C-level

Dear Bob …Great piece Bob ("The causes of greatness," Keep the Joint Running, 9/10/2007).[Short version: Great organizations are the result of:LeadershipGreat employeesFocus on achievementTeamworkWillingness to innovateWillingness to not

AMD leads by listening

AMD put software partners and system manufacturers back in charge of the x86 agenda AMD has taken great care to date to make sure that Opteron CPUs and system platforms, and the high-end desktop platforms that are derived from Opteron, aren't se

Caught with their breaches down

In a Special Client Announcement designed to attract as little media attention as possible, TD Ameritrade has admitted that six million customer records have been breached by spammers and other evildoers of the black hat persuasion. On the Ameritrade

It’s Back to the Future with IBM Lotus Symphony!

“I wanna go back, and do it all over…” Yes, it’s time for another episode of “flashback” with the enterprise desktop dude! It’s circa 1987, and Eddie Money is tearing up the charts with hits like “Take

Yahoo! Moves on SaaS

SaaS vs. Open Source: Open Source will win

One of the things that struck me as I roamed the floor of the Dreamforce event (besides the fact that I find events like this to be incredibly depressing) is that there is a clear difference between companies that form a "community" and tho

Survey: 63 percent of companies have run out of datacenter power, space

I'm not a Trekkie, but I have vivid memories of scenes where Captain Kirk would suddenly demand of Scotty, the chief engineer, "We need more power!" when trying to complete a critical task. These days, plenty of datacenter operators fe

Test Center Tracker: Keeping it Green

The Green Scene: Yesterday, the Daily pointed you to 7 Reasons Your Software is So Slow. Proving that we read our own stuff, Ted Samson has looked at the environmental impact of slow apps in his Sustainable IT column. The longer we're at this bu

Are you doing VDA for SOA?

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Eclipse PHP Tools

Zend, a major contributor to PHP, has helped launched the Eclipse PHP Development Tools 1.0 (PDT)project this week. Since PDT is built on the Eclipse framework, hundreds of Eclipse plug-ins can be used immediately by PHP developers. This project has

IBM Launches Lotus Symphony

InfoWorld reports: "IBM is to offer the world a free word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program in yet another bid to upset the dominance of Microsoft's Office suite. … IBM says it will contribute 35 programmers to the Symphony

BEA’s Future Should Include Apache Geronimo

I just read that Carl Icahn owns a 8.5% stake, worth $426.5M, in BEA. He wants to see BEA sold in order to maximize shareholder value. While I can understand this point of view, I'd like to offer another option. Transforming OSS from a threat to

Open sourcing closed source software

Stop the presses. Hold everything. Though only rumored to exist within the mind of author Hugh Lofting, a creature that can simultaneously go both forwards and backwards has been discovered. That's right, the rarest animal of all, the highly sou

Zapped: Ungrounded PC a shocker

Who knew that terra firma would have been the culprit behind one client's PC connectivity problems? In the late 80s I had a customer with various PCs connected to an IBM mainframe controller via coax. We had a maintenance contract on all of the

Microsoft guns for Adobe rich Internet apps crown

Flash and Flex owned rich Web application development until Silverlight came along There is little doubt that RIAs (rich Internet applications) are here to stay. After all, the promise of desktop app functionality delivered through the Web is compell

IDF moves: Does Intel have the guts?

Intel has the power to create the strongest x86 server market yet seen. Does it have the nerve? Intel Developer Forum (IDF) is an unusual show. It gathers software and hardware engineers around a microprocessor core for a commodity instruction set. A

Yahoo Strikes Back with Open Source

It's interesting to see that under CEO founder Jerry Chang, Yahoo is using open source to gain an advantage over rival Google. While it's too early to say whether Yahoo's use of open source will have impact, it does appear to be part o

Thinking SOA…

There seems to be a lot of confusion when it comes to traditional enterprise architecture and SOA. So, while many argue revolution, I ague assimilation and enhancement. This means that SOA provides a core systemic value to enterprise architecture, an

VMware Announcements Made Around VMworld 2007

VMworld is now over and for those of us who were there and made it back home safely, most of us are still probably trying to recover from a whirlwind of events. There were over 147 exhibitors present at the show, and each of them had something to sha

Alert: Code green

While a lot of green responsibility lies with the hardware vendors, the companies that deliver the apps and platforms that run on those boxes have a responsibility, too.

Is Salesforce planning to offer an online operating system next?

While the big news at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2007 user conference in San Francisco was leaked a week early, CEO Marc Benioff added more details and said something either inadvertently or on purpose that hints at an even bigger role for Visual

Yahoo buys Zimbra for $350m

All Things D says that Yahoo is buying Zimbra. Congrats to the Zimbra team for keeping the OSS acquisition numbers in the stratosphere! $350 million is a nice chunk of change. Note to big companies: you better buy the OSS startups now before they are

Test Center Tracker: All aboard the Adaptec SAN that can

Small format, big features: Senior Test Center Analyst Mario Apicella got yet another exclusive look at a shnazzy, features-packed pieces of entry-level storage hardware, this time Adaptec's Snap Server 720i. The machine "combines good admi

Prince v. YouTube: A Violet Video Vendetta

The artists are revolting, and you can take my meaning however you choose. Popstar legend Prince has threatened to sue YouTube, eBay, and The Pirate Bay for illegally trafficking in his videos. His Purpleness is complaining that YouTube has no proble

StrikeIron, IBM partner on enterprise mashups

StrikeIron and IBM are partnering to deliver more than 100 data services from StrikeIron to IBM's enterprise mashup maker, QEDWiki, Also, StrikeIron has developed seven widgets allowing users to drag and drop data directly onto the mashup maker,

When to fire an irreplaceable employee, and when not to

Dear Bob …I'm writing to comment on "The causes of greatness," (Keep the Joint Running, 9/10/2007) in which you criticize the idea that you should immediately fire any employee who is irreplaceable.There are two reasons why an employ

Sun Reselling Windows?

Ok, this strikes me as weird. After so many years of bashing Microsoft and saying how other companies were foolish to sell Windows, Sun is now planning on reselling Windows. And Linux. And Solaris. Which they open source. And also sell as closed sour

Security saps system performance

Culprit No. 4: The hidden cost of security is a hit to processing

Lack of standards stifles agility

Culprit No. 5: Vendor lock-in muddles interoperability, prevents shifts to faster solutions

Usability remains an afterthought

Culprit No. 3: Flashy UIs devoid of documentation sap productivity

Centralizing IT gives rise to bureaucracy

Culprit No. 6: Heavy-handed IT policies often hamstring IT operations

Computing trends overburden the network

Culprit No. 7: Bottlenecks abound when business asks too much of the network

Code bloat abounds

Culprit No. 2: Sales-driven software cycles beg the question of upgrades

Chip advances leave developers in the dust

Culprit No. 1: Capitalizing on multicore requires a new mode of development

7 reasons why your software is so slow

Ever wonder why your PC keeps choking on that slick, new corporate app? Here are the chief culprits bogging down the latest software's performance

Open source hippies and opinionated bloggers

This week, the sniping is fast and furious while the software is slow and tedious

Windows Updates and Software Ownership

<P>Do you own the software on your computer, or do the software companies? That's really the issue that lies at the heart of a brouhaha that arose last week regarding Windows Updates that apparently are installed without user permission. W

Will BEA go begging?

You know it and I know it: The best technology doesn't always win. Case in point — BEA Systems, whose just concluded BEAWorld conference garnered little buzz. (Coincidentally, the newly independent VMware held its annual shindig at the same tim

Is Apple missing the ‘Mac Opportunity’?

Today's NY Times (login maybe required) has an article discussing Apple's over-focus on the iPod as Mac computers appear to languish with few new features and limited new models. This is something that we have written about before here on O

Possible Solutions for Spam

My rant about spam last week drew several interesting&nbsp;responses: The CEO of MailFoundry offered to send me an email filtering appliance, a 1U server that goes in front of the email server and claims to have no false positives A&nbsp;guy

SWsoft Unveils Virtuozzo 4.0 Beta

SWsoft has unveiled a Beta version of its long running operating system virtualization software – Virtuozzo 4.0. The company was demonstrating the new product at VMworld this past week as well as other products that the company has to offer. If you a

Desktop Linux? Stick a Fork in It!

It's over. The magic is gone. The dream is dead. The egg has fallen off the wall and no amount of "sudo" super glue can put his pieces back together again. I'm referring, of course, to the not-so-recent departure of Con Kolivas fr

Parallels Making Advances in Virtualization

Parallels, Inc. is making great strides to bring their vision of virtualization to market. Not afraid of its larger competitors, the company continues to move forward with advancements to its desktop offerings and is adding server class virtualizatio

VMworld Day 3 – Mendel Always Brings It

VMworld may be over, but on the last and final day of the show, VMware's co-founder and Chief Scientist really brought things home as I expected. At last year's conference, I really enjoyed Mendel's discussion – especially the part abo

Microsoft’s Push and Pull Approach to Vista Migration

Microsoft wants you to migrate to Vista. That should come as no surprise. But the company seems to be willing to shoot itself repeatedly in the foot to get you to make the move — first by dissing its old operating system, and then by demonstrating i

Avoid VDA! (Vendor Driven Architecture)

When looking at the technology buying patterns in the world of SOA, there is one common thread. The Global 2000, and many government agencies, are purchasing from their existing vendors, no matter what the needs or requirements. I call these solution

Milestone creep

SCO Bankruptcy

Looks like predictions have come true for SCO as they have now filed for bankruptcy. While I'm sure many will be cheering SCO's demise, this may hurt SCO customers even worse. They're going to need to make plans to migrate to a more ma

We Now Rise to Prepare to Return the Torah to the Ark

I just finished two days of singing and choral conducting at Rosh Hashanah services. I feel uplifted, and also exhausted. As I expected, my physical mailbox was full when I dropped by my office to check on things, but only one book had been left outs